No sex please, we're French

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

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

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

 Following the Onelook link I found that, although the headword is dauphinois, most of the examples, have daphinoise. In fact, in the first screenful of examples, there are only two cases of dauphinois to nine of dauphinoise, and all the cases of dauphinoise refer to a manner or mode (both feminine nouns in French) of cooking. So what explains the two cases of dauphinois?

..ois or ...oise?

The answer is suggested by the second example and confirmed by  all four cases of dauphinois in the next screenful  (with dauphinoise still in the majority, but less so: 7 out of 11). Wherever dauphinois occurs it can (mistakenly) be parsed as an adjective qualifying gratin. There are no dates on the examples, but I suspect that these "adjective qualifying gratin" examples predate the first case in my first screenful: dauphinois as an adjective qualifying gratin becomes a justification for dauphinois understood as a free-standing noun.

The second screenful

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

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

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

... etc.)

The fight in defence of the rectitude of bourguignonne (according to the "B-G rule" [B-G being the French master who taught me it]) has been well and truly lost. Google finds 

About 9,010,000 results for boeuf bourguignon 

but only 

About 311,000 results for boeuf bourguignonne.

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

b

Rules run amuck

I‘ve mentioned before the way that people learning a language (particularly people acquiring their mother tongue) tend to take a newly-learnt rule and test it to destruction:

It's fairly obvious to a  native speaker that the most common way [of forming a plural] is to add an s. In fact, this rule becomes apparent whenever a young language learner mistakenly adds an s to an irregular plural – sheep becomes sheepS rather than sheep, for example; and when an adult corrects mouseS to mice, the compulsion to keep faith in the add-an-s rule is so strong that the next attempt is quite often miceS.

More here

But a similar source of error is frequently met, particularly in a singer's life, with respect to the rules of foreign languages, and particularly (as in that add-an-s case) the rules of phonology.

The two that spring most readily to mind (I was going to call them "my favorites", but  favorite is not quite the word) occur in French and in German (both languages that I have studied). And although my O-level German knowledge,  as I have admitted before, is Best Before November 1969 [or whenever it was in that winter], I had to resurrect it in order to study Romance philology...

<EXAMPLES type="German scholars of Romance languages" need-to-know="0">

• Grimm (of Grimm's Fairy Tales fame); the brothers made a crucial observation, known as Grimm's Law.
• Meyer-Lübke, compiler of Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
  the bible of all students of this area – the one necessary reference
• Gerhard Rohlfs, editor of Sermo Vulgaris Latinus
  a collection of very early texts – including, for example, graffiti from Pompeii
• and many others

</EXAMPLES>

1 Thirteen waters

This error is so common that I have given it a name. The rule here is

When there's a written s at the end of a word, it isn't sounded 

unless the following word starts with a vowel.

There are provisos and exceptions, but that's the gist.

This is the rule that gets out of hand in the Thirteen Waters Error. One of the exceptions applies to a word that starts h+<vowel> (but not just any old h).  There is, in French, the hache aspiré, which the LawlessFrench site explains thus:

This error oftSuch a false liason often  occurs in the first line of the sublime Cantique de Jean Racine, composed by Gabriel Fauré ...

<PROGRAMME_NOTE>
when (as programme notes insist on saying he entered it for a "school prize". Sometimes they even say 'when he was only a schoolboy!!!' [if you'll pardon the screamer-orrhea]. But he was not a schoolboy in the Just William sense; he was nineteen, studying at the École Niedermeyer de Paris,)
</PROGRAMME_NOTE>

....which has the basses alone – as exposed as a choral singer can be. And this howler occurs between the fourth and fifth words:

Verbe égal aux très haut

I'm not sure about the transcription in that  LawlessFrench excerpt. (Note: that's my way of saying I am sure and am not impressed.) But it makes the point clearly enough :

 Some hs don't block elision
when they precede a vowel, so the s isn't sounded:
the h in haut is one such: so /trɛ.ɔ/ not /trɛzɔ/.

<DIGRESSION>
(and Les Halles, while we're at it: /le.al/)
</DIGRESSION>

There is no rule for remembering which hs are aspirés and which are muets.  Dictionaries* mark it in some way, but that's no help for regular speech. You can't carry a dictionary around everywhere you go.

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_EXCEPTION>
As a matter of fact, my brother did during an exchange visit, in his early teens. He was not a great linguist, but he was always very keen on communication.
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_EXCEPTION>

You just have to know which is which. Just over a hundred words start with  an hache aspiré, so it‘s not a huge undertaking  to just learn them – which is all very well for people who hate hammocks; personally, I prefer a more humane approach to language learning.

I complained about this to a native speaker of French once, but he was not sympathetic  – particularly as people learning English have to grapple with a not dissimilar rule, telling honest with initial /ɒ/ from honk with initial /hɒ/.

But, returning to the Cantique, "aux treize eaux" (which the rule over-appliers seem to be singing) makes it sound as though the Cantique is being addressed to someone with thirteen waters (with the aux analogous to the aux in La dame aux Caméllias), or perhaps to a  Native American called 'Thirteen Waters'.

2 Sturm und wrong

The errant rule here, in German now, is this:

In some cases an s that precedes
another consonant becomes /ʃ/

(or "sh" if you must, but for more on my feelings about sounds-like transcriptions, see here; regular readers will already be accustomed to this fad.)

An obvious case is a word like Sturm (as the st occurs at the  start of a word – habitual home of examples of this phonological rule); but the /ʃ/ remains even in mid-word, as in the derived word Regensturm

But often  this change is not applied . And in the musical world a common habitat for the misapplication of this rule is Liebestraum, Liebestod or Liebesliede (any word, I now realize, that starts with Liebes- – not to suggest that it doesn't happen after similar-possessives (it's just that all the examples that spring to mind use that word). In a week of not unusually dedicated monitoring of the airways, I've noticed two cases: the first was on Desert Island Discs (no names, no pack-drill; but it was the guest – young Lauren got it right after the excerpt from Liebestod).

In the second case there was no error – my life, like that of many another survivor of an RC education, is plagued by an eternal vigilance for what the Penny Catechism ...

<GLOSSARY further-info="autobiographical">
(the RC equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book. [If you're interested I can still reel off "The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost" or "The Twelve Fruits of the Holy Ghost"])
 </GLOSSARY>

... used to call "occasions of sin" (situations that invite misbehaviour). But the presenter of the same piece at the Proms (a supporting piece in the Mozart's Requiem concert) knew her stuff.

But this has gone on too long. There's an urgent bio-mass crisis in the front garden.

b


Update: 2019.08.23.10:20  – Typo fix

Update: 2019.08.26.20:20  – More typo fixes, and a couple of clarifications in blue.

Update: 2019.09.06.16:10  – Added footnote:

*A dictionary is of  limited (usually no) use with names.  Often (in  English-language news broadcasts) the French politician François Hollande was the unwilling recipient of trans-gender treatment (Françoise).  In such cases the best advice is to listen to a native speaker: if there‘s no liaison  before it, the h is aspiré.

As I was saying

The words "As I was saying" trigger in me a memory I described a few years ago, here

[<something>] reminded me of a story I heard in a half-remembered lecture, about Juan del Encina.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1971-1972">
In May 1972 I was ... not quite a world authority on sixteenth-century Spanish literature, but Professor E. M. Wilson, my lecturer for that year, was.  

Juan del Encina

Juan del Encina, author of some of the seminal works in Spanish Golden Age literature, was arrested by the Holy Inquisition in the middle of a lecture. He was away for some considerable time (years, I think, but I was never much of a note-taker; I'm sure the details are somewhere on the Internet, if you‘re that way inclined). 

When he returned, his opening words were Dicebamus hesterno  die [="{As} we were saying the other day"].

<digression>
It was partly because of Professor Wilson's specialism (he had just contributed the chapter on Calderón to the standard work on Golden Age Literature first published in 1971) that the Hispanic Society chose the play mentioned here.
</digression>

</autobiographical_note>

Back on terra firma (this post, phew)  this is in effect an update to one I wrote nearly five years ago, but it's a bit more than an afterthought. It hinges on some research notes I produced in the late 1970s – when my future had more in it than my past.

<autobiographical_note>
I found the notes during a massive clearout of things I had written. The earliest was a spy spoof I produced when I was still wearing shorts.

<disambiguation> 

(no reference here, for North American readers, to deshabille. These were the 'my mamma done told me' kind of dress: knee-pants, if you will). 

<disambiguation>

</autobiographical_note>

Just to recap the gist of my speculative idea:

The royal coat of arms of Great Britain bears the motto Dieu et mon droît (a reference to the divine right of kings). Google finds well over 200,000,000 hits for the rather feeble (not to say meaningless) translation 'God and my right'. 

Somewhere (when I had reading rights in the old BM reading room) I found a French bible with the words Le Seigneur est ma justesse, which appears in the AV (no refs. today, my battery's about to die, as is my brain) as 'The Lord is my righteousness'.

...

Cutting to the chase, let's imagine Dieu e[s]t mon droît was the translation in some French bible of the verse that appears in the AV* as 'The lord is my righteousness'. The French-speaking Plantagenets would have met it. What better motto for Henry (the first king of Great Britain to adopt the motto) to adopt as a statement of a newly defined right (Henry having picked it up from his forebear Richard I, who favoured it as a crusading battle cry [meaning, roughly, 'God's on my side'])? 

*[2019 correction] I was wrong about the AV, which has (Jeremiah 23:6) 'the Lord our righteousness' . The Revised Standard Version   has Jeremiah 23:6 translated as 'the Lord is our righteousness' (as do other versions)
. 

A French version of this battle cry might have been Dieu est notre droit, which in Old French could have had et for est; e before -st becomes acute, and all this correct spelling stuff wouldn't have bothered Richard I (or his advisers, or chaplain) when he adopted it as his motto at Gisors in 1198. And a few centuries later (as my original post said). it was in use at around the time that defining the divine right of kings became relevant.

<digression>

Getting One's Metaphors in a Twist

David Coleman is not the only source of Colemanballs. Sports commentaries generally offer a cornucopia of such infelicities. The need for a continuous stream of verbiage almost guarantees it.  In the half-time break of a recent Ireland/England rugby match an  example was produced and allowed to slip away unnoticed (apparently unnoticed in the studio, but linguistically aware observers were on the qui vive). 

England had dominated the first half, but in the last ten minutes Ireland were resurgent, and had a one point lead.  The person leading the panel of interested parties in the studio wanted to say Ireland's tails were up and Ireland's noses were in front. Given the positional sense of the two metaphors (tails up/noses in front) it's no surprise that what came out of the presenter's mouth was the posturally improbable mixture: 

Ireland have their tails in front.

</digression>

But those shelves won't clear themselves.

b

The persistence of technology metaphors

On Word of Mouth the other day Michael Rosen and his guests Laura Wright (a semi-permanent guest, addressing all things linguistic) and Rob Eastaway were talking about measurements. At one stage, Laura Wright remarked on the way metaphors tend to persist long after the technology has left them behind. She reached for a low-hanging fruit example (oh yes, we always use that one: the old ones are the best; I've used it more than once in this blog, here for example). Her example was the telephone:

"Everybody in this building has got a mobile...

<philological_aside>
I'm surprised she could resist pointing out how an adjective can often come to be used in place of the noun it qualifies. A peach, for example,  was imported to Roman dinner tables as a mala persica (persian apple). and the adjective became the noun in most Romance languages; read more here.
<philological_aside>

... and yet we will still talk about calling people up, hanging up, the phone ringing off the hook.... We're referring to  technology from the nineteenth century when phones really did hang, when you had to ring a bell to ring somebody – or somebody had to ring it; the operator had to do so...."

This persistence of old metaphors affects nearly every context you can think of:

• guns: a flash in the pan; keep your powder dry, the barrel of a gun (referring to a centuries-old method of constructing them from several pieces of metal held together with hoops, like the staves of a wooden barrel)..
• the sea: laden to the gunnels...

  <digression>
  Two layers of metaphor there: modern ships have gunnels, but the gunnel was originally so called because it was a heavy plank  used to reinforce the part of a ship that had to support cannon: it was a gun wale..
  </digression>

  ... starboard (a board attached to the right side of a sailing boat, used for  steering), ...
• film: footage (used to refer to a series of digital images that have never been anywhere near a linear medium), "the last  reel" – referring to the same long disused technology...
• cars: dashboard (a reference to part of a horse-drawn vehicle), fuel economy expressed in miles per gallon, long after fuel was sold by the gallon, horse-power, the colloquial use of "Shotgun" to refer to (and reserve) the seat next to the driver...
• theatre equipment: limelight (and its use away from theatrical contexts), long after an intense artificial light was generated by burning lime; iron (to refer to the safety curtain, presumably once made of or with iron)..
• coin-operated mechanisms: "spend a penny", "the penny drops"...
• and so on, wherever you look

... There are more examples, for anyone who has the time – further evidence for Guy Deutscher's "reef of dead metaphors" idea, which I mentioned in a very early post (a much-visited one  – coming in third most popular among nearly 400 of these musings)

....Looking out of my rain-streaked window I see clouds - cumulus clouds. Cumulus is Latin for 'little heap' - which is what the cloud looks like. Now after the rain, a house-proud property-holder will go out and sweep the dead leaves on the new patio 'into a little heap' - ad cumulum. The Romans had a word for that - not for sweeping up dead leaves (which I'm afraid is a bit of a personal obsession at the moment), but for collecting stuff together: accumulare - whence our 'accumulate'. Guy Deutscher, in his fascinating The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention calls language (in a brilliant metaphor about metaphors - a 'meta-metaphor'?)  'a reef of dead metaphors'. In fact, Deutscher says more; it's not just words that were born phoenix-like from dead metaphors; dead metaphors are 'the alluvium from which grammatical structures emerge'. 

But staying with the subject of measurements (the grit at the centre of this ... erm, whatever) someone on  that programme mentioned how memorable measures (resisting metrication) tended to be monosyllabic – foot, inch, yard, and so on. Which brought to mind another such monosyllable –  chain – which was mentioned too. But what wasn't mentioned, on the subject of persistent obsolete technology metaphors, was the surveyor's assistant: chain boy. (The term was current when my brother was one in the 1970s, and a quick Google search confirms that it's still in use [though sometimes, in a diverse workforce, with PC tweezers])*.

And while they were addressing the subject of monosyllabic measures, I was surprised that the seriously francophone Michael Rosen didn't mention the French pouce (which serves dual roles: both "inch" and "thumb"), especially as someone on the programme (possibly Rosen himself...?) did mention the relation between that measurement and the first joint of the thumb.

But time's wingéd chariot is doing its usual trick, so I'll just record for posterity my answer to the Height of Everest in metres problem: Michael Rosen said he knew the height of Everest in feet (29,000 odd) but not in metres. Well, if you don't mind a few approximations it's not that difficult:

• 29,000 feet is about 5½ miles
• 5 miles is 8 kilometres
• Everest is 8000 metres + a bit under 1km (8848m, to use Wikipedia's figure, though I'm sure Rosen's right in saying  that snow makes a seasonal difference; and "just under 9000 metres" is good enough for me.).

Bye for now.

b

Update: 2019.06.24.10:30 – Added PS

PS
Many years ago I was writing about something entirely inapposite, into which I interpolated this digression:

<digression type="potential">
When was it that boxed sets lost their participial suffix? In my days at OUP we knew what a boxed set was: it was a set of books that had been or were to be (in editorial discussions) boxed. The -ed is assimilated to the....But this is beginning to be more than just potential ...
</digression> 

But now the words have taken on a new metaphorical meaning that adds them to the list of metaphors that hark back to an old technology.  Just when I had learnt to suppress the "But where's the D?" reflex, "box set" has taken on a new meaning: "the whole series, available to download or stream". The idea of a physical box has disappeared entirely.

And don't talk to me about podcast. Even the strenuously commercial-free BBC have embraced this word (with its etymological link to the iPod).

<autobiographical_note>
Speaking of which, before the appearance of the iPod I was the proud owner of an iPadq (in the heady days before Apple had monopolized iWords). It was a PDA, before smartphones could do all the requisite personal digital assisting.
</autobiographical_note>

Update: 2019.06.24.17:30 – Typo fix in PS, and clarification in blue.

Update: 2020.09.08.11:20 – Added PPS and footnote

PPS On the subject of the persistence of references to old technology in metaphors, I think I've  just spotted another case hiding in  plain sight. I don't have the time to research this now, so don't present this as gospel. But it seems pretty likely.

In the old candlestick (!) telephones, the user held the upright part (incorporating the microphone) in their less dominant hand (i.e. left, in the majority of cases), and the receiver (with the loud-speaker) in their dominant hand. When technology moved on, and both the microphone and the speaker were in a single unit, it was still called "a receiver" ...

<parenthesis>

This is the bit that needs researching (or, in the argot of the International Organization for Standardization [that's "ISO", not "IOS"] it is For Further Study): in candlestick telephones,  at the time, was the receiver (the part with the speaker) called "the receiver"?

</parenthesis>

...(although it did more than just receive).

I suspect that even this word is on the way out, as many people today eschew land-lines – and a handset is a handset. The Collins English Dictionary shows a slight tapering off in usage – as far as its data extend – and I don't see why this slow dwindling should have slowed in the last 12 years (rather the reverse):

---

* Another such word is ell, which exemplifies another recurrent feature of language development. Just as the original "For aught I know" was replaced by "For all I know", because "all" is more common than "aught", the original "Give him an inch and he'll take an ell" was superseded by "Give him an inch and he'll take a mile" (slightly improbable; an ell is 1¼ yd  – someone taking 45 times much as is offered is less unlikely [though not all that likely]  than someone taking  63360 times as much. This kind of change (the mile version enjoys 4 times as many hits on Google as the ell version...

<warning reason="double-counting">
Of course, all the ell pages include references to the mile version; that still leaves 3 times as many pages with just the mile version.
</warning>

...) is made more likely if there's a phonological similarity  between the old word and the new one:

• all/aught – monosyllables sharing an initial /ɔ:/ phoneme
• mile/ell – monosyllables sharing a final /l/ phoneme

Frites or crêpes? Who cares?

A few days ago the usually unruffled calm of French grammar was rudely disturbed by a pair of teachers in Belgium, who wanted a change:

Currently, the rule is that the past participle of a verb does not agree with the direct object of a sentence if it comes after it, but it does when the object comes before the participle.

So for instance, in the sentence j'ai mangé des frites (I ate chips), mangé remains the same. But in the sentence les frites que j'ai mangées (the chips that I have eaten), the participle agrees with the word chips, which is feminine and plural.

...The rule was imported from Italy by pedants in the 16th Century and is being dropped in everyday use, the pair argue.

BBC source

There are three things about the original Libération article  that struck me:

• Those Italian pedants in the 16th Century had a name, and it started with only one:
  

  Au XVI^e siècle, Clément Marot, constatant le même phénomène en italien, en fait la promotion à l’aide d’un joli poème, ce qui fera dire à Voltaire : «Il a ramené deux choses d’Italie : la vérole [HD: smallpox] et l’accord du participe passé. Je pense que c’est le deuxième qui a fait le plus de ravages [HD: I think the latter did the most damage]».

  This is reminiscent of the history of English, which is littered with pedantic attempts at "tidying up" by introducing rules that cause more trouble than they solve.
   
• The "80 hours of teaching time" claim looks very odd, not to say iffy. I suspect some strange extrapolation of Wallonia's version of OFSTED accounting methods. Before anyone believes this, or worse still acts on it, I recommend a closer inspection of this figure. (On a related topic, I wonder what proof there is of the "being dropped in everyday usage" claim. It seems credible, and should be easy enough to prove, but I'd be happier not relying on what a couple of Belgian teachers ARGUE [I wonder what universe the BBC plucked that verb out of]).
  
  
• The example has changed. This is not a serious counter argument; indeed, it's just not a counter-argument – simply an object of passing interest. The writer of the BBC article seems to have decided that frites was a more telling example than crêpes:
  

  «Employé avec l’auxiliaire avoir, le participe passé s’accorde en genre et en nombre avec le complément d’objet direct quand celui-ci le précède (les crêpes que j’ai mangées). Mais si le complément suit le participe, il reste invariable (j’ai mangé les crêpes).» [HD: my underline, just to make navigation a bit easier.]
  

This sparked off an irrelevant memory:

<autobiographical_note date="1968">
After my O-levels [HD: fore-runner of GCSEs] I went hitch-hiking around Europe with a friend. When we arrived outside Paris (at the Auberge de Jeunesse in the unpromisingly-named Châtenay-Malabry [surely bon abri would have been a more attractive-sounding name]), we ate from a stall that sold crêpes. The crêperie was set up a bit like a fish-and chip stall. But this apparent similarity was  a faux-ami. The bottle on the counter, tipped with a pouring spout, was not for free use of the customer.

<meta_digression\>
While I'm on the subect of "false friends", an ongoing cycle repair has alerted me to fact that rubber solution is not solution de caoutchouc but dissolution de caoutchouc; not exactly a false friend, but something that's just not friendly at all.
</meta_digression\>

I ordered and paid for a crêpe and reached for a bottle of Grand Marnier, standing on the counter like a vinegar bottle in a fish and chip stall. The stall-holder was not amused, and gave me an earful. She no doubt agreed with de Gaulle, who for some years had remained obdurate about keeping la perfide Albion out of the EEC.
</autobiographical_note>

I'm glad that the English have avoided this sort of wrangling by the simple expedient of not having a supreme arbiter of correctness. If the rule is being used in practice less and less, that will be it. The Académie (or some more relevant body, as the Académie doesn't really do syntax) can keep its finger in the dyke if it likes, but it won't have much bearing on the linguistic facts.  We are left with a twale twold by a twidiot:

The BBC article translates this: "why not also drop the offside rule in football? That way ... schoolchildren will be able to spell phonetically and football players will be able to play with their hands.

I'm not sure about the "that way", but la règle du hors-jeu will make a useful new entry in my Vocab. Book.

b

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

...when we try to organize our thoughts about language ...

<digression>
(and it's no accident that the idea of weaving is at the root of the word text – 'from PIE root *teks- "to weave, to fabricate, to make; make wicker or wattle framework."', as Etymonline puts it. They quote Robert Bringhurst, from The Elements of Typographic Style:

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

</digression>

I've written before about the damage done by thinkers about language, who create their whole petty world of Mrs Thistlebottom's "rules", policed by Strunk & White, purveyors of jackboots to all discerning grammar Nazis. Here, for example, I wrote

When Dr Johnson defined a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge' I think he knew what he was doing. Lexicographers can make life much more difficult for students. They say 'Look, what a boon is standardization'; but look at the mess they make!

(Interested readers can look in that post for examples of the mess.)

But, as  a representative of a pattern-loving species I have to put my hand up for the fault of  seeing rules where there is only (messy, almost chaotic) usage.

In The Changing English Language (my entree into Linguistics, which I first read in the late 1960s), Brian Foster wrote:

Nouns ending in "-ee" have long been a feature of the English  vocabulary, and such a modern-looking  formation as "payee"  goes back to the 18th century, while "recognizee" (the person to whom one is bound in a recognizance) is dated 1544 by the SOED, These particular examples show the fairly characteristic passive meaning implied by this suffix..

There are many examples of this passive sense. The Macmillan English Dictionary (not a notable authority, but the publisher of the dictionary software I happen to use) lists addressee, amputee,  appointee, deportee, detainee, employee, evacuee, franchisee, inductee, internee, interviewee, licensee, nominee and payee – all unarguable  patients of the verb in question. An element of indirectness is discernible in referee: the person is not referred; what is referred (to the referee) is a point of fact or interpretation. Devotee is also different, in  that the actor and the patient of the act are one and the same – except in the case  of forced conversions (where "devotee" would in any case be a misnomer). And the passiveness in the case of retiree is questionable; some people "of pensionaable age" are happy to put their feet up; it is only their more dedicated colleagues who fit the passive pattern and are retired  against their will.

But Brian Foster goes on to say

Such indeed is the usefulness of this device that an endless succession of nonce-words based on it  is made possible,  like the one made up by Gilbert Harding when he wrote in his Book of Manners that '... a hug from the Russian bear might well crush the huggee to death.' This semi-humorous [HD Only semi- ? Well, maybe not a rib-tickler, but definitely jocular] procedure is not a new one, for in Mr.  Sponge's Sporting Tour, published in 1853, R. S. Surtees refers to a person being toasted as the 'toastee'.

But, he goes on

... the possibility of using this suffix in an active sense is old-established, because 'absentee' goes back to 1537 and 'refugee' came into the language in 1685, the year of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV when many French Huguenots fled the country to escape persecution. Escapee is attested in 1865...

Hang on, I thought when I read this. S'abstenir is reflexive anyhow, so someone who does it to him/herself is an absentee with no problem for the seeker after passives. And both  s'échapper and se refugier are as my old French master would have said verbes de déplacement: someone who has escaped s'est échappé[e], and someone who has sought refuge s'est refugié[e]; again, there's no problem for the passive-o-phile. (If you've met the argument about 17th- and 18th-century grammarians making the mistake of trying to force English into the grammar of Latin [so, for example, no sentence-final prepositions], you may get a sense of dêjà vu here: it's just that the mistake here is the adducing of French grammar.)

So despite evidence to the contrary, I still have a quiet resentment of arriviste non-passives like attendee.

<autobiographical_note>
This issue came to a head when I was in a working group that had rotating minute-takers. Many of my colleagues had knocked up a clever bit of time-saving software that highlighted differences from meeting to meeting. As I was their junior, and they expected a flag to mean Something's new rather than Bob's at it again, I soon learnt not to change Attendees: to Present:
</autobiographical_note>

But that evidence to the contrary  (to the contrary, that is, of the passive implication of -ee endings) keeps mounting. Attendees are joined by resignees, even dilutees (unskilled workers who dilute the skill-level of a group of skilled workers).  I feel that these new -ee words with no passive implication are in some sense regrettable. But they happen, and a student of language can only recognize it and avoid creating yet another angels-on-a-pinhead  "rule" for the unwary to stub their toes on (and yes, I did write their).  

b

PS 

Some clues:

• Before? After? Get up, with last going first. Ridiculous! (12)
• Truncated Hamlet done recast as contemporary political thriller. (8)

Update: 2018.11.22.10:30 – Added PPS.

PPS: The answers: PREPOSTEROUS and HOMELAND.

Taking the cake

A proverb that bothered my younger mind has come to unwonted prominence, in the fertile soil provided by the context of Brexit. And recently a Prospect blog written by Professor Simon Horobin cast some light on this:

The well-worn proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it” is enjoying something of a revival in the heated exchanges over Brexit. Ever since Boris Johnson characterised his policy on cake as “pro having it and pro eating it too,” Brussels has sought to alert the British negotiators to the impossibility of adopting such an attitude.

In October 2016, European Council president Donald Tusk, taking a rather literal approach to the aphorism, called upon proponents of the ‘cake philosophy’ to carry out a scientific experiment: “Buy a cake, eat it, and see if it is still there on the plate.”

A month later a Tory MP caused a certain amount of embarrassment when, emerging from a Downing Street briefing, his handwritten notes were photographed in the barefaced admission “What’s the model? Have your cake and eat it.” 

<advanced_riposte>
And NO, the "?" doesn't absolve the miscreant. The question  is “What’s the model?...". The answer is "...Have your cake and eat it.”
</advanced_riposte>

My impression is that this slip gave rise to the neologism cakeism, used strictly in the context of Brexit.

Horobin's blog explains the source of the confusion mentioned in my first sentence:

The reason for the confusion is that the original form of the phrase has been reversed in its modern incarnation. Here it is in a 16th-century book of proverbs: “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?” The idea, then, is that once you have eaten your cake, you can no longer continue to possess it; that is, sometimes you are forced to choose between two irreconcilable options.

In France, the approximately equivalent idiom is vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre which I have seen translated as “to want the butter and the money from the butter”  – confusingly. What does "from the butter" mean? (I suspect the intervention of an abused dictionary, as 'du' can (sometimes) mean 'from [the]'). But this is the translation that Professor Horobin uses, although I imagine he's not the original dictionary-abuser – rather that he knows French and overlooked the inadequacy of the translation.

What English does for this sort of "de" is that it simply prepends the beneficiary/recipient: e.g. "dinner money", "fag packet" ... L'argent du beurre is "the butter money" or, if you like, "the money reserved/designated/intended... to pay for the butter", or, more briefly (but rather clumsily), "the money for the butter".  For, at  a push, but not From ". The money from the butter" could be used if somebody were selling the butter.

Which brings us to the afterthought sometimes added to intensify Vouloir le beurre et l'argent du beurre ...: et le sourire de la crémière. The crémière does perhaps collect "the money from the butter". This intensifier was presumably the source  of  the Luxembourg Prime Minister's: “They want to have their cake, eat, and get a smile from the baker.”

<hat_tip>
This is a pretty impressive bit of linguistic pyrotechnics  – not so much L1-interference  as L1-interpretation or just L1-riffing; he even adds "get" where the French model has no verb, and then changes the supplier appropriately. And all in a second (or even possibly third) language.
</hat_tip>

Another culinary metaphor to receive a new lease of life from Brexit is cherry-picking. This can be understood in one of two ways: either picking dessert cherries from a mixed fruit-bowl (not a way I've ever seen cherries served),  or – greedily and selfishly – picking a glacé cherry from the top of a bun/cake,  and thus unknowingly but carelessly marking the residual carbs as tainted. Or maybe, now I think of  it, the image evokes someone viewing a bowl of cherries and picking the ripest.

I'm not sure I buy everything Professor Horobin says. For example, I don't think even he believes it when he says 'The belief that the mouth was designed principally for its consumption is suggested by the slang term “cake-hole.”'. "Designed principally"...? Does he know what principally means?   But his blog is worth a read. And when he points to "with a cherry on top" as a possible intensifier to "the icing on the cake" I'm reminded of that crémière (whose smile is used to intensify the beurre metaphor).

b

PS: A couple of clues:

• Championship is moreish in a sense. (8)
• Orchestral manœuvres after withdrawal of leftist extremists before Part Three finale, Nijinsky, for example. (9)

A mole by any other name

Last week MrsK tried a new recipe for something called Turkey Mole. I had never met the word mole in a culinary context – though the fact that one of the ingredients was chocolate should have alerted me to the likelihood of a South American origin.

New words are like buses, you spend years not meeting a word and then two come along at once. In Saturday's Times Giles Coren  was reviewing a restaurant specializing in Mexican food, and he mentioned that one of the dishes came with a mole. I knew what it was,  just-in-time,  and tried to find other related words. Staying in South America, guacamole is a sort of mole – so there was another mole, hiding in plain sight.

Could this be related to our molars – the grinding teeth? Everyday English doesn't have any other word that preserves the "o" in a grinding word (as do Spanish and Italian [moler/molere] and no doubt many others. In French, it's become "ou" in moulin (and even the most monoglottally Anglophone will have met this in the trade-name  Moulinex). In English and German, different leaves of the PIE tree, we have mill and Mühle.

<digression>
Another way of smashing things up to release the flavour (apart from grinding, that is) is pounding or crushing, and words related to that are derived from the Latin pestare. The most obvious derivative from this is pesto, made with a pestle. This shows how a word that refers to a process can come to be used to refer to a sauce made with that process.
</digression>

Detail of the image in that video

But let's look more closely at that derivation of guacamole.   I knew before that avocado, the main constituent of  guacamole, is nothing to do with the similar-looking advocacy. Rather, it derives from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl (Nahuatl being the language spoken by the Aztecs).

<scatological_digression>
Watch the video here  to see that avocado means testicle – presumably because of the way they hang.
</scatological_digression>

But I had no idea until the last weekend in February that the "guaca-" of guacamole derived from ahuacatl.  Etymonline says:

So, it all looks pleasingly neat: Sp. moler, Pg moer, It. molere, Prov. molre, Cat. modre. Eng. mill, Ger. Mühle, Nahuatl molli ...{?} Hang on though, not so fast. Why should the language of the Aztecs (which pre-dates the Spanish which didn't begin to taint it until the late 15th century)  have anything to do with a PIE language? This is inviting further investigation, though I suspect the seeming relatedness between words to do with grinding (which on the analogy of pesto can  be used to refer to a sauce made with that process) and the Nahuatl molli is illusory and accidental. Shame....  Very probably molli has as much to do with grinding as ahuacatl has to do with advocacy.

b

PS – A couple of clues:

• Bi-polar longing to spill the beans. (6)
• Deserving opprobrium about sort of tail wrapped round first of belligerents. (13)
  

Update: 2018.06.04.12:05 – Added PPS

PPS
The answers: SNITCH and REPREHENSIBLE.

Benedicite

In a choral singer's life, the pronunciation  of Latin is bound to become an issue. People learn one way in school, and can't help being infected. Fortunately, in the Venn diagram of my life,  Church Latin (which I started to ... enunciate at the age of about 7, as described here), school Latin (there are several of course, but mine was Church-Latin-speaking), and the Latin used in the study of Romance Philology (Vulgar Latin), all coincided.

I can't claim to know the whole story, but there are at least four gross variants – old and new Classical systems, Church Latin, and Germanic or continental Latin; there are probably more. And these are further compounded by  national phonemic peculiarities (sounds that are excluded – made effectively unpronounceable – as a necessary part of the acquisition of a mother tongue) such as those I mentioned here.

I  discussed one of the many problems arising from this clash of pronunciation regimes here. But in this post I want to talk about an old system that has almost died out but was once widely taught both in the UK and of course in many schools around the world in the British Empire (ensuring that the colonies paid at least twice for the dubious accolade of the imposition of the Pax Britannica).

Ask the search engine of your choice about Benedicite and you will be told this:

If you're not a user of the IPA, I recommend pressing the little loudspeaker doofer (in your browser that is, not on my screen-capture).

Elsewhere I wrote:

<autobiographical note>
In a choir I used to sing in, there was a great kerfuffle about how one should pronounce Benedicite. It couldn't have mattered less, as it happens, since that word does not occur in the [Ed: English] text.  But in  Benjamin Britten's world (and particularly at the school he went to when he went there) the first "i" (but not the second) had this same /ɑɪ/ diphthong.

<PS date=2017>
Benedicite was just the name of a canticle he was familiar with in the Book of Common Prayer: "Bless ye the Lord".
</PS>

</autobiographical note>

The first i has the same /aɪ/  diphthong as the mori that ends that poem: as I said here (a post that unaccountably has attracted nearly 1 in 3 of all 100,000+ page visits that all HD posts have enjoyed over the last 5 years):

... in the school where Wilfrid Owen learnt his Latin, the last two lines rhymed...

<WHOOPS>
The words are "old lie/mori", but it is an internal rhyme, I now see, as "Dulce" doesn't – as I had thought – start the last line.
</WHOOPS>

...(and they may have scanned as well – I dunno; even  if they didn't they probably did in schoolboy-speak, where the stress  is often inverted in memorized (and drilled) Latin. Think of aMO aMAS aMAT..., whose actual stress [Ed: on the first syllable] is attested by most [if not all] Romance languages [aimer, amar, amare, etc. etc].)

(Naturally, if you know and remember and love the poem with the sound /'mɔ:ri:/ don't let  me interfere. In my house there are many mansions/let a thousand flowers bloom/etc.)

Many examples in legal Latin show a similar vowel sound: prima facie (/praɪmә feɪsi:/), decree nisi (/naɪsaɪ/).... The same system of diphthong vowel sounds accounts for habeas corpus (/heɪbiәs.../) among others (although later "corrections" may have been made, especially in parts of the world where the English legal system was adopted).

But I have promises to keep, and files [sic] to weed before I sleep.

b

PS: A few clues:

• Do about 50, not completely. (6)
• Used up exemplary piece, in which to be used no longer. (9)
• Publish electronic Bible version? (7)

Update: 2017.10.07.15:30 – Added PPS.

PPS Just heard one on the radio (a misquote, FWIW, but enough to remind me: anno domini (the second i with an /aɪ/ sound). In fact, this phrase may have been the catalyst for the misquote, now I think about it: it was "laudato domini" ( for "laudate dominum"): <some-latin-stuff>o <more-latin-stuff>i).

But laudato means "to|by|with|from the praised [one]"; and domini means "of the lord". Put them together and... well, I imagine a Latin scholar could find a context that they would fit in, but that ain't me, babe.

Update: 2017.10.29.17:30 – Added PPPS.

And another (recalled by a Radio 3 playing of I was glad: "Vivat Regina".

And those answers: PARTLY, DESUETUDE and EVULGATE. Sorry about the "in which", which I'm afraid seems to have been an accidental typo.

Update: 2017.12.09.12:45 – Added P⁴S.

Last one: ex gratia (/'greɪʃə/)

Update: 2018.02.19.11:30 – How many Ps for Pete's sake, and didn't he say...?

The ghost of  "Last One Yet-to-come": verbatim (/vɜ:'beɪtɪm/)

Little birdies in their nests agree

I came late to Twitter, though late is relative (I followed Stephen Fry ...

<apologia>
Don't judge. I'm not just a star-struck celebrity-stalker. we are fellow near-contemporaries (a few years apart) at CU Footlights, and have a number of connections and interests in common.
</apologia>

...before he reached 20,000 followers and he's now at about 13 million). At the 2008 Language Show I saw a talk given by the amazing Joe Dale, and he recommended it. But I resisted until I saw him again at the 2009^PPS Language Show, and since then I've been an aficionado and a user (rather more than some might wish. :-)

But  the other night two tweets reminded me of one of my many reasons for loving Twitter. The first was this:

This doesn't use the #mfltwitterati tag, so I have no reason to suppose the tweeter is a language specialist (though she might be – I know the Retweeter of the second tweet is).  But the first two words set me off on a fascinating trail – scent perhaps.

CANICULUS. Long-time followers of this blog will recognize the -ULUS ending (it's a little one of whatever it is – the magic words are diminutive suffix). And related words such as English canine and, less obviously, French chien (and canaille, someone on the radio has just told me...

<digression>
I've checked, but not in my usual source for this sort of thing, Etymonline (which presumably doesn't... whoops, it does. Still)... 

More here 

</digression>

...), point to the doggy part. CANICULUS -> Canis Minor.

According to this site

Canis Minor contains two primary stars and 14 Bayer/Flamsteed designated stars. It’s brightest star, Procyon (Alpha Canis Minoris), is also the seventh brightest star in the sky. With an apparent visual magnitude of 0.34, Procyon is not extraordinarily bright in itself. But it’s proximity to the Sun – 11.41 light years from Earth – ensures that it appears bright in the night sky. 

More

And from there we get to the Dog Days:

The dog days or dog days of summer are the hot, sultry days of summer. They were historically the period following the heliacal rising of the star Sirius, which Greek and Roman astrology connected with heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck. They are now taken to be the hottest, most uncomfortable part of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Wikipedia

So an alerte canicule is not just a "dogs die in hot cars" warning, although that is something worth considering during the Dog Days.

Attentive readers will have noticed an unexplained inflation in the size of the dog. French canicule derives from CANICULUS (which should be Canis Minor) But the Dog Days are related to Sirius, which is in Canis Major. The only explanation for this that I can see is that, to quote that Universe Today site, Canis Minor‘s brightest star is "Procyon ... the seventh brightest star in the sky". And then:

The star’s name is derived from the Greek word which means “before the dog”, a reference to the fact that it appears to rise before Sirius (the “Dog Star”) when observed from northern latitudes.

So, when Procyon rises, it makes sense to think "Here come the Dog Days".

The second tweet gives less food for thought; it's just an example of the sort of linguistic trouvaille (never thought I'd use that word  :-) ) that Twitter tends to throw up.

Note for Anglophones: mec means something like "bloke". I think this is much more elegant than "mansplaining", which seems to me to suffer from the same neologizing crudeness as "chocoholic" or "gyrocopter" (just lumping two bits of words together, regardless of their structure). I‘m not hung up on origins; but I like neologisms to hang together like other words do, morphologically.

<rant type="another bugbear">
And I'm unreasonably hostile to "atpersand" (for the sign @). Its model is obviously the word ampersand. but the structure of that is "and (per se and)". So the at-based analogue should be ATPERSAT.  

"SHOULD? – that's the way it is.  Ask Google." says the little descriptivist dæmon on my shoulder  Still...
</rant>

But I'm missing the cricket.

b

PS And here are a couple of clues.

• Is introduced to soupçon, pesky thing! (8)
• Legal document introducing sort of Elgar maestoso; really clear. (4,5)

Update: 2017.10.03.11:15 – Added footnote (and crossword answers).

^PPS With some regret, I have cancelled my @BobK99 account (because of Twitter's new Ts&Cs, the gist of which is "Everything you write or link to is ours to do with as we will, and we have the right to pass it on willy-nilly to third parties of our choice"), keeping my toe in the water as @WVGTbook^P4S – which won't point to my blog. But as a result of this rejigging I've noticed that the account dated back to 2008; I must have signed up in the fog of post-Language Show admin. I just didn't start using it until 2009.

Crossword answers: NUISANCE and WRIT LARGE

Update: 2017.10.13.11:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS: A while ago I noted another of those marvellous tweets that reveals something about another language:

... Les planches as metonymical reference to the theatre. An English actor treads the boards, but "boards" and planches aren't cognates.  I  wonder which came first...?

Update: 2018.01.03.10:45 – Added P⁴S

P⁴S Correction: on mature reflection I've renamed this account to @leBobEnchaine, which your Twitter interface may display as BobK Lite. 

<minirant>
And among the many things I dislike about Twitter as it has developed over the years, is the way the Twitter handle has become a secondary thing. What with that, the change from Favorite to Like, the move from 140 to 280 characters... Anyone'd think they were trying to reduce their user-base.
</minirant>