Widows & Orphans: The Endnotes

Some odds & ends about 'grass widow', 'widows & orphans', golf, & Mountbatten.

Image credits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Johnson_J_Hooper_Plaque.JPG
http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/_DAMx/image/20/123/a1840003h.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:In_a_rut_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1183554.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Varsity_Polo_2013.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lord_Mountbatten_Naval_in_colour_Allan_Warren.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battenberg_famil #/media/File:Arms_of_Battenberg-Mountbatten.svg

Podcast: http://www.alliterative.net/podcast

Transcript:
Today, some extra bits of information from my video about the word Widow; & if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.
Looking again at the expression grass widow, which as we saw in the main video went from meaning a “discarded mistress” to a “married woman whose wife is away”, we saw there was speculation that the shift in meaning happened in Anglo-India. The one problem is that the earliest citations the Oxford English Dictionary has in the newer sense are not from India but from American & Australian English, first in a story published in 1845 by American humorist Johnson J. Hooper. Then in 1853 Ellen Clacy writes in A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia: “The absence of so many of ‘the lords of creation’ in pursuit of what they value..more than all the women in the world—nuggets. The wives thus left in town to deplore their husbands' infatuation, are termed ‘grass-widows’—a mining expression.” So Clacy takes it as a mining term. It’s not until 1859, that we have an Anglo-Indian example from John Lang’s Wanderings in India in which he writes “Grass widows in the hills are always writing to their husbands, when you drop in upon them.” All these citations are from around the same time, & perhaps someone will antedate the term finding an even earlier example in India.
Another important widow expression is the phrase widows & orphans, originally referring to the vulnerable members of society most in need of charitable help, but also with a couple of important figurative senses. There’s the financial sense “designating a safe, low-risk investment deemed suitable for those considered as vulnerable or having limited knowledge of investing, such as (originally) widows or orphans.”, so widow & orphan investments or widow & orphan stocks. Then there’s the typesetting term widows & orphans referring to a paragraph-ending-line that falls at the beginning of a page (a widow) or a paragraph-opening line that appears at the bottom of a page (an orphan). Typesetters usually try to avoid widows & orphans as they look messy & break up the flow of the text.
The etymology of orphan, by the way, is quite an interesting one. It comes, through Greek orphanos & Latin orphanus, from a Proto-Indo-European root that means “to turn” with derivatives in a number of languages referring to change of allegiance or the passage from one status to another. So etymologically speaking an orphan has turned from the status of having parents to not having them, in other words turning from one sphere of belonging to another, & this would explain the various derivatives from the same root that have to do with inheritance & slavery, such as the word robot, which originally meant “slave”, before it was borrowed into English from Czech referring to a more mechanical servant. Another word that descends from this root in its base sense of “turn” is orbit, coming from Latin orbita meaning “wheel track”, with the original English sense of “eye socket” before being applied to other round or spherical things, such as the astronomical sense, which was first used in English in the 1690s.
And so to bring all of this back to golf, another of the topics of the main video, in 2006 as a publicity stunt, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit a golf ball into orbit off the International Space Station. There were differing estimates of how long it probably stayed in orbit before burning up in the atmosphere, ranging from three days to three & half years.
And speaking of golf, or rather its distant relative polo, & the polo-obsessed Lord Mountbatten, his name is an Anglicization of the original German surname Battenburg, burg meaning “mountain or hill”. The family adopted the English translation of their name around WWI due to anti-German sentiment in Britain at the time. At first glance the batten element of the name might seem to be a possible instance of that root in bastard, from Greek bastazein meaning “to carry”, as indeed the word batten as in batten down the hatches as a kind of stick or staff is related to baton, which comes ultimately from Greek baston meaning “support” from bastazein. But in the name it is more likely to have come from a Germanic root meaning “to improve” related to the word better.