Can you identify all of the following?
Thomas Nashe’s 1594 novel The Unfortunate Traveller (Wikipedia, original text, modern-spelling text) is a strange and grisly piece of work, equal parts The Spanish Tragedy, Inglourious Basterds, and The Dying Earth. It follows Jack Wilton, an Englishman who is half scoundrel and half philosopher, on a picaresque journey through mid 16th-century Europe. (“I was at Pontius Pilate’s house, and pissed against it.”)
One passage in particular has stuck with me. Earlier in the novel, Jack and his companion Diamante encounter an Italian named Bartol and a Spaniard named Esdras, who have been raping, robbing, and murdering their way through Rome, taking advantage of an outbreak of plague to prey on rich, defenseless women. In their raid on the house where Jack is staying (with rape, robbery, and murder described in lurid detail), Bartol abducts Diamante. Esdras lusts after her, so he picks a fight with Bartol, mortally wounding him.
At the end of the novel, Jack and Diamante, reunited, come across an execution. The condemned man is Cutwolf, Bartol’s brother. In a long speech, Cutwolf explains that he that swore revenge on Esdras and spent twenty months chasing him across Italy, begging rather than break off the pursuit to go back for money.
Cutwolf finally locates and corners Esdras in Bologna, saying, “I have promised the devil thy soul within this hour; break my word I will not; in thy breast I intend to bury a bullet.” Esdras pleads for his life piteously and at great length. He offers Cutwolf riches, he asks Cutwolf only to maim him, and he finishes by imploring Cutwolf to consider his own soul’s fate:
Spare me, spare me, I beseech thee; by thy own soul’s salvation I desire thee, seek not my soul’s utter perdition; in destroying me, thou destroyest thyself and me.
Cutwolf is unmoved. “There is no heaven but revenge.”
Esdras tries again, offering to carry out whatever horrific and humilating demands Cutwolf makes of him:
Command me to cut all my kindred’s throats, to burn men, women and children in their beds in millions by firing their cities at midnight. Be it pope, emperor or Turk that displeaseth thee, he shall not breathe on the earth. For thy sake will I swear and forswear, renounce my baptism, and all the interest I have in any other sacrament. Only let me live how miserable soever, be it in a dungeon amongst toads, serpents and adders, or set up to the neck in dung. No pains I will refuse, howsoever prorogued, to have a little respite to purify my spirit; oh, hear me, hear me, & thou canst not be hardened against me.
At this, Cutwolf has an idea. Esdras, he says, must do three things to live:
First and foremost he should renounce God and his laws, and utterly disclaim the whole title or interest he had in any covenant of salvation. Next, he should curse him to his face, as Job was willed by his wife, and write an absolute firm obligation of his soul to the devil, without condition or exception. Thirdly and lastly (having done this), he should pray to God fervently never to have mercy upon him, or pardon him.
Esdras complies, blaspheming with such fervor that Cutwolf is amazed the earth doesn’t open up and swallow the two of them on the spot. And when Esdras is done, Cutwolf completes his plan:
These fearful ceremonies brought to an end, I bade him ope his mouth and gape wide. He did so (as what will not slaves do for fear?); therewith made I no more ado, but shot him full into the throat with my pistol; no more spake he after; so did I shoot him that he might never speak after or repent him. His body being dead looked as black as a toad; the devil presently branded it for his own.
And that is it. Cutwolf has had his revenge—not just on Esdras’s body, but on his soul.
I learned about The Unfortunate Traveler in college, in a course on Shakespeare. Hamlet’s reluctance to kill Claudius while he is praying echoes Cutwolf. As always with Shakespeare, you can have what may well be the source material right there in front of you (Hamlet probably dates to somewhere between 1599 and 1601) and still be amazed at how differently a line like “that his heels may kick at heaven” lands.
For some reason, I have been reminded of Esdras’s fate the last few days. Sometimes, it is good to think about what you are and are not willing to do when there is a man with a gun to your head.
I am pleased to announce the public release of my freely available intellectual property textbook, Information Property. I have been working it since 2012. In that time, it has evolved from a collection of supplementary problems, to a coursepack, to a casebook, to a textbook. The result reflects how I think an IP survey course should be taught, because it is how I teach my own IP survey course. Here are a few highlights of what I have done, and why:
First, this is a textbook, not a casebook. Although it contains a few edited cases, most of it consists of my own explantions of IP doctrines and how they fit together. The point is to put in one place everything that a beginning IP student should know, clearly explained, and vividly illustrated. It contains hundreds of images: patent drawings, copyright works-in-suit, infringing products, and much much more.
Second, the book presents a systematic exposition of IP concepts. I have broken every IP field down into the same seven basic topics: subject matter, ownership, procedures, similarity, prohibited conduct, secondary liability, and defenses. It brings out the ways in which different fields are alike, and the ways in which they diverge. I find that this approach helps enormously in bringing order to what can seem like a riotous diversity of forms of IP.
Third, the book has unusually broad coverage of IP fields. In addition to the standard topics (patent, copyright, trademark, and sometimes trade secret), it also covers undeveloped ideas, false advertising, geographic indications, right of publicity, design patent—and a unique chapter on trademark-like issues in identifier registries.
Fourth, the book is freely available. I have released it under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and it is available from my website as a free PDF download. In addition, I sell at-cost paperback (black-and-white) and hardbound (full-color) versions through Lulu.
I am grateful to the many students and colleagues who have read previous versions of Information Property and given me useful suggestions on how to improve future ones. I plan to revise and extend it in the years to come, and your comments are warmly welcomed.
Universities exist to promote the discovery, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. While they can help make to make a society virtuous, prosperous, and free, they do so by pursing their mission, which is truth. They can offer their service to government, but it is not their purpose to serve it. If the civil power makes demands of them that are incompatible with their commitment to the freedom of thought, they are bound in conscience to refuse.
In pursuit of its political goals, the Trump administration has attempted to intimidate and extort numerous universities. It has threatened them with with severe consequences, including the loss of federal funding, termination of accreditation, and denial of the ability to enroll foreign students. Some have resisted, filing lawsuits against these unlawful threats. Others have capitulated, including most recently Columbia University.
Columbia’s agreement with the federal government includes a $200 million fine, restrictions on its admissions and hiring processes, modified disciplinary processes, mandatory faculty appointments, and changes to its curriculum and educational programs. No court has held that these changes are required by law, and many of them are seriously inconsistent with Columbia’s purported commitments to institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and a campus environment that is welcoming to all.
Columbia’s actions are immoral, unwise, and dangerous. In the name of compromise with the administration, it has compromised the core values to which universities are dedicated. Worse, it has done so in the face of a widespread authoritarian crackdown not just on higher education, but on all the civic instutitions of a free society: the legal profession, the news media, nonprofit organizations, and many more. Columbia’s failure to defend its own freedoms threatens those freedoms for all. It gives aid and comfort to tyrants, and exposes others to the same kind of extortionate threats.
Universities have institutional moral standing because they stand apart from private profit and public power. The knowledge they produce and maintain is not reducible to the coin of the realm, and so they can legitimately call upon the generosity of others to sustain their mission. The alumni donor who writes a check and the outside reviewer who writes a tenure letter are participating in a gift economy built on payment forward rather than on payment in return. They give purely so that knowledge may grow and continue—or at least that is what the university should be able tell them with a straight face when it calls upon their aid.
Columbia can do so no longer. Along with the $200 million and the laundry list of promises, Columbia has traded away its soul. How can a university that lets the government illegally dictate who it admits and hires tell its faculty and students that they are truly free to think for themselves and say what they believe? It cannot. How can a university that pays Dane-geld promise donors that their geld will not go straight to the Dane? It cannot. How can a university that grovels in the face of demands for ideological control assure speakers that they are contributing to learning and not just the accumulation of power? It cannot.
Or so it seems to me. As an academic, I have committed myself to the mission of the university, to the pursuit of knowledge, to the continuation of the three-thousand-year tradition we have inherited. And unlike the cowards, quislings, and fools who run Columbia, I remember why we do what we do—and what we must not do.
I pledge that I will not provide any service to Columbia University. I will not speak at conferences held at or organized by Columbia. I will not publish with Columbia publications or provide peer reviews for them. I will not provide outside tenure evaluations for Columbia departments. I will not contribute in any way to the institution until everyone who is responsible for this week’s shameful decision has resigned, retired, or been fired, and until Columbia repudiates their catastrophic choice.
Although it may seem like a thin distinction, this is not a boycott of Columbia’s faculty and students. I have many Columbia-affiliated friends and colleagues who are in no way responsible for this week’s debacle—indeed, many of them made heroic efforts to prevent it. They are committed to knowledge and freedom, even if their university is not. I will continue to work with Columbia scholars and speak with Columbia students, as I always have. That too is part of the mission of the university; the community of scholars knows no borders and answers to no authority. It is Columbia the institution that has gone wrong, and it is from Columbia the institution that I withhold my aid.
I have a choice of where I will put my efforts in my limited time on this earth. There are many good causes, both within the academy and beyond. There is no shortage of work to be done, now more than ever. I will do what I have always done, which is what I can. It just won’t be for Columbia.
North, east, south, and west are the four cardinal directions. The term derives from the Latin cardo, which can mean “hinge” or “pivot,” and thus figuratively a turning point or pole. It also had a derived meaning of “something on which something else depends”—because a door de-pends (i.e. hangs) on its hinges and turns about them—and thus also could mean “principal thing.” Many modern word senses of “cardinal” derive from this idea. For example, a high Catholic official was an episcopus cardinalis (i.e. “principal bishop”), and thus ultimately just a “cardinal.” The red bird was named after the red robes worn by cardinals, and the baseball and football teams are named after the bird. (Of course, they have red uniforms and logos.) The association with the compass points, however, is an ancient one that has endured. A north-south street was a cardo, and the four principal directions were quattuor cardines orbis terrarum (“the four pivots of the world”).
What should we call the four intermediate directions: northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest? Two names with perfectly respectable Latinate justifications would be semi-cardinal (cf. “semi-annual” or “semicircle”) or intercardinal (cf. “interpolation” or “interregnum”) directions. But some sources, including Wikipedia, refer to them as the ordinal directions, a usage that is close enough to right to sound plausible if you don’t think too closely about it.
The English “ordinal” comes from the Latin ordo, which means “order,” “line,” or “regular arrangement.” Thus, a ordo could be a course of stones in a wall, a line of soldiers, a class of citizens, or anything else arranged correctly in its place. One sense that has endured in several meanings of “order” is that of a linear series, so that the adjective ordinalis described things arranged by order of succession: first in line, second in line, third in line, and so on.
And this, it appears, is how “cardinal” and “ordinal” collided. A cardinal number is a counting number: 1, 2, 3, and so on. They are so-called because they are the principal numbers; other senses in which numbers are used depend on this one. An ordinal number describes something’s place in an order: first, second, third, and so on. They are so called because they describe the order in which things are arranged. For finite numbers, cardinals and ordinals correspond exactly. You use a cardinal number to describe how many things there are in a group, but use an ordinal number if you want to pick out where one of those things falls within the group. (Mathematicians would say that the two senses diverge for infinite numbers; infinite cardinals have very different properties than infinite ordinals.) And thus, generations of students have been taught to think of “cardinal” and “ordinal” as closely related, with “cardinal” being the
At this point, you can probably guess what happened. One finds occasional pre-1970 references to “ordinal directions” in a Google Books search, but most of them appear to be by people who have mistaken “ordinal” for “cardinal” when they meant to refer to the principal directions. It’s in 1972, as noted by Redditor phalp, that we find an attested use of “ordinal” in this sense:
… classics, though as intervening routes were made the cardinal and ordinal directions were gradually used up and so arrived at South-West by West.
I think this is simply wrong, but as with all matters of language use, it will become right if enough people use it that way over time. And if Wikipedia is any guide, we are well along that road already.
Sources: