{"id":4599,"date":"2019-11-13T23:00:23","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T23:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/?p=4599"},"modified":"2019-11-14T04:01:09","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T04:01:09","slug":"word-of-the-day-gambit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/2019\/11\/13\/word-of-the-day-gambit\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Day: Gambit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mirriam-Webster\u2019s Word of the Day today is gambit<\/em>, which originally is a term in\nchess. Mirriam-Webster says, \u201cIn 1656, a chess handbook was published that was\nsaid to have almost a hundred illustrated gambetts. That early spelling of\ngambit is close to the Italian word gambetto<\/em>,\nfrom which it is derived. Gambetto<\/em>,\nwhich is from gamba<\/em>, meaning \u2018leg,\u2019\nwas used for an act of tripping\u2014especially one that gave an advantage, as in\nwrestling. The original chess gambit is an opening in which a bishop’s pawn is\nsacrificed to gain some advantage, but the name is now applied to many other\nchess openings. After being pinned down to chess for years, gambit<\/em> finally broke free of the hold\nand showed itself to be a legitimate contender in the English language by\nweighing in with other meanings.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other meanings, then, include \u201ca remark intended to start a\nconversation or make a telling point,\u201d or a \u201ctopic,\u201d and \u201ca calculated move\u201d or\n\u201cstratagem.\u201d The last definition is the one most people use today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On this date in the year 1002, King \u00c6thelred II of England ordered\nthe massacre of Danish men in England. \u00c6thelred was the king of England from\n978, when he was 12 years old, until his death in 1016. He was the successor to\nhis older half brother, Edward the Martyr, who was assassinated by supporters\nof \u00c6thelred;\nactually, it was probably his mother, \u00c6lfthryth, who orchestrated the murder of\nEdward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During \u00c6thelred\u2019s reign, the English faced renewed problems\nfrom the Danes. The Danes had been a significant part of England since around\n865. Following about 60 years of raids on the English coast, the Danes finally\nlanded an army to try to take possession of England. They landed in East Anglia\nunder the leadership of two of the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok, the legendary\nViking. The Danes took over almost half of England, and fighting continued for\ndecades. But in addition to the fighting there were long periods of peace between\nthe two groups. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following the Battle of Maldon in 991, a loss for the\nEnglish, \u00c6thelred agreed to pay Danegeld\u2014tribute to the Danes. As an aside, the\nBattle of Maldon is also the name of a famous Old English poem, one that gives\nus the famous lines \u201c”Hige sceal \u00fee heardra,  heorte \u00fee cenre,  mod sceal \u00fee mare, \u00fee ure m\u00e6gen lytla\u00f0\u201d [\u201cPurpose\nshall be the firmer, heart the keener, courage shall be the more, as our might\nlessens\u201d]. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a poem entitled \u201cThe Homecoming of Beorhtnoth\nBeorhthelm’s Son\u201d which was inspired by the Old English \u201cBattle of Maldon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1002, \u00c6thelred made a treaty with Duke Richard of\nNormandy, a deal which included \u00c6thelred\u2019s marrying Richard\u2019s daughter, Emma.\nPerhaps feeling strengthened by his treaty with Richard, \u00c6thelred decided to\nget back some of his own against the Danes. So he announced that the English\nwere to find all the Danish men they could and kill them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, the English killed more than just the men. In Oxford,\nthe Danish women and children took sanctuary in the local church, so the\nEnglish burnt the church down. Unfortunately for \u00c6thelred, one of the women\nkilled in Oxford was Gunnhild, the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard. Sweyn was not\npleased, and Danish attacks on England increased. Swein actually forced \u00c6thelred\nto flee to England, and he took over as king of England for a couple of years,\nfrom about 1013 until his death the next year. Upon Sweyn\u2019s death, \u00c6thelred\nreturned and ruled for two more years, but after his death in 1016, his\nsuccessor was Sweyn\u2019s son, Cnut became the ruler of England. He subjugated\nScotland the next year, and in 1018 he ascended to the throne of Denmark,\nmaking him the king of three nations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00c6thelred is known today as \u00c6thelred the Unready. It makes\nhim sound like someone who just wasn\u2019t ready for something, perhaps for ruling,\nperhaps for the Danish invasions\u2014it\u2019s hard to say. But the nickname doesn\u2019t\nreally have anything to do with readiness. His Old English name, \u00c6\u00feelr\u00e6d, <\/em>means well advised. But his\nnickname is actually unr\u00e6d<\/em>, meaning poorly advised. This notion of poor\nadvice is a common theme through medieval and Renaissance Europe. The idea was that\nyou didn\u2019t want to criticize the king, who was divinely appointed, so you\ncriticized his advisors. Notable kings of England who suffered from poor advice\ninclude Edward II and Richard II, both of whom were eventually deposed by\nothers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\ntheme continues today. Oftentimes leaders of various types\u2014in politics, in\nbusiness, in sports, and even in academia\u2014blame their relative lack of success\non poor advisors. Think of how often a head coach in sports fires the coaches\nunderneath him or her as an attempt to keep their own job. Sometimes leaders\neven try to keep their distance from difficult decisions or activities in order\nto maintain plausible deniability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But\nthe truth is that the leader of an organization is always, ultimately, the one\nresponsible for the poor decisions made by himself or herself or by those\nbeneath them. A leader who blames his or her underlings for the failures of the\norganization are engaging in a gambit that will prove to be no more successful\nthan \u00c6\u00feelr\u00e6d Unr\u00e6d\u2019s<\/em> decision to kill all the Danes on St. Brice\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mirriam-Webster\u2019s Word of the Day today is gambit, which originally is a term in chess. Mirriam-Webster says, \u201cIn 1656, a chess handbook was published that was said to have almost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4600,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4601,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4599\/revisions\/4601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}