In the opening quatrain of Sonnet 91, Shakespeare’s speaker dismisses the things in which other people take pride:
Some glory in their birth, some in their skill, Some in their wealth, some in their body’s force, Some in their garments though new-fangled ill, Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse. . .
We're sorry. Something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one,
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com
In the opening quatrain of Sonnet 91, Shakespeare’s speaker dismisses the things in which other people take pride:
Some glory in their birth, some in their skill, Some in their wealth, some in their body’s force, Some in their garments though new-fangled ill, Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse. . .
All are familiar, and appear without criticism — except clothing. People are awfully proud of their Elizabethan hipster chic even when the look is terrible.
The word newfangled was itself newfangled in the 16th century (though with roots older than Chaucer), and since then its meaning has been more or less consistent: something new, fashionable (with the implications of being transitory).
The real dope, though, is in fangle, a word that hovers around 16th-century usage and appears, says the Oxford English Dictionary, “always in contemptuous sense” — “a fantastic, foppish, or silly contrivance.”
ADVERTISEMENT
To fangle is (or once was) to promote these novelties, and fanglement is “the action of fangling or fashioning.”
We’ve had an odd relationship with the word newfangled, which has nothing to do with fangs (but carries with it a Germanic memory of the meaning “to take” or “to catch,” as in German fangen). Nor, for you Romance-language readers, does it have anything to do with mud (as in Italian fango).
Newfangled has an old-timey American feel. (“What in tarnation are you doin’ swimmin’ in that newfangled cement pond?” a character might have said on The Beverly Hillbillies, giving 1960s America a cringe-worthy lesson in artificial authenticity.)
Pringles Potato Chips began its conquest of the pre-shaped potato-chip market by promoting its product as ‘”the newfangled potato chip,” which meant not new at all but a variant on something comfortingly olde.
As in much else about language, everything old, or olde, is new, or newe, again.
ADVERTISEMENT
Which brings me to STEM journals.
In 2013 The Economist ran a piece on open access and the purchase of the Swiss journal Frontiers by NPG (the Nature publishing group, of which the esteemed journal Nature is a major product). “This is not NPG’s first foray into the new-fangled world of ‘science 2.0’,” the article observed.
Here the word new-fangled strikes a “’tis new to thee” chord — it’s complicated and unfamiliar, but not to those who have been around and paying attention.
I am not a scientist, and no one who has spent two minutes with anything I’ve written would mistake me for one. Yet I’m continually “invited” (in this instance these scare quotes are inadequately scary) to submit articles for scientific publications, usually outside the traditional Anglophone world.
This week’s mail brought a solicitation — what feels like the digital equivalent of seine fishing — for participation in an online “International Conference on Newfangled Methods of Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics.” You might just refer to it by its jaunty initialism, ICNMPCM.
ADVERTISEMENT
The conference’s website features a slide show of graphics depicting the solar system and the words “Know More” boxed below the conference dates. I tried to click on it, several times actually, until I concluded that “Know More” didn’t mean “For Further Information Click Here” but simply “Our Goal is to Expand Knowledge.”
Further descriptive text, which is displayed in unedited English, leads the reader to the International Journal of Engineering & Technology and the Science Publishing Corporation. Which is where this reader stopped. I’m baffled by what engineers and scientists might think about having their cutting-edge theories and research conclusions described, apparently without shade, as newfangled.
I’m not weighing in on the legitimacy of this or any other online conference or resulting publication, but no academic can be unaware of the proliferation of that newest of not-at-all-new commercial endeavors, the scholarly journal that costs the author a considerable sum to have her or his work published.
A poet even older than Shakespeare warned that all is vanity, to which one might respond maybe not quite all, but in terms of publication opportunities there’s a lot out there that looks unappealingly complicated by payments from writers.
Science publishing, open access, and the rights of authors are subjects too important for the necessarily quick takes of a language-blog post.
ADVERTISEMENT
Enough to say here that the sense of taking and catching — the fang- root in newfangled — can make the procedures of online solicitation seem less about innovation than entrapment.
To which sense of newfangledness I’d be happy to say “no more.”