Question: Why is an unknown criminal suspect or unidentified body called John Doe or Jane Doe?
Answer: Because barristers hunted. That's the best guess here.
The term "John Doe" and the lesser known "Richard Roe" (which is still used by some lawyers) were invented in England several centuries ago. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1768.
As you know, "doe" is a female deer (if you forget this, think of Julie Andrews singing "Do-Re-Mi"). A "roe" is also a deer. A roe deer is a scrawny thing with funny antlers that lives in Europe and Asia.
So the barristers who invented the terms for describing unknown people in legal transactions were definitely deer-fixated. That's probably because they were of the social class that was out hunting all the time, says David Jost, senior lexicographer for the American Heritage Dictionary. You can imagine them standing around with falcons on their wrists, inventing new words.
The need for fictitious names in legal actions goes way back. The Romans referred to "Titius" and "Seius." The British played around for a while with the name "Goodtitle." That's it, just "Goodtitle." Not even "Lord Goodtitle" or anything. We would have voted for something like "Louie `the Nose' Goodtitle."
The Mailbag:
John D. of Winchester, Va., writes, "Why are valuable oil deposits always found in remote, godforsaken places, instead of - at least occasionally - being located in beautiful, desirable areas with nice people?"
Dear John: Oil is randomly distributed. There are oil wells in lovely valleys in the Rocky Mountains and in the Florida Keys. There are oil wells in downtown Los Angeles. Downtown L.A. certainly isn't remote. (Godforsaken, maybe, at least since the start of the O.J. Simpson trial.)
Another question is, why are there particularly huge reserves of oil in some parts of the world, like the Middle East?
The conventional wisdom would be that some places have the right kind of geologic structure - lots of "source rock," then porous reservoir rock on top of that and then an impermeable rock to seal the top of the oil field.
But the conventional view of oil and gas sometimes gets revised. Consider this: Some people think oil and gas are not "fossil" fuels. They say the stuff isn't made out of old plants and dead dinosaurs.
Thomas Gold, professor emeritus of astronomy at Cornell, promotes the theory that oil and gas are left over from the creation of the Earth. Hydrogen and carbon were compressed and heated to the point where they formed the hydrocarbons that make up oil and gas deposits.
He points out that there are hydrocarbon gases, such as methane, elsewhere in the solar system where there is no sign of life.
"Any mix of carbon and hydrogen at sufficiently high pressures and temperatures will in fact generate the series of hydrocarbons that we call gas and oil," Gold says.
We then spoke to someone who drills deep natural gas wells. Robert Hefner, owner of GHK Co., based in Oklahoma, says there's evidence that Gold is right. He has found gas at 31,000 feet below the surface and says that it has a pressure that indicates it has drifted up from even deeper regions.
If there's gas way, way down there, it raises the possibility that it's too deep to have come from the remnants of dinosaurs and plants. And that would mean the stuff you burn in your car is billions of years old. It's juice from the birth of the planet.
Harold M. of Hialeah, Fla., writes, "Would appreciate it if you could tell when and who developed the longitude and latitude formula."
Dear Harold: How about we recast the question: Why does everyone agree that 0 degrees latitude is in Greenwich, England?
It turns out that there was a big vote in 1884. The International Meridian Conference met in Washington, D.C., and by a tally of 22 to 1 the participating nations approved the Royal Greenwich Observatory as the site of the prime meridian. (We are not sure who the 1 was but are guessing it was France.)
The 1884 vote was triggered by the railroads. Every town had its own time. Railroad schedules made no sense. So the prime meridian was established during a flurry of standardization.
They chose Greenwich because 70 percent of the world's shipping already used Greenwich as the prime meridian. The observatory, founded in 1675, had been devoted to solving the problem of longitude. It got a head start, and no one could ever gain as much prestige in the longitude biz.
Latitude is easily discerned by sailors - you just look at the angle of the sun or the Pole Star above the horizon. The farther north you go, for example, the higher the Pole Star is in the sky. So the latitude system has been understood since ancient times.
But longitude is a different kettle of fish. It can be thought of as a measurement of time. The Earth turns 360 degrees in 24 hours, or 15 degrees an hour. So if you know the time at the prime meridian, and know the time where you are at any given moment, you can calculate WHERE you are relative to Greenwich, England.
You might say that longitude is one of the last remnants of the British Empire.