<\/p>\n
Again, into a broadcast, I want today to insert one of my favorite subjects – the origin of words. The importance of that subject to persons interested in history is that it reveals much about the customs of hundreds of years ago, some of them quite forgotten or never known by most people today.<\/p>\n
For instance, consider two common words dealing with finance – expend and estimate. Both come from the Latin and tell us something about finance in ancient Rome. The first medium of exchange among the several Italian tribes that were later merged under Roman rule was cattle, because those animals were everywhere regarded as valuable and were easily moved. But as trade expanded, a less bulky and more easily transferred commodity became necessary. The Romans found it in copper, for which their words was aes. Before coins were invented, pieces of copper had to be weighed and the unit of exchange was fixed at a given weight of copper. Our word estimate means literally to value copper. Expend originally meant to weigh copper.<\/p>\n
A division of’ government in ancient Rome, along with the more renowned Senate, was the Assembly, a large elected body. Because it was so fully democratic, it came to signify the people, so that all Roman historians speak of senate and people, meaning senate and assembly. In the imperial days of great expansion under Augustus, the Roman legions carried all over
\nthe Mediterranean world banners with the letters, SPQR, Senatus Populus Que Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome. When a citizen presented himself for election to the peoples’ assembly, he was required to dress in a candor toga. This is a toga of pure white. That gives us our word candidate.<\/p>\n
A very important element in Roman life was the family clan – the gens. It meant more than one’s immediate family, more even than relatives as remote as cousins. The word for that smaller group was familia, from which we get our word family. The gens, was much broader, including all who could trace descent from a common prominent ancestor. So the great genetes, or clans of Rome were relatively few – the Cornelian, the Tullian, the Julian and half a dozen others.<\/p>\n
From the word gens we get many English words: generation, genealogy, gentle, gentlemen and, generous. That derivative is because the wealthy families, the great genetes of Rome,were patrons of literature and the arts. Th outstanding example was Maecena~r, who financed the poet Virgil and the historian Livy.<\/p>\n
The names for the last three months of the year tell us that the year once began in March, not in January. The months September, October, November and December take their names from the numerals seven, eight, nine and ten, whereas today they are actually the 9th to the 12th months. That w6,m6~tAs:):i~foi’~’S spelling were originally QU\u00a5ntalli~, and Sept~l1is 11 the fifth and sixth months. In imperial times they were changed to honor the two great Caesars, Julius and Augustus to July and August. Quite naturally, the ancients considered the year to begin in March, at the time of the spring solstice, when all nature was awakening anew. From the dead of winter, ending an old year, came burgeoning spring, bringing a new year.<\/p>\n
Why do we apply the word conjugal to marriage? Because Roman custom and for a time Roman law, required that at the marriage ceremony, both bride and groom place their necks under a jugum, a yoke, symbolizing unbreakable union. Many modern English words are derived from Latin words connected with writing. When a Roman citizen traveled, he carried a double folded parchment in the form of what we today call a passport. Because fold or ploma was double it was two-folded or diploma. That is the source of the certificate given now to school and college graduates.<\/p>\n
In more sophisticated times, when Romans did much writing on waxen tablets, they came to prefer that the surface be of white or alba wax. So it is from the Roman adjective for white that we get our word album. Out of Pergamum in Asia Minor came the choice animal skins that gave a very durable surface for writing. From Pergamum we therefore get parchment. A more common writing material was bark, fiber, that gives us our library.<\/p>\n
Our word ovation had a more humble origin than its present meaning of high acclaim. When a Roman commander won a victory for the Empire he was given a triumphal procession on his return to Rome. But the legions were constantly making conquests, some of them major, but still victories. Those lesser commanders were deemed worthy of public notice. They could not like the triumphant victors, have an ox sacrificed in their honor, but they did rate the sacrifice of a sheep, an Ovis. So attention to them came to be called ovations<\/p>\n
How did the God Pan give us the word panic?<\/p>\n
In A.D. 33 there was severe financial depression in Rome that caused wide unemployment. That created hysterical, sometimes violent, demonstrations in the streets, remarkably like the riotous revels that characterized the annual festival to the God Pan. Those demonstrations, or panica, became our panics.<\/p>\n
What was the circus? It had the same origin as circle. Both came, from the Roman arena, not really a circle, but an oval for the chariot races. While those arenas or circi were in cities allover the Empire, the greatest was the Circus Maximus in Rome – the Greatest Circus.<\/p>\n
The word possession originally meant temporary, not permanent membership. That old meaning is partly retained in our expression, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” The Roman possession meant holding for a time. The word for permanent ownership was dominium, which came to us as signifying government rather than individual ownership.<\/p>\n
The words I have talked about today all come from Latin, once the literary language of the European World .On some later occasion we will consider derivations from other languages.<\/p>\n
Now let us devote the, rest of this broadcast to a man who meant much to the business and industry of our part of the Kennebec Valley during the 19th century. He was John D. Lang.<\/p>\n
Born in Gardiner in 1799, he lost his father when he was only four years old. His mother, left with three small children, had a hard time. She moved to Wiscasset, then to Fryeburg, whereat the age of fifteen, John Lang left home to seek his own way in the world.<\/p>\n
He found work in a clothing mill in Dover, N.H., operated by the man who had married his older sister. In 1819, when he was still a year short of legal manhood, he took over the management of a mill in Berwick, running it for the deceased owner’s widow. John then married the woman and got ownership of the mill.<\/p>\n
John Lang was the first manufacturer to make in this county printed cotton cloth, which had previously been obtained only by importation from England. Lang’s substantial fortune, however, came from his making superior rubber blankets. In 1846 he sold the Berwick mill at a handsome profit, moved to Vassalboro and bought a farm on the Kennebec.<\/p>\n
In partnership with Alton Pope, John Lang started a woolen mill on the Outlet Stream in North Vassalboro. There he mode fine cloth from foreign wool. He became so well known as a woolen manufacturer that at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 18761 he was chairman of the committee of awards for manufactured cloth.<\/p>\n
It was on the shore of his Vassalboro farm that John Lang built, in 1850, a? sea-going vessel, the Ocean Bird. Under Captain Dickman, Lang sent the ship to Africa, from which it brought back 8,000 bushels of peanuts, said to have been the first of that product to reach America, and now made famous by the occupant of the White House. Also on board were two monkeys, a parrot, and a negro boy. The captain had taken on that boy, not as a slave, but as an apprentice seaman, and promised to take him back to Africa on the next voyage. He fulfilled that promise after the boy had lived for a full year in the house of John Lang in Maine.<\/p>\n
Lang was already a man of some wealth and prominence before he came to Vassalboro. For several years he had been a director of the Eastern Railroad between. Boston and Portland. After settling in Vassalboro, he was determined that a railroad should pass through that town on its way up the Kennebec. Disappointed when the first railroad into Waterville went up some distance west of the Kennebec, through Winthrop, Belgrade and Oakland, he worked diligently to get an extension of the Portland and Kennebec, which had finally reached Augusta. He saw that hope realized in the building of the Somerset and Kennebec from Augusta to Skowhegan. It was quite a victory for Lang and his associate, because it called for the expense of two bridges across the Kennebec, one at Augusta, the other at Waterville. John Lang was directly responsible for that railroad coming up the east side of the river.<\/p>\n
Back in Berwick, at the age of 2~, John Lang had joined the Society of Friends, and all his life he was a devout Quaker. He was one of the founders of Oak Grove Seminary, and provided one-fourth the cost of its first building. He did much to develop and strengthen the Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting of Friends, saw that its chapel on the Oak Grove grounds was kept in repair and entertained in his home a steady stream of visiting Quakers.<\/p>\n
A specific contribution by John Lang to industrial Waterville was his association with Allios Lockwood, who for a time placed Lang in management of the Lockwood Mills.<\/p>\n
In his businesses John Lang was succeeded by his son John A. The Langs always made cloth of high quality. The elder John had won first prize at an exhibition in London in 1853, and 25 years later in 1878 his son, J ohn A. won first prize at Paris. The Langs not only gaye employment to many Kennebec workers, they also marked the Kennebec as a region where the best textiles were produced.<\/p>\n
Year: 1978<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1152, Broadcast on February 12, 1978<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35316,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}