Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Tame Sows and Wild Boars

7/12/2021

4 Comments

 
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The Iliad and The Odyssey include tales of swineherds and swine. Among the earliest animals to be domesticated, pigs figure prominently in ancient banquet menus, rituals, and pottery. Tame sows in search of acorns must have met wild boars in the forest. The Romans called their progeny hybrida.

I love word origins. Unlike words that reverse meaning over time (awful once meant “awesome”), hybrid has kept its original sense: something of mixed origin. Its use in English increased after 1850, as scientists worked to improve food crops and animals through crossbreeding. Hybrid tea roses are favorite garden flowers.

Beyond biology, hybrid came to mean vehicles with both gasoline and electric motors. In a fresh use of the term this year, instructors, employers, and worship leaders are scrambling to design hybrid post-pandemic event formats that are both virtual and in-person.

It’s clear what hybrid cars and meetings share with the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. More puzzling is why we don’t call almost everything else hybrid too. Bronze Age peoples mixed tin with copper. Talking pictures combined silent movies with sound recording. Pasta with tomato sauce blends ingredients from Italy and the Americas. Cultural diffusion shapes our language, clothing, folklore, music; all their origins are mixed. We’ll figure out whatever hybrids we need. We’ve been doing it for millennia.
4 Comments
Rebecca link
7/12/2021 11:18:38 am

This is very thought provoking etymology, Sarah! Hybrids di abound in philosophy, culture, farming techniques... My parenting style is a hybrid of how I was raised and books I've read about how to raise children. Thanks for this new lens.

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Sarah Cook link
7/12/2021 01:39:13 pm

Parenting style is a wonderful example! Do we still call something hybrid if it combines more than two sources? I also learned by trial and error, and what I observed with my friends.

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Richard Heiberger
7/16/2021 10:53:18 am

Wonderful. and it sets me off in thinking.
Today i think "hybrid" means active combining of two different, and in some sense, equal, things.
When the result becomes common, then it gets its own name and the history of how the merge happened is lost.

bronze is a thing. oh yes, it is made from two other things.,

movies are a thing. they probably never were called hybrid because moving pictures (dominant) were augmented (not merged) with sound (secondary).

my guess on "virtual and in-person" events is that once it stabilizes it will get a name and we won't even think of the distinction between two typed of attendance. Fifteen years ago we often(?) had a remote speaker talk by video to an audience in an auditorium or classroom. Today we often have two or more people in the same room talking by video to other pairs of people or other individual people. I think we need another technological shift that provides a more balanced experience for both the remote and local people. I am imagiining a conference table with a big monitor
for each non-local person, so the local people can just move their eyes around the table to see all participants. AND a camera for each local person, so the video-attendees see a collection of zoom faces and all look equally remote. And we will call it a conference and the history of merging two distinct technologies will be forgotten.

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Sarah Cook link
7/17/2021 08:18:37 am

Good points, thank you, Rich. So a Google search for "hybrid" mostly brings up cars because while not super-rare, they are still relatively novel. When/if they become standard, they will just be "cars." The talk of hybrid meetings is because it isn't standard yet and technological hurdles remain. (For years I've dialed into meetings where most were physically present, and found it unsatisfactory.) Your suggestion of individual local cameras is interesting and one I hadn't heard.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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