As I was mowing a small lawn the other day...
<parenthesis>
(its size matters, because it would have been silly to mow it boustrophedonically [that's 'up and down' to you],...<meta-parenthesis>
(Marvellous word, "boustrophedonical"; the bou- bit means "bull" [think of bovine]. So the picture behind the metaphor is of oxen ploughing a field. I've only ever seen it used with reference to dot matrix printers like the one built into my Amstrad word processor 30 years ago...<meta-meta-parenthesis>
(and I can date it because I used the Amstrad to write a novel entered for a competition for writers of under 40; I just slipped under the bar)
</meta-meta-parenthesis>...that have a printer head that prints one line from left to right and the next from right to left.
</meta-parenthesis>... so I went round and round)
</parenthesis>
...I wondered (again) what they called "clockwise" before clocks were invented: counter-widdershins?
And the word "widdershins" came up recently in that Christmas book I mentioned in a recent post:
A story needs an opponent, a threat if not a monster, someone for the hero or heroine to defeat. Every protagonist needs a wiþer-wengel.
Wiþer-wengel (adversary) comes from [HD: sic, and I'm profoundly unimpressed with this form of words; let's just say "related to"] wiþer (against, in opposition) and... wengel? Wengel doesn't appear on its own in the surviving Old English texts, so it's hard to say what it means (if anything). Wiþer is unrelated to modern English 'wither', to become dried up or shrivelled up - that comes from [HD: ahem?] the verb 'weather'. A piece of outdoor furniture can be 'weathered' from the sun and rain. You can 'weather' a storm or even a serious illness. It is from this weather-'wither' that we get withering stares and glances, pointed looks meant to make someone feel ashamed.
The 'wither' that comes [HD: Enough already!] from Old English, meaning 'hostile' or 'against', became obsolete after the Middle Ages, although it still appears as a prefix in Scots: a 'witherweight' is a counterbalancing weight, and 'withershins' (or 'widdershins') is the wrong way, anti-clockwise.
<mini-rant>
And while we're on the subject of "the wrong way", I wish people would agree that turning things clockwise is doing them up and turning things anti-clockwise is undoing them. This applies to screws, but also to twistee ties in the garden or the Christmas tree [undoing those things can be a nightmare], taps. and anything else where rotation relates to doing up/undoing; window locks are particularly inconsistent in this regard. Is it too much to ask...? (time for my medication).
</mini-rant>
I didn't know it was Scots. I guess my mother's vocabulary was influenced by her parents Archibald and Bertha; with the result that I regard words like "widdershins" and "outwith" as plain English.
Which brings us to "shall" (which sprang to mind because of the whither shall I wander? quote...
<tangent>
I wonder if gander ever rhymed with wander, or whether it's the sort of lame eye-rhyme that writers of nursery rhymes thought they could get away with because the little darlings wouldn't know any better. Hmmm..?
</tangent>
... but stayed there [in mind] because it was the answer to Tuesday's Wordle (on which I registered a PB, and stifled an unwarranted warm glow of 'achievement' when the app said "Magnificent". But then I thought
SHUT YOUR PATRONIZING MOUTH;
GETTING IT IN 2 IS DOWN TO LUCK
).
"Shall", as is often the case with words that are dying out, is the subject of many a prescriptive rule – the sort of shibboleths up with which younger users (and they're the ones that matter when it comes to usage trends) will not put. And it's those words (the moribund ones) that harbour exceptional pronunciations too; rather than learning and applying the rule ...
<rule>... people just stop usinng the word. The usage graph given in the Collins English Dictionary Online shows this:
Monosyllables spelt with the ending "-all" (like all, ball. call, fall, gall, hall, pall, small, spall, stall) have the sound /ɔ:l/. There are two exceptions: mall and shall, which typically have the sound /æl/. I say /mæl/ because that was a street name in the Ealing of my youth, and there are two (The Mall and Pall Mall) in London. But shopping malls (the most common habitat of the word in the 20th and 21st centuries) are usually /mɔ:lz/.
</rule>
After an explosion at the end of the 18th century it declined steadily over the next two centuries.
<wot-no-data>The picture with "mall" is less smooth but more dramatic:
It was a shame when I first started using these graphs (in 2012) that the data came to an end in 2008. Now it's just embarrassing.
</wot-no-data>
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