Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 July 20

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 20

James Harden-Hickey

James Harden-Hickey had a handmade crown. Whatever happen to it after his death and what did it look like and what was it made of?--KAVEBEAR (talk) 04:42, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

In answer to the second question: In the scanned (not wikisource) version of the Real Soldiers of Fortune book, there is a picture of a medal issued by Harden-Hickey [1] along with the statement "For himself, King James commissioned a firm of jewelers to construct a royal crown. In design it was similar to the one which surmounted the Cross of Trinidad. It is shown in the photograph of the insignia." 184.147.140.76 (talk) 13:17, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

So very similar to St Edward's Crown. Alansplodge (talk) 19:46, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

According to a newspaper article; BACK IN THE DAY: Story behind Corona's name involves a baron, the town of Corona, California was named by Harden-Hickey who had bought a ranch there. Neither article mentions an actual crown, but perhaps there's a link? Alansplodge (talk) 19:55, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

First World War medical report

I have obtained copies of my grandfather's enlistment papers from 1915. I'm fascinated by the standard form the Medical Examiner had to sign, which said:

"I have examined the above-named person and find that he does not present any of the following conditions, viz. :-

Scrofula; phthisis; impaired constitution; defective intelligence, defects of vision, voice, or hearing; hernia; haemorrhoids; varicose veins, beyond a limited extent; marked varicocele with unusually pendent testicle; inveterate cutaneous disease; chronic ulcers; traces of corporal punishment, or evidence of having been marked with the letters D. or B.C.; contracted or deformed chest; abnormal curvature of the spine; or any other disease or physical defect calculated to unfit him for the duties of a soldier."

I'm glad Grandpa passed the test, but I'd love to know why people of his generation in Australia might have "been marked with the letters D. or B.C.". Anybody? HiLo48 (talk) 05:37, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

According to this, D meant "Deserter". The other seems to mean "bad conduct". Even worse for business than an unusually pendent testicle, I'd figure. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:08, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Yep, gotta watch the latter though. Never know where they'll lead. What's described in that link seems a nasty way to brand a deserter, but I guess they weren't popular. And Grandpa wasn't a deserter. Though I did find later in his record a few days AWOL in France. One can only wonder.... HiLo48 (talk) 06:48, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Nasty, but effective. Can't exactly take "I promise I'll never hurt you" at face value, especially without knowing who's already dishonest. This way, they either have the mark, or a suspicious scrape where the mark should be. Gentler now with central databases, biometric ID and impaired constitutions.

Speaking of impaired, nasty and promises, your grandpa likely did the same things in France mine did in the next war to end all wars. Maybe even the same women. If I'm in the area for World War III, I'll raise a glass to both of them before finding the wisest mademoiselle left. She'll know what to do. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:27, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

I wonder if they used brands or tattoos. If tats, then that doesn't seem particularly cruel to me. It seems to imply that they couldn't otherwise keep track of who each person was, presumably meaning they would accept recruits who couldn't produce a birth or baptismal certificate, and they had nothing like a Social Security number at the time to uniquely identify people. StuRat (talk) 12:30, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Australian War Memorial: Enlistment Standards: First World War: "On enlistment recruits were examined for BC or D tattooed on their skin. These were British army tattoos. BC stood for bad character and D for deserter." 184.147.140.76 (talk) 12:58, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Which authors used the most adjectives and which ones used the least

In most writing classes they teach you overuse of adjectives and adverbs is a bad thing, and that use of nouns and verbs is the best way to get your point across. I have been reading HP Lovecraft, and while I believe is he is a very effective teller of scary stories, he uses way too many adjectives. Which other famous authors used way too many adjectives and which ones used them the most sparingly?--24.228.94.244 (talk) 07:19, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

According to one count [2], there isn't much of a variation. King of purple prose Edward Bulwer-Lytton and adjective-hating Mark Twain both came out to 6.8% adjectives in the samples tested. The counter concludes that "Calculating the relative percentages of adjectives and adverbs in texts tells us nothing useful about their readability, clarity, or efficiency." 184.147.140.76 (talk) 12:51, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Well, in general, Ernest Hemingway was known for his economy of language. Herman Melville springs to mind when I think of authors who used many adjectives. ceranthor 23:46, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

When forced to schlep through Moby-Dick in English class, I strongly suspected that Melville was being paid by the word. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:55, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

'Lives of the saints'

The following passage is from Isabell Hapgood translation of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. This passage has a reference to a book or work called 'Lives of the saints'. This is not the only place that I have found someone referencing to it. In Robert Graves 'Goodbye to All That' he alludes to it as well. The impression I got is that it is a well known work of the western canon, but on looking up in wikipedia, though there are a few works listed having the name "Lives of saints", the most prominently listed one is a novel dating from circa 1990. So what is exact work that is being refereed to as the "Lives of saints" without any qualifications in Les Miserables, and in 'Goodbye to All That'.

"The children ate in silence, under the eye of the mother whose turn it was, who, if a fly took a notion to fly or to hum against the rule, opened and shut a wooden book from time to time. This silence was seasoned with the lives of the saints, read aloud from a little pulpit with a desk, which was situated at the foot of the crucifix. The reader was one of the big girls, in weekly turn. At regular distances, on the bare tables, there were large, varnished bowls in which the pupils washed their own silver cups and knives and forks, and into which they sometimes threw some scrap of tough meat or spoiled fish; this was punished."

Gulielmus estavius (talk) 14:26, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Upon reading Hagiography, I wonder whether a specific book is meant, or whether the term is a catch-all for any book in the hagiographic tradition, of which there were many. The French wikipedia, for example, gives this list: Vies de Saints. You might also like to look at Acta Sanctorum, a 68-volume work published from 1643 to 1940. I do not, however, have a reference that this is the book intended by Hugo. 184.147.140.76 (talk) 15:25, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

The most famous single work was probably the Golden Legend, but presumably there were a lot of repackagings over the centuries to satisfy various styles of Catholic piety. The Charlotte Bronte novel Villette has a classic passage expressing the reactions of an English-speaking Protestant to a French compendium of saints' lives read out for the edification of young girls (see Chapter 13 at Wikisource... -- AnonMoos (talk) 15:29, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

How are former French, Spanish, Portuguese and English colonies performing economically?

Can we say that the colonies of the one or the other are much better off than the others? It's clear that the US and Australia will skew things up for England, but there is also India to skew it down. OsmanRF34 (talk) 15:33, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

No one here will stop you from reading the relevant Wikipedia articles and coming to your own conclusions. You can find the lists of the colonies at places like Spanish Empire, British Empire, French colonial empire, and Portuguese Empire. You can find measures of economic strength based on any measure you want at Wikipedia, for just one example, List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita (that's just the first I grabbed. By linking it, I am not recommending that measure over any other you want to use). Using articles like that, you can research the answer to your question. --Jayron32 15:50, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

• The question is much more if it is meaningful to compare the present economical situation than to know if former colonies of one are more developed.OsmanRF34 (talk) 18:07, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

• Which measure of development do you wish to use? Wikipedia has articles about most of the important ones, for example the Human Development Index would work for you. Again, I (and no one else here) is going to stop you from cross-referencing that article to the articles which list the colonies of the European powers. --Jayron32 20:00, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure that there's much point in comparing colonies of settlement (where the majority of the population is European-descended, and which are culturally largely overseas extensions of Europe) -- such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina etc. -- with colonies where the majority of the population remained local (not forgetting a third type of colony, such as Fiji and parts of the Caribbean, where there was a huge infusion of non-European non-locals from distant areas). Russia also had comparable colonial zones of expansion, even though geographically adjacent (not overseas). At one point, it was commonly said that former-British colonies in Africa were doing better than former-French colonies in Africa, but I'm not sure that's still true... AnonMoos (talk) 15:56, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

A common observation is that colonies that were largely populated by the British seem to have done better than those which were largely populated by the Spanish and Portuguese. One difference is that the British colonies tended to develop renewable resources, such as tobacco and cotton, while the Spanish colonies and Portuguese colonies extracted nonrenewable resources, such as gold and silver. With renewable resources, it makes sense to invest in infrastructure and set up a stable, long-term local government. With nonrenewable resources, you want to keep all those expenses minimal, so you can extract the resources from one colony and then move on. This might also explain why those nations which possess a more recent nonrenewable resource, petroleum, and have thus undergone neocolonization as a result, haven't done particular well, either.

One colony largely populated by the French, Canada before it was taken over by the British, did OK, as they relied on a semi-renewable resource, beaver pelts (renewable only if hunting is kept at a low enough level). Their Haiti colony, on the other hand, did very poorly, despite it's reliance on a renewable resource, sugar cane. (It did well while under French rule, but their over-reliance on and mistreatment of slaves led to a successful revolution, after which nobody would trade with them. If the US had solely consisted of the South, then it might have suffered a similar fate.)

Disclaimer: No colony relied solely on one or two resources, but I tried to list some of the major exports of each. StuRat (talk) 16:48, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Note also that both the US and Canada include large areas colonized or controlled first by France, by Britain, and for the US, also by Spain; and in some cases large territories passed from one colonial power to another; and each of these areas had its own resources. So although it was Britain that both countries eventually gained independence from, any analysis as Stu does above according to colonizing power becomes complicated. --50.100.189.160 (talk) 19:57, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

The short answer is, it depends on which colony you're talking about, to whom you're talking about it, and when you're talking about it. Dependency theory holds that poverty in postcolonial nations is largely a result of their economic dependence on larger nations. The outside economic interest that organized their economies during the colonial era has now resulted in an economy and infrastructure that is oriented toward outside support, without the means to be self-supporting or self-sufficient. Dependency theory can probably explain poverty in many countries, but certainly not all of them. As advocates of world systems theory note, not all poor nations are former colonies, and not all former colonies are now poor nations. Evan ^{(talk|contribs)} 19:48, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

And if you go back far enough, the colonial powers were themselves colonies, specifically, of the Roman Empire. StuRat (talk) 22:31, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

• Here's one academic paper that looked at this question for Africa: [3]. The abstract says: "We investigate the impact of 20th-century European colonization on growth. We find that colonial heritage, as measured by the identity of the metropolitan ruler and by the degree of economic penetration, matters for the heterogeneity of growth performances in Africa. Colonial indicators are correlated with economic and sociopolitical variables that are commonly employed to explain growth and there are growth gains from decolonization.". If you need the article to improve wikipedia articles, you can ask for a complete copy at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request; otherwise it's probably a matter of visiting a university library or asking if your local reference library can get a copy. 184.147.140.76 (talk) 20:06, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Going back to the Sodanomics section, is there any correlation between a given country's economic strength and the amount of soda sold there? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:36, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

First we would have to do some linguistic work. What Americans call soda is not called soda in Australia. Soft drink would be the descriptor for a similar category of beverages, but I'm not sure if the boundaries are the same. HiLo48 (talk) 00:29, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Colored fizzy syrup. --Jayron32 04:06, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Nope. Some of it isn't coloured. Or colored. HiLo48 (talk) 09:09, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Your previous comment could have been "What some Americans call soda". Names for soft drinks in the United States. Hack (talk) 09:35, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

To make any comparison meaningful, I would think one would have to compare former colonies that are relatively close to each other geographically, as well as similar in size and resources ... for example: comparing Guyana to French Guyana and Surinam ... or Ghana to Togo, and Benin... or Kenya to Tanzania, and Mozambique. Blueboar (talk) 10:35, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Although Guyana has a thriving agricultural sector which French Guiana does not. Also, you could argue that French Guiana is still a colony since it has been made a département d’outre-mer and is dependant on French subsidies and the European Space Agency. Alansplodge (talk) 21:26, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

• This is further complicated in regions like the Caribbean where some islands (now nation states) were at various times under the colonial rule of England, France or Spain, sometimes split between two and shuffled back-and-forth during times of dispute and conflict. To which colonial power do you give credit for the positives and to which do you assign blame for the negatives? St★lwart¹¹¹ 07:16, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Back to the topic, and in response to one by Evan, dependencia, as per our article, “Dependency theory no longer has many proponents as an overall theory, but some writers have argued for its continuing relevance as a conceptual orientation to the global division of wealth.” The reasons are that the counter-examples – particularly Korea and Taiwan – can’t be explained by this model. DOR (HK) (talk) 03:50, 23 July 2014 (UTC)