Little birdies in their nests agree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here 

</digression>

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

According to this site

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

More

And from there we get to the Dog Days:

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

Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I'm missing the cricket.

b

PS And here are a couple of clues.

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

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

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

Crossword answers: NUISANCE and WRIT LARGE

Update: 2017.10.13.11:15 – Added PPPS

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

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

Update: 2018.01.03.10:45 – Added P⁴S

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

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

The end of the affair (stress on foreign words, part 2)

The other three words I had sur l^ea planche^r (a metaphor that will become relevant in the fulness of time: – avoir du pain  sur l^ea planche^r ≅ have work to do, have one's work cut out  [at the risk of confusing the baker with the tailor]) were

• Medici 
• Wallander
• /`mama/ (more likely /`mʌmʌ/)

Medici

I forget the context; it may have been the first half of a Sky Arts programme about The Eagles. An American referred to someone as "a sort of 20th-century Medici" (a lavish patron of the arts). The nationality is relevant, because I often notice that speakers  of American English tend to be more sympathetic (or even respectful) of foreign words' pronunciation. I imagine this is related to there being so many 1st/2nd/nth-generation immigrants there.

Anyway, he stressed Medici correctly, rather than using the common (British) anglicization Medici. The machine generating the sub-titles really went to town on this one, calling to mind the saying

To err is human, but if you want a real SNAFU use a computer

This latter-day Medici became a meta-chief.

Wallander

I can't work up much enthusiasm to write about this  travesty –  the abuse of word-stress (by several if not all the characters, as well as the BBC continuity people, whom I mistakenly gave the benefit of the doubt) should have warned me not to get my hopes up. There's two hours of my life that I'm not going to get back. For the record, stress is on the second syllable –  but you already knew that, didn't you, from the original sub-titled series.

/`mama/

If I'd seen the word mentioned in the salutation of each of the letters in  Love from Boy: Roald Dahl's Letters to his Mother that Radio 4 serialized recently I wouldn't have suspected an anachronism. Each letter began with what I thought must be 'Dear mama' (given the period and context – pre-war (in the first selection, at least) letters home from a boy at a boarding school). But I did some checking here and found that mamma was indeed stressed on the first syllable; his contemporaries would have written to Dear Mama, but young Roald would indeed have said /`mama/.

L'envoi

But what about that pain sur l^ea planche^r? Well, in last night's Cav&Pag (on BBC 4) I tuned in a bit late. In her intermezzo (as it were), between Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (the new Covent Garden modern-dress production) even the lovely Clemmy made Cavalleria rhyme with the English cafeteria – which was strangely appropriate, as the setting featured a panificio (bakery) .

But what made my metaphor particularly appropriate was that the first scene I saw (tuning in, as I said, a few minutes late) featured Santuzza singing and Lucia kneading dough. It wasn't yet du pain, and it wasn't on a planche^r (which I suppose is the board that a baker loads with loaves before putting a batch in the oven) – rather on some kind of work-surface; close enough, though.

On with the motley, as someone once said.

b

PS
And it's been a while since I gave you a clue.

Withdrew endorsement of researchers first, then called to mind. (7)

PPS
And I almost forgot  this:

Update: 2016.08.26.10:40 – Added PPPS, and added explanatory phrasing (they're not repairs exactly, just avoidance of infelicities) in red.

PPPS OK, time's up on that clue: REVOKED.

Update: 2018.02.15.09:40 – Corrected misremembered idiom (courtesy of Twitter:

)