Nascent, adolescent, dehiscent, and crepuscular

Nearly eight years ago here in the first months of this blog (when this blog was nascent [before  its adolescence and – some would say – senescence]) I first visited the idea of inchoative infixes. Etymonline skates over them, rather missing the point, I would suggest, by calling -escent a suffix...

<weasel-words>
(in case anyone actually bothers to follow that link, I'd better admit that Etymonline doesn't actually use the word "suffix"; but it does call -escent a "word-forming element", showing a cavalier disregard for Occam's razor and ignoring all the -asc, -isc, and -usc- cases hinted at in my subject line.

<FFS> 

<order-order scurrility-quotient="0"> 

And no, the  S doesn't  stand for "sake". FFS means "For Further Study". 

</order-order> 

There may well be an -osc- word to complete the picture, but I can't think of it off-hand. Maybe "osculate" is all about puckering up before you O someone. Or "proboscis"...? But what's starting or growing about a proboscis, except in a special case such as Pinocchio? (That's not a serious suggestion, although some research into whatever preceded Latin might be interesting.... Probably not though.)
</FFS>

...What Latin did with an inchoative infix was take a verb like florere (="to flower") and add an  -esc-   before the ending to make it mean "start flowering"/"burst into flower": florescere. 

<road-not-followed> 

(Which, incidentally, is where our verb "flourish" comes from [ultimately].) 

</road-not-followed> 

And while I'm in the realms of full disclosure, I should admit that experts say infixation only happened with -esc- and -isc-; I'm not so sure, although those two infixes are by far the most common.
</weasel-words>

But this coining of new inchoative words by using an infix was not what linguists call "a productive mechanism" in the forming of Romance languages; they simply took the verb form and did what suited their needs. As I wrote in  that old post

In fact Elcock, in The Romance Languages says 'of all the innovations in the active verb of Vulgar Latin, perhaps the most noteworthy is the extension of the -ESC/ISC infix'...[which was] more influential as a basis for the formation of Romance language verbs [Fr.  finissons/finissez/finissent/etc from  finir, etc] – where there is no sense of 'inchoateness', and the infix just introduces this 'regular irregularity' to French -ir verbs;... 

<INLINE_PS> 

This one took me a while to work out after eight years. I suppose readers at the time just dismissed it as further evidence of a confused mind. What I meant by "regular irregularity" was just that "-ss-" suddenly appears from nowhere in the new verb paradigm. 

<INLINE_PS>

...in Spanish and Portuguese they didn't use it as an infix at all, and used -ESCERE as a rather long suffix. to create verbs such a aparecer – 'appear' – presumably distantly related to Latin aperire   'to open' (as in French, careful readers will notice that it happens only to –IRE verbs). 

And this all started with a harmless reflection on the word "opalescent".  Like "fluorescent" and "iridescent"  the idea of inchoateness (="beginning/becoming", roughly) is here only in the sense that the image is always becoming something else. It is, to use a word coined by the wearer of the opal in question many years ago, sprickly. 

b

 

 

PS A chance observation. There exists in English the word flatty. Its primary meaning (among several) is a sort of shoe:

But it's not that common a word. Collins gives this usage graph:

It was quite popular (with some meaning) in the eighteenth century, went downhill in the nineteenth, and has been next to moribund since then (but not so moribund as to escape my attention: I first met it when such footwear was prescribed for my oldest sister when she played a pirate in HMS Pinafore).

Now good old M&S  has resurrected it, and not without effrontery they have even slapped a trademark on it. Flatties^TM  are escalopes of chicken tenderized/marinaded in various ways. They are quite pleasant to eat; I'm not sure what makes them trademarkable though.

 

And this is not the first time a shoe name has been used to refer to a foodstuff. In 1982 "a baker in Adria, province of Rovigo, Veneto, Italy [created them]  in response to the popularity of French baguettes", says Wikipedia. Whereas the French called their sort of bread "drumsticks" (which takes us in a coincidental circle back to chickens) he called his new loaf a ciabatta (which means slipper). And don't talk to me about choux buns [Bou-boum]

 

But there is an ongoing biomass crisis in the garden that I must attend to. 

 

b

To his coy mistress

The idea for this  post has been bubbling away on the back-burner for some time, but something  struck me today – or more probably the day before yesterday by the time I hit Publish – that has brought it to the fore.  And "Something" is an appropriate choice of words, as it relates to the song Something's Coming at the beginning of West Side Story; specifically the introductory words, when Tony's still stacking bottles of pop ...

Could be,

Who knows?

... before deciding to sing.  Each ...

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Correction: only the second – I misremembered.

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of these lines includes a tritone (mentioned before here with this note:

<autobiographical_note>
(bane of a child violinist's life, especially in the key of Bb if memory serves*, not that I stuck at it for more than a year or two; couldn't stand the noise) 

<footnote repositioning-rationale="for 2020 post"> 

*  Close, but no cigar. I was thinking of the key of F major  (which involves a tritone stretch on the A string. (It all comes flooding back: An inch boy, an inch. Don't you know what an INCH looks like? My teacher, a dreadful old woman, was a fan of neither Galileo ... 

<clarification>  

(the father, that is, though doubtlesss the son "helped" with his father‘s experiments on string lengths and pitch) 

</clarification>

...nor Pythagoras.) 

</footnote> 

</autobiographical_note>

...).

In the later song Maria (and Maria transpires to be that something)  the same tritone is there, but spelt differently (it's a rising diminished fifth this time, rather than a falling  augmented fourth). Bernstein is telling the audience something, and it's only taken me sixty-odd years ...

<autobiographical_note>
The film (which the older of my brothers saw in the West End) premiered in 1961, but I heard the original Broadway cast recording in the late '50s.
</autobiographical_note>

...to notice it. I wrote "later song Maria", though Something‘s Coming was an afterthought (as explained here), so Bernstein knew de antemano as they say in Spanish...,

<tangent>
And there's another thing that I've no time to pursue: calques, or "loan translations". Which came first, de antemano or beforehand? ante = before, and mano = hand (where those "=" signs have a fairly loose sense of equivalence).
</tangent>

...what the "Something" was, and what it would lead to – the song Cool (after the rumble) opens with a tritone. I'm sure there are many more, underlining the story; I just haven't noticed them yet.

All of which, belatedly, brings me to the order of the day – theme tunes that hold hidden musical messages. I notice these from time to time. The four that have stuck in my mind are:

• Mr Bean                               
  This is not a hidden message in the music, so much as words hiding in plain sight, cloaked by the music accompanying them. Howard Goodall has used a musical setting reminiscent of the many other settings of (Christ's) Ecce homo. It's plaintive and reflective. But listen to the words:  
  
  Ecce homo qui est faba 
  ("Behold the man who is Bean")
  

  <tangent>
  If you have time to kill, dip into the comments on that YouTube clip and another hymn beloved of Richard Curtis will spring to mind: "Forgive our foolish ways".
  </tangent>

• Mission Impossible             
  This theme music has a more clear message, using Morse code. The rhythm spells out dash dash dot dot ...
  

  <autobiographical_note>
  Like most English speakers I don't know much Morse code apart from S and O (Because of "SOS"), H (because it's so unwieldy: dot dot dot dot)), and RK (which appealed to me because of their symmetry – dot-dash-dot, dash-dot-dash [which I noticed only because they're my initials])
  </autobiographical_note>

  ..."IM". The idea of hiding Morse in music goes one step further in the theme music to the TV series Morse, which spells out not only the title character's name but also (in incidental music) clues to the action.
   
• Charlie Wilson's War           
  In this film, based on a true story (of a US politician lobbying [and more] to equip the Mujahideen in their struggle against the Russians [or was it Soviets? – one forgets so much...].), the retaliation of the Mujahideen purifying their country...
  

  <inline_ps>
  (casting out the Infidel)
  </inline_ps>

  was accompanied by some strangely familiar music. After a while I recognized it: it was an up-tempo version of Handel's And He Shall Purify.
  
  
• Sherlock Holmes                
  When the steam launch is passing the Palace of Westminster ...
  

  <inline_ppps>
  (in the 2009 Robert Downey Junior film)
  </inline_ppps>

  ...the music has a bass line that chimes out the Westminster jingle (the one that everyone knows and most people – including me – can't reproduce).

No time for more. I'm sure there's much more to notice,

Had I but world enough and time

(but this particular coy mistress [music] is one that I've sadly not pursued [with any vigour]).

Ho hum.

b

Update: 2021.10.15.11.35 – Added  <inline_ps />.

Update: 2021.10.18.15.5 – Added  <inline_pps /> and <inline_ppps />.