Bibliographic record
Abstract
JUST PAST the half-way point in Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus the sailor Knowles entertains his fellow-seamen with an account of collective refusal to work on the part of crew:I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded ship - leastways she weren't overloaded, only fatherly old gentleman with white beard and an umbreller came along the quay and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be drownded in winter just for the sake of few pounds more for the owner - he said. Nearly cried over them - he did; and he had square mainsail coat and gaff-topsail hat too - all proper. So they chaps they said they wouldn't go to be drownded in winter - depending upon that 'ere Plimsoll man to see 'em through the court. They thought to have bloomin' lark and two or three days' spree. And the beak giv' 'em six weeks - coss the ship wasn't overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn't. There wasn't one overloaded ship on Penarth Dock at all. 'Pears that old he was only on pay and allowance from some kind people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn't see no further than the length of his umbreller. (1997: 79-80)This passage is quoted from Allan Simmons's 1997 Dent-Everyman Centennial Edition of the novella, which, like the 1897 serial version that it uses as copy text, is divided into eight chapters. Editions based on the various book editions of the work are divided into five. Knowles's speech thus occurs in Chapter 6 of Simmons's edition, in Chapter 4 of Dent's Collected Edition, the copy-text for Jacques Berthoud's 1984 Oxford World's Classics Edition, and of the 1921 Heinemann Collected Edition that Robert Kimbrough's 1979 Norton Critical Edition takes as its copy-text. Simmons glosses in this passage as Sly, knowing person. In his 1984 World's Classics Edition, however, Jacques Berthoud glosses the same word as (US) contemptuous term for negro (abbreviation of raccoon) (187). Racoon is the British spelling, raccoon the American.The OED provides the following definitions of the word when applied to persons:a. A nickname for member of the old Whig party of the United States, which at one time had the racoon as an emblem.b. A sly, knowing fellow; fellow,The second definition cites occurrences from 1860, 1870, and 1881. In addition to these meanings, the dictionary confirms that the word may also function as shortened form of racoon, that a gone coon can be a person or thing that is done for, and that the term can be used attributively as in such terms as coon-hunting. This does not mention that the term can be used as racial slur. But Eric Partridge's, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English provides the following gloss:1. A man, esp. if sly and shrewd. Ex. US, anglicised by Punch in 1860. 2. A Negro: ex US (-1870), anglicised ca. 1890. Ex racoon. 3. Hence, in Aus. coll., an Aboriginal: since ca. 1920.Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang confirms the double meaning:1. [derog.] A Negro. 1887 [citing H. L. Mencken from the 1944 Dictionary of American English as source for the term's derivation: Originally from the name of the animal (racoon) which Southern Negroes were supposed to enjoy hunting and eating.']2. A stupid person; one who can be swayed easily; strong or brutal man with little brains. From mispronunciation of 'goon'.An example of the word in British-raised Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush; Qr, Liife in Canada (1852) seems to associate it more with stupidity and stubbornness than slyness or shrewdness:Father might have had the pick of the township, quoth Uncle Joe; but the old preferred that sup of good water to the site of town. Well, I guess it's seldom I trouble the spring; and whenever I step that way to water the horses, I think what tarnation fool the old one was, to throw away such chance of making his fortune, for such cold lap. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".