Stupid Question ™
March 21, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: What the heck is a “Toll House morsel”? What does a toll house have to do with chocolate chips?
—Stephen D., Ohio
A: Nestle Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels are those chocolate chips sold in bags for cooking purposes.
On each package is a good-sized picture of some kind of cottage, the words “Toll House,” and the slogan, “Since 1939.”
These days, “tolls” tend to conjure up an image of tossing change into a basket on a smoggy turnpike, not morsels of yummy chocolate. However, it was indeed an old toll house that spawned the modern chocolate chip, and reputedly the chocolate chip cookie, as well.
It all goes back to a 1709 toll house in what is now Whitman, Massachusetts, built along an early turnpike that is now Bedford Street. A toll house was something like a modern truck stop combined with a toll booth—you could not only pay your toll, but get a meal and lodgings, too.
The old property was bought in 1930 by Ruth Graves Wakefield and her husband Kenneth. They reopened it as an inn called, appropriately if not imaginatively, the Toll House Inn.
Ruth, a former home ec teacher, came up with the food for the place. As the legend goes, one day she decided to break up a bar of Nestle’s semi-sweet chocolate and toss it into the batter of her butter cookies.
She expected the chocolate to melt and swirl around in the batter, but the bits stayed in place instead. She liked it, so did everybody else, and the chocolate chip cookie was born. According to Nestle corporate history, Ruth’s recipe became a New England hit when it was published in several newspapers. Nestle noticed when its chocolate bar sales started going up.
It was Ruth, however, who had the smarts to go cut a deal with Nestle. She agreed to let them put the recipe on their chocolate bar wrappers as a sales-booster, while Nestle agreed to provide her with free chocolate for life.
The year 1939 comes in because that’s when Nestle got the bright idea to start selling actual chips instead of a chocolate bar you had to bust into pieces yourself. (Previously they had started selling the bars with score marks for breaking.) These chips were (and are) tiny versions of the shape known in the trade as a “kiss,” and were given the catchy name “morsels.”
The Toll House name was originally a sign of Nestle’s connection to the original chocolate chip. Now it’s just a kind of meaningless nostalgia, but still effective as the brand many people think of when it comes to buying “morsels.”
Free chocolate for life is a heck of a deal, but like all bargains with the devil, did not work out in the long run. Now Ruth is dead and the Toll House Inn is scattered ashes from a New Year’s Eve, 1984 blaze. But Nestle still gets to flog the name.
A Wendy’s fast-food restaurant now sits on the old Toll House Inn property. Wendy’s carries chocolate chip cookies in select stores—but, for the record, the Whitman franchise isn’t one of them.
March 29, 2008
Explosion And Implosion
Stupid Question ™
March 14, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: What’s the difference between an explosion and an implosion?
—Daniel (age 10), from the Internet
A: In everyday language, an explosion is a violent burst directed outward, while an implosion is a violent burst directed inward.
For example, fireworks are explosions caused by superheated gases and flames bursting outward from the center of a rocket.
An example of an implosion is a submarine under very deep water losing its air pressure because of a leak and then being crushed from the outside in, because of the pressure of the water.
The terms “explosion” and “implosion” almost always imply that pressurized gases or liquids are involved. If you jump on a soda can, that’s also something collapsing from the outside in, but it would rarely be called an implosion.
The words have a history that may surprise you, because “explosion” originally had nothing to do with bombs or blasts.
The verb “explode” is taken straight from the Latin word explaudere (or explodere), which literally means “to clap off.” It’s a theater term referring to a bad actor being forced off the stage by audience clapping. The clapping in this case was not a good thing, like we think of it today.
In Latin, it also came to mean expressing contempt for anything.
This was the meaning the word had when it came into English, too, around the early 1500s. In fact, it’s a meaning the word still has today, in phrases such as, “His argument was exploded.”
In the mid-1600s we start to see another meaning of the word, pretty close to what we use today: to force air or some other gas out with a loud sound. This is where the linguist term “explodent consonants” comes from, which means the kinds of letters we pronounce by blowing out air.
By the late 1700s, the word took on its full, common meaning of a violent, inside-out burst.
The Romans had a different word for our common meaning of “explode.” They used displodere, which roughly means “to clap into two pieces.” It seems to have referred especially to bladders, used for holding water and other liquids or gases, bursting with a loud sound. In the 1600s, the English version of the word, “displode,” was used to mean what “explode” means today.
“Implosion” is a modern invention from the 1800s, a reversal of “explode”; it literally means “to clap (or burst) inwards.”
“Ex-” in “explosion” means “off” or “out.” The “im-” in “implosion” means “in” or “inward.”
Why “im-” instead of “in-,” which would seem to make more sense?
Well, it really is “in-.” In Latin words that began with “in-” the letter “n” was changed to an “m” if it came before the letters “i,” “m” or “p.” That’s because the “n” sounds like an “m” in front of those letters anyway.
Try it yourself. If you say, “inplosion,” it sounds like “implosion” because of the way the letter sounds hit each other.
March 14, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: What’s the difference between an explosion and an implosion?
—Daniel (age 10), from the Internet
A: In everyday language, an explosion is a violent burst directed outward, while an implosion is a violent burst directed inward.
For example, fireworks are explosions caused by superheated gases and flames bursting outward from the center of a rocket.
An example of an implosion is a submarine under very deep water losing its air pressure because of a leak and then being crushed from the outside in, because of the pressure of the water.
The terms “explosion” and “implosion” almost always imply that pressurized gases or liquids are involved. If you jump on a soda can, that’s also something collapsing from the outside in, but it would rarely be called an implosion.
The words have a history that may surprise you, because “explosion” originally had nothing to do with bombs or blasts.
The verb “explode” is taken straight from the Latin word explaudere (or explodere), which literally means “to clap off.” It’s a theater term referring to a bad actor being forced off the stage by audience clapping. The clapping in this case was not a good thing, like we think of it today.
In Latin, it also came to mean expressing contempt for anything.
This was the meaning the word had when it came into English, too, around the early 1500s. In fact, it’s a meaning the word still has today, in phrases such as, “His argument was exploded.”
In the mid-1600s we start to see another meaning of the word, pretty close to what we use today: to force air or some other gas out with a loud sound. This is where the linguist term “explodent consonants” comes from, which means the kinds of letters we pronounce by blowing out air.
By the late 1700s, the word took on its full, common meaning of a violent, inside-out burst.
The Romans had a different word for our common meaning of “explode.” They used displodere, which roughly means “to clap into two pieces.” It seems to have referred especially to bladders, used for holding water and other liquids or gases, bursting with a loud sound. In the 1600s, the English version of the word, “displode,” was used to mean what “explode” means today.
“Implosion” is a modern invention from the 1800s, a reversal of “explode”; it literally means “to clap (or burst) inwards.”
“Ex-” in “explosion” means “off” or “out.” The “im-” in “implosion” means “in” or “inward.”
Why “im-” instead of “in-,” which would seem to make more sense?
Well, it really is “in-.” In Latin words that began with “in-” the letter “n” was changed to an “m” if it came before the letters “i,” “m” or “p.” That’s because the “n” sounds like an “m” in front of those letters anyway.
Try it yourself. If you say, “inplosion,” it sounds like “implosion” because of the way the letter sounds hit each other.
Victorian Crime Slang
Stupid Question ™
March 7, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: I’m reading a mystery novel set in Victorian London, and a character is described as a “smasher” and “screwsman.” What does this mean?
—Holly, Columbus, Ohio
A: It means he’s at least two sorts of criminal, in the language of the Victorian underworld.
The terms are among the hundreds of colorful and sometimes deliberately confusing bits of slang that arose in cant, the lingo of the criminal underground. It mixed Cockney rhyming slang, Romany (or “Gypsy”), neologisms and other influences to create a kind of code language.
In cant, a screwsman was a particular sort of burglar—one who uses lockpicks or (usually stolen) keys. That’s as opposed to a cracksman, who just busts things open with a hammer or what have you. According to Kellow Chesney in “The Anti-Society,” a great overview of Victorian crime, “cracksman” was the preferred generic term for any sort of burglar.
“Screwsman” comes from “screw,” a slang term for a skeleton key or similar device used to pick a lock. The exact origin of “screw” in this sense is unclear, but can be guessed—especially if one is willing to be vulgar.
A smasher is someone who passes counterfeit coinage, which was a widespread crime in the Victorian era. “Coiners” or “bit-fakers” were specialists who actually made fake coins. In something akin to modern drug-dealing set-ups, these gurus then passed the product along to bulk distributors.
Smashers were the bottom rung of this criminal ladder, the ones who actually put the coins into circulation—typically by buying them from bulk dealers and then buying things illegally with them.
In the high Victorian era, fake coins were known as “snide,” and the distribution the smashers engaged in was called “snide-pitching.” However, it was also sometimes known as “smashing.”
That in turn came from “smash,” meaning a counterfeit coin. The term is unknown, but possibly is related to the main technique at the time—stamping coins out of sheet metal. Of course, it could also derive from some complicated Cockney rhyme.
In any case, from that we get the natural “smasher.”
Whatever their place in the hierarchy, counterfeiters were collectively known as “shofulmen.” That’s from shoful, a straight-from-Yiddish term roughly meaning “worthless garbage.”
Chesney says snide-pitching wasn’t big business and typically was done as a side venture by people into other forms of crime. So it is entirely believable for someone to have been both a smasher and a screwsman.
March 7, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: I’m reading a mystery novel set in Victorian London, and a character is described as a “smasher” and “screwsman.” What does this mean?
—Holly, Columbus, Ohio
A: It means he’s at least two sorts of criminal, in the language of the Victorian underworld.
The terms are among the hundreds of colorful and sometimes deliberately confusing bits of slang that arose in cant, the lingo of the criminal underground. It mixed Cockney rhyming slang, Romany (or “Gypsy”), neologisms and other influences to create a kind of code language.
In cant, a screwsman was a particular sort of burglar—one who uses lockpicks or (usually stolen) keys. That’s as opposed to a cracksman, who just busts things open with a hammer or what have you. According to Kellow Chesney in “The Anti-Society,” a great overview of Victorian crime, “cracksman” was the preferred generic term for any sort of burglar.
“Screwsman” comes from “screw,” a slang term for a skeleton key or similar device used to pick a lock. The exact origin of “screw” in this sense is unclear, but can be guessed—especially if one is willing to be vulgar.
A smasher is someone who passes counterfeit coinage, which was a widespread crime in the Victorian era. “Coiners” or “bit-fakers” were specialists who actually made fake coins. In something akin to modern drug-dealing set-ups, these gurus then passed the product along to bulk distributors.
Smashers were the bottom rung of this criminal ladder, the ones who actually put the coins into circulation—typically by buying them from bulk dealers and then buying things illegally with them.
In the high Victorian era, fake coins were known as “snide,” and the distribution the smashers engaged in was called “snide-pitching.” However, it was also sometimes known as “smashing.”
That in turn came from “smash,” meaning a counterfeit coin. The term is unknown, but possibly is related to the main technique at the time—stamping coins out of sheet metal. Of course, it could also derive from some complicated Cockney rhyme.
In any case, from that we get the natural “smasher.”
Whatever their place in the hierarchy, counterfeiters were collectively known as “shofulmen.” That’s from shoful, a straight-from-Yiddish term roughly meaning “worthless garbage.”
Chesney says snide-pitching wasn’t big business and typically was done as a side venture by people into other forms of crime. So it is entirely believable for someone to have been both a smasher and a screwsman.
Selection Of New Pope
Stupid Question ™
Feb. 28, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: How is a new pope selected?
—Anonymous, from the Internet
A: Not to be pessimistic about Pope John Paul II, but…well, you’re not asking to be optimistic, are you?
Fittingly, the current pope himself made the most recent changes to an electoral system that has been regularly tweaked to avoid the riots and antipopes that once plagued the choosing of the peaceful pastor of the God of love.
The history of selecting popes is long, colorful and wildly brutal, as amusingly described in Catholic almanacs and encyclopedias.
At first, choosing a guy who was basically just the archbishop of Rome was a relatively casual affair. But then the whole Christianity thing really took off, and next thing you know—riots like there should have been over the 2000 U.S. election.
The Roman emperors, being law-and-order types, said enough of that, and stepped in to start running—not to mention fixing—the elections. No more riots, but a few centuries of Machiavellian politics, assassinations and general unholiness (involving other countries and Italian families, too).
Eventually, the church got sick of all that and decided that only cardinals would choose the new pope. A further tweak was requiring a two-thirds majority vote. Next thing you know—more riots!
Cardinals have to choose among themselves who gets the plum pope-for-life job. One can only imagine the horrific jockeying and office politics involved.
Actually, one doesn’t have to imagine. Just take my personal favorite, the election following the 1268 death of Pope Clement IV. The cardinals jerked around for three years, arguing about who would get the job, and even then didn’t decide until, in the words of Our Sunday Voice’s Catholic Almanac, “the citizens of the city [Viterbo, Italy] reduced them to bread and water and tore the roof off the palace in which they were residing.”
Finally, the church came up with the still-current practice of the Conclave. I.e., the cardinals are locked into the Sistine Chapel and not allowed to come out until they’ve made up their minds. Unsurprisingly, solitary confinement has greatly speeded the election process.
Things begin when the so-called College of Cardinals convenes in the Vatican for the election, called there by the Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church. They have 15 days to gather, and no more than five days to mess around, with an introductory Mass and processional and so on, before they enter the Conclave. (Cardinals over 80 years old don’t get to vote and hence don’t enter the Conclave.)
The Conclave means they’re sealed inside the Vatican with almost literally no outside contact whatsoever. They’re allowed to spend the night in Vatican lodgings, but the rest of the time they’re locked inside the Vatican Palace. In either case, they’re not allowed to say anything about the voting or deliberations, ever. Secrecy is a huge and significant part of the process, avoiding unsightly Florida-style election embarrassments and scandals. No one ever knows who the “candidates” even are—except for the winning one, of course.
And I mean locked inside, literally. The Vatican’s Swiss Guard puts a padlock on the door .
Once inside, the cardinals can presumably mill about and deliberate as at any political convention—though trading votes is reportedly not allowed. The actual voting takes place in the Sistine Chapel; during the election of the current pope, ballots were counted at a table set up in front of the altar of the Last Judgement. Yikes!
In theory, a pope can be chosen by “acclamation”—that is, all the cardinals agreeing on one guy. Unsurprisingly, this apparently never happens, judging by the amount of time recent Conclaves have lasted.
This leaves “compromise” or “scrutiny”—a normal casting of ballots, as we would call it. Votes are written on paper ballots, put in a ballot box, and read aloud. Four votes are taken each day of the Conclave until somebody wins.
Winning consists of pulling two-thirds of the votes plus one. After a certain number of unsuccessful ballots—30, according to one source—the rule changes to allow the man who wins a simple majority to win the election.
Keeping in mind the obsession with secrecy, all of the ballots, notes and any other election documents are tossed into a stove and burned.
This burning is what led to the famous smoke signal from a Vatican chimney—the sfumata—that is the only indication to the outside world whether a new pope has been chosen. If the smoke is white, that means they’ve made up their minds. If it’s dark, it means they’re still deciding.
The smoke distinction used to be made by adding straw to produce thick, dark smoke if necessary. However, this was never reliable, and more recently chemicals have been used to produce either white or black smoke.
Even this screwed up in the 1978 election of Pope John Paul I, when a reported accident with the “white” chemical unintentionally produced thick, dark smoke.
Feb. 28, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: How is a new pope selected?
—Anonymous, from the Internet
A: Not to be pessimistic about Pope John Paul II, but…well, you’re not asking to be optimistic, are you?
Fittingly, the current pope himself made the most recent changes to an electoral system that has been regularly tweaked to avoid the riots and antipopes that once plagued the choosing of the peaceful pastor of the God of love.
The history of selecting popes is long, colorful and wildly brutal, as amusingly described in Catholic almanacs and encyclopedias.
At first, choosing a guy who was basically just the archbishop of Rome was a relatively casual affair. But then the whole Christianity thing really took off, and next thing you know—riots like there should have been over the 2000 U.S. election.
The Roman emperors, being law-and-order types, said enough of that, and stepped in to start running—not to mention fixing—the elections. No more riots, but a few centuries of Machiavellian politics, assassinations and general unholiness (involving other countries and Italian families, too).
Eventually, the church got sick of all that and decided that only cardinals would choose the new pope. A further tweak was requiring a two-thirds majority vote. Next thing you know—more riots!
Cardinals have to choose among themselves who gets the plum pope-for-life job. One can only imagine the horrific jockeying and office politics involved.
Actually, one doesn’t have to imagine. Just take my personal favorite, the election following the 1268 death of Pope Clement IV. The cardinals jerked around for three years, arguing about who would get the job, and even then didn’t decide until, in the words of Our Sunday Voice’s Catholic Almanac, “the citizens of the city [Viterbo, Italy] reduced them to bread and water and tore the roof off the palace in which they were residing.”
Finally, the church came up with the still-current practice of the Conclave. I.e., the cardinals are locked into the Sistine Chapel and not allowed to come out until they’ve made up their minds. Unsurprisingly, solitary confinement has greatly speeded the election process.
Things begin when the so-called College of Cardinals convenes in the Vatican for the election, called there by the Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church. They have 15 days to gather, and no more than five days to mess around, with an introductory Mass and processional and so on, before they enter the Conclave. (Cardinals over 80 years old don’t get to vote and hence don’t enter the Conclave.)
The Conclave means they’re sealed inside the Vatican with almost literally no outside contact whatsoever. They’re allowed to spend the night in Vatican lodgings, but the rest of the time they’re locked inside the Vatican Palace. In either case, they’re not allowed to say anything about the voting or deliberations, ever. Secrecy is a huge and significant part of the process, avoiding unsightly Florida-style election embarrassments and scandals. No one ever knows who the “candidates” even are—except for the winning one, of course.
And I mean locked inside, literally. The Vatican’s Swiss Guard puts a padlock on the door .
Once inside, the cardinals can presumably mill about and deliberate as at any political convention—though trading votes is reportedly not allowed. The actual voting takes place in the Sistine Chapel; during the election of the current pope, ballots were counted at a table set up in front of the altar of the Last Judgement. Yikes!
In theory, a pope can be chosen by “acclamation”—that is, all the cardinals agreeing on one guy. Unsurprisingly, this apparently never happens, judging by the amount of time recent Conclaves have lasted.
This leaves “compromise” or “scrutiny”—a normal casting of ballots, as we would call it. Votes are written on paper ballots, put in a ballot box, and read aloud. Four votes are taken each day of the Conclave until somebody wins.
Winning consists of pulling two-thirds of the votes plus one. After a certain number of unsuccessful ballots—30, according to one source—the rule changes to allow the man who wins a simple majority to win the election.
Keeping in mind the obsession with secrecy, all of the ballots, notes and any other election documents are tossed into a stove and burned.
This burning is what led to the famous smoke signal from a Vatican chimney—the sfumata—that is the only indication to the outside world whether a new pope has been chosen. If the smoke is white, that means they’ve made up their minds. If it’s dark, it means they’re still deciding.
The smoke distinction used to be made by adding straw to produce thick, dark smoke if necessary. However, this was never reliable, and more recently chemicals have been used to produce either white or black smoke.
Even this screwed up in the 1978 election of Pope John Paul I, when a reported accident with the “white” chemical unintentionally produced thick, dark smoke.
Woman Pope
Stupid Question ™
Feb. 21, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: Was there ever a female pope?
—Tracy, from the Internet
A: The short answer is, “No”—despite an 800-year-old legend that a woman masquerading as a man indeed beat Vatican sexism at its own game.
The long answer is more complicated, because the legend has gone through a strange progression of being strongly believed to strongly reviled and/or debunked, and then believed again in some circles. Almost no one, including modern Catholic historians, has written about it with objectivity.
I relied on Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe’s history “The Female Pope: The Mystery of Pope Joan” for much of what follows. It’s the only rational, in-depth study available.
The story first appears in obscure histories dating to the mid-1200s. They have an unnamed, highly-educated woman, dressed as a man for traveling purposes, being hired into the Vatican and eventually rising to pope around 1100. She is discovered when she becomes pregnant and inconveniently gives birth while mounting a horse for a public procession. A demon outs her, to boot.
The tale was later interpolated into the contemporary manuscripts of Martin of Troppau’s extremely influential history of the popes and Roman emperors. This slightly different and more elaborate version identified the woman as a German called “Johann Anglicus” (indicating an English connection), and further confused matters by placing the action in the 800s.
Other histories quickly picked up the story, too, adding various details and commentary, usually describing her death by stoning. She had some aliases, with Agnes being popular in the 1400s. “Johannes” or “Joan,” the feminized “Johann” or “John,” became popular in the late 1400s through the present.
There is no doubt that the story somehow was taken seriously by both the public and the Church. A bust of her—later removed—was included in a series of papal portraits in the cathedral of Siena, Italy around 1400.
And popular legend connected to her some type of statue, now lost, in a Roman street said to be the location of her unmasking, along with an inscription of unknown content and location. The elaborated legend was that the popes avoided this street due to the connection, and there appears to be some validity to that.
The legend did have its doubters, including the future Pope Pius II. However, the Church didn’t really change its tune until Protestant reformers in the late 1500s began making fun of the supposed female pope, which was held up as a sexist example of hypocrisy and corruption in the Church. It also incarnated the Protestant image of the Church as the “Whore of Babylon” and spun off other insulting legends, such as the pope being required to undergo a proof-of-sex display.
It didn’t help that many Catholics continued to believe the legend, forcing them to attempt to explain her as a hermaphrodite.
Ironically, it was Protestant authors, influenced by modern rationalism, who took the first shots at debunking the legend.
Women gaining power by dressing up as men was a motif of medieval storytelling. The Pardoes point out specifically that it’s an element of the legends of many women Catholic saints. They even found a similar legend, dating to about 980, about a woman ascending to a bishopric of the Eastern church that way; the tale apparently stuck in the imagination, being brought up in 1054 in a nasty letter to the Eastern church from Pope Leo IX.
The Pardoes suggest the woman pope legend—which first appears in histories written by Franciscan monks—was invented, based on pre-existing material, as part of potshots in an internal dispute between their order and Rome.
Why the story would be taken seriously and even embraced is another question. The setting around 1100 was credible, since there were several would-be popes vying for power (and short reigns for those who got it). Perhaps the warning to troublemaking women or anyone who would sneak into power was considered useful.
Interestingly, however, the idea of the woman pope seems to have been responded to positively in the 1400s, the same period in which its popularity appears to have peaked. Some sources credit the humanist movement for embracing papal equal opportunity.
While the popularity of the legend is mysterious, there is no doubt is simply a legend. There are no contemporary references to a woman pope or such a remarkable scandal. There isn’t even room in the currently acknowledged papal chronology to fit her in.
Things are now coming full circle among some feminists, who argue “Pope Joan” was real, her history now somehow censored by the Vatican. Her bust in Siena was indeed censored—one might say, properly edited out—during the Protestant controversy. But it takes a lot of wishful reading to locate her historically.
Likewise, some feminist sources refer to Maifreda (sometimes “Manfreda”) as a woman pope. She was a figure in a late-1200s Italian sect called the Guglielmites, which formed around a deceased woman preacher. The group supposedly plotted to overthrow the Roman Catholic Church and elected Maifreda as its would-be pope; the Inquisition had them all killed around 1300.
While Maifreda may have called herself a pope, that’s like me declaring myself president. The Guglielmites were a small group that never threatened the formal Catholic papacy.
Feb. 21, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: Was there ever a female pope?
—Tracy, from the Internet
A: The short answer is, “No”—despite an 800-year-old legend that a woman masquerading as a man indeed beat Vatican sexism at its own game.
The long answer is more complicated, because the legend has gone through a strange progression of being strongly believed to strongly reviled and/or debunked, and then believed again in some circles. Almost no one, including modern Catholic historians, has written about it with objectivity.
I relied on Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe’s history “The Female Pope: The Mystery of Pope Joan” for much of what follows. It’s the only rational, in-depth study available.
The story first appears in obscure histories dating to the mid-1200s. They have an unnamed, highly-educated woman, dressed as a man for traveling purposes, being hired into the Vatican and eventually rising to pope around 1100. She is discovered when she becomes pregnant and inconveniently gives birth while mounting a horse for a public procession. A demon outs her, to boot.
The tale was later interpolated into the contemporary manuscripts of Martin of Troppau’s extremely influential history of the popes and Roman emperors. This slightly different and more elaborate version identified the woman as a German called “Johann Anglicus” (indicating an English connection), and further confused matters by placing the action in the 800s.
Other histories quickly picked up the story, too, adding various details and commentary, usually describing her death by stoning. She had some aliases, with Agnes being popular in the 1400s. “Johannes” or “Joan,” the feminized “Johann” or “John,” became popular in the late 1400s through the present.
There is no doubt that the story somehow was taken seriously by both the public and the Church. A bust of her—later removed—was included in a series of papal portraits in the cathedral of Siena, Italy around 1400.
And popular legend connected to her some type of statue, now lost, in a Roman street said to be the location of her unmasking, along with an inscription of unknown content and location. The elaborated legend was that the popes avoided this street due to the connection, and there appears to be some validity to that.
The legend did have its doubters, including the future Pope Pius II. However, the Church didn’t really change its tune until Protestant reformers in the late 1500s began making fun of the supposed female pope, which was held up as a sexist example of hypocrisy and corruption in the Church. It also incarnated the Protestant image of the Church as the “Whore of Babylon” and spun off other insulting legends, such as the pope being required to undergo a proof-of-sex display.
It didn’t help that many Catholics continued to believe the legend, forcing them to attempt to explain her as a hermaphrodite.
Ironically, it was Protestant authors, influenced by modern rationalism, who took the first shots at debunking the legend.
Women gaining power by dressing up as men was a motif of medieval storytelling. The Pardoes point out specifically that it’s an element of the legends of many women Catholic saints. They even found a similar legend, dating to about 980, about a woman ascending to a bishopric of the Eastern church that way; the tale apparently stuck in the imagination, being brought up in 1054 in a nasty letter to the Eastern church from Pope Leo IX.
The Pardoes suggest the woman pope legend—which first appears in histories written by Franciscan monks—was invented, based on pre-existing material, as part of potshots in an internal dispute between their order and Rome.
Why the story would be taken seriously and even embraced is another question. The setting around 1100 was credible, since there were several would-be popes vying for power (and short reigns for those who got it). Perhaps the warning to troublemaking women or anyone who would sneak into power was considered useful.
Interestingly, however, the idea of the woman pope seems to have been responded to positively in the 1400s, the same period in which its popularity appears to have peaked. Some sources credit the humanist movement for embracing papal equal opportunity.
While the popularity of the legend is mysterious, there is no doubt is simply a legend. There are no contemporary references to a woman pope or such a remarkable scandal. There isn’t even room in the currently acknowledged papal chronology to fit her in.
Things are now coming full circle among some feminists, who argue “Pope Joan” was real, her history now somehow censored by the Vatican. Her bust in Siena was indeed censored—one might say, properly edited out—during the Protestant controversy. But it takes a lot of wishful reading to locate her historically.
Likewise, some feminist sources refer to Maifreda (sometimes “Manfreda”) as a woman pope. She was a figure in a late-1200s Italian sect called the Guglielmites, which formed around a deceased woman preacher. The group supposedly plotted to overthrow the Roman Catholic Church and elected Maifreda as its would-be pope; the Inquisition had them all killed around 1300.
While Maifreda may have called herself a pope, that’s like me declaring myself president. The Guglielmites were a small group that never threatened the formal Catholic papacy.
Mammoth Meat
Stupid Question ™
Feb. 14, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: Has anybody ever eaten the meat of a frozen mammoth?
—Dan F., Columbus, Ohio
A: There is no reliable report of a modern human eating any part of a frozen mammoth—and very few unreliable reports, for that matter.
The story seems to have sprouted from a thought-about-it-but-decided-not-to report from a groundbreaking mammoth find in 1903. And the idea of people feasting on flash-frozen mammoth steaks has become a staple of loony fundamentalist Christian literature, feeding their ideas of a young Earth and a Biblical flood that knocked off prehistoric species.
All that being said, there is a solid example of a scientist and his friends tasting the flesh of a similarly frozen bison. However, that case—involving a dry, tough scrap of flesh boiled in a stew—only underlines why frozen mummy flesh is not generally eaten.
It must also be noted that dogs and scavenging animals have certainly eaten frozen mammoth meat. So at least it is true that modern animals have had the rare experience of feasting on meat aged 10,000 years or more, since the days when our ancestors were hunting the beasts with spears.
The mammoth-meat idea rests on misconceptions. Mammoths (and other frozen, mummified fossil animals ranging from rhinos to mice) are found in frozen silt, not a giant ice cube.
The silt may contain veins of ice. Also, the corpses are often immediately surrounded by ice created by the drawing out of moisture from the body itself, which results in the mummification. Nonetheless, when these things thaw enough to be discovered, they are in balls of muck, not a piece of ice. This also means they are desiccated, not big, juicy hunks of meat—though unquestionably some red meat is still preserved in certain specimens.
Only a couple mammoths have been found in anywhere near an intact state. Most were already scavenged, preyed upon and/or decayed to some degree before their freezing in the permafrost, leaving little soft tissue behind. And when they become exposed, typically through erosion, they start to rot fast. Thawed soft tissue is quickly consumed by modern scavengers.
The organic muck combined with the rotting of whatever flesh remains produces what is reportedly an unbelievable stench.
So, to recap, finding a mammoth is not walking into nature’s meat locker. It’s exhuming an icy grave.
Frozen mammoths are found in Siberia. It is not out of the realm of imagination that someone in such a harsh climate would consider eating some mammoth flesh. However, there is no reputable report of it.
It should be remembered that in early times, mammoths were exclusively found only by being washed out into the open, and could be reached by scientific investigators only after months or even years, and even then with no refrigeration equipment to preserve the find.
There’s a stray 1800s report from a Russian scientist who claimed that one tribe, the Yukats, occasionally ate mammoth meat, but his was not an eyewitness account. He did note, like many other reputable reports, that the Yukats’ dogs sometimes ate the meat, which is a more likely explanation for any missing flesh. Especially because the Yukats, like all other natives of the region, have a strong taboo about unearthing mammoth fossils. (Theoretically, this could be rooted in bad dining experiences of the past, but there’s no evidence of that.)
Going much farther back, about 2,000 years, there’s a Chinese tale that refers to underground beasts in the north whose flesh can be eaten as a kind of jerky. This has been presented as referring to mammoths, and may well do so. However, it is not first-hand information and is part of a highly fanciful account of foreign regions, replete with diamond-bladed swords and the like.
The crux of the whole issue appears to be the 1903 scientific examination of the Berezkova, Siberia, mammoth, the find that put “frozen mammoth” into the popular consciousness.
Otto Herz led the expedition to the site, which back then was a months-long journey across barren tundra and across mountain ranges. Once they finally located the mammoth, the Siberian winter was already coming in and the men were subsisting on horsemeat—a context that is probably significant in what Herz later reported.
To wit: He said some of the mammoth’s meat remained red and marbled with fat and appeared “as fresh as well-frozen beef or horse meat. It looked so appetizing that we wondered for some time whether we should not taste it, but no one would venture to take it into his mouth, and horseflesh was given the preference.”
The party’s dogs did eat some of the meat, he added. Note that while it looked pretty yummy—it wasn’t yummy enough. Herz also reported that the find stunk to holy heck, so that probably dissuaded even the least picky eaters in the group.
It’s worth noting the Berezkova find was one of the most complete ever, with an unusual amount of soft tissue intact.
I can find no record since then, in all the ensuing mammoth finds, of anybody popping the meat in their mouths. Typically, it’s the local dogs who benefit.
That brings us to sole reputable report of modern eating of ancient meat. In “Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe,” R. Dale Guthrie, professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, describes his inspection of the 1979 find of “Blue Babe,” a 36,000-year-old frozen bison. The carcass had already been largely eaten in prehistory, but, Guthrie reports, it still showed some red muscle.
After a thorough examination of the remains, which were kept frozen in a lab, Blue Babe was reconstructed with taxidermy for museum display. That task done, Guthrie set about eating part of the ancient bison along with taxidermist Eirik Granqvist, the late paleontologist Bjorn Kurten and apparently unnamed others.
“A small part of the mummy’s neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables,” Guthrie wrote. “We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.” Kurten later wrote that the bison stew was “agreeable.”
Guthrie was an experienced hunter who had a very well-preserved corpse on his hands—he had washed it out of the sediments himself and kept it frozen from the first moment until examination in a controlled lab. That—and probably the aura of the preexisting mammoth-eating legends, probably influenced his decision to munch.
Feb. 14, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: Has anybody ever eaten the meat of a frozen mammoth?
—Dan F., Columbus, Ohio
A: There is no reliable report of a modern human eating any part of a frozen mammoth—and very few unreliable reports, for that matter.
The story seems to have sprouted from a thought-about-it-but-decided-not-to report from a groundbreaking mammoth find in 1903. And the idea of people feasting on flash-frozen mammoth steaks has become a staple of loony fundamentalist Christian literature, feeding their ideas of a young Earth and a Biblical flood that knocked off prehistoric species.
All that being said, there is a solid example of a scientist and his friends tasting the flesh of a similarly frozen bison. However, that case—involving a dry, tough scrap of flesh boiled in a stew—only underlines why frozen mummy flesh is not generally eaten.
It must also be noted that dogs and scavenging animals have certainly eaten frozen mammoth meat. So at least it is true that modern animals have had the rare experience of feasting on meat aged 10,000 years or more, since the days when our ancestors were hunting the beasts with spears.
The mammoth-meat idea rests on misconceptions. Mammoths (and other frozen, mummified fossil animals ranging from rhinos to mice) are found in frozen silt, not a giant ice cube.
The silt may contain veins of ice. Also, the corpses are often immediately surrounded by ice created by the drawing out of moisture from the body itself, which results in the mummification. Nonetheless, when these things thaw enough to be discovered, they are in balls of muck, not a piece of ice. This also means they are desiccated, not big, juicy hunks of meat—though unquestionably some red meat is still preserved in certain specimens.
Only a couple mammoths have been found in anywhere near an intact state. Most were already scavenged, preyed upon and/or decayed to some degree before their freezing in the permafrost, leaving little soft tissue behind. And when they become exposed, typically through erosion, they start to rot fast. Thawed soft tissue is quickly consumed by modern scavengers.
The organic muck combined with the rotting of whatever flesh remains produces what is reportedly an unbelievable stench.
So, to recap, finding a mammoth is not walking into nature’s meat locker. It’s exhuming an icy grave.
Frozen mammoths are found in Siberia. It is not out of the realm of imagination that someone in such a harsh climate would consider eating some mammoth flesh. However, there is no reputable report of it.
It should be remembered that in early times, mammoths were exclusively found only by being washed out into the open, and could be reached by scientific investigators only after months or even years, and even then with no refrigeration equipment to preserve the find.
There’s a stray 1800s report from a Russian scientist who claimed that one tribe, the Yukats, occasionally ate mammoth meat, but his was not an eyewitness account. He did note, like many other reputable reports, that the Yukats’ dogs sometimes ate the meat, which is a more likely explanation for any missing flesh. Especially because the Yukats, like all other natives of the region, have a strong taboo about unearthing mammoth fossils. (Theoretically, this could be rooted in bad dining experiences of the past, but there’s no evidence of that.)
Going much farther back, about 2,000 years, there’s a Chinese tale that refers to underground beasts in the north whose flesh can be eaten as a kind of jerky. This has been presented as referring to mammoths, and may well do so. However, it is not first-hand information and is part of a highly fanciful account of foreign regions, replete with diamond-bladed swords and the like.
The crux of the whole issue appears to be the 1903 scientific examination of the Berezkova, Siberia, mammoth, the find that put “frozen mammoth” into the popular consciousness.
Otto Herz led the expedition to the site, which back then was a months-long journey across barren tundra and across mountain ranges. Once they finally located the mammoth, the Siberian winter was already coming in and the men were subsisting on horsemeat—a context that is probably significant in what Herz later reported.
To wit: He said some of the mammoth’s meat remained red and marbled with fat and appeared “as fresh as well-frozen beef or horse meat. It looked so appetizing that we wondered for some time whether we should not taste it, but no one would venture to take it into his mouth, and horseflesh was given the preference.”
The party’s dogs did eat some of the meat, he added. Note that while it looked pretty yummy—it wasn’t yummy enough. Herz also reported that the find stunk to holy heck, so that probably dissuaded even the least picky eaters in the group.
It’s worth noting the Berezkova find was one of the most complete ever, with an unusual amount of soft tissue intact.
I can find no record since then, in all the ensuing mammoth finds, of anybody popping the meat in their mouths. Typically, it’s the local dogs who benefit.
That brings us to sole reputable report of modern eating of ancient meat. In “Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe,” R. Dale Guthrie, professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, describes his inspection of the 1979 find of “Blue Babe,” a 36,000-year-old frozen bison. The carcass had already been largely eaten in prehistory, but, Guthrie reports, it still showed some red muscle.
After a thorough examination of the remains, which were kept frozen in a lab, Blue Babe was reconstructed with taxidermy for museum display. That task done, Guthrie set about eating part of the ancient bison along with taxidermist Eirik Granqvist, the late paleontologist Bjorn Kurten and apparently unnamed others.
“A small part of the mummy’s neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables,” Guthrie wrote. “We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.” Kurten later wrote that the bison stew was “agreeable.”
Guthrie was an experienced hunter who had a very well-preserved corpse on his hands—he had washed it out of the sediments himself and kept it frozen from the first moment until examination in a controlled lab. That—and probably the aura of the preexisting mammoth-eating legends, probably influenced his decision to munch.
Pine, Fur, Spruce
Stupid Question ™
Feb. 7, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: What’s the difference between a pine, a fir and a spruce? Are they the same thing?
—Mike, Columbus, Ohio
A: This is one of those sad situations that arise when modern scientific classification attempts to embrace the common names that came before it.
Only such rational irrationalism could produce the modern distinction between “pines” and “true pines,” or insist that the Douglas fir is an imposter and actually a pine in disguise.
Let’s go back to a simpler time, when people just wanted to know, “Does that tree have pointy, evergreen leaves or not?”
The Old Teutonic answer, with typical brevity, was “fir.” (Well, “fir” is the Old English version of it, but you get the idea.) This meant pretty much anything pine-y.
Farther south, the Romans had need of similar words, and one of them was “pinus.” Those Old English speakers who were fancy-pants enough to be using Latin turned that into “pine.”
Over time, these dueling terms sorted out into specific meanings, often based on the quality of wood produced (pine wood generally being better for construction than fir). As a northern name, “fir” also became pegged to the rugged, northern kinds of conifers.
Naturally, people noticed various species of these trees, resulting in “white pine” and other specific terms.
“Spruce” began in the 1300s as one of these more specific terms: it’s short for “Spruce fir.” (The abbreviation was in use by the 1600s.)
“Spruce” was an alternative form of “Pruce,” which was a contemporary term for the region of modern Germany, Poland and Russia then known as Prussia. (Later a state, Prussia officially went away as part of the deal ending World War II.)
Among the products Prussia (a.k.a. Spruce) was known for at the time was quality fir wood. Naturally, it became known as Spruce fir. Possibly it referred to various types of fir wood collectively. The abbreviation to Spruce is fairly contemporary with the introduction of “spruce” (as in “spruce up”) in English, which is likely also a reference to Prussia (some speculate a basis in sharp-looking clothing made of then-famous Prussian leather).
Shortly thereafter came modern scientific classification, which did not improve on things very much.
All of the aforementioned trees are conifers (their seeds come in woody cones) with needle-like leaves and a resinous wood. Wisely, science lumps them all under the order of conifers. So far, so good!
However, all of these trees (along with larches, hemlocks and cedars) are put under the family of Pinaceae, or “pine-like,” trees. Pine is the natural preference since scientific classification is written in Latin.
Within the family is the genus Pinus—the “true pines.” Pretty much all this means is a tree with clustered needles that have a sort of cuticle or “sheath” at the base. Several trees that look like all the other pines are not considered “true pines.”
That includes the modern separation of the firs into the genus Abies. Basically it means any kind of northern, high-altitude conifer; the “scientific” distinction is noting the needles are flat, do not come in bunches and grow straight out of the branch without a stem.
Meanwhile, “spruce”—simply a type of fir—gets its own genus, Picea. The only scientific difference between a spruce and a fir is that spruces have rectangular needles. The scientific name for the famed Norway spruce admits as much: it’s Picea abies, or “spruce fir,” the original common term.
Granted, these genera do make reasonably worthwhile distinctions between trees that have evolved in somewhat different environments. There’s some biological credibility behind them.
But their distinctions are too sharp and literal to extrapolate from broadly defined common words. And by retaining the attachments to those common names, the scientific terms have branched out into confusion.
Arborists, landscapers and nature guides invariably refer to Picea trees as “spruces” and can go into the intricacies of identifying them. But a spruce is simply a fir from northeastern Europe, etymologically speaking.
Likewise, a fir is just a cold-weather pine, and they’re all pines in the end. Or all firs, if you’re feeling Teutonic. Scientific classification won’t tell you anything more than that—it’ll just make you count needles to do it.
Feb. 7, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: What’s the difference between a pine, a fir and a spruce? Are they the same thing?
—Mike, Columbus, Ohio
A: This is one of those sad situations that arise when modern scientific classification attempts to embrace the common names that came before it.
Only such rational irrationalism could produce the modern distinction between “pines” and “true pines,” or insist that the Douglas fir is an imposter and actually a pine in disguise.
Let’s go back to a simpler time, when people just wanted to know, “Does that tree have pointy, evergreen leaves or not?”
The Old Teutonic answer, with typical brevity, was “fir.” (Well, “fir” is the Old English version of it, but you get the idea.) This meant pretty much anything pine-y.
Farther south, the Romans had need of similar words, and one of them was “pinus.” Those Old English speakers who were fancy-pants enough to be using Latin turned that into “pine.”
Over time, these dueling terms sorted out into specific meanings, often based on the quality of wood produced (pine wood generally being better for construction than fir). As a northern name, “fir” also became pegged to the rugged, northern kinds of conifers.
Naturally, people noticed various species of these trees, resulting in “white pine” and other specific terms.
“Spruce” began in the 1300s as one of these more specific terms: it’s short for “Spruce fir.” (The abbreviation was in use by the 1600s.)
“Spruce” was an alternative form of “Pruce,” which was a contemporary term for the region of modern Germany, Poland and Russia then known as Prussia. (Later a state, Prussia officially went away as part of the deal ending World War II.)
Among the products Prussia (a.k.a. Spruce) was known for at the time was quality fir wood. Naturally, it became known as Spruce fir. Possibly it referred to various types of fir wood collectively. The abbreviation to Spruce is fairly contemporary with the introduction of “spruce” (as in “spruce up”) in English, which is likely also a reference to Prussia (some speculate a basis in sharp-looking clothing made of then-famous Prussian leather).
Shortly thereafter came modern scientific classification, which did not improve on things very much.
All of the aforementioned trees are conifers (their seeds come in woody cones) with needle-like leaves and a resinous wood. Wisely, science lumps them all under the order of conifers. So far, so good!
However, all of these trees (along with larches, hemlocks and cedars) are put under the family of Pinaceae, or “pine-like,” trees. Pine is the natural preference since scientific classification is written in Latin.
Within the family is the genus Pinus—the “true pines.” Pretty much all this means is a tree with clustered needles that have a sort of cuticle or “sheath” at the base. Several trees that look like all the other pines are not considered “true pines.”
That includes the modern separation of the firs into the genus Abies. Basically it means any kind of northern, high-altitude conifer; the “scientific” distinction is noting the needles are flat, do not come in bunches and grow straight out of the branch without a stem.
Meanwhile, “spruce”—simply a type of fir—gets its own genus, Picea. The only scientific difference between a spruce and a fir is that spruces have rectangular needles. The scientific name for the famed Norway spruce admits as much: it’s Picea abies, or “spruce fir,” the original common term.
Granted, these genera do make reasonably worthwhile distinctions between trees that have evolved in somewhat different environments. There’s some biological credibility behind them.
But their distinctions are too sharp and literal to extrapolate from broadly defined common words. And by retaining the attachments to those common names, the scientific terms have branched out into confusion.
Arborists, landscapers and nature guides invariably refer to Picea trees as “spruces” and can go into the intricacies of identifying them. But a spruce is simply a fir from northeastern Europe, etymologically speaking.
Likewise, a fir is just a cold-weather pine, and they’re all pines in the end. Or all firs, if you’re feeling Teutonic. Scientific classification won’t tell you anything more than that—it’ll just make you count needles to do it.