Quarantine and epicentre

People who know a bit about the formation of languages learn  that they must beware of the Etymological Fallacy, which this Oxford Reference page defines as

The belief that an earlier or the earliest meaning of a word is necessarily the right one. That it is fallacious is illustrated by the fact that orchard once meant a treeless garden, treacle a wild beast, and villain a farm labourer.

The creeping Wikipedi-ization of the modern world has exposed us more and more to this tendency to hold that words must mean what they used to mean, which implies that meanings must never change. Still, a knowledge of where words come from can be fascinating.

The word "quarantine" has had a long history, originally referring to a period of isolation at the time of The Plague (well  one of the waves of  one of them – it was all a bit muddled back them, TBH).

This page dates it (with annoying vagueness – the site is, after all, designed to drum up business for English Language summer schools, so it would be unreasonable to expect much in the way off academic rigour) to "a document from 1377"  though in an  earlier form that set the safeness-from-plague period to thirty days – una trentina. In an earlier post I briefly referred to "quarantine"‘s ship-of-possible-carriers origin, but I didn't place the first use as coined by Venetians trying to keep the plague out of Dubrovnik (as this page does if you care to read it through):

The word “quarantine” has its origins in the devastating plague, the so-called Black Death, which swept across Europe in the 14th century, wiping out around 30% of Europe’s population. It comes from the Venetian dialect form of the Italian words “quaranta giorni”, or “forty days”, in reference to the fact that, in an effort to halt the spread of the plague, ships were put into isolation on nearby islands for a forty-day period before those on board were allowed ashore.  

Source

My ingrained cynicism about the temptations of the Etymological Fallacy doesn't,  however,  prevent me from experiencing a frisson of "innocent merriment" ...

<PC_defence degree="set phasers to stun">
(at the risk of seeming to make light of a notably unfunny situation)
</PC_defence>

... when the Diamond Princess quarantine forced the word back to its roots (with people not  being allowed to leave a ship).

My other concern at the moment is the snowballing over-use of epicentre. Again, I'm not trying to argue that the word can only be used between consenting vulcanologists ...

<spelling_for_dummies>
(and the infernal machine wants me to write "volcanologists", but quod scripsi scripsi)
</spelling_for_dummies>

... but I just feel my lip curling whenever people use a big word just to make them sound serious. What's wrong with centre? What's wrong with focus?...

<digression>
There's that innocent merriment again. Focus, being derived from the word for fire, seems particularly apt when talking about an infection that causes, among other things, fever.
</digression>

...hub..., source ... There are many ways of avoiding epicentre; but it continues on its juggernaut way. This view of its growth in popularity (sadly out of date – the  latest data they've got is from 2008, and in the last twelve years its use can only have grown) comes from Collins:

 Anyway, it's time I got back to note-bashing for  our next concert:

<incidental_observation>
A fellow choir member has asked about "Jesu chare"  in the Pergolesi Buxtehude  – not having found chare in a latin dictionary.  There are two problems with this search. The first is that the phrase is vocative – addressing Jesus. "Dear Jesus" would be, in the nominative (just naming him), Jesus carus. The spelling of that second word points to the second problem. This recalls my "epicentre" rant; one of the mechanisms of language change is hypercorrection (trying to sound important by a misplaced display of "learning"). The introduction of h after c ...

<inline_ps>
I'm not referring to a /h/ sound following the /k/. The hypercorrect change is from /k/ to /χ/ (like the sound at the end of Bach). Trimalchio – that* character in the Satyricon – is (unwittingly) referring to the influence of Greek sounds on Latin. Greek slaves were common in the Roman world,  and there were Greek-speaking enclaves in what we now know as Italy.
</inline_ps> 

...is usually hypercorrect; this is satirized as early as the first century AD in the Satyricon; which has a social-climbing character who is mocked for saying chommodus rather than commodus; Oops, TMI.
</incidental_observation>

Anyway, it's lovely music. Don't miss it.

b

Update: 2020.02.18.15:45 – Added inline PS.

Update: 2020.02.19.12:15 – Added footnote

* Oh what a tangled web we weave
   When first practice to update with an inline PS

That character is mentioned later on. Sorry.

Update: 2020.02.21.10:20 – Corrected the composer; it was Buxtehude

Assassins and Dutch courage

The starting point for today's ramblings is the word assassin. Followers of The Old Man of the Mountains (shaik-al-jibal) were known for (in the words of Etymonline)  "murdering opposing leaders after intoxicating themselves by eating hashish." It goes on:

1530s (in Anglo-Latin from mid-13c.), via medieval French and Italian Assissini, Assassini, from Arabic hashīshīn "hashish-users," an Arabic nickname for the Nizari Ismaili sect in the Middle East during the Crusades, plural of hashishiyy, from the source of hashish (q.v.).

The Etymonline entry for hashish reads

hashish (n.) 

also hasheesh, 1590s, from Arabic hashīsh "powdered hemp, hemp," extended from sense "herbage, dry herb, rough grass, hay."

and quotes English Words of Arabic Ancestry:

Its earliest record as a nickname for cannabis drug is in 13th century Arabic. Its earliest in English is in a traveller's report from Egypt in 1598. It is rare in English until the 19th century. The word form in English today dates from the early 19th century. The word entered all the bigger Western European languages in the early to mid 19th century if you don't count occasional mentions in travellers' reports before then.  

That mention of cannabis invites the reflection that the English word canvas is related. Unstressed vowels between consonants (like the second a in cannabis) are, as students of language change over time say, unstable: they tend to disappear.

Here , relatively early in the life of this blog, I was writing about a spiral ring found in Pompeii,  with an inscription that included the word domnus (sic, no i).

... no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10-15 cm spiral ring, for one little I, or that this one-stroke character was too complex for an otherwise impeccable craftsman! No, people were dropping the unstressed I in speech; and this accounts for words like the Italian Donna and Spanish Doña when the  Latin was Domina . (I changed the sex of the lordly person, because in the masculine the attrition of an unstressed vowel has gone one step further in Spanish – Don [which dropped its unstressed vowel {HD 2019: that is, after dropping the unstressed i it dropped the unstressed u}].)

It would have been less contentious to cite the Portuguese donna, as in current Spanish the change has gone further, with the introduction of the ñ.

Anyway, the same happened to the unstressed a in cannabis (though in a different context, of course – not, as linguists are wont to say diachronic) to produce the word "canvas" – woven from that "herbage, dry herb, rough grass, hay.".

The -in of assassin is, incidentally,  a false  plural, like "a criteria", "a panini", "a cherubim".

<THE_USUAL_PROVISO prescriptivism="0">
(I hasten to add that that "false" is an indication of how the word was formed, not a value judgement. Some of these mistakes are becoming standardized.  I won't say "a panini" but at some stage that sort of finger-in-the-dikery will become misplaced  A mistake is at the root of many words. My favourite, and oft-cited, example is the French  word for bat – discussed at length here. [I recommend that piece, but if you don't have time the short version is this: a chauve-souris is not a bald-mouse but an owl-mouse.])
</THE_USUAL_PROVISO>

If the notion of a fighting force getting high before spilling blood seems odd, try your preferred search engine with the string US Army Vietnam drug-taking. I get nearly 22 million hits.

But Vietnam was by no means the first theatre of war that encouraged....

 <QUOD_SCRIPSI_SCRIPSI translation="Youi'd better believe it">
 "Substance abuse in the Vietnam War wasn’t just limited to the marijuana and heroin enlistees could buy on the black market. Military commanders also heavily prescribed pills to help improve soldiers' performance."

History.com
</QUOD_SCRIPSI_SCRIPSI>

 .... drug-taking. The Phrase Finder writes

'Dutch courage' derives from the English derision of the Dutch which came about during the Anglo-Dutch wars. 

Strictly, the Phrase Finder is at pains to point out that the use of alcohol to "stiffen the sinews" wasn't the chief aim of the original users of the expression. Rather, the Anglo-Dutch wars encouraged the use of 'Dutch as a pejorative:

• Dutch bargain - a contract made when one is drunk.
• Dutch concert - where several tunes are played at the same time.
• Dutch feast - where the host gets drunk before the guests.
• Dutch treat - a 'treat' at which one has to pay one's own share.
• Double Dutch - nonsense.

I'm not sure I buy the pejorative idea. After all, a "Dutch auction" isn't a substandard or risible auction, it's just a different sort of auction  So I am not so quick to dismiss the idea that Dutch fighters had a nip of the hard stuff before an engagement. They wouldn't have been the first to do it, and gin was cheap and plentiful

Time to return to real life.

b

The Brexicon

Whether you parse my subject line as Br[itish]+ exit + lexicon or Br[itish] + exit + con[fidence trick] is a matter of personal conscience. I couldn't possibly comment (well, I could,  but as the whole sorry shambles reduces me to incoherent/impotent rage, my comments woudn't have much force either way).

On 25 March of 2018 The Westmnster Hour included an item that dealt with the language of Brexit "[f]rom Cakeism and Remainiacs, to Regulatory Alignment and Insufficient Progress" as the iPlayer blurb puts it. The programme as a whole is not available, but iPlayer's largesse makes up for this, by making available a "clip" of about 8 minutes.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly told us that Brexit means Brexit. But what do the words associated with Brexit mean? The Westminster Hour's John Beesley has been exploring the etymology of the Brexit lexicon. 

More here

Graeme Davis, Profeeor of Humanities at Buckingham University, gives the interviewer some basic pointers to start with. It all started with Grexit – which, as you may remember, referred to a putative exit of Greece from the Euro. Britain was never in the Euro, so Brixit [sic, with an i – an early form that didn't catch on] wasn't just about money.

Brexit spawned various spinoffs, includind Brexiter and Brexiteer. Dr Davis calls the first of these  "I suppose, relatively neutral" [hmmm – not sure what that "relatively" is doing; just –  I  suppose  – academic feigned diffidence] and the second "has quite a positive spin on it".  Again, hmmm; I think the direction of the spin depends on the attitude of the hearer. If you think Brexit is A Bad Thing, then Brexiteer has more of the negative spin of racketeer (one might link this word with capitalists with off-shore wealth profiteering from the chaos which is bound to... No Bob, don't go therre. Even words like privateer and buccaneer have spin that can be either positive or negative, depending on which end of the cutlass is involved. 

And the addition of the prefix arch- seems to me to impart renewed negativity. If I call Jacob Rees-Mogg an arch-Brexiteer, I don't think there's much risk of my being thought to  approve of his antiquarian antics. 

<apologia>
Excuse the gratuitous assonance; I can't hear a word without being tempted down playful back-alleys. At least I spared you the 'Jacob Real-Smug' gag...

<whoops>
No I didn't.
</whoops>

</apologia>

In the end, I didn't find the Westminster Hour clip very enlightening. But I did find the words of Kathleen O'Grady ("a journalist with a special interest in linguistics") interesting:

German is currently the most widely spoken native language  about 16% of the EU speaks German as a native language. But once you take into account people who speak various languages as a second language, English then quickly overtakes both German and French, and also Italian – which is quite widely spoken. So 38% of adults in Europe speak English as a second langage. If you compare that to the total of German speakers – both native and as a second language – that's only 27%.

And she goes on to refer to research that suggests the use of English may be boosted by Brexit:

After the UK leaves, most people speaking English in the EU ...

<you_what?>
Most people? Perhaps she has some Astérix-like vision of a redoubt of hardy native speakers of English among all the second-language speakers – perhaps led by Nicola Sturgeon in the Astérix role, with Alex Salmond playing Obélix...
</you_what?>

will be on the same footing. If everybody's on the same footing, everybody's speaking it as a second language, people might be more happy to use it.

This is strangely reminiscent to me of David Crystal's work in Original Pronunciation (OP)  and his observation that OP gives non-UK actors ownership of the text. I heard this at a British Council talk a few years ago., but the same point is made by David Crystal's son Ben:

The accent draws him [HD: the actor using OP] more out of the head of the standard accent and into the heart. This, he believes, brings “an ownership over Shakespeare that is rare,” both for the actor and the audience. Americans, he notes, have sometimes told him that they feel like Shakespeare isn’t theirs because “we can’t do your accent,” but that many of the vowel sounds in O.P. may in fact be more accessible naturally to Americans than to modern Brits.

More here

So Globish will go sailing off pluckily into the unknown, leaving us speakers of RP clinging to the wreckage.

But this isn't getting the lawn patched. Bye for now

b
PS: A couple of clues:

• Hostile response to insult, with intervention of mountain bike in reverse; formidable. (11)
• Men and girl conspiring to put a spanner in the works (7)

Update: 2018.07.12.09:30 – Shame-faced typo-fixes (involving acute accents).

Numbers

Time for another of my periodical looks at Harmless Drudgery‘s vital statistics.
In  Oct 2016 I wrote of the previous 2 years and 3 months:

It would be unrealistic, I think, to expect a similar near-doubling readership over the coming 9 quarters;  and, besides, it takes quite a bit of (writing) effort to maintain interest – which is at odds with the original purpose of the blog [which, longer-term visitors will know, was to support my other writing efforts].

In April 2015, in a PS to this) I had written of a record average of daily visits of 55. Well, 55 schmifty-five. The average for this month so far is about four times as much – over 200. The trend started about Christmas 2016, followed by another up-tick at Easter 2017, leading me to think that maybe my key demographic was teachers, who saved their recreational blog-reading for the school holidays, but page visits in May are already (after about two-thirds of the month) almost as high as the total for April (5,147).

HD stats, courtesy of Blogger

And while we're on the subject of numbers, I have long felt something that grates on my ear as "just American"...

<digression>
(pace Susie Dent, whose Americanize!: Why the Americanisation of English Is a Good Thing on Radio 4 last Saturday neither was  particularly persuasive nor had to be; I don't need persuading. I prefer -ize myself where admissible – certainly NOT in the lamentable cases of *televize or *analyze, for example  And incidentally, I suppose the inconsistency of that programme's title [Americanize but Americanisation] was intentional)
</digression>

...needed further attention – preferably on the basis of numbers. My source as usual is the British National Corpus (BNC) and its much bigger and more recently updated transatlantic cousin the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). My first three searches seemed to confirm my prejudice:

BNC:

sooner rather than later (just click and sit back while BNC does its thing) 65
sooner than later (just click and sit back while BNC does its thing) 6 

COCA:

sooner than later (just click and sit back while COCA does its thing) 105.

QED. Sooner than later could be assigned, along with I could care less (and incidentally I don't buy Steven Pinker's irony argument – but I don't have time to trace the reference, given the length of the grass) to the Expressions that don't make sense in American English pile.

But COCA is more than five times the size of BNC, so I might have expected a frequency for the preferred form of more than 5 times 65 – well over 300. So I looked again in COCA.

sooner rather than later (just click and sit back while COCA does its thing) 486

So what was demonstratum was not what was demonstrandum. Based on those corpus figures, sooner rather than later is more than 10 times as commonly used by British English speakers/writers than sooner than later. But among American English speakers/writers the predominance is similar; just more less pronounced – less than half the ratio of sooner rather than later to sooner than later. And perhaps the preference is on the wane – taken up by a smaller proportion of linguistic ground-breakers on this side of the Atlantic; the sort of comparative-historical corpus query that could prove that though is beyond me.

Enough. Biomass destruction is the hors-d'œuvre of the day, and the mower awaits.

b

PS – a clue to be going on with:

• VIP? Mark; a nut, when crushed. (6,5)
  

Update: 2017.05.22.22:40 – Added PPS

PPS – Whoops; got the polarity of the comparison wrong, fixed in bold.

Update: 2017.05.26.14:10 – Added PPPS

PPPS – I said I'd write more about Americanisms. I find it hard to say anything new, because I've been fighting this prejudice for so long and in so many different forums.

<digression>
(And there's another one – pluralizing of words with a clear Latin provenance. I'm with Fowler on this one, as I've said before. He wrote:

 ...that all words not English in appearance are in English writing ugly and not pretty, and that they [HD: Latin plurals] are justified only (1) if they afford much the shortest or clearest, if not the only way to the meaning ... or (2) if they have some special appropriateness of association or allusion in the sentence they stand in.

A consequence of the practice of using English endings is that you avoid solecisms such as syllabi; incidentally, for what it's worth – not a lot for writers of English – the Latin plural of syllabus is syllabūs [or a u with some such diacritic – we didn't need them for the exam, so like any self-respecting school-child I ignored them.)
</digression>

A few years ago I wrote here:

...Less well-informed commentators go so far as to say - when asked the difference between authorise and authorize -

No difference at all ... only that americans spell it different cos they feel the need to be different . The correct spelling is with an -s-

Oh dear. In one such discussion I said

There's nothing unBritish about the spelling 'apologize'. It has been the house style of The Times for well over a hundred years, and is used by many large and influential publishers (Oxford University Press, for example). I'm tired of being accused of flirting with modernity and excessive American influence, just because I use a spelling that millions of British people use (so long as they haven't been got at by generations of school-teachers peddling misinformation).

That may have been true of The Times at the time of writing, but 'the times they are a-changin''. A few cases of '-ize' pass the scrutiny of the subs' eyes - especially when there is a strong etymological justification - as in the case of 'baptize' (where there is a zeta rather than a sigma in the original Greek); but fewer and fewer.

But to quote the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors

The first line is crucial:

WHERE verbs can be spelled with either an -ize or -ise ending...

American and British English speakers simply disagree over that can: not, say we, in a case like televise; to give it a z would be to suggest that there was the noun or adjective telev - and if you televized something you made it either more like one (in the case of the noun) or just more televvy (in the case of the adjective).

The rest, as Professor Brian Cox might say, is science (sic).

Here we go steadily nuts in May

...Or perhaps it was April.

Last Saturday's Times announced a revival of the National Theatre‘s original(-ish)  production of Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. At least, I assume it's a revival; the 50th anniversary can't have escaped the notice of the publicity department. I say -ish because the first production of the play under this title took place on the Edinburgh Fringe in the Summer of 1966

The following Spring the play  opened at the Old Vic (because at the time there was no bricks and mortar [or rather slabs and mastic, I suppose] home for the National Theatre). For a few weeks before the opening, the doors were open for Press Previews, at reduced prices – reduced enough for a school trip.

The school minibus accommodated about fifteen passengers. Priority bookings went to the VIth form, and any seats left were offered to the years below. At the time I was in the fourth year (which, in new money, is Year 10), so it was a rare treat for the likes of us to be given the chance. But in the March or early April of 1967 I had such a chance. Some of us were self-assured enough to be amused by the bar-room talk at the interval, with pseuds ....

<explanatory_note type="suspected neologism">
(some of us read Private Eye, home of the Pseuds Corner column).

Until writing this I assumed that the Eye had created the word. But it  turns out that it has been around since the turn of the 18th century, peaking in 1930. Then there was a lesser peak in 1953, 8 years before Private Eye was founded. The second of these mini-peaks, which the Eye might claim some credit for, was in 1967 – the year of my visit. So the word was popular at the time;  just not as popular as I once supposed (or for the reasons I imagined):

Frequency graph from this Collins site
(though the graph is generated from scratch when your browser loads the page,
so you may want to have a cup of tea while you wait)

</explanatory_note>

... who, having no reviews to bone up on, didn't know what to think). Some of us, though. were too shocked at the prices (4/6 for a bottle of Double Diamond! [bought for us by the older boys while Mr Crawford's back was turned]).

Another visit, one that I didn't go on, was to see The Royal Hunt of the Sun – also at the Old Vic. But I did witness its fruits, as it became the school play (once in my time, but with many revivals since*).

When, a few years later, I started to learn Spanish, I smugly laughed at the pronunciation of Pizarro with a [ts]. Though on reflection my school play's pronunciation no doubt mimicked that of the National Theatre; and they, very probably, had a dialogue coach who had done their homework.

In my loft there may well be a moldering copy of  "The De-voicing of Mediaeval Sibilants", mentioned in a similarly Latin-American context here. A written z, which had in Old Castilian been pronounced [dz], came to be pronounced [ts]. I don't know how long this process took, or when the subsequent progression to [Ѳ] heard in some parts of mainland Spain (and on the lips of learners – of whom, at the time of the aforementioned smugness, I was one) started. But with my usual magnanimity I'm prepared to give that National Theatre dialogue coach the benefit of the doubt; besides, as Pizarro's men were adventurers, it's reasonable to imagine that they were early-adopters of the linguistic trend.

Thassall – I must try to catch the last of this glorious weather.


b

* Many years later, a contemporary of mine (and the other half – though much the more vocal half – of The Simon and Garfunkel of North Harrow), who had taken the leading part of Pizarro in 1969, visited the old school unexpectedly and unannounced. One of the directors of the play was still there. And when Albert interrupted his class he said to the boys "This is the original Pizarro".

This is a sample of the duo's work – not precisely contemporary, but from  1969.

Siege perilous

For the last month or so, though no longer – as atrocities redefine atrocity and the word enormity reclaims its self respect – I couldn't hear the name Aleppo without recalling an early Richard Curtis sketch.

<autobiographical_note time_span="1976.07:1976.09" venue-"Edinburgh">
Like much (all?) Richard wrote at the time, it was a vehicle for Rowan Atkinson. That star of the Oxford Theatre Group one-man show (with a cast of 9) – mentioned here and, briefly,  in the update to this post – was a conductor in tails and white gloves and with a baton, conducting (in the hilarious sort of random juxtaposition, so typical of Oxbridge humour at the time) a rehearsal of a scene from Othello. The Moor was delivering the lines 

"...that in Aleppo  once...

I took by the neck the smitten dog and circumcised him thus" 

[I've underlined the two typoes for the benefit of bardophiles who may know the original and gloss over them.]

At this, the conductor tapped his lectern, frowned, and indicated that Othello should try again. Othello did, still with the words "smitten dog ...circumcised". The conductor stopped him again. [Repeat ad lib as long as the audience is laughing]. Eventually, Othello got the words right: "circumcisèd dog...smote".

</autobiographical_note>.

Now though I can hear the word Aleppo without that irrelevant memory popping its irreverent head over the PC parapet. Now it's the word siege. that distracts me momentarily from the horror.

I discussed  chairs a while back, here, but said nothing about siege at the time. In Mallory's Morte d'Arthur the vacant seat at the Round Table was the siege perilous, and this was the earliest meaning: a chair. Etymonline says

siege (n.)

early 13c., "a seat" (as in Siege Perilous, early 13c., the vacant seat at Arthur's Round Table...[F]rom Old French sege "seat, throne," from Vulgar Latin *sedicum "seat," from Latin sedere "sit" ...

Only then does the entry go on:

...The military sense is attested from c. 1300; the notion is of an army "sitting down" before a fortress.

That is to say, siege had been around for about a century with the meaning chair before it acquired its military sense. Sadly (considering the fate of the besieged) the military sense became the predominant one

But that "Vulgar Latin *sedicum" (and its more reputable Latin relatives) left many other traces, from courts in session to recording studios (with session musicians); in a less formal musical environment, a guest musician may sit in (and of course they don't just sit). In Portuguese, where Spanish has catedral (which Portuguese [Continental Portuguese, that is; to call my grasp of Brazilian Portuguese rudimentary would be a gross overestimate]  can also use, having many such pairs*), the word is sé (in Coimbra, in the summer of 1973 I used to catch the eléctrico at a stop called Sé Velha). The Holy See is a Santa Sé. 


Of course, English too has see in this sense (that is, not just in the abstract sense of Holy See, but in the concrete sense of bishopric). Cathedrals, sees and all sorts of hierarchical seats...

<digression type="potential" status="LOOK IT UP">
When discussing hierarchies it's worth remembering what ἱερός  means.
</digression>

...form an all-enveloping web of words and meanings.

Back to Real Life...(at present I'm caught in the crossfire of two WSIWYG tools, which disagree about what constitutes well-formed HTML – aha, that's it, #headslap [different versions of HTML]!)

b

 *Eça de Queiroz  is notable for using such pairs: a bottle, for example, is sometimes uma botelha and sometimes uma garráfa.

PS And here's a clue:
 Feigning incapacity when malign reign gets the treatment. (11)

Update 2016.11.03.09:10 – Added PPS

PPS The penultimate sentence in that Etymonline entry for siege ended ...from Latin sedere "sit" (see sedentary). The entry for settle (the noun) ends with the same cross-refernce:

settle (n.)

"long bench," 1550s, from Middle English setle "a seat," from Old English setl "a seat, stall; position, abode; setting of a heavenly body," related to sittan "to sit," from Proto-Germanic *setla- (source also of Middle Low German, Middle Dutch setel, Dutch zetel, German Sessel, Gothic sitls), from PIE *sedla- (source also of Latin sella "seat, chair," Old Church Slavonic sedlo "saddle," Old English sadol "saddle"), from root *sed- (1) "to sit" (see sedentary). 

That [PIE] root has many progeny.

PPPS – And here's another clue:

Unprepossessing discount store stocking entertainer. (8)

Update 2016.11.03.14:35 – Correction in red.

Update 2017.12.19.19:30 – Added P⁴S

The answers: MALINGERING, GRIMALDI.

Bless each honey bole

In the second of his Radio 4 series on the Robber Barons, Adam Smith (stop sniggering at the back – it's just a name) played a clip from The Ballad of Casey Jones in the background of his account of the life of Jay Gould. The link was clearly appropriate: Gould made his millions from railways.

But it brought to mind an early board-treading occasion in the life of the young... well, me.

<autobiographical_note>
In a Gang Show produced  in the very early '60s (or even late '50s) the 20th Ealing (St Benedict's) Wolf * Cubs sang what I presume was a precursor of that ballad:  Steamboat Bill. I say presumably because either way it was a pretty close-run thing. The song narrates a steamboat accident suffered by Steamboat Bill "trying to beat the record of the Robert E. Lee" – and that record was set during Casey Jones's childhood (in 1870, a few months before his 7th birthday.)

And  the last lines involved the captain's widow telling her children ("Bless each honey bole lamb" [the hastily typed script featured that gross typo, and I always remember the  meaningless version, and then wonder why it doesn't rhyme with the last line:

 The next papa you have'll be a railroad man

] – which suggests that Peak-Steamboat preceded Peak-Railroad, although there was a fair overlap between the two forms of transport.
 <autobiographical_note>

Anyway, as I wrote elsewhere songs interbreed and cross-fertilize quite prolifically in the Folk Process, and my reaction on hearing the tune – Why are they playing Steamboat Bill in the background of a piece about railroads? – was unreasonable.

Word Watch

As I was listening to the TMS commentary this morning, my mind was arrested (I don't think  that's too strong a word) by a commentator saying that someone had "wrestled the initiative". "Doesn't he mean wrested?" I thought. And then I had the further thought "What's the difference between wresting and wrestling?"

As often, I looked to the British National Corpus for answers, and came up with these two results:

Search results for "Wrestle the <noun>"

Search results for "Wrest the <noun>"

Regular readers may have noticed that I haven't done my usual thing of giving links to actual searches, because in this case my point is made by the results rather than by their relative weights (although it's true that "wrest the <noun>" is three times more common than "wrestle the <noun>"). The more significant difference is that the objects of wrest are generally abstract, whereas the objects of wrestle are generally concrete.

But here are some links anyway, as my screengrabs aren't too clear:

wrest the <noun> | wrestle the <noun>

(Update: 2020.08.18.17:05 – BNC has stopped supporting these links.
I'm leaving them in the no doubt unrealistic hope that
Things Will Change For The Better).

<autobiographical_note> 

This calls to mind an ertswhile colleague's answer to the question  "What's the difference between hardware and software?" Hardware hurts when you drop it on your foot. 

</autobiographical_note>

In other words (as a dictionary might have told me, though most [if not all] modern dictionaries are corpus-based, and I generally prefer primary sources) the words mean different things. They are, of course, etymologically linked. The $10 word, for what it's worth, is frequentative; the ending -le often marks a frequentative – usually in verbs (like tinkle and tingle), but often in other word classes; a frequentative, for example, is at the root of puddle.

puddle (n.)

early 14c., "small pool of dirty water," frequentative or diminutive of Old English pudd "ditch," related to German pudeln "to splash in water" (compare poodle). Originally used of pools and ponds as well. Etymonline

So that cricket commentator, when he said "wrestle the initiative", was .... (I hesitate to say wrong; maybe just...) 'at the leading edge of yet another simplifying language change that I, pointlessly, regret'.

b

PS Here are a couple more clues:

• See angry hens with alibi when subjected to reformation or some other blip in Church history. (11,6)
  
• The misfit rethought anachronistic point of view. (9)
  
  

* Re this old-style name of what are now called Cub Scouts, see the PS to this.

Update: 2016.10.21.19:55 – Added BNC links.

Quips and quiddities

I've been thinking about seasons – specifically about adding an s. Taking as an example the frame

"a <season> day" 

I thought it was simple (if arbitrary): you can have a winters day or a summers day, but you can't have a springs day or an autumns day.

But I was forgetting the importance of collocation – what comes next  (in this case).

I was led to uncover this when I wanted to put numbers on this pattern. BNC doesn't happen to include an instance of a winters day.  And this made me use the "any noun" search syntax; which led me to conclude that the pattern is even more uneven. All season names are much preferred without the s (I've no  idea what its syntactical status is – some kind of possessive, I suppose; stay tuned for an update.)

By the wonders of BNC, the following seven links all run a BNC query; depending on line speeds, processor speeds, and all sorts of other techy imponderables, you may have to wait a second or two after clicking for the full story to unfold

winter [*n]  1590  winters [*n] 19 

spring [*n]  1086  springs [*n] 90 

summer [*n] 23163  summers [*n] 21 

autumn [*n]   774...

<tangent>
Why so many more cases of summer? About 30 times as many as of autumn, 20 times as many as of spring , 15 times as many as of winter. (Those numbers are wobbly; I didn't use a cuaculator. I could've just said an order of magnitude greater, but that expression has been sadly debased.) Hmm...  Meanwhile, back at the a <season>s <noun> pattern...
</tangent>

 ...But autumns doesn't follow the pattern of feast and famine. In that case it's feast and starvation; absolute starvation. The string autumns [*n]  just doesn't occur in BNC. And precious few occur in the much bigger (520 million words – more than five times bigger) COCA; just three (of which one is a mistake, resulting from a mistaken parsing of the word back):

autumns [*n] 3

I'm  not sure what this shows, except that when you put numbers on something you end up finding that things aren't quite as clear-cut as they seemed at first.

And here are two numbers that have only the very faintest soupspoon of a connection (and even that is arguable – it's just that the number of refugees world-wide can only increase when nation-states take more than their fair share of the planet's resources).

The first comes from a UNHCR report. CNN reported it like this

 The second comes from the ONS:

But the numbers reached out and grabbed my attention by dint of their similarity. I suppose another way of looking at it is that we have reached a tipping point: the number of refugees world-wide now exceeds the population of the UK (and that's before any readjustment that Nicola Sturgeon might have in mind ).

But time's wingéd chariot could do with some 3-in-ONE.

b
PS A couple of clues:

Affect brilliant fedora without an emergency jump-starter (13)
Such a way of arguing makes him a demon (2, 7)

Update 2016.09.16.11:45 – Added PPS and PPPS

PPS And I meant to add, justifying my subject-line (this is more of a quiddity than a quip), earlier this week I heard something of interest to a one-time translator of songs (a bit of background covered in this old post) . In Monday's Woman's Hour (the song starts at about 18'30")  Kizzy Crawford sang about a pond skater (no, really). She sang in English, but she sang the last chorus in Welsh. One word leapt out at me from the Welsh. Earlier (English) choruses had involved the word lily pad (see? – it really was about a pond skater); and the word that jumped out at me from the Welsh was lily pad.

I looked this up in an online Welsh dictionary: pad lili. What was up? Was Kizzy fibbing?

Of course not. She does say, in the interview that precedes the song, that Welsh is more appropriate to singing about nature. And one of the ways it has of being more flexible may be the choice of translation sources.  By chance I found this alternative translation (in Google Translate): lilypad  – note the lack of word-break.

Marvellous things, dictionaries. But they have their limits.

PPPS The promised update on syntax: the jury's still out. In some cases, it's obviously a possessive; summer's lease is the metaphorical lease held by belonging to a metaphorical summer. There's an apostrophe, and its aptness is not in question. But in summers day there's no apostrophe* and no sense of possession. I'll ask some teachers.

Update 2016.09.18.10:45 – Added P⁴S

Yes – it's an attributive genitive (also called descriptive). Some people omit the apostrophe, and in cases where the idea of possession is weak (or absent) this tendency is stronger.


Update 2016.09.26.11:15 – Added P⁵S

*Nonsense – I just misunderstood the BNC's search algorithm's treatment of the apostrophe.  I think  it's true, however, that the apostrophe , which usually marks possession, is less widely insisted on (and, from the point of view of a language historian, more likely to  be dropped   – rather like the apostrophe marking omission before words such as bus, cello or phone – when the sense of possession is weaker.

Update 2016.10.29.15:05 – Answers to those clues: DEFIBRILLATOR and AD HOMINEM.

Rood boy

© Copyright JThomas and licensed
 for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Cooped up in Ruthwell Church, the Ruthwell Cross was the 8th century's Angel of the North (made for the open air)

The Cross is the bearer of an extract from a poem that may be the earliest written poem in an English dialect  (Northumbrian, thought to be a fore-runner of Scots*). [That may is due to doubt about its having been written before the cross was made. It may have been added some time later.]

The poem may, for all I  know (next to nothing in this case) even have been written specifically for this cross. It is, after all, The Dream of the ROOD  (rood meaning "cross"); I imagine the word can still be seen today,  fossilized in the vocabulary of church architecture: rood-screen.

The poem is an amazing piece of anthropomorphism, with the cross itself reflecting on the crucifixion; it feels guilt about being the instrument of the Saviour's torture and death but finds a kind of solace in the thought that the sacrifice is necessary for the redemption of mankind. [I suspect the anthropomorphism breaks down a bit here; is the poet a man – caring about the fate of Mankind – or a cross {an unusually altruistic one}?]

<autobiographical_note> 

In the late  '80s (or maybe early '90s– there are sadly no written records) I sang with the University of Reading's  University Chorus. We sang Howard Ferguson's 1958 setting of The Dream of the Rood. He was at the time an old man; he died in 1999, but he came to the concert; and at the dress rehearsal he pooh-poohed the notion that his music was "modern": "It's about as modern as the design of the Morris Minor". This was fairly accurate if he meant the Minor 1000 , designed in a 1956 update; but the Morris Minor was, says Wikipedia, "conceived in 1941" and first saw the light of ...erm ... Motor  Show in 1948 (fully ten years before Ferguson's piece). 

</autobiographical_note>

The Ruthwell  Cross was covered in Melvyn Bragg's the Matter of the North  (in the second episode, broadcast last week –  though the whole series will be available on iPlayer for about a year). It is an extraordinary example of the strength  of multiculturalism even so early. He speaks to Dr Chris Jones, of the University of St Andrews, who lists some of the many influences that come together in the Cross: an Anglian poem, runic script, elements of Greek and Roman and Celtic design...

The whole series mérite un détour.

b

PS Here are a few clues:

• Interminably hunts for something to eat (7)
• Principal reason for buying after conjunction's onset of astrological borderland (4)
  
• Unrestrained colt or filly for Dr Spooner's cornucopia? (5,4)

And a special 50th anniversary clue:

Spock's not atypical response to hearing "the one about `American soldier goes into a pub... '" (7)

Update 2016.09.07.16:25 – Added footnote

* This is a bit of a throwaway. In particular, "thought to be a forerunner" is a gross over-simplification. The history of Scots is not something I've studied, but I put in a link to Scots so that you can follow this up if you want to know more. Wir Ain Lied ("Our own language") is the most authoritative source of information on Scots that I've found.

Winners and losers: icon and dozen etc

A little over a year ago I wrote here about words coming and going to and from dictionaries, which – with a few exceptions –  record the current state of [lexical] play. But what makes words come and go out of fashion? I've been thinking of late about two (clusters of) words, with diametrically opposite fortunes in my lifetime. Well, not exactly (symmetrically) opposite. Their rates of change don‘t match. But one goes up and the other goes down.

Up: icon

Things have gone well for icon. Time was when an icon was something you'd associate with Cyrillic script; it was a religious picture:

Its use in that context spawned several related word: iconoclasts (literally the smashers of holy pictures), iconoclasm ...

Then two things happened; one cultural and one technological. The growth of celebrity culture exposed the need for a word for something unique, striking, and representative of its class  – classic, if you'll permit me to use the word IN ITS PROPER SENSE (excuse that little outburst – I know I shouldn't).

The word icon was readily to hand. But a technological breakthrough in the late '60s added its weight to the impetus. Douglas Englebart's Mother Of All Demos, at Menlo Park in 1968 unveiled a system based on the notion of a new sort of computer interface that used windows, a mouse, and a pointer (some sources make the P stand for pop-up menus) – a WIMP interface. And that was windows not the capitalized sort: Apple was first to make a commercial go of this, and young Mr Gates came late to the party. Now, the command-line interface is unknown to many computer users (a majority? – this is neither conclusive nor representative, but more than two-thirds of visitors to this blog use Windows ).

Collins Online's "Usage trends" graphs show the affects of these two changes. Starting in the early '70s, usage rocketed:

Frequency graph

(Scroll down to the bottom of the  page, 

and wait for it to load)

Down: dozen

Over more or less the same period, the word dozen was suffering  a similar change – but in the other direction. The reasons  for this were mainly cultural (decimalization and metrication – in the UK, that is), though these were no doubt reinforced (and to an arguable extent prompted)  by a technological imperative: the calculating infrastructure (computers, electronic calculators, adding machine, cash registers and so on) favoured base-10 calculations

Our dozen derives, unsurprisingly, from the French douzaine – "about twelve". In French -aine is a suffix that can make any number approximate; in English, though, dozen is the only ...

<digression>
I was hoping that, in recognition of the fact that flowers are sold in 10s and 5s, the word dizen would evolve (French dixaine). Sadly. it hasn't happened.
<digression>

...such word we have; quarantine is related, but came via Italian quarantina giorni – the period that ships from plague-ridden countries had to wait in the offing [never thought I'd use that one, except in the song "Blow the Wind Southerly"] before putting in at 17TH-century Venice.

But this analysis oversimplifies. The high-point of that 50-year picture for dozen wasn't appreciably higher than in the 18TH century (see left).

And although the rise of icon reaches record heights – well above the 18TH-century peaks – it did enjoy some popularity before its 19TH-century doldrums (right).

There's more to be said about derivatives, but that's enough for today. If this sort of thing floats your boat, stay tuned for an update.

b

Update 2016.01.16.17:20 – Added afterthought in blue, and fixed a few typos.

Update 2016.01.19.13:0 – Added PS on derivatives:

PS So much for icon. But the adjective derived from it was not subject to the technological influence I mentioned earlier; if you click on the right part of a window on a computer screen, it doesn't become iconic. Moreover, a little painting of a saint in the Orthodox church isn't iconic either – at least, not any more: this Etymonline excerpt shows that that, indeed, is what it once meant (what else, in 1650?):

iconic (adj.) 

1650s, "of or pertaining to a portrait," from Late Latin iconicus, from Greek eikonikos "pertaining to an image," from eikon "likeness, image, portrait" (seeicon)... 

But now, the word iconic is reserved exclusively for the more recent cultural sort of icon; so, as one might have expected, its nigh-on vertiginous (do I mean that, or just vertical?) rise in usage over the last 60-odd years:

But if a window turned into an icon on a computer screen isn't iconic, what is it? In the early days of WIMP interfaces, various neologisms were toyed with, among them iconize and iconify. Once you had a verb, a past participle could describe the thing on the screen. In this Wild West of maverick nomenclature, Microsoft felt the need to lay down the law. Their Manual of Style for Technical Publications (my copy is from 1995) felt strongly enough about iconize that they devoted to it a separate headword:

iconize
Do not use; instead use shrink to an icon or minimize.

– a forlorn hope: in nearly 20 years of exposure to technical publication, I saw many more instances of iconize than of minimize in this context: Sic semper tyrannis – diktats about language use don't usually work, though their existence is often a useful indicator for students and observers of language change (as this blog has shown on several occasions).

b
PPS: A couple of clues:

Proceed with unspecified questionable practice? Get away! – (4,2)
Such a philistine most unlikely to visit place dedicated to literati– (5,6)
  
Update 2016.10.11.10:50  – Added PPPS

PPPS

An answer to the second clue: POETS' CORNER. Can't do the first one right now.