Bobby Shaftoe's gettin' a barn

Borgen last week (and this week too, probably) reminded me of a setting of Bobby Shaftoe that we sang on the Wokingham Choral Society's tour of the West Country earlier this year, reported here.

<digression theme="all men are false">
And on the subject of Bobby Shaftoe, I don't see why it's always presented as such an upbeat song.

 "He'll come back and marry me"...?                  Who are you trying to kid, sister?

"Bobby Shaftoe's gettin a bairn"...?                   oh yeah? You are  Take it from me    kiddo, you've seen the last of the aptly-initialled BS.

<meta_digression subject="All men are false">
The song Silver Dagger includes the verse

"'All men are false'
Says my mother,
'They'll tell you wicked loving lies.
And the very next evening
He'll court another
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.'"

At least, that's the way I know it, from a Joan Baez EP (Remember them?). In a play on Radio 4 last week (still catchable if you're quick) a character sang "All men are fools"; OK, that's the folk process. Words change from singer to singer. But 'my mother' didn't mean that men are fools: 'They'll tell you wicked loving lies" You wouldn't catch her singing "He'll come back and marry me".
<meta_digression>

</digression>

Where was I...? Borgen. Katrine was talking to Kasper about 'min barn' (Google Translate says the min becomes mit in that context, but I'm not convinced. I suspect a typo. I'm pretty sure I heard an [n].) Anyway, Danish barn means English 'child'.

In preparation for our tour, I downloaded a recording of  an American choir singing Bobby Shaftoe, and I was greatly amused by the words 'Bobby Shaftoe's gettin' a barn [sic]' The next line is 'For to dandle on his arm', and I thought the singers were just trying to 'repair' the rhyme (not knowing the Scottish pronunciation of 'arm').

Album containing
The Road t Dundee

The song The Road to Dundee includes the line '...she gave me her ar-m'. And the tune is a match for the strangely similar-sounding Streets of Laredo (totally different, and modal where Streets of Laredo† is in the major, but the rhythms are the same [Streets of Laredo=Gave me her ar-m] and the tunes are an inexact mirror image of each other). Arm is [eʀm]. (Other similarities include reference to the season in the first line, in a way relevant to the mode [Cauld winter was howlin' o'er moor and o'er mountain versus I left my hometown one warm summer evenin' in the warmer-sounding major tune, and a first-person narrative.])

So in Bobby Shaftoe, the 'bairn/arm' rhyme doesn't need repairing. Silly Yanks I thought (being a bit of a Chauvinist; apologies for the intemperate slur, which I'm about to retract, if you'll be so good as to read on); Fancy not knowing that.

But Borgen made me think again. The printed text in the musical score is '...bairn/...arm'; and a non-British speaker might not recognize the word bairn. But if one of the singers had Danish ancestry (as a good few North Americans do) they might have recognized it as barn. There was Danish influence on Scots and English. So my imagined Dane might well assume it was a plain typo. Not so silly.

b
PS
A while ago I noted this snippet somewhere, which seems vaguely relevant:

A linguistics professor at the University of Oslo has been making headlines with a controversial claim. He believes that English is, in fact, a Scandinavian language, placing it in the North Germanic language family rather [ed: 'than'] the West Germanic family, where it has traditionally been placed. Is English a Scandinavian Language? he asks in a K International blog.

But I must be getting on before the next episode starts and fills my head with more 'wild surmise'.

Update 2013.12.01.11:35 – Added links
† Johnny Cash's version doesn't have the 'warm summer evening'.  That's the folk process for you.

Update 2013.12.01.17:15 – Added this PS:

PS

Report from the word face

When  I last reported on #WVGTbook I was having trouble with conversion to hardcopy, partly because the only format Amazon would take was PDF, so I was forced off the WinWord I know (Word 2003) onto a new one (a beta test kit) that lets me choose .pdf as an output format.

Suddenly – though I suspect that if I read the right blogs I'd've known it was coming – they're accepting .doc, docx, and even .rtf as well. So I'm retracing my (very tentative) steps with Word 2013 and working on a plain .doc file. I should be done before Christmas. Stay tuned ....

Update 2014.05.06.12:15 – Updated footer

Update 2014.06.06.21:45 – And again.

Update 2015.06.22.10:05 – And again, and added picture.

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Over 49,100 views  and nearly 8,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

New images from old guns

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.

I've compiled a list of expressions/collocations/sayings of one kind or another, even a name, that refer to obsolete arms technology.  I'm sure the list, like all such lists, will grow:

• Broadside – all the cannon on one side of a fighting ship firing at once.
• Give no quarter – like take no prisoners (see below), but the expression 'give quarter' is itself archaic. Modern soldiers don't talk about 'giving quarter'.
• 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.
• Fletcher – the name of a medieval arms dealer (the person who added the feathers to arrows)
• Laden to the gunwales – see my recent post
• Lock stock and barrel – parts of an old gun
• Loose cannon – a danger in an operational gun-deck, when a cannon's recoil broke its tether
• On a short fuse – there are still fuses, but the expression (meaning short-tempered) dates from a time when many explosions were controlled by the length of a fuse
• Ordnance Survey maps – The original Ordnance Survey was carried out to support the use of ordnance in Scotland after the Jacobite Rebellion. See more here
• Ramrod – either ramrod-straight or straight/stiff as a ramrod. The ramrod was used in packing the charge in a muzzle-loading firearm
• Sally – walled towns often had a sally port, a small gate that allowed besieged forces to launch an informal attack
• Salvo – a slightly more modern form of broadside
• Shield – there are still shields in modern warfare, but they are generally not free-standing articles (except in the case of police controlling hostile crowds)
• Shoot from the hip – people can still do this, but when the idiom was first used metaphorically to mean 'shoot first and ask questions later' (there's another one) it referred to gun-fighters shooting as soon as a gun was out of its holster 
• Take no  prisoners  – the taking of prisoners is still a feature of modern warfare, but the metaphorical usage (meaning 'be ruthless') dates from a time when prisoner-taking was hedged around with more gentlemanly conventions

The following are ones that (like shoot from the hip) may be interpreted as referring to current technology, but probably first saw the light of day when arms were less sophisticated than they are now.

• air cover – assistance from on high
• covering fire – a  distracting attack while something else is happening
• give it to someone with both barrels – a reference to twin-barrelled shotguns
• have something in your sights – intending to attack
• out of a clear blue sky -  of an unexpected attack (reference to fighter planes)
• Russian Roulette - a means of dicing with death. Now, it doesn't have to be death that you're dicing with. I remember in the '60s a line about 'Vatican Roulette' (5 aspirin pills and a contraceptive one [)]- it may have been on TW3)
•  sawn-off – first used of a shotgun, adapted to do maximum damage at close range, but now used in other contexts to refer to any DIY reduction of anything.
• staring  down the barrel of a gun – sure of something unfortunate

These two lists have a lot of overlap. A metaphor is usually supported by at least some vestige of the relevant technology, until the metaphorical usage is established. And the process will no doubt go on. Long after solid projectiles and gunpowder are things of the past and everything is done with lasers and tasers and what-have-you, people will still  be referring to bullet points and silver bullets and smoking guns.

That's all for now. I'll update with a few more links  when I return from my week in Wales but I've got to finish off the "-oo-" trawl before I go tomorrow.

b
Update 2013.08.23.21:15 Added this PS:
PS Five more from an afternoon's cricket commentary, one that I'm not sure about (the first) and one that relates to military strategy rather than hardware:

• To have a shot in your locker – maybe this has had an 'a' introduced to make it work for cricket...? I need to check.
• Gun-barrel-straight
• To shoot yourself in the foot
• To go off half-cocked
• To burn your boats/bridges – this refers to a miltary strategy that ensured that troops far from home would not think about going back

And that last one reminds me of another expression that refers to a no-going-back-now river crossing undertaken by Julius Caesar – crossing the Rubicon. By doing that, Caesar had shown his hand [another fertile source of metaphor, card games – discussed here many moons ago] as having designs on Rome (if I remember the story right – De Bello Gallico-related memories best-before June 1968).
Yechy da, or whatever.

b

Update: 2013.09.27.12:40
HeadFOOTer updated

Update: 2015.01.20.19:30 ‐ and again; and added this admission:

<autobiographical_note date="30 Jan 1965" type="PS">
At the age of 13¼ I watched the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. And I remember Richard Dimbleby‘s commentary – especially the words ‘gun carriage‘. I knew what a gun was  – my television-watching was restricted: my father had bought a black-and-white TV to watch the Coronation, but if I wanted to see ITV (or anything in colour) I had to sit on the floor in Archie‘s Room. Archie was my mother's very Scottish father, to whose insistence on a non-Catholic name for his new grandson I owe my name. But on The Lone Ranger I had seen hand-guns and rifles.

But I couldn't for the life of  me see why that horse-drawn vehicle should be called a gun carriage. I was not aware in those days of the historical background, or of its importance in metaphor.
</autobiographical_note>

Update: 2016.12.05.15:00 – Deleted obsolete footer.
Update: 2016.12.06.12:50 –  Added PPS and  added explanatory line in red.

PPS I just noticed another one to add to the first list:

• Hold the fort – Do the necessary for the defence of a fort, either alone or short-handed, while the main body of troops  moves on to another field of activity (perhaps protecting refugee civilians).

Update: 2018.03.31.15:50 – Added PPS

The recent resurrection of (no, not Him, although it's that time of year) the Spitfire has prompted me to wonder whether expressions like "She's a proper little Spitfire"...

<excuse type="sexism">
Sorry, but I think usage bears this out. Spitfires of this metaphorical sort tend to be girls or small women, unexpectedly fierce.
</excuse>

 ... predated the aeroplane. Well, duhh 😱, only by  4/500 years.

But, in my defence, the word did start out as a weapon of war. The metaphor then took over, and finally Mars reassserted his warlike claim.

The story started, according to Etymonline,  in the sixteenth century with the Florentine cacafuoco, a cannon dubbed shit_(sic)-fire. In the early seventeenth century the word surfaced in English, but cleaned up – as spit-fire.

<bowdlerization>
This avoidance of taboo words often happens in language-development. A favourite example of mine is cunny [from the Latin diminutive for a rabbit: cuniculu(m)). Cunny is still discernible, though encoded by phonological wizardry in the furrier's "coney". Honey and money still have their /ʌ/, but coney prudishly hides behind an /əʊ/-shaped figleaf. Prim governesses went a stage further and changed its initial /k/ to /b/ to give the much less near-the-knuckle bunny.
</bowdlerization>

But the rain seems to be holding off, so the garden calls.

Du côté de chez Knowles

For years as a student of French (among other things) I thought that Proust's Du côté de chez Swann meant 'from Swann's point of view'. Chez can mean either 'at the home of' or, in the academic world, 'in the thoughts or writings of'; "chez moi" can mean either 'at my home' or 'in my view'. German bei mir is ambiguous in the same way.

<etymological_note need_to_know="nugatory">
It's probable that the use of 'by me' as meaning 'in my opinion' was first popularized by German immigrants to the USA, who found it easily memorable because of its simil- arity to their own bei mir.
</etymological_note>

I (think) I was wrong (there's no knowing what puns are lurking in the Proustian undergrowth). There's a more mundane explanation*; but my title means "From Knowles's point of view".

WCS Tour to the West Country

The tour was a great success in many ways – musical, social, personal.... About half of us met at the Café Rouge on the first night, and began to get to know each other. The evening ended at about 10.30, when student life was just starting. The rooms were well-appointed (some better than others), but the ones overlooking the road, or adjoining the neighbouring pub weren't very restful. There was about an hour of peace between 3.00 AM (when the carousing stopped) and 4.00 AM (when the gulls started). Cooked breakfasts, when we found the cafeteria, were lavish and varied.

The first concert was at Buckfast Abbey. The choir vastly outnumbered the audience – I'd guess there was one unattached punter for each of our camp-followers (perhaps a dozen of each). But one of them thought we did well enough to merit an email to Linda (which we didn't know about until after the Truro concert).

The church at Lostwithiel

The concert at Lostwithiel was more of a family affair The Vicar, and father of the treble who sang Pie Jesu, was a college friend of Alex's (our MD). And because of the local interest there was a bigger audience (not as many as I expected though, with a three-line whip from the Vicar,  say 30-40).

The Truro concert was our best performance. Even Bobby Shaftoe worked. By that stage I think Alex had given up on the basses, who got the syncopations right in the first two lines but went back to singing on the beat in the third and fourth. Still, it was rhythmical! The voice parts were reinforced by Philip (Vicar of Lostwithiel) in the basses (with the occasional alto phrase when he liked their tune), his daughter Beth (?)  in the sopranos, and Nick – the organist – in the tenors.

That's the bare bones of the tour. But the best part was the chance to get to know people who were nodding acquaintances until the tour. For example, I found that my son and Anne Iles's were at Reading School together, and that we had sung the Fauré Requiem (mentioned, incidentally, here [just look for the red text about halfway down]) in the same parents and boys choir in the early/mid '90s.

Ho hum. Many thanks to everyone, especially Rhoda (for some reason many of my photos feature Rhoda peering confusedly at her mobile!), Alex, Nick, and Josh. Here's to the next. Now I must return to The Book which needs another few months' work. (And if you want to know what that is you should have been in the Seymour Arms on Sunday night when Helen was reading my blurb and asking some pertinent questions! Bless her – she feared she might have offended me; but all's fair in self-publishing. )

b


*Some readers may have noted in yesterday's post that a circumflex in French is often a sign of a missing s. Côté is related to our 'coast'. Proust's Du côté de chez Swann refers to a lake with paths on each side. Swann was the owner of a neighbouring property, bounded by one of the paths.

Update 2017.09.04.23:00 – Added picture, and clarification in blue.

Unos 20 personas simpáticas, así como Usted

'Probably the finest Gothic building in Spain', the cathedral in León  – 'the House of Light' – passed me by.  I didn't rejoice in the 125 medieval stained glass windows, 1,800 square metres of glass – catching and mediating the sunlight in different ways as the Sun moves (or as the Earth moves, if you must); it was the last church that I went into as a (vestigial) believer,  in March 1971, and my mind was on other things. The Guardia Civil were not among the '20 personas simpáticas' who, according to my sales spiel, I was to talk to each day ('diáriamente y en cada lugar donde vamos visitando...').

I had just been arrested at gunpoint, and my one colleague (I had previously been in a group of about a dozen 'students' – well, young people, mostly students – but we two were to be the nucleus of a new group) was still being held. I had no return ticket, precious little money, and I was working  with a man whom I didn't know from Adam – or rather Adán, he being Spanish – who, the police had tried to convince me, was probably a spiv. So I turned to religion; or just  wanted to sit down somewhere cool (a need which I think may explain the popularity of Catholicism in the Mediterranean).

I was reminded of that magnificent Gothic pile yesterday, at Truro Cathedral (and cognoscenti of the money-changers story may be interested to note that, by the magic of predictive text, 'Truro' is only a finger-slip away from 'usury'). As the cathedral's website says:

Since at least 1259, and probably before, there has been a Parish Church of St Mary located on this site. When Truro was chosen it was assumed that the Parish Church would be completely demolished to make way for the Cathedral. However, the architect John Loughborough Pearson, argued and eventually gained permission to keep at least part of the old Parish Church. He cleverly incorporated the South Aisle of the church into his design for the new Cathedral, so that symbolically and physically the Mother Church of the Diocese has a protective arm around one of her daughter churches.

 There had been a bishopric of León since the ninth century AD, their website says:

A Christian community is first recorded in León in 254, but no bishop is recorded in Visigothic times. The bishopric of León was established in 860, after King Ordono conquered the city from the Moors. It was subordinate to the diocese of Toledo until 1105.

But it was not until the middle of the thirteenth century AD – about the same time as the building of Truro's Parish Church of St Mary – that work on  the cathedral at León was started with money from Alfonso the Wise. [Cardinal Wiseman school? No, that would be a digression too far, even for me.] Both cathedrals, also, were built mainly over two periods: León's in the thirteenth and then in the nineteenth; Truro's in the nineteenth century (the foundation stone was laid in 1880) and not completed until the twentieth (with refurbishment extending into the twentyfirst).

They are both Gothic – although Truro's is an example of the Victorian Gothic Revival. And although Truro's stained glass bears no comparison with León's, it is still spectacular (a word with a pleasingly optical double-entendre). And, presumably for lack of funds, much of its glass above ground-floor level is clear. The rose window at the front of the building, though, is magnificent; and there is much other notable stained glass (just not 1,800 square metres!)

I was in Truro at the end of my choir's short tour of the West Country, of which more anon. But before I go I can't resist an etymological reflection induced by my visit to the Mayflower Exhibition. Plymouth was noted for being a Roundhead stronghold during the English Civil War – and that name for the Puritans' soldiers, was coined with reference to their headgear (I prefer the soldiers' helmet theory to the pudding-basin haircut theory expounded – very briefly – here).

The Roundhead soldiers were by no means the first fighting force to be given a nickname based on what their heads looked like. When Roman soldiers occupied Gaul the locals thought that their helmets looked like cooking pots (Vulgar Latin TESTA(M)). Among all the Romance-language names for head (capo, cabo, cabeza, cabeça ...) where does the French tête come from? Well, here's a hint; the circumflex in French is often a vestige of an s.

I'll leave that with you. After 5 days away I have mail to delete; and then I must get on with V3.1 of #WVGTbook.^PPS

b
PS Another headgear-based term of abuse and/or contempt was one that I was exposed to in common with other wearers of the uniform of St Gregory's RC Primary School – which included a cap that sported the papal arms (a mitre, that looked a bit like a bee-hive). Hence the unbelievers' cry of  'Look out, here come the bee-hives', a term of derision that I classed with the "dungeon, fire and sword" that, according to the hymn, the Faith of our Fathers [was] living still in spite of.  With any luck it'd be worth a good few Hail Marys in the Hereafter Stakes.

Update 2017.06.02.13:50  – Deleted old footer and added PPS.

PPS –This link no longer works, as at the time I wrote this post the book was half finished. The finished book is here.