Stockholm Syndrome

With the 18-year captivity of Jaycee Lee Dugard in the news, TIME magazine published an article on the history of Stockholm Syndrome.  This is the phenomenon of a captive beginning to indentify with her captor.  I was most interested in where the name comes from.

According to journalist Laura FitzPatrick the name comes from an August 1973 bank heist in Stockholm, Sweden.  The theives,  Jan-Erik Olsson and Clark Olofsson, held four bank employees hostage for six days.  At the end of the affair, when the employees were released, they hugged and kissed their captors.  FitzPatrick cannot prove the coiner of the phrase, but she says the most likely candidate was Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot.

The article continues to tell of famous cases in history.  Patty Hearst is the most notable.  Oddly, she left out the episode of the Simpsons when before being ransomed, Homer presents his South American captors with a scrapbook of their time together.

Disorderly Conduct

For a special Saturday post, an interesting Time article on the history and understanding of disorderly conduct.

Cleave

v. to part or divide by cutting asunder. (OED)

or.

v. to stick fast or to adhere (OED)

My friend, and a very talented musician, Sandra R.B. suggested this word as a possible auto-antonym, and it was one of two that I am readily familiar with.  I was at a wedding of a college roommate of mine in Vermont when I was first stumped by this.  Her wedding vows consisted of something akin to “to cleave on to you for the rest of my life.”  The phrase was quite jarring, considering that my only understanding of the word was the first definition above.  How could a word mean to rip asunder and to adhere together yet still have any meaning?  Never mind the fact that, as a noun, it also means an Irish basket.

This is a rare case of a true auto-antonym, as opposed to one that was formed from misuse.  The word is actually two different words, stemming from two different etymologies, that happen to be spelled and pronounced the same way and have meanings that contradict each other.

The two words are not necessarily identical in their other forms.  In both cases you can say that you cleaved something or cleaved to something, but other forms of the past tense exist that are more specific.  So the retired lumberjack clove wood and cleft wood, while the divorced couple clave each other.  Wood is cloven while a contract is cleaved to.  In the end, these two words at some point just became too close to each other, and could only be cloven when put into different tenses.

For the record, my Vermont roommate still cleaves to her husband.  They are building a beautiful inn, called the Snapdragon in Windsor, VT, and you can read about its progress here.  The also have a delicious looking eatery called the Windsor Station Pub.  If you are ever in Windsor, cleave to those locations.

P.S. Cleave is also a noun form of the word cleft. According to the OED, the first published use of the noun cleavage was in Time magazine’s August 1946 issue.  It was in reference to a trade term about the cut of an actress’s dress.