Two bites of the cherry

Some years ago on this blog I devoted a post to sporting metaphors, mentioning in passing a couple of expressions that have to do with cricket. But  I'm returning to it because it's a particularly fruitful source.

And fruit is relevant I've never  heard a football commentator say 'That was a peach of a ball'. But for a cricket commentator a whole range of fruit is available. A ball (that is, the delivery of a ball rather than the ball itself) can be either "a peach" or "a Jaffa" (a kind of orange, named after its home area)...

<tangent>
(The normal pronunciation today is with an /ʌ / [as in "apple"] in the stressed syllable. But in a version of a comical song based on "the 'phonetic' alphabet" [whatever that is, but you know the sort of thing A for 'orses, B for mutton, C for yourself {a more niche variation, learnt from my mother [whom saints preserve, and they better had] had "C for th'Highlanders"} ...] I once read "J for oranges" – which suggests a pronunciation with /eɪ/ [as in "cake"]. I wonder if this was ever a normal pronunciation of "Jaffa", or if was just a rather strained [and unsuccessful] part of the joke. In its earliest form – that is, the earliest form I know – it had the wartime "Q for rations", but this was later given the less time-sensitive "Q for the cinema" [though this is itself time-sensitive in that it refers back to a time when queues outside cinemas were a commonplace ].)
</tangent>

.... The ball itself can be either "a cherry" or "a nut", and the word cherry can be recycled in the expression "two bites of the cherry". I haven't played much cricket (only two semi-serious games, involving whites and a hard ball, that is...

<autobiographical-note>
Both were at  Cambridge – one for the chapel choir, and one for Cambridge University Ladies (I did say semi-serious). The latter was a social fixture between a Corpus XI (not the Corpus XI, though it included one or two serious players) and the CU Ladies (or was it "Women"?). As I, an intended spectator (it being a Sunday afternoon affair), had made the dual mistakes of wearing white and having long hair, I made up the numbers.

In deference to the social nature of the event, the men were allowed only a short run-up. But no such allowance was made for me, and the pent-up hostility of their fast bowlers was unleashed. They were no doubt disappointed that I lasted for so few (I think 3 balls – my memory is mercifully sketchy on this traumatic episode). The first missed everything, the second hit my bat (with little or no direction on my part) and went to the boundary. The third reduced my wicket to match... 

<parenthesis> 

(Does a cricket ball – making a direct hit – ever reduce stumps to anything other than matchwood, I wonder? If not, and the groundsman has done his job with the watering can, the ball knocks a stump cartwheeling out of the ground.  If there is no direct hit, the metaphor is different. The ball misses the wicket by a coat of varnish.

</parenthesis> 

</autobiographical-note>

)... but I've heard and watched a  lot.

There are arguments for and against the exercising of the option (after a number of overs depending on the match conditions – typically 90) that the fielding side has with regard to the use of a new ball. A new one is harder, and adds to a fast bowler's fierceness. On the other hand, whereas a soft old ball is harder to score off, a new ball flies readily to the boundary.

<parenthesis>
(It is also more likely to carry to a fielder's hands...

<tangent>
(Yet more metaphorical foodstuff: unless he or she has "butterfingers")
</tangent>

...and here the figure of speech is a metonym (part for whole) with added synechdoche I think (though the naming of parts in figurative speech was never my strong point): a catch is achieved if the bowler "finds the edge".
</parenthesis>

Now then, that "two bites..." thing. Towards the end of a session, the fielding captain may take the new ball, so that the bowlers can use it before play ends (for a day or playing session) and then again, when it's still relatively new, after a rest.

 If a ball is not a "peach" or a "Jaffa", but rather the reverse, it is either "filth" or a "pie" .

<parenthesis>
(I don't have an authoritative explanation of this one, though it might have something to with such balls being "as easy as pie" to hit [though that just shifts the question away from the cricket pitch: what is so easy about pie? ] One popular "explanation" involves clowns, and the inexact throwing of custard pies; I'm not convinced.)
</parenthesis>

It is a sad but inevitable fact that most good cricketers have a Public School background ...

<rant>
(and regular readers of this blog will be used to this convention (ils sont fous ces Bretons, as Astérix would say). In the UK a Public School is not [as in  many less linguistically deceitful parts of the world] a state school. A UK Public School is a fee-paying school (public to the extent that anyone with money can go...

<meta-rant counter="scholarships"type="autobiographical">
But what about scholarships? some people ask. Scholarships schmolarships. At age 11 I won a "free" place to such a school in the street where we lived, but couldn't take it up because my mother (WSPATBH [see above]), a young widow with five children and an ailing father to look after, couldn't afford the uniform.
</meta-rant>

...). Such schools can afford not to sell their playing fields [as increasing numbers of state schools must, in order to pay for little luxuries like pencils and paper, or coursebooks published relatively recently – say this century. They can also afford a groundsman, equipment, a teacher with first-class experience...
</rant>

and such schools often have a "CCF" (or some similar cadet force). So many cricketing metaphors refer to the military. 

But those must wait for an update.

b

Update: 2020.08.14.10:50 – Added PS

PS on military metaphors:

• Military 
  The word "military" itself is used in cricket of inoffensive bowling: "military medium". The reference is to military displays, where extremes are avoided.
• Ram-rod straight
  This is another example of the persistence of old technologies in metaphorical language, mentioned not infrequently in this blog. A ram-rod was used to load a muzzle-loading firearm.
• Gun-barrel straight
• Shoulder arms
  When a batsman "shoulders arms" he doesn't play a shot and makes a flamboyant display of not doing so by resting his bat on his shoulder. The expression "shoulder arms", in its original context, was a command issued to soldiers on parade
  
  Shouldering arms – from
  https://www.trentbridge.co.uk/assets/images/32/1507549656_chris-broad.png

Bon voyage M. Dumollet...

♪♫ ♪ ...À St Malo débarquez sans naufrage 
Bon  voyage M. Dumollet

Et revenez si le pays vous plaît.

A quickie for the Quatorze Juillet

On 8 July 2016, the frigate Hermione sailed out of St Malo ...

<autobiographical_note>
("charming walled town city on the Emerald Coast of Brittany", as long-standing readers may recall from this – the blue bit at the end )
</autobiographical_note>

...bound for Brest (a little after we steamed out of St Malo – which accounts for a less than memorable photo. There are plenty of better ones here.

The Hermione is a 32-gun Concorde class frigate fitted for 12-pounder guns, completed in Rochefort by the Asselin organisation in 2014. She is a reproduction of the 1779 Hermione, which achieved fame by ferrying General Lafayette to the United States in 1780 to allow him to rejoin the American side in the American Revolutionary War.

Wikipedia entry for French_frigate_Hermione_(2014)

For the week leading up to the Quatorze Juillet there was a festival of world music at St Malo. On the 8th, one of the offerings was from an Argentine group. I imagine they knew of their link to St Malo, but I'll assume you share the ignorance I had until fairly recently

In September 1763 Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville  (later to distinguish himself in that same war) 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 a 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].

<autobiographical_note>
In the newspaper article about the festivities marking the end of the festival I saw the name of one of the groups playing at the Fest Noz that night. They were called Startijenn. This word had meant nothing to me until the night before, when I was reading the chapter on Breton in Lingo (a book that I'm deferring judgement on, as it refers to much that I don't know about but is not totally sound on the few things I do know about). 

But an amusing and intriguing feature of the book is that each chapter in this Language Spotter's Guide to Europe concludes with a word that comes from the language covered but has no equivalent in English. For Breton, it is startijenn.

No equivalent, that is, in formal language. But a fairly close gloss is provided by the colloquial kick-start. A startijenn is "a kick of energy, such as you get from a shot of coffee". Gaston Dorren, author of Lingo, calls it "probably derived from English start". I'd say  it's almost certainly cognate, though derived suggests rather more than that. I'll see what the  Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch has to say, if anything. 

</autobiographical_note>

But that'll have to be in an update.

b

PS A clue:



Floor-covering including great, if questionable,  book. (5)

2016.07.15.11:30 – Report  on  Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch

PPS Sorry – nothing. At a guess, I would suggest that the word is a combination of two roots:

• Start
  In the words of Etymonline
  ...from PIE root *ster- (1) "stiff." 
  
  From "move or spring suddenly," sense evolved by late 14c. to "awaken suddenly, flinch or recoil in alarm," and by 1660s to "cause to begin acting or operating." Meaning "begin to move, leave, depart" (without implication of suddenness) is from 1821. 
• -jenn
  Again from Etymonline, sv genus
  ...from PIE root *gene- "to produce, give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to family and tribal groups. 
  ...Cognates in this highly productive word group include Sanskrit janati "begets, bears," janah "race," janman- "birth, origin,"  jatah "born;" Avestan zizanenti"they bear;" Greek gignesthai "to become, happen," genos "race, kind," gonos "birth, offspring, stock;" Latin gignere "to beget," gnasci "to be born," genius"procreative divinity, inborn tutelary spirit, innate quality," ingenium "inborn character

Update: 2016.07.18 – Added PPPS

PPPS One possible (if linguistically naïve) objection to the derivation suggested in my PPS is that it makes startijenn a mongrel – derived from two sources (a supposed aberration, according to some observers).  But, as I wrote here, it is ridiculous for any language to lay a claim to a word  for all time – it's  a question of where you choose to stop the etymological clock [a metaphor I introduced here].

Television is my stock example of a word derived from two sources – a Greek prefix and a Latinate stem. A purely Greek version would be teleopsy; a purely Latin version would be ultra-vision. Another less obvious example (discussed here) is morganatic, a happy mixture of Germanic and Latin, which is more relevant as it mixes a Germanic stem with a classical affix (as startijenn does, if my guess is right).



And here are a couple more clues:

Arab returning soon, says Cockney (5)
Bloody truncheon here? (5, 5)

Update: 2016.07.2016.16:30 – Added P⁴S (last one, honest)

P⁴S Another mongrel that had always confused me until my recent visit to Bretagne is polyvalente – usually seen in the phrase Salle polyvalente; come to think of it, quite possibly some chemicals are polyvalent in English (yup). That word has a Greek prefix and a Latinate stem. In English a hall that can be put to various uses could be described as all-purpose, though in practice I've seldom met it in that context (except in special cases like "all-purpose sports hall"); we usually just say something more homely, such as village hall – although I'm probably betraying my South-Eastern commuter-belt background there. It goes without saying that such a hall is suited (or valid) for a range of purposes

This demonstrates the point first brought to my attention by M. Baring-Gould, that French tends to prefer hi-falutin (though he probably used a more diplomatic term) vocabulary.

<autobiographical_note>
The example he gave to class 2Ba...

<Pedagogical_Correctness_gone_mad> 

Oh no, none of this elitist ABC stuff, our classes were named after the first two letters of the teacher's name; it was entirely accidental that the boys who had come up from 1A had a as the teacher's second letter while the boys who had come up from 1C went into class By 

</Pedagogical_Correctness_gone_mad> 

...was carié. English does have the word carious, but the register is different. Dental professionals use it, but not the patient-in-the-chair.
</autobiographical_note>

So the words salle polyvalente, common on hitherto baffling signposts everywhere I've been in France, mean (presumably  – I haven't checked, it just seems obvious to me [NOW]) is just an all-purpose hall.

b.
Update 2017.10.01.15:15 – Added P⁵S   (so P⁴S  wasn't so final).
P⁵S: A few clues, the first being topical.

• I'm upset before one and after her– Harry's peer. (8)
• This way in Paris – about time! Gasp for a communard. (11)
• Adjustment to famine's a statement about direction of travel. (9)

And answers:
In PS: LINGO
In PPPS OMANI and BATON ROUGE (where it was relevant at tle time)

Update 2018.04.14.20:15 – Added P⁶S

P⁶S The answers: HERMIONE, PARTICIPANT, MANIFESTO
And here are some clearer photos from AFP.

Dangeur! Diphthongues inattendues!

In Brittany last week, home of NECESSARY BABIES (of which we had some once), and tourist bumph that recommended a visit to St Flavour's (St Saveur), and somewhere where we could see an extraordinary triomphe l'oeil painting (a bit like The Fighting Temeraire, I suppose  –  but it was raining so we didn't find out) I spotted what I assumed was a typo at the foot of a carte de vins. (I still think it was; I'm just covering myself with that assumed):

Attention: l'abus de l'alcool 

est dangeureux pour la santé.... etc

I thought little of it at the time, dismissing it as just another semi-literate typo; or, conceivably – if improbably – there was a thitherto unknown pair of words: dangéreux and dangeureux (the second having some specialist application – perhaps in official pronouncements). More likely, though, as MrsK said at the time, it was just the sort of spelling mistake that people make – even foreigners. (She also questioned my spelling – but I am a forgiving man.)

The following evening, though, I saw it on another carte de vins – reinforcing, to my chagrin, the official pronouncement hypothesis. On further reflection I found two other possible explanations, both with an interesting linguistic foundation.

1. Both cartes took their spelling unquestioningly from an official source (that just happened to have a typo in it). This would be reminiscent of the way students of philology can trace the provenance of a manuscript through their accumulation of  traits in successive generations. I mentioned one such manuscript-based linguistic happenstance in an earlier post about bald owls BATS (not exactly the same, but similarly depending on a chance mistake, concretized in subsequent usage).
2. A really interesting possibility, based on the phonology of Breton. A glance at  a map of the region will show several examples of place-names (the last refuge  of etymological nuggets) such as Saint Domineuc –
   
   
   
   – with the digraph eu where one would expect an i. Perhaps one could extend this to apply to vowels such as é (also a front vowel – one produced towards the front of the mouth [as opposed to back vowels such as a, o, or u]). Is Breton phonology characterized by a tendency to substitute  eu for a front vowel?*
   
   In that case, the dangeureux typo would be more likely to occur in Brittany than elsewhere in France – a possibility that is intriguing (if unlikely to succumb to further research, given the state of the hedge [which is in urgent need of a haircut]) 

b
Update: 2016.07.11.22:45 – Added clarificatory parenthesis in red.

PS And a trilingual crossword clue (a  new invention – the clue is followed by its character count and indications of three languages, the first two representing languages used in the clue, and the last indicating the language used in the answer)

Expression of gratitude interrupted just before the end by article reversing, for example, Ash. (8,  Fr – D – Fr)

Update: 2017.01.06.11:15 –  Added PPS

PPS: Answer: MERCREDI (Came to me in a boulangerie [with an horaire {mot juste?} showing opening times]).

Update: 2018.03.31.12:35 –  Added PPPS

PPPS: Added explanatory parenthesis in blue to PPS. Without it, the detail was pointless – just an old man's memory (which it was, of course; but my point was that seeing the word was the stimulus for the cruciverborhoea [and don‘t bother looking that up 😐] )

Update: 2018.10.12.16:15 –  Added footnote.

* This lumping together of e and i for special treatment is not random. As an example , consider what happens tn to a c in Spanish or Italian when it precedes an e or an i. The sound becomes /𝜃/ or /s/ in the former case. and /ʧ/ in the latter. (This does not involve the modification of the vowel sound itself – my argument is just about anything [any linguistic change, that is] that happens only to e and i and not to other vowels.)