Jumping to conclusions

The other day I met a word that was new to me, in a brief  More or Less programme. The contributors to that discussion used the pronunciation /'sʌbɪtɑɪz/, which gave me no idea about what it might mean – which is "to perceive at a glance the number of items presented" to quote Collins.

The reason for this is, I'm tempted to suggest, plain ignorance. The word has nothing to do with sub (/sʌb/) meaning "under". It's not about estimating numbers under 4 (as they said on the radio just now...

<parenthesis> 
[Collins was more generous, allowing estimates of up to 7, but who's counting? {That was a rhetorical question.}] 
<parenthesis>

...) But anyone who has a smattering of Italian (subito) or French (subite) or indeed Latin (subitus), or anyone with a passing knowledge of musical tempo markings...

<rant>
Any half-literate speaker of English, for the LOVE OF MIKE! as my mother...

<meta-parenthesis>
(and she would have known, although like many a woman of her day she left school at 12 – well, her father was a dominie (Scottish for 'teacher') and she was 'only a girl'
</meta-parenthesis>

..whom saints preserve [and they better had] would have delicately put it. Why is it elitist to expect a modicum of education on the BBC?  But I digress...)
</rant>

... would  guess that it has something to do with doing a thing quickly. A pronunciation with the sound /u:/ in the first syllable would make the word much more readily understandable; but that pronunciation seems to be rare.

A Onelook search for subitize yields this:

 

Most of these have /ʌ/. Some have no indication of pronunciation, and one (which shall be nameless ) has a meaningless roll-your-own system in which the vowel is anyone's guess. Only Dictionary.com has an unequivocal /u:/. But the Collins entry could suggest what may have been going on in that More or Less programme.

The first version it gives is something that it chooses to call "British English" (for reasons  best known to the editors); and for this it gives the pronunciation /'sʌbɪtɑɪz/. But scroll down a bit and you see this:

So possibly the US authors of Making Numbers Count (who were being interviewed) have got the idea that the British way (the obscurantist /ʌ/ pronunciation) is best for this interview (on the World Service of the BBC); and they'll revert to saying /'su:bɪtɑɪz/ once they're back home. I doubt it though.  I imagine that the people who coined the word (which is rare, and  chiefly  used in the field of psychology) knew about the etymology and used the /u:/ pronunciation. 

Subsequently it became all the rage in educational circles (My Learning Springboard gives a taste of the breathless earnestness that advocates this "important math skill") and people who thought it had something to do with subtraction did their worst with the pronunciation. But the this-is-a-new-word.-Just-learn-it school, who care nothing for the derivation of words, is in the majority, and  I'm afraid the linguistic version of  Gresham's Law (which I've mentioned before) has won the day: the meaningless (and misleading) pronunciation has driven out the etymologically sensitive one, but the language as is is what we have to live with. (But I know what I know, and if ever I use the word I shall use the /u:/)

L'Envoi

Amid all the anniversary shenanigans last week (commemorating the Falklands War) I heard this BBC programme. Towards the end a local was saying how she couldn't understand the attitude of Argentinians ...

<inline-ps>
(hostile and belligerent – she used the term 'sabre-rattling')
<inline-ps>

...('It's a little bit exhausting' was the way she put it) as both the Falkland Islanders and the Argentinians were remnants of European colonial powers. This reminded me of a piece I wrote six years ago, when  I reflected on the French origins of the name used by the current Argentine Prime Minister, Alberto Fernandes, in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of their defeat a regañadientes (sort of 'with clenched teeth', but with a subtext of entitlement and smouldering resentment): 

'Las Malvinas fueron, son, y serán Argentinas'

(The Malvinas were are and will [always] be Argentina's)

But that name represents yet another European power, not English, not Spanish, but French:

In September 1763 Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville  ... set sail from St Malo on a voyage of discovery (as many ocean voyages were, at the time). In January 1764 he put in at an unclaimed group of islands, which – like so many explorers before and since – he named in an autocentric way (is that a word? Well it is now.) This is a theme I've visited before, here,)

He called the landing point Port Louis after the French king, and he named the islands after his point de départ: Les Îles Malouines. The islands were those known to Les Rozbifs as .... [but no, I know better than to spoon-feed my readers].

That's all. Now the green blade riseth; biomass reduction is the order of the day.

b

Update: 2022.04.20.11:35 – Added <inline-ps />

Update: 2022.04.20.15:35 – Clarified screengrab (links not live)

To Wordle or not to Wordle

You may have come across those shared grids that have begun to infiltrate the anti-social media. A picture being worth a thousand words, those 5x6 grids of squares of increasing verdure...

<parenthesis>
(which sounds inappropriately botanical; I just mean greenness, green being  the signifier of success – olive green for the right letter in the wrong place, and emerald green for the right letter in the right place)
<parenthesis>

... or 5x5, or 5x4, or 5x3, or even 5x2 (my PB^UPDATE, though someone interviewed on a fairly recent Newscast had got a first-time guess) say "look how clever I am" or, depending on your point of view, "Look how much time I've wasted", or "Look how sad I am, not waving but drowning in a sea of pointless guesswork."

But what's a winning strategy?

 

Ever since Sherlock Holmes told us, we've known that E is the commonest letter in English: "Elementary, my dear Watson"...

<parenthesis>

(which, in Conan Doyle's text, the great detective never said, although what happens in plays or on film or TV is anyone's guess)

</parenthesis>

.... Where would we be without E.? Lmntary my dar Watson. And Conan Doyle's source was presumably Samuel Morse's calculation:

Source

But look at the sample size – fewer than 110,000 letters, which, using the rule of thumb used in my publishing days (about 6 letters per word), amounts to fewer than 18,000 words. And that means that the balance is skewed towards whatever kind of text the "sets of printer's type" happened to include: if they were, say, recipe books, then words like boil and heat and teaspoon would be over-represented; it's hardly a representative sample.

As that Notre Dame page goes on to say, the problem of this tiny sample size is solved by using a dictionary as the source...

<parenthesis>
(and strangely, for a US seat of learning, they chose the OED  rather than say Webster's.)
</parenthesis>

See here for an explanation of the 3rd column

 

...with the result that, whereas Morse calculated that E was 24 times as common as Q, in the OED it is nearly 57 times more common.

More common in glossed words that is. Not content with this, real Wordle-nerds have calculated the relative frequencies of letters in 5-letter words...

<reservation>
Not that letter-frequency is anywhere near the whole story. What matters more is morphemes (word-building blocks, represented by groups of letters). To take a trivial example from a recent answer:

<example>
The target was CHUNK. By chance, my first guess ended CH. So I got two olive green (right letter, wrong place) squares. If I had been a devotee of the  "letter frequencies of  letters in 5-letter words" school, I'd have had to consider 4 possible alternative places for C AND 4 possible alternative places for H. But I imagine (if I were a betting man, I'd put money on it) that in any word... 

<inline-pps> 

(particularly in any short word; in composite words there are more opportunities for c to follow h; in spatchcock, for example, there's an -hc-, but 5-letter words don't allow for that sort of juxtaposition)

</inline-pps> 

...that includes both C and H, the odds are that they will fall together and in that order. So instead of the 4x4 set of possibilities, there were just 3; and among those 3, CH??? was by far the most probable.
</example>

Morphemes matter more than letters.
</reservation>

..so if that sort of thing floats your boat ...

<tangent subject="5-letter vessels">
CANOE, KETCH, SKIFF, SLOOP, YACHT...

<meta-tangent>
(incidentally, one of the few words that fit the pattern ??CH?; Onelook lists only 63 "common" words here, but a definition of common that includes words such as "zuche" and "elche" seems to me rather dubious.)
</meta-tangent>

</tangent>

... a Google search will lead you further down this rat-hole. And only wimps stop at a mere five letters;  there are more variants than most viruses.

But that's enough for me; and more than enough for now.

b

 

Update: 2022.04.15.15:40 – Added PS in red.

Update: 2022.04.10.17:20 – Added <inline-ps />

Update: 2023.06.04.17:25 – Added a few interesting solutions (where "interesting" is, as we used to say in the software engineering world, a signed variable.)

I've done it in 2 before
bu not after so inauspicious a start

A Christmas tree, and all bright green

1,2,3,4,5, and still bright green

Not so symmetrical
just frustratingly regular

And an epic fail

ning

Update: 2023.06.08.16:25 – Added PPPS.

PPPS A rather different five-letter based word game is this.

Update: 2023.08.18.19:45 – Added P⁴S.

No longer: this happened this morning:

The app, which comments on a successful guess, was rendered nearly wordless: 'Genius'. I'm not so sure. Maybe Someone was saying 'Ha! Thought you could kill another 10 minutes? Think again, sucker.'

What's in a name?

The answer, of course, is Intellectual Property Rights ("IPR" to friends), though Shakespeare didn't know that when he was writing Romeo and Juliet; so naïve; well, they were in those days.

When I started this blog – which is coming up to its tenth birthday, having started in  October 2012 – it was a source of some (admittedly pointless) satisfaction that in a Google search of Harmless Drudgery it came first in the list of results. It still does.

But if you search for Harmless (tout sec [that's French for that, no just that, ONE word for Pete's sake, give me strength] the top of the list is  a blog with the same title by Kory Stamper, author of Word by Word. And when I first noticed this I suspected some fancy SEO jiggery-pokery. Search Engine Optimization is a dark art that let's you steal a march on other less savvy web sites. I thought momentarily ...

<parenthesis>
(and I use that word in its relatively meaningful sense,  rather than  the execrable "in [not for] a moment" sense, which I fear will ultimately displace it; but over my dead body – a small delay which I imagine will be acceptable to the linguistic gods)
</parenthesis>

... that some arriviste (French for "carpet-bagger) had employed an SEO wonk to deprive me of my rightful primacy, Google-wise.

But there's nothing new under the sun. Another writer wrote a blog with the same title in 2007 (Lexicoblog); it seems that "Harmless Drudgery" is low-hanging fruit when it comes to naming a blog about language. What would Dr Johnson have thought (not that he could have)? Besides, my blog isn't exclusively about language; it was originally named to refer to work I was doing at the time. A lot of it is about language, but I think other bloggers have as much right to the name as I do, if not more.

But the topic of intellectual property cropped up in a recent edition of Past Forward which took as its point de départ (French for fons et origo) a recording of one of Cecil Sharp's main contributors to Folk Songs From Somerset: Gathered And Edited With Pianoforte Accompaniment, singing a song that one contributor regarded as paving the way not only for Vaughan Williams and Elgar  (sorry – no time to find the exact quote) but also the folk revival; (she mentioned Joan Baez and Bob Dylan (many of whose sources were English – though in that context I'd have mentioned English singers, like Martin Carthy, Bert Lloyd and Ewan McColl).

Cecil Sharp collected folk songs that had almost died out since the Industrial Revolution, arranged them for piano and had them sung in schools (in the days when cultural enrichment was still allowed in schools, before the National Curriculum put paid to all that nonsense), I was at school during those folk-singing years. I mentioned this a while ago here (in the context of the carol Joys Seven, which uses the same tune as The Lincolnshire Poacher):

<pre-script>
That's something they don't seem  to do in  Primary Schools any more  – communal singing of  what were known as "Folk Songs" before the Revival of  the late '50s–early '60s.. I remember at St Gregory's RC Primary School singing with gusto

When me and my companions were
    setting of a snare
'Twas then we spied a gamekeeper
For him we did not care
For we can wrestle and fight,
    me boys,
And jump o'er anywhere...

A one-time colleague of mine, who already played the piano and the violin, during her teacher-training was required to learn the guitar so that she could maintain eye-contact with her pupils. As a consequence of this sort of thinking, today's schoolchildren can sing Kumbaya but not Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill.
</pre-script>

I always thought that Cecil Sharp was an unmitigated Good Thing. But that programme opened my eyes to the Dark Side of what he did: gentrification of working class music, doing nice little arrangements suitable for the parlours of the bourgeoisie, copyrighted it and monetized it. And did the contributors get a royalty? Of course not. But the singer of the song that started so much got a concertina and a copy of the book (with the unintentionally ironic inscription Exchange is no robbery).

<for-further-study>
Who was  it who said 'There's nothing so easy as stealing a culture from people who don't  know they've got one'?
</for-further-study>

 There's more to be said, but not now; I'm off to the frozen north.

b