Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 July 1

= July 1 =

Measure for Measure
In Act 4 Scene 2, Duke tells Provost to "shave the head and tie the beard" of Barnardine so Barnardine he will look like Claudio.

He says "you know the course is common" that implies it was a common custom in that era. What is the significance of shaving the head and tying the beard before death? 151.192.123.58 (talk) 07:01, 1 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Providers of critical commentaries appear to be a bit stumped. One suggestion for the beard thing is that it may have to do with the poor bloke's imminent decapitation: "Perhaps it was usual to tie up the beard before decollation." For the shaving, suggestions range from a custom in some regions to burn the hairs of executed felons, to a supposed desire of Roman Catholic to look like a monk when shuffling of this mortal coil. --Lambiam 07:45, 1 July 2022 (UTC)


 * The preceding line: "...say it was the desire of the penitent to be so bared before his death" suggests that it was an outward display of penance, but I haven't found anything much to support that. Earlier in the passage, there is a discussion about the hangman, so perhaps decapitation was to be post-mortem? Alansplodge (talk) 09:47, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * An example from medieval Germany:
 * When he summoned a person before his court, he peremptorily demanded that the accused confess his guilt, reveal his fellow heretics , and have his head shaved as a form of penance Alansplodge (talk) 09:47, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Also: Cutting or shaving off the hair of the head could also be a penance imposed on both men and women guilty of crimes or sins. A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages Alansplodge (talk) 09:52, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Bight of Benin Protectorate
Various sources, including Bight of Benin and Territorial evolution of the British Empire, note a "Bight of Benin Protectorate". I'm not questioning it existed, everyone seems to agree that it did, but I'm not able to find any actual primary sources for it. No orders from the British government proclaiming it as such, no details about borders or anything beyond that it happened on February 1, 1852, and was merged with the Bight of Biafra Protectorate (similarly hard to find info on) on August 6, 1861, as the Bights of Benin and Biafra Protectorate. Does anyone know where I might find primary information on these? And if we can't, does that have any implications for our articles that we're apparently only ever linking to second-hand sources and none of them seem to have any primary information? --Golbez (talk) 15:54, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * These Protectorates were created by Order in Council.  There's a reference to the creation of a successor Protectorate at . 86.162.182.188 (talk) 12:58, 2 July 2022 (UTC)


 * What I understand from sources is that there was originally (since 1849) a single British protectorate for the Bights of Benin and Biafra, with a single consul, John Beecroft, which was divided into two parts in 1852, with a vice-consul (Louis Fraser) specifically assigned to the Benin part, taking office in Lagos. Some sources say the split occurred in 1853, when Benjamin Campbell was assigned as full-fledged consul for the Bight of Benin. The split appears to have been first an internal redistribution of duties and next more a pragmatic administrative move by the Foreign Office than an act of government. --Lambiam 14:27, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you both for this, but I still would like to see a primary reference to this Order in Council. We have plenty of sources saying something like it existed, but I've not been able to find any specific citation or text from it. I've glanced at the London Gazettes from just before and after 1 Feb 1852 and have found no mention of the Bight of Benin. I feel uncomfortable with the fact that the only sources we seem to be able to find have no specific details on it, except recording (generally vaguely) that it happened. --Golbez (talk) 20:29, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * This book dates the Benin protectorate to 1849 and the Biafra protectorate to 1850.   The source which you cite refers to the administrative deployment of consuls rather than the territorial demarcation of protectorates.   Our article List of British colonial gazettes may be helpful. 2A00:23D0:20:6101:D919:2B35:1D8B:3621 (talk) 11:01, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * We have multiple references saying it happened, but no primary sourcing. This is akin to us having a ton of references saying "Hawaii was admitted to the US in 1959," without actually having the document or any direct proof, just people saying it happened, with no citation to legal reasoning, specific date, or borders. It's gotten to the point where I simply can't trust any book published after 2005 for citations here, because they have a non-zero chance of simply referencing Wikipedia without saying so. Like, for example, your link: "Benin protectorate 1849". Says who? I need some kind of primary source to even confirm they're saying something remotely close to the truth, rather than parroting what the last book they read said, who parroted the last book they read, and so on. At least with my Hawaii example, there is an easily-findable act of congress admitting the state. That's all I want - a citation or link to the Order in Council creating this. Otherwise I'll start to wonder if, like the Colony of the Queen Charlotte Islands, it didn't actually exist, and people just started saying it did. I'll browse that article but a glance shows me nothing that would be relevant to the Nigeria region in the 1850s. --Golbez (talk) 17:54, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * And please don't take my annoyance as an attack on anyone helping, it's just that it's giving the exact same vague info we already had, which, considering this is what we get with more eyes on it, makes me even more wary of it. --Golbez (talk) 20:17, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Here's an example of what's available .  See also.
 * Of particular interest:

CONS 1-10: Consular Records [also known as CALPROF at the Ibadan Archives, where the originals are kept] (134 volumes, 1846-1911)

There is a search room at the Ibadan Archives and it is likely that email, postal and telephone searches can be made. The records of the Chief Secretary's Office include:

CSO5: Administrative, constitutional and legal instruments. Includes treaties, agreements, proclamations, orders-in-council, letter patents [sic], royal instructions, and conventions (265 pieces, 1842-1960) 2A00:23C5:C719:7201:2CFC:E3D5:511:6B53 (talk) 11:04, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Do these names make sense as "euphemistic"?
I was reading about Britomartis, a goddess of mountains and hunting, whose name meaning "sweet" (possibly "sweet maiden") may be a euphemism. I investigated the source for that, a book called The world of classical myth, which has a lot of similar examples: Like Tritogeneia-Athena, Apollo could tack his African identity onto his name. He was called Aristaeus (or Aristaios, the ‘Best’): commonly in Greek, things that are too sinister to name can be called by their opposite: like aristera for the ‘left hand,’ which Latin more honestly calls sinister. The story is variously told, but there was a maiden named Kallisto, the ‘Best, Most Beautiful,’ similar in meaning to what we have said about Aristaios. the island of Kalliste (the ‘Most Beautiful,’ an overly optimistic name for the Death Goddess) the nymph Britomartis, one of the sisterhood that hunted with the hounds of Artemis. Her name is supposed to mean the ‘Good Maiden’—which like Aristaios and Kalliste, is probably a euphemism for its opposite, the Maiden of Death. One of the Danaid sisters was named Amymone (the ‘Flawless,’ but perhaps she was called that to fend off the more obvious truth of her chthonic identity, like the names of Artemis as Kalliste, Britomartis, and the other ‘good ladies’). What I'm unclear on is, are any of these characters actually sinister? Apollo is the god of sunlight, and healing, and protection from evil, and music and poetry and a lot of other nice things. Callisto (mythology) just seems to be another Artemis-like hunting goddess (or nymph). Was Artemis scary? Amymone seems to be a human, and a specifically blameless one compared to her 49 sisters who killed their husbands. I was considering adding one or more of these to noa-name, but are these theories even plausible? Wiktionary does mention "euphemism" at ἀριστερός (aristerós, left), which I might gloss as "counter-right", but I don't know what it would be a euphemism for: is the implication that there was an actual name for "left" which was rarely used? Card Zero (talk) 17:02, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * No expertise about this but:
 * Apollo
 * In the Iliad, Apollo is the healer under the gods, but he is also the bringer of disease and death with his arrows,
 * Artemis
 * Artemis could be a deity to be feared by pregnant women, as deaths during this time were attributed to her.
 * About the Greek word for "left", consider that, except Italian, several Romance languages avoided the sinister connotations of Latin sinister. See izquierda, stânga, gauche. I don't know about lesser languages and dialects (I just remember quer). So it may well be that aristeros substituted one of the synonyms Wiktionary provides or a word so sinister that is not written in Wiktionary.
 * --Error (talk) 19:43, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, I was conscious of not mentioning the archery. Artemis (sometimes aka Artemis Kalliste) is the twin sister of Apollo, and they're both liable to shoot other beings, such as people maybe, so ... but I don't quite buy that this makes them gods of death whose terrible names shall not be spoken, because they're all sorts of other things as well, often benign and fluffy things. Card Zero  (talk) 21:17, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I understand that our post-Renaissance view of Classical mythological is more clear-cut than the one the ancients had. Compare Artemis the huntress with the Ephesian Artemis. The ancients did their interpretatio graeca of their Hellenized neighbors with quite freedom, and later Hellenists, Byzantines, Renaissancers and Neo-Classical erudites had to hammer the old material into a neat picture that you could put into statues for gardens, banks and libraries. --Error (talk) 23:07, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * About aristeios, if you can access https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12124, it says:
 * The last case is the two Greek languages, ancient and modern. The same basic switch must have happened there at some time from negative,which shaded the original term [laios] (a bit surprisingly, because in ancient Greek it was the poetic term for left), to positive. The new word for the left and the left hand became  [aristeros]. This is grammatically incorrect, as the elative  [aristos] (the best) from  [agathos] (good) cannot be put in the comparative.
 * --Error (talk) 23:07, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Ha! "Bestest". Good stuff, thank you. Wiktionary just gives two senses for the suffix (1. some notion of contrast with an antonym, 2. comparative). I guess it's a reasonable theory that the new word arose because they didn't want to say laios, or skaios. (Both from PIE roots, both found in Latin too, as laevus and scaevus. Why do we have two Proto-Indo-European root words for left?) Card Zero  (talk) 00:16, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Here the contrastive sense of the suffix fits well: –  Same in Latin: sinist er  – dext er  and even Dutch link er  – recht er . This is not the comparative suffix, so the statement about grammatical incorrectness is baseless.  --Lambiam 13:12, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm actually not seeing the negative connotation of λαιός. Wiktionary says it can mean "awkward", but that seems based on a French dictionary defining it as "gauche"! Gauche is itself a replacement for a derivative of sinister. Best I can come up with is that λαιoς rhymes with σκαιός. Maybe λαιός itself was a euphemism and the euphemism treadmill is at work. sinister says "possibly a euphemism" too ...  Card Zero  (talk) 21:37, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Was Artemis scary? Yes. Go read the section on divine retribution in her article.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 07:53, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I also found Hecate, sometimes-sort-of an aspect of Artemis, and definitely involved with death. I'm picking up the impression that Greek gods took no particular responsibility for looking after the Greeks. They could be pleased, or offended, cure a disease or cause a disease, and they could be touchy and bad-tempered, and this wasn't about an ancient Greek's morality in general but about their infractions on a given god's domain or reputation. A stand-offish relationship. So invoking them by name risks slander (blasphemy?), followed by unpleasant incidents. I wish I had a second source for the names being euphemistic.
 * Oh, Erinyes says the Furies had an alternate name meaning something like "the kindly ones", and cites The Greek Myths (Robert Graves). That'll do. Also it's in the Suda. Card Zero  (talk) 12:17, 2 July 2022 (UTC)

"Star" names in American sci-fi and tech
One may notice that there are many names referencing star in American sci-fi and tech, from astronaut, Boeing Starliner and Stardust to Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Starship Troopers, etc. Is it sort of romantic affection to stars made more prominent by the US, a homage to The Star-Spangled Banner or something else? Brandmeistertalk  19:37, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * A possible cause is also the Apollo Project and the immense effort that the US made to convince its citizens that their Manifest Destiny is to reach the Final Frontier: the stars. NASA is still big at self-promotion. --Error (talk) 19:52, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Starting in the early 1950s (before NASA), Isaac Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series, six juvenile science fiction novels set in the far future. Cullen328 (talk) 20:04, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Is there any evidence that this is any different in non-American science fiction? Interstellar travel is one of the main tropes of the genre, so mentioning stars seems pretty natural. --Trovatore (talk) 20:14, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * After a little search I think the earliest reference to the idea of travel to/from another star (at least in the Western canon) is Voltaire's Le Micromégas (1752). Obviously this significantly predated the rise of proto-scifi of Mary Shelly and her gang in the mid-19th century, and I don't know if their group or later with Jules Verne or HG Wells ever did anything with interstellar travel. SamuelRiv (talk) 21:26, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I think they were cluey enough to know that it's impossible to travel to a star, at least without a strong possibility of you and your craft being burned to a crisp well before you ever get there. It's planets that provide more exploratory interest. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:37, 1 July 2022 (UTC)


 * It is certainly not only a US thing. The phrase Ad astra ("To the stars") has a long pedigree. Compare also the title of Stanislaw Lem's story collection The Star Diaries (1957). While cosmonaut is a more accurate name for a space traveller remaining in the solar system, the planets used to be called "wandering stars", and the term astronaut has been used in speculative fiction long before NASA was founded. Astronautics was the title of a journal that appeared since about 1927 to 1944. Some early (pre-NASA) uses of star in American SF literature are Asimov's pre-Galactic Empire novel The Stars, Like Dust (1951), Heinlein's Starman Jones (1953), The Star Beast (1954) and Double Star (1956), and James Blish's They Shall have Stars (also 1956). --Lambiam 22:38, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Stanislaw Lem jinx! Card Zero  (talk) 22:41, 1 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Stars are also important to Italy, and Turks, and were significant symbols for Soviets and their allies, and feature on many flags such as the flag of Liberia. Sci-fi with a word for "star" in the title includes Powrót z gwiazd, Dzienniki gwiazdowe, Tähtivaeltaja magazine, and Tähtien tarhoissa ("Among the Stars", Arvid Lydecken, 1912). Five stars meaning "excellent" is internationally understood symbology. If star/translations is correct then (local word for) star, meaning "talented or famous person", exists in many languages including Swahili and Malay. (I'm amused to see that the equivalent Japanese word for a celebrity, however, means "flower-shaped".) So there's a widespread international idea that stars are romantic, exciting, excellent, symbolize importance, or (naturally enough) are keywords in sci-fi, and I can't accept your premise. Starship Troopers (film) Stargate (film) was directed and co-written by a German, who was admittedly living in the US but had been there for less than four years. Apstar 6 is a Chinese satellite. Star One (satellite operator) is Brazillian. Respectfully, I think the consensus on your theory is "nah". Card Zero  (talk) 22:39, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * While there was, confusingly, also a German director named Paul Verhoeven (1901–1975), the director of the SF flick Starship Troopers is a Dutchman. The title was anyway that of the novel it is based on. --Lambiam 22:47, 1 July 2022 (UTC)}
 * Dammit, I'd just this moment noticed I'd got the wrong film. Yes, I meant Stargate, not Starship Troopers. Card Zero  (talk) 22:50, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

US two-party system
Two-party_system describes various periods of two-party dominance in US political history, where the two parties on top changed between periods. And I seem to remember reading that when Abraham Lincoln was first elected president, there were four viable parties, presumably a necessarily temporary situation if we believe Duverger's law. I imagine something like a game of musical chairs, where there are two "major party" chairs and a bunch of minor party chairs, and once in a while, some situation in the country makes everyone get up, circle the chairs, and sit back down, possibly resulting in the "major party" chairs getting new occupants. During Lincoln's election things were in flux so nobody had those chairs.

Is that picture anything like accurate? Is there some good history or explanation of how relations between parties evolve? Like right now, there is something of an ideological split within the GOP (religious vs business), while the Democrats in trying to please everyone make so many compromises that they can't seem to implement their policy goals (I'll stay out of the question of whether those goals are good or bad). Could we be heading towards a collapse of one or both major parties, with existing or new minor parties becoming the new majors? Are those sorts of transitions necessarily turbulent, or is it just sort of a natural succession process, like when everyone moved from AOL to Facebook (or however that worked) pretty much peacefully? Thanks. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:FD2B (talk) 21:27, 1 July 2022 (UTC)


 * In the presidential election of 1860, there were four major candidates, but not really four major parties. There were a northern/anti-Buchanan faction of Democrats, a southern/pro-Buchanan faction of Democrats, and Republicans.  The "Constitutional Union" party was a vehicle of the Bell candidacy, and fell apart after he lost.  Anyway, there have only been a few shifts -- from Federalists, to Whigs, to Republicans. Not much has remained consistent across 230 years, but some historians speak of a basic persisting "Hamiltonian" vs. "Jeffersonian" opposition. AnonMoos (talk) 22:18, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Modern Pubs must be Jeffersonian. Thought almost all jobs would be "farm without tractors" forever. Almost declined to double the land and good land of the country for 4¢/acre cause Constitution didn't explicitly allow border treaties. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 07:21, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * That's not really the case -- Hamiltonian means favoring "big business" (though there were very few big businesses in the U.S. in the late 18th century), high finance, and infrastructure projects to promote economic development. Jeffersonian means favoring the interests of ordinary people (originally mainly farmers -- but after the 1870s, homesteading a farm was no longer a very good way for a family to lift itself out of poverty).  Of course there have been some switches over the centuries -- the Democratic party was originally in favor of small government, but FDR changed that.  For a long time, the Democratic party relied on the support of white immigrants in eastern cities, and rejected anti-immigrant sentiment, but was very racist towards Black people. but that's changed too...  P.S. You should probably stick to words found in dictionaries. AnonMoos (talk) 07:43, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The new reply system fucked up again. It likes to eat bytes. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 09:46, 2 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Okay that makes sense. It seems both left and right could pick either man to spin as their side if they wanted to. A bit like astrology. At least Hamilton isn't too minarchist to build the tiniest internal improvement. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 09:58, 2 July 2022 (UTC)


 * From Minor party: Third parties usually have little chance of forming a government or winning the position of head of government. Nevertheless, there are many reasons for third parties to compete. The opportunity of a national election means that attention will be paid to the positions of third parties. The larger parties might be forced to respond and adapt to their challenges, and often the larger parties copy ideas from them. Most third parties try to build their support to become one of the dominant parties, as the Labour Party in Britain and New Democratic Party in Canada did. Of course it's not every century that the main two parties cease to bogart their musical chairs. In the meantime, though, the effect of minor parties on major party policy is observable (Borg-like absorption is how they prevent minor parties gaining ground). I'm not sure whether Trump counted as an example of this effect, still less what the next evolution of either party might be, but a likely future event (wait a minute, this isn't a request for a prediction is it?) is a slight gain in popularity for some minor party followed by a major party attempting to embrace, extend, and extinguish it, by evolving. Card Zero  (talk) 23:57, 1 July 2022 (UTC)


 * If you read Spanish, La democracia como mercado político tries to explain why center parties won't last long in Spain. It mentions Joseph Alois Schumpeter and provides as references:
 * Andrés de Blas Guerrero, Jaime Pastor Verdú: Fundamentos de Ciencia Política, UNED, Madrid 1997
 * Ernst U. Von Weizsäcker: Política de la tierra, 3ª edición, Madrid 1992
 * Irene Delgado Sotillos, Lourdes López Nieto: Comportamiento Político, Partidos y Grupos de Presión, Sociología Electoral, UNED, Madrid 2004
 * Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas: Bárometro de abril de 2022, Madrid 2022


 * There's no shortage of Civil War autodidacts online (and I'm not one), so if you don't get your answer here you should definitely try the appropriate board on SlackX or Reddit. I think from your conception the idea of having only two chairs is kind of a consequence of living in this country over the past century and a half. But the "early" history (first 100 years?) of the U.S. is interesting because while some founders envisioned the inevitable forces of a two-party system, we had the total annihilation of two major parties (Federalists and Whigs), one or two extended periods of single-party rule (Era of Good Feelings and the Reconstruction era), and as you point out, the unpredictable political force of so-called minor parties. I was going to go speculate on post-Civil War strengthening of two-party dominance (which has some empirical support in modern civil wars from my brief literature search), but it looks like how actual historians conceptualize it is different as explained in our articles Political parties in the United States and the Third Party System. SamuelRiv (talk) 00:45, 2 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Some of the authors of the U.S. constitution (in the Philadelphia Convention) were rather skeptical or doubtful about political parties at a national level. AnonMoos (talk) 07:43, 2 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks all, yeah, I wasn't specifically looking into Abraham Lincoln but am interested in the more general question of how major parties lose their status and minor ones step into their place. Thanks AnonMoos for clarification about what happened with Lincoln. Basically I don't like either of the two current US major parties so am wondering what hope there is of somehow demoting one or both of them. I'm assuming that the two party system per se is an inevitable consequence of the US voting system, but conceivably that's wrong too. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:FD2B (talk) 05:35, 2 July 2022 (UTC)


 * The Federalists were always strongest in New England, and lost popularity by their opposition to the War of 1812, leading to a period when national political struggles were between political factions and/or personal ambitions within what today would be called the Democratic Party. The Whigs started falling apart when many Whigs in the north, even if they didn't care all that much about slavery, grew disgusted with Southern domination of the U.S. government in the 1850s, while many Whigs in the south felt that they had to loudly declare themselves ultra-pro-slavery in order to compete with Democrats in the South.  That's pretty much it for the decline and fall of "big two" political parties in the U.S. AnonMoos (talk) 07:22, 2 July 2022 (UTC)