The ship sails

As a linguist, one of the things you have to get used to is that languages change.

The denial of this basic fact is at the heart of the argument between prescriptivists (people who think there are hard-and-fast rules regarding "proper" or "correct" speech and writing) and descriptivists (people who believe that a linguist's job is not to codify language for the purpose of determining what's correct, but simply to describe it and monitor how it changes).  I tend to be strongly descriptivist -- after all, my M.A. is in historical linguistics, and if the vocabulary and syntactic rules of languages didn't evolve, I'd be out of a job.  On the other hand, there's a line (no, I don't know where exactly it is), because if there were no grammatical and pronunciation rules whatsoever, it'd make communication pretty difficult.

So I understand why we teach prescriptively.  But it behooves us all to realize that the language is gonna change anyhow, whether we want it to or not, and fighting like hell against it is the very definition of an exercise in futility.

One of the places things change the fastest is in slang.  When I taught high school, I used to run into new slang expressions very nearly on a daily basis.  Some of them have interesting origins.  For example, the slang use of the word ship -- meaning, to watch or read a piece of fiction and hope that two characters fall in love -- comes from the characterization of fans who want that outcome for the characters as "relationshippers."  This got shortened to "shippers," and finally converted into a verb -- e.g., "I ship Mulder and Scully."  (And in fact, the word did come from fans of the iconic television show The X Files.)

The capacity for sinking yourself into the lives of a celebrity or a fictional character led to another coinage, this one from none other than a song by Eminem.  It's the word stan -- a portmanteau word made up by combining stalker and fan.  Initially, it had a completely negative connotation, implying the person was deranged, perhaps dangerous.  But over time it's moderated, and like ship has become a verb, meaning "to behave like a fanboy/fangirl."  The recent sweet queer romcom Red, White, and Royal Blue led to a lot of people stanning Alex and Prince Henry -- and I have to admit I felt a little of that myself.

Then there's yeet, which dates to 1998, and means "to throw something."  The origin of this word is uncertain, but may be imitative, representing the noise you make when you pitch something heavy.  I posted on social media last week something about this word -- "Linguistics question of the day: is the past tense of yeet yote?  Because it should be."  This generated a rather hilarious discussion over whether it should be yote, yot, yaught, yet, or yut, and one person who patiently explained to all of us that because yeet is a modern coinage, we shouldn't expect it to follow any of the patterns from Middle English strong verbs, so it should be yeeted.

Illustrating another general principle, which is that no matter how obvious you try to make humor, some people are going to take you seriously.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Even accents change, and it's new research in this field that brought the topic to my mind today.  A recent study at the University of Georgia found that the traditional Southern drawl -- for example, pronouncing prize as /praz/ and not as the more standard American English /praiz/, and face as /fɤis/ and not as /feis/ -- is fast disappearing.  The last generation of Southerners whose pronunciations are characteristic of the old drawl are Baby Boomers.  (There are exceptions, mainly in rural areas, but their numbers are dwindling quickly.)  The homogenizing effects of movement from one region to another, and hearing the more common accents of the Pacific Coast and Midwest on television, have gradually shifted the way people speak.  (And another factor has a darker subtext, one that as a native Southerner I'm really sensitive to; people using a fake Southern accent to code someone being stupid, bigoted, or backwards.  These ugly perceptions are why a lot of people who move north strive to lose their Southern-ness.)

The South is not the only area in the United States experiencing this, of course.  "The demographics of the South have changed a lot with people moving into the area, especially post World War II," said study co-author Jon Forrest, of the University of Georgia department of linguistics.  "We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics."

While I understand the reasons behind all this, and I know it's inevitable, I can't help but find it a little sad that regions are losing part of what makes them unique.  Our mobility and the role that television and movies have in culture are blending a lot of the distinctness out of us.

So while we'll continue seeing new coinages like ship and stan and yeet, we'll see other features of our language fade and eventually disappear.  It's the way of things.  Take, for example, this recounting of an argument from printer and writer William Caxton in 1490, when Middle English was inexorably evolving into Modern English, leading to the older generation having some difficulties being understood even in matters as simple as what the plural of egg was:

In my dayes happened that certayn marchau[n]tes were in a ship in Tamyse [the Thames] for to haue sayled ouer the see into Zelande [in Holland] and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte Forlond [in Kent]. and wente to lande for to refreshe them[.]  And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows [house] and axed [asked] for mete [food], and specyally he axyed after egges[.]  And the good wyf answerde, that she coude speke no Frenshe.  And the marchau[n]t was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges and she understode hym not.  And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren, then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym wel.  Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certainly it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite [&] chau[n]ge of langage.

Forsooth, Caxton, thou hast said it.

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Witness to a crash

Well, thanks to my friend, the brilliant writer Gil Miller, I now have another reason to huddle under my blankie for the rest of the day.

We've dealt here before with a great many cosmic phenomena that you would seriously not want to get too close to.  Some of these sound like Geordi-Laforgian technobabble from Star Trek, but I promise all of them are quite real:

• supernovae
• quasars
• blazars
• fast radio bursts
• magnetars
• fast blue optical transients
• Wolf-Rayet stars
• gamma-ray bursters
• false vacuum collapse

From this,  you might come to the conclusion that I have a morbid fascination with astronomical phenomena that are big and scary and dangerous and can kill you.  This is not entirely incorrect; I would only modify it insofar as to add that I am also morbidly fascinated with geological phenomena (earthquakes, volcanoes, pyroclastic flows, lahars) and meteorological phenomena (hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning, microbursts) that are big and scary and dangerous and can kill you.

Call it a failing.

In any case, thanks to Gil's eagle-eyed facility for spotting cool recent research in science, I now have a new astronomical one to add to the list -- a luminous fast cooler.  This one provides the added frisson of being (as yet) unexplained -- although as you'll see, there's a possible explanation for it that makes it even scarier.

The research that uncovered the phenomenon was done by a team led by Matt Nicholl, astrophysicist at Queen's University Belfast, using data from ATLAS, the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (speaking of scary phenomena) telescope network in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa.  The event they discovered was (fortunately) nowhere near our own neighborhood; it was spotted in a galaxy two billion light years away.

What happened is that a completely ordinary, Sun-like star suddenly flared up by a factor of a hundred billion.  The first thought, of course, was supernova -- but this explosion's profile was completely different than that of a supernova, and stars the size of the Sun aren't supposed to go supernova anyhow.  Then, as if to add to the mystery, it cooled just as fast, fading by two orders of magnitude in only two weeks.  A month later, it was only at one percent of its peak brightness shortly after detonating (still, of course, considerably brighter than it had been).

The first question, of course, is "if it wasn't a supernova, what was it?"  And the answer thus far is "we're not sure."  So the researchers started trying to find other examples of the phenomenon, and uncovered two previously unrecognized events that matched the recent explosion's profile, one in 2009 and one in 2020.

But that still doesn't tell us how a perfectly ordinary star can suddenly go boom.  Nicholl says that the team has come up with only one possible hypothesis -- and it's a doozie.

"The most plausible explanation seems to be a black hole colliding with a star," Nicholl said.

Well, that's just all kinds of comforting.

Artist's conception of a black hole devouring a star [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

So it's all very well to say cheerily, "Hey, at least the Sun's not gonna go supernova, and we don't have any Wolf-Rayet stars nearby, and the nearest gamma-ray burster isn't pointed in our direction, and false vacuum collapse is really unlikely!  We're sitting here happily orbiting a highly stable star still in the prime of life, in a quiet corner of the galaxy!  What could go wrong?"

Apparently, what could go wrong is that a black hole could come swooping in out of nowhere and make the Sun explode.

Now, mind you, there are no black holes near us.  That we know of.  And chances are, we would, because even though they're black (thus the name), their influence on the matter around them is considerable.  The great likelihood is if there were a black hole headed for a crash with the Sun, you'd know about it plenty in advance.

Not that there's anything you could do about it, other than the time-honored maneuver of sticking your head between your legs and kissing your ass goodbye.

So thanks to Gil for making me feel even tinier and more fragile than I already did, which led me to share this delightful discovery with you.

Have a nice day.

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Escapees from Siberia

As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in genealogy, linguistics, and evolutionary genetics, when there's a study that combines all three, it's a source of great joy to me.

This was my reaction to a study in Nature on the evolutionary history of humans in northern Europe, specifically the Finns.  Entitled, "Ancient Fennoscandian Genomes Reveal Origin and Spread of Siberian Ancestry in Europe," it was authored by no less than seventeen researchers (including Svante Pääbo, the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish biologist who is widely credited as founding the entire science of paleogenetics) from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Helsinki, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Vavilov Institute for General Genetics, and the University of Turku.

Quite a collaborative effort.

It's been known for a while that Europe was populated in three broad waves of settlement.  First, there were hunter-gatherers who came in as early as forty thousand years ago, and proceeded not only to hunt and gather but to have lots of hot caveperson-on-caveperson sex with the pre-existing Neanderthals, whose genetic traces can be discerned in their descendants unto this very day.  Then, there was an agricultural society that came into Europe from what is now Turkey starting around eight thousand years ago.  Finally, some nomadic groups -- believed to be the ancestors of both the Scythians and the Celts -- swept across Europe around 4,500 years ago.

Anyone with European ancestry has all three.  Despite the genetic distinctness of different ethnic groups -- without which 23 & Me genetic analysis wouldn't work at all -- there's been enough time, mixture, and cross-breeding between the groups that no one has ancestry purely from one population or another.

Which, as an aside, is one of the many reasons that the whole "racial purity" crowd is so ridiculous.  We're all mixtures, however uniform you think your ethnic heritage is.  Besides, racial purity wouldn't a good thing even if it were possible.  That's called inbreeding, and causes a high rate of homozygosity (put simply, you're likely to inherit the same alleles from both your mother and father).  This causes lethal recessives to rear their ugly heads; heterozygous individuals are protected from these because the presence of the recessive allele is masked by the other, dominant (working) copy.  It's why genetic disorders can be localized to different groups -- cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Huntington's disease in people whose ancestry comes from eastern England, sickle-cell anemia from sub-Saharan Africa, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and so on.

So mixed-ethnic relationships are more likely to produce genetically healthy children.  Take that, neo-Nazis.

Map of ethnic groups in Europe, ca. 1899  [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, the current paper looks at the subset of Europeans who have a fourth ancestral population -- people in northeastern Europe, including Finns, the Saami, Russians, the Chuvash, Estonians, and Hungarians.  And they found that the origin of this additional group of ancestors is all the way from Siberia!

The authors write:

[T]he genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago.  This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today.  Additionally... [the] ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age.

The coolest part is that this lines up brilliantly with what we know about languages spoken in the area:

The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, to which both Saami and Finnish languages belong, has diverged from other Uralic languages no earlier than 4000–5000 years ago, when Finland was already inhabited by speakers of a language today unknown.  Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE. Particularly, southern Ostrobothnia, where Levänluhta is located, has been suggested through place names to harbour a southern Saami dialect until the late first millennium, when early Finnish took over as the dominant language.  Historical sources note Lapps living in the parishes of central Finland still in the 1500s.  It is, however, unclear whether all of them spoke Saami, or if some of them were Finns who had changed their subsistence strategy from agriculture to hunting and fishing.  There are also documents of intermarriage, although many of the indigenous people retreated to the north...  Ancestors of present-day Finnish speakers possibly migrated from northern Estonia, to which Finns still remain linguistically close, and displaced but also admixed with the local population of Finland, the likely ancestors of today’s Saami speakers.

Which I think is pretty damn cool.  The idea that we can use the genetics and linguistics of people today, and use it to infer migratory patterns back forty thousand years, is nothing short of stunning.

Unfortunately, however, I have zero ancestry in Finland or any of the other areas the researchers were studying.  According to 23 & Me, my presumed French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English ancestry was shown to be... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  No surprise admixtures of genetic information from some infidelity by my great-great-grandmother with a guy from Japan, or anything.

On the other hand, I did have 284 markers associated with Neanderthal ancestry.  Probably explaining why I like my steaks medium-rare and run around more or less naked when the weather's warm.  Which I suppose makes up for my lack of unexpected ethnic heritage.

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The family tree of dogs

We've had both our dogs DNA tested -- purely for our own entertainment, not because we have any concern about "pure breeding" -- and both of them gave us results that were quite a shock.

First, there's Guinness, whom the rescue agency told us was a black lab/akita mix.  You can see why:

Turns out he is neither -- he's American Staffordshire terrier, husky, chow, and Dalmatian.

Then there's Rosie, who we thought sure would turn out to be fox terrier/beagle:

Once again, not even close.  She came out to be a mix of about ten different breeds in which Australian cattle dog predominates.  Not a trace of hound, which is surprising not only because of her facial features, but her temperament.  We've had hounds several times before, and they are sweet and loving... and stubborn, headstrong, and selectively deaf, all of which describe Rosie perfectly.

I'm not sure that it's reasonable to expect a fifty-dollar mail-order dog DNA test to be all that reliable, mind you.  In Guinness's case, though, there are features that do make sense -- the ebullient disposition and square face of the AmStaff, and the curly tail and thick, silky undercoat of his husky/chow ancestry.  Whatever its accuracy, though, it's fascinating that any signal of ancestry at all shows up in a simple saliva test.

Especially given that just about every dog breed in existence traces back to wild dog populations in only a few thousand years.  That's an extremely short time to have any evolutionary divergence take place.  But genetic testing has become sophisticated enough that we can now retrace the steps in dog evolution -- creating a family tree of dog relationships encompassing 321 different dog breeds (including several sorts of wild dogs).

A team of geneticists led by Jeff Kidd of the University of Michigan, Jennifer R. S. Meadows of Uppsala University, and Elaine A. Ostrander of the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute did a detailed study of two thousand different DNA samples containing over forty-eight million analyzable sequences.  They identified three million SNPs -- single nucleotide polymorphisms, or "snips" -- that were characteristic of certain breeds. 

"We did an analysis to see how similar the dogs were to each other," Kidd said.  "It ended up that we could divide them into around twenty-five major groups that pretty much match up with what people would have expected based on breed origin, the dogs' type, size and coloration."

Interestingly, wild dogs and "village dogs" -- dogs that are somewhere between domesticated and feral, something you find in a lot of towns in developing countries -- have significantly more genetic diversity than domestic breeds do.  This, of course, contributes to their vigor (and, conversely, is why many "pure" dog breeds are susceptible to particular health problems).  It's also why it's so easy to identify behavioral characteristics of particular breeds, like the cheerfulness of golden retrievers, the intelligence and independent nature of huskies, and the nervousness of chihuahuas.

And the fact that if you want to partake in an exercise in frustration, try to housebreak a cocker spaniel.

If you take the time to read the original paper -- highly recommended, because it's amazingly cool -- you'll get to see the final "family tree" of dog breeds and see who's related to whom.

Now y'all'll have to excuse me, because Guinness wants to go outside and play.  I wonder what gene controls the trait of Wanting To Retrieve Tennis Balls For Hours.  Because whatever it is, I think Guinness has like fifty copies of it.

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Balm of hurt minds

The main character of Haruki Murakami's brilliant and terrifying short story "Sleep" is a perfectly normal middle-class woman living in Tokyo.  Her husband is a dentist, and they've got a lively, cheerful five-year-old son.  Everything about her life is so ordinary that it's hard even to describe.

Then, in one instant, all that changes.

One night, she awakens -- or thinks she has -- to a terrifying vision that even afterward, she's not certain was real or a hallucination during sleep paralysis.  A dark shape is huddled by the foot of her bed, and unfolds itself to reveal the figure of an elderly man, dressed in black, staring at her with an undisguised malevolence.  She attempts to scream, and can't.  After a moment, she forces herself to close her eyes, and when she opens them, the man is gone.  She's drenched with sweat, so she gets up, showers, pours herself a brandy, and waits for morning.

But after that moment, she is completely unable to go to sleep.  Ever.

The remainder of the story could be a teaching text in a fiction writing course lesson about how to create a believable Unreliable Narrator.  She returns to her ordinary life, but everything starts seeming... off.  Some senses are amplified, others dulled into nonexistence.  Everyday objects appear surreal, as if they've changed subtly, but she can't quite tell how.  One evening, she watches her husband as he's sleeping, and realizes that his face suddenly looks ugly to her.  She takes to going out driving at night (once her husband and son are asleep) and meets people who may or may not be real.  Her progressive slide into insanity reaches its apogee in the wee hours of one night, after seventeen days with no sleep, when she drives farther than she has ever driven, and ends up in an empty parking lot overlooking the ocean.  Dark figures raise themselves on either side of her little car, grab it by the handles, and begin to rock it back and forth, harder and harder.  She's thrown around by the motion, slamming against the door and steering wheel, and her last panicked thought is, "It's going to flip over, and there's nothing I can do to stop it."

An apt, if disturbing, summation of what is happening to her mind.

Sleep is an absolutely critical part of human health, but even after decades of research, it is unclear why.  Just about every animal studied sleeps, and many of them seem to dream -- or at least undergo REM sleep -- the same as we do.  (I know my dogs do; both of them bark and twitch in their sleep, and our sweet, gentle little dog Rosie sometimes growls as if she was the biggest meanest Rottweiler on the planet.)

Now, a team at the Binzhou Medical University's Shandong Technology Innovation Center has found one reason why sleep is so critical.  Sleep-deprived mice stop producing a protein called pleiotrophin, which apparently has a protective effect on the cells of the hippocampus.  Reduced pleiotrophin levels lead to cell death -- impairing both memory and spatial awareness.  Pleiotrophin decline has also been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sasha Kargaltsev, Sleeping (10765632993), CC BY 2.0]

What's unclear, though, is what direction the causation points.  Does the decline in pleiotrophin from sleeplessness cause the neurodegeneration, or does the neurodegeneration lead to insomnia and a drop in pleiotrophin levels?  The current research suggests the former, as the mice in the study had been genetically engineered to experience sleep disturbances, and the pleiotrophin loss seems to have followed as a consequence of the sleep deprivation.  Then, the question is, if pleiotrophin decline does trigger neurodegeneration, could the damage from Alzheimer's be prevented by increasing the production of the protein?

Uncertain at this point, but it's intriguing to find one piece of a puzzle that has intrigued us for centuries.  It seems fitting to end this musing on the power of sleep with the famous quote from Macbeth:

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,’ the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

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Trojan horse

Well, I just ran into the single stupidest conspiracy theory in existence.

Don't even try to convince me there's a dumber one, because I don't want to hear it.  HAARP controlling hurricanes and tornadoes to target enemies?  Pshaw.  A global network of Illuminati in league with Reptilian aliens to control major world governments?  Amateur hour.  Big Pharma putting mind-control microchips in our meds to turn us all into soulless automata?  Little League.

Because now we have: the COVID vaccine is "installed with payloads" of the Marburg virus, which will be activated in October by a signal broadcast from 5G networks, triggering the zombie apocalypse and killing billions, starting with all of the people who were foolish enough to get vaccinated.  This will result in the Evil Democrats winning (for that, read stealing) the 2024 election.

*brief pause for you to regain your equilibrium*

Okay, some background first.

Marburg virus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. https://www.utmb.edu/newsroom/article11484.aspx, 137488 web, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Marburg virus causes a deadly hemorrhagic fever similar to the better-known (and related) Ebola virus.  It's a bad one; there's no vaccine yet, and even with treatment the mortality rate is somewhere between sixty and eighty percent.  It's endemic in certain parts of Africa, and seems to be carried by bats and monkeys.  It's considered to be of significant concern with regards to epidemics, given how contagious it is.

However, there is no way to (1) put it into some kind of Trojan horse in a vaccine, and (2) activate it using a 5G signal (or any other kind of signal).  In order to believe this, you have to know essentially nothing about viruses, vaccines, or 5G.

Which is apparently the case with Todd Callender, who seems to have been the origin of this particular lunacy back in 2022.  He appeared in an interview with Jeffrey Prather on his program The Prather Point, and we're assured that Callender isn't "some hare-brained fringe theorist" because Prather vets all of his guests and he says so.

So that's good to know. 

"A broadcast from 5G cell towers at 18 MHz, for a specific duration and sequence, will cause affected cells to rupture," Callender said, "unleashing Marburg payload bioweapons into the blood of those who took the mRNA injections.  This, in turn, would instantly unleash a Marburg pandemic and produce a sudden rush of symptoms including bleeding out (hemorrhagic fever isn't pretty), cardiovascular deaths, seizures and more.  Some of the symptoms that could appear would even resemble classic zombies as depicted in pop culture; biting, loss of cognitive function, aggression, confusion and extreme alterations in the appearance of skin and eyes, among other similarities."

The ultimate outcome is that the Democrats (who, of course, engineered all this) will swipe the 2024 election.  "If this theory pans out, the obvious timeframe for the powers that be to release the binary weapon would be before the [next election]...  With a whole new pandemic hitting the scene -- with far more serious symptoms and a higher death rate compared to COVID -- the elections could either be cancelled or altered into a universal vote-from-home format which would favor the highly organized vote rigging and ballot counterfeiting of the Democrats (who are only in power because they stole the last election, of course)."

For all the doubters in the studio audience, we're told to stop being KoolAid-drinkin' sheeple.  "Critics might say this all smacks of science fiction.  But we are living through a science fiction dystopian scenario right now, with extreme censorship, an Orwellian global cabal trying to exterminate the human race, the rise of the robots and the mass injection of billions of people with exotic nanotechnology that seems to have a rather nefarious purpose, far from merely offering 'immunity.'"

The last bit reminds me of the wonderful quote by Carl Sagan: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.  They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers.  But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

In any case, we don't have long to wait, since the latest intel is that this is all going down in October.  Me, I'm kind of bummed by that, because my birthday's in October, and I was rather looking forward to having a nice quiet celebration with my wife, and not having to stumble around the village bleeding from the eye sockets and looking for brains to eat.

But I'll return to my original point, which is that if there is a stupider conspiracy theory out there, I don't want to know about it.  Writing about all this made me long for the good old days when the antivaxxers were content to inject bleach and swallow horse dewormer.

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Do a little dance

One of the unfortunate things about having a skeptical approach is that sometimes, you have to admit you simply don't have an explanation.

I get that it's frustrating.  I used to run into this sometimes with students, and have conversations like the following:

Student: Do you think there's intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy?

Me:  I don't know.

Student: But what do you think?

Me:  I don't think anything.  I simply don't know.  We have one example of a planet with intelligent life, and only vague guesses about how likely the conditions are that would select for intelligence.  It might be extremely common, or it might be extraordinarily rare.  We just don't know.

Student:  Doesn't that drive you crazy?

Yes, sometimes it does drive me crazy.  But if you're approaching the world scientifically, you better get used to it, because you're going to be spending a lot of time standing right up against what astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson calls "the perimeter of our own ignorance."

And you don't have to go to the outer reaches of the galaxy to find phenomena that we've yet to explain -- ones for which, if you consider them honestly, you have to admit you may never have a good explanation.  The universe is big and weird and chaotic and complex, and frankly, we're lucky we've been able to explain as much of it as we have.

Which brings us to the Dancing Plague of 1518.

In July of the year 1518, in the town of Strasbourg, Alsace, a woman known to us only as Frau Troffea suddenly felt compelled to dance.  Unable to stop herself, she left her house and began to dance on the street, resisting all attempts to get her to stop.

Keep in mind that this was a highly superstitious time, when such behavior wouldn't have been considered comical; the early sixteenth century was the era of witch burnings and the heresy-hunters of the Inquisition.  To the onlookers of the time, Frau Troffea didn't seem funny, she looked as if she'd been possessed by a demon.

Worse, several other people joined her over the hours that followed.  During the next week, three dozen people were dancing; by mid-August, the numbers had risen to four hundred, and the illness -- whatever it was -- had spread to nearby towns.  At first, both the doctors and religious authorities suggested the victims be encouraged to dance themselves to exhaustion, to "dance free of it," and even hired musicians to keep them going.  But as the "dancing plague" spread through the countryside, panic ensued.  The powers-that-be reversed course, and forbade musicians from egging the dancers on.  The priests and bishops declared that the dancers were being punished by Saint Vitus, the patron saint of dancing, but what they'd done to merit that was never clear, as the dancers came from all walks of life.  Despite that, and probably driven by a desperation to do something, the religious authorities forced the dancers to wear shoes blessed with Holy Water, which had crosses embroidered on them, in the hopes that this might make the saint happy and stop the strange affliction.

Unsurprisingly, this had no effect whatsoever.

A depiction of some of the dancers in an engraving by Hendrik Hondius (1564) [Image is in the Public Domain]

By September, the whole thing began to die down.  Some contemporaneous sources say a few of the dancers danced themselves to death, but the number of fatalities (if any) are uncertain.  In the third week of September, the afflicted (now over their bad case of Boogie Fever) were sent to the shrine of Saint Vitus to receive absolution, and the whole episode ended.

So, what caused this bizarre outbreak?

If you're discounting the Demonic Possession Hypothesis and the Pissing Off Saint Vitus Hypothesis, there are two explanations that are most commonly proffered to account for the Dancing Plague, but both of them are not without their problems.

The first is that it was ergotism -- a condition caused by eating ergot-infected wheat and rye.  Ergot is a fungus that produces a chemical analog to LSD, and when consumed, it can cause bizarre hallucinations.  While this is a possibility, there are two main arguments against it.  First, an LSD trip doesn't last for weeks, and some of the people affected danced through most of July and August.  Second, severe ergotism -- consumption of large quantities of the fungus-infected grain -- triggers another effect of the chemical, which is vasoconstriction.  People with severe ergotism can have blood vessel constriction bad enough to cause gangrene in their extremities.  Considering how long the Dancing Plague went on, it's odd that if it was ergot, no one showed the other symptoms that usually come along with it.

The second is that it was an example of mass psychogenic illness.  This occurs when groups of people start exhibiting similar symptoms because of being part of a cohesive group and sharing similar biases and living conditions.  Put simply, it was superstition, hysteria, and the power of suggestion at work.  Examples of other illness thought to be caused by this phenomenon are the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of Tanzania and the "June Bug" incident in the southern United States, both of which (coincidentally) happened in 1962.  More controversially, some have explained Havana syndrome and Morgellons disease as psychogenic in origin -- but there are plenty of people who dispute both of those.

But as far as the Dancing Plague goes, there is one odd fact that argues against it being psychogenic in origin.  Almost every victim of the outbreak lived near water -- particularly along the Rhine and Moselle Rivers.  The farther away you were from the rivers, the less likely you were to be affected.  This gives the appearance of some sort of water-borne disease, but there's no known germ that has these effects.

Whatever caused the Dancing Plague -- and we still don't have an explanation that accounts for all of the known facts -- at least the authorities of the time didn't do what you might expect, which is to turn against the victims.  Considering the medieval tendency to see Satan hiding in every dark corner, it's kind of surprising they didn't.  There's no indication that, even after having spent a few weeks gettin' down, the victims were treated any differently afterward.

Maybe it was the trip to Saint Vitus's shrine that did the trick.

In any case, we really don't know what caused it.  Frustrating, but -- to come back around to my initial point -- given how weird and complicated the world is, that's gonna happen.  And as good skeptics, we have to be okay with it.  We can't explain everything, and even given all the facts at hand, there will still be times we have to shrug our shoulders and admit we don't know.

Even if it does drive us crazy.

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