Wealth and Want:
Glossary

While most of the writings on this website are in familiar language, there are a few terms that were unfamiliar to me. I've created theme pages for many of them. Some of the words I find unfamiliar were common to 19th century audiences.  Others are terms with specific meanings in economics.  And some are unique to the Georgist view of the world -- words one wouldn't find in other writings.  In part, this website began as my search to understand some words whose meanings I had difficulty processing.  In some cases, simply seeing them in context is sufficient to deduce their meaning.

brigand -  bandit: an armed thief who is (usually) a member of a band

dogs-in-the-manger
Henry George: Thou Shalt Not Steal  (1887 speech)
But we do not propose to abolish poverty by dividing up wealth. We propose to abolish poverty by setting at work that vast army of men — estimated last year to amount in this country alone to one million — that vast army of men only anxious to create wealth, but who are now, by a system which permits dogs-in-the-manger to monopolize God’s bounty, deprived of the opportunity to toil.

ecotones -- zones of change of land use -- found in Mason Gaffney: Land as a Distinctive Factor of Production

Lion's Share The Lion went once a-hunting along with the Fox, the Jackal, and the Wolf. They hunted and they hunted till at last they surprised a Stag, and soon took its life. Then came the question how the spoil should be divided. "Quarter me this Stag," roared the Lion; so the other animals skinned it and cut it into four parts. Then the Lion took his stand in front of the carcass and pronounced judgment: The first quarter is for me in my capacity as King of Beasts; the second is mine as arbiter; another share comes to me for my part in the chase; and as for the fourth quarter, well, as for that, I should like to see which of you will dare to lay a paw upon it."

"Humph," grumbled the Fox as he walked away with his tail between his legs; but he spoke in a low growl: "You may share the labours of the great, but you will not share the spoil."

latifundiazation -
found in Mason Gaffney:  Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George (in The Corruption of Economics, London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1994)

seriatim  -- In a series; one after another.

subvention
found in: Gaffney: Canada's System of Revenue Sharing
Wordsmith defines subvention as: 1. a grant of financial aid or relief by a government or other official source; subsidy
2. a grant of financial support by a government or other official source for a scientific or cultural institution, organization, or program; endowment.

Upas tree --

• Socialists, Populists and charity mongers -- the people who would apply little remedies for a great evil are all "barking up the wrong tree." The upasof our civilization is our treatment of land. It is that which is converting even the march of invention into a blight. -- Henry George: Causes of Business Depression (1894)
• Millions of American children, of all creeds, classes, and conditions, daily gather beneath the wide-spreading branches and inhale the poisonous odors of this deadly upas.  --Edward McGlynn, A Speech Responding to Henry George
• "But although the sun shines ceaselessly, and man's labour follows him steadily in his course, the flow of blessings which such evolutions naturally produce is polluted and diverted by the influence of landlordism, which, like a upas tree, poisons the surrounding atmosphere, spreads desolation in the country, and crowds the town with vice, want, disease, misery, and crime, far beyond the power of churches, charities, hospitals, divorce courts, and police courts to cure. There is only one cure - “Cut it down: why cumbereth it the ground?” --  D. C. MacDonald's Preface to Ogilvie’s Essay on The Right of Property in Land, edited from the 1891 Edition of Birthright in Land, by George Morton. http://www.tipiglen.dircon.co.uk/ogprefce.html

  Remarks on the Poison Tree [the upas] of the Island of Java.  http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-gmall?id=GM1794
  

Usufruct -- this one has its own page!

Unearned Increment
found in: Churchill -- The Mother of All Monopolies