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confusion worse confounded   Quick reference

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (2 ed.)

... worse confounded complete confusion, deriving from a usage by Milton in Paradise Lost ( 1667...

Confusion   Reference library

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (19 ed.)

... Confusion of tongues According to the Bible ( Genesis 11:1–9 ) the people of the earth originally spoke one language and lived together. They built a city and a tower as a rallying point, but God, seeing this as the beginning of ambition, ‘did confound the language of all the earth’ and scattered them abroad and hence the town was called babel . This was taken as an explanation of the diversity of languages and the dispersal of mankind and of the origin of the name babylon . Confusion worse confounded Disorder redoubled, a mix-up that has gone from...

Gennys   Quick reference

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (5 ed.)

...of St Gennys (Cornwall) is sometimes identified with Genesius of Arles , but the fact that his feast is kept in Cornwall in 2 May (and not on 25 August ) probably points to the cult of an obscure local founder, later identified with the more famous Genesius . The confusion is worse confounded by William Worcestre's entry: ‘There were three brothers of the name of Genesius, each one of whom carried his head and one was archbishop of Lismore.’ Each of these statements is false. The head-relics enshrined in the canons' church at Launceston were identified...

Solar wind   Reference library

Magic Universe: A Grand Tour of Modern Science

...indicating significant changes in the radiocarbon production rate. When archaeologists used the bristlecone results to calibrate their dates, the effects were revolutionary. A cherished idea that civilization and technologies diffused outwards from Sumeria and Egypt was confounded when the corrected radiocarbon dates showed that folk in Brittany were building large stone monuments 1500 years before the first rough-stone Egyptian pyramid was constructed. As Colin Renfrew at Southampton announced in 1973 : ‘The whole diffusionist framework collapses,...

Nature and Nurture as an Enduring Tension in the History of Psychology   Reference library

Hunter Honeycutt

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of Modern Psychology

...is neither a legitimate nor a constructive way of thinking about development. Instead, developmental analysis reveals that the terms commonly associated with nature (e.g., innate, genetic, hereditary, or instinctual) and nurture (environmental or learned) are so entwined and confounded (and often arbitrary) that their independent effects cannot be meaningfully discussed. The nature–nurture division oversimplifies developmental processes, takes too much for granted, and ultimately hinders scientific progress. Thus not only is there a lingering tension about...

Strategy   Reference library

Joshua Rovner

The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History

...Their adaptations may be wise or foolish, but in either case they are likely to change the trajectory of war, making it difficult to sustain a coherent strategy throughout. A fundamental problem for strategists is that logical plans for linking means and ends are often confounded by interaction effects. Strategists need to think about the sequence of military actions needed to achieve some political goal, but enemy adaptation may throw that sequence completely out of whack. The situation is even more complicated when coalitions are involved. Unexpected...

Historical Views of Homosexuality: European Colonialism   Reference library

Robert Aldrich

The Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy

...and young men that were commonplace and accepted in Japan. The physiognomy and dress of “natives” often confounded Europeans’ notions of gender propriety and sexuality. In Ceylon, men who grew their hair long, and oiled and ornamented it with a comb, seemed unmanly, and the slight build of many of the islanders provoked Europeans to call them androgynous. Cultures elsewhere with little gender variation in clothing styles similarly caused confusion about differences between male and female. By contrast, Europeans saw black African men as dangerously...

Cognitive Approaches to Foreign Policy Analysis   Reference library

Aaron Rapport

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis

...are externally valid—can one infer the cognitive traits of foreign policy officials using results from typical individuals in an artificial setting ( Hafner-Burton et al., 2013 ; Lau & Levy, 1998 , pp. 40–41; Mintz, Redd, & Vedlitz, 2006 )? This problem may be further confounded by the alleged replication crisis in psychology, in which researchers have debated the prevalence of problematic research practices that bring the reliability of a range of findings into question ( Pashler & Wagenmakers, 2012 ; Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011 ). In some...

London   Reference library

Andrew Sanders, Andrew Sanders, Andrew Sanders, Andrew Sanders, Paul Schlicke, David Parker, Andrew Sanders, David Parker, Andrew Sanders, Andrew Sanders, Anne Humpherys, and David Parker

The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens

...for carcasses was built ( 1866–8 ). Dickens, then, saw Smithfield reformed and reconstructed but, characteristically, it was the old Smithfield that held his imagination. Hustled through it by Bill Sikes , Oliver Twist found it ‘a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses’ ( OT 21; see also 16). Pip complained that ‘the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me’ ( GE 20). Passing allusions are made in Dickens's works to the Borough Market ( PP 10, 32), Clare Market ( PP 20),...

Dance   Reference library

Francis Sparshott, Graham McFee, Mark Franko, Mark Franko, Erin Brannigan, and André Lepecki

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)

...time to note how “it is therefore imperative to distinguish contemporary art from art of the current moment” (1992, p. 128). Similarly, and considering dance specifically, Frédéric Pouillaude states how the contemporary, in the expression “contemporary dance,” is not to be confounded with the “self-figuration of an epoch,” since it concerns “a certain mutation that has happened in the choreographic field during the past 10 years” (i.e., roughly since the mid-1990s). This “mutation” results from the fact that choreographic works over the past decade and a...

Empire and Imperialism   Reference library

Heather Streets, John E. Kicza, John P. Cann, Wim van den Doel, Aaron D. Whelchel, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, G. N. Uzoigwe, Erik Grimmer-Solem, Kirk W. Larsen, and Christopher A. Conte

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World

...related to “empire,” “imperialism” refers to the ideologies held within the dominant polity that support and encourage the creation of empires. It is, in other words, the force behind empire that translates expansionist sentiment into action. “Imperialism” is frequently confounded with “colonialism,” but in fact the two terms are not synonymous. Rather, “colonialism” refers not to the driving ideology behind empire, but to the policies and practices set in motion within imperial territories in order to maintain order and to realize economic and social...

United States of America   Reference library

The Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality

...into which people could neatly be sorted. However, many scholars now consider gender and race as social constructions, based on social and political influences, rather than on biological characteristics (Irvine 1995 ; Simon 1996 ). Additionally, many research studies have confounded socioeconomic status with race. Shortcomings often encountered in sexuality research include the lack of historical context, cultural in-sensitivity, and generalizations or assumptions about gender (Burgess 1994 ). Various aspects of African-American women's sexuality are...