Haggard Hawks 30

Doctrices, dance moves, and an unburnable Babylonian

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THE DOCTRIX IS IN

 

This week, the BBC announced that they had cast actress Jodie Whittaker as the thirteenth incarnation of Doctor Who, and some people thought that casting a woman as a centuries-old time-traveling alien from the planet Gallifrey who travels the universe in a phone box stretched the realism of the story too far.

 

Here at HHHQ, we thought Sylvester McCoy was still Doctor Who, so we’re probably not in a position to comment. All that we’re concerned with is that a doctrix is a female doctor —a fact that turned out to be this week’s most popular tweet. 

 

Doctor comes from the Latin verb docere, meaning “to teach”. In fact, when the word was first adopted into English in the fourteenth century, it originally meant “teacher”, “instructor”, or “one who has attained the highest level of learning” and so is in a position to teach others—a meaning that still survives in academic doctorates.

 

Grammatically speaking, doctor is the agent noun of docere, meaning that it’s the term for someone who carries out the action of the verb. And in Latin, masculine agent nouns ended in –or, while feminine agent nouns ended in –trix. Hence doctrix.

 

Amongst the words we’ve borrowed from Latin, this gender distinction was once much more strictly observed in English than it is today; browse a dictionary, and you might spot old entries for words like protectrix, inventrix and ambassatrix. But nowadays, outside of fairly formal and set-in-stone writing styles like legalese (where terms like inheritrix and executrix still have some application), only a dwindling handful of feminine Latin agent nouns remain in use.

 

You might, for instance, still see Amelia Earhart referred to as an aviatrix rather than an aviator—but the chances of seeing Kathryn Bigelow described as a directrix, or Carol Ann Duffy as a versificatrix?

 

Doctrix is one of those dwindling, old-fashioned words: first recorded in English in the early 1600s, it’s seldom encountered today (and would probably raise a few “seriously, you’re going to be that pedantic?” eyebrows if you were to drop it into everyday conversation). Drawing distinctions between the genders just isn’t as pressing a concern—nor as fashionable—as it once was, and terms like doctor, sculptor, benefactor and spectator are now considered genderless.

 

Elsewhere this week we found out that: 

 

  • next time there’s a full moon in the sky, you can also call it a panselene
  • should you ever need a word for one, a heart-scald is a bitter disappointment, 
  • a florisugent creature that drinks the nectar or honey from plants
  • the earliest known reference to rye bread is in the name “Adam Rybred” in 1326
  • and next time you’re climbing up a steep hill, you might be climbing a borstall.

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STEP BY STEP


The fact that orchesography is a bizarre diagrammatic system for notating dance moves (see below) ended the week as one of the most popular tweets. 

 

Both the word orchesography and this curious system of notation were invented by Thoinot Arbeau, a French Renaissance historian and scholar who, in 1577, wrote an influential treatise on French dances called Orchésographie.

 

Arbeau based his word on two Greek roots: orkheisthai, meaning “to dance”, and graphe, meaning “to write” or “draw”. The second of these will be familiar as the root as words like geography (literally “a written description of the Earth”) and biography (“an account of life”), while the first is an etymological cousin of the word orchestra. Long before it came to be used of the group of musicians who accompany a stage performance, an orchestra was an open space or raised platform in front of a stage on which dancers or members of the chorus would perform; as a result, orchestra literally means “a place for dancing”. 

 

From Arbeau’s work in the sixteenth century, orchesography was adopted into English in the early 1700s and has remained in, albeit fairly niche use, ever since. 

 

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FIRE ESCAPE 

 

The fact that a Shadrach is someone who appears unaffected by intense heat cropped up on HH this week—and as some of you clever, clever people pointed out there’s a curious story attached to this one.  

 

The term Shadrach alludes to an episode from the reign of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, recounted in the Old Testament book of Daniel. According to the tale, the king commanded that three young Jewish officers—Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—be thrown into a “burning fiery furnace” for refusing to worship a glittering golden idol. 

 

Nebuchadnezzar came near to the mouth of the burning fiery furnace … and said, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego … come hither. Then [they] came forth of the midst of the fire. And the princes, governors, and captains … saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them.

Daniel, 3:26–7

 

Not only did the three men emerged unharmed, but Nebuchadnezzar claimed to have seen a fourth figure “like the Son of God” walking with them through the flames. The king promptly had them pulled from the furnace, and was so humbled by what had happened that he promoted them to high offices in Babylon, decreeing that anyone who spoke against their God would be “cut in pieces, and their houses ... made a dunghill.” Well, quite.

 

Originating in this story, Shadrach—which is also now the name of a mechanism that feeds air into a blast furnace—dropped into allusive use in English in the nineteenth century, and remains in use as a byword for anyone apparently unaffected by extreme heat: 

 

Let to its own devices, the class tied Eunice Ann Simpson to a chair and placed her in the furnace room. We forgot her, trooped upstairs to church, and were listening quietly to the sermon when a dreadful banging issued from the radiator pipes, persisting until someone investigated and brought forth Eunice Ann saying she didn't want to play Shadrach any more—Jem Finch said she wouldn't get burnt if she had enough faith, but it was hot down there.

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)

 

TEMPLATE No. 23

 

Four more tricky template puzzles this week: only one dictionary word (that we could find) fits each one of these word templates. What are they?

 

W_ _ _ _UY

_UYB_ _ _

_ _ _ _ _ _ _UY

_ _UYE_ _

 

[Answer to last week’s puzzle: COWPOX, VIEWPOINT, BLOWPIPE, SLOWPOKE]

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