Scotland’s Celebrity Rectors: The Chosen Ones of the Undergrad Vox Pops

Popular Culture, Tertiary Ed

A Rector is a type of office-holder pertaining to both the ecclesiastical and the academic realm. It is in this second context of the term, that of academe, that is the focus of this blog. The word ‘rector’ itself derives from the Latin regere (Ruler), and in the 17th century it signified one who governed a city, state or region. In the contemporary world of universities it is widely employed in Europe, Latin America, Russia, Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia and the Middle East. Its meaning varies from place to place, in some of these the term ‘rector’ is used in the sense of chancellor, ie, the executive head of a university, but much more likely it denotes the ceremonial head (in a British University the real power would usually reside with the vice-chancellor rather than the chancellor).

The Ancient Universities of Scotland (Aberdeen)

In the English speaking world the rector is not a common office in the university hierarchy, the exception to this being Scotland where the post dates back to the 16th century. Each of the four ‘ancient’ universities of Scotland (St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh) plus Dundee – all have the office of rector, in some cases it is called, more grandly, lord rector. Scottish rectors are elected by the student body for a three year term, although at the University of Edinburgh rectors are still elected by both students and staff.

In the sphere of higher education the duties of rectors vary from institution to institution but broadly they are there to represent the interests of students in the wider university context on various governing bodies, eg, in Scotland they might also chair the University Court, the highest governing council of the university. One way they directly represent students is in an ombudsmen’s role, being a forum for students to air their grievances and complaints and a conduit to have their issues addressed within the university. Other duties of a rector might include participating in convocation ceremonies [‘What does the Rector even do?’, http://queensu.ca/rector/blog/].

In past centuries the Scottish tradition was for noblemen as rectors, titled gentlemen with a assortment of names sounding like variations on the “8th Earl of Cumbleyheathwaite”. By the 20th century the post tended to be filled by high achievers from business, politics, the civil service, the military, and the occasional notable clergyman. In the interwar period St Andrews set a precedent, by electing inventor Guglielmo Marconi, North Pole explorer Fridtjof Nansen and writer Rudyard Kipling to the post. After WWII Edinburgh University followed suit by electing the popular British actors Alastair Sim and James Robertson Justice, having earlier given the post to Churchill and a host of other MPs.

Nero as Rector

By the late sixties and the seventies celebrity rectors were starting to become a feature of the academic landscape. Students at Dundee University elected actor and “Renaissance Man” of letters Peter Ustinov for a second term which seems a measure of his popularity … perhaps this was not universally the case however. In his memoirs Dear Me, the rector emeritus expressed stinging criticisms of the arts students at Dundee for having the temerity to protest vociferously against the Vietnam War and militarism and authoritarianism in general, whilst under his watch. The peeved thespian compared them unfavourably to the University’s political and socially apathetic but scholastically conscientious engineering students.

Other colourful rectors followed at Dundee. Actor and omnipresent TV personality Stephen Fry was a popular rector in the 1990s, a popularity apparently not tarnished by Fry’s recent admissions that he used cocaine and Ecstasy during his rectorship at the University [Reported in The Courier (UK, 14 Oct. 2014) www.thecourier.co.uk ]. NB: the good burghers of the Dundee University community, if perturbed by this revelation, should take comfort in Fry’s disclosure in his memoirs that he also snorted coke on a visit to Buckingham Palace, so Dundee is in lofty company. The incumbent rector of Dundee University in 2015 is another celebrated Hollywood actor, Brian Cox, a Dundee local whose two terms are incident free to this point.

Dundee students may have expressed a preference for actors as their rectors but this has not exclusively been the case. In the 1970s they selected chef, broadcaster and politician Clement Freud (grandson of the father of Psychobabbling, Sigmund Freud). Clem Freud later had a second turn as rector, this time at St Andrews University where he edged out polarising feminist icon Germaine Greer in the ballot for the job.

Rector for “Silly Walks”

St Andrews’ most high-profile rector in recent history was comic actor John Cleese (1970-73), the “Minister for Silly Walks” himself. Cleese proved a popular rector at St Andrews and his staunchly anti-Vietnam War speeches struck a receptive cord among politicised students of the day. Cleese was an active participant in University activities and allayed any fears there may have been about his whacky persona bringing discredit on the office with any “Monty Python” antics [Cinema St Andrews , ‘John Cleese elected Rector of University of St Andrews’, www.cinemastandrews.org.uk]. Actors and television personalities have been the preferred flavour of the St Andrews’ student body, numbering Tim Brooke-Taylor, Frank Muir and Nicholas Parsons amongst their “media-sourced” rectors.

Edward Snowden (Image: NY Review of Books)

Whereas Dundee University’s preference has been for actors as rectors, Glasgow University students in recent times have made more bolder political choices. The Glasgow rectors have ranged from ANC (African National Congress) anti-Apartheid activists, Albert Lutuli and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, to establishment vilified ‘whistleblowers’ Mordechai Vanunu and Edward Snowden (the current rector). The selection of these individuals were only symbolic choices as rectors (meant as a student statement of support and solidarity with international figures and causes) as none of the people were free to travel to Scotland to take up their posts. Accordingly the office of rector has been effectively unoccupied during these tenures.

A recent working(sic) rector voted in by matriculated Glasgow students was the actor and journalist Ross Kemp. Kemp’s term was truncated as a result of an abysmal performance in the post (repeated failure to attend important university events like the “freshers’ welcome”). The Students Representative Council at Glasgow carried a vote of no confidence in him and forced his resignation[‘Kemp quits university post’, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk].

Aberdeen University students have been a little more restrained than their southern Scottish university counterparts in seeking out the very famous for rector, opting in the main for locally known identities. The University hasn’t steered clear entirely of rectors with celebrity status. In the early 2000s it had Clarissa Dickson Wright, TV cook and writer, one half of the popular “Two Fat Ladies” series, as its rector (though perceptive gender equality enumerators would have already noted that women have been numerically disadvantaged in the bestowing of the post of rector across all the institutions❈).

The ambitious & frugal young Mr Brown – his first leg on the political ladder

Overall, opinion north of the River Tweed has been mixed about the merits of celebrity rectors. Those who support the trend and try to explain its appeal, point to the growing dissatisfaction of students with party politics, and the perception that politicians are bland and dour and lacking in dynamic, like recent British PM Gordon Brown who was rector of Edinburgh University back in the early 1970s – having been elected to the office whilst still being a student (unusual). Entertainers and media personalities on the other hand, the theory goes, can add cache to the university, attracting positive publicity and much-needed funding … and they can bring a fresh, outsider’s perspective to what are traditional organisations.

Of course how successful or otherwise the celebrity rector is comes down to the individual. A factor in how much benefit the celebrity can be as rector is how much time (and energy) the incumbent can give to the position. Rectors with heavy demands on their time due to their full-time “day jobs” will be restricted in what they can give to the office. Also, if a rector attracts adverse publicity during his or her tenure (eg, Fry and Kemp), by association it could reflect badly on the institution [‘After this soap, your next role will be a rector’, Times Higher Education, (22 Jun. 2001) www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/feature].

The process for the election of Scottish rectors is open and quite democratic. Only 20 signatures are required to nominate someone for rector, which can give rise to surprising nominations. For example a Dundee student nominated his pet rat for the post, which might be viewed by some as trivialising and ridiculing the office. A nominee in 1928 for rector of St Andrews, coming clear out of right field, was Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. Had the Fascist head of state been successful in his bid it might have been interesting to see what if anything he would have done with the office[ibid.].

Billy Connolly (Source: The Independent)

So, an academic post with the potential to maximise publicity for financially-struggling universities in Scotland, I am left to ponder the obvious thought that comes to me … why isn’t Billy Connolly on anyone’s short-list when they were putting forward the next round of nominees for rectors?

‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿
❈ this comes as no surprise but women have been under-represented as university rectors even in more socially-inclusive, recent times

When Bill Met Yang in Lintong

Archaeology, Popular Culture, Social History, Travel

If ever you find yourself on a tour of China, one of the first places you will want to visit is Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses site and its Museum. Once you get there, while being driven to the venue from Xi’an Xianyang Airport or perhaps from your city hotel after a ride around Xi’an’s impressive City Walls, the chances are that your Chinese tour guide in the course of his or her information talk will bring up the topic of Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 visit. The celebrated occasion has entered into local folklore and Chinese guides are quick to bring up the “special anecdote” concerning the US President in the preamble they give to international tourists on the bus. I’ll get to that story soon enough but first some basic background on the Terracotta Warriors.

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The Yangs do some digging with totally unexpected consequences
The whole phenomena of the Terracotta Warriors has its origin in March 1974 when several dirt-poor peasant farmers (thought to be seven in number) in Xiyang village in Lintong County, were digging for water in the dry, forbidding countryside 35km east of Xi’an. One of the farmers, Yang Zhi’fa, struck something hard with his hoe which he thought was a bronze relic of some kind. Digging a bit deeper he discovered the object had the form of a shoulder and torso. The other farmers, thinking they were human remains and fearful of Buddhist superstitions, urged Yang to rebury it so as not to offend the ancestors (ghost lore has been commonplace in the eastern Xi’an region for centuries). Yang was unperturbed and shortly later took the dismembered clay warrior to the Lintong Museum. Before long archaeologists from Beijing were swarming all over the site and so commenced a massive state-run excavation (of three pits) which has unearthed over the course of the last 40 years, an army of terracotta soldiers, horses and chariots, of what is the Mausoleum of the first Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi who unified China c. 221BC (imperial Qin Dynasty).

The 'aircraft hangar' of terracotta warriors
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The Terracotta Warriors discovery: Profitable to some involved but not to others!
The government eventually expropriated the land from the farmers to give free rein to the excavations, effectively destroying the Yang village. The dispossessed villagers were inadequately compensated for the disruption to their lives. By the early 1990s, after years of meticulous and arduous preparation work, the site area was opened as a museum and rapidly became a modern wonder of the world and a tourist mecca. The permanent exhibition proved to be a great little supplementary ‘earner’ for local Communist Party officials and many enterprising business people also profited enormously from the financial opportunities. This propitious good fortune has not been shared by the statues’ discoverers or by the Yang community as a whole. In fact Yang’s fellow farmers blamed him for the loss of their plots and livelihoods, and he was ostracised by his neighbours. Other misfortune followed for the community, two of the farmer Yangs died, only in their fifties due to impoverished circumstance and another, Wang Puhzi, hanged himself. To the farmers who had feared that the feng shui of the location would be disturbed by digging up the area, these tragic outcomes confirmed in their minds that it had been cursed.

A Terracotta Army fan with good connexions
Over in Washington DC, President Bill Clinton, when he wasn’t being leader of the “Free World”, had been following the unfolding archaeological story of the Xi’an terracotta army with growing interest and fascination. So, not long after, on a scheduled 1998 state visit to Beijing, Clinton requested that PRC allow him to make a side trip to Xi’an so he could see the terracotta marvels in situ for himself. The Chinese authorities, sensing a PR coup in the making, arranged for Mr Yang to be on hand at the site to meet the American president before the news cameras. For the occasion the (presumably) illiterate farmer was taught a few words of English to greet the president with. As it transpired, Yang got very nervous at the prospect of meeting the US leader and when introduced to Clinton on the day, instead of saying “How are you?”, what came out of Yang’s mouth in his halting English was “Who are you?” to which Clinton instantly responded, “I’m Hillary’s husband!” The flustered Mr Yang replied,”Me too!” Everybody laughed…on the Chinese officials’ part it was more of a nervous laugh!

⬅️ When Bill met Yang (but which Yang?)

Mr Yang, ‘professional’ book-signer
The encounter between president and peasant farmer generated a second anecdote: at the meeting Clinton asked Mr Yang for his autograph. Yang, who could neither read nor write, simply drew three circles on a piece of paper. Followed a slightly uncomfortable moment … not least for the embarrassed Chinese officials in attendance. Consequently, the local authorities later sent the uneducated Yang for calligraphy lessons, after which Yang was given a job by the government in the Terracotta Warriors tourist shop. His task was to sit at a table all day signing books on the Terracotta Warriors (leading to his being called by some people, “China’s First Professional Signer”). It should be added that Yang Zhi’fa subsequently disputed the inference of this story circulated by a Chinese newspaper in 2002 that he was illiterate, contending that he in fact had a primary school education. Yang sued the newspaper and was eventually awarded damages [Yu Fei, ‘Living with the Terra-cotta Army’, (Consulate-General, Peoples Republic of China in Houston), www.houston.china-consulate.org].

Crafty Mr Yang
If you venture into the Emperor Qin Museum shop in Xi’an, as I did three years ago, you will still see the same unsmiling Mr Yang, inscribing his signature on the inside of countless coffee table books, none of which are written by him! Although he looks distracted and bored in his sedentary confinement, he is in actual fact ever vigilant, on the lookout for maverick tourists trying to snap his precious photograph, something he is peculiarly adverse to. While he was looking the other way, and thinking I was out of the line of his peripheral vision, I tried to grab a surreptitious, sneaky photo of Yang from the side…just as I was about to, the sour-faced septuagenarian, suddenly and without looking towards me, raised a cardboard sign in my direction which said in large English letters, “NO PHOTOS OR VIDEOS ALLOWED!”.
But is it the ‘real’ Clinton? 

Other spots, other ‘Yangs’
If you wander further afield around the Terracotta Warriors complex you may chance upon other individuals also purporting to be “Mr Yang”. It’s quite an industry in Xi’an! In one building near the entrance to the complex there is Yang Xi’an who passes himself off the discoverer of the warriors (although his banner actually says “the discover of the warriors”), displaying a photo of himself posing with Clinton as proof of his credentials. It transpires that this Mr Yang was in fact the manager of a Xi’an factory making replicas of the warriors at the time of Clinton’s 1998 visit – this explains the photo taken when “Slick Willie” stopped off at the factory on route to the Terracotta Museum.

Would the real Mr Yang, the genuine “Discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors’, please stand up?
In the glow of world attention being lavished on the terracotta army discoveries and the recognition bestowed on Mr Yang, it is not surprising that the other three surviving farmers present at the 1974 archaeological find wanted to get in on the act. Yang Quany was also given a spot in the museum signing books for a small stipend and began promoting himself as “the discoverer of the treasures”. The remaining two Yangs followed suit. Yang Zhi’fa however discredits his fellow Lintong farmers’ motives and insists that it is he who was primus intra pares (first among equals) in discovering the Emperor Qin relics.

And it doesn’t stop there by any measure. Zhao Kangmin, retired curator of the nearby Lintong Museum, has made his case for recognition as the real discoverer. The way Mr Zhao tells it, after the initial finding Yang Zhi’fa brought the fragment of the terracotta relic first to him at his museum and that he went back to investigate the discovery, and later he reconstructed the first terracotta warrior and horse. Zhao argues that he was the one who had the expertise to grasp the significance of the cultural relics, and that “seeing” as Yang and the others merely did, “doesn’t mean discovering”. You’ll find Zhao, despite being retired, most days at the Lintong Museum where he has set up a small display of the terracotta figures. Zhao spends the day signing postcards for tourists, on the cards he writes, very deliberately: “Zhao Kangmin, the first to discover, restore, appreciate, name and excavate terra-cotta warriors” [Ibid].

imageWhilst the Lintong farmers haven’t made much money from discovering (or being associated with the discovery of) the terracotta army, the same can be said of the workers who did most of the hard physical work of unearthing and restoring the statues. Most of those recruited to curator Yuan Zhongyi’s archaeological team found themselves working round the year with only a break at the time of the Spring Festival holiday for a wage of only 1.72 yuan (US $0.28) a day in 1976 [Zhao Xu, ‘Yang Zhifa, 76, soldiers on amid terracotta warriors’, (09-XII-2014),China Daily USA, www.chinadaily.com].

A Terracotta Warriors discoverer-impostor industry
Back at the Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum, as the fame and popularity of Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum grows, more impostors continue to spring up. These “fake discoverers” of the warriors were like Yang Xi’an, not even present at the discovery of the relics in 1974 (some are not even old enough to have been there!). A manager of one of the gift shops admitted that the complex shops hire men who fraudulently passed themselves off as discoverers of the relics to facilitate the sale of terracotta warrior books by the retailer [Simon Parry, ‘Curse of the Warriors’, South China Morning Post, 15 Sept 2007, www.scmp.com].

“The three in the middle just moved!”

PostScript: Discovery of yet more warriors made from fired clay
Meanwhile back in the football field sized excavation pits at Lintong, Emperor Qin’s life-sized army of clay statues continues to grow. Archaeologists working in pit Nō 2 recently made a fresh discovery, one which might yield another 1,400 warriors, archers, horses and charioteers (and 89 chariots of war) [‘China’s Terracotta Army has new recruits’, Daily Mail, 6 May 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk]. Chinese officials have speculated that there may be around 6,000 terracotta warriors at the site still to be excavated … ensuring no doubt that there will be plenty of new and ongoing opportunities for discoverer-impostors in the future.

Lexical Adventures in Suffixland: Getting Creative with Naut and Nik

Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Society & Culture

Two of the more interesting suffixes borrowed by English and put to good neologistic use are -naut and -nik. The origins of the word ‘naut’ have connotations of travel and water, Naut derives from an Ancient Greek word, translated as ‘naútēs‘, meaning ‘sailor’, sometimes rendered as ‘to navigate’. From naut we get the word ‘nautical’, something nautical relate of course to water and ships, although the root word naut has been employed to form new words which relates more to the sky or to atmosphere rather than to water.

✒︎ The Argonauts

The first use of this suffix in the above sense seems to emanate from Greek mythology and the story of Jason and his crew who sailed according to legend in search of the Golden Fleece – the Argonauts. The etymology is: Classical Latin Argonauta; from Classical Greek Argonautēs; from Argō, Jason’s ship + nautēs, sailor; from naus, ship [Webster’s New World College Dictionary]. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles dates it’s use in English from 1596, so it’s been in currency for a long time.

The post-war phenomenon that has given naut words their impetus and continued relevance was the Space Race from the late 1950s, initially involving only the USSR and the United States. The US space program brought astronaut into common use , a word formed by simply conjoining the prefix astro (= stars) with naut. Far from being newly coined, the word itself has a history that long pre-dates the 1950s and 60s “Race to the Moon”. In 1930 the term was used in a pioneering Sci-Fi short story, ‘The Death’s Head Meteor’ by Neil R Jones (and there are other instances of the word in fiction go back to the late 19th century). The explorations of space fired the popular imagination, propelling astronaut into common usage to describe those (especially American) who ventured into space on behalf of the “Free World”. Astronaut may have been influenced by the term aeronaut (aero meaning air or atmosphere, as in aeronautics, from Ancient Greek aēr = air) in use to describe balloonists dating from the 1780s [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut]. With the long-term goal of reaching the Moon accomplished by the US in 1969 and further Moon missions planned, it was of no surprise that the more precise lunarnaut soon crept into the vocabulary.

As the Soviet Union entered the bipartite race with the intention of ‘conquering’ space and establishing a technological superiority over the US, the Russian Cold Warriors wanted for ideological reasons naturally enough to differentiate their extra-planetary achievements from those of their capitalist foes. So when the first successful spaceman Yuri Gagarin went up in Vostok I in 1961, the word cosmonaut (from Cosmos, the Universe, from Ancient Greek Kosmos = order) came into the lexicon – the New York Times attributed its genesis to Premier Khrushchev “and Soviet publications” [‘Russians coin a word for him: “Cosmonaut”, NYT, 13 April 1961].

✒︎ “astroboy” touches down

Astronauts by other names
The expansion of the Space Race to other nations outside of the big two spawned a whole lot of other naut-based neologisms. The first Indian in space (1984) was initially depicted as a cosmonaut (because he flew under the Soviet space program), but Indian pride and patriotism and the advancement of their own, homegrown space program, soon led to the evolution of a distinctive term for Indian space-traveller, vyomanaut (from Sanskrit vyoman (= sky). Although among Hindi-speakers there has been some debate about the rival merits of other terms, eg, there is a measure of support for anthanaut (or antharnaut), derived from anthariksh, meaning ‘space’ in Hindi.

When China joined the “Man-in-Space Club” by launching their own pilot beyond the stratosphere in 2003, the Chinese inevitably found their own term to describe it – tàikōnaut (taikon the Chinese word for space or cosmos, derived from tàikōngrén = spaceman) [‘Taikonaut’, Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/]. Although it was apparently a Chinese-Malaysian who first used the term for Chinese astronaut and the Xinhua News Agency uses it in its English-language publications (but not the Shenzhou space program).
NB: For a pure Chinese rendering of the concept, either hángtiānyuán or yūhángyuán (literally translated as sky navigator or sailor and Universe navigator or sailor respectively) more accurately capture the essence of the meaning [ibid.]

Another word invented to describe the profession of space explorer of a specific country or region is spationaut, meaning a French astronaut, from Fr: spationaute (= space navigator). Spationaut is also used more generally to delineate astronauts from other European states, although a more suitable, generic term for this might be Euronaut.

Along the lines of aeronaut we also have aquanaut which might be a grander way of describing an underwater diver (the prefix ‘Aqua’, from Ancient Greek for water), which is distinct from an oceanaut whose scientific marine exploration is done in a submarine. ✒︎ A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)

Other -naut-suffixed terms signifying navigation in either a precise or looser sense include:

• chrononaut (a time-traveller – inspired by Doctor Who or Back to the Future?)
• cryonaut (one whose body is preserved by cryonics)
• cybernaut (a voyager in cyberspace; user of the internet or virtual reality. Could also be called an infonaut)
• gastronaut (person with a keen appreciation of food, ie, a more formal name for a ‘foodie’)
• hallucinaut (a hallucinator)
• neuronaut (one who studies the brain especially the effects of psychedelic drugs). cf. psychonaut who explores one’s own psyche under the effects of drugs.
• oneironaut (one who explores dream worlds)

As can be gleaned from the above there is a high degree of artificiality in the construction of many of these naut words. Some involve the choice of a convenient word (eg, gastronaut) rather than involving an act of literal navigation. Another concocted naut word with an interesting medical-related origin is responaut. The term was first applied c.1964 to a group of people at a particular facility in England with severe breathing difficulties whose condition needed them to be attached virtually permanently to the newly invented iron lung (mechanical respirator) in order to preserve their lives. ‘Responaut’ (formed from combining respirator + naut) was chosen because these patients experience similar problems to astronauts and oceanauts in establishing and maintaining communications and vital air supplies [Sunday Times (Lon), 12 January 1964, cited in Word Finder (Oxford English Dictionary), http://findwords.info/term/responaut].

The word Juggernaut contains the form of the naut suffix only by coincidence. It it unconnected to the idea of navigation or sailing, having come into English currency from a difference language group. Juggernaut derives from Sanskrit via a Hindi word, jagannath, meaning literally, world lord or protector. In English it has come to signify anything to which persons blindly devote themselves to or are ruthlessly crushed by [Shorter OED on Historical Principles].

Yinglish and spacerace-speak
Turning to words with the suffix ‘nik’, these come to English from a different path being of Slavonic origin with some Yiddish influence. Nik suffixes are very common in Slavonic languages, we find for example polkovnik (meaning colonel) in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and so on. Just as the Space Race gave naut words a new impetus, nik also found its way into English from Russian after the Soviet Union’s successfully launched a space craft named Sputnik in 1957.

The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]

The Cold War tensions of the 1970s spawned another new word formed from the root nik – refusenik. Originally, refuseniks were individual citizens (many Jewish but not exclusively so) of the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries who were denied permission by the Communist authorities to emigrate. Over time the application of ‘Refusenik’ in colloquial English has broadened to take on the meaning of “a person who refuses to do something, especially by way of protest” [Oxford English Dictionary (online)].

Peacenik is a word which has often been used in a derogatory way to describe someone who is an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention [www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/peacenik] (cf. “woke”/”wokeism”).The term is thought to have originated in the 1960s [possibly 1962 according to www.wordorigins.org]. Its precise origin is not known but very likely the term arose out either out of the anti-nuclear weapons movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. Peacenik is a synonym for pacifist or dove.

Holics – taking it to the nth degree
An unrelated but similarly manufactured word to peacenik is peaceoholic (sometimes spelt peaceaholic). Peaceaholic and other words with an -aholic or -oholic postfix are back-formed by analogy with the word alcoholic (into English from Arabic via French or Middle Latin). So we have shopaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, sexoholic, etc. which convey the sense of an addiction to or obsession with an activity or object.

Other nik words with a Yiddish flavour to them include Nudnik and Kibbutznik. Nudnik means obtuse, boring, a bothersome person a pest (nudyen = to bore). The Jewish Chronicle reports (18 February 2009) that Nudnik has entered modern Hebrew … “a common and even respected modus operandi in Israeli society”. A nudnik is someone “who is constantly asking you for something or otherwise taking up your time” [www.thejc.com]. Kibbutznik is a name given to workers who are members of an Israeli collective farm (a Kibbutz).

Review of The Epic Film : Myth, Meaning and Mass Entertainment

Cinema, Literary & Linguistics, Media & Communications, Popular Culture, Social History

The Epic Film: Myth and History, Derek Elley [re-published 2014, originally published 1984]

༻♝♗♝♗♝♗♝♗༻

The onset of the 21st century seemed to herald a revival in the epic genre in film. Large-budget “Sword-and-Sandal” movies of the early 2000s such as Gladiator and Troy, labelled “Neo-epic films” by cinema critics, have reinvigorated the genre. At the same time, a new blockbuster phenomenon in the shape of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series of films, padded with wall-to-wall distinguished British (and Commonwealth) actors, have extended the epic genre, and in the case of the ‘Rings’ cycle, given the flagging “Sword-and-Sorcery” sub-genre a new lease of life.

The author’s approach to his subject is a somewhat scholarly one, although the book also remains accessible purely on an entertainment level. Elley begins by making clear the distinction between the heroic and the epic … “heroes alone do not make an epic,” other ingredients especially the “all-important mythic quality” is needed to elevate the narrative to a higher plane, the ‘supra-human’ dimension. The author then proceeds to trace the transition from the epic in its original, literary form to its cinematic form.

The book concerns itself to a large extent with the type of epic film much in vogue in the fifties and sixties, drawn from the history and mythology of antiquity (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia). Right up front I’d have to say that I think that the author is inclined to take the genre a bit too seriously. The epic movie, in whatever phase or incarnation it takes, has been something difficult to be especially serious about! By definition the standard form of the epic has tended to be characterised by an indulgence in excess – grandiosity, vulgarity, basically everything 8XL in size! Mention the epic film and people often think of monumental Hollywood flicks like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and the like. Conspicuous consumption the order of the day, so much so so that it could be suggested that epic films should be primarily seen as a kind of parody of themselves.

The Epic Film spends a good deal of time examining another type of epic movie, the Continental Sword-and-Sandal variant of the species which further takes away from the serious side of the genre’s purpose. The “Sword-and-Sandal” as the book points out is also known in the trade as a Peplum movie …from peplos the type of ancient Greek robe or tunic worn by women (as modelled below). Strictly speaking ancient men wore chitons, a lighter, simpler and usually shorter garment than the feminine peplos, but the name ‘Peplum’ stuck for the epic movie!

This sub-genre had its heyday between the late 1950s and the mid 1960, usually set in Ancient Greece or Rome and often filmed at Cinecittà in Rome (for a time the world’s film studio of choice) and/or in the campagna in Italy or Spain. The elements of the genre are well-known and entirely formulaic: heroic but one-dimensional gladiatorial strongmen, a bevy of immaculately beautiful but defenceless heroines in sexy, ultra-mini peplums, a paper-thin storyline appallingly scripted and only coincidentally unrecognisable as history, incoherently edited, low budgets, sloppily shot with atrociously wooden acting and haphazardly dubbed into English.

Footnote: the popularity of the Italian Peplum provided career change opportunities for body builders as many would-be actors like Steve Reeves, Mark Forest and Kirk Morris, made the transition from the bodybuilding game to become leads in Sword-and-Sandal sagas. Interestingly, many of the Italian musclemen-stars took Anglo-sounding names in an attempt to make them more appealing to the American market, thus the well-known Sergio Ciani became on screen the aptly named “Alan Steel”.

Steve Reeves’ phenomenally successful Labors of Hercules (1957) was the springboard for a spate of strongman-centred Pepla. From the mid sixties a number of the Peplum strongmen made the switch to Spaghetti Westerns which spectacularly filled the void when the popularity of the Sword and Sandal costumers began to wane. Spaghetti Westerns utilised the same device of giving its Italian stars American-sounding names, the most famous of which were the ‘Trinity’ duo, Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.

Whilst acknowledging the limitations of many of these B-grade epics Elley soberly proceeds to unearth all manner of meaningful cinematic aesthetics from the likes of Samson against the Moon Men, Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon, etc, etc. The author describes his text somewhat grandly as an extended essay on defining “the epic form in its filmic context”. The definition in the book that took my eye is attributed to Charlton Heston, “There’s a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: It’s the easiest kind of picture to make badly” (Chuck should have known – he appeared in his fair share of dud epics in his career).

Strongman ‘Maciste’

Elley points out that spectacle is the most characteristic trademark of the epic genre, and that trait is (or was) synonymous with Hollywood. Although we connect the Pepla of that era with Italy and the Continent, we tend to associate the wider phenomenon of epics with America. The author quotes Peter Ustinov to good effect: “I’ve always thought that only the Americans can do Ancient Rome pictures. Both cultures have the same kind of relaxed, rangy pomp. Both have exactly the same kind of bad taste”.

Transparent marketing attempt to capitalise on the famous ‘Ben-Hur’ chariot race but failing to meet those expectations

The book is adorned with some 88 pictures in glorious black-and-white and these may hold for some readers the greatest interest. Amongst these is a still from the 1964 movie The Fall of the Roman Empire, a long range shot of a Late Roman frontier fortress under attack – complete with a modern Italian villa and two parked fiats close by in the background. Another revealing picture contains a close-up of the cleft-chinned Kirk Douglas as the fabled Ulysses, his heroic countenance somewhat spoiled by the clearly visible but unsightly appearance of Kirk’s varicose veins! Or equally entertaining, is the photo of Victor Mature as Samson, teeth gritted, valiantly wrestling a ‘savage’ lion which has the look of having been recently rejected by a local LA taxidermist.

Many of the era’s epic films that came out of Hollywood tend to be prone to snatches of excruciatingly bad dialogue. The book provides a wealth of atrocious quotes from the genre. Savour if you will these little vignettes which run the gamut from overblown dramatic(sic) intensity to inane absurdity:

“When you speak of destiny, this is something I must at last believe” (delivered with exaggerated emphasis), Genghis Khan, in Genghis Khan (1965).

“Love and hate are horns on the same goat”, Rune woman, in The Vikings (1958).

“At one time, when you were a little fella, you were always asking questions!”, Joseph, to Jesus, in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

This last line of dialogue, tinged with more than a touch of folksy mid-western Americanism, could easily have rolled from the mouth of failed actor-turned-US president, Ronnie Reagan, whilst whittling wood on the back-step of his Californian ranch.

By focussing on 50s and 60s Hollywood and Italian epics Elley largely neglects the first resurgence of the Sword-and-Sorcery film which took place in the late 70s and early 80s … the Star Wars cycle, Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, etc (all made before The Epic Film‘s original publication in 1984). Other (admittedly minor) sub-genres of the epic such as the Sinbad saga films (The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, and so on) and the Swashbuckler/Pirate films don’t get a guernsey at all … although the Sinbad movies could just as well be categorised as adventure-fantasy films, rather than strictly Sword-and-Sorcery ones.

Elley’s study of the epic film genre is informative and instructive in so far as it goes. Ancient Greeks and Romans, Biblical figures, barbarians and Norsemen, all get a good run, but Elley’s historical survey cuts off at the end of the Dark Ages. I’m left with a tinge of regret that he didn’t take a more expansive approach in the book to include the grand and occasionally grandiloquent epic movies made about legendary Britons of a later era like Arthur and Robin Hood, as well as the more modern epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr Zhivago and even extend it to examples of the genre as diverse as 2001 a Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.