John Chadwick (21 May 1920 – 24 November 1998) was an English linguist and classical scholar who, with Michael Ventris, was most notable for the decipherment of Linear B.

Early life and education[link]

He was born in East Sheen, Richmond-upon-Thames, and educated at St Paul's School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and he served as an officer the Royal Navy's Special Branch during the Second World War.^[1] In 1942 he was transferred to intelligence duties in Alexandria, Egypt, and worked on breaking lower-level Italian naval codes.^[2] In 1944 he was transferred to Bletchley Park (“Station X”), learned Japanese, and worked on reading the encoded messages sent by the Japanese naval representatives in Stockholm and Berlin.^[2]

After the end of the war in 1945, he returned to his studies at Cambridge, graduating with First Class Honours in Classics Part II, with a distinction in his special subject, Linguistics.^[2]

While studying at Corpus Christi College, he attempted, with some of his fellow students, to use cryptographic methods to decipher the “Minoan Linear Script B”. They were already aware at the time of the work of Michael Ventris. They stopped working actively on the problem owing to a lack of published data from inscriptions.^[2]

In 1950 he published his first scholarly work, an edition of The Medical Works of Hippocrates, co-authored with his cousin, William Neville Mann, a distinguished physician.^[2][3] After finishing his degree, he joined the staff of the Oxford Latin Dictionary before beginning a Classics lectureship at Cambridge in 1952.^[2] That year he began working with Ventris on the progressive decipherment of Linear B, the two writing Documents in Mycenean Greek in 1956, following a controversial first paper three years earlier. Chadwick's philological ideas were applied to Ventris's initial theory that Linear B was an early form of Greek rather than another Mediterranean language.

After Ventris's death, Chadwick became the figurehead of the Linear B work, writing the accessible and popular book The Decipherment of Linear B in 1958 and revising Documents in Mycenean Greek in 1978.

He retired in 1984, by which time he had become the fourth (and last) Perceval Maitland Laurence Reader in Classics at Cambridge. He continued his scholarship until his death, being an active member of several international societies and writing numerous popular and academic articles. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy and of Downing College, Cambridge.^[1]

Family[link]

Chadwick married Joan Hill in 1947 and they had one son.^[1]

Publications[link]

• Ventris, Michael; Chadwick, John (1953) "Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives", The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 73, (1953), pp. 84–103.
• Chadwick, John (1958). The Decipherment of Linear B. Second edition (1990). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-39830-4. http://books.google.com/books?id=TD8YAlh_XHwC&printsec=frontcover. 
• Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World. Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-29037-6. 
• Ventris, Michael and Chadwick, John (1956). Documents in Mycenaean Greek. Second edition (1974). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-08558-6. 

See also[link]

• Mycenaean Greek, Mycenaean Greece
• Michael Ventris

References[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2012)

"The Man" is a slang phrase that may refer to the government or to some other authority in a position of power. In addition to this derogatory connotation, it may also serve as a term of respect and praise.

The phrase "the Man is keeping me down" is commonly used to describe oppression. The phrase "stick it to the Man" encourages resistance to authority, and essentially means "fight back" or "resist", either openly or via sabotage.^[1]

History[link]

The earliest recorded use^{[citation needed]} of the term "the Man" in the American sense dates back to a letter written by a young Alexander Hamilton in September 1772, when he was 15. In a letter to his father James Hamilton, published in the Royal Dutch-American Gazette, he described the response of the Dutch governor of St. Croix to a hurricane that raked that island on August 31, 1772. "Our General has issued several very salutary and humane regulations and both in his publick and private measures, has shewn himself the Man." ^{[2][dubious – discuss]} In the Southern U.S. states, the phrase came to be applied to any man or any group in a position of authority, or to authority in the abstract. From about the 1950s the phrase was also an underworld code word for police, the warden of a prison or other law enforcement or penal authorities.

It was also used as a term for a drug dealer in the 1950s and 1960s and can be seen in such media as Curtis Mayfield's "No Thing On Me", William Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch, and in the Velvet Underground song "I'm Waiting for the Man", in which Lou Reed sings about going to Uptown Manhattan, specifically Lexington Avenue and 125th Street, to buy heroin.

The use of this term was expanded to counterculture groups and their battles against authority, such as the Yippies, which, according to a May 19, 1969 article in U.S. News and World Report, had the "avowed aim ... to destroy 'The Man', their term for the present system of government". The term eventually found its way into humorous usage, such as in a December 1979 motorcycle ad from the magazine Easyriders which featured the tagline, "California residents: Add 6% sales tax for The Man."

In present day, the phrase has been popularized in commercials and cinema, featuring particularly prominently as a recurring motif in the 2003 film School of Rock.^[3][4][5][6]

Use as praise[link]

The term has also been used as an approbation or form of praise. This may refer to the recipient's status as the leader or authority within a particular context, or it might be assumed to be a shortened form of a phrase like "He is the man (who is in charge)." One example of this usage dates to 1879 when Otto von Bismarck commented, referring to Benjamin Disraeli's pre-eminent position at the Congress of Berlin, "The old Jew, he is the man."^{[7][dubious – discuss]}

In more modern usage, it can be a superlative compliment ("you da man!") indicating that the subject is currently standing out amongst his peers even though they have no special designation or rank, such as a basketball player who is performing better than the other players on the court. It can also be used as a genuine compliment with an implied, slightly exaggerated or sarcastic tone, usually indicating that the person has indeed impressed the speaker but by doing something relatively trivial.

See also[link]

• Absentee landlord
• Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
• New World Order (conspiracy theory)
• Ruling class
• The Establishment
• Power elite
• Corrections officer
• YTMND

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Lighter, J.E. (Ed.). (1997). Random House Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Random House.

Mark Calvert (born September 29, 1956) was a pitcher in Major League Baseball. He played for the San Francisco Giants.^[1]

Calvert attended East Central HS in Tulsa before attending Tulsa University and playing baseball.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Career statistics and player information from Baseball-Reference

This biographical article relating to an American baseball pitcher born in the 1950s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e