A participle is not a particle

Play. That‘s what it means:  

Press this to make the thing play. 

Similarly, Pause:

Press this to make the thing pause.

That's the way  it's been since the dawn of ti... technology (the 20th-century sort, that is: specifically, audio equipment). But globalization has undermined these comfortable certainties.

I have an MP3 player, characterized by the typical uselessness of its user "manual" (which is at least stapled together in the form of a book, better than the many self-styled "manuals" I've had to grapple with – often just a single sheet of A4). Like many bits of technical wizardry, it seems to have been generated by engineers who felt that their brainchild needed no written support.

<autobiographical_note>
Many an engineer thinks this, mutatis mutandis. I remember a conversation I had  with a Software Engineer more than 30 years ago, shortly after I started work with the Digital Equipment Corporation as a Technical Editor. He was trying to work out just what Technical Writers did (at the time I was at one remove from that, but if he could only get to grips with what Writers did he could then see what I did).  I  said things about making information clear and consistent and with repetition only when appropriate, and he raised an eyebrow and said "What, like the comments we put in our code?"

Self-documenting software has long been the Holy Grail of Software  Engineers, but the final and most insuperable obstacle is the ego of the creator: 

My stuff is self-evidently Good.

</autobiographical_note>

But this MP3 player had more than the lack of documentation to overcome; and  it wasn't just the infelicity of  the  "translation". Its problem is incorporated into the GUI ...

<buzzword>
That's Graphic User Interface. Most of us see them  regularly on the screens of PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The engineer who designed it may well not have known he (she? – I wonder whether female engineers are as rare in China [that's where it's from] as they are in the West) was using one at all. But the device has functions, and controlling those functions involves manipulating icons. So there's a GUI.
</buzzword>

...itself.

Which brings us to those particles (mentioned in my subject-line). Chinese has a funny way with verbs. It doesn't inflect  them. But it achieves a fully nuanced set of what I can only metaphorically describe as "verb forms" (more accurately, syntactical constructs that give context to verbal ideas). And one of the syntactical devices Chinese languages use is particles. So whereas most Western languages have participles, Chinese doesn't. Particle is a near-miss, orthographically, but unrelated.

So there's no one-word translation of Playing or of Paused – which, confusingly, are what those "universal" music-playing symbols mean on my MP3 player: the little right-pointing triangle means Playing (that is, the precise opposite* of Play), and the middle-less "H" means Paused (again, the precise opposite* of what it seems to promise). And it's specifically (usually, impossibly) a one-word translation that a user of a second language wants.

"One-word translation" – so often a mythical beast, but still believed in by so many.

b

PS: A couple more clues:

• Vegan embracing angry (upset) one of less extreme practise (10)
  
• The end of a tournament to waste away (7)
  

Update: 2018.02.13.16:10 – Added footnote.

*This phrase is open to misinterpretation. Playing is not  the opposite of Play in the same  way that black is the opposite of white, or true is the opposite of false. In this context I just mean Making it start as the opposite of  Making it pause.

Update: 2018.08.15.16:00 – Added PPS

The answers to those clues: VEGETARIAN ,  ATROPHY

Update: 2019.01.40.08:55 – Added PPPS

Just when you thought this post was finished, I've noticed another misconstruing, in this player's GUI, of a participle. It has a function that lets you lock the dial; after you've done it (that is, when it's locked) the display shows a little locked padlock. Fair enough.  But the text tells a different story: LOCK, it says. Similarly, when you have unlocked it there's a picture of an opened padlock. Again, fair enough. But the caption says UNLOCK.

Of crooks and crosiers

If you visited Iceland and asked someone what they called the smelling organ in the middle of their face, they'd tell you, nev. In Japan, it's hana. To Sar speakers in southern Chad it's kon, and among the Zuni tribe of the southwestern United States. it's noli. In fact, you could go to more than 1,400 places around the world, question speakers of more than 1,400 different languages, and hear 1,400 words that contain the sound "n." But all of them mean the same thing: nose.

So said the Washington Post last September.

Well   G O S H ... Given that N is the nasal consonant par excellence (if it's possible to achieve excellence in nasality. There are others, but N is the granddaddy of them all)...

<further_explanation type="egg-sucking for grannies">
Put the tip of your tongue behind your teeth and jam the body of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, then make a speech-sound. It'll come out of your nose and be something like [n]. That's what a nasal consonant is – not necessarily [n], that is, but a consonant formed by releasing air down the nose.
</further_explanation> 

... it seems to me that the question should be Out of 7,000 languages in the world, why do only 20% of them include a nasal? Surely it's just contrary NOT to include one? (Natural languages aren't invented; they evolve. And whatever mixture of sounds and gestures is involved in referring unambiguously to a nose, a nasal consonant is the first thing one would expect.)

Morten Christiansen, author of the paper that occasioned that article was on Inside Science last week, and he gave another body-part example: in languages that have a word for breast, many have the sound [m] in its name. I found this as surprising as the nose example: that is, nugatorily. Take a tube (a length of plastic drainpipe would be ideal) and make the  noise you make when the doctor tells you to 'Say "Ah"' – a continuous noise – down it. Then shut-and-open the free end of the tube, imitating a brass player with a mute. That's the noise a baby makes: ma. It would be surprising if words for mammary in natural languages FAILED to include the sound [m].

But as the Professor says at the end of that interview, there's something going on but we don't know what (that's not verbatim, but it gives the gist: the interview occupies the last 5 minutes of the end of that programme). The examples I've given are cherry-picked for literary effect (alias "cheap laughs"). There's more to this than meets the...er...ear, and while some of it can be explained with reference to articulatory physics there is much that can't be. By chance, I have been thinking about the not unrelated phonesthesia (first discussed here), which is due for a revisit.

Tai Chi, as so often, started the hare. My teacher often refers to what I hear as "the croix" (which she often explains by referring to the inguinal crease*). I make my francophone assumption by analogy with other linguistic relics of France's imperial presence in the far east, such as the name for a Chinese (ritually important) pony-tail  – the queue. But maybe, I've since thought, it's a native Chinese word that happens to share the crucial sound..

<autobiographical_note>
This sparked off a not entirely irrelevant memory of a conversation I had about 5 years ago with a fellow chorister  – a German national, but with impeccable English; impeccable, but not up to the term "cruciate ligament". She pointed to her knee and used the word she knew – Kreuzband. Although my German was immeasurably inferior to her English, I could translate (or at least make a pretty secure educated guess) on the basis of the /kr/ sound.

<meta_digression>
The title of this post cheats a bit. The words crook and crosier do share a reference to what Etymonline calls

perhaps related to a widespread group of Germanic kr- words meaning "bent, hooked". 

Presumably crochet, crouchback, and hundreds of other /kr/ words share this provenance; even, by a more indirect root, words like crotchet (that's an American quarter-note), half of which in French is une croche (the French care more about the image – a quaver looks much more hook-y than a crotchet). This recalls.... no, no time.

Anyway, cheating. The crosier is shaped like a crook not because of phonological relatedness but because it's symbolic of the role of the carrier as a pastor – it's interesting how much Christian imagery refers to sheep and shepherds: pastor (related to pasture), "Worthy is the lamb that was slain", "I am the Good Shepherd", "feed my lambs"... even the word congregation is derived ultimately from the Latin for flock: grex, -gis.
</meta_digression>

</autobiographical_note>

Anyway, that's enough for now. I have some serious word-bashing to do.

b


PS: A couple of clues:

• Tangled thread leads to scarcity (6)
• International security force tucked in to make a digression (11)

Update: 2016.11.23.22:00 – Added footnote and PPS.

* Investigation of inguinal crease will lead you into the sort of web-site that appeals to young men. who hanker after a six-pack, rather than to an old man with a Party Four.

PPS: And another clue – 

• Show about the Spanish  – bit rude. (10)

Update 2017.01.20.11:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS: The answers: DEARTH. INTERPOLATE. and ... no, can't do it! [got it: INDELICATE].

Update 2017.01.22.13:45 – Corrected PPPS.

Update 2018.06.14.09:45 – A few typo-fixes..

Good morning Tokyo and the politics of medal-gathering

Something must have happened in 1964 ...

<autobiographical_note theme="docLewis"  date_range="1964">
...apart from my getting  116% in a Maths exam set by a lazy examiner. He set 16 questions, with a mark of 10"%" for each. He assumed nobody would score over 100. His plan was to take the marks and just call them "%". But as a mathematician he couldn't live with such a "percentage", so he scaled everyone's mark down. You can imagine how popular I was with my peers – especially the ones who had scraped a pass at the first pass and were now downgraded..
</autobiographical_note>

... because, of all the Olympic theme tunes (even the one for Rio), Tokyo Melody is the only one that sticks in my mind, Well, that's its official name, but I've always thought of it as Good morning Tokyo, because those words fit the tune (a correspondence exploited, I think, by the BBC at the time). Maybe there was even a song with that name..

This is strange (the persistence of the ear-worm), as (because of heat before September and typhoons in that month),  the Tokyo games were scheduled for October, a time when – as I had just started my 2nd year  at big school , taking  3 or (on a bad day) over 4 hours on public transport each day – I can't have spent much time in front of the television.

Which brings me to the recent success of British athletes. I must say it makes me feel uneasy. At those Olympics (Tokyo 1964) a united team from East and West Germany performed together for the last time (before the reunification); they came 4th in the medals table . In the 1968 Olympics, East Germany came 5th in the medals table , with West Germany placed 8th (they won 1 more medal overall, but  East Germany won nearly twice as  many golds. It is hard to avoid thinking that the practice of entering a united German team was discontinued because East Germany wanted to strut their (Communistic) stuff.

It was a commonly  held belief at the time that East Germany's success was questionable. TV commentators routinely looked askance at records set by East Germans. They must have been taking drugs, surely?

Since the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the USSR, it has been left to China to fly the Communist flag at the Olympics, and they have done it very well.  In Beijing in 2008 they came top of the medals table. I seem to remember cynics at the time saying it was a fix; they were joint first with the USA.  And admittedly they did have exactly the same number of medals as the USA; just many more golds – nearly 42% more. (But USA led the world in silvers and bronzes.). For 8 years I have swallowed the capitalist line that China didn't deserve top ranking.

But they did win, outright. What was the reason? "Drugs, of course", said some commentators. Some openly disregard certain World and Olympic Records because "they must have been drug-assisted". OK, some athletes take drugs; but not just Chinese ones. Why can't China's success just be the result of state support?

Now, at Rio, British athletes have collected precisely  THREE TIM5ES  as many gold medals as East Germany won in 1968, and nearly three times as many medals overall (67 as against 25). They have come ahead of China. But has anyone mentioned drugs (in the context of the Team GB's success?) Of course not – at least, not in the UK's press.  And quite rightly so. The improvement, as many a commentator and athlete and coach agrees, is due to  nothing more than money (or to use the euphemism du jour) FUNDING.

Of course, that "nothing more" is arguable. More money means more facilities, more routes for enthusiasms to be funnelled down. It's easier (indeed, possible) to wake at 7.00 to go to train at the local track (or whatever)  than to get up at 5.30 to get your parents to drive you to the next county. Athletes win medals because of effort, tenacity, courage .... etc, etc. But all those things can only yield medals (in the quantities we have come to expect) if there is money (from either capitalism red in tooth and claw or communism [red... just RED]).

Personally I find "our" athletes' untoward success faintly obscene. At Tokyo, supposing we win "only" – say – 30  medals, commentators will be up in arms. Heads will roll. There will be phone-ins to talk interminably about "the crisis". Even more of the time devoted to TV sports will be talking heads rather than actual stuff.

But that sort of medal-count (still a few more than East Germany's 25 in 1968) would strike me as perfectly satisfactory – especially if it meant that more UK children had a chance to have a go at sports with exorbitant start-up costs, that schools could stop selling sports fields, and that children didn't have to go to fee-paying schools to get any experience of certain sports,

b