Crook

Crook (pronounced krook)

(1) A bent or curved implement, piece, appendage, etc; hook.

(2) The hooked part of anything.

(3) An instrument or implement having a bent or curved part, as a shepherd's staff hooked at one end or the crosier of a bishop or abbot.

(4) A bend or curve; a bent or curved part; a curving piece or portion of something).

(5) In slang, a person who steals, lies, cheats or does other dishonest or illegal things; a criminal; to steal, cheat, or swindle; an artifice; a trick; a contrivance.

(6) To bend; curve; a bend or curve.

(7) In slang, sick; unwell; feeble (Australia & New Zealand).

(8) In slang, out of order; functioning improperly; unsatisfactory; disappointing (Australia & New Zealand).

(9) In etiquette (as “to crook the knee”), a bending of the knee; a genuflection.

(10) A lock or curl of hair (obsolete).

(11) In structural engineering, a support beam consisting of a post with a cross-beam resting upon it; a bracket or truss consisting of a vertical piece, a horizontal piece, and a strut.

(12) A specialized staff with a semi-circular bend (called “the hook”) at one end and used by shepherds to control their flocks (a small scale version of which (as the “pothhook”) is used in cooking to suspend a pot over a heat-source.

(13) In the traditional Christian churches, a bishop's standard staff of office, the shape of which emulates those historically used by shepherds, an allusion to the idea of Christ’s relationship to his followers as that of “a shepherd of his flock”, mentions in several passages in scripture including John 10:11 (I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep) and Psalm 23:1 (The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want).

(14) In music, a small tube, usually curved, applied to a trumpet, horn etc to change its pitch or key.

1125-1175: From the Middle English croke & crok (hook-shaped instrument or weapon; tool or utensil consisting of or having as an essential component a hook or curved piece of metal), from the Old English crōc (hook, bend, crook (although the very existence of crōc in Old English is contested by some), from the Proto-Germanic krōkaz (bend, hook), from the primitive Indo-European greg- (tracery, basket, bend).  It was cognate with Old Norse krokr & krāka (hook), the Dutch kreuk (a bend, fold; wrinkle), the Middle Low German kroke & krake (fold, wrinkle), the Danish krog (crook, hook), the Swedish krok (crook, hook), the Icelandic krókur (hook) and the Old High German krācho (hooked tool).    Crook is a noun, verb & adjective, crooks is a verb; crooked is a verb & adjective, crooking is a noun & verb, crooker & crookest are adjectives, crookedly is a adverb and crookedness is a noun; the noun plural is crooks.

Lindsay Lohan with crooked Harvey Weinstein (b 1952).

Crooked (bent, curved, in a bent shape) emerged in the early thirteenth century, the past-participle adjective from the verb crook and the figurative sense of “dishonest, false, treacherous, not straight in conduct; To turn from the path of rectitude; to pervert; to misapply; to twist” was from the same era, the familiar synonyms including rogue, villain, swindler, racketeer, scoundrel, robber, cheat, shyster, knave, pilferer and shark.  In that sense it was from the Middle English crooken, croken & crokien, from the Old English crōcian, from the Proto-West Germanic krōkōn (to bend, wrinkle) and was developed from the noun.  It was cognate with the Dutch kreuken (to crease, rumple) and the German Low German kröken (to bend, offend, suppress).

Leading the flock: Cardinal George Pell (1941-2023) with his bishop's crook.

The use in the slang of Australia, New Zealand emerged in the nineteenth century and was use variously to convey (1) something or the conduct of someone held to be unsatisfactory or not up to standard, (2) feeling ill or (3) annoyed, angry; upset (as in “to be crook about” or “to go crook at”), the comparative being crooker, the superlative crookest.  The sense of “a swindler” was a creation of late nineteenth century US English and developed from the earlier figurative use as “dishonest, crooked in conduct”, documented since at least the early 1700s, these notions ultimately derived from the use of crook in Middle English to describe a “dishonest trick”, a form prevalent in waring against the means to which the Devil would resort to tempt.  In idiomatic use, “arm in crook” describes two people walking arm-in-arm (ie the arms linked in the crook of the elbow) and “by hook or by crook” means “by any means necessary” although the origin of this has always puzzled etymologists.

Crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013).

Crooked Hillary Clinton gained, however unhappily, the most memorable of the monikers Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) applied so effectively in his campaigns first to secure the Republican nomination and then win the 2016 presidential election.  It was a novel approach to electioneering but there had before been crookedness in the oval office, some of the conduct in the nineteen century truly scandalous and one of Richard Nixon’s not unjustified complaints about life was he and his administration being subject to a level of scrutiny never inflicted on his (Democratic Party) predecessors.  That was illustrated during one of Nixon’s few happy moments during the Watergate scandal when on 26 September 1973 when his speechwriter Pat Buchanan (b 1938) appeared before a congressional committee investigating the manner.  The committee had taken some delight in conducting lengthy sessions during which various Republican Party figures were questioned but as Buchanan produced the facts and figures documenting decades of dirty tricks and actual illegalities by successive Democrat administrations, committee counsel Sam Dash (1925–2004) got him “…off the stand as quickly as possible”.  So crooked Hillary was part of a long political tradition and the label stuck so well to her because it according with the perceptions of many although, in fairness, there were plenty who’d done worse and suffered less. Presumably, crooked Hillary is watching with interest to see if any branch of the US justice system succeeds in declaring Donald Trump crooked.  One way on another, she could be waiting for some time.  

Richard Nixon (1913–1994, US president 1969-1974) & Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973, US president 1963-1969), the White House, 1968.

Warren Harding (1865–1923, US president 1921-1923).

Unfairly or not, Warren Harding is now often called crooked, primarily because of the link with the "Teapot Dome" scandal which occurred under his administration but he wasn’t personally implicated.  However, Teapot Dome was one of many scandals on his watch so his reputation suffered.  He dropped dead while still in office, probably a good career move.  The 1964 US presidential election in which the candidates were the incumbent Democrat Lyndon Johnson and the Republican Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) was characterized as a contest between “a crook and a kook”, LBJ famously crooked in his business and political dealings in Texas and Barry, probably unfairly, characterised by his opponents as unhinged from time-to time.  The electorate was apparently sanguine about the character traits of the two and, given the choice on election day, voted for the crook, LBJ enjoying one of the biggest landslide victories in history.

Richard Nixon with Checkers (1952-1964), Washington, 1959.  Sometime during the Watergate scandal (if not before) Nixon may have reflected on the remark attributed to Frederick the Great (Frederick II (1712–1786, Prussian king 1740-1786) ): "The more I know of the character of men, the more I appreciate the company of dogs".

Already a national figure for this and that, Richard Nixon added to his notoriety by denying crookedness in his "Checkers speech", made in 1952, refuting allegations of impropriety which had threatened his place on the Republican ticket as General Dwight Eisenhower’s (1890–1969, US president 1953-1961) running mate in that year’s election.  Though not uncriticised, at the time and since, the “Checkers speech” worked and Nixon’s political career survived but two decades later, another speech with the same purpose failed to hold back the Watergate tide.  Held in Florida’s Disney's Contemporary Resort, it was at the 1973 press conference Nixon declared “…in all of my years of public life I have never obstructed justice... People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.”  Little more than a year later, facing impeachment and removal from office, Nixon resigned although, to be fair, when he said “I’m not a crook”, he wasn’t speaking of the Watergate affair and aspects of his legacy, like that of his predecessors, needs to be assessed separately from his crookedness.

Reinsure

Reinsure (pronounced ree-in-shoor or ree-in-shur)

(1) In insurance, to again insure.

(2) In insurance, to insure under a contract by which a first insurer is relieved of part or all of the risk (on which a policy has already been issued), which devolves upon another insurer.  It’s preferable in this context to use the hyphenated re-insure to distinguish from reinsure (the again of again insuring something.

1745–55: The construct was re- + insure.  The re- prefix was from the Middle English re-, from the circa 1200 Old French re-, from the Latin re- & red- (back; anew; again; against), from the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (again), a metathetic alteration of wert- (to turn).  It displaced the native English ed- & eft-.  A hyphen is not normally included in words formed using this prefix, except when the absence of a hyphen would (1) make the meaning unclear, (2) when the word with which the prefix is combined begins with a capital letter, (3) when the word with which the is combined with begins with another “re”, (4) when the word with which the prefix is combined with begins with “e”, (5) when the word formed is identical in form to another word in which re- does not have any of the senses listed above.  As late as the early twentieth century, the dieresis was sometimes used instead of a hyphen (eg reemerge) but this is now rare except when demanded for historic authenticity or if there’s an attempt deliberately to affect the archaic.  Re- may (and has) been applied to almost any verb and previously irregular constructions appear regularly in informal use; the exceptions are all forms of be and the modal verbs (can, should etc).  Although it seems certain the origin of the Latin re- is the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (which has a parallel in Umbrian re-), beyond that it’s uncertain and while it seems always to have conveyed the general sense of "back" or "backwards", there were instances where the precise was unclear and the prolific productivity in Classical Latin tended make things obscure.  Insure was from the mid-fifteenth century insuren, a variant spelling of the late fourteenth century ensuren (to assure, give formal assurance (also the earlier (circa 1400) sense of "make secure, make safe")) from the Anglo-French enseurer & Old French ensurer, probably influenced by Old French asseurer (assure), the construct being en- (make) + seur or sur (safe, secure, undoubted).  The technical meaning in commerce (make safe against loss by payment of premiums; undertake to ensure against loss etc) dates from 1635 and replaced assure in that sense.  Reinsure, reinsured & reinsuring are verbs and reinsurer & reinsurance are nouns; the common noun plural is reinsurances.

Reinsurance

In commerce, reinsurance is a contract of insurance an insurance company buys from a third-party insurance company to (in whole or in part) limit its liability in the event of against the original policy.  In the industry jargon, the company purchasing the reinsurance is called the "ceding company" (or "cedent" or "cedant") while the issuer of the reinsurance policy is the "reinsurer".  Reinsurance can be used for collateral purposes such as a device to conform to regulatory capital requirements or as a form of transfer payment to maximize the possibilities offered by international taxation arrangements purposes but the primary purpose is as risk-management, a form of hedging in what is essentially a high-stakes gambling market.  There are specialised reinsurance companies which, in their insurance operations, do little but reinsurance but many general insurers also operate in the market, their contracts sometimes layered as they reinsure risk they’re previously assumed as reinsurance.

In the industry, there are seven basic flavors of reinsurance:

(1) Facultative coverage: This protects an insurance provider only for an individual, or a specified risk, or contract.  If there are several risks or contracts that needed to be reinsured, each one must be negotiated separately and the reinsurer has all the right to accept or deny a facultative reinsurance proposal.  Facultative reinsurance comprises a significant percentage of reinsurance business and must, by definition, be negotiated individually for each policy reinsured.  Facultative reinsurance is normally purchased by a cedent for risks either not or insufficiently covered by reinsurance treaties, for amounts above contractual thresholds or for unusual risks.    

(2) Reinsurance treaty: A treaty contract is one in effect for a specified period of time, rather than on a per risk, or contract basis.  For the term of the contract, the reinsurer agrees to cover all or a portion of the risks that may be have been incurred by the cedent.  Treaty reinsurance is however just another contract and there’s no defined template; the agreement may obligate the reinsurer to accept reinsurance of all contracts within the scope ("obligatory reinsurance”) or it may allow the insurer to choose which risks it wants to cede, with the reinsurer obligated to accept such risks ("facultative-obligatory reinsurance ((fac oblig)).

(3) Proportional reinsurance: Under this contract, the reinsurer receives a pro-rated share of the premiums of all policies sold by the cedent, the corollary being that when claims are made, the reinsurer bears a pro-rata portion of the losses.  The two pro-rata calculations need not be the same; that a function of agreement by contract but, in proportional reinsurance, the reinsurer will also reimburse the cedent for defined administrative costs such as processing, business acquisition and writing costs.  The industry jargon for this is “ceding commission” and the payment of costs can be front-loaded (ie paid up-front).  Technically, it’s a kind of agency arrangement best thought of as out-sourcing.

(4) Non-proportional reinsurance: Non-proportional reinsurance, also known as “threshold policies”, permit claims against the policy to be invoked only if the cedent’s losses exceed a specified amount (which can be defined in the relevant currency or as a percentage) which is referred to as the priority or retention limit.  Operating something like excess in domestic insurance, it means the does not have a proportional share in the premiums and losses of cedent and the priority or retention limit may be based on a single type of risk or an entire business category; this is a matter of contractual agreement.

(5) Excess-of-Loss (EoL) reinsurance: This is a specialised variation of non-proportional coverage, again the reinsurer covering only losses exceeding the cedent’s retained limit but EoLs are used almost exclusively in large-scale, high-value contracts associated with the coverage of catastrophic events.  The contracts can cover cedent either on a per occurrence basis or for all the cumulative losses within a specified term.

(6) Risk-attaching reinsurance: Here, all claims established during the define term of the reinsurance will be covered, regardless of whether the losses occurred outside the coverage period whereas no coverage will extend to claims which originate outside the coverage period, even if the losses occurred while the reinsurance contract is in effect.  These contracts are executed generally in specific industries where circumstances differ from the commercial mainstream.

(7) Loss-occurring coverage: A kind of brute-force coverage where the cedent can claim against all losses that occur during the term of the reinsurance contract, the essential aspect being when the event causing the loss have occurred, not when the claim has been booked.

Bismarck and the Reinsurance Treaty

Although in force barely three years between 1887-1890, the Reinsurance Treaty, a secret protocol between the German and Russian Empires, was an important landmark in European diplomatic history, partly because of the part it played in the intricate structure of alliances and agreements maintained by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898; Chancellor of the German Empire 1871-1890) but mostly because of the significance of the circumstances in which it lapsed and the events which followed.

A typically precise Bismarkian construct, the treaty required both parties to remain neutral were the other to become involved in a war with a third great power, but stipulated that term would not apply (1) if Germany attacked France or (2) if Russia attacked Austria-Hungary.  Under the treaty, Germany acknowledged Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia as part of the Russian sphere of influence and agreed to support Russia in (essentially any) actions it might take against the Ottoman Empire to secure or extend hegemony in the Black Sea, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the straits leading to the Mediterranean.  The treaty had its origins in the sundering in 1887 of the earlier tripartite German-Austro-Hungarian-Russian (Dreikaiserbund (League of the Three Emperors)) which had had to lapse because Vienna and St Petersburg were both anxious to extend their spheres of interests in the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire declined and needed to keep options open.

Otto von Bismark.

Bismarck interlocking system of alliances was designed to preserve peace in Europe and the spectre of a competition between Russia and Austria–Hungary to carve up the Ottoman spoils in the Balkans, thus the attraction of the reinsurance treaty to forestall the risk of an alliance between St Petersburg and Paris.  Ever since the Franco-Prussian war, the cornerstone of Bismarck’s foreign policy had been the diplomatic isolation of France, his nightmare being hostile states to the west and east, a dynamic in Germany political thought which would last generations.  It certainly wasn’t true he believed (as he was reputed to have said), that the Balkans weren’t worth the death on one German soldier and that he never bothered reading the mailbag from Constantinople, but he did think it infinitely preferable to manage what should be low-intensity conflicts there than the threat of fighting a war on two fronts against France and Russia.  Thus the Reinsurance Treaty which, strictly speaking, didn’t contradict the alliance between the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, the neutrality clauses not applying if Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary.

Kaiser Wilhelm II in uniform as an Admiral of the Fleet in the British Royal Navy (circa 1896), oil on canvas (believed to be painted from a photograph), by Rudolph Wimmer (1849-1915).

However, Bismarck’s system was much dependent on his skills and sense of the possible.  Once Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941; German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia 1888-1918) dismissed Bismarck in 1890, German foreign policy fell into the hands of a sovereign who viewed the European map as a matter to be discussed between kings and Bismarck's successor as Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi (1831–1899; Chancellor of the German Empire 1890-1894) was inexperienced in such matters.  Indeed it was von Caprivi who, showing a punctiliousness towards treaties one of his successors wouldn’t choose to adopt, took seriously the contradictions with some existing arrangements the Reinsurance Treaty at least implied and declined the Russian request in 1890 for a renewal.  From that point were unleashed the forces which would see Russian and France drawn together while Germany strengthened its ties to Austria-Hungry and the Ottomans while simultaneously seeking to compete with Britain as a naval power, a threat which would see Britain and France set aside centuries of enmity to conclude anti-German arrangements.  While the path from the end of the Reinsurance Treaty to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 wasn’t either inevitable or lineal, it’s not that crooked.

Reinsurance recommended: Lindsay Lohan in Esurance Sorta Mom advertisement for Esurance Insurance (an Allstate company).

Schism

Schism (pronounced siz-uhm or skiz-uhm)

(1) Division or disunion, especially into mutually opposed parties.

(2) Parties or groups so formed.

(3) In ecclesiastical matters, a formal division within, or separation from, a church or religious body over some doctrinal difference.

(4) The state of a sect or body formed by such division.

(5) The offense of causing or seeking to cause such a division.

1350-1400: From the Church Latin schisma, scisma (and in the Medieval Latin as cisma), from the Ancient Greek σχίσμα (skhísma) (genitive skhismatos), (division, cleft), from σχίζω (skhízō) (I split), the stem of skhizein (to split), from the primitive Indo-European root skei- (to cut, split).  The word replaced the French and Middle English cisme scisme & sisme (a dissension within the church producing two or more parties with rival authorities) all of which were from the Old French cisme or scisme (a cleft, a split), again ultimately from the Ancient Greek σχίσμα (skhísma).  By the late fourteenth century, scisme (dissention within the church) had emerged although in the New Testament, schism (or an equivalent from the stem of skhizein) was applied metaphorically to divisions in the Church (eg I Corinthians xii.25).  The classical spelling was actually restored in the sixteenth century but pronunciation may have remained unchanged and the general sense of “disunion, division, separation” became common in the early fifteenth century, and within a few years the adjective schismatic (the original spelling being scismatik) was coined in the sense of “pertaining to, of the nature of, or characterized by schism”, something which referred specifically to “an outward separation from an existing church or faith on difference of opinion:, on the model of the Old French scismatique & cismatique (which endures in Modern French as schismatique), from the Church Latin schismaticus, from the Ancient Greek skhismatikos.  The adjective was used also as a noun in both the Old French and Late Latin and had actually been used thus in English in the late fourteenth century in the sense of “one who participates in a schism”.  In both French & English, the modern spelling was adopted in the late sixteenth century.  Schism is a noun, schismatic & schismatical are nouns & adjectives and schismatically is an adverb; the noun plural is schisms.

The East-West Schism of 1054 is sometimes casually referred to as the “Great Schism” but this is best avoided because it can be confused with the Great Schism of 1378-1417 (which followed the “Avignon Papacy” (1309-1376)), known as the “Babylonian captivity of the Papacy”.  The Avignon era was a confused period, presided over by seven popes and five antipopes, something to be recalled by those who think today’s squabbles between the Vatican factions are disruptive.  The schism of 1054 was the break of communion between what are now the (Eastern) Orthodox and (Western) Roman Catholic churches.  There were a myriad of ecclesiastical and theological disputes between the Greek East and Latin West before 1054 covering issues such as whether leavened or unleavened bread should be used in the Eucharist.  More serious perhaps were a cluster of arguments about power; the Pope’s claim to universal jurisdiction and the place of Constantinople in relation to Rome.

By 1053, there was open clerical warfare.  Greek churches in Italy were forced to close or to conform to Romish ways and, in retaliation, the eastern Patriarch closed the Latin churches in Constantinople; and harsh words were exchanged and by 1054 the hierarchies of both factions were busily excommunicating each other.  It’s a little misleading to cite 1054 as the date of the schism because the dispute actually dragged and technically, relationships wouldn’t fully be sundered for almost two centuries but historians accept that year as critical and in many ways, as a point on no return.  Now almost a thousand-years on, there seems no prospect of reconciliation.

Amusing Australian schisms

The Australian Rugby League (ARL), 1995-1997: Australia is well-known for schisms in sport.  The game of rugby league was the product of a schism in the rugby unions ranks, the essence of which was the disagreement about player payments and the amateur status of the game.  That schism happened in England in 1895 but exactly a hundred year later, in Australia, the professional rugby league competition endured its own when News Corp, seeing the game as the perfect content provider for the then novel platform of pay-TV, staged a raid and attempted to entice the clubs to join their breakaway competition, offering the traditional inducement of lots of money.  The established competition responded, backed with money from its broadcaster and a two-year war ensued until corporate realities prevailed and a merged entity divided the spoils between the media organizations.  The dispute and its resolution followed essentially the same path as the schism in Australian cricket a generation earlier.

The Australian Labor Party, 1955: By the mid-1950s, the strongly anti-Communist faction in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) was actively engaged in a campaign to counter communist infiltration of both the political (the ALP) and industrial (the unions) arms of the labour movement.  Had the ALP enjoyed more capable leadership, things might have turned out differently but, handled as it was, the ALP split, the schism most serious in NSW and Queensland but no state was wholly unaffected.  What emerged as a predominately Catholic splinter-party was the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), the existence of which adversely affected the ALP vote for a generation.  Thought exterminated in 1974, the DLP still shows up at the odd election and has won seats before succumbing to its own schisms.

Department of Law, Macquarie University, 1980s: More traditional (black-letter) academic lawyers at Macquarie became concerned at the teachings of others whom they called legal sociologists.  Styling themselves substantive lawyers, they didn’t especially object to the content of their opponents; they just though it had no place in a law school.  A pre-social media schism, the dispute manifested mostly in letters to the editor and bitchy comments in legal journals.  Eventually, the dispute faded as the factions either called a truce or simply ignored each other.

Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, 1972: John Anderson (1893–1962) was a Scottish philosopher who held the Challis Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1927 until retirement in 1958.  His influence continued even after his death and by the early 1970s, faculty were engaged in a quite bitter dispute about subject matter, educational techniques and the very nature and purpose of philosophical study.  The differences proved irreconcilable and in 1974 the department split into two separate units, the Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy and the Department of General Philosophy.  The latter thought the former little more than a polite discussion group re-hashing the thoughts of last two and a half-thousand years while the former considered the latter politically radical but philosophically barren.  The department eventually reunited some thirty years later.

Mean Girls (2004) is a tale of schism, back-stabbing and low skulduggery. That has attracted those in "media studies" departments and other such places who, drawing perhaps a long bow, have constructed textual analyses aligning the script with William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1603), The Tragedy of Macbeth (1623) and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599).

Infinitive

Infinitive (pronounced in-fin-i-tiv)

(1) In English grammar, the infinitive mood or mode (a grammatical mood).

(2) In English grammar, a non-finite verb form considered neutral with respect to inflection.

(3) In English grammar, a verbal noun formed from the infinitive of a verb.

1425–1475:  From the late Middle English, from the Middle French infinitif, the from Late Latin infinitivus (unlimited, indefinite), from the Latin infinitus (boundless, unlimited, endless (indefinite in the grammatical sense)), ivus being the Latin suffix forming adjectives).  In essence, the infinitive is a form of the verb not inflected for grammatical categories such as tense and person and used without an overt subject.  In English, the infinitive usually consists of the word “to”, followed by the verb.  Infinitive is a noun & adjective, infinitival is an adjective and infinitively an adverb; the noun plural is infinitives.

The most fastidious grammar Nazis condemn split infinitives.  In English, a split infinitive exists if an adverb sits between “to” and a verb: “to fully understand” is a split infinitive whereas “fully to understand” is not.  The “rule” exists, unfortunately, because of the influence, however misunderstood, of Classical Latin on the development of Modern English.  Infinitives appear to have been split since at least the 1400s, the practice increasingly common in Middle English before becoming rare in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Shakespeare seems to have dabbled only twice and then probably as an artistic device, a syntactical inversion better to suit the rhythm of his prose.  Spenser, Dryden, Pope, and the King James Version of the Bible used none, and Dr Johnson, John Donne & Samuel Pepys were sparing.  Despite this timeline, no reason for the near extinction is known; there’s nothing in the documents of the era to suggest scholarly or other disapprobation.  They reappeared in the eighteenth century, became more common in the nineteenth and it was only then the label emerged to describe the construction; the earliest use of “splitting the infinitive" dating from 1887.

The Split Infinitive as a fetish

It was also in the nineteenth century the dispute began, some authorities condemning, others endorsing.  Objections fall into three categories:

(1) The descriptivist objection: Also known as linguistic snobbery, this (very English) view, first published in 1834, argued the split infinitive was a thing commonly used by uneducated persons but not by people "of the better classes".

(2) The argument from the full infinitive: It’s a very technical point.  That there are two parts to the infinitive is disputed with some linguists asserting the infinitive is a single-word verb form which may or may not be preceded by the particle “to”.  Some modern generative analysts classify “to” as a "peculiar" auxiliary verb; others as the infinitival subordinator.  However, even when the concept of the full infinitive is accepted, it does not necessarily follow that any two words belonging together grammatically need be adjacent to each other. It’s true they usually are, but exceptions are not uncommon, such as an adverb splitting a two-word finite verb ("will not do"; "has not done").

(3) The argument from classical languages: It’s a bit of a linguistic myth the prohibition is because the grammatical rules of Classical Latin were absorbed by Modern English.  An infinitive in Latin is never used with a marker equivalent to the English “to” so there’s thus no parallel for the construction.  Despite this, claims by those who disapprove that they are applying rules of Latin grammar to English has widely been asserted for over a century but they rely on a false analogy with Latin; Latin infinitives appear as a single word.  The rule which prohibits splitting hints at the deference to Latin at a time when it was fashionable to apply its rules to other languages.  It was another variation of snobbery.  As late as the Renaissance, particularly in the churches and universities, there was a reverence for the purity of the languages of antiquity and aspects of English which differed were regarded as inferior.  By the nineteenth century, with English increasingly a world-wide tongue, but for a few pedants such views had faded and there’s anyway the etymological point that there’s no precedent from antiquity because in Greek and Latin (and all romance languages), the infinitive is a single word impossible to sever.  In “educated English”, there has evolved a curious convention in the handling of split infinitives.  The accepted practice is they should be avoided in writing but in oral use are actually desirable if their adoption renders a more elegant sentence (which is almost always the case).  English has similar conventions for written and oral forms such as the use of verbal shorthand of foreign extraction such as inter-alia which appear thus in writing but which, when spoken, are translated into English.

Henry Fowler (1858–1933), whose A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) remains a reliable arbitrator of all things right and wrong in English, rules on the matter with his usual clarity. declaring: The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish.  These he reviewed and decided those who neither knew nor cared were the happy majority and should be envied by all the others.  Among the others may or may not have been George Bernard Shaw (GBS; 1856-1950) who, after noticing a proofs-editor had "corrected" his infinitives, remarked: “I don’t care if he is made to go quickly, or to quickly go – but go he must!”

Some girls are so mean they'll correct even Captain Kirk.  William Shatner (b 1931) and Lindsay Lohan in Planet Fitness commercial played during Super Bowl 2022.

Drake

Drake (pronounced dreyk)

(1) The male of any duck.

(2) As “Drake equation”, a formula proposed as a mechanism to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

(3) A small-bore cannon, used mostly in the seventeenth & especially in the 17th and 18th centuries.

(4) A dragon (archaic).

(5) In angling, an artificial fly resembling a mayfly.

(6) A fiery meteor, comet or shooting star (archaic).

(7) A beaked galley or Viking warship.

1250–1300: From the Middle English drake (male duck, drake), from the Old English draca, an abbreviated form of the Old English andraca (male duck, drake (literally “duck-king”), from the Proto-West Germanic anadrekō (duck leader) and cognate with the Middle Dutch andrake, the Low German drake, the Dutch draak (drake), the German Enterich (drake) and the dialectal German drache.  In the Old High German, the equivalent forms were antrahho & anutrehho (male duck).  The archaic meaning in Middle English (a dragon; Satan) dates from before 900 and was from the Old English draca (in the sense of “dragon, sea monster, huge serpent”), from the Proto-West Germanic drakō (dragon), from the Latin dracō (dragon), from the Ancient Greek δράκων (drákōn) (serpent, giant seafish), from δέρκομαι (dérkomai) (I see clearly), from the primitive Indo-European derḱ-.  The Proto-Germanic drako was productive, the source also of the Middle Dutch and Old Frisian drake, the Dutch draak, the Old High German trahho and the German drache.  In a footnote in the long history of the Royal Navy, HMS Marshal Ney, the ship once known as "the worst ship in the navy" was briefly (during her surprisingly long service) re-named HMS Drake.  Drake is a noun, the noun plural is drakes.

Guilty as sin.  Functional necrophilia by a drake: In November 2001, a researcher at Natuurmuseum (Museum of Natural History), Rotterdam, reported the first known case of homosexualnecrophilia in the mallard duck (mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)).

In idiomatic use, the phrase “ducks and drakes” (usually in the form “playing ducks and drakes”) dates from 1585 and means “recklessly or irresponsibly to behave with something valuable or to waste something precious”.  The origin is believed to lie in the pastime of throwing flat stones across the surface of water (known also as “skipping stones”, “stone skiffing” or “skimming stones”, the allusion being to the behavior of the water as the stones bounce before eventually losing energy and sinking, the effect (the circular rings produced by the skipping stone) said to be something like that created by the splashing of ducks and drakes (and waterfowl in general).  It was thus a a reference to doing something in a haphazard and careless manner, without any particular aim or purpose and over time, came to be used generally to refer to any kind of wasteful or irresponsible behavior.  It accurately described the pointlessness of skimming stones but was something of a slight on the birds; their activities on water an indication of their industriousness.  The sense of “to squander, to throw away” emerged in 1614, the notion being “throwing money away, as if throwing away stones in this pastime”.  The perfectly-shapes stone for the purpose (flattish & disc-like) was called a drakestone and in parts of northern England the pastime was known as drakestoning.

The Drake equation

The Drake Equation is a mathematical formula developed in 1961 by US astrophysicist Dr Frank Drake (1930–2022) to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations that (1) might exist in our Milky Way galaxy and (2) be capable of communicating with us. The equation takes into account various factors, such as the number of habitable planets, the probability of life forming on those planets, and the likelihood of intelligent life evolving.  The equation takes the form:

N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy that are within the parameters capable of communicating with us
R* = the rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of stars that have planets
ne = the average number of habitable planets per star with planets
fl = the fraction of habitable planets that develop life
fi = the fraction of planets with life that develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop technology to communicate with others
L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space

Sixty-odd years ago, Dr Drake was well aware his equation was not a tool of immediately practical application because there was no certainty about any of the values.  Additionally, the formula was designed not to estimate the actual volume of intelligent life in the galaxy but the number of instances where the conditions might exist which would allow an intelligent to broadcast radio transmissions into space.  Since then, we’ve actually been able to better quantify two of the variables but the equation remains an interesting, speculative device and it remains a widely used tool for discussion and debate.

Portrait of Sir Francis Drake (circa 1581), oil on panel by an unknown artist, National Portrait Gallery, London.  A navigator and buccaneer (a kind of pirate), Sir Francis Drake (1540–1596) was the first Englishman to sail around the world (1577–80) and is best remembered for his command of the fleet which faced the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Androgynous

Androgynous (pronounced an-droj-uh-nuhs)

(1) Being both male and female; hermaphroditic (archaic).

(2) Having both masculine and feminine characteristics.

(3) Having an ambiguous sexual identity.

(4) Neither clearly masculine nor clearly feminine in appearance.

(5) In botany, having staminate and pistillate flowers in the same inflorescence.

1622: From the Latin androgynus (androgyne + ous), derived from Greek androgynos (hermaphrodite, male and female in one, womanish man).  Historically used as an adjective (of baths) with meaning "common to men and women," from andros, genitive of aner (male) (see anthropo) + gyne (woman).  Gyne is ultimate root of queen.  Related forms include androgyny, androgenous, androgynous. Androgyny was first used as a noun circa 1850, nominalizing the adjective androgynous.  Adjectival use dates from the early seventeenth century, derived from the older French and English terms, androgyne.  The older androgyne is still in use as a noun with overlapping meanings.  Androgynous is an adjective, androgyny is a noun, androgynously is an adverb; the noun plural is androgynies.

Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) as Amy Jolly in Morocco (1930).

In an amusing political conjunction, it appears the Central Committee of the PRC’s (People’s Republic of China) ruling Communist Party (CCP) seems now to agree with California’s most recent Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (b 1947; governor of California 2003-2011), that “girly men” are a bit of a problem.  The committee has been for some time concerned with the habits of the young and in addition to cracking down on ideologically unreliable actresses, introduced restrictions on the amount of time the young could spend frittering away their (ie the state’s) time playing video games instead of studying agricultural techniques, developing surveillance systems or something useful.  Around the republic, it’s suspected parents gave thanks to the committee for at least attempting to achieve what their years pleas and nagging failed to achieve although, being an inventive and clever lot, no one is expecting the caffeine-fuelled youth easily to abandon their obsession.  Work-arounds are expected soon to emerge. 

The Guangzhou Circle (the doughnut).

Fashionistas and rabid gamers weren’t the committee’s only target, an actual culture war declared on androgyny, many young men deemed too effeminate banned from the wildly popular television genre they seem to have co-invented with the TV broadcasters impressed by the ratings.  Having called in the executives to tell them to promote "revolutionary culture" instead of Western decadence, the crackdown on girly men is seemingly part of President Xi Jinping’s (b 1953; paramount leader of China since 2012) campaign to tighten control over business and society so the CCP can impose and enforce an official morality.  The president’s vision is certainly all-encompassing.  As well as “deviant” young men, Mr Xi also doesn’t like the “weird architecture” he’s noticed is part of the world’s biggest ever building boom, disapproving of intriguing structures like the doughnut-shaped Guangzhou Circle skyscraper by Italian architect Joseph di Pasquale (b 1968) and to demonstrate it’s not merely a criticism of foreign influence, he’s also condemned some of the works by Chinese designers.  The president expects buildings to be like Chinese youth: cost-conscious, structurally sound, functional and environmentally friendly.  That’s it; no deviation allowed.      

The new headquarters of the state media’s China Daily during construction.  When finished if looked less confronting but one can see why the president was concerned.

But the architects got off lightly compared with the androgynous, the state’s regulator of television content ruling that broadcasters must "resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal aesthetics", telling them to ban from the screens the niang pao (derisive slang for girly men which translates literally as "girlie guns”).  Culturally, the new interest shouldn’t be surprising given a narrow definition of gender roles has long been a theme in the identity and propaganda of authoritarian administrations, the imagery, campaigns and policies of twentieth century communist & fascist regimes being well documented, those not conforming suffering much.

Lindsay Lohan is androgynous mode.

Like the West, modern China has some history with LGBTQQIAAOP issues and, certainly in the twentieth century, many in the LGBTQQIAAOP communities were treated as mentally ill undesirables and sometimes prosecuted but, reflecting changes in the West, in 1997, Beijing decriminalized homosexuality and in 2001 removed it from the official list of mental disorders.  Before long, officially recognized gay bars appeared in Shanghai and gay pride marches were held and it appeared state tolerance of such things had become, if not state policy, then certainly the practice.  However, under President Xi, things began to change, films and other material with LGBTQQIAAOP themes often censored or actually banned, universities compiling lists of students who identify as gay and the pride marches have been cancelled although this was officially a COVID-19 infection-prevention measure.  In a prelude to the committee’s statement on the suppression of androgyny, in July 2021, the government ordered the Tencent-owned messaging app WeChat to delete accounts connected to LGBTQQIAAOP groups.

Wrong: The androgynous men on Chinese TV.

Some medical experts have suggested the government is under no illusion about homosexuality and understand it’s always going to exist but they just want it to remain invisible; in the closet as it were, something done behind closed doors between consenting adults but something which dare not speak its name, must less be shown on television.  Others suspect the crackdown on degeneracy may reflect the regime’s fiscal and demographic concerns, a feeling the younger generation are suffering from the “curse of plenty”.  Having grown up knowing little but relative affluence and abundance, youth and working-age adults are starting to rebel against the heavy workload they’ll have to bear for the rest of their lives to maintain an aging population, a cultural movement called "lying flat" identified which rejects the “996” (working 9am-9pm 6 days a week, ie 72 hours) culture.  The party seems to have realised 996 may not be something helpful for regime survival and, in August 2021, arranged for the Supreme People's Court on to declare it illegal.  However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t endure as a cultural expectation, especially in companies employing younger workers.

996: When first seen by US pilots over Korean skies in 1950, the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG-15  (NATO reporting name=Fagot)) made an impact like few others.  Unlike the British and Americans who had trouble keeping things secret from the Soviets, the MiG-15's existence was unknown and unexpected.  Clearly influenced by the German war-time experience and the North-American F86 Sabre, it used an (illegal) copy of a Rolls-Royce turbojet and so instantly did it transform the control of the Korean War skies that the Americans were compelled to rush squadrons of Sabres to the theatre to augment the now out-paced P51 Mustangs.  MiG-15 996 (NX996) was first assigned to the USSR Air Force but in 1955 was transferred to the People's Liberation Army Navy (the then correct term for the Chinese Navy).

Right: The manly men of the CCP’s Central Committee.

Making connections between the strands has been a rich environment for conspiracy theorists searching for hidden agendas and ulterior motives.  Blaming video games, entertainment, and androgyny for making men "too soft to work hard" is said to be just blame-shifting for the consequences of the 996 culture burning out whole generations.  State-sanctioned statistics do show extraordinary gains in productivity over the last dozen years, economic output having doubled but the gains disproportionately have been accrued by a relatively few oligarchs and those well-connected to the senior echelons of the party with even many in the upper middle-class complaining the purchasing power of their incomes are consistently falling, not keeping pace with the rising cost of housing and raising children.  Reaction to the party’s announcement that the one-child policy was finished and couples should now have two or three was thus muted; in the absence of anything actually to help parents afford to have another child, a baby-boom is not soon expected.  Still, one of the advantages of living in a communist state running a regulated capitalism as a sort of public-private partnership, is the compulsory education in Marxist theory so at least the people will understand where the alienated surplus profits from their labour went and the party does seem aware of the problem, another of their crackdowns directed against the oligarchs.  However, unlike the androgynous, they’re not expected to be banned, instead they’ll be “encouraged” to spread the wealth.  Just a little.