Fewer eponyms have made a bigger career than Orwellian. Extremely popular during the cold war, it was widely used by correspondents reporting on the gritty realism of the Soviet Union. The word took its name from George Orwell (1903-1950), an English writer and journalist, who criticized a socialist totalitarianism in his monumental book entitled 1984.
Originally published in 1949, the novel depicted a futuristic world of Oceania, where the omnipresent Big Brother controls every move of his citizens and the thought police “vaporizes” anyone who dares to rebel, even in his mind.
The book sold well and almost immediately the adjective Orwellian became synonymous to totalitarian. Mary McCarthy, an American writer and critic, is reported to have first used the word in one of her works in 1950. Soon it was noticed by newspapermen who began to include it in most of their reports from the Soviet Union and other countries where freedom and democracy were banned. Time described Isaac Babel, a Russian writer expelled from the USSR, as “an Orwellian unperson.” The same magazine also called Fidel Castro's continuous appearance on TV “an Orwellian marathon.”
Throughout the years, the eponym assumed different meanings. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, journalists used Orwellian more often in situations that involved less strict control, for example at work or school. The adjective also earned a satirical notion. Leonard Sloane of the New York Times entitled his 1992 article about electronic badges registering employees' movements, “Orwellian Dream Come True: A Badge That Pinpoints You.”
The decade of the 1990s was dubbed the decade of peace as totalitarianisms fell apart one after another. For a while it seemed that Orwellian would soon disappear from the popular vocabulary as democracy was spreading across the world. But the tragic events of September 11, 2001, have made many countries introduce restrictive laws that, for some, equaled undemocratic solutions. “The Senate may be moving towards passage of the Orwellian Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevent Act of 2007,” warned the Global Research website in May of 2008. A year earlier, BBC quoted a senior police officer from London who feared that “the spread of [city's] cameras is leading to an Orwellian situation.”
Although in his books – Animal Farm and 1984 – Orwell presented himself as an ardent critic of any totalitarianism, his personal opinion was more ambiguous. “I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler,” wrote Orwell in 1940. “The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.”
Friday, October 3, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Nicotine
Bad as it is, smoking is still widely popular among people of all ages and nationalities. Although more and more smokers give up this nasty habit, undaunted millions remain faithful to Oscar Wilde's words that “a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure.” All this fuss is about one substance: nicotine.
One man, Jean Nicot (1530-1600) is solely responsible for millions of nicotine victims. This French diplomat discovered tobacco in Portugal while negotiating a marriage between a six-year-old French princess and a Portuguese prince one year her junior. As cigarettes were unknown in Europe (unlike in South America), Nicot and other fashionable aristocrats snuffed tobacco powder rather than smoke it. The habit quickly caught on in France and from there moved rapidly east and south, reaching the frontiers of Russia and Turkey.
Because Jean Nicot popularized tobacco in Europe, the curious plant earned his name. Its Latin form – herba nicotiana – was coined circa 1600, and could be translated as Nicot's herb. Now by “Nicotiana” we mean “any of various flowering annual or perennial herbs of the genus Nicotiana, native to the Americas and including the tobacco plant and ornamental species with fragrant flowers” (the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition). It is worth mentioning that the word “tobacco” dates back to 1588 and is of Indian origin.
On the other hand, the word “nicotine” made its way to the English language only in 1819. To quote the same source, nicotine is “a colorless, poisonous alkaloid, derived from the tobacco plant and used as insecticide. It is the substance in tobacco to which smokers can become addicted.” A pair of German chemists, Posselt and Reimann, who first isolated nicotine in 1828, gave it a less appealing name – C10H14N2 .
Why is nicotine so dangerous? “Nicotine in high doses acts as an effective nerve poison and can have a number of potentially harmful side effects,” writes Wise Geek, a website which provides “clear answers for common questions.” In other words, the substance works like a drug that enslaves people who, in order to satisfy their nicotine hunger, need it in bigger and bigger quantities. Moreover, nicotine – apart from cigarettes' other ingredients – increases the chance of developing cancer. The same applies to various nicotine patches and gums, advertised as safe alternatives to smoking.
Women are especially prone to nicotine addiction. In 2005, the New York Times published a scientific research that found female smokers less successful “with nicotine replacement therapy and are more affected by 'cues' that set off a desire to smoke.” If this does not sound convincing enough, many women will shiver at the thought that one of nicotine's effects is “to make women's brains work more like men's.”
It was never Jean Nicot's dream to go down in history as the name-bearer of an addictive drug. The French diplomat died 40 years after first snuffing tobacco and there is little prove that his habit rendered his health. But contemporary statistics do not lie: nicotine claims hundreds of thousands of people every year all over the world.
One man, Jean Nicot (1530-1600) is solely responsible for millions of nicotine victims. This French diplomat discovered tobacco in Portugal while negotiating a marriage between a six-year-old French princess and a Portuguese prince one year her junior. As cigarettes were unknown in Europe (unlike in South America), Nicot and other fashionable aristocrats snuffed tobacco powder rather than smoke it. The habit quickly caught on in France and from there moved rapidly east and south, reaching the frontiers of Russia and Turkey.
Because Jean Nicot popularized tobacco in Europe, the curious plant earned his name. Its Latin form – herba nicotiana – was coined circa 1600, and could be translated as Nicot's herb. Now by “Nicotiana” we mean “any of various flowering annual or perennial herbs of the genus Nicotiana, native to the Americas and including the tobacco plant and ornamental species with fragrant flowers” (the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition). It is worth mentioning that the word “tobacco” dates back to 1588 and is of Indian origin.
On the other hand, the word “nicotine” made its way to the English language only in 1819. To quote the same source, nicotine is “a colorless, poisonous alkaloid, derived from the tobacco plant and used as insecticide. It is the substance in tobacco to which smokers can become addicted.” A pair of German chemists, Posselt and Reimann, who first isolated nicotine in 1828, gave it a less appealing name – C10H14N2 .
Why is nicotine so dangerous? “Nicotine in high doses acts as an effective nerve poison and can have a number of potentially harmful side effects,” writes Wise Geek, a website which provides “clear answers for common questions.” In other words, the substance works like a drug that enslaves people who, in order to satisfy their nicotine hunger, need it in bigger and bigger quantities. Moreover, nicotine – apart from cigarettes' other ingredients – increases the chance of developing cancer. The same applies to various nicotine patches and gums, advertised as safe alternatives to smoking.
Women are especially prone to nicotine addiction. In 2005, the New York Times published a scientific research that found female smokers less successful “with nicotine replacement therapy and are more affected by 'cues' that set off a desire to smoke.” If this does not sound convincing enough, many women will shiver at the thought that one of nicotine's effects is “to make women's brains work more like men's.”
It was never Jean Nicot's dream to go down in history as the name-bearer of an addictive drug. The French diplomat died 40 years after first snuffing tobacco and there is little prove that his habit rendered his health. But contemporary statistics do not lie: nicotine claims hundreds of thousands of people every year all over the world.
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