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.

Gove, Gwynne, Churchill ...?

One of may favourite toys at the moment is the Text Analyser provided by usingenglish.com. As Gove's Golden Rules have been so much in the news of late, and as he is such an espoused fan of Winston Churchill^†, it occurred to me that it might be fun to put Gove's Rules into the analyser, in comparison with a text that Churchill sent to his War Cabinet. The texts are of different lengths, so the comparison is not as balanced as I might have hoped, but the circumstances (a politician briefing his underlings) are quite similar.

Here is Churchill's score:

And here is Gove's:

One number jumps out: the one for Hard Words, defined in the Using English help as

words with three or more syllables. This definition is used in calculating the readability and difficulty of a text, including the Gunning Fog Index

Nearly 12% of Gove's text includes such words, whereas Churchill's text has a score of less than 9%. For words of up to 5 letters, honours are pretty even, but from 6 letters and more Gove (with a few exceptions) stretches his sesquipedalian legs. He beats Churchill on 6 letter words, 7 letters, 8 (by a factor of more than 2), 9 (by a factor of more than 3), 12 and 13 (Churchill has none). Churchill leads in his percentage of 10 and 11 letter words, and is alone in using a single 15 letter word.

This word, 'conversational', is not so Hard. In fact the very concept of Hard Words is a subjective one that the writer of the Text Analyser has tried to render objective by tying it to syllable count. But hardness is a much more complex thing than that, including familiarity (e.g. 'family', with three syllables, is much less hard than 'ilk', with only one), abstractness (e.g. 'motor-bike', with three syllables, is – I would say – less hard than 'traffic', with only two)... and many other factors. For more information on the full text, see this TES resource, which I made with an earlier version of the Text Analyser, comparing Churchill's text with an Aunt Sally parody I wrote – breaking all Churchill's rules and then some).

But Gove does not come off too badly in the comparison. His and Churchill's Fog Index scores are pretty much the same; and Gove's sentences aren't as long (sentence length is one of the factors considered in calculating the Gunning Fog Index.) This (shorter sentences) is what lets Gove use longer words but still have a slightly lower Fog Index. And his Lexical Density^‡ is considerably lower than Churchill's.

So, my report:

Satisfactory, but could do better. He seems to have come under the dubious influence of an older boy (Gwynne Major).  We can only hope he snaps out of it soon.

And while we're on that subject, I heartily recommend Oliver Kamm's piece in this Saturday's copy of The Times, in which he calls Gove's guidance 'well-intentioned and largely either futile or destructive' and says of Gwynne's Grammar

It is a work of titanic silliness, and it's alarming that the Education Secretary doesn't see this.

(That's got quite a ring to it. Gwynne's marketers – probably himself [among his shortcomings, self-effacement isn't one] – should snap that one up. I can see the cover sticker now: '... Work of Titanic Silliness').

b


† One tweeter even proposed this bingo game:

 

He appended to this a link, but in this capture it wouldn't have been live. It is the same as the one I used above for Winston Churchill.

‡ Lexical Density = (Number of different words / Total number of words) x 100
Update 2019.07.28.10:50 – Old footer deleted

Sez who?

'Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong'

This is the sort of lazy cliché that makes my lip curl more than somewhat. People don't 'know things about grammar'; more to the point, they're not taught things about grammar. In some cases, they're taught grammatical rules that the teacher thinks are true; and almost always those are wrong. Moreover, what's that 'you' doing? I can see that it makes for a catchy headline, but it risks contemptuous  scrutiny by people who don't think anything of the sort (whatever that may be)!

And most annoying is the fact that the article's heart's in the right place (or rather the hearts of the 'bloggers at Grammarphobia.com and former New York Times editors' who wrote it). I started by laying into the headline; OK, as a committee was writing the post, maybe an unpaid intern (and while we're on the subject of unpaid interns, sign this, won't you?) wrote it. So, what about the post itself?

Here's the first paragraph and a bit:

You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”

It’s a great story, but it’s a myth.

What has this got to do with the point of the post? The scribbled riposte – not made, I think, by Churchill, but reported by Sir Ernest Gowers in an early edition of Fowler – is an example of the sort of 'rule' the post is talking about; so it's relevant. But what has the next line got to do with the price of fish? If they want to say it's untrue (a usage of 'myth' that I loathe [sic, and another thing I loathe is being thought to have got the spelling wrong when I use 'loth' to mean 'unwilling'] with the heat of a million Suns, as my little sister knows to her cost*), they're undermining their own argument. And to what end? They give no authority for their statement in any case.

Perhaps 'legend' ('that which is to be read' – legendum ) would be nearer the mark – as it has been written about – by Gowers. And the written record has been been reproduced and embellished and distorted over the years. My headmaster (RIP 'Dodo', a bully but a charming and talented one) had it as “This is the sort of English that I will not up with put.” Another source (I forget which) held that it was Churchill again, but added an expletive or two.

The thing is that English has phrasal verbs – where a verb is thrown together with a 'particle' (usually a preposition, but without its prepositional force). So that you cut a tree down before cutting it up. Or you 'listen out for the milkman' – although nothing goes out from the listener; an acoustics engineer might hold that in fact any movement (sound waves) is towards the listener. English shares this trait  (in a less extreme way) with German, of which Mark Twain famously wrote:

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

Mark Twain's Speeches, "Disappearance of Literature"

(Skippable – though not entirely irrelevant - digression)

My choice of 'listen out' as an example is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem, which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano solo tune† marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

Then the speaker thinks better of this impertinent fortissimo interruption, and repeats Exaudi  – but piano. The id then reasserts itself with the next word fortissimo: 'No I'm  not going to be quiet and reverential.' The internal dialogue between the super-ego and the id is reminiscent of Gollum's arguments with himself.  But enough of this, I really am going to get back to that article...

         <autobiographical_note>

At the funeral of a grande dame yesterday (RIP Pat, and lucky old Bob) I witnessed an underlining of the importance of this Ex-. We were in the middle of one of those interminable call-and-response prayers, with the congregation saying ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘ again and again. And The Angelus butted in. (For the uninitiated:  The Angelus is a very noisy Call-to-prayer^†† – much noisier than the Islamic version: ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause..._{has it stopped?}>  <oh dear me NO, suckers> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING... [ad nauseam]).  And the congregation was bleating (that‘s one for the etymologists: grex = ‘flock‘) ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘. Here was the perfect opportunity for something more robust: ‘Listen out for my prayer‘. 

<autobiographical_note>

One of the shibboleths addressed in the article is the one about not ending a sentence with a preposition, which they trace to the rule of Latin grammar – mindlessly imposed by early English grammarians. But this omits a point that is perhaps too obvious to be noticed. Look at the word 'pre-positions'; they come before things. It is simply a logical impossibility to end a sentence with a word that necessarily comes before something – unless it were a 'pre-full-stop'.

But what happens when you force this rule onto English, with all its phrasal verbs? Any phrasal verb in a subordinate clause risks its particle, apparently a preposition, falling last: to use that Exaudi example, 'This is the prayer that I hope God will listen out for.'

As I said at the beginning though, the writers' hearts are in the right place. The message is right on; shame about the medium. The last point (made by Orwell‡ many years ago) is worth underlining:

There’s a simple test that usually exposes a phony rule of grammar: If it makes your English stilted and unnatural, it’s probably a fraud.

b

*In the mid '70s I was studying the idea of myth in the work of Borges, and with the self-assurance of a 23-year-old I thought myself the sole custodian of the word 'myth'. Sorry, old bean

† Update 2013.01.28: Fauré made the elementary mistake of not making this a solo – though it is a sweet and angelic-sounding tune sung by the sopranos. Apologies for this lapse ( – he was only young!)

‡ Update 2013.01.29: January 2013 was the occasion of several programmes about Orwell on BBC Radio 4. I expect - or have missed - the traditional trotting out of David Crystal, who never misses an opportunity to put the boot in. There are 5 mentions of Orwell in the index of The Stories of English, one of which points to a two-page salvo. I have a pretty good idea he does the same at least once in The Story of English in 100 Words. The problem is that Orwell made a mistake that offended Crystal's linguistic sensitivities.

OK, the man got it wrong. But he's wise and perceptive; lay off, Crystal – you're bigger than him (in this  respect).  Orwell's article is thought-provoking, perceptive, and witty. At one point (the parody of Ecclesiastes in modern business English) it's hilarious. It should be required reading for anyone who tries to communicate in writing; it might avoid such painfully jargon-ridden, obscure, and pleonastic signs as the one I saw recently in a municipal building: 'Due to the Council's Green Practices initiative this hand-dryer is non-functional. Visitors are hereby requested to use alternative disposable paper products.'

Orwell's Ecclesiastes spoof inspired my teaching resource based on Churchill's memo to the War Cabinet. In my TESconnect description of it I say:

This handout looks at a memo written by Churchill to his wartime cabinet on the subject of plain writing. Opposite Churchill's original there is a parody breaking all the rules he mentions (and a few more). On the reverse, there is a textual analysis done by the tool available at http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php, showing the quantifiable effects of using woolly language. This could be a basis for web research into writing skills.

As – regrettably, but inevitably – they say, enjoy!

Tales from the word-face

After the shenanigans mentioned here, I have just reinstalled HoTMeTal Pro. But bearing in mind the fears I expressed there of new software, I stopped (after installing V5,0) and didn't install the V6.0 upgrade. Let's see if it works any better...

b

Update 2013.07.15: 'Tempus', as my old maths master used to say as we neared the end of another lesson, 'has fugitted'. See below for the latest.

Update 2013.07.24: Various tweaks and bits of  esprit de l'escalier.

Update 2015.01.16.10:30 – Added autobiographical note in red and updated footer.

Update 2015.01.16.16:45 – Added this note:

^†† Not all believers would recognize this as a call to prayer exactly, but the name 'Angelus' is the first word of the prescribed prayer.

Update 2017.09.02.18:05 – Added PS

PS: Much of  this post,  brushed up, reordered, tweaked, and with added esprit d‘escalier here and there, appears in my forthcoming (perhaps that should be F O R T H C O M I N G – that is, don‘t hold your breath) Words and Music.

In the meantime there is this sampler (which will be free to download from time to time: follow @WandMbook on Twitter for announcements).