What people forget about the 90s was the absolute tonal whiplash that seemed to occur every other week. From hair metal to gangsta rap to grunge to neo-swing to post-grunge to nu-metal in roughly eight years (91-99) sounds like a normal Tuesday in today’s post-genre streaming era. But back then it was weird1.
For myself and my crew, we went from Doc Martens and flannel under our caps and gowns in 1993 to dressing cas2, but you know, cool for a New Year’s Eve swing show by Royal Crown Revue in 1997. Whiplash indeed. And somewhere in the middle of all that, all those classic crooners became cool again.
All of which is a very long way of saying that I heard the Sex Pistol’s cover of My Way long before I heard Sinatra’s and when I did hear Old Blue Eyes, I suddenly got it. This is what cool was for a long, long time. And if Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board, was the leader, then his right hand man, the Brad Pitt to Sinatra’s George Clooney3 was none other than Dean Martin.
One pivotal Gap commercial and a dozen years later, when YouTube became the place to see every clip of every old t.v. show ever, I went down the rabbit hole watching Dean Martin on 60s t.v. He was cool and funny and charming, but also sexist, racist, classist, and so pickled in booze it’s amazing he could talk at all. No wonder Sinatra loved him.
Great. Cool. For a brief moment in time, you measured cool against the gin-soaked yardstick of Dean Martin. So what?
The point is, last issue we talked about chair as a title. Well, dean is also a title. It also happens to be a name. But do they come from the same place? Short answer: no, no they don’t.
So now, 300 words into this week’s essay, let’s get into it.
Let’s start with two very different definitions of Dean, the title, from Merriam-Webster:
the head of the chapter of a collegiate or cathedral church
and
the head of a division, faculty, college, or school of a university
While these might seem disparate and unrelated, they make a lot more sense when you remember that most universities began as churches of one stripe or another. Or, as Etymonline puts it:
early 14c., an ecclesiastical title, etymologically "head of a group of ten,”…"president of a faculty or department in a university" is by 1520s (in Anglo-Latin from late 13c.).
In other words, we start with a word that means group of ten and decide that that is a good word for someone in charge of a small group of church scholars. As academic scholarship moves from purely religious institutions into secular ones, the title moves with it becoming the word we know in modern Academia.
And what does this have to do with Dean Martin? Not a single damn thing. See, the name Dean, especially as a first name comes from an entirely separate branch of the English language. In fact, not only does the title stem from a different source than the name, Dean as-first-name comes from a different source than Dean as-last-name. Freaking English, amiright?
Which brings us to the onomastic4 tangle that is Dean as a surname, per Ancestry.com:
English: topographic name from Middle English dene ‘valley’ (Old English denu) or a habitational name from any of several places in various parts of England
While Dean as a first name comes from either the original title or the toponymic5 surname through anthroponymic transposition, i.e. the way in which surnames shift and become first or middle names, usually because they sound good, they hold some specific meaning for someone or something, or because, did I mention that they sound good?
And all this fascinates me especially because Dean Martin’s name wasn’t even Dean but Dino6. Only Dino is an Italian name meaning either “little sword” or “little bear.” Go figure. Martin took Dean as a stage name early in his career in order to sound less ethnic. (Read: so he wouldn’t be kicked out of the club just for having an Italian-sounding name.)
What’s interesting here is that one of the reasons titles make the shift to names is that it confers a bit of prestige on the person thus named. Think of names like Baron, Earl, Justice, or even Judge. Now, whether Dean, as a first name actually comes from the title or from the Old English word for valley may be up to the individual, but the relevance and prestige of Dean as a title is unquestionable.
Dean, as a title, is startlingly relevant in modern Academia. It marks the transition from teacher to manager. In other words, if Chair is the last stop on the teacher’s ladder, Dean is the first rung on the next ladder up, where there is a lot less classroom time and a lot more time spent in budget meetings and admin duties.
Most importantly, not to bury the lede, it’s a position prone to over-reach and to expansion. In other words, an increase in the number of deans at a university is a symptom of bloat and bureaucracy, often at the expense of full professorships.
So, while in pop culture, Dean might indicate a certain swagger and boozy charm, in academia, too many deans indicates a sober expansion of academic rot. And you can drink to that.
Stay curious,
Joel
You had conversations about how you listened to a little bit of everything on the regular because, while it was true, it was true for everyone just a little bit differently.
That’s casual to you.
Statistically, 98% of you think I’ve committed some kind of blasphemy by comparing 60s cool to 90s cool as if the latter were not merely an echo of the former.
Relating to the study and history of names you dirty, dirty little monkey.
Big, fancy linguistic term that means - name taken from a place or feature of the landscape
Yeah, I want to read it as dai-noh too.