who created the word essay

The Essay: History and Definition

Attempts at Defining Slippery Literary Form

An Introduction to Punctuation
Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

"One damned thing after another" is how Aldous Huxley described the essay: "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything."

As definitions go, Huxley's is no more or less exact than Francis Bacon's "dispersed meditations," Samuel Johnson's "loose sally of the mind" or Edward Hoagland's "greased pig."

Since Montaigne adopted the term "essay" in the 16th century to describe his "attempts" at self-portrayal in prose , this slippery form has resisted any sort of precise, universal definition. But that won't an attempt to define the term in this brief article.

In the broadest sense, the term "essay" can refer to just about any short piece of nonfiction -- an editorial, feature story, critical study, even an excerpt from a book. However, literary definitions of a genre are usually a bit fussier.

One way to start is to draw a distinction between articles , which are read primarily for the information they contain, and essays, in which the pleasure of reading takes precedence over the information in the text . Although handy, this loose division points chiefly to kinds of reading rather than to kinds of texts. So here are some other ways that the essay might be defined.

Standard definitions often stress the loose structure or apparent shapelessness of the essay. Johnson, for example, called the essay "an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance."

True, the writings of several well-known essayists ( William Hazlitt and Ralph Waldo Emerson , for instance, after the fashion of Montaigne) can be recognized by the casual nature of their explorations -- or "ramblings." But that's not to say that anything goes. Each of these essayists follows certain organizing principles of his own.

Oddly enough, critics haven't paid much attention to the principles of design actually employed by successful essayists. These principles are rarely formal patterns of organization , that is, the "modes of exposition" found in many composition textbooks. Instead, they might be described as patterns of thought -- progressions of a mind working out an idea.

Unfortunately, the customary divisions of the essay into opposing types -- formal and informal, impersonal and familiar -- are also troublesome. Consider this suspiciously neat dividing line drawn by Michele Richman:

Post-Montaigne, the essay split into two distinct modalities: One remained informal, personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational and often humorous; the other, dogmatic, impersonal, systematic and expository .

The terms used here to qualify the term "essay" are convenient as a kind of critical shorthand, but they're imprecise at best and potentially contradictory. Informal can describe either the shape or the tone of the work -- or both. Personal refers to the stance of the essayist, conversational to the language of the piece, and expository to its content and aim. When the writings of particular essayists are studied carefully, Richman's "distinct modalities" grow increasingly vague.

But as fuzzy as these terms might be, the qualities of shape and personality, form and voice, are clearly integral to an understanding of the essay as an artful literary kind.

Many of the terms used to characterize the essay -- personal, familiar, intimate, subjective, friendly, conversational -- represent efforts to identify the genre's most powerful organizing force: the rhetorical voice or projected character (or persona ) of the essayist.

In his study of Charles Lamb , Fred Randel observes that the "principal declared allegiance" of the essay is to "the experience of the essayistic voice." Similarly, British author Virginia Woolf has described this textual quality of personality or voice as "the essayist's most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool."

Similarly, at the beginning of "Walden, " Henry David Thoreau reminds the reader that "it is ... always the first person that is speaking." Whether expressed directly or not, there's always an "I" in the essay -- a voice shaping the text and fashioning a role for the reader.

Fictional Qualities

The terms "voice" and "persona" are often used interchangeably to suggest the rhetorical nature of the essayist himself on the page. At times an author may consciously strike a pose or play a role. He can, as E.B. White confirms in his preface to "The Essays," "be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter."

In "What I Think, What I Am," essayist Edward Hoagland points out that "the artful 'I' of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction." Similar considerations of voice and persona lead Carl H. Klaus to conclude that the essay is "profoundly fictive":

It seems to convey the sense of human presence that is indisputably related to its author's deepest sense of self, but that is also a complex illusion of that self -- an enactment of it as if it were both in the process of thought and in the process of sharing the outcome of that thought with others.

But to acknowledge the fictional qualities of the essay isn't to deny its special status as nonfiction.

Reader's Role

A basic aspect of the relationship between a writer (or a writer's persona) and a reader (the implied audience ) is the presumption that what the essayist says is literally true. The difference between a short story, say, and an autobiographical essay lies less in the narrative structure or the nature of the material than in the narrator's implied contract with the reader about the kind of truth being offered.

Under the terms of this contract, the essayist presents experience as it actually occurred -- as it occurred, that is, in the version by the essayist. The narrator of an essay, the editor George Dillon says, "attempts to convince the reader that its model of experience of the world is valid."

In other words, the reader of an essay is called on to join in the making of meaning. And it's up to the reader to decide whether to play along. Viewed in this way, the drama of an essay might lie in the conflict between the conceptions of self and world that the reader brings to a text and the conceptions that the essayist tries to arouse.

At Last, a Definition—of Sorts

With these thoughts in mind, the essay might be defined as a short work of nonfiction, often artfully disordered and highly polished, in which an authorial voice invites an implied reader to accept as authentic a certain textual mode of experience.

Sure. But it's still a greased pig.

Sometimes the best way to learn exactly what an essay is -- is to read some great ones. You'll find more than 300 of them in this collection of Classic British and American Essays and Speeches .

What is a Familiar Essay in Composition?
What Does "Persona" Mean?
What Are the Different Types and Characteristics of Essays?
Rhetorical Analysis Definition and Examples
What Is a Personal Essay (Personal Statement)?
The Writer's Voice in Literature and Rhetoric
Point of View in Grammar and Composition
What Is Colloquial Style or Language?
What Is Literary Journalism?
Definition and Examples of Formal Essays
What Is Expository Writing?
The Difference Between an Article and an Essay
First-Person Point of View
What Is Tone In Writing?
An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction

Simple and Practical Writing Tips from Real Writers
About Jessie and TopWritingTips
Who Invented Essay Writing
May 10, 2017
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Students in every country, at all levels of education from the lower echelons of high school to post graduate and research schools are well practised in the writing of essays. These days, essays come in many different formats and structures; from a book review to a comparison essay to an argumentative essay to a dissertation and everything in between. In today’s education system, we often take for granted the fact that the essay is one of the main forms of assignments. We accept the challenge and complete them without ever thinking about the origins of the format. If you are interested in where the essay actually began and who was the first to bring the assignment format into existence, then read on for a brief history of the essay.

The word “essay” was first used by a Frenchman

It is generally accepted that the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, born in 1533, was the first author to describe his works of writing as essays. Back then, essay was a term that he used to characterise the way that he would attempt to put his various thoughts into writing. From this description, it is easy to see how this attempt to arrange thoughts on a page could turn into the type of essay that we are familiar with today. Eager to share his new form of writing with the world, in 1580, Montaigne compiled his essays into a published collection entitled Essais. He achieved great success with this, and for the rest of his life, he spent time revising and publishing previously written essays, as well as composing new ones.

Francis Bacon is considered the first English language essayist

In terms of the English language, Francis Bacon’s essays, published in the form of books in 1597, 1612 and 1625, were the first works of English to be officially described as essays. Interestingly, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the word ‘essayist’ was recorded by playwright Ben Jonson in 1609.

Asia wrote essays before Europeans

Of course, as with most of recorded history, the claim for the invention of the essay is much older in Asia than it is in Europe. Much like the novel, which was being cultivated in places like Japan much earlier than in England and Europe, essays existed and were known as zuihitsu, a word meaning fragmented ideas. A word somewhat incongruous to the aim of an essay which attempts to bring order to thoughts and ideas. Notable examples of this early form of essay include The Pillow Book court lady SeiShonagon from 1000 A.D. and 1330’s Tsurezuregusa by the famous Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenko. Kenko spoke of his essay writings in a very similar way to Michel de Montaigne, classing them as nonsensical thoughts that were written during idle hours. One more interesting thing to note is that in a stark difference from the overwhelming patriarchy in writing in Europe, Japan was filled with female writers who enjoyed creating essays. However, this rich history of female Asian work has been somewhat erased by Chinese-influenced writing by male writers who were much more revered at the time.

From random to ordered

Though the origins of the essay are very much rooted in authors assembling ‘varied thoughts’ and ‘fragmented ideas’ on the page, over time the essay has become a much more official and rigid form of writing, constructed for students and academics to be able to argue, explain or explore a topic in a defined and recognised fashion. Here is a brief list of some of the most popular essay forms today:

Cause and Effect – an essay that is used to argue causal chains that connect a cause to a direct effect.
Compare and Contrast – an essay that is used to identify and evaluate the differences between two ideas, objects or concepts e.g. chalk and cheese, Hitler and Stalin, Pride and Prejudice and Emma
Descriptive –an essay that required writing that is characterised by all of the sensory details such as sight, smell, sound, touch. Generally intended to appeal to a reader’s emotional response.
Argumentative – an essay in which the author takes a stand on one side of an argument, and works to build a case around why exactly their view point is the most persuasive.
Reflective – an analytical essay in which the author describes a scene, either real or imagined in as rich detail as possible, with an eye on surmising a learning experience.

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1590s, "trial, attempt, endeavor," also "short, discursive literary composition" (first attested in writings of Francis Bacon, probably in imitation of Montaigne), from French essai "trial, attempt, essay" (in Old French from 12c.), from Late Latin exagium "a weighing, a weight," from Latin exigere "drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test," from ex "out" (see ex- ) + agere "to set in motion, drive" (from PIE root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move") apparently meaning here "to weigh." The suggestion is of unpolished writing. Compare assay , also examine .

"to put to proof, test the mettle of," late 15c., from French essaier , from essai "trial, attempt" (see essay (n.)). This sense has mostly gone with the divergent spelling assay . Meaning "to attempt" is from 1640s. Related: Essayed ; essaying .

Entries linking to essay

c. 1300, "to try, endeavor, strive; test the quality of," from Anglo-French assaier , from assai (n.), from Old French assai , variant of essai "trial" (see essay (n.)). Related: Assayed ; assaying .

c. 1300, "put (someone) to question in regard to knowledge, competence, or skill, inquire into qualifications or capabilities;" mid-14c., "inspect or survey (something) carefully, scrutinize, view or observe in all aspects with the purpose of forming a correct opinion or judgment," from Old French examiner "interrogate, question, torture," from Latin examinare "to test or try; consider, ponder," literally "to weigh," from examen "a means of weighing or testing," probably ultimately from exigere "demand, require, enforce," literally "to drive or force out," also "to finish, measure," from ex "out" (see ex- ) + agere "to set in motion, drive, drive forward; to do, perform" (from PIE root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move"). Legal sense of "question or hear (a witness in court)" is from early 15c. Related: Examined ; examining .

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Michel de Montaigne and the Art of the Personal Essay

Montaigne invented the essay genre after deciding he wanted to write a literary self-portrait of himself. This turned out to be an impossible task.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is one of France’s most celebrated literary giants . Born into a noble Catholic family from South West France, he spent many years sitting in Bordeaux’s parliament. But after 15 years working in the legal and political sphere, Montaigne retired to his country estate in Dordogne.

It was here, inside a small library within one of his chateau towers , that Montaigne began writing the Essays . He published the first two volumes of these essays in 1580, followed by a third in 1588. Within their pages he wrote chapters of varying lengths (sometimes only a few paragraphs, sometimes hundreds of pages long) on a wide array of topics ranging from architecture to child-rearing. His writing style was unusual in the 16th century for its complete honesty and informality.

The Essays: Michel de Montaigne’s Personal and Historical Context

Before we dive into the essays themselves, it’s helpful to understand Montaigne’s mindset when he first began writing in 1571. The nobleman had already suffered a series of personal tragedies by the time he put quill to parchment. His close friend Étienne de la Boétie passed away in 1563, followed by Montaigne’s beloved father Pierre only a few years later in 1568.

In fact, Montaigne was arguably surrounded by death throughout his life. He and his wife Françoise had several children, but only one daughter, Léonore, survived childhood. Furthermore, France was embroiled in a bloody civil war between Catholic and Protestant factions for much of the latter half of the 16th century. This violence reached the walls of Montaigne’s chateau on many occasions. Montaigne himself was twice accosted by spies and soldiers who wanted to kidnap or kill him, but in both cases he managed to talk his way out of trouble.

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In this context of grief and bloody violence, Montaigne began to look inwardly to himself. After all, his external reality, which was filled with family tragedy and religious massacres, didn’t seem to be making much sense. It’s hardly surprising that in his famous preface to the Essays , the author expresses a belief that his own death will occur fairly soon. Therefore his writing will serve as a legacy, a reminder of his character and personality once he is dead.

This is where the unique nature of Montaigne’s writing comes into play. In the Essays he wants to try and pin down his own thoughts and feelings on paper, amid the uncertainty and violence of the world around him. He accepts that there are plenty of things he knows very little about, which is why he often defers to other people by including direct quotations from ancient philosophers and historians in his writing. But what he can do is draw on his own experience, i.e. his memories, personal events etc. and combine it with the books and philosophies that have shaped him, in order to try and sketch a self-portrait of himself.

The Essays were printed and widely disseminated throughout Europe, bringing Michel de Montaigne a large degree of fame during his lifetime. He continued to write and rewrite previous editions of his work, resulting in several versions of the Essays in circulation. Eventually, after some brief periods of travel across France and Italy, ill health confined Montaigne to his chateau once again. He died of quinsy at the age of 59.

The Unique Composition of the Essays

As you may have guessed, the Essays (in French: Essais ) are an unusual collection of writing. The word ‘essay’ itself comes from the French verb ‘essayer’ i.e. ‘to attempt’. Each chapter is Montaigne’s attempt to explore a particular topic, whether it be child-rearing or suicide , by capturing the natural flow of his thoughts as they enter his mind. In a chapter on politeness, for example, he might begin by discussing a famous quote on being polite, then compare this with what various philosophers say on the matter, before finally reflecting on his own attitude towards politeness.

Despite being a member of the upper classes, Montaigne discusses historical events and philosophical questions alongside personal anecdotes and health issues (including his bowel movements and napping schedule!). Although it’s now a common literary genre, this free-flowing essay form was completely new to 16th century audiences. The Essays represented the origins of an entirely new way of writing.

What makes Michel de Montaigne’s writing even more unique was his insistence on constantly revising what he had already published. In later editions, he added hundreds of annotations (sometimes several paragraphs long) or hastily deleted sentences and quotes he no longer liked. In fact, this constant rewriting highlights just how difficult it is to paint a literary self-portrait. Our ideas and opinions on subjects are constantly changing over the course of our lifetime. The Essays are a record of how Montaigne’s own mindset evolved as he grew older, read more books and experienced even more of life.

Montaigne and the Act of (Re)writing

Indeed, the rewriting process feeds into this problem which Montaigne encounters during his writing. In a chapter entitled ‘On Repentance’, he ends up discussing how difficult he finds it to record himself through the medium of writing: “I can’t pin down my object. It is tumultuous, it flutters around” (Montaigne, 2007). Then he asserts one of his most famous dictums: “I don’t paint the being. I paint the passage” (Montaigne, 2007). Here he illustrates what he believes to be one of the key conditions of human existence: that all human beings are constantly in flux.

Michel de Montaigne can never truly give a single self-portrait of himself through his writing. Because he, like us, is constantly changing over time. His body is aging, his emotions change from day to day, his favorite authors and philosophers evolve as he reads more books. He cannot write the ‘being’ because it’s constantly in flux, so he can only record the ‘passage’ of himself as it changes from day to day, minute to minute.

The Philosophical Significance of the Essays

So if we’re constantly in flux, how can we ever do what a philosopher wants to do best and try to find truth? After all, Montaigne acknowledges that learning and attempting to find truth in the world is often portrayed as the most distinguished way to spend one’s time: “We are born to seek out truth…the world is nothing but a school of learning” (Montaigne, 2007).

Montaigne suggests that we humans possess a strong desire to fulfill our curiosity. Furthermore, when Michel de Montaigne discusses truth, he often uses verbs such as ‘to seek’ or ‘to search’ but never claims to have finally ‘found’ the truth. This suggests that he believes truth-seeking to be an open-ended journey, one which will never quite be fully realized. This is mirrored in the writing of the Essays themselves, which were edited and re-edited by their author, before subsequently spawning a long tradition of academic scholarship which still debates the meaning of Montaigne’s writing today.

In a temporal world , learning and accessing truth is challenging. Montaigne often uses the French word branle (which roughly translates as ‘inconstant movement’) to describe time. Time’s inconstancy affects us every single day. Montaigne points out that each new day brings new feelings and flights of imagination, leading us to flit between different opinions. Time’s inconstancy isn’t just reflected in the external world i.e. through the changing seasons, but it also affects the inner essence of our being. And we humans allow ourselves to drift along in this way, stating an opinion then changing it an hour later, for the entirety of our lives on earth: “It’s nothing but inconstancy” (Montaigne, 2007).

When it comes to pinning down a literary self-portrait, Montaigne struggles due to the impermanence of living in time: “If I speak of myself in different ways, it’s because I view myself differently” (Montaigne, 2007). However, his commitment to writing and rewriting his thoughts shows his determination to try and find truth in the world despite all of its uncertainty. Even though human beings exist in temporal flux, we still have a brain and rational tools which allow us to live in time. Truth-seeking means doing what Montaigne is doing with his writing: drawing on your own experience and writing down your thoughts to try and know yourself. After all, the one thing that humans can reliably claim to know about is themselves.

Michel de Montaigne’s Literary and Philosophical Legacy

The Essays are celebrated due to their inventive nature. In the end, Montaigne didn’t care that he would never be able to represent himself faithfully through writing. He accepts that this is the way of the world, and puts quill to parchment anyway. Scholar Terence Cave once described the Essays as “the richest and most productive thought-experiment ever committed to paper” (Cave, 2007). Furthermore, as stated above, the clue is in the name essay , which means ‘attempt’: as he reflects on the French civil war or the nature of custom, his thoughts shift and change. He is trying, and that’s all we can ever do.

Montaigne has also defied classification as a philosopher. Sometimes he favors Stoicism as a world view, at other times he prefers the Skeptics. And unlike many philosophers who are seeking a way to live in the world , Michel de Montaigne refuses to give a final judgment on whatever topic he is writing about. His personal anecdotes and moral reflections always lead towards open-ended conclusions. He doesn’t seek to provide his readers with absolute answers to life’s major questions. What he does do is attempt to record himself searching for those answers in vain.

Bibliography

Terence Cave, How to Read Montaigne (London: Granta, 2007)

Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais , ed. by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien & Catherine Magnien-Simonen (Paris: Gallimard, 2007)

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By Rachel Ashcroft MSc Comparative Literature, PhD Renaissance Philosophy Rachel is a contributing writer and journalist with an academic background in European languages, literature and philosophy. She has an MA in French and Italian and an MSc in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Rachel completed a PhD in Renaissance conceptions of time at Durham University. Now living back in Edinburgh, she regularly publishes articles and book reviews related to her specialty for a range of publications including The Economist.

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The History of Essay: Origin and Evolvement

These days, an essay is one of the key assignments at college. This particular task allows tutors to evaluate the student’s knowledge effectively. But it was not always a key assessment tool in the education sphere. So, when did an essay become so important for study purposes? And who invented the essay? According to Aldous Huxley, this particular literary piece can be used to describe almost everything. Essays have become very popular since the first day this type of paper was introduced. What is more, the first time the essay appeared in the far 16th century, it was a part of a self-portrayal done by Michel de Montaigne. The term essay was adopted from French “essayer”, which was adopted from Latin “exagere”. The last one means “to sort through”. In the far 16th century, the essay was mostly a form of a literary piece. Afterward, it has gained wider use in literature and study. It lost all its formality and has become quite a popular writing form. Besides, it has turned into quite a complicated study assignment. That is why many modern students need help writing an essay these days.

Difference Between Essay and Article

In contrast to an article that mostly has an informative purpose, an essay is more a literary paper. The “essay” concept can refer to practically any short piece of report or small composition. It can be a short story, some critical piece, etc. The essay differs from an article or other kinds of papers. Many prominent features distinguish essays from research papers, case studies, or reports. The essay paper has a standard structure in most cases. Sometimes, the layout can be a little bit creative. An article provides information on a certain topic. It has a mostly informative character and does not tend to deliver solutions or recommendations. Besides, it lacks a strict formatting style and outline. Still, it mostly refers to modern academic essays. In old times, essays had no defined format or structure. The origin of the essay does not affect its current usage. Now, it is an effective educational tool and one of the top college projects. Academic essays have an assigned structure and formatting style. You cannot ignore the provided requirements if you want to have a good grade. There are many strict rules to essays assigned at college. Students often check long tutorials to learn how to prepare a proper essay

Types of Essays and Its Characteristics

In the history of the essay, there were always different types of essays. First and foremost, essays were divided into formal and informal. Next, impersonal and familiar. Formal essays are mostly focused on the described topic. Informal essays are more personal and focused on the essayist.

Academic essays differ greatly with their wide variety of types and formats. You can count descriptive, argumentative, reflective, analytical, persuasive, narrative, expository essays’ types. The key types of academic essays include analytical, descriptive, persuasive, and critical.

Every of the mentioned types has its own essay format. They also differ by structure, length, main points to analyze, and purposes. In old times, writers were mostly concerned by the personal or impersonal tone of written composition. It takes more effort to learn all the types of academic essays these days. Besides, they all have a different focus and the final goal.

The most popular narrative essay is quite familiar to the one it was just a few centuries ago. In this paper, you tell the story and focus on a single idea. Such papers like argumentative or analytical essays are more like research papers. They require a thesis statement, strong arguments, and supporting evidence. You have to conduct research work. It is way more difficult than to tell a simple story. Still, even storytelling requires natural talents and a clever mind to be appreciated by readers.

Essay Evolvement and Modern Use

The essay history describes the way the traditional essay was turned into a decent educational tool. First, the essay was a typical literary form of expression. Authors were mostly concerned to share their point of view about some ideas or themselves in the composition. It gained more personal coloring than any other paper in years.

Since being parted from a self-portrayal, this particular piece was mostly essayist-focused originally. Afterward, once the essay writers have figured out it can describe particularly everything, an essay has gained wider use. Not every modern essay writer knows how the term “essay” was created. Still, modern writers face even bigger challenges with these particular kinds of written papers.

The key reasons include a set of strict rules and requirements for academic essays. They force writers to come up only with the most interesting and unique ideas. Also, they make writers prepare papers formatted due to an assigned formatting style only. Besides, many types of essays require strong analytical abilities.

An analytical essay is like a research paper. It also requires all the elements of a research piece. Thus, the ability to conduct proper research work and provide a complex analysis is mandatory for a modern author as well.

Final Thoughts

Preparing an essay can take a lot of time and great effort these days. With lots of complex requirements and difficult writing instructions, students often need outside writing essay help to succeed.

A modern essay differs greatly from the one it was in the far 16th century. In the first years, this particular writing form was introduced, it was a part of self-portrayal. In many following years, it turned into one of the most popular compositions and the top college assignment.

Nowadays, there is probably not a single student who has never dealt with an essay. Therefore, knowing how it was created and who introduced it to the world can be quite interesting and surely very informative for everyone. Knowing history helps to recognize yourself in the world better. Knowledge can always be quite a driving force for every person.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The origins of writing.

Proto-Cuneiform tablet with seal impressions: administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars

Cuneiform tablet: administrative account with entries concerning malt and barley groats

Cylinder seal and modern impression: three "pigtailed ladies" with double-handled vessels

Ira Spar Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The alluvial plains of southern Mesopotamia in the later half of the fourth millennium B.C. witnessed a immense expansion in the number of populated sites. Scholars still debate the reasons for this population increase, which seems too large to be explained simply by normal growth. One site, the city of Uruk , surpassed all others as an urban center surrounded by a group of secondary settlements. It covered approximately 250 hectares, or .96 square miles, and has been called “the first city in world history.” The site was dominated by large temple estates whose need for accounting and disbursing of revenues led to the recording of economic data on clay tablets. The city was ruled by a man depicted in art with many religious functions. He is often called a “ priest-king .” Underneath this office was a stratified society in which certain professions were held in high esteem. One of the earliest written texts from Uruk provides a list of 120 officials including the leader of the city, leader of the law, leader of the plow, and leader of the lambs, as well as specialist terms for priests, metalworkers, potters, and others.

Many other urban sites existed in southern Mesopotamia in close proximity to Uruk. To the east of southern Mesopotamia lay a region located below the Zagros Mountains called by modern scholars Susiana. The name reflects the civilization centered around the site of Susa. There temples were built and clay tablets, dating to about 100 years after the earliest tablets from Uruk, were inscribed with numerals and word-signs. Examples of Uruk-type pottery are found in Susiana as well as in other sites in the Zagros mountain region and in northern and central Iran, attesting to the important influence of Uruk upon writing and material culture. Uruk culture also spread into Syria and southern Turkey, where Uruk-style buildings were constructed in urban settlements.

Recent archaeological research indicates that the origin and spread of writing may be more complex than previously thought. Complex state systems with proto-cuneiform writing on clay and wood may have existed in Syria and Turkey as early as the mid-fourth millennium B.C. If further excavations in these areas confirm this assumption, then writing on clay tablets found at Uruk would constitute only a single phase of the early development of writing. The Uruk archives may reflect a later period when writing “took off” as the need for more permanent accounting practices became evident with the rapid growth of large cities with mixed populations at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. Clay became the preferred medium for recording bureaucratic items as it was abundant, cheap, and durable in comparison to other mediums. Initially, a reed or stick was used to draw pictographs and abstract signs into moistened clay. Some of the earliest pictographs are easily recognizable and decipherable, but most are of an abstract nature and cannot be identified with any known object. Over time, pictographic representation was replaced with wedge-shaped signs, formed by impressing the tip of a reed or wood stylus into the surface of a clay tablet. Modern (nineteenth-century) scholars called this type of writing cuneiform after the Latin term for wedge, cuneus .

Today, about 6,000 proto-cuneiform tablets, with more than 38,000 lines of text, are now known from areas associated with the Uruk culture, while only a few earlier examples are extant. The most popular but not universally accepted theory identifies the Uruk tablets with the Sumerians, a population group that spoke an agglutinative language related to no known linguistic group.

Some of the earliest signs inscribed on the tablets picture rations that needed to be counted, such as grain, fish, and various types of animals. These pictographs could be read in any number of languages much as international road signs can easily be interpreted by drivers from many nations. Personal names, titles of officials, verbal elements, and abstract ideas were difficult to interpret when written with pictorial or abstract signs. A major advance was made when a sign no longer just represented its intended meaning, but also a sound or group of sounds. To use a modern example, a picture of an “eye” could represent both an “eye” and the pronoun “I.” An image of a tin can indicates both an object and the concept “can,” that is, the ability to accomplish a goal. A drawing of a reed can represent both a plant and the verbal element “read.” When taken together, the statement “I can read” can be indicated by picture writing in which each picture represents a sound or another word different from an object with the same or similar sound.

This new way of interpreting signs is called the rebus principle. Only a few examples of its use exist in the earliest stages of cuneiform from between 3200 and 3000 B.C. The consistent use of this type of phonetic writing only becomes apparent after 2600 B.C. It constitutes the beginning of a true writing system characterized by a complex combination of word-signs and phonograms—signs for vowels and syllables—that allowed the scribe to express ideas. By the middle of the third millennium B.C. , cuneiform primarily written on clay tablets was used for a vast array of economic, religious, political, literary, and scholarly documents.

Spar, Ira. “The Origins of Writing.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrtg/hd_wrtg.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Ira Spar

Spar, Ira. “ Mesopotamian Creation Myths .” (April 2009)
Spar, Ira. “ Flood Stories .” (April 2009)
Spar, Ira. “ Gilgamesh .” (April 2009)
Spar, Ira. “ Mesopotamian Deities .” (April 2009)
Spar, Ira. “ The Gods and Goddesses of Canaan .” (April 2009)

Related Essays

The Amarna Letters
Art of the First Cities in the Third Millennium B.C.
The Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian Periods (2004–1595 B.C.)
The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period (ca. 1595–1155 B.C.) in Mesopotamia
Assyria, 1365–609 B.C.
Early Dynastic Sculpture, 2900–2350 B.C.
Early Excavations in Assyria
Etruscan Language and Inscriptions
Flood Stories
The Gods and Goddesses of Canaan
Mesopotamian Creation Myths
The Old Assyrian Period (ca. 2000–1600 B.C.)
Uruk: The First City

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Connections: “Taste” by George Goldner and Diana Greenwald

The Short History of the Invention of Writing

Writing was invented, but by whom?

Colin Schultz

If writing had never been invented, this world would be a wholly different place.

For starters, some of us, cough , would be far less employed. On the broader scale, though, without writing information could only travel as swiftly as the nearest bard. Memories would last only as long as we lived, or as long as those who came after remembered to keep passing our stories down.

Socrates railed against writing, says Dennis Baron , on his blog The Web of Language. The philosopher warned "his fellow Athenians that writing would weaken human memory, that when they lost their shopping lists they'd quickly forget what to buy when they went to the Agora. We remember what Socrates said because Plato wrote it down." Baron:

Socrates also objected to writing because it wasn't interactive -- this was long before text messaging -- and because the written word gave only a distant and incomplete picture of the reality to which it referred. Writing, Socrates complained, can't answer questions the way a real live human being can. If you ask a piece of paper something, all it can do is repeat the same words over and over. Writing, Socrates told his companion Phaedrus over and over again, is like a broken record.

So Socrates wasn't a fan. But we feel safe saying that, on the whole, writing was a pretty stellar invention.

Which brings us to the question: who came up with the idea of communicating through little lines scratched on a surface? In the video above, Matthew Winkler explores the history of the written word for TED Education . It's a question that, like so many others, has no simple answer.

H/T Maria Popova

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Colin Schultz | | READ MORE

Colin Schultz is a freelance science writer and editor based in Toronto, Canada. He blogs for Smart News and contributes to the American Geophysical Union. He has a B.Sc. in physical science and philosophy, and a M.A. in journalism.

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Essay Writing

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This resource begins with a general description of essay writing and moves to a discussion of common essay genres students may encounter across the curriculum. The four genres of essays (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) are common paper assignments you may encounter in your writing classes. Although these genres, also known as the modes of discourse, have been criticized by some composition scholars, the Purdue OWL recognizes the wide spread use of these genres and students’ need to understand and produce these types of essays. We hope these resources will help.

The essay is a commonly assigned form of writing that every student will encounter while in academia. Therefore, it is wise for the student to become capable and comfortable with this type of writing early on in her training.

Essays can be a rewarding and challenging type of writing and are often assigned either to be done in class, which requires previous planning and practice (and a bit of creativity) on the part of the student, or as homework, which likewise demands a certain amount of preparation. Many poorly crafted essays have been produced on account of a lack of preparation and confidence. However, students can avoid the discomfort often associated with essay writing by understanding some common genres.

Before delving into its various genres, let’s begin with a basic definition of the essay.

What is an essay?

Though the word essay has come to be understood as a type of writing in Modern English, its origins provide us with some useful insights. The word comes into the English language through the French influence on Middle English; tracing it back further, we find that the French form of the word comes from the Latin verb exigere , which means "to examine, test, or (literally) to drive out." Through the excavation of this ancient word, we are able to unearth the essence of the academic essay: to encourage students to test or examine their ideas concerning a particular topic.

Essays are shorter pieces of writing that often require the student to hone a number of skills such as close reading, analysis, comparison and contrast, persuasion, conciseness, clarity, and exposition. As is evidenced by this list of attributes, there is much to be gained by the student who strives to succeed at essay writing.

The purpose of an essay is to encourage students to develop ideas and concepts in their writing with the direction of little more than their own thoughts (it may be helpful to view the essay as the converse of a research paper). Therefore, essays are (by nature) concise and require clarity in purpose and direction. This means that there is no room for the student’s thoughts to wander or stray from his or her purpose; the writing must be deliberate and interesting.

This handout should help students become familiar and comfortable with the process of essay composition through the introduction of some common essay genres.

This handout includes a brief introduction to the following genres of essay writing:

Expository essays
Descriptive essays
Narrative essays
Argumentative (Persuasive) essays

Trying to devise a structure for your essay can be one of the most difficult parts of the writing process. Making a detailed outline before you begin writing is a good way to make sure your ideas come across in a clear and logical order. A good outline will also save you time in the revision process, reducing the possibility that your ideas will need to be rearranged once you've written them.

The First Steps

Before you can begin outlining, you need to have a sense of what you will argue in the essay. From your analysis and close readings of primary and/or secondary sources you should have notes, ideas, and possible quotes to cite as evidence. Let's say you are writing about the 1999 Republican Primary and you want to prove that each candidate's financial resources were the most important element in the race. At this point, your notes probably lack much coherent order. Most likely, your ideas are still in the order in which they occurred to you; your notes and possible quotes probably still adhere to the chronology of the sources you've examined. Your goal is to rearrange your ideas, notes, and quotes—the raw material of your essay—into an order that best supports your argument, not the arguments you've read in other people's works. To do this, you have to group your notes into categories and then arrange these categories in a logical order.

Generalizing

The first step is to look over each individual piece of information that you've written and assign it to a general category. Ask yourself, "If I were to file this in a database, what would I file it under?" If, using the example of the Republican Primary, you wrote down an observation about John McCain's views on health care, you might list it under the general category of "Health care policy." As you go through your notes, try to reuse categories whenever possible. Your goal is to reduce your notes to no more than a page of category listings.

Now examine your category headings. Do any seem repetitive? Do any go together? "McCain's expenditure on ads" and "Bush's expenditure on ads," while not exactly repetitive, could easily combine into a more general category like "Candidates' expenditures on ads." Also, keep an eye out for categories that no longer seem to relate to your argument. Individual pieces of information that at first seemed important can begin to appear irrelevant when grouped into a general category.

Now it's time to generalize again. Examine all your categories and look for common themes. Go through each category and ask yourself, "If I were to place this piece of information in a file cabinet, what would I label that cabinet?" Again, try to reuse labels as often as possible: "Health Care," "Foreign Policy," and "Immigration" can all be contained under "Policy Initiatives." Make these larger categories as general as possible so that there are no more than three or four for a 7-10 page paper.

With your notes grouped into generalized categories, the process of ordering them should be easier. To begin, look at your most general categories. With your thesis in mind, try to find a way that the labels might be arranged in a sentence or two that supports your argument. Let's say your thesis is that financial resources played the most important role in the 1999 Republican Primary. Your four most general categories are "Policy Initiatives," "Financial Resources," "Voters' Concerns," and "Voters' Loyalty." You might come up with the following sentence: ÒAlthough McCain's policy initiatives were closest to the voters' concerns, Bush's financial resources won the voters' loyalty.Ó This sentence should reveal the order of your most general categories. You will begin with an examination of McCain's and Bush's views on important issues and compare them to the voters' top concerns. Then you'll look at both candidates' financial resources and show how Bush could win voters' loyalty through effective use of his resources, despite his less popular policy ideas.

With your most general categories in order, you now must order the smaller categories. To do so, arrange each smaller category into a sentence or two that will support the more general sentence you've just devised. Under the category of "Financial Resources," for instance, you might have the smaller categories of "Ad Expenditure," "Campaign Contributions" and "Fundraising." A sentence that supports your general argument might read: "Bush's early emphasis on fundraising led to greater campaign contributions, allowing him to have a greater ad expenditure than McCain."

The final step of the outlining process is to repeat this procedure on the smallest level, with the original notes that you took for your essay. To order what probably was an unwieldy and disorganized set of information at the beginning of this process, you need now only think of a sentence or two to support your general argument. Under the category "Fundraising," for example, you might have quotes about each candidate's estimation of its importance, statistics about the amount of time each candidate spent fundraising, and an idea about how the importance of fundraising never can be overestimated. Sentences to support your general argument might read: "No candidate has ever raised too much money [your idea]. While both McCain and Bush acknowledged the importance of fundraising [your quotes], the numbers clearly point to Bush as the superior fundraiser [your statistics]." The arrangement of your ideas, quotes, and statistics now should come naturally.

Putting It All Together

With these sentences, you have essentially constructed an outline for your essay. The most general ideas, which you organized in your first sentence, constitute the essay's sections. They follow the order in which you placed them in your sentence. The order of the smaller categories within each larger category (determined by your secondary sentences) indicates the order of the paragraphs within each section. Finally, your last set of sentences about your specific notes should show the order of the sentences within each paragraph. An outline for the essay about the 1999 Republican Primary (showing only the sections worked out here) would look something like this:

I. POLICY INITIATIVES

II. VOTERS' CONCERNS

III. FINANCIAL RESOURCES

A. Fundraising

a. Original Idea

b. McCain Quote/Bush Quote

c. McCain Statistics/Bush Statistics

B. Campaign Contributions

C. Ad Expenditure

IV. VOTERS' LOYALTY

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God the Creator

Other essays.

Creation is an act of God alone, by which, for his own glory, he brings into existence everything in the universe, things that had no existence prior to his creative word.

Creation is the act by which the Bible introduces to God. It is an act of God alone, by which, for his own glory, he brings into existence everything in the universe, things that had no existence prior to his creative word. In creation, we see God’s lordship on display in his control over all things , his authority over all the universe, and his presence in every part of creation. The doctrine of creation should elicit praise from all of his creatures and offers significant parallels to our redemption as well. While significant questions are still disputed, such as the nature of the six days of creation, the age of the earth, and the validity of evolution, Genesis is clear that God alone can take the credit for the creation and continual upholding of all things that exist.

When Scripture first introduces us to God in Genesis 1:1, it presents us not with a definition of God or a list of attributes but an act : “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That act nevertheless tells us much about who God is and how he is different from the world he has made. Indeed, this verse presents us with the biblical worldview in a nutshell: Reality is twofold. Everything must be understood within the context of a distinction between Creator and creature.

Therefore, it is misleading to understand the world, as did the Greek philosophers, as “Being” in general. There are two distinct realities, and they cannot be mixed together or confused with one another. All of our knowledge about the world is qualified by this distinction. There is divine being and created being, different in their attributes, powers, actions, rights and obligations.

The term creation applies both (1) to God’s original act of bringing being out of nothing ( ex nihilo) (Gen. 1:1) and (2) to God’s subsequent actions bringing structure to created being (Gen. 1:2–2:3). These two phases are sometimes called original and subsequent creation. A good definition of creation , therefore, will embrace both of these: Creation is a n act of God alone, by which, for his own glory, he brings into existence everything in the universe, things that had no existence prior to his creative word. Some have defined creation as “the continual dependence of everything on God,” but such definitions fail to anchor the concept as Scripture does in the events of Genesis 1. Of course, creation is indeed continually dependent on God, but this fact is best discussed under the headings of providence, preservation, and concurrence.

What follows are some of the main contexts in which Scripture speaks of creation. These shall introduce additional clarifications into the concept.

The chief name of God in Scripture is Yahweh , which English translators render as Lord around 7000 times. God’s lordship includes his control over all things , his authority over all the universe, and his presence in every part of creation. God’s work of creation underscores his lordship in all three of these respects.

Creation establishes God’s ownership of all things in heaven and earth (Exod. 20:11; Neh. 9:6; Ps. 146:5; Acts 14:15; 17:24; Col. 1:16; Rev. 4:11; 10:6; 14:7). Because all things are his, there is no limitation to his controlling power.

It also establishes his authority , his right to tell all creatures what to do. In Genesis 1, the very method of creation is his word: he commands and things obediently come into being (see also Ps. 33:6, 9; John 1:3; Col. 1:15–16). Jesus shows that he himself is the creator, as his commands still the waves (Mark 4:35–41) and bring healing (Luke 7:1–10).

Creation is also the basis of God’s presence in all places of the universe. Contrary to some false views of transcendence, God is not far removed from any of us, for we exist by the direct touch of his creative power. Contrary to some false views of immanence, we are not God, for we are his creatures. Since God has created all things out of nothing, he has touched everything in his creation directly. There is no “chain of being,” no continuum between God and the world, but a duality of divine and created being in which God creates and governs us by his direct touch.

God’s creation, therefore, is a universal revelation of his lordship. Confronted by that lordship, by his control, authority and presence, our obligatory response is worship. Often in Scripture, consideration of creation motivates worship (Neh. 9:6; Ps. 8:3–9; 33:6–9; 95:3–7; 146:5–6; Rev. 14:7). Paul tells the Gentiles at Lystra and Athens that the Lord has created all things, and that therefore they should not worship men or idols (Acts 14:15; 17:24-25). How absurd it is that men “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever” (Rom. 1:25)! God has made the world for his own glory; therefore, when we consider creation, we should bring him praise (Rom. 11:36).

Salvation is of the Lord (Jonah 2:9). Since creation is a vivid revelation of God’s lordship, we should expect significant parallels between creation and our redemption from sin. In Genesis, the story of creation anticipates God’s deliverance of Israel from bondage and their establishment as his own special people, his new creation (see Ps. 89; Isa. 43:1–7, 14–15; Jer. 33:20–25). In the New Testament, our salvation in Christ is a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10). As God originally brought the universe out of nothing, so he brings to us in Christ new life out of the death of sin. The faith of Abraham, the great model of Christian faith, was a faith in God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).

Disputed Questions

The six days.

Genesis 1 presents what we have called subsequent creation as occurring in six days, culminating in a day of divine rest. According to Exodus 20:8–11, this pattern provides a model for the human work week and Sabbath rest. That the Sabbath is also a day of worship reinforces what I said earlier about creation as a motivation for human worship. Theologians have disputed the length of these days. Some have argued that they are “literal” or “ordinary” days; others have said that they each represent long geologic ages. Still others hold to what is called the “framework hypothesis,” namely that the whole narrative is a literary device and makes no chronological claims.

The Age of the Earth

The genealogies in Genesis of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and others suggest a “young earth” view, that the world is somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 years old. But many theologians have said that in such questions we should defer to the present scientific consensus, that the earth is something like 4.5 billion years old and the origin of homo sapiens (modern man) was about 200,000 years ago. This is called the “old earth” view. Some have also held mediating positions, observing places in the Genesis narratives where there may be gaps in the apparent chronology, allowing for a longer period of time than the young earth view supposes, or suggesting problems with the usual ways of measuring geologic time.

A third area of dispute concerns whether the creatures mentioned in Genesis 1 (especially Adam and Eve) were directly created by God or whether each kind of life (including mankind) developed from previous kinds by a process similar to that described in the theory of evolution. Whatever one concludes about questions #1 and #2 above, it is very difficult to argue from Genesis that Adam and Eve are anything other than special creations, since (1) according to Genesis 2:7, God made Adam from earth and brought him to life by a special inbreathing. In verses 21–22, the creation of woman (from the rib of Adam) is even more obviously a supernatural event. (2) The frequent repetition in Genesis 1 of “according to their kinds” indicate at least that there are divinely imposed limits on what can result from reproduction. It is difficult to reconcile any such limits with the theory of evolution. (3) The theory of evolution appears to be a generalization of the principle that species change according to their inherent genetic possibilities in response to change in environments. That principle is called “microevolution,” and it seems to be well-established scientifically. But whether that principle can be universally generalized to explain all differences in life forms, even beyond existing genetic possibilities (“macroevolution”) is dubious (see John Frame, Systematic Theology , 195–203, 803-06).

How the N-Word Became Unsayable

By John McWhorter

Dr. McWhorter is a linguist who has written extensively about both race and language. He is the author, most recently, of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter,” from which this guest essay is adapted.

This article contains obscenities and racial slurs, fully spelled out. Ezekiel Kweku, the Opinion politics editor, and Kathleen Kingsbury, the Opinion editor, wrote about how and why we came to the decision to publish these words in Friday’s edition of the Opinion Today newsletter .

In 1934, Allen Walker Read, an etymologist and lexicographer, laid out the history of the word that, then, had “the deepest stigma of any in the language.” In the entire article, in line with the strength of the taboo he was referring to, he never actually wrote the word itself. The obscenity to which he referred, “fuck,” though not used in polite company (or, typically, in this newspaper), is no longer verboten. These days, there are two other words that an American writer would treat as Mr. Read did. One is “cunt,” and the other is “nigger.” The latter, though, has become more than a slur. It has become taboo.

Just writing the word here, I sense myself as pushing the envelope, even though I am Black — and feel a need to state that for the sake of clarity and concision, I will be writing the word freely, rather than “the N-word.” I will not use the word gratuitously, but that will nevertheless leave a great many times I do spell it out, love it though I shall not.

“Nigger” began as a neutral descriptor, although it was quickly freighted with the casual contempt that Europeans had for African and, later, African-descended people. Its evolution from slur to unspeakable obscenity was part of a gradual prohibition on avowed racism and the slurring of groups. It is also part of a larger cultural shift: Time was that it was body parts and what they do that Americans were taught not to mention by name — do you actually do much resting in a restroom?

That kind of concern has been transferred from the sexual and scatological to the sociological, and changes in the use of the word “nigger” tell part of that story. What a society considers profane reveals what it believes to be sacrosanct: The emerging taboo on slurs reveals the value our culture places — if not consistently — on respect for subgroups of people. (I should also note that I am concerned here with “nigger” as a slur rather than its adoption, as “nigga,” as a term of affection by Black people, like “buddy.”)

For all of its potency, in terms of etymology, “nigger” is actually on the dull side, like “damn” and “hell.” It just goes back to Latin’s word for “black,” “niger,” which not surprisingly could refer to Africans, although Latin actually preferred other words like “aethiops” — a singular, not plural, word — which was borrowed from Greek, in which it meant (surprise again) “burn face.”

English got the word more directly from Spaniards’ rendition of “niger,” “negro,” which they applied to Africans amid their “explorations.” “Nigger” seems more like Latin’s “niger” than Spanish’s “negro,” but that’s an accident; few English sailors and tradesmen were spending much time reading their Cicero. “Nigger” is how an Englishman less concerned than we often are today with making a stab at foreign words would say “negro.”

For Mandarin’s “feng shui,” we today say “fung shway,” as the Chinese do, but if the term had caught on in the 1500s or even the early 1900s, we would be saying something more like “funk shoe-y,” just as we call something “chop suey” that is actually pronounced in Cantonese “tsopp suh-ew.” In the same way, “negro” to “nigger” is as “fellow” is to “feller” or “Old Yellow” is to “Old Yeller”; “nigger” feels more natural in an Anglophone mouth than “negro.”

“Nigger” first appeared in English writings in the 1500s. As it happens, the first reference involved “aethiops,” as it had come to refer to Ethiopia, or at least that term as applied sloppily to Africa. We heard of “The Nigers of Aethiop” in 1577, and that spelling was but one of many from then on. With spelling as yet unconventionalized, there were “neger,” “nigur,” “niger,” “nigor” and “nigre” — take your pick.

It was, as late as the 1700s, sometimes presented as a novelty item. The Scottish poet Robert Burns dutifully taught, referring to “niger,” that it rhymes with “vigour, rigour, tiger.” Note, we might, that last word. If “tiger” rhymes with “vigor” and “rigor,” that means that “tiger” could once be pronounced “tigger,” which then sheds light on the rhyme:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe Catch a tigger by the toe If he hollers, let him go Eeeny, meeny, miny, moe.

“Tigger,” then, was a polite substitute for the original “nigger.” After all, do we really imagine a tiger hollering in protest? So, for one, we gain insight into why the Winnie-the-Pooh character is called “Tigger” and the books are so vague on why it’s pronounced that way. That was an available alternate pronunciation to A.A. Milne. But more to the point, the original version of the “Eeny, meeny” doggerel is a window into how brutally casual the usage of “nigger” once was, happily trilled even by children at play. For eons, it was ordinary white people’s equivalent of today’s “African-American.”

Someone wrote in passing in 1656 that woolly hair is “very short as Nigers have,” with the term meant as a bland clinical reference. “Jethro, his Niger, was then taken,” someone breezily wrote in a diary 20 years later. And this sort of thing went on through the 1700s and 1800s. Just as “cunt” was a casual anatomical term in medieval textbooks, “nigger,” however spelled, was simply the way one said “Black person,” with the pitiless dismissiveness of the kind we moderns use in discussing hamsters, unquestioned by anyone. After a while, the current spelling settled in, which makes the contrast with today especially stark.

Its use straddling the 19th and 20th centuries is especially interesting: While America was becoming recognizable as its modern self, its denizens said “nigger” as casually as today we do “boomer” or “soccer mom.” Frank Norris’s anthropological realism is an example. In his “Vandover and the Brute,” set at the end of the 1800s, the white protagonist in San Francisco squires a gal about town who has been doing some teaching and tells him

about the funny little nigger girl, and about the games and songs and how they played birds and hopped around and cried, “Twit, twit,” and the game of the butterflies visiting the flowers.

Annals of popular dancing shortly after this era gaily chronicled dances such as the bunny hug, turkey trot and grizzly bear but discreetly left out that a girl like the one in “Vandover” was equally fond of one called the nigger wiggle, named as if Black people were just one more kind of amusing animal. (This dance entailed, for the record, a couple putting their hips together and holding each other’s rear ends.)

Of course, the word was also used in pure contempt. Not long after “Vandover,” William Jennings Bryan, the iconic populist orator, as secretary of state, remarked about Haitians, “Dear me, think of it, niggers speaking French.” Meanwhile, the Marine in charge of Haiti on the behalf of our great nation at the time, L.W.T. Waller, made sure all knew that whatever their linguistic aptitudes, the Haitians were “real nigs beneath the surface.”

There was a transitional period between the breeziness of “real nigs beneath the surface” and the word becoming unsayable. In the 20th century, with Black figures of authority insisting that Black Americans be treated with dignity, especially after serving in World War I, “nigger” began a move from neutral to impolite. Most Black thinkers favored “colored” or “Negro.” But “nigger” was not yet profane.

Film is, as always, illuminating. We have been told that early talkies were splendidly vulgar because, for instance, Barbara Stanwyck’s character openly sleeps her way to the top in “Baby Face.” But linguistically, these films are post-Victorian. That character never says “fuck,” “ass” or “shit” as the real-life version would, and in films of this genre, that reticence includes “nigger.” It is, despite the heartless racism of the era, almost absent from American cinema until the 1960s. Rather, we today can glean it in the shadows: There it reigned with an appalling vigor.

So in the film “Gone With the Wind” no one utters it, but in the book it was based on, which almost everyone had read, Scarlett O’Hara hauls off with, “You’re a fool nigger, and the worst day’s work Pa ever did was to buy you.” And she then thinks, “I’ve said ‘nigger’ and Mother wouldn’t like that at all.” As in, there was now a veil coming down, such that one was supposed to be polite — approximately in the book, conclusively in the movie. But still, it was always just under the same surface that our Marine saw “nig”-ness through.

Same period, 1937: a Looney Tunes cartoon ( “Porky’s Railroad” ) has Porky Pig as the engineer in a race between trains. Porky’s rival zooms past a pile of logs and blows them away to reveal a Black man sitting, perplexed. Today we wonder why this person was sitting under a pile of logs. The reason is that this was a joke referring to the expression “nigger in the woodpile,” an old equivalent of “the elephant in the room.” No Looney Tunes characters ever utter “nigger,” but this joke reveals that their creators were quite familiar with the word being used with joy.

Even into the 1970s, the word’s usage in the media was different from today’s. “The Jeffersons,” a television sitcom portraying a Black family that moves from working-class Queens to affluence in a Manhattan apartment tower, was considered a brash, modern and even thoughtful statement at the time. Here was the era when television shows took a jump into a realism unknown before, except in flashes: The contrast between the goofy vaudeville of “Here’s Lucy” and the salty shout-fests on “The Jeffersons” is stark. So it was almost a defining element of a show like “The Jeffersons” that loudmouthed, streety George Jefferson would use “nigger” to refer to Black people with (and without) affection.

George freely hurled it while playing the Dozens in an early episode. (“Take this elite nigga, wolfin’ at my door / With your yellow behind, I’m gonna mop up the entire floor!”) On the show the character began in, “All in the Family,” while bigoted Archie Bunker does not use the word, as his real-life counterpart would, George uses it, such as when he rages about the possibility of having (white) Edith Bunker help out at his dry-cleaning location. (“The niggers will think she owns the store, and the honkies will think we bleached the help!”)

Nor are only Black people shown using it; the writers air the “real” “nigger ” as well. White men use it a few times on an episode in which George meets modern Klansmen. But white people aren’t limited to it only in very special episode cases like this. George calls his white neighbor Tom Willis “honky,” and Tom petulantly fires back, “How would you like it if I called you ‘nigger’?” Then, that read as perfectly OK (I saw it and remember); he was just talking about it, not using it. But today, for Tom to even mention the word at all would be considered beyond the pale — so to speak.

The outright taboo status of “nigger ” began only at the end of the 20th century; 2002 was about the last year that a mainstream publisher would allow a book to be titled “Nigger,” as Randall Kennedy ’s was. As I write this, nearly 20 years later, the notion of a book like it with that title sounds like science fiction. In fact, only a year after that, when a medical school employee of the University of Virginia reportedly said, “I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to Blacks,” the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Julian Bond, suggested this person get mandatory sensitivity training, saying that his gut instinct was that the person deserved to simply be fired. The idea, by then, was that the word was unutterable, regardless of context. Today’s equivalent of that employee would not use the word that way.

Rather, the modern American uses “the N-word.” This tradition settled in after the O.J. Simpson trial, in which it was famously revealed that Detective Mark Fuhrman had frequently used “nigger” in the past. Christopher Darden, a Black prosecutor, refused to utter the actual word, and with the high profile of the case and in his seeming to deliberately salute Mr. Read’s take, by designating “nigger” “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language,” Mr. Darden in his way heralded a new era.

That was in 1995, and in the fall of that year I did a radio interview on the word, in which the guests and I were free to use it when referring to it, with nary a bleep. That had been normal until then but would not be for much longer, such that the interview is now a period piece.

It’s safe to say that the transition to “the N-word” wasn’t driven by the linguistic coarseness of a Los Angeles detective or something a prosecutor said one day during a monthslong trial. Rather, Mr. Darden’s reticence was a symptom of something already in the air by 1995: the larger shift in sensibility that rendered slurs, in general, the new profanity.

This occurred as Generation X, born from about 1965 to 1980, came of age. These were the first Americans raised in post-civil-rights-era America. To Generation X, legalized segregation was a bygone barbarism in black-and-white photos and film clips. Also, Generation X grew up when overt racist attitudes came to be ridiculed and socially punished in general society. Racism continued to exist in endless manifestations. However, it became complicated — something to hide, to dissemble about and, among at least an enlightened cohort, something to check oneself for and call out in others, to a degree unknown in perhaps any society until then.

For Americans of this postcountercultural cohort, the pox on matters of God and the body seemed quaint beyond discussion, while a pox on matters of slurring groups seemed urgent beyond discussion. The N-word euphemism was an organic outcome, as was an increasing consensus that “nigger” itself is forbidden not only in use as a slur but even when referred to. Our spontaneous sense is that profanity consists of the classic four-letter words, while slurs are something separate. However, anthropological reality is that today, slurs have become our profanity: repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment.

John McWhorter ( @JohnHMcWhorter ) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “ The Power of Babel : A Natural History of Language” and, most recently, “ Nine Nasty Words : English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever,” from which this guest essay is adapted.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Who Made That Word and Why?

No matter how many words in a language, it seems that we always need just one more to explain ourselves.

An illustration from Alice in Wonderland; a dramatization of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the looking glass," 1915

The Merriam-Webster dictionary contains around 470,000 words. Where do they all come from? And why can we still not find the one we’re looking for? Writer and editor Barbara Wallraff explores the creation of new words .

The most famous coiner of words may be William Shakespeare. But, as Wallraff notes, this aspect of his reputation is complicated. He was writing at a time before we collected all English words into dictionaries. It’s possible that some of the words we think of as his—besmirch, impede, and rant, among many others—were already familiar in his time, and we only credit them to him because they haven’t survived in any earlier writings.

What we do know is since Shakespeare’s time, we haven’t stopped creating words. Sometimes the point of a neologism is to convey nuance . That’s why, Wallraff suggests, we may say “myocardial infarction” instead of “heart attack,” or “bling-bling” instead of “fancy jewelry.” (Note that she was writing in 2006.)

And then there’s the creation of words just for the fun of it. Among the first literary examples is the poem Jabberwocky, found in Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll’s 1871 sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . Few of these words caught on—“brillig,” for example, hasn’t moved into general usage. But one word from the poem did: chortle—with its suggestion of “chuckle” and “snort”—was useful enough and obvious enough in its meaning that it ended up in the dictionary.

Carroll also gave us a helpful word for discussing new words: portmanteau , which, prior to the publication of Through the Looking Glass, meant “two-compartment suitcase.” Humpty Dumpty used it to explain the mysterious vocabulary of Jabberwocky to Alice: “Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

In 1914, writer Gelett Burgess published Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You have Always Needed . Culp, he decided, meant “a fond delusion, an imaginary attribute,” while “nulkin” was “the core or inside history of any occurrence” or “a true, but secret explanation.” Of all his new words, the only one that really caught on was “blurb.”

Later efforts at something similar included comedian Rich Hall’s sniglets—such as “profanitype,” meaning the exclamation points, asterisks, and other symbols used by cartoonists to replace curse words—and Wallraff’s own “Word Fugitives” column in The Atlantic, in which writers asked for and received suggestions about words that ought to exist.

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Managing the column, Wallraff found people sought words for a range of concepts. What do you call it when you’re so focused on not saying the worst possible thing that you end up doing just that? Shouldn’t there be a word in English for the sound a camel makes? While words for these ideas might be useful, ultimately, Wallraff writes, that’s not really the point.

“Coining words is like sex in that it’s necessary to our species,” she writes. “But rarely do people engage in it for the sake of keeping humankind going. We do it because it’s fun.”

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The Invention of the Internet

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 28, 2019 | Original: July 30, 2010

Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another. Today, we use the internet for almost everything, and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.

The Sputnik Scare

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first manmade satellite into orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik, did not do much: It relayed blips and bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Earth. Still, to many Americans, the beach-ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming: While the brightest scientists and engineers in the United States had been designing bigger cars and better television sets, it seemed, the Soviets had been focusing on less frivolous things—and they were going to win the Cold War because of it.

Did you know? Today, almost one-third of the world’s 6.8 billion people use the internet regularly.

After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.

The Birth of the ARPAnet

Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible.

In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. and ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to this problem: a “galactic network” of computers that could talk to one another. Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system.

In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its own route from place to place. Without packet switching, the government’s computer network—now known as the ARPAnet—would have been just as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.

On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling ARPA network anyway: The Stanford computer only received the note’s first two letters.

The Network Grows

By the end of 1969, just four computers were connected to the ARPAnet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s.

In 1971, it added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and two years later it added networks at London’s University College and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. As packet-switched computer networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them to integrate into a single worldwide “internet.”

By the end of the 1970s, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had begun to solve this problem by developing a way for all of the computers on all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one another. He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional protocol, known as “Internet Protocol.” The acronym we use to refer to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s protocol as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space.”

The World Wide Web

Cerf’s protocol transformed the internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another. However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Since then, the internet has changed in many ways. In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.) Mosaic offered a user-friendly way to search the Web: It allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links.

That same year, Congress decided that the Web could be used for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the internet to sell goods directly to customers. More recently, social networking sites like Facebook have become a popular way for people of all ages to stay connected.

HISTORY Vault: 101 Inventions That Changed the World

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South Seattle Emerald

PHOTO ESSAY | Getting Blessed in the Rain for the 21st Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Festival

by Jenn Ngeth

On April 27, the Seattle community showed up to celebrate the 21st Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Festival.

This all-day New Year’s event, organized by the Cambodian Cultural Alliance of Washington , was packed with programming that’d please any ancestors. Through the downpour of rain, festivalgoers gathered for monk blessings, traditional dance performances, a bok lahong (green papaya salad) contest, delicious Cambodian foods, and many more activities.

Among the numerous vendors and booths, people weaved between the crowd to get themselves a platter of mouthwatering Khmer New Year essentials, like beef sticks with fried rice and pickled green mango, to enjoy while watching the traditional dances called robam . Attendees popped into booths to seek shelter from the rain and to check out the offerings, which ranged from traditional Cambodian clothing, arts, and culture to organizations that offered resources for small businesses.

Throughout the event, emcees Samphy Chen, Srey Routh, and Rotha Seng kept the crowd engaged, and featured guest speakers Aaron Garcia, the executive director of the White Center Community Development Association, and Carmen Smith, executive director of the White Center Food Bank. Khmer music filled the air between the speakers and glistening robam performances while the street buzzed with the excitement of celebrating a new year in solidarity and resilience.

Three women in ornate traditional Cambodian dresses and headdresses posing at a street festival, with onlookers in the background.

This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, “Resilience Amidst Hate,” in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.

Jenn Ngeth is a Khmer American woman from Seattle, Washington, who grew up in South Park. She received her A.A.S. in visual communications from Highline College and is a published poet and multidisciplinary artist.

📸 Featured Image: Dancers from the Cambodian Classical Dance of the Northwest performing Robam Tep Monorom at the White Center Cambodian New Year Street Festival on April 27, 2024. (Photo: Jenn Ngeth)

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Amplifying the Authentic Narratives of South Seattle

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The Essay: History and Definition
Meaning. In the broadest sense, the term "essay" can refer to just about any short piece of nonfiction -- an editorial, feature story, critical study, even an excerpt from a book. However, literary definitions of a genre are usually a bit fussier. One way to start is to draw a distinction between articles, which are read primarily for the ...
Essay
Definitions John Locke's 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt".In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as ...
Essay
essay, an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view. Some early treatises—such as those of Cicero on the pleasantness of old age or on the art of "divination ...
A History Of The Invention Of The Essay
The word "essay" was first used by a Frenchman. It is generally accepted that the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, born in 1533, was the first author to describe his works of writing as essays. Back then, essay was a term that he used to characterise the way that he would attempt to put his various thoughts into writing.
English Essay: Origin, Development and Growth
The 'essay' as a form of literature is not of ancient origin. It was in 1571 that the 'essay' was invented by the French philosopher, Montaigne. He called his short, philosophical writings which were the products of moments by the French word assai, which means 'attempt'. Since then the word 'essay' has been applied to compositions of the kind ...
essay
essay. (n.). 1590s, "trial, attempt, endeavor," also "short, discursive literary composition" (first attested in writings of Francis Bacon, probably in imitation of Montaigne), from French essai "trial, attempt, essay" (in Old French from 12c.), from Late Latin exagium "a weighing, a weight," from Latin exigere "drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test," from ex "out" (see ex-) + agere ...
Michel de Montaigne and the Art of the Personal Essay
Montaigne invented the essay genre after deciding he wanted to write a literary self-portrait of himself. This turned out to be an impossible task. Aug 15, 2022 • By Rachel Ashcroft, ... The word 'essay' itself comes from the French verb 'essayer' i.e. 'to attempt'.
The History of Essay: Origin and Evolvement
The term essay was adopted from French "essayer", which was adopted from Latin "exagere". The last one means "to sort through". In the far 16th century, the essay was mostly a form of a literary piece. Afterward, it has gained wider use in literature and study. It lost all its formality and has become quite a popular writing form.
The Origins of Writing
Only a few examples of its use exist in the earliest stages of cuneiform from between 3200 and 3000 B.C. The consistent use of this type of phonetic writing only becomes apparent after 2600 B.C. It constitutes the beginning of a true writing system characterized by a complex combination of word-signs and phonograms—signs for vowels and ...
The Man Who Invented the Essay
Montaigne's writings ushered in the age of the Enlightenment, helped the Christian world recover from bitter religious wars, and became a chief inspiration for Thomas Jefferson. And so Montaigne invented the essay, a genre of literature that has tortured students for many generations. Reading this funny, bawdy, conversational, ingenious man ...
The Short History of the Invention of Writing
In the video above, Matthew Winkler explores the history of the written word for TED Education. It's a question that, like so many others, has no simple answer. It's a question that, like so many ...
Etymology of the literary form "essay"
Montaigne used the word "Essays" for his work because the work was an attempt by him to record his thoughts (to "essay" means to "attempt" something in old French). Future works of a similar vein have been called essays after Montaigne's work. This is corroborated by multiple online sources as well. Boorstin mentions in passing that Montaigne ...
History of writing
The history of writing traces the development of writing systems [1] and how their use transformed and was transformed by different societies. The use of writing prefigures various social and psychological consequences associated with literacy and literary culture. With each historical invention of writing, true writing systems were preceded by ...
The Beginner's Guide to Writing an Essay
Come up with a thesis. Create an essay outline. Write the introduction. Write the main body, organized into paragraphs. Write the conclusion. Evaluate the overall organization. Revise the content of each paragraph. Proofread your essay or use a Grammar Checker for language errors. Use a plagiarism checker.
Essay Writing
Essays are shorter pieces of writing that often require the student to hone a number of skills such as close reading, analysis, comparison and contrast, persuasion, conciseness, clarity, and exposition. As is evidenced by this list of attributes, there is much to be gained by the student who strives to succeed at essay writing.
Outlining
The final step of the outlining process is to repeat this procedure on the smallest level, with the original notes that you took for your essay. To order what probably was an unwieldy and disorganized set of information at the beginning of this process, you need now only think of a sentence or two to support your general argument.
God the Creator
Summary. Creation is the act by which the Bible introduces to God. It is an act of God alone, by which, for his own glory, he brings into existence everything in the universe, things that had no existence prior to his creative word. In creation, we see God's lordship on display in his control over all things, his authority over all the ...
How to Write an Essay Outline
Revised on July 23, 2023. An essay outline is a way of planning the structure of your essay before you start writing. It involves writing quick summary sentences or phrases for every point you will cover in each paragraph, giving you a picture of how your argument will unfold. You'll sometimes be asked to submit an essay outline as a separate ...
How to Write an Argumentative Essay
Make a claim. Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim. Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim) Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives. The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays.
Opinion
How the N-Word Became Unsayable. April 30, 2021. Artwork by The New York Times. Share full article. By John McWhorter. Dr. McWhorter is a linguist who has written extensively about both race and ...
Who Made That Word and Why?
In 1914, writer Gelett Burgess published Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You have Always Needed. Culp, he decided, meant "a fond delusion, an imaginary attribute," while "nulkin" was "the core or inside history of any occurrence" or "a true, but secret explanation.". Of all his new words, the only one that really ...
Why Did God Create the World?
It was the plan, because grace is the summit of the mountain of his glory. And he created the world for his glory. He planned the world for the glory of his grace. 3. God's plan was that the praise of the glory of his grace would come about through the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
The Invention of the Internet
The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one ...
The Creation of the World Essay
731 Words. 3 Pages. Open Document. The Creation of the World. The creation of the earth and all that is within the earth is mysterious, yet miraculous at the same time. Although there are probably hundreds of different accounts, they all seem to be different while almost identical in text. I will be comparing and contrasting between the ...
PHOTO ESSAY
On April 27, the Seattle community showed up to celebrate the 21st Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Festival. This all-day New Year's event, organized by the Cambodian Cultural Alliance of Washington, was packed with programming that'd please any ancestors. Through the downpour of rain, festivalgoers gathered for monk blessings, traditional dance performances, a bok lahong (green ...