Well said, that man

In this week's Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, Rowan Williams was talking about his new book The Way of St Benedict., which led me to think about the many appearances of Benedict in my life.

The first was as near home as you can get. When looking for a house to buy, my father had three priorities: nearness to church, RC school, and Ealing studios (in that order). He got the first two spot on: the church and the school were within walking distance. The journey to Ealing Studios (where he worked at the time)  would have taken a little longer – maybe 15-20 minutes in the Standard Vanguard (known, for reasons I never questioned, as "the Green Lizard"):

The church and school were named for St Benedict, as was indirectly... 

<parenthesis>

Very indirectly. Father Ben (sic  – younger and trendier than most of his peers) named the youth club he started after the bird that figured on the school's emblem: "the Corbie":

 

<subparenthesis>  

And there are twa. I wonder.... Probably not though. I suspect the corbies were just a heraldic pun referring to the great Benedictine foundation in Picardy: Corbie Abbey. (Although perhaps the designer of those arms knew the song.) 

</subparenthesis>

</parenthesis>

... the folk club that was the scene of my first guitar-related efforts.

Benoît ....

<you-at-the-back command="Wake up">
Do I really need to point out that this is one of several French names cognate with "Benedict"?
</you-at-the-back>

... was "my" member of the Regnault family, who lived in Motteville.

<background-info>
Throughout the 1960s my family took part in a number of exchange visits with a family made up of conveniently spaced children. Jo exchanged with Odile, Mick with Denis, Angela with Vincent, I with Benoît, and Yag [don't ask] with Nicolas (note the names; we were matched in religion, an important consideration at the time,  as well as age).
</background-info>

Which brings me to Bene't – presumably the anglicized version of Benoît.  My college at Cambridge was built next to St Benet's Church – and at one time was known colloquially as "Bene't College". The church stands in Bene't Street, scene of a bit of unconsummated ésprit d'éscalier recounted here: 

A few years ago I was in Cambridge, and missed a trick. I was at the front of the crowdlet in front of the Chronophage [HD: See here], and a tourist behind me wondered aloud what the inscription meant: 

Mundus transit, et concupiscentia ejus 

It took me a while to work it out, as two of the less obvious words (everything except transit, et and ejus) had glyphs that hid the letters un and en behind the conventional stone mason's tilde, giving ũ and ẽ. But what it says could be rendered as The world passes, as does its concupiscence. (I think the comma justifies my as does).

The trick I missed was the opportunity to give the tourists the impression that round every corner (the Chronopage is on the corner of Bene't St) in Cambridge there lurks a Vulgar Latinist. (And if you want to know more about concupiscence, read that post.)

There are other Benedicts in my life; a nephew, the celebrant of my little sister's wedding, the patron saint of Europe (who seems to have taken his eye off the ball spectacularly in the last few years), my choir's multi-talented accompanist ...

But what of my subject line, particularly the expression well said?  Well, according to Wikipedia, ...

Etymologically it [HD: Benedict] is derived from the Latin words bene ('good') and dicte ('speak'), i.e. "well spoken" [HD:my emphasis] 

...which strikes me as broadly true (though I wonder what 'dicte "speak"' is supposed to  mean...

<tangent>
Why the inflexion -e on dicte? Why cite a root in the ablative? I suspect the writer had only a passing acquaintance (if that) with Latin, and maybe once had a penpal called Bénédicte.
</tangent>

...) but crucially irrelevant. A person who in Latin is benedictus is not "well-spoken" but is BLESSÉD*. In the words of the Sanctus "he who comes in the way name of the Lord" is blesséd:

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini

<tangent>
"He who comes in the way name of the Lord is well-spoken?" Just as well, really. We don't want any of those ill-spoken yobs coming in the name of the Lord.  What would people think?
</tangent>

The speaker of the good things is Himself – and it would be either anathema or pointless or meaningless (depending on your beliefs) to pass judgment on His elocution.

That's all for now

b

Update: 2020.10.02.10:05 – Added PS

PS

When listing Benedicts in my life, I missed an obvious one, which I might have remembered if I'd read the WCS rehearsal schedule for last night before I hit Publish. We were due to sing the Benedictus  from Beethoven's Mass in C (although in the rehearsal we overran on the Credo and didn't get round to it).

<parenthesis>
And when I said "in the words of the Sanctus " I meant it. Most composers treat the Sanctus and the Benedictus as separate movements (though often there is an actual or implied attaca linking the two, and each is followed by a Hosanna with broadly the same notes). But the Benedictus is part of the same prayer – at least it was in my altar-boy days.
</parenthesis>

Update: 2020.10.09.10.15 – Fixed misquote. Mea maxima culpa.

Update: 2020.10.24.14.15 – Added footnote

* I've just become aware of a case of contrasted benedicts versus Bad Lots that will be well-known to singers of various Requiems. The Ur-Requiem in my mind is Mozart's: in the Confutatis maledictis an ominous figure in the lower voices is interrupted by an angelic Voca me cum benedictis in the upper voices ("Call me [to be/to stand/to stay] with/among the blesséd [as opposed to the maledictis]. The music forces an interpretation that isn't strictly there in the prayer. The infernal tune and lower voices mark the maledicti. The angelic tune and upper voices stand for the benedicti ...

<inline-p⁴s>
(strictly, I suppose, benedictae)
</inline-p⁴s>

.... But in the prayer there is only one voice – that of a soul awaiting judgment: "When the wrong-doers have been condemned to Hell [confutatis maledictis] ...

<inline-pps>
(Some of the more attentive readers, if not deprived of the schooling in Latin that is everyone's birthright,  may have recognized the ablative absolute here –  "Caesar having thrown a bridge across the river" sort of thing.)
</inline-pps>

 ...call me ...". It's a bit like when a teacher is choosing the worthiest in the class: "Ooh me, pick me".

Update: 2021.03.31.15:00 – Added <inline-pps />

Update: 2021.12.22.11:35 – Added PPPS

PPPS

I've only just learnt, from an alumni magazine [incidentally, I wonder when "old boys/girls" became "alumn-i/-ae"] of another instance of "Benedict" turning up in my back-story: this fore-runner of that termly publication:

The Benedict was first published in 1898, and continued under that name (with a break in 1914-18) until 1928.

Update: 2022.12.31.15:00 – Added <inline-p⁴s>

/e 'luʧəvæn le 'stele/

These are indeed trying times, and made none the less trying by the mispronunciation called out in my subject. I don't know either why this is so painful or why people do it. Puccini has spelled it out in the first four words of the aria....

<aside type="boogy-woogy">
I mean, it's not like, say, Squeeze's Up the junction, where the name of the song is not mentioned until the last line. (Not sure why that occurred to me.)
</aside>

... with stress obviously, clearly, musically on the second syllable of lucevan. And the orchestration is as sparing as can be; the tenor is as clear as... [ed. can you do something with "bell/bel canto" here?] [You'll be lucky sunshine.]...a very clear thing.

The words are there, spelled out, what possible excuse is there for mangling the Italian? But the DJ on Classic FM (it would be invidious [indeed pointless] to name him, but he's an educated chap) says 'Here it is from Tosca, E loochevan le stele'.  Strange that he doesn't pick up the obvious clues; it doesn't take a great linguistic gift to hear something so simple.

Another frequent trial [while we're on the subject of bees in bonnets] comes for the Classic FM listener (or, more regularly except in these days of isolation, for a choral singer) whenever an r closes a Latin syllable. In English (in RP, that is) an r in this position does something strange to a preceding vowel (a bewildering array of strange things ...

<plug>
In due course ...

<really_though>
[hollow laugh; breath retention is not advised]
</really_though>

... WVGT2bk will list these. But its tortoise like progress has already covered most r words; only UR to go. AR, for example, can represent /ɑ:/ (in par), /eə/ (in pare), /ær/ (in parry), /ᴐ:/ (in war),  /ər/ (in parietal),  /ɒr/ (in quarry)... to list only the obvious cases. The whole grisly story (grisly, that is, for students of ESOL) is covered for AR, ER, IR, and OR words in WVGTbk2 , which will be free to download over the Easter weekend.</plug>

) Anyway, that frequent trial. The life of a choral singer is beset by fellow singers who – when singing Mozart's sublime Ave Verum Corpus, for example – insist on pronouncing the last word as if it were some kind of regimental mascot ("corps puss", geddit? [bou-boum tsh].)

That's all for now; the great outdoors is calling...

b

Update 2020.04.10.17:40 – Added PS

PS A similar mistake  happens with  Che gelida manina. The words are the first thing you hear after an unfussy introduction, and all clearly enunciated on one note. In Lucevan le stelle, the one note statement comes after the clarinet's I left my love in Avalon tune. In Che gelida manina, though, the mangling of the stress is subtly different. Whereas Lucevan is stressed (correctly) on the second syllable, gelida is stressed on the first.

<mnemonic type="approximately homophonic, irreverent">
Think of "jellied eels" – long-short-short.
</mnemonic>

So I ask myself again why the mis-stressed version (gelida) is so common. There's no excuse; the right stress is there, spelled out in the music.

Tenebrae

Gregorio Allegri wrote his Miserere for the service of Tenebrae, to be performed in the Sistine Chapel. The service gets its name from the hour when it's sung – twilight – although the music itself is far from TENEBRAL.

<inline_ps>
Incidentally, I wonder whether the service of Tenebrae  was already commonly referred to as "Evensong" before the Reformation. I've just watched a fascinating programme on BBC Four: Lucy Worsley's Elizabeth I's Battle for God's Music, that detailed the invention of the service of Evensong based on John Merbecke's setting of the Book of Common Prayer (that's a gross [and possibly mistaken] over-simplification: it was all very confused).

But at the beginning of the programme (8 minutes in), she reads – and points out in the manuscript – an eye-witness account of the dissolution of the monastery of Evesham in 1539. And in that account the monk uses the term Evensong: 

I don't know enough about manuscripts to judge for certain whether  the E is capitalized: the first e of Evensong looks bigger than the second, but smaller than the E of Evesham (in the first hand-written line). It is clearly one word though – which suggests that it was a Thing.
 </inline_ps>

There is a story about Mozart and the secretive Vatican rules that kept the music undocumented – protected, one might say, not so much by copyright but by papa-right.As Wikipedia says:

According to the popular story (backed up by family letters), fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was visiting Rome when he first heard the piece during the Wednesday service. Later that day, he wrote it down entirely from memory, returning to the Chapel that Friday to make minor corrections. Less than three months after hearing the song and transcribing it, Mozart had gained fame for the work and was summoned to Rome by Pope Clement XIV, who showered praise on him for his feat of musical genius and awarded him the Chivalric Order of the Golden Spur on July 4, 1770.

Various embellishments have been added;  "At some point, it became forbidden to transcribe the music" as that article puts it; no wonder that page comes with the stern warning/plea:

The version I was sold at school was "it had never been written down, but Mozart's version, after a second visit to the Sistine Chapel was note-perfect".

Well... Let me just....hmm..? I'm sure Mozart's piece was wonderful, and his memory remarkably accurate. But, if nobody had written it down, how could anyone judge its accuracy? One could surely rely on the Vatican authorities to claim Mozart‘s version as their own.

I mention this piece because it will form part of our Remembrance Concert in two weeks.

But it is not the mainstay of the concert; that is the choral suite from  Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man, which has most of the good bits from the work originally commissioned (Wikipedia again)

...by the Royal Armouries Museum for the Millennium celebrations, to mark the museum's move from London to Leeds

<digression>
It was there (the Royal Armouries at Leeds) that I started one of my earlier posts. Strange how one keeps stubbing one's toe on these Aha moments. 
</digression>

When we sang the whole piece some years ago, the only movement that struck me (apart from the choral suite, that is) was the song that gives the whole piece its name: L'homme armé.

Apart from this there are some lovely reflective pieces by composers  from Mendelssohn to Tavener, with many other gems  along the way.

Give it a go. Hurry, while stocks last.

b

PS Here are a couple more clues:

• He improvised frantically, but without a bean.(12)
• Causing a ruckus about tale I have first, making up the numbers for profit.(8, 10)

Update: 2017.10.30.16:45 – Added inline PS.

Update: 2017.10.31.12:05 – Added afterthought in red.

Update: 2017.11.07.10:55 – Added PPS.

Less than a week now to our next concert. One of the pieces on the programme that I haven't mentioned yet is In Paradisum from Fauré's Requiem. Some time ago, preparing to sing this piece, I wrote:

In can mean many things in Latin, but when followed by a noun in the accusative it doesn't mean 'in'. If the words were In Paradiso they would mean 'In Paradise'; but they are In Paradisum ... going on ...deducant Angeli : 'Angels will lead you into Paradise...' One of many other meanings of in, this time followed by the dative, is exemplified in the next phrase: in tuo adventu: that's closer to 'in' in meaning, with a sense something like 'on the occasion of', though I'd favour a simpler translation: 'When you arrive...'.

It is a lovely piece that  most people know, even if they can't place it. Knowing Lennon & McCartney's tendency to borrow from "classical" favourites (there are those metaphorical tweezers again – I'm seldom at ease with the phrase "classical music")...

<beatles_factoid>
It has been widely reported that the song Because was inspired by someone in the recording studio playing the easier bit of Moonlight Sonata.
</beatles_factoid>

...it seems to me possible that the introductory bars (of In Paradisum) were at the back of someone's mind when they wrote the harp introduction to "She's Leaving Home".

Anyway, no time for more – I have words to learn for Saturday.

PPPS

And here are three more clues:

• A-courting we will go, in disarray, "Upon St Crispin‘s Day"?.(9)
• Charm is a recipe for winning friends and influencing people.(8)
• Reportedly misbehave at beginning of soirée, but be brilliant, (11)

Update: 2018.03.23.1555 – Added P⁴S

IMPOVERISHED,  CREATIVE ACCOUNTING,  AGINCOURT,  CHARISMA,  SCINTILLATE

Shameless plug

A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.

The first is Vivaldi's Gloria, which I've sung twice before, once with Reading Haydn Choir about 20 years ago, and once when I was driving my son to a concert arranged by a fellow barbershop singer (who was choir master at his local church). As I knew the piece, I became a singing chauffeur.

The other two pieces involve a setting of Psalm 110, once entirely (Handel's Dixit Dominus) and once as one of several texts in Mozart's Vesperae Solennes de Confessore. When I first sang the Handel, at the first rehearsal, somebody asked me what the opening words of Dixit Dominus meant. One word in the opening sentence was new to me, so I could only say 'The lord said to my lord "Sit on my right, until I do something jolly unpleasant to your enemies."'

The unknown word  was scabellum* – a footstool. The something jolly unpleasant was turning them into footstools (although I imagine there was an element of metaphor here  – I don't think trans-substantiation was involved).

The word 'until' seems a bit odd. Does the first lord – the speaker – mean that  the second lord can only occupy the favoured position until the enemies turn up and suffer enscabellation – thereafter to sit somewhere else (on the enemies, perhaps)? But donec, when followed by a subjunctive, usually does mean until. The bible translations listed here all use until or till, with a small handful of exceptions. Only two translate it as while, in which case donec would usually be followed by an indicative (not ponam but pono). Food for thought. But not today – I'm neglecting the cricket.

Suffice it ...

<digression> 

I refer readers to an old discussion,, in the UsingEnglish forum, where I explained: 

The fossilized phrase 'Suffice it to say' means 'let it be sufficient to say'; a more modern idiom is 'Enough said' - but, unlike 'suffice it to say', this follows the thing said: 'I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry. Enough said'.

You'll have noticed that I keep saying 'Suffice it to say'. This uses the subjunctive, which is hardly used in informal British English. And as both 'it' and 'to' are unstressed in that phrase, they are easily heard as a single /t/ followed by a schwa - particularly by habitual non-users of the subjunctive. This form [HD clarification: the ITless form] is widely used, and has become almost as common as the fuller form: BNC has 53 instances of 'suffice to say' and 88 of 'suffice it to say'.

In COCA, on the other hand, which is based on N. American usage, has [HD correction: 'there are' (I may have meant háy)] 376 (377 if you include 'sufficeit to say', of which there is a single instance which I found by accident ), and only 97 of  'suffice to say'. And that balance makes sense, considering the relative strength of the subjunctive in American English. 

Anyway, I'm an IT-man. 

</digression>

... to say that you should put Saturday 2nd April, 2016 at 7.30pm in your diary. (More details of the concert here.)

Tales from the word-face

My android system's latest exploit in the matter of spelling corrections involve a Character Entity expressed in the Named Entity Syntax (and if you really want to know what all that means, pick the bones out of this).  My HTML code makes occasional use of &nbsp; – a non-breaking space (for use when you want to keep a space between two words but keep them on the same line).

If I used it often enough I'd tell the spell-checker to add it to my dictionary. But for now, whenever it sees "nbsp" it asks me if I'd prefer to use "tbsp", which sounds like the sort of Character Entity that'd come in useful for writers of recipe books.

b

PS Another clue:
Landlubbers' haven in heavy swell (in case of bowel-movement) (5)

Update 2016.01.27.12:15 – Added PPS

PPS
I've been thinking about the until/while problem mentioned in the fifth para. To recap: the Latin text has Donec ponam  (="until I put"), not Donec pono (="while I put"). "Until I put" involves the first 'Lord' (the speaker) in some rather strange reasoning, making the sitting at the right hand only a temporary (pre-enscabellatory) position – which I suppose I should gloss as meaning lasting only until the end of the turning-into-a-footstool [sorry about these unfeeling neologisms, but scabellum is too good a word not to have any derivatives in English]). So why is ponam not pono – unless, of course, St Jerome (or one of his predecessors) got it wrong (when translating from David's [or someone's – Wikipedia has a rather ominous  "although his authorship is not accepted by modern Bible scholars"] Hebrew)?

It would take a Hebrew scholar to take this further (and I'm working on that), but I suspect that Hebrew has a way of expressing temporal and/or conditional relations in a way that does not fit in with the Latin way – so that neither "until" nor "while" really does the job. Hmmm...

Update 2016.01.27.15:05 – esprit d'escalier in blue.

Update 2016.02.05.10:15 – Added PPPS


PPPS

When, in last night's rehearsal, we broached (and on occasion breached) the Magnificat, I was reminded of last summer's post, My soul doth magnify the problem – particularly this bit:

...the words of the Magnificat reminded me of a confusion that keeps cropping up in the life of a choral singer. In the text that that link points to you'll see in the third line of the Latin exultavit, translated in the English as "hath rejoiced". But later on the word exaltavit appears, translated in the English as "hath exalted". 

Italianate pronunciation of Latin now gets involved. Listen to this YouTube clip; the relevant word starts occurring from about 30 seconds in, and is repeated as often as Vivaldi chooses. When this vowel (not unlike the English /ʌ/ phoneme – the one that occurs in, for example, "exulted", although it is closer to [ɑ] {Update note: this is an IPA transcription})  – is heard by a strictly Anglophone ear, confusion arises.... 

 Last summer's post   

Update 2016.02.06.16:40 – Added P⁴S
P⁴S Another clue:

Surfeit of promissory notes – hateful (6)

Update 2016.02.10.09:15 – Added concert poster.

Update 2016.03.24.14:40 – Added footnote, and crossword solutions.

* By chance, flicking through a dictionary looking for something else (the kind of serendipitous Aha-provoking discovery that doesn't happen with an online dictionary – excepting artificial things like Word-of-the-day), I found that Spanish (and indeed Catalan, Provençal, Italian, French etc, I've since determined [courtesy of the wonderful Meyer-Lübcke – which I've mentioned before] all have similar words) has the word escabelo. Spanish also has a quite charming metaphorical use for escabelo (which is, on weekdays, "a little stool"); in its Sunday best, figurative, use it is a "stepping stone". Life really is just one digression after another.

Solutions: BELOW and ODIOUS.