WHAT sort of boeuf?

The present state of the kitchen (with two saucepans fresh from the oven) reminds me of this piece, which I wrote two years ago – almost to the day:

<pre-script> 

On the last Saturday in November (that's  how long I've been worrying at this bit of linguistic gristle) an article in The Times mentioned a reader who had been working away at an anagram for over 3 years. My mail to the Feedback column fell on stony ground, but here it is:

Leigh Carter‘s three-and-a-half year computer-assisted anagram search may have used tools that incorporated the "rule" my French master taught me more than 60 years ago: that cookery words that are based on a name are preceded by an implicit  "à la mode" and are therefore feminine - bourguignonne, mayonnaise... and dauphinoise.

However, I have often reflected, as a student of philology, that rules like this are usually the sign of a linguistic change in progress; I discuss a fascinating case here (about an early Roman Latin master's list of rules proscribing common errors). My most recent dictionary (Concise OED, 2013) lists dauphinois as a headword and relegates dauphinoise to a parenthetical "(also ...)". But Onelook (a web-based finder of dictionary entries) finds only one entry - Oxford's. (In contrast, it finds four - including Oxford's) for dauphinois. 

</pre-script> 

There my main area of concern (linguistic concern, that is  – I wouldn't like anyone to think I  get properly upset about stuff like this; what kind of nutter do you take me for?) was the ending of dauphinois/e. But that old post went on:  

<pre-script> 

[T]his does not apply only to dauphinois, for which Onelook finds only one entry. In the case of bourguignon (which I vainly, and – let's face – it mistakenly) whinged about here:

... (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette, Bourgignon/Bourguignonne... 

<mini-rant status="stillborn">
No, I won't but... If people would just pronounce the /n/ when they say Bœuf Bourguignonne.  PLEASE.
</mini-rant> 

... etc.)

The fight in defence of the rectitude of bourguignonne (according to the "B-G rule" [B-G being the French master who taught me it]) ...

<2022-afterthought>
(and rather neatly it repeats the initials not only of M. Baring-Gould but also of the first two syllables of the word in question)
</2022-afterthought>

...has been well and truly lost. Google finds 

About 9,010,000 results for boeuf bourguignon 

but only 

About 311,000 results for boeuf bourguignonne.

And the ...gnon version really has the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Teachers laying down rules are a sure sign that language is on the move.

</pre-script> 

That last sentence is worth underlining. In  the second paragraph of that unpublished letter, where I refer to a Latin teacher (or tourist guide, or whoever it was that compiled a list of common mistakes and the "correct" version) I touch on one of the main sources of information of use to students of the history of languages: contemporary advice about "correct" ways of talking. In What's BALD about a bat? I discuss the warning not to say CALVA SORICEM but rather VESPERTILIONEM (the source of our pipistrelle...

A pipistrelle bat (far from bald)

...) But the mistake (which seems to be based on a pre-existing underlying local word (the fancy word is "substrate") that meant owl; so that CALVA SORICEM, meaning 'owl-mouse' (making much more sense than 'bald-mouse', which it's manifestly not), is the source of the standard French chauve souris.

That's all for now.

b

 

OCR schmOCR

A letter to this month's CAM started:

I’d like to nominate CAM 96 for an ‘understatement of the year’ award. On page 26, Professor Suchitra Sebastian is quoted as saying a milligram of these materials contains 10^²³ electrons

After a certain amount of egg-sucking advice (presumably aimed at grandmothers who don't know what  10²³ means) the writer went on to point out that the editor had made a mistake:

The editor apparently read it as 1,023 and put “more than a thousand”, but a hundred sextillion is indeed more than a thousand – in fact it is a hundred quintillion times as much.

<autobiographical-note>
To save time I keep these magazines (and others, to MrsK's dismay) until the following number comes. Then I read the letters in the latest one, to find out which articles in the old one are worth reading.
</autobiographical-note>

The letter confused me: the quoted text said 10²³, and the editor had presumably seen that; so where was the mistake? When I looked at last month's CAM it became clear. Someone had pulled out a bit of text, summarized it, and set it in a larger font – a pull-out quote. I would expect a sub-editor to do that; hence my confusion. Though in a small office who knows what depths an editor must stoop to?

The text was this:

We understand how a single electron behaves, but a milligram of these materials contains 10²³ electrons and every one of them is interacting with every other one. It is similar to the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of swallows, where collectively they shape-shift and a new form emerges. That potential for completely unimagined forms of physics to emerge is what makes it so exciting.

The pull-out quote was this: 

We understand how a single electron behaves, but a milligram of these materials contains more than a thousand every one interacting with every other one...

But the editor (or whoever) was only partly to blame, as I found when I took a photo of the article, and got Google Lens to copy the text. Because of the limitations of the (otherwise amazingly accurate) OCR transcription, the superscript ²³ was read as 23 making the figure 1023. When working against the clock it would be easy not to stop and think 'Hey, that doesn't make sense; they're jolly small...'. It doesn't take an innumerate arts graduate (the sort of ignoramus who needs to be told that 10²³  "is read as ‘ten to the twenty three’ ", as the letter-writer helpfully explains) to make that sort of slip.

But there is a nit to be picked, one I almost missed, as the image is so descriptive:

...similar to the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of swallows

A beautiful and persuasive image; except that the swallows should have been starlings, the only birds that behave like this, according to this website:

Starlings

Starling murmuration is a fascinating natural phenomenon that is a wonder to behold. The beautiful sight of them flocking and flying in perfect formation is something you don’t forget in a hurry once you’ve seen it, but arguably, the most interesting fact about murmuration is that starlings are the only species of birds who do it. 

How's that for nit-picking? 

In passing

Radio 3's 'Composer of the Week' last week  was César Franck. I was listening ...

<tangent>
Among the many things I dislike about BBC Sounds is that it incontinently splurges out whole series at one swell foop, cluttering up the view of that week's listening, with the result that I oftem find myself listening to live radio and have to change channels when something comes up on the broadcast schedule that I've already heard asynchronously. (The number of Christmas Specials I've already heard is ridiculous.)

The answer, of courese, is to use another app with a more manageable interface – but that involves the converse problem: topical shows become available a month after broadcast.
</tangent>

...on Friday, and learnt that Franck was hurt in a traffic accident involving "a horse-drawn bus". For a moment I was surprised that the presenter resisted the temptation to point out that this sort of carriage with benches was called a char-à-bancs, the source of the English "charabanc" (with the French banc becoming "bang"  – a different [more English] sort of nasal a)...

<tangent>

On the subject of banks, a guest on a recent episode of Tim Harford's Understand the Econmy pointed out that banks (the financial sort) took their name from an obvious (now I think of it) physical object. Those money-lenders  in Lombardy (or wherever) used to offer their services in the open air, on benches.

</tangent>

...Then I realized that the presenter probably didn't know, if he read the report in translation.

Tha's all for today.

b

How not talk to a racist

Nearly five years ago, here, I wrote about the (new to me at the time) concept of pedigree collapse.

...the closer the consanguinity, the fewer the  maternal great grandparents. This pedigree shows how 1st cousins marrying share only three maternal great grandparents. 

When 1st Cousins M and F Marry

There is a corollary to this, which is hard to credit and seems counter-intuitive, but which Adam Rutherford explained in last Sunday's Private Passions: because of pedigree collapse, if you go back far enough, the family trees criss-cross so much that everyone living now is descended from everyone living then. For people of broadly European heritage, this point is about 1000 AD. So everyone in that population is descended from Charlemagne. (But don't get too cocky; we're also descended from Ivan the Terrrible.)

So the answer to William Wilberforce's question (for those of the XY persuasion, at least) is "Yes. I am a man and a brother."

Dr Rutherford went on to recount the story of a taxi driver who had asked him where he was from; he said he was born in Ipswich but now lived in Dulwich. This didn't satisfy the driver, who asked 'But where are you really from?'

<background>

In his book How to Argue with a Racist, Adam Rutherford writes:

I am mixed race, or dual heritage, or biracial. Half-caste is a term which has fallen out of favour, but for much of my life that is how many have described me, some out of habit, occasionally in a dismissive way. I am often asked where I am from, and I adjust my answer by second guessing what they are really asking. Britain, England, Suffolk, Ipswich or London, where I have lived for twenty-five years. All are true, but often, what they are really asking is why do you look the way you do? 

So I wonder why he doesn't answer that question. In the same book he writes

My father was born in Yorkshire, with both his parents being White and British. My mother is British and Indian, though she has never set foot in India. She was born in Guyana in South America. Her grandparents were shipped there from India in the nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations under the auspices of a colonial edict known as Indenture - a form of semi-forced migration and labour that is a shadow of slavery. She emigrated to England in the 1960s, in the wake of the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought 802 Caribbean women and men to begin new lives in Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like them, she was a British citizen invited to the homeland of the colonies as the imperial age waned 

This does the job, although the version Sarfraz Manzoor gave on The World Tonight last Wednesday, mutatis mutandis (that's Latin for 'making the obvious changes, duh'), "I come from X ^UK but my people came from Y ^{HERE BE DRAGONS} "

</background>

As I said, I have to wonder why he doesn't answer that question. I know he is a firm believer in the accuracy of his research, but this makes him insist on coat-traiing when there is anyone who hasn't learned the Gospel According to A. Rutherford, giving him the chance to Make a Point.

<autobiographical-note>

This is a position that I know only too well. Many's the time that I have rocked the social or professional boat because of my insistence on sticking to an academic truth. On one memorable (well, I remember it) occasion I upset my toddlet (at the time) son, and his mother asked 'Did daddy shout at you?' He answered 'No, but he used his shouty voice.'

<parenthesis>

I'm reminded (with almost negligible relevance, but you're used to that, aren't you?) of a scene in the West Wing when CJ is being prepped for a court hearing. The lawyer asks 'Do you have the time?' and, looking at her watch, she says 'A quarter of two' (or whatever). Whereon he says 'I wish you'd stop doing that.' She asks what, and he says 'Giving more information than the questioner asks for. In your case, the answer was "Yes".' (I saw this several years ago, so it's not verbatim; but you get the gist.) 

My point is that sane people operating in society do more than just answer questions mechanically, but guess what the questioner really wants. This tolerance is the grease that makes society work.

</parenthesis>

</autobiographical-note>

This came up in that The World Tonight program, when a huge kerfuffle ...

<tangent>

(cause célèbre would be a bit of an exaggeration, though when Twitter gets its teeth into an issue like this it quickly becomes one) 

</tangent>

...kicked off about an old woman's insensivity, which  led to an event variously described as hostile, hurtful, unwelcoming, violent...

Of course, I am a WASP (or more accurately WAS RC_lapsed), so I'm in no position to say how non-WASP people feel about this sort of questioning. But it seems to me that there is room for more tolerance and understanding in this area, and blighting the few remaining years of an elderly woman is itself at best intemperate and at worst (ironically) insensitive, not to say plain stupid (though perhaps I mean childish?)    

b