Dunce who capped it all
QUESTION
What is the origin of the dunce’s cap? THE dunce’s cap refers to a hat worn by Catholic Scottish philosopher/theologian Duns Scotus, who died in 1308.
He was a medieval academic who worked at Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. However, he had many enemies, who later ridiculed him and his followers by associating him with foolishness.
The central theme of his work was that we should be able to argue rationally and understand theology without faith alone.
Duns produced arguments for topics as varied as God’s existence, the free market and a proof of Mary’s immaculate conception. His obsession with trying to demonstrate everything through reason led him to quote ancient Greek thought nearly ten times as much as he did the Bible, a faux pas for theologians at the time.
This did little for his reputation within Catholicism, but it was ultimately the emergence of Protestantism in England in the 16th century that led to the destruction of much of his work in 1535.
Many students were thrilled by no longer having to study tedious logical arguments.
To this day, Duns’s theories, like his hat – which he is routinely depicted in, having worn it due to his short stature and superstitious beliefs about the intellect-enhancing potential of cosmic rays – are taken as a sign of over-obsession with irrelevant and peculiar details of thought and not the arguments in themselves. Peter O’Neil, Wivenhoe, Essex.
QUESTION
Is ‘punk’ an ancient word? SEVERAL meanings have been attributed to the term punk over the course of history.
An overall common characteristic is that punk has consistently carried unappealing negative connotations – ranging from sexual deviancy to prostitution and severe inexperience. The etymological origin of the word is obscure; it is not ancient, but quite old, thought to have originated in Britain in the 16th century to denote a prostitute.
Shakespeare used the term in The Merry Wives Of Windsor (1602): ‘This punk is one of Cupid’s carriers.’
In Measure For Measure (1623), he used the word to illustrate how an unmarried woman was perceived to be a prostitute based on her failure to conform to the expected gender roles of her time: ‘My lord, she may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid, widow nor wife.’
According to Lucio’s logic, if a woman is neither of these things, she must be a prostitute.
Punk took a strange definitional turn when it arrived in America. During the 1700s, it was used as a description for slow-burning rotten wood or fungus, which, when dry, could be used as tinder.
In this context, it was a measure of an object’s lack of worth and quality, in the sense that ‘punk’ objects were believed to be cheap, worthless or rubbish.
In the early 20th century, punk entered the US prison system where it was used to denote male victims of sex crimes. This definition led to an understanding of punks as petty criminals, deviants, gangsters or hoodlums.
This sense was widely popularised in movies such as Dirty Harry, which features Clint Eastwood as homicide police inspector Harry Callahan delivering the famous line: ‘You’ve got to ask yourself one question, “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?’
Finally, it was adopted by punk rockers in the Seventies: they embraced the word to depict themselves as rebellious deviants feared by society.
Jan Saunders, Brighton.
QUESTION
What currency was used in the US before the introduction of the dollar and when were the first bills issued? When did George Washington first appear on dollar bills? IN the 1650s, the colony of Massachusetts Bay was proving a commercial success. But an inadequate supply of money put its future development in jeopardy. England, in the midst of the Civil War, could not afford to send gold and silver coins to the colonies.
Taking matters into their own hands, the Boston authorities allowed two settlers, John Hull and Robert Sanderson, to set up a mint in the capital in 1652.
The two were soon striking silver coinage – shillings, sixpences and threepences. However, the mint was seen as a threat to English sovereignty and was shut in 1682.
Called upon by the British to help fight the French in Canada in 1689 in King William’s War, the authorities in Massachusetts struggled to comply because of a shortage of coinage. On December 10, 1690, the government issued certificates to the troops in lieu of paying them with coins.
To that end, the General Court of Massachusetts authorised the issuing of £7,000 in public paper currency, the first in the Western world. Since these notes could be redeemed for coinage an unknown functionary had an idea: why not leave them in circulation? After all, everyone accepted their status as ‘real’ money. So it was done.
Colonial authorities elsewhere took note and began issuing paper currency, too. The first one-dollar bill was issued as a legal tender US note in 1862. It bore a portrait of Salmon P. Chase, then US secretary of the treasury.
In 1869, the $1 US note was redesigned with a portrait of George Washington in the centre and a vignette of Christopher Columbus sighting land to the left. Aaron Black, London SE12.
QUESTION
Do some countries paint their wildlife with reflective paint to prevent traffic accidents? FURTHER to the earlier answer, about 60 wild horses are killed each year on roads around Dartmoor, southwest England, and rangers have tried a number of schemes to stop this. Reflective collars were attached to animals, but this failed as they tended to get torn off when the animals wandered through the gorse.
Following the Finnish approach, in 2015 the Dartmoor Livestock Protection Society began painting a fluorescent stripe across the flanks of the animals. However, there were technical issues – the paint faded after a few nights, and it was decided the effectiveness of the scheme would be undermined by the problem of ponies shedding their winter coats.