Latte of this parish

<gratuitous_pun theme="subject line"> 

Not that I was ever a habitué of the local church, but when, over five years ago, this started being discussed, I admit to having had  a house of prayer/den of thieves [Matthew 21:12]  moment. But since then, despite the toe-curling tweeness of the name, I've come round to the idea. More recently, I felt not a twinge of such hypocritical pietism at the opening of a small (and now thriving) village shop in the next-closest church.  Besides, it makes for a rather pleasing (if gratuitous) pun (at the possible expense of its being mistaken for an Android-inspired typo). 

</gratuitous_pun>

I've been thinking of late about the TV series Witnesses – specifically who witnessed what?  What does it have to do with the series? I suspect that a reason will be revealed in due course.

But already, regardless of the denouement, Témoins (the original title) is relevant, because exhumed corpses appear in show homes, and a show home is a maison-témoin. This sort of untranslatable linguistic clue to the theme of a work of fiction is also apparent in the name of a key (not quite central) character's name: Maisonneuve.

Death and the compass, one of the Fictions, misses a similar trick (an unwinnable one, in a translation)

<plot_spoiler avoidance_advice="Skip this bit"> 

The piece translated as Death and the Compass (most recently published as one of the Ficciones) appeared originally as  La Muerte y la Brújula in 1944 (Artificios). The denouement expected by the central detective is not where or when he expects it. He guesses the position of a murder by looking at a street-plan and plotting an equilateral triangle based on two murder sites. He assumes that this is the end of the series. 

It turns out that he was on the right track with the idea of an equal-sided 2-dimensional figure, but it is not an equilateral triangle; it is a rhombus, with the fourth corner being the site of the final murder. 

<meta_plot_spoiler>
Look, I‘ve warned you ONCE... But no, I'm  not saying who the victim is.
</meta_plot_spoiler> 

But you don't need a compass to read a street-plan. What you do need, to describe an equilateral triangle (and then – if you've read the story – a rhombus) starting from two points on a street-plan, is a pair of compasses – un compás. 

Borges, whose command of English was impeccable, knew what he was doing. So he knew that he was giving his translator an impossible task. 

</plot_spoiler>

<rant flame="5">
On the subject of Borges, a reworking of his El Aleph has been in the news. I first got wind of it on A Good Read of  16 August, as part of. Carlos Gomero's Postcard from Buenos Aires. The relevant excerpt is at 14'44"– 15'27": that three-quarters of a minute will save you  reading this Guardian piece.

He refers to the book as The fattened Aleph, although  Amazon doesn't know of a translation. In fact – as Pablo Katchadjian only published 200 copies – Amazon doesn't know anything about it at all. The English-speaking world doesn't seem to know much about it; that Guardian article is the only one I've found in the English press.

Anyway, as that article says

In the short story Pierre Menard: Author of Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges writes of an author’s quest to reproduce Cervantes’ masterpiece, word by word, comma after comma. “Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough – he wanted to compose the Quixote,” Borges writes. 

More likely than not to be aware of this Borgesian playfulness, Argentine author Pablo Katchadjian decided in 2009 to remix one of Borges’s most renowned short stories The Aleph, keeping the original text but adding a considerable amount of his own writing. The result was the short experimental book called El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph), published by a small underground press in a short run of 300 copies [BK sic; I'm not sure this is right; but the figure, whatever it is, is tiny] . An unfortunate consequence of Katchadjian’s literary experiments is an ongoing lawsuit initiated in 2011 by Maria Kodama, Borges’s widow and fervent guardian of his literary estate...

More here

The reason the issue has come to the fore again, as the judge in 2011 saw sense and dismissed the widow's talk of  'plagiarism' as the pitiful nonsense it so obviously is, is that Ms Kodama has appealed again and again and finally got a criminal court to take her allegation of  FRAUD seriously.

If found guilty, Katchadjian faces up to six years in gaol. 

OK, Katchadjian is guilty – of impoliteness. Having read Borges, he must have known that Borges would have approved [and approved of, which is a whole 'nother thing] the literary experiment; but Katchadjian should have run the idea past the literary executors as a simple matter of courtesy. In spite of this lapse, though, should the nut of a slight literary faux pas be cracked with the sledge-hammer of six years inside? I think not.

Also, had he addressed the executors back in 2009  (the 'publication' date – a print-run of 200 was hardly going to fund Katchadjian's retirement; no  wonder it took the executors two years to so much as notice it), there would have been one of two outcomes:

• his idea would have either been given its deserved imprimatur 
• he would at least have known that the executors were totally out of sympathy with the playful inventiveness that lies behind the body of work that they were supposed to be protecting

In the second case, he would have known what a legal minefield he was dealing with and he could have chosen to engordar something that was out of copyright – though, come to think of it, perhaps a Borges work was essential to underline the Borgesian nature of the enterprise.

Anyway, I recommend this summary and petition to all and sundry.
</rant>

b

PS And remind me, if ever I appoint literary executors, to make sure to avoid penny-pinching and pusillanimous NINCOMPOOPS

PPS

<crossword_clue> 

Spooner might point the finger at child minders; topping! (5,7) 

</crossword_clue>

Update 2015.11.13.10:45 – Added PS
OK, time's up: the answer to that clue is CRÈME FRAÎCHE.

Update 2018.05.12.14:45 –  Repaired broken links.

The big ten revisited?

The other day I  saw this tweet:

And I thought "That old canard", thinking it was the "Latin phrases everyone should know" that I had addressed back in April 2013. (It was not a dead duck [as canards go ], but there were a few slips in it. And I thought that, like many old pieces on the net, it had had a 'new twease of life'.)

But the title 'Ten Latin Phrases You Should Know' was different – which should have warned me. And as it happens that title seems to have been invented by the RTd tweeter, as the linked page has the title 10 Latin Phrases You Pretend to Understand^‡. I thought the 'should know' in the earlier post and in the tweet was  questionable, but I'm not sure 'pretend to' is much of an improvement. As I said before:

Another thing everyone (everyone who uses them, that is)  should know is how to translate and/ or spell them.

It's the word should that bothers me (I was using it myself in that instance for literary effect: it's up to you whether you bother to find out about them but if you use them you'd better know your stuff: the writer's mark for translation was 7/10 [details here], not a bad score but dodgy enough to identify the person using those Latin tags as a poseur.)


When you're not sure who your audience is, it's not clever to use fancy terms. What are you trying to prove? Does it improve your chances of communicating whatever you want to communicate if half of your audience don't know what you mean and a fair few of the others have to make allowances for your own misapprehensions (I'm thinking here, for example, of the many people who confuse i.e. and e.g.)

The ones who don't know what you mean are likely to pretend they do, which I suppose goes some way towards justifying the title '10 Latin Phrases You Pretend to Understand'; but I don't pretend to understand them (except in the Borgesian sense of  '¿Tú que me lees, estás seguro de entender mi lenguaje?' [meaning, loosely, 'How can you be sure you know what I mean?]).

Accepting (pro tem. [!]) that 'pretend', let's look at that newer post (from the mental floss stable). It starts out promisingly:

Whether you're deciphering a cryptic state seal or trying to impress your Catholic in-laws, knowing some Latin has its advantages. But the operative word here is "some." We'll start you off with 10 phrases that have survived the hatchet men of time (in all their pretentious glory).

Their 10 overlap with only 2 of the everyone should know 10: Cogito ergo sum (the mental floss page gets the translation right this time in #4) and persona non grata (this time the honours are reversed in my view: the 'unwelcome' of the older post seems to me better than 'unacceptable' [used in #2 of the newer page]).

It's strange that in #1 and #3, both with a second declension verb (which makes it pretty easy to spot the subjunctive) the mental floss page gets the translation right in #1 (caveat – 'let him beware'), but wrong in #3 (habeas – 'you have').  The whole point of the law of habeas corpus is that if you don't 'have the body'  [an unfortunate translation, more like '"the person[al presence]"' you can demand it. Numbers #5 and #6 pass mauster, but the others are all questionable:

7. Ad Hominem
   "To [attack] the man"

   See what they did there? Clever, but deceitful. The Ad does indeed 'mean' (there go those mental tweezers again – I'm never comfortable with any form of words that implies some kind of equivalence) but not that sort of to. They've made it into the sort of to that introduces an English infinitive, 'justifying' (the unjustifiable, in my view) introduction of a verb. So an adjectival phrase has become a verb phrase. (The to, incidentally, is the 'addressed/directed [to]' sort, and the phrase 'means' '[addressed] to the individual' (unless they want to coin a new Ad feminam argument, to be directed to the distaff side)

8. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
   "All for the Greater Glory of God"

   Who said anything about all?

9. Memento Mori
   "Remember, you will die"

   My schoolboy Latin (reinforced by later Romance Philology studies) runs out here, but sure as eggs is eggs there's no imperative form^†. And mori is 'to die' (or to be subject to certain death). So the whole tag is something like 'A reminder of mortality', which fits in with the further explanation on that page:
   

   ...[T]he latter [explanation] was the one preferred by the early Christian Church, which would use macabre art—including dancing skeletons and snuffed-out candles—to remind the faithful to forgo temporal pleasures in favor of eternal bliss in heaven.

   A picture like that was a memento mori. It's impossible to be 'a remember...'
   

10. Sui Generis
    "Unique and unable to classify"

    Errm... where to start?  'Unable to classify' is what the management trainee is in the old joke.
    

    <autobiographical_note>
    During the death throes of DEC, in the mid-late '90s, this story was current:
    

    A management trainee on an away-day at a farm was given the task of mucking out a stable. He finished very quickly and the farmer was so impressed he gave him another job, sorting a pile of potatoes into three heaps –  big ones, little ones, and middle-sized ones.
    
    The farmer came back half an hour later to find the management trainee with three very small piles, scratching his head over the next potato.
    
    'I can't understand it,' said the farmer. 'You were so quick and thorough at the first job, but you've hardly made a dent in the pile of potatoes.'
    
    'Aha,' said the trainee, 'when it comes to shovelling sh1t I'm an ACE, but ask me to make a decision and I lose the plot.'

    </autobiographical_note>

    
    Something that is sui generis can't BE classified; it is 'of its own kind'. Why complicate it?

So, in the end, I can only repeat my closing words last time:

But does everyone need to know these Latin tags? I have my doubts. Some of them are useful to know, but that's not the same. They're neat and  efficient; I use them sometimes. But they're easy to get wrong, and can interfere with communication. Moreover, they are a custom-made banana skin ‐ and if you slip on it you may get egg on your f... (Verbum sat.)

b
Update 2014.07.10:12:15 – Bunch of typoes (that's crying out for a neater collective noun...) and
esprit de l''escalier (as usual )  
  
Update 2014.07.10:15:55 – Added this note:

^† VULGAR LATINIST IN IRREGULAR VERB HORROR
Memento IS imperative (meminisse – perfect in form but present in meaning). I might have known that saying 'sure as eggs is eggs' was a guarantee of egg on my face.

Update 2014.07.19:17:20 – Fixed typo, and updated TES stats in footer.

Update 2014.07.21:10:55 – Added this note:
^‡ I should have warned you before that this webpage uses the rather dubious sounds like approach, and compounds the dubiousness by using 'English' to mean 'American English'. So the pronunciation guidance is specific to the right sort of reader (which is what makes the approach dubious – it makes unwarranted assumptions about who's going to be a reader: this makes it possibly less dubious on this page, but in teaching forums it really makes my blood boil )

---

 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.

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 44,000 views  and over 6,000 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 2,200 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.

Stalking the stork

Cycling along the Old Basingstoke Road  this morning I saw a cluster of photographers with long lenses trained over the fields. A friend who had spoken to them told me they were looking at a stork (a Great White as it happens [not THAT sort of Great White, silly]), and I mused about the possibile irony of a Twitterstorm leading to Birders (I doubt if they'd call themselves Twitchers) mobbing a bird.

After my Tai Chi class (which had been my destination) I had a look on Twitter to see whether that irony had really happened. And it hadn't. Twitter had a few hits for Spencers Wood's Great White:

Hardly a Twitterstorm – scarcely a tweacup-ful. I may have missed a couple, but there were only ever a handful, spread out over four hours. Those dozen or more photographers I had seen must have had some pre-Twitter network.

I didn't see the stork, but I saw its photographers. I wonder whether that counts as a '#LifeTick' to quote the second-last of those tweets. Hardly. But it made me think of an inconsequential musing that occurred to me recently – not consequential enough to merit a blog-post all to itself. It was about Erdős numbers.

These have become quite a Thing recently, though it hadn't seeped through to my neck of the academic woods by the early 'seventies (when the Professor may still have been productive, if any of his 1,525 papers was published that late in his life – he was born in 1913

<digression>
a contemporary of my mother^†, as it happens, though Erdős enjoyed a longer education, she having left school in 1925; she was, after all, only a girl, and my grandfather (whose wife Bertha Fergusson, had proudly preceded him carrying a suitcase bearing the admonitory initials BF), a school-master [or dominie

<meta-digression theme="dominie">
Was a 'dominie''s class, I wonder, full of dominees [<boo-boom tsh>
I thangyou]
</meta-digression>

I should perhaps say in the appropriate argot], was amply equipped to teach her enough to get her a job as a shorthand-typist, she's pretty bright after all.

<meta-digression theme="autobiography/shorthand">
I still recall her shopping lists, written in Pitman's shorthand. Perhaps my first brush with phonemes was the /t/ stroke that represented 'tea'.
</meta-digression>

Forgive him. He was born in the 19th century.
</digression>

). In brief they are a measure of mathematical proximity: if you've co-written  with Erdős, your EN is 1; if you've co-written with someone with an EN of 1, your EN is 2; etc.... As he recedes into the history of mathematics, ENs are getting higher. Wikipedia says the mean (at some time of writing [though the primary source is given as a web-page updated Feb. 2014]) is 3.

My contribution to  Erdős-related-angels-on-a-pinhead-speculation is this: if you co-write with several other authors, several or all of whom have an EN, how do you calculate your EN? Do you just take the lowest and add 1 to that, or do you do something fractional? To take an unrealistically simple example, if you have two co-authors each with an EN of 3, is your EN 3.5? Hmm.

b

PS Another plea for reviews of Digraphs and Diphthongs . (And if you didn't download a copy while it was free, DM @WVGTbook for a review copy) I'm really unsure of what to do next (apart from DIY, that is).

Update 2014.05.08,17:55 – Added this PPS:

^† Belatedly, this update rubricates^‡ what would have beeen her 100th birthday, if the world had had that good fortune.

^‡ I've borrowed this, with appropriate anglicization, from Borges' rubricar. Well, maybe it's not his exactly – I dunno – but if he didn't coin it he used it in a memorable way.

---

 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.

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 40.300 views  and well over 5,600 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 well over 2,000 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.

Confiteor

... that I don't know where I was when I heard about JFK's assassination. This may come as a surprise to people I've told otherwise. Marvo the Memorious^† has become Fibbo the Mendacious.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1963">
It's not that I thought I was lying. I thought I had a memory of sitting in a primary school classroom and being told by a grief-stricken RC teacher. (JFK was RC too, and was generally  thought to be a Good Thing among papists; the Marilyn Monroe stuff was unknown then {at least by innocent [at the time] little me}, and even if it had been he'd have been OK – nothing Holy Mother Church likes so much as a good-hearted sinner).

But the assassination was in November, when I'd have been in my first term  of secondary school, and at 18.30 UTC (which is the trendy euphemism for 'GMT' [avoiding any  imperialistic overtones]). So I wouldn't have been in a classroom at all, let alone one in a primary school.

The nearest my 'memory' can be is that, in those pre-Twitter days the news didn't break until the following morning. I'll have to start working on a new 'memory', in which Dodo (RIP, Fr Dominic mentioned elsewhere) announced it in assembly.

<digression>
Dodo it was who had been one of the many owners of my latin dictionary, first inscribed in 1868  – before even he was born. And one of the previous owners, in the entry for Confiteor, had struck out the words 'acknowledge, confess', leaving 'own [not 'own up'], avow, concede,  grant'. But I don't know what weight to put on this; perhaps he (I'm pretty sure it wasn't a 'she'   – a girl learning Latin in those pre-war days, the very thought!) was studying a set book that used the other meaning exclusively....
</digression>

</autobiographical_note>

Confiteor is a two-headed word that is uppermost in my mind because of my choir's latest offering. In the Credo it has its sinless sense: Confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1958-1960">
My apprenticeship in the Latin mass started when I was 7. My local church was a large monastery, so dozens of priests said Mass every day – so the server was often the only one in the congregation. A lot of the Mass is a dialogue (in Latin in those pre-1966 days). And a 7-year-old had to memorise long screeds of gobbledygook.

One did this by recognizing near-sound-alikes: Quia tu es Deus, Fortituda mea, Quare me repulisti et quare tristis incedo dum affligit me inimicus? had something  to do with 'forty-two' (it's /fɔ:titu:da/ , not /f.ɔ:titju:da/, and besides I hadn't met the word 'fortitude' [well, I had in the Catechism , that being one of the 'Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost', but it was not part of my active vocabulary.]) My party piece was the Confiteor:

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti [and a long list of saints in the dative] quia peccavi^‡ nimis.... Ideo praecor beatam Mariam semper virginem [and a similar list of other saints, in the accusative this time]... orare pro me ad Dominum Deum Nostrum.

The Confiteor was my party piece, as I said  (since the congregation, even if there was one, didn't join in). The Credo was open to all comers, and included the word Confiteor (but in the other sense) 'I confess one baptism'. This duality, a few years later (just before the cassocks got too short for a bare-calved ten-year-old) bothered me. I hadn't yet appreciated that Sin was everywhere; however good your intentions, there was someone to LEAD US INTO TEMPTATION (a pretty unfriendly thing to do, I remember feeling at the time).
</autobiographical_note>

Anyway, time's a wasting and an ELTon  application has to be submitted by Friday. Oh, and I've got to rewrite the Introduction so that it doesn't look like what I submitted last time.

b

^† I've borrowed this adjective from a translation of Borges' memorioso  – the funereal character Funes, who had the Midas Touch of not being able to forget anything.
^‡ There's that peccare word again. Whichever meaning confiteor has {'claim as done in error' or 'assert as true'}, Sin is never far away.

Update 2013.11.18.17:50    –  added red bits

Update 2013.11.19.16:10    –  added PS:

PS Another, similar-looking word is confide, which is related in at least two ways. The one that may have struck some of  my readers is the idea  of 'having faith' (Latin fides). But in the context of what I said about confiteor the second thing they have in common may have struck fewer (if any). It is that confide is similarly Janus-like (January?): it has two very different meanings.

The earlier mid-15th-century meaning is 'have faith in'. I read somewhere a story, fascinating if true, that Admiral Nelson's planned message [before the Battle of Trafalgar –  added 2013.11.22 for clarity: English people had this story drummed into them at school {perhaps with Drake's Drum...? This is getting silly.}] was not  'England expects that every man will do his duty'. Any MBA student, studying 'Motivation 101', would recognize that while it has a certain force it is not nearly as good as the planned message: 'Nelson CONFIDES that every man will do his duty'. The story goes that 'England' and 'expects' had short forms, and HMS Victory didn't have enough flags for the more human version.

It was not until the 18th century that the meaning of confide was extended to mean 'have faith in somebody...' [so far so conservative] '...'s discretion to such an extent as to tell them a secret'. This second meaning seems to me to have more or less ousted the simple 'have faith' meaning. Nelson's  alleged original message sounds rather quaint, to my ear at least.

Anyway, must go. V5.2 will be appearing very soon. (I've submitted it to Amazon, and the wheels of Kindle Direct Publishing are grinding away even as I write.)


Update 2017.10.06.14:45 – Format tweaks and removed old footer.

Apologia pro screw-up sua

(And apologies for using apologia as if it meant 'apologies'. When Newman used it for Apologia pro Vita Sua it meant something more like explanation or justication or vindication – a word that reminds me of Borges' 'Biblioteca de Babél', where people search ceaselessly for the possible book that is a Vindicación of their own life. But I digress. In other news, to quote a recent tweet, bears shit in the woods.)

Loyal followers of #WVGTbook will have downloaded earlier versions. V2.0, which I released last April, is the only one that has been reviewed. When I published V3.0 (or maybe V2.1... the details aren't significant) I made it a new title, and the same for future work-in-progress releases.

But in the case of V5.0 I wanted to 'recapture' the V2.0 reviews, so I resurrected the old ASIN. Little did I...

In the first 3 days of the free promotional period there were fewer than 50 downloads (in comparsion with well over 100 for V1.0 (probably more  – I hadn't learned by then to drive Amazon's reports, and was only counting downloads from one site [120 from amazon.com]). I put this down to dwindling interest (hard to credit, but not beyond the bounds of possibility).

But a message from my sister in Florida put me wise to my error. She said Amazon wouldn't let her download the new book because she had already downloaded it last April. This suggests that the 50-odd downloads so far are from new readers, and that old lags are rewarded – like many bank customers – with an official 'Available for new accounts only'.

O me miserum! (or as Steinbeck's Lenny said 'I did a wrong thing, George').

I don't know how to fix this. But in my many years in the world of software engineering (but as a dilettante, or 'technical writer') I've often been helped by engineers fixing problems I had with intractable (not to say pig-headed) computers. The fixes often involved doing things differently (or 'exercising an alternate code-path', as I learnt not to say). There's more than one way to skin a cat, and some code-paths may involve the computer forgetting V2.0; with any luck, you can exploit a hitherto undiscovered bug. (And there's a juicy digression... no).

So here's what I'd try:

• Delete the earlier download and reboot. With any luck, Amazon's memory depends on the presence of the old download; but this may not be enough.
  
  STOP PRESS
  This one works, so you needn't bother with ....
  In which case...
• Use a different device. You can download to a laptop or PC (as Amazon gives you a free reader). Instructions are here
  But Amazon's memory of V2.0 may be specific to an account rather than to a device, in which case...
• Download to a different account. If you have access to a Significant Other's account, or if you have set up distinct accounts for distinct purposes, this should be relatively easy. For those instructions I set up a new account. If all else fails...
• Try one of these mirror sites:
  • .com
  • .co.uk
  • .de
  • .fr
  • .es
  • .it
  • .co.jp
  • .ca 
  • .in
  • .com.br
  • .com.mx
    
  
  (For all I know they all map to the same database somewhere in that Great Amazon Delta in the Sky [not sure where that metaphor came from, but I suspectt rain forests and clouds came into it], but any different way of getting to the same place has the potential to fool the computer into thinking the world is different.)

Try these, and if I don't get a quick increase in downloads I'll resubmit (in which case the reviews will be lost to posterity).

Sorry

b

Update 2013.11.02.17:15 – Added list of mirror sites [now defunct]
Update 2013.11.05.10:15 – Added first (most obvious) fix. It's too late now anyway, but just for completeness...
Update 2013.11.08.10:15 – Added PS
Update 2013.11.09.15:15 – Added PPS

PS Vindication of 5.1

'Nuff said. (Well, too much if I'm honest. All hell is about to break loose, courtesy of SSE: 'planned outage'. Which, as a friend once said, is American for outrage.)
 PPS
OK, a bit of analysis for the ones that like words. The glitch I was trying to address (not being able to download) affected my sister in Florida but not my son in  Leeds. From this I reckon that downloads from the  .com site may be more significant than others.

In V5.0's 5 days there were 30 downloads from the .com server. InV5.1's 2 days there were more than 50 – more than 4 times as many, pro rata.

But, even assuming my guess about the significance of the .com server is wrong, the total figures are persuasive enough: V5.0. <60 in 5 days versus V5.1 >60 in 2 days.

 I rest my keyboard.

Update 2014.05.06.20:55 – Added STOP PRESS (to the list of possible fixes)

---

 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.

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Red letter day

Actually, it's not (a red letter day – work is progressing on the -UI- section of #WVGTbook);  but I suppose it is (an RLD) for someone.

To start this morning's In Our Time, one of the guests was describing what there was in the way of church literature before the Book of Common Prayer. The main player was the Missal all in Latin. The faithful had no precise idea of what was going on in the mass; which is why the altar boy rang a hand-bell at critical moments. The same speaker also said there were 'rubrics'.

When people don't know what's going on they can listen for the bell, watch for interesting bits of ceremony, and look at the Missal – even though they can't read Latin. Because rubrics tended to be, and usually were picked out in red (I'm not sure why Etymonline is so mealy-mouthed with its '(often in red writing)'; the word comes from the Latin rubrica  – itself derived from ruber, 'red').The man on the radio probably knew this, but didn't say it (although it strikes me, at least, as interesting and apposite).

To this day⋇, roman missals have instructions to the congregation in red. And every week-day, when there is no special theme to the Mass, is marked (in red) Feria. Students of Portuguese will recognize here the days of the week: Prima Feira, Segunda Feira.... The feira part is so common that the days of the week often have (feminine) adjectives as names: Terça, Quarta, Quinta...

The strange thing is, though (and it's been bothering me for many years) that feria means 'feast'; it's ultimately where the English 'fair' comes from (the public celebration sort of fair, that is).  So  maybe (only my guess) the typesetters of the first missals wanted to say that on the lowliest of working days the Mass was a special celebration.

I was meaning to carry on the theme of redness by marvelling at  Borges' use of rubricar in the story known to many English readers as 'Death and the compass' but which has the original title La muerte y la brújula (which is better, because it doesn't telegraph the solution†). But I have words and words to do, and promises to keep and words to do before I sleep‡.

b

† Note, if you're that interested in the writings of 'un mero literato de la República meramente argentina': The whereabouts of the final murder in that story is predicted not with a compass but with un compás – which can be used to contruct a rhombus given an equilateral triangle. The English 'compass' and 'pair of compasses' (for the few who insist on giving it its proper name, not just 'compass') are too close for comfort, and you can't tell me that Borges, with all his English learning, didn't know what he was doing when he used that bilingual pun.

Update: 2013.10.18.10:30
‡repaired the misquote (which is now a misquote on only one level!).

Update: 2013.10.21.17:10

^⋇Well, until 1966, at least; and where the Latin Mass is said (if it IS – I'm a bit out of touch with this stuff) I imagine the missals used still say it.

---

 Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.1: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU,   IA-IU, OA-OU, and – new for V4.1 – UA-UE.  If you buy it, contact  @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
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Sez who?

'Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong'

This is the sort of lazy cliché that makes my lip curl more than somewhat. People don't 'know things about grammar'; more to the point, they're not taught things about grammar. In some cases, they're taught grammatical rules that the teacher thinks are true; and almost always those are wrong. Moreover, what's that 'you' doing? I can see that it makes for a catchy headline, but it risks contemptuous  scrutiny by people who don't think anything of the sort (whatever that may be)!

And most annoying is the fact that the article's heart's in the right place (or rather the hearts of the 'bloggers at Grammarphobia.com and former New York Times editors' who wrote it). I started by laying into the headline; OK, as a committee was writing the post, maybe an unpaid intern (and while we're on the subject of unpaid interns, sign this, won't you?) wrote it. So, what about the post itself?

Here's the first paragraph and a bit:

You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”

It’s a great story, but it’s a myth.

What has this got to do with the point of the post? The scribbled riposte – not made, I think, by Churchill, but reported by Sir Ernest Gowers in an early edition of Fowler – is an example of the sort of 'rule' the post is talking about; so it's relevant. But what has the next line got to do with the price of fish? If they want to say it's untrue (a usage of 'myth' that I loathe [sic, and another thing I loathe is being thought to have got the spelling wrong when I use 'loth' to mean 'unwilling'] with the heat of a million Suns, as my little sister knows to her cost*), they're undermining their own argument. And to what end? They give no authority for their statement in any case.

Perhaps 'legend' ('that which is to be read' – legendum ) would be nearer the mark – as it has been written about – by Gowers. And the written record has been been reproduced and embellished and distorted over the years. My headmaster (RIP 'Dodo', a bully but a charming and talented one) had it as “This is the sort of English that I will not up with put.” Another source (I forget which) held that it was Churchill again, but added an expletive or two.

The thing is that English has phrasal verbs – where a verb is thrown together with a 'particle' (usually a preposition, but without its prepositional force). So that you cut a tree down before cutting it up. Or you 'listen out for the milkman' – although nothing goes out from the listener; an acoustics engineer might hold that in fact any movement (sound waves) is towards the listener. English shares this trait  (in a less extreme way) with German, of which Mark Twain famously wrote:

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

Mark Twain's Speeches, "Disappearance of Literature"

(Skippable – though not entirely irrelevant - digression)

My choice of 'listen out' as an example is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem, which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano solo tune† marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

Then the speaker thinks better of this impertinent fortissimo interruption, and repeats Exaudi  – but piano. The id then reasserts itself with the next word fortissimo: 'No I'm  not going to be quiet and reverential.' The internal dialogue between the super-ego and the id is reminiscent of Gollum's arguments with himself.  But enough of this, I really am going to get back to that article...

         <autobiographical_note>

At the funeral of a grande dame yesterday (RIP Pat, and lucky old Bob) I witnessed an underlining of the importance of this Ex-. We were in the middle of one of those interminable call-and-response prayers, with the congregation saying ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘ again and again. And The Angelus butted in. (For the uninitiated:  The Angelus is a very noisy Call-to-prayer^†† – much noisier than the Islamic version: ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause..._{has it stopped?}>  <oh dear me NO, suckers> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING... [ad nauseam]).  And the congregation was bleating (that‘s one for the etymologists: grex = ‘flock‘) ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘. Here was the perfect opportunity for something more robust: ‘Listen out for my prayer‘. 

<autobiographical_note>

One of the shibboleths addressed in the article is the one about not ending a sentence with a preposition, which they trace to the rule of Latin grammar – mindlessly imposed by early English grammarians. But this omits a point that is perhaps too obvious to be noticed. Look at the word 'pre-positions'; they come before things. It is simply a logical impossibility to end a sentence with a word that necessarily comes before something – unless it were a 'pre-full-stop'.

But what happens when you force this rule onto English, with all its phrasal verbs? Any phrasal verb in a subordinate clause risks its particle, apparently a preposition, falling last: to use that Exaudi example, 'This is the prayer that I hope God will listen out for.'

As I said at the beginning though, the writers' hearts are in the right place. The message is right on; shame about the medium. The last point (made by Orwell‡ many years ago) is worth underlining:

There’s a simple test that usually exposes a phony rule of grammar: If it makes your English stilted and unnatural, it’s probably a fraud.

b

*In the mid '70s I was studying the idea of myth in the work of Borges, and with the self-assurance of a 23-year-old I thought myself the sole custodian of the word 'myth'. Sorry, old bean

† Update 2013.01.28: Fauré made the elementary mistake of not making this a solo – though it is a sweet and angelic-sounding tune sung by the sopranos. Apologies for this lapse ( – he was only young!)

‡ Update 2013.01.29: January 2013 was the occasion of several programmes about Orwell on BBC Radio 4. I expect - or have missed - the traditional trotting out of David Crystal, who never misses an opportunity to put the boot in. There are 5 mentions of Orwell in the index of The Stories of English, one of which points to a two-page salvo. I have a pretty good idea he does the same at least once in The Story of English in 100 Words. The problem is that Orwell made a mistake that offended Crystal's linguistic sensitivities.

OK, the man got it wrong. But he's wise and perceptive; lay off, Crystal – you're bigger than him (in this  respect).  Orwell's article is thought-provoking, perceptive, and witty. At one point (the parody of Ecclesiastes in modern business English) it's hilarious. It should be required reading for anyone who tries to communicate in writing; it might avoid such painfully jargon-ridden, obscure, and pleonastic signs as the one I saw recently in a municipal building: 'Due to the Council's Green Practices initiative this hand-dryer is non-functional. Visitors are hereby requested to use alternative disposable paper products.'

Orwell's Ecclesiastes spoof inspired my teaching resource based on Churchill's memo to the War Cabinet. In my TESconnect description of it I say:

This handout looks at a memo written by Churchill to his wartime cabinet on the subject of plain writing. Opposite Churchill's original there is a parody breaking all the rules he mentions (and a few more). On the reverse, there is a textual analysis done by the tool available at http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php, showing the quantifiable effects of using woolly language. This could be a basis for web research into writing skills.

As – regrettably, but inevitably – they say, enjoy!

Tales from the word-face

After the shenanigans mentioned here, I have just reinstalled HoTMeTal Pro. But bearing in mind the fears I expressed there of new software, I stopped (after installing V5,0) and didn't install the V6.0 upgrade. Let's see if it works any better...

b

Update 2013.07.15: 'Tempus', as my old maths master used to say as we neared the end of another lesson, 'has fugitted'. See below for the latest.

Update 2013.07.24: Various tweaks and bits of  esprit de l'escalier.

Update 2015.01.16.10:30 – Added autobiographical note in red and updated footer.

Update 2015.01.16.16:45 – Added this note:

^†† Not all believers would recognize this as a call to prayer exactly, but the name 'Angelus' is the first word of the prescribed prayer.

Update 2017.09.02.18:05 – Added PS

PS: Much of  this post,  brushed up, reordered, tweaked, and with added esprit d‘escalier here and there, appears in my forthcoming (perhaps that should be F O R T H C O M I N G – that is, don‘t hold your breath) Words and Music.

In the meantime there is this sampler (which will be free to download from time to time: follow @WandMbook on Twitter for announcements).