This week’s new-to-me word is also pretty new-new, and also indirectly comes from Covid and lockdown. The word is credibility bookcase: the shelves of books that you see behind someone while they’re on a Zoom meeting.
If you’re an habitué of virtual meetings, you undoubtedly know all about this. While someone is blabbing away during a meeting, you’re looking past their talking head at all the stuff in the background: the paintings on their wall, the design of their kitchen cupboards, whatever. If you’re a book-oriented person, you also scrutinize—or try to—the books you can see on their shelves. As Kathy Sierra once said, “One of the best ways to get to know someone is to look at their bookshelf.”
But virtual meetings are now part of people’s work, so they think about how best to project a professional image. Whereas a year ago you might have worried about whether your shoes were shined, today you need to think about what people can see of your space during a video meeting.[1] Many people have therefore created a credibility bookcase: a carefully curated collection of books to represent their online image.
So a credibility bookcase isn’t just, as I started with, the books you happen to have behind you; it’s a more deliberate assembly that’s crafted for effect. Though for credibility, it has to seem like it’s just your natural environment. As it says in one article, “Your home is everyone’s business now. But don’t look like you’re trying too hard.” And if it’s not practical to scare up a shelf and some books to polish up your image, the folks at Penguin Books (and probably elsewhere) are happy to supply you with bookcase backgrounds for your Zoom meeting.
It hadn’t really occurred to me that I could, er, manage what shows up in the background of my own environment. But now I’m thinking that I might need to up my cred with some carefully placed volumes. (Pants, well, that’s another matter.)
Ok, origins. Today there’s a double header. Where does the term rear admiral come from? First, why would an admiral be a rear one? As background, it’s helpful to know that a rear admiral is the least senior rank among admirals; above a rear admiral is a vice admiral and above a vice admiral is an admiral.
These three ranks of admirals have (or had?) different responsibilities at sea. (I learn these things from the internet, not because I know naval ranks and responsibilities.) The admiral was in charge overall, with a ship in the middle. The vice admiral is in front, going at it directly with the enemy forces. And the rear admiral is in the rear: in charge of reserve ships. I didn’t really think that the title of rear admiral would be quite so literal.
I said double header, didn’t I? Where does admiral come from? A more interesting story. The root is the Arabic word amir, which meant “commander.” In Arabic, the title was often amir al (“commander of the …”), as in amīr al-mū’minīn, “commander of the faithful.” One theory is that the combination of amir + al was imported into Latin as a unit, which explains the -al ending on admiral. Maybe. What is known is that Latin had admiralis, which showed up in French in various spellings like admiral and ammiraille. We of course got it from French. The -d- (“excrescent d”) that was not in the Arabic original was just a thing that made its way into the word, possibly due to confusion with other words in Latin that began with ad-.
In Arabic, amir was a generic commander. The word was originally borrowed into Latin in this sense, and in medieval English we also still used admiral for any commander. But by the 1400s, admiral in English had acquired its specifically naval sense.
A fun fact that emerged as I looked into this is that we borrowed the word amir twice, so to speak—once for admiral, and then again in its general sense as the word emir, which describes a chief or commander in various countries. An emir is in charge of an emirate. So United Arab Emirates, the country, has a lexicographic relationship to the person who commands the fleet. Nice.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[1] I’ve been at some hilarious virtual meetings, including one where one of my engineer-authors was booted out of the kitchen so his wife could start dinner, and we got to see him (via his laptop) wandering around the house looking for a place to perch. [^]