Monte Cristo (Olympics Special)

Getting my retraction in first

I  know I know. I made the same mistake I was analysing. The YouTube  thing is fine. The Jobim song doesn't mention the Pão de Açúcar at all. I've left the text as-is rather than unpick it all.

The Hunchback (Corcovado, Rio de Janeiro) is sometimes called Monte Cristo (although the statue of Cristo Redentor is not on the hunch itself – assuming, as I do, that the hunch is the eminence just over half-way up).

For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, Wikipedia says that Corcovado is sometimes confused with nearby Sugarloaf Mountain. Evidence of this confusion  – which I admit I thought unlikely when I read it  –  is provided by this YouTube clip, which has this image for a performance of the Jobim song Corcovado (sung here by Nara Leão):

A possible explanation of this confusion is the song's lines

Da janela vê-se o Corcovado, 

O Redentor que lindo.

It's a list of what the reflective guitarist sees from the window (da janela). The view must include both Corcovado and Sugarloaf Mountain (as does the photo below  – although the singer would have had to be on a ship to get this view).

When I first came across this name I assumed that it referred to some kind of Brazilian pastel. It was only much later, when I was visiting a National Trust kitchen, that I saw a real sugarloaf. As Elizabeth David explains in English Bread and Yeast Cookery

Households bought their white sugar in tall. conical loaves, from which pieces were broken off with special iron sugar-cutters (sugar nips). Shaped something like very large heavy pliers with sharp blades attached to the cutting sides, these cutters had to be strong and tough, because the loaves were large, about 14 inches (36 cm) in diameter at the base, and 3 feet (0.91 m) [15th century]

So that other mountain dominating the Rio skyline is well-named; Sugarloaf  (a name that is used for various mountains all over the world) could be added to my list of culinary metaphors.

Sugarloaf Mountain with the much taller Corcovado 
(nearly twice the height) in the background

So much for Brazil.

But before I sign off, here are a couple of  statistical pictures, relating to the popularity of this blog – Citius, Altius, Fortius [Quicker, higher, stronger*]  (which is about as close as this post is going to get to the the Olympics  ). Before my choral tour 10 days ago, visits for the first three weeks of July amounted to just over 700; they looked to be heading for a monthly total of about 900. For the last few days, though, the average has been over 100, giving a monthly total of nearly 2000 (a record). Hardly viral, but quite satisfactory

But before I get too excited by this rise, I've collected  the data for this graph, showing quarterly totals, which show more of a plateau:

b

PS

Clues

• Penny-pinching trust of late (8)
• Sounds like Tessa's insolence is too close for comfort (5-2-4)
• Mistaking area for regional leader leads to decoration. (7)

Update: 2016.08.01.18:40 – Added preamble in red.
Update: 2016.08.02.12:50 – Added footnote.

* Possibly there may still be people who would prefer it if the translation reflected the comparative adverbs: more quickly, more highly, more strongly. The synthetic comparative adverb (with an ending simply added to a stem) did not make it into Vulgar Latin. If you're interested in the way Vulgar Latin created an analytic one, by compounding a feminine adverbjective (of course) with -mente ("in that state of mind"), I tell the tale here.

FOGgies (pt 3)

(The story so far: the FOGgies are annual awards for outstandingly bad writing. The idea for the name derives from Robert Gunning's FOG index, although these awards don't restrict themselves only to obstacles to readability measured by that index.)

The award for Most Unnecessary Use of Management Jargon goes to Jon Day, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, for 

              Jon Day: I’ll start by briefly saying what the machinery is; I think it is quite important to say what it is before saying where the weaknesses are. Each Department has its own horizon scanning policy development machinery. If I were to indentify [HD – sic in the minutes] the first risk, it’s that this work is stovepiped and inconsistent. It’s better than it used to be, but there is inevitably the risk of stovepiping. The horizon scanning machinery that was set up two years ago and that I helped run was explicitly designed to deal with that risk.
responding to the questioning of the Commons Public Administration Select Committee          (specifically 'What are the shortcomings in the horizon scanning apparatus, the assessment and analysis apparatus and  the ability to respond; what are the shortcomings in the machinery of government at the moment?')

The judges said

'Strangely, the newspaper reports (for example, this) quote another response Mr Day gave, almost as worthy of the Award: '...That mechanism starts before the disruptive challenge. Some of the stove-piping is broken down to get departments together about the issues that are approaching.'  But the minutes don't have this; we suspect it came from a different speaker at another sitting. And when the chairman hauls him over the coals about his use of jargon, and his response draws the accusation 'That really is 'Yes Minster'', the minutes have 'The answer is yes.' where the newspapers have the more nuanced 'No! Or the answer is, is yes.' Perhaps they were working from a verbatim report . 

'Be that as it may, the obfuscation starts with the word machinery with its implication of workaday simplicity. This is underlined by the opening words, 'I'll start by briefly saying...'. If only! The smokescreen continues with the words 'horizon scanning [sic] policy development machinery' – itself a contender for the 'meaningless string of abstract nouns' award that went in the end to Google (as the first word only looks like a noun, and the second word only looks like a gerund  [an abstract noun] – the omission of the crucial hyphen conceals the fact that 'horizon-scanning' is an adjective, disqualifying it from the Award that went to Google). 

'But perhaps Mr Day is not entirely to blame for that, as he has previously said, in the introductory remarks, 'I also run the Government’s horizon scanning process...', which suggests that the jargon may have been wished on him. 'Horizon-scanning policy development', incidentally, is about thinking up ways of keeping a look-out.

<etymological_digression>
It's worth remembering that 'scanning the horizon' [the actual horizon, that is] is what a lookout – the naval sort, in a crow's nest, (who has no hyphen: I do think about these things)  –  did. There's a recipe for creating management-speak: unpack a metaphor and pick out the longest two words.
</etymological_digression>

'Then comes the clincher: stovepiping, which is the opposite of  TALKING TO EACH OTHER. What Mr Day is saying is that departments planning responses to future threats don't talk to each other. He is to be congratulated for his Herculean efforts to avoid saying that.'

The special 'Clusterbomb' award for a family of inter-related euphemisms goes jointly to the CIA, the ciasavedlives.com website and the White House for:

• EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION
• ENHANCED INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES
• HIGH-VALUE TERRORISTS
• BLACK SITE
• STRESS POSITIONS
• LEARNT HELPLESSNESS
• 'THE AGGRESSIVE PHASE' OF AN INTERROGATION
• ETC ETC

The judges said

'It is impossible to decide between these outstanding nominees. The creation of one euphemism in an area such as this leads to other stake-holders (the metaphor is intentionally ambiguous) to make further euphemistic combinations to other aspects of the same programme. It would be invidious to congratulate any one over any other.'

b
Update: 2014.12.14.11:10 – Added explanatory bit at the beginning.

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 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

P1ss was it in that dawn to be alive...

...But to be young was very heavy'

 as Wordswsorth so nearly put it.

If I had my time again I'd be feeling extremely paranoid. The pressure starts being heaped on at primary school, where – as I mentioned last time – not only are the hoops you have to jump through getting smaller and higher, they are held by fools (or lions led by donkeys: look at the comments to that David Crystal blog I cited, and you'll see a good and conscientious teacher being forced into the goons' short-sighted bidding by an inflexible marking scheme).

Then there's secondary school, where the hoops are not only smaller and higher, now they're ringed with flame. Where Victorian schools had notices saying Boys and Girls, they should now say

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate

(commonly mis-translated as 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here'. It's 'all hope'.)

And when the kids get through the hoops anyway, there's the ritual annual decrying of standards. 'More of them should be failing' snarl the hounds of hell (oh yes, I'm still working on the Dante theme).

In my day, the lower sixth was a breathing space. In my case apart from the UCCA thing (that's what UCAS was called in those days), I took on a couple of new O-levels (one in an A-level subject I was doing from scratch, and one in a new language). And I spread my wings a bit  musically and socially. My lower sixth was fun and rewarding and I learnt a lot of value. 'Bugger "value", what about price?' snarled the hounds. So ASs were invented, another nail in the coffin of education.

What I thought was the final straw was tuition fees. I really don't know how anyone who voted for them (let alone opposed them with their fingers crossed behind their backs) can sleep at night. Still, 'It's only 27,000 quid, and they don't have to repay a penny until they're earning a decent whack.' And, let's face it, the chances of earning any kind of whack are pretty remote.'

This solves another problem for the young. They have little chance of getting a mortgage. 'But they couldn't repay a mortgage anyway while they're repaying their student loan.  It's a Win-Win!'

So young people's paranoia is fed for the first quarter of their lives. Until they're about 20. But the hell-hounds weren't finished yet.  'How else can we load the swings and roundabouts of outrageous fortune against the young...? Got it. Housing Benefit.'

We're filling the streets with angry young men. And somehow I don't think it's just a revolution in theatre we're fomenting. Today's Jimmy is armed not just with an ironing board but with the power of the Internet.

I wish I could see an up-side to this, but 'hell' and 'handcarts' spring to mind.

b
Update 2013.10.08.17:45  – last sentence tweaked, and changed the title to deter any NetNanny software that may disapprove..


Update 2012.10.15.14:40  – Footer updated

Update 2014.04.25.18:10  – And again:

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 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

He tested the children Govely, but learnt nothing of value

Today's text is:

An English-teacher correspondent in the UK writes to tell me a very worrying - but totally to be expected - story emerging from the Key Stage 2 grammar test marking earlier this year. Question 16 asks children to complete the sentence 'The sun shone ________ in the sky.' and the mark scheme reads 'Accept any appropriate adverb, e.g. brightly, beautifully'.

A child presented the answer 'The sun shone bright in the sky', and this was marked wrong, on the grounds that it is 'not an adverb'.

Read more in David Crystal's blog

 In  the ensuing discussion (on 12 September) David Crystal wrote, in a comment:

This is one of the problems with trying to test grammar in the way Gove wants. Things are rarely as black and white as testers would like them to be.

The thing is that ending in '-ly' is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being an adverb.
Many adverbs, like the problem-word 'bright', have no '-ly' ending. And a fair few adjectives end in '-ly'. Mostly, these refer to the qualities of people – kindly, poorly, portly, comely, homely, kingly..*. – or about the quality of something people do (leisurely, seemly, cowardly, gentlemanly... I'm sure there are more).

Princely doesn't seem† to fit this scheme; it doesn't have much on the face of it to do with princes per se, though I suppose there might be felt to be some connection between 'a princely sum' and a 'king's ransome'. The phrase 'a princely sum', though, is often used ironically as in 'the taxman gave me a rebate – the princely sum of <name-your-pittance>'.

† Oh yes it does. I was thinking of 'princely sum', by far the most common princely ... collocation. Here are the first 15 hits in BNC for "princely + <noun>"'. There are 124 cases, but more than 1 in 5 is 'princely sum'. The rest (apart from 'princely sums' and 'princely paypacket' – both of which weigh in at only 2 cases each) are indeed to do with the characteristics of a prince or a prince's surroundings:

1		PRINCELY SUM	27
2		PRINCELY HOUSEHOLDS	4
3		PRINCELY COURTS	4
4		PRINCELY STATES	3
5		PRINCELY HOUSES	3
6		PRINCELY SUMS	2
7		PRINCELY AUTHORITY	2
8		PRINCELY FAMILY	2
9		PRINCELY GENEROSITY	2
10		PRINCELY ABODE	2
11		PRINCELY JURISDICTION	2
12		PRINCELY OFFICIALS	2
13		PRINCELY PAYPACKET	2
14		PRINCELY TREASURIES	2
15		PRINCELY WOODWIND	1

etc. All the others have only one hit. (As before when I've quoted BNC, the links in that table may not work for you.) 'Princely sum' just seems to have gone into a princeless backwater for reasons best known to its thousands of users.

But UE calls. Sorry not to have said more about (to quote  a tweet I saw the other day) 'the supreme Goviet'. But I was side-tracked, as so often, by BNC. That Crystal blog, and the many wise comments thereto (where wise is a signed variable, to quote an IT colleague I once had)) says it all: give it a browse.

b
Update 2013.10.15.14:40  – Footer updated

Update 2013.10.15.16:40  – Added PS:
*PS And lovely of course. It has an antonym, loathly but that's pretty much archaic.

Update 2013.10.23.11:20  – Added PPS:
PPS And sprightly; and manly. The idea of this form's being used predominantly for adjectives that can be applied to people clearly has legs‡. It is presumably related to the Old English suffix -lic and more recently to the productive English suffix -like.

Further to the lovely example, it's interesting that love and lovely go together, and loathe/loathsome, but both lovesome and loathly are relatively rare (apart from not sharing a meaning with their respective 'pair').

Update 2014.02.02.17:00  – Added PPPS and updated footer.
‡PPPS An aptly bi-pedal metaphor.

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 37,250 views  and 5,200 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1867 views/867 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Go placidly...

Here is the promised -MENTE post; in my last I mentioned the link between Latin ACUTE and Spanish agudamente, and the excitement was too much for me - like the Wife of Bath I had to tell someone. You are my reeds.

 A few months ago, a student asked, in UsingEnglish.com's Ask a Teacher forum, our views of the question 'How do you think of the plan?'

Someone posted a simple answer, with which I agreed. But I couldn't resist the temptation to imagine a cock-eyed context that would justify the question in ... er ... question.

In that question, 'How' means 'In what way?'. The answer to 'How do you think of the plan' would be 'Constantly', 'optimistically' - any possible adverb (often one that refers to a state of mind*)

And (as one does, when one is in two minds [or three or ...] about how much information to give to a student) I added a PS:

PS This probably doesn't apply to Korean, so you can ignore it keannu. But some readers may be interested to know that in the Romance languages this (the mind) is what, historically, was the basis of the standard mechanism for forming adverbs: initially, it worked only with adjectives that referred to mental states - placida mente is Latin for 'with a placid mind'. But more recently, in French, Spanish, Italian and so on, adding -ment[e] turns any adjective into an adverb.

The source of this tit-bit was Elcock's The Romance Languages:

In  the formal development of the adverb the most notable innovation of western Vulgar  Latin was the creation of the periphrasis formed from the ablative MENTE (ed: 'with a mind')  preceded by an adjective that agreed with its feminine gender.

1st edn, p 145.

In my UsingEnglish post, I had not mentioned that 'western' restriction - not because I edited it  out but because it either slipped my mind, or - more likely - never entered it. A mistake that is easily slipped into is to say 'in Vulgar Latin....', because the examples that spring most readily to mind are from the west - French, Provençal, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian ... and a myriad regional dialects (I know one word of Gascon). But anything eastern is easily ignored, even though the very word 'Romance' is derived from a way of forming an adverb ('the way the Romans speak') that doesn't use this MENTE periphrasis.

Anyway, in the Reichenau Glossary, a document of which the earliest copy dates from the early eighth century - already mentioned in another post - SINGULARITER is glossed as solamente.

Elcock goes on

The congealing of the periphrasis in such a way that -mente became an adverbial suffix indicating manner probably took place very gradually.

The Romance Languages, 1st edn,  p. 145

In fact, the congealing is still underway - or has reached a half-way house that speakers are happy to accomodate in a grammatical rule. In modern Spanish, and Portuguese, when two adverbs appear together the first one has no -mente ending but a femininine adjectival ending: clara y distintamente - 'clearly and distinctly', or (if you prefer to read an adjective into the first bit of the last word) 'in a clear and distinct way'.

OK, that 'one word' of Gascon before I get on with my day, Chaucer, as with the Wife of Bath's reed, is my springboard:

Lordynges, quod he, in chirches whannes I preche
I peyne me to han an hauteyn speche.

I forget the details - and indeed the spelling - of the Pardoner's description of this act , but one thing I do remember is his face: 'thanne bekke I forth'*. He is strutting about like a cockerel. And the Gascon word for 'cockerel' - bigey - is based on the basis of a metaphor: 'vicar'.

Guy Deutscher's 'reef of dead metaphors' again .

b

Update, 12.12.17:14.00 * Ha - so much for the italicized do. My four-word memory (Pardoner's Tale quotes Best Before June 1968) was an extreme conflation of three lines:

Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke
And est and west upon the pepl I bekke
As dooth a dowve...

It was that 'bird' image (with the echo of bekke and 'beak') that made my memory do some furtive editing, and it is this that made me think of the Pardoner and the Gascon for 'cockerel' in one thought.


Update: 2016.05.12.18:05 – trivial typo fix, leaving the unfortunate hyphens (where I should have used "–" for when I'm not about to leave for a rehearsal. But I did delete the superseded  footer.)

Update: 2016.08.25.14:10 – less trivial correction in penultimate para.