Today at sundown marks the beginning of Hanukkah, the eight day Jewish Festival of Lights. Instituted to celebrate the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, the festival is observed by lighting the eight candles in a menorah, eating, the recitation of scripture, and the giving of gifts. Coincidently it’s also one of the primary holidays during the month of December, along with Christmas, but it does hold a more marginalized role in popular culture than the latter. One of the more confusing elements of the holiday (for someone who doesn’t celebrate it), is the English spelling of the name—is it Hanukkah or Chanukah or Chanukkah or something else entirely?

The name of the holiday, חנוכה, originates in the Hebrew verb חנך, “to dedicate”—a signification that makes sense since the festival celebrates the rededication of the Temple when the Jews regained control of Jerusalem from the Seleucid empire in the second century BCE. חנך can be broken down into two parts—חנו from the Hebrew word for encampment and כ”ה, the twenty-fifth day of Kislev, the day the holiday begins. Another possibility to the etymology is ח’ נרות והלכה כבית הלל, “eight candles as determined by the House of Hillel,” of which Hanukkah is the acronym for. Apparently a disagreement sprung up between two religious groups as to how to light the candles—lighting all on the first night and blowing one out every subsequent day (Shammai) or lighting one candle per night (Hillel). As we can now see, the official position is that of Hillel.

As for the spelling of the word, Hanukkah or Chanukah or Chanukkah (etc.), back in 2005 on All Things Considered, Robert Segal reported that the main issue behind the spelling conundrum is that certain Hebrew letters simply don’t have an equivalent in English. However, that doesn’t quite explain the popularity of Hanukkah over Chanukah or vice versa. Andy Carvin, in his blog post Chanukah vs. Hanukkah Death Match: the Great Spelling Shift, found out some weird statistics. When Segal reported on the spelling debate, 2.8 million Google hits were for Chanukah where as Hanukkah only logged 650,000. Carvin was interested in finding out if another shift had occurred, or if Chanukah was still more popular than Hanukkah. One year later, however, the number of hits for Chanukah dropped to 3,070,000 while the hits for Hanukkah jumped to 10,200,000. This change Carvin suggests could be accounted for by the use of Hanukkah as the official Wikipedia entry—it redirects you if you type in Chanukah.

Another blogger, however, Balashon—Hebrew Language Detective takes issue with the spelling of Hanukkah.

I’m partial to Chanuka or even Hanuka, but my wife quotes her fourth grade teacher as saying “The one rule about spelling חנוכה – it must have eight letters.” And since shalom bayit (lighting Shabbat candles) comes before the mitzva of publicizing the miracle (lighting חנוכה candles) – see the last Rambam in Sefer Zmanim – I’ll stick with Chanukah.

He also goes on to question the simple etymology I’ve listed above (the popular etymology, at least). Apparently the complications in etymology arise from the root word, חנך. According to Dr. Stefan Reif at Cambridge University, חנך actually means “to begin, to initiate,” not to dedicate. To dedicate, to consecrate for sacred uses is actually קדש in Hebrew and the translation of “to dedicate” in חנך stems from the Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate.

Unfortunately, this “to dedicate” vs. “to initiate” debate doesn’t exactly clear up the question of how to spell the holiday. Whether one spells it Hanukkah or Chanukah or Chanuka, I don’t think anyone’s going to get too upset. But, I thought it would be interesting to run some figures like Carvin on the number of Google hits for either word. Like most things these days, popular vote does seem to determine things, at least at the cultural level.

So, here goes: According to Google Insights, a tool that analyzes worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for specific terms, most people in the U.S. search for the spelling Hanukkah. It’s interesting to see the regional and quantitative differences for the different spellings, and in the charts below, you’ll notice the spikes that mark the high points for the searches in a given year, which in the case of Hanukkah, of course, happen in December.

The figures represent the number of searches that have been done for each spelling relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

The spelling, Chanukah, shows an interesting decline in search over the last few years. In 2004, it was searched at close to the same rate as the now favored Hanukkah, but last year, those search numbers decreased by almost half! These are keywords typed directly into Google’s search field, so Wikipedia can’t be the culprit. Here’s the chart:

The spelling, Chanuka, is not searched as often in the U.S., but it is the spelling that most Google users type when searching from Israel and the Czech Republic.

Here’s how searches for the three spellings break down by nation, and however you decide to spell it, have a happy Festival of Lights!:

Innovation: it’s a word that conjures up images of scientific advances—meat in Petri jars, prosthetic limbs, the next big as-seen-on-TV product. It is also, as David Brooks reminds us, something viewed as quintessential to the American self-portrait: America prides itself on innovation. But what meaning does the word carry that makes it such a key concept? Is innovation reliant on invention or can it mean something else, and how does it pertain to American identity now, almost a decade into the twenty-first century?

Brooks frames the question of innovation within the current stages of the economic recovery, and subsequent “anxiety that the recovery will be feeble and drab.” He then goes on to say, hold your horses, “let’s not get carried away with the malaise. The U.S. remains the world’s most competitive economy, the leader in information technology, biotechnology and nearly every cutting-edge sector.”

Well, it looks like for the moment innovation is inextricably linked with invention—specifically that of technology. While Brooks doesn’t explicitly link the two, several paragraphs later he does say, “there’s a straightforward way to revive innovation.” But does innovation need reviving; or, rather, can it even be revived?

According to the OED, to innovate is to (1) “To change (a thing) into something new; to alter; to renew;” (2) “To bring in (something new) the first time; to introduce as new;” (3) “To bring in or introduce novelties; to make changes in something established.” While the first definition is set aside as “rare after 1750,” I think it holds the key to understanding the innovation that Brooks is referring to.

If innovation means, at its core, to revive, then, no, innovation cannot be revived—it either is or it isn’t, it’s either reviving itself or not. Of course common use of the word has moved over to the third definition, and this is the innovation Brooks is interested in—novelty, technology, change. To revive change or novelty, still, seems a bit oxymoronic since novelty is defined as “something new, not previously experienced.”

When Brooks pushes into the heart of his call for innovation, he emphasizes political and economic moves like fulfilling education reforms, funding scientific research, addressing global imbalances, etc. Again, however, we’re faced with the key term disagreement—none of these proposals are new, unusual, or not previously experienced. They are not the novel, they are not changes in something established—they are continuations.

Sure, calling this push for additional funding sounds better when it’s boxed and labeled under the concept of innovation, but, if we are to stay true to the definition of innovation, a different word would be better—accountability, and that word would be truly innovative in America today.

Last week when I read an article in the New York Times discussing the first full-length Hebrew translation of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan—a translation which appeared only last month. “While the first two parts have long been available in translation, the third and fourth parts — in which Hobbes addresses religion and the state — had not appeared in Hebrew.”

I’m not a philosopher, but I have read parts of Leviathan, arguably one of the most important works of Western philosophy, so I was definitely intrigued by the discussion launched by several of the leading U.S. and Israeli scholars on the translation. Fania Oz-Salzberger, professor at the University of Haifa, at Monash University in Australia, and a distinguished visiting professor at Princeton University, correlates the lack of a complete translation of Leviathan to a lack of funds. In 1962, the Hebrew University Magnes Press published the first Hebrew translation of Leviathan, but the press “was not a rich publishing house, and neither were its customers.” The edition featured only sections Parts I and II and cut out, in addition to the more Hebrew-oriented sections, the wordier and more heavily footnoted sections.

Oz-Salzberger makes an interesting point regarding the new translation that concerns all areas of translation:

Times have changed. Since 1962, the Hebrew reading public has grown at least sevenfold. No other language has ascended, during modern times, from under a million speakers and readers to well over seven million. The new and full Hebrew edition of Leviathan shows how Israeli culture has come into its own: it can now afford, both financially and intellectually, a full Hebrew rendering of this whale of a text.

My question regarding translation at large is this, how much revisionism has occurred over the years in translated texts? Certainly the population swell of Hebrew readers makes this particular translation issue pertinent, but how many other languages and cultures have been slighted over the year due to simple problems like funding or an available market? While some regions like the Arabic region, face tremendous hurdles in regard to translation, others can afford to revisit key texts and clean house if necessary.

In some ways, translation is curation. Like an art curator, a translator’s job is never done. While the artist (author) may be long gone, or at least unable to translate (not everyone is Samuel Beckett!), the work still remains, and over time it may show wear and tear, inconsistencies—it may even be missing huge chunks of texts as in the case of the 1962 Hebrew translation of Leviathan. Like a curator, the translator then revisits the text and reworks it, restoring the text as accurately as possible to the original language version. So maybe dissertations and panel discussions don’t need to focus on strange topics like television and popular culture (although there’s nothing wrong with that)—you never know when the classics might resurface and need a whole new set of eyes to read, translate, and interpret.

Yesterday, November 29, 2009, marked the beginning of Advent, the first day in the year of liturgical Western Christian churches. Falling on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, the holiday was celebrated around the world in churches by the lighting of candles, the recitation of certain Biblical verses pertaining to the birth of Christ, the liturgical color of purple (on the priest’s vestments or on the tabernacle), and, in some cases, fasting.

One of the more humorous, but now extinct, traditions is that of Norman farmers who had children run through their fields with lit torches. The children set fire to bundles of straw as a gesture to drive out rats and other vermin that might destroy the crops. it doesn’t seem like the safest or holiest of traditions, but it went on for some time. More common today are the Advent candles or Advent calendars found in many households. During each day of the Advent month (starting four weeks before Christmas), one section of the candle is burned or one door/box/piece of the advent calendar is opened/removed to mark the passing of Advent.

The etymology of Advent is fairly straight forward—the English word stems from the Old French advent which is from the literary form auvent. The French, of course, stems from the Latin adventus for “arrival.” In French, however, the only meaning of the word is that of the sense applied in Christian tradition, the coming of the Savior, nowadays, the period of the Nativity beginning four weeks before Christmas. In English, however, it has passed into the generic sense of any important arrival. This generic meaning did not arrive in the English language until perhaps 1742, but it was not recognized in English dictionaries as such until the mid-nineteenth century. The religious sense of the word stretches back to the tenth or eleventh century.

With Hanukkah starting on December 11, Kwanza around the same time as Christmas, and, most importantly, Festivus on December 23, it’s certainly the advent of the holiday season no matter what faith or cultural upbringing.

A picture may say a thousand words, but what about a flower? Last week in Singapore, while the world leaders convened to discuss politics, global climate change, and humanitarian efforts at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, volunteers took to the streets to hand out 45,000 long-stemmed gerber daisies (photo to the left). The daisies were meant to symbolize the ideal of personal kindness, something Singapore’s leaders feel is in short supply.

Using flowers as an expression of a word or ideal is nothing new. Red poppies are still used to symbolize remembrance for the victims of WWI, and in Victorian times, flowers symbolized everything from love to hate to death. The fact that we still give flowers as a sign of affection is just one hint of such history.

Can flowers substitute for words? In the Singapore kindness campaign, the answer is yes. Even though some people were wary of the free flower, others happily accepted one, and, hopefully (or at least as the Singapore Kindness Movement is hoping) realized the meaning behind it — random acts of kindness, giving freely to others.

In case you’re planning to mix a bouquet with a specific meaning for someone near or dear to you (or, an enemy), here are a few of my favorite flower meanings (of which most of my favorite flowers mean something awful — hydrangea signifies heartlessness? I suppose I am pretty heartless…):

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While my friend and I were driving through the mountains to a small Appalachian town in southwestern Virginia for their weekly bluegrass jamboree, we passed the turn-off to Green’s Garage. I explained to him that Green’s is a small food cooperative where there are no employees—everything is purchased on the honor system, faith that you’ll leave the correct change in the box or write each item down on your tab. The store is a meeting place of sorts where folks find each other and stand around and talk about the news or town gossip.

That’s when the linguistic conundrum hit—is there a word that means a gathering of individuals who chat and gossip? What I needed was an online dictionary in which you could type in a string of key words of the definition you’re thinking of and then the dictionary would pop out a string of possible words that fit the definition. Each combination of key words would go through an algorithm to find the closest fit. There should be a phone app that does that, which got me researching the available dictionary apps for the iphone.

It turns out that there are quite a few English dictionary apps out there.

• Mirriam-Webster put out their Collegiate Dictionary for iPhone last year. It contains over 225,000 entries as well as suggestive search, history, wildcard search, similar word search, and pronunciation. However, the app cost $25, which is a little ridiculous in my mind.
• If you’re willing to swing it, the full American Heritage Dictionary app will set you back $30. With approximately 300,000 terms, it beats out the Mirriam-Webster app, it also features “partial matches,” different font sizes, and an audio pronunciation guide. There is also a bookmarks and search history tab.
• For significantly less, you can download the Advanced English Dictionary & Thesaurus for $4. The app review fails to mention how many words the dictionary contains or any specific features—just that it has “every feature you would expect from a dictionary application on the iPhone.”
• In the Thesaurus department, Roget’s has a thesaurus app for $13. The Roget’s II Thesaurus features suggestive search options and bookmarking.
• The general Thesaurus app costs only $1, and, given the cost, is fairly basic. Enter a search term, get a result.
• For free, you can download the Dictionary.com app which contains 275,000 definitions and 80,000 synonyms. It also features audio pronunciations, similarly spelled words and Word of the Day. As with the website, the app also contains alphabetical indexing, synonyms example sentences, non-standard uses, word origin and history.
• If you’re in the mood for playing some Scrabble—and cheating at it since I thought looking up words in a dictionary while playing scrabble was illegal—Turon Technologies, Inc., has the app for you: Scrappy, “the ultimate Scrabble dictionary.” While allowing you to look up over 250,000 words from the official SOWPODS tournament list of legal English words, Scrappy also works as a general word browser that can be applied for other word games. For $1, it’s not the biggest investment, but it’s not a dictionary either.

So as far as I can tell, no reverse word search dictionaries exist on the iPhone, which is something some developer should get on. After a quick Google search, I did come up with the OneLook Dictionary Search Reverse Dictionary, but, honestly, after typing in a few concepts, I came up with paltry results.

It looks like our plan of reversing the online OED is still open though. Any developers want to go in on this with us?

The last week of October and the beginning of November brings together some fairly disparate events, holidays, and emotions. For one, especially here in the U.S., October 31 is Halloween, that strange co-opted holiday where kids dress up in cute or ghoulish costumes and beg for candy from their neighbors. The following day, November 1, however, is All Saints Day—the day of remembrance and celebration of the saints, and the day after that, November 2, is All Souls Day—the day of remembrance for those who have died in the previous year or years before. Just a few days later, depending on the calendar, is Election Day in the U.S. which ushers in a new period of government policies and action. While this particular Election Day isn’t as exciting or grand as the Presidential one last year, for some states who will elect governors and House representatives, it’s all-important.

Given this strange mash-up of events, it seems that nothing would be able to bind them together. Two words, however, can—spirit and conspiracy. What might seem obvious to some, the etymological link between the two words, came as a surprise to me, a surprise that was a little bit delightful, I’ll admit.

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In honor of Blog Action Day 2009, here is an exploration of the language used in the climate debates:

Today there exist an impressive number of environmental publications, blogs, and websites dedicated to tracking and, possibly helping solve, global climate change. Grist.org , for example, prides itself on “making lemonade out of looming climate apocalypse.” The website has monitored and reported on various environmental action news items since 1999, but today it is 100% devoted to global climate change. Its articles address transportation, politics, agriculture, and various other “green stories” as a way to examine climate change from every possible angle. Small blogs like Fred First’s, Fragments from Floyd, chronicle both the global and extremely local aspects of climate change. His focus on the small mountain town of Floyd, Virginia, separates the blog from others, although his science journalism is on par with any major newspaper or magazine.

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There are few things that I love more than finding out that two seemingly very different words share the same root. Like the shared history of pomegranate and hand grenade, these connections between word origins sometimes surface in decidedly non-linguistic places. Today’s strange linguistic history comes from Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. McGee’s 700 page tome of food science, history, and myth covers everything from the difference between curds and whey to the development of the French sauce families to the chemical explanation of the affect of cooking on meat pigments. It’s a wildly interesting book for any serious cook or connoisseur, but probably boring for people who don’t share that passion for food.

In his chapter on dairy, McGee discusses the various chemical and physical components of milk, cream, cheese, ice cream, and yogurt (among other products). His section on cream opens with the sentence, “The word cream comes from the Greek chriein, which means ‘to anoint,’ and which is also the root word of Christ (‘the anointed one’).” No, this isn’t a dream that Dan Brown had after falling asleep with a half-eaten pint of Ben and Jerry’s—the cream Christ connection is real. McGee goes on to explain that,

The link between ancient ritual and rich food is oil, the substance used to anoint the chosen, and the defining element of cream. Cream is a form of milk in which the fat globules have become more concentrated than usual, whether by rising to the top in a bottle or spinning off from the heavier water phase in a centrifuge.

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