Two bites of the cherry

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

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

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

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

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

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

<parenthesis> 

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

</parenthesis> 

</autobiographical-note>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But those must wait for an update.

b

Update: 2020.08.14.10:50 – Added PS

PS on military metaphors:

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

That's one way of looking at it

I've been thinking about – among other things (hence my failure to add to the Harmless Drudgery mountain (slag heap?) for the best part of  two weeks) – obsession. In particular I've been thinking about what obsession, gunwale, and titanic have in  common.

People with an etymological bent (sic – I‘m reminded of Joni  Mitchell‘s ‘That  girl is twisted‘) – will be familiar with the random arising of questions such as "What‘s obsession got to do with sitting?‘

<grandmothers_egg_sucking>
(And I know it should be grandmothers', but the compiler wouldn't be able to handle apostrophes; I know the compiler is a figment of my imagination, but if a conceit‘s worth pursuing it‘s worth pursuing to the last syllabub of recorded time.) 

Words built from some variant of "session" (not -cession, which is a whole 'nother kettle of worms) include somewhere along the line the idea of sitting. At its simplest, for example, a court that  is  ‘in session‘  is sitting.  Session musicians "sit in". And the Holy See involves sitting on a particular sort of chair (whence the building that houses it, a cathedral, gets its name). 

<RC_note>
Ex cathedra pronouncements are reserved for when the Pope Really Really Means It.
<RC_note> 

Etymonline‘s entry for "obsess" explains further:
</grandmothers_egg_sucking>

So besieging – the now obsolete meaning of obsession – involves an army encircling a town and just sitting it out. (I discussed words to do with sitting a while ago, here.) If you think of the poor besieged  townsfolk,  who can‘t get anywhere, by any path, without coming up against the besieging force, you can see where the modern sense comes from: any thought leads to the same place  – the obsession (the besieging enemy).

So ob and sedere got together to concoct the military  meaning, and psychotherapy took the ball and ran with it – so successfully that the ‘besieging‘ idea withered on the vine: obsession isn't just a metaphor; it‘s a metaphor that turned into another metaphor with a totally different meaning.

Which brings me to  gunwale, commonly reduced to gunnel. Most  native speakers of English have met the expression "laden to the gunnels" (OK make that ‘about a third of us, with the other two thirds saying "packed to the gunnels"). The gunnel is a wide plank at the edge of the deck, and if a ship is laden to the gunnels its load is so heavy that the ship  is low in the water.

But if you peel back the superficial metaphor (and when I said "plank" I was giving the game away, as today wood need not  be involved and often isn't) you find out what the gun is doing. On a sailing ship intended for battle the edge of the deck was reinforced with an especially sturdy plank, which supported the cannon – the gun wale.

<further_reading>
Pick the bones out of this if you're interested in the wale bit.
</further_reading>

Like obsession, gunnel (in expressions such as "laden/full to the gunnels") started life as a metaphor, and was pressed into use as another totally different metaphor.

You can probably see where I‘m going with this; the story with titanic is similar. I‘ll just sketch out the bare bones:

Titans (powerful gods) 👉 titanic (=big and powerful) 👉 Titanic: big/powerful ship

Along comes an iceberg and one metaphor gets flipped on its head to make another: something that‘s titanic can either be big/strong/influential ("a titanic struggle") or it can have a capital T and be over-confident and doomed to failure.

There must be more such metaphors  that have been given a new lease of life as newly formed metaphors, but this has gone on long enough...

<autobiographical_note>
(as has this accursed backup)
</autobiographical_note>

.. and I  must return to the land  of the living.

b

On the road (river?)

See the 6 August update for thoughts
about the "upon"

This coming weekend representatives of the Wokingham Choral Society (not quite half) will be taking to the road with Songs of Travel and I thought I'd write a word or two about the places we're going.

In the phrase "Taking to the road" though, perhaps river would be better than road, as both our concert venues have names that, at one time, referred to rivers.

We arrive ...

<DIGRESSION>
(appropriately enough, as the word ARRIVE itself derives from the Vulgar Latin phrase AD-RIPAM [VENIRE] [and RIPA means river-bank])*
</DIGRESSION>

...first in Stratford on† Avon, which the University of Nottingham's Key to English Place-names (awarded a TEZZY here).

<GLOSSARY item="TEZZY>
Time-wasting Site of the Year.
</GLOSSARY>

explains like this:

The Key to Place-names output for Stratford on Avon.
(Ignore the 'Refs' button in the top right-hand corner
which of course is not live in this screen capture.)

The first syllable is related to the Modern English "street", the Italian strada and German Strasse. The second syllable is self-explanatory*. The last word is rather unsatisfactorily explained. OK, the origin may be unknown, but it‘s  not just a "River-name"; it means river – at least, Welsh afon means river. And even if the origin is unknown (as the Key says) I think  it‘s reasonable to imagine afon is related in some way (as a single f written in Welsh represents a /v/ sound [which explains the ff in names like "Ffion" – as a written ff is used to represent an /f/ sound]. )

Our second port of call (to use a suitably watery metaphor) is Warwick, which the .Key to English Place-names explains like this:

The Key to Place-names output for Warwick.

(Ignore the 'Refs' button in the top right-hand corner

which of course is not live in this screen capture.)

There; told you it was a time-waster. But I have words/notes  to learn, so that's all for now.

b

Update:2019.08.01.14:50 – Added footnote on AD-RIPARE

^* This assertion could do with some support.

In an earlier post I wrote:

Elcock explains:

While VENĪRE remained everywhere the usual verb for 'to come', two new terms conveying a more visual image were  borrowed from maritime language. ... [HD: The first is well worth looking at,  but not here.]  AD-RIPARE, 'to come to shore', was a somewhat later creation which found favour in Gaul (cf Prov. arribá ).... From Provence it spread to Catalonia, and during the Middle Ages was carried thence to Sardinia, as arribare.   

The Romance Language (I've given this source more than once, but make no apology for that: it's very good.)

Update:2019.08.02.10:30 – Clarified numbers going.

Update:2019.08.06.15:40 – Added footnote

†The Key goes for plain "on", but elsewhere it is "upon" or "Upon". I noticed this at the time of first writing, and on Saturday afternoon saw that the embroiderers of the kneelers in Holy Trinity Church (in Stratford) preferred "upon".

<COINCIDENCE>
I didn't know when I saw the embroiderer's "upon", but it turns out that the unnamed embroiderer was the godmother of the choir's chairman; so my inclination is to favour "upon" (but I have no principled objection to the minimalist view, if that's what floats your boat).
</COINCIDENCE>

Schwarzkopf and the harpsichord

Quirks of a translator's life – sitrep

In the course of my translation work (towards the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation mentioned before in some recent posts to this blog), I've come across a word with a fascinating cluster of meanings. I've also started to use a new function of Google Sheets – a function that provides a Google Translate version (one word) on the fly.

The syntax of the new function is

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(<cell-to-translate>"<source->","<target>")

for example

 =GOOGLETRANSLATE(A4,"pt","en")

(This function call tells Google Translate to look at the Portuguese word in cell A4 and translate it into English.).

As anyone involved with language knows, meanings of words depend almost entirely on context. So the disembodied words thrown up by Google Translate in its Google Sheets incarnation  can be a bit off-the-wall.

I rather forced that incarnation into the last sentence, as it provides a link to one of the meanings of the keyword, the Portuguese cravo. This can mean "carnation", a meaning that possibly has a more than accidental link with "incarnation", if the derivation for that word (Etymonline lists several possibilities) is the Latin for flesh:

...Or it might be called for its pinkness and derive from Middle French carnation "person's color or complexion" (15c.), which probably is from Italian dialectal carnagione "flesh color," from Late Latin carnationem (nominative carnatio) "fleshiness," from Latin caro "flesh" (originally "a piece of flesh," from PIE root *sker- (1) "to cut"). OED points out that not all the flowers are this color. 

More here

Another possible meaning of cravo is (my source here is the Collins Portuguese Dictionary) "harpsichord". But these language1-to-language2 dictionaries often raise more questions than answers in a translator's mind; I suspect that the equivalent instrument might rather be a clavichord which doesn't sound or behave the same.

<example>
A strangely neglected album has Oscar Peterson playing with Joe Pass in an arrangement of excerpts from Porgy and Bess for clavichord and guitar, exploiting this unique quality of the clavichord: that the thing that strikes the string also defines its length. 

<aside subject="defines">
A deliciously apposite word. The word "determines the length" would be similarly appropriate for those of an etymological bent, as the tangent (that's what the doofer inside a clavichord is called) provides the terminus ad quem the string vibrates.
</aside>

This lets the keyboard  player bend a note, as does a blues guitarist.
</example>

In a harpsichord, on the other hand,  the strings are plucked.

<maybe_though>
(On the other hand, the clavi- bit of the word just means key [as in clef, clavicle, or the French clé] so any keyboard instrument might have been called a "clavi<something>". The makers of the Clavinova were the second (after whoever named the clavichord)  to exploit this neologizing open goal.)
</maybe_though>

Yet another possible meaning of cravo is "nail" or "stud", which – if you think of a nail driven home so that only its head is visible – accounts for the metaphorical use which for reasons best known to Google is the meaning fixed on by Google Translate (try putting that function call 

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A4,"pt","en")

into a Google Sheets spreadsheet and you'll see what I mean: hint – Schwarzkopf.)

b

Update: 2019.05.28.08:55 – Added PS

PS In my rush to hit the <Publish> button yesterday I left out the one meaning of cravo that applied to the passage I'm translating. Again, it's metaphorical, but unlike blackhead (aha – THAT was it, Schwarzkopf, geddit?) which is animal, this meaning is vegetable: clove.

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

What's that got to do with drawing?

The latest round of transport chaos on the GWR line to Paddington was reported here.

A new £16million “bullet” train on a test run caused commuter mayhem after wrecking 500 metres of overhead power cables on the approach to Paddington station.

The major rail hub was almost effectively closed this morning with no services to or from Heathrow and Reading until lunchtime, and knock-on delays expected for the rest of the day....

The incident happened at Hanwell about 10pm last night [HD:16 Oct 2018]. The Italian-built Hitachi train – capable of 140mph - was being used to train Great Western Railway drivers when its pantograph arm, which connects carriages to overhead power cables, got caught in the wires.
Source

It was the last paragraph that – amid a tale of  woe that is by no means unusual – grabbed my attention. At first sight, given the appropriate lexicographical background, the obvious question is '"What's that got to do with drawing?"

At least, that was my response But this is not – as with photograph – a special sort of drawing (in that case, manipulating  chemicals to simulate the process of drawing with light)...

<another_example>
And in digital photography we can see another instance of old technology frozen in metaphor, as discussed here. From graphite to photographic chemicals isn't that big a figurative leap – from one physical medium to another. But with digital photography there is no kind of physical medium (unless you consider that the pixels involved have a physical reality).
</another_example>

... it is a metaphor that refers to a tool that can be used in drawing. If you have a look at this animation you''ll get  the idea.

<process_note subject="flickering lights">
(I originally cut/pasted it into this post, but it made the rest of the post [and also the beginning, though that was not where I was at] impossible to read.

<meta_digression>
Cavemen gazing at a fire are the fore-runners of 20th-century people gazing at TVs (and 21st-century people gazing at smartphones). Flickering light commands attention.

<further_digression>
(Which, incidentally, is where the word focus comes from – a fireplace [source of flickering light.])
</further_digression>

</meta_digression>

</process_note>

You can see where the railway electrification people got their idea; the doofer that electrified trains use to get power from overhead wires is called a pantograph.

The suffix -graph is quite  prolific when it comes to coining words that have nothing to do with drawing. Choreograph, phonograph, tachograph, and telegraph all bear little sense of drawing, and many other -graph words have left the idea of drawing some way behind - epigraph, paragraph, monograph...

But I could do this all day. That's all folks.

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

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 flash in the pan

The orgy of on-the-spot fruitless speculation occasioned by the IED (Ineffectual Emphatic Deflagration) at Parsons Green brought to mind a phenomenon that I have mentioned before: the way metaphors freeze in time a technology that is time-specific and doomed to being superseded. In this post I started with this observation:

A few weeks ago I mentioned (here) a possible future post about the way obsolete arms technology is used to form metaphors that persist long after the arms technology is relegated to museums; it's not just arms-related vocabulary of course. Someone who has never seen a stair-rod or heard a telephone bell may give someone a bell and report that it's coming down in stair-rods. But arms-related (and armed-conflict-related) vocabulary is a particularly fruitful source of metaphor.

 One of this sort of metaphor that I listed was this:

Flash in the pan – in a flint-lock, the trigger sparked off an explosion in a pan which itself set off the main explosion. Sometimes there was a flash in the pan, but the main charge was unaffected.

In other words, as veterans of the Parsons Green coverage will  recognize, a flash in the pan was a deflagration. Of course, the exact configurations of initiator and explosive don't match; but the ignitio praecox of the Parsons Green bucket bomb was a deflagration.

But this was not the only case that the bomb coverage threw up. There were two more in the accounts of the expected investigation (though I suspect my memory may have added the verb). Police would be 'scouring  CCTV footage'. They would, of course, not scour anything; this is a metaphor (and not, I now realize, related to technology, so make that one more case – footage).

CCTV may once have used film, and a few possibly still do. But surely today they produce MPEG files (file – there's another one). But it's film that is measured in feet, and people who refer to footage in the context of CCTV (or other media) are evoking a past technology (not that long in the past, and I'm sure most users [today] of the expression could work out where the word comes from; but, Trump willing, to a 22nd-century user, the technological background will be much more opaque.)

<re_retraction>
When I said 'make that one'  two paras ago, I hadn't thought about a new development in the field of CCTV: if the CCTV automatically sends the file to a remote site (or even to the cloud – discussed here if you're that way inclined) it doesn't really deserve to be called Closed-Circuit TV)
</re_retraction>

In fact, film or tape has spawned quite a few of these fossils (traces of a former state)...

<digression>
This metaphor commonly used by linguistics academics came immediately to mind as I read Oliver Kamm's review of How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention when in the first paragraph he writes "unlike physical organisms, the languages of prehistory leave no fossilised traces". This is true, in a strictly prosaic non-figurative sense. But since philologists regularly refer to fossils, my background has led me to almost forget that it is a metaphor. (Read on, though: everything is.)
</digression>

... slow-motion, cut, fast-forward, rewind, flashback, inter-cut ...

<apologia theme="inter-cut">
There may be objections to this one, as it's use chiefly to refer to film technology (although cut itself freezes a bygone scalpel-and-sticky-tape process). But it is sometimes used to refer to other sorts of story-telling – in a novel, for example, several stories may be inter-cut.
</apologia>

...I'm sure there are many more. It's rather like the exercise of taking a square yard of meadow and counting the different species it contains; the longer you look at film and tape metaphors, the more you find (another illustration of Guy Deutscher's reef of dead metaphors view of language):

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'.

More here

Thankfully, though, I've just heard on the News that all but one of the victims of that flash in the pan are now out of hospital . Which is not to say that it was a damp squib (see what  I did there?)

But the pyracantha ("fire-thorn-plant") is demanding the resumption of its annual trim, suspended when the heavens opened a while ago.

b

Captain Corelli‘s Egg-Slicer - Pedants of the world unite, Part the second

In last week‘s Review (one of the many pull-outs of The Times that almost ALWAYS goes astray on the way from the warehouse and it‘s not the shop‘s fault, honest, there‘s nothing we can do, it‘s the wholesaler) someone had taken the trouble to write in with a bit of misplaced pedantry that I used to be a believer in myself. (And if you're a fan of  "in which", read this – you're damned if you do invert and damned if you don't; I've chosen my route to damnation.)

In a letter to the Feedback column, a correspondent said he was writing ‘as a science student‘, but I suspect he meant ‘as a schoolboy who did GCSE Physics' or – depending on his age – O-level Physics, or even (as in my case) O-level Physics with Chem (that hasty genuflection at the altar of Mammon that, at one time, we Lotus Eaters were allowed to make on the way to a Greek class).

I first wrote about pedantry over four years ago here (well, I‘m sure I had written about it many times before,  but that early blog post was my first airing  for the PEDAI gag: "you have nothing  to lose but your PEDAI [=‘chains' {Greek – I wasn't kidding in my opening para]" – geddit? It‘s an etymological joke... Oh well}):

One of the grammar checker's shibboleths [BobK 2017: the object of my disdain at the time was grammar checkers – particularly Microsoft Word's: "a sort of Strunk & White incarnate"] is 'that in defining relative clauses' (and now the gloves are off – the underline is RED.)

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth">
Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one ... is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom*'s blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.'
</grammar_point>

... I know the rule is hooey, but... 

And speaking of hooey, the other thing about using that in subordinate clauses is that it forces you to 'break' another 'rule', by relegating a phrasal verb's particle to the end. (I have mentioned this before, in the red excursus in the middle of this post).

And that is the point on which I shall end. 

*Mrs T is not my invention; I have mentioned her before. She haunted Dave Barry's Mister Language Person columns, which have gone the (sorely lamented) way of the songs of Tom Lehrer.

As I said, I was – until quite recently – a participant in this oft-repeated nitpick ("Quanta are really small, look at the ignoramus suggesting it's big"). But then I saw this explanation in a UsingEnglish forum:

According to quantum theory, electromagnetic radiation can only exist in certain values as opposed to being on a continuous scale. Passing from one value to another is taking a 'quantum leap'.

This has entered the language as a metaphor for abrupt or significant change in something rather than a gradual evolution.

Another response offered further clarification (together with a helpful link to more detailed stuff at Wikipedia):

The electron can't gradually change. It is either at one energy level or another. No inbetween.

As it moves from one level to another it emits or absorbs photons. The "color" (wavelength) of the photon depends upon the size of the leap.

So the  metaphor works perfectly: the nature of the electron changes suddenly and radically because of the quantum jiggery-pokery going on inside it, and as a result there's a significant change in the behaviour of the atom it haunts (I doubt if that's the right word... But what do electrons do? Whizz?).

Quantum Leap may well be, as the Times Style Guide says, a cliché (to be avoided like the plague [my silliness, not their word]). But it makes sense.

But the season of mists (chemical clouds?) and mellow fruitfulness is nearly upon us. The drive-by fruitings of the unreasonably prolific pear-tree are coming to an end, but things need doing to the apple-tree. I am going out, and may be some time...

b

PS: A couple of new clues:

• Immerse lowest ranker reportedly in the shallows here. (7)
• After play,  M. S. Dhoni gets a talking to. (8)

Update: 2017.10.20.10:55

Answers: DUNKIRK, ADMONISH

Cliff edges

Back from Pembrokeshire, home of coast paths and sideways rain, I'm reflecting on systems meeting each other; cliffs, for example,

One system is at <cliff_height> metres and another system is at sea-level, and at the cliff-edge there's an abrupt change.

<autobiographical_note>
Highlight of our holiday was a trip in a RIB around Ramsey Island, whose West Cliff is the heighest in <somewhere>. There were too many of us for one boat, but fortunately they had a spare RIB. Presumably they were called Adam and Eve; bou-boun_tsh_I_thang_yow. But earlier on in the trip we had come across – and crossed – another sort of cliff; a metaphorical one, but a tangible one  (unlike many other metaphors).

Until the end of the Ice Age (??? weren't there several – regardless, the local tourist mythology was based on  just one, THE Ice Age) Ramsey Island was joined to the mainland by a tongue of land. The melting ice caused a rise in sea-level...

<whoa_there>
Hang on though, what about Archimedes – the displacement of the floating ice?  Shouldn't the sea-level stay the same? Well, no. That's what I thought until I read  this article about the recently-formed giant iceberg:

Ice shelves are vast expanses of ice floating on the sea, several hundred metres thick, at the edge of glaciers.

Scientists fear the loss of ice shelves will destabilise the frozen continent’s inland glaciers. And while the splitting off of the iceberg would not contribute to rising sea levels, the loss of glacial ice would.

The  melting of the ice-shelf uncorks the glaciers
</whoa_there>

... so most of that tongue, while submerged, is still marked by a treacherous string of rocks (a garrotte of rocks?) known as The Bitches. But that's just above the surface; the remnants of the old land-bridge form an even more treacherous submarine line of  obstacles.

This makes for an area of white water. It looked from a few boat-lengths  relatively placid, though we were told that in certain tidal/temporal conditios there could  be a difference in depth on each side of the cliff of 2 metres. Besides, the apparent placidness was only relative. The difference  between the two levels was underlined by the RIB's being held in place half-way up the slope. The outboard motor laboured to keep us from slipping back, with the sound of a lawn mower hitting a swathe of extra lush grass, and I thought we'd have to give up and find a gentler slope. But the motor was up to the challenge (indeed, the steersman probably held us there for effect).
</autobiographical_note>

But now I'm back to an untidy pile of emails on my cyber-doormat.; and the main cliff-edge metaphor is Mrs May's. There are others, though, if you screw your eyes up. The earthquake in Kos, for example. Conflicting pressures build up on either side of a fault-line, and when it gets too much there is a big jerk: again, two systems meeting, and a dangerous change at the meeting point. Or, at a more abstract level, pensions. There is one system, later there is another, and where the two meet there is disruption.

But I must get on , preparing for my choir's coming jaunt:

b

PS – a few clues:

• Factor it; it‘s confused with penis enhancements. (15)
• Short friend, cold, hard acts to follow this sort of golf. (9)
• The wrong sort of bachelor, say, with inputs from leftist extrenists, can be made out. (12)

U\pdate: 2017.07.24.17:45 – Added PPS and fixed some typos.

PPS And a topical one:

• Scatty vain dolls take note here. (4, 6)

U\pdate: 2017.08.29.14:00 – Added PPPS

PPPS: The answers: PRETTIFICATIONS, MATCHPLAY, INTELLIGIBLE, and LOVE ISLAND (this last one is probably UK-specific, but I imagine the US has a similar Unreality TV show).

Shedding light...

... or smoke and mirrors

My attention was caught recently by this tweet:

I dutifully (well, some would say pursuing ideas is an act of self-indulgence rather than duty: discuss) followed the link and reached a linguisten.de page. But I like to know where what I'm reading comes from, and linguisten.de is really a portal; in their page was this link, to an elearning page that made this eyebrow-raising claim:

Barbara Malt, professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Science Program at Lehigh University explains: “The idea that language moves from describing concrete phenomena to abstract ideas has been around for a few decades. But, nobody has taken that idea and looked at how word meanings have evolved over time – until now.” 

Hmm. Concrete to abstract: then what about Ttaanic? Think about it:

Absstract: pertaining to the Titans, (jolly big): example: "a Titanic struggle"

|

v

Concrete: a particular ship: the SS Titanic

|

v

Abstract: pertaining to the fate of that particular ship

Example: "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic"

In this case abstract and concrete applications dance a minuet with each other, now one thing, now the other, and back again. Admittedly, though,. concrete -> abstract is the more common direction of travel. But the words ...nobody has taken that idea and looked at how word meanings have evolved over time – until now. got my goat rather – especially the last breathless bit. The idea of a systematic mapping of how metaphors are formed is new, but the idea that "looking at" meaning development is new is just risible: 19th-century philologers were doing it, in a piecemeal and anecdotal way.

Anyway, returning to that hyperlink-enabled paperchase: At last, I thought, I was getting somewhere. But man proposes and the Interweb disposes. At the end of a paragraph or two of press release there was yet another link, to this EurekSlert page. My quest was over: from...

How a word becomes a metaphor, new research , Lehigh University

...I had reached an article entitled

Analysis sheds light on how metaphors like 'sheds light' evolved

Oddly, though, the ultimate (?) source had the jokier title (a misleading one, as it happens, but a gag's a gag). This should  have warned me that my quest was not finished;  not by a long chalk. (Interesting, that; why not a short chalk) The EurekAlert piece said this:

...New word meanings come about when there's a need to express something new," says Barbara Malt, professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Science Program at Lehigh University. "For instance, the original meaning of the word 'grasp' only described holding something physically. Later, 'grasp' also came to mean holding something in a metaphorical sense, such as 'grasping an idea.'"

Is this crossing-over from one realm of meaning to another random? Or does it follow a pattern?I

...The... findings will be published in an article in a forthcoming issue of Cognitive Psychology called: "Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium."...

The article is on a ScienceDirect site, where (of course) you can only read an Abstract of

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

The next stage involves my enriching the coffers of Elsevier, which ain't gonna happen: here are Highlights, as advertised there:

So where has this daisychain of hyperlinks led us? The fabled infinite number of monkeys now have more than just a typewriter; they have  an infinite number of photocopiers. And it's getting increasingly hard to screen out the white noise of cloned bumf.

b

PS A few clues:

• Less than elegant in an ugly configuration, (8)
• Working class in typical fettle (2, 4)
• Compôte of pears left over. (5)

Trumpery and Popery

Just  imagine: Trump  meeting Pope Francis; the personification of being in denial meets the personification of self-denial. What I wouldn't give to be a fly in the ointment during that conversation...

But there are two metaphors where the vocabularies of rampant, bullying, exploitative, self-regarding capitalism on  the one hand and the papacy (though probably not Pope Francis in one case) on  the other intersect. The one where the present occupant of the shoes of the fisherman is presumably blameless is nepotism. 

Nepotism

Many readers of this blog won't need telling that the word is derived from the Latin nepos -otis (= "nephew"), or – in the simpler, more direct Vulgar Latin notation (explained elsewhere in this blog, passim) NEPOTE(M). Where the papacy comes in is that in the bad old days of monastic shenanigans the nephew-word (whatever it was, certainly not "Italian", which didn't exist at the time; something Italic [or come to think of it, given the context, maybe they just used Latin]) was used as an (impious, not to say impish) euphemism for what the strait-laced OED [secondary source, I'm afraid] calls "the natural son" of the Pope; born the wrong side of the chasuble, as it were.

In fact this Etymonline excerpt shows that the word was not specific to one particular relation:

nephew (n.) c. 1300, from Old French neveu (Old North French nevu) "grandson, descendant," from nepotem (nominative nepos) "sister's son, grandson, descendant, grandchild," and in a general sense, "male descendant other than son" (source also of Sanskrit napat "grandson, descendant;" Old Persian napat- "grandson;" Old Lithuanian nepuotis "grandson;" Dutch  neef; German Neffe "nephew;" Old Irish nia, genitive niath "son of a sister," Welsh nei)....

In that respect, come to think of it, it is reminiscent of cousin in Shakespeare's day: Falstaff, as I remember, was wont to address Prince Hal as "cuz". Old English nefa, which Etymonline says persisted into the 16c, could mean "nephew, stepson, grandson, second cousin"; almost any male blood relative – so it doesn't quite work for Trump's son-in-law [not that I'm a sufferer from  the Etymological Fallacy].

Pontifex

The simplest and most self-evident explanation of this word is that it is an amalgam of words for bridge and make; the maker of a bridge between us miserable offenders and Heaven. There have been suggestions that there has been an element  of folk etymology in the derivation, and that something either Umbrian or Etruscan was involved; I'm satisfied, though , with bridge-builder, as was the Northumbrian monk who used the word brycgwyrcende "bridge-maker". (If you screw your eyes up you can just about see work in the middle of that calque – linguist's jargon for a loan-translation).

<digression>
To form a calque the receiving language borrows the format that the donor language uses to construct a typically two-part compound, but not the word itself. It translates each element of the compound using a native word: for example Latin omni- + potens, Old English æl- + mihtig (whence our almighty), Spanish todo- + poderoso. [Incidentally, that bunch of examples isn't supposed to suggests a series of any kind; its just a bunch of examples.]

Incidentally, it's /kælk/, not /kɔ:k/ or /kɔl:k/;  I'm not sure I've ever heard it said, though – it's that sort of word.
</digression>

Oops  – left a bit out. See update.

L'Envoi 

So [and that is a subordinating conjunction, if that sort of thing bothers you] these two metaphors make a (fairly tenuous, admittedly) link  between the sublime and the ridiculous. Time's wingéd chariot, though...

b

PS Here's a clue:

Re-recording makes Midge Ure a really legendary creator. – (8)

Update: 2017.01.17.11:45  – Added PPS

PPS
Sorry  – I missed out a bit of the argument: what links Trump to pontifex? Given a pontiff,  together with a belief in his infallibility, you get an action verb: pontificate  – to say what must be true, on the highest authority.  In a way familiar to students of language ...

<digression theme="semantic somersaults">
(here I mentioned the link between glamour and grammar, as discussed by David Crystal in The Story of English in 100 Words. You can read Crystal's discussion for yourself, but I would go a bit further; as I said in that post:

...This is the root of the word glamour, which came to refer to charm or attractiveness in the early twentieth century. Crystal doesn't say so, but it seems likely to me that Hollywood had something to do with it. The progression from wizardry to smoke & mirrors to magic lantern shows to movies strikes me as a fairly likely one.

</digression>

... the meaning flipped. From being a Good Thing (telling the truth, unquestionably) it became a Bad Thing (shooting your mouth off on subjects you have a shaky grasp of and expecting to be believed unquestioningly). Trumpery? You make the link.

Updatt: 2017.08.17.19:05  – Added PPPS

PPPS: Another case of that semantic somersault (the post I mined that Crystal quote from). is backlog ; as I said this process is very familiar to students of language. I should have specified, though, that I was referring to students of meaning-development in languages

And that clue: the answer, at last: DEMIURGE.

The world is just an oblate spheroid

In the year of my birth, the 17-year-old Alan Bennett went to Der Rosenkavalier at Leeds Grand Opera House. At the time he was under the innocent misapprehension that the young man had "just stopped by for tea and toast"; (I think those were his words in the televised selection  from his Diaries). He had no idea of what was going on behind the curtain during the overture. I was told many years ago by a then young lady called Joy (who blushed with a giggle that suggested  "Isn't Strauss awful?" as she said that the horns in the overture were "representative of the act of love"). I'd say they were about as subtle as the train going into the tunnel in the last scene of North by North West, while the young lovers in the sleeping car are studiously observing the Hays Rules. Con fu*co, knowha'Imean?

The television programme was loosely based on an edition of Private Passions, notable (to my hyper-sensitive – not to say anal – ear) for Michael Berkeley's mis-quoting of the words he had just heard (from The Dream of Gerontius): "Softly and gently, dearly ransom’d soul". He said "dear departed soul".  Come to think of it, it may not be a misquote but a quotation from elsewhere in the text, made to sound like a misquote because of the editing. He surely can’t be that cloth-eared? (Though, come to rethink of it, the angel, in the Celestial Arrivals Lounge, surely wouldn't have addressed Gerontius as departed ; he'd only just got there, for Heaven's sake.)

The collocation “departed soul” is a pretty strong one; and the syllable-count and stress pattern are right (hence my subject line – the words you're looking for are "great big onion"). But it makes dear define soul, whereas in the original – by John Henry Newman  – dearly modifies ransomed.

<autobiographical_note type="hair-splitting">

A lot of ransoming goes on in Christianity. In the second line of the version of “O come O come Emmanuel” that I learned at my mother’s knee (which was never far from Aunty Katy’s, genuflecting away like billy-o,...

<digression>
(a coincidentally – I didn't know until I checked the spelling – but strangely appropriate word,  given one of the possible derivations of the word; as The Phrase Finder says,

...Alternatively, the derivation is said to be from Joseph Billio, the zealous 17th/18th century Puritan preacher. Billio preached at the United Reformed Church in Market Hill, Maldon, Essex, in and around 1696. He was an enthusiastic 'hellfire and damnation' preacher and, given his name and reputation, ought to be a serious contender as the source of the phrase. They are certainly convinced in Maldon, and it must be true - they have a plaque to prove it. 

                    But, as I was saying, genuflecting....)
                    </digression>

...as only knees can [that’s one for the etymologists]) was And ransom captive  Israel. In the  C of E-preferred version I have sung since then, the words of that line are Redeem thy captive Israel. Wha...? Israel's not Emmanuel's captive  – not guilty, yer 'Onner  –  it's Pharaoh's captive. Israel was (in the 15th-century, when the carol surfaced in France) a metaphor for Christendom, and in the words of Elgar's angel, the ransom (the price paid for redemption) was dear (in the expensive sense): the soul may be dear to some people, but the point is that it was dearly ransomed.
</autobiographical_note>

The programme was worth watching, though. In the view of the Guardian critic, it was the best of the Christmas TV:

The whole review's  here; "best Christmas TV", though, isn't the warmest of accolades (a word discussed here:

When a knight was welcomed to the ...knightate? ...he was given a big hug; his liege lord wrapped his arms around his neck (think of our 'collar'). He embraced him, to use another physical metaphor, which I haven't time to pursue.

And so we come to accolade, quite appropriate in this week of Nobel prizes. Those Swedish grandees are echoing that welcoming embrace...

 )

b