The naked flesh forecast for inshore waters

Sanditon – Fair – Buttocks – Mostly firm –  

Male – Mid-to-late 20s with occasional 30s 

In March 1817 Jane Austen stopped working on her novel Sanditon (previously entitled...

<GLOSSARY PC-value="0">
I know, I know, the trendy thing to say is "titled", but I use British English, and the social environment that that language evolved in is not the same as that of late 20th-early-21st-century United States, home of American English (and consequently of the style guides that seem to govern  most current academic writing). I've discussed this before, in a note to this.

<rant>
And 'Spare us, O Lord' , from the gruesome 'titled'. ...  

...There is no question of ambiguity; if a person is entitled  it's a question of entitlement, but if a document is entitled it's a question of nomenclature. American English., with its egalitarian background, just doesn't feel it necessary to recognize 3 [designations of social rank]. Two words/two meanings => one word for each is the AE rule. Fine: just don't force it (and thus your cultural background) on me.
</rant> 

</GLOSSARY>

... The Brothers). She had completed only eleven chapters, and died later in that year. But those eleven chapters mostly set the scene (fairly exhaustively), which made the uncompleted work attract much attention from potential (diachronic) collaborators...

<DIGRESSION>
if you'll permit me to rescue the word from our tinpot dictator, Bozo the Clown, more prrecisely Alexander Boris de Pfeffel the Clown  To be fair, I should admit that he – with his expensive education – knows perfectly well what the word means. But – with his expensive (right wing) education – he knows perfectly well the word's value as a dog whistle.

In Anglo-French matters collaborator has a nasty secondary meaning. One of the earliest  instances I met of this word as a term of abuse was in Marcel Pagnol's La Gloire de mon père; one of the characters was referred to as  "le fils du collabo" – with the abbreviation adding to the implication of contempt. 

</DIGRESSION>

.. .that is, they worked with her on the same artefact ,  though centuries apart.

<JUSTIFICATION word-choice="artefact">
I say artefact; I considered enterprise, but I don't feel that's quite right; they didn't have the same aim. Jane Austen's aim was to write a work of literature or perhaps primarily to exercise her wit (as, in her day, women of her social standing weren't expected [or even allowed] to do  much else in the way of self-fulfilment). On the other hand, Andrew Davies' aim was less literary
</JUSTIFICATION>

Which is not to suggest any kind of disapproval on my part. Sexing stuff up is his schtick, and good luck to him. As James Jackson wrote in The Times recently.

So far at least [HD: after one episode] it can't really be faulted  for giving an unchallenging whirl through Austen's world of love and money, marriage and class. It is a truth universally acknowledged that, being Davies, there'll be a bit of sex too. Perhaps, by now, it's in the old goat's contract to provide some sauce for pre-publicity purposes

But (I wish people wouldn't try to suggest that the whole sexing-up thing had a higher purpose. In the Radio Times Kris Marshall (Tom Parker in this version) is quoted as saying:

"The simple fact was female nudity was a lot more hidden away in those days, and male nudity was kind of natural. So it's completely accurate [HD:  it's not clear whether this IT is the nude bathing scene or the whole series] and Andrew Davies isn't sexing Austen up at all."

No. This doesn't follow. Davies is (without question, predictably, unashamedly, and admittedly) sexing Austen up; he's just using historically accurate material to do it.

But  now the second episode has been and gone without ruffling the waters of the Knowles consciousness, I have better things to be doing.

b

Aus der Alten Welt

Shortly after its first performance in Prague in 1880, Dvořák's Stabat Mater was performed several times in the UK, starting with a performance at the Royal Albert Hall in 1883.

Dvořák's Stabat Mater (1880) was performed and very well received at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 10 March 1883, conducted by Joseph Barnby.^[2] The success "sparked off a whole series of performances in England and the United States", a year ahead of appreciation in Germany and Austria.^[2] Dvořák was invited to visit Britain where he appeared to great acclaim in 1884.

More

On 12 September 1884...

<autobiographical note relevance_value="0">
 (135 years ago – a period neatly bisected by my own birth on 12 September 1951)

<inline_pps>  

Dvořák‘s tour was twice as long ago as the origin of Wokingham Choral Society. Precise records haven't survived – "Autumn 1951" is as close as it gets. 

</inline_pps>

</autobiographical note>

... it was performed at Worcester, and this title page of the score was signed by members of the orchestra and by Antonin Dvořák (signing himself "Ant."):

The dot above the n may be a reference to the last syllable of his full name,
or it may just be the end of one of the other signatures on this crowded page

As a fellow member of my choir said 'Where has this piece been hiding for the last 40 years?'

<confession>

I borrowed this observation, and added a few years to the claim - though in all honesty I should admit that although my experience of singing in an SATB choir started in the early 1970s it has not been continuous. 

</confession>

The piece really is extraordinarily tuneful. Don't miss it, or the (free, to ticket-holders) introductory talk.:-)

b





Update: 2019.02.07.09:40  – Added PS

PS
In an earlier post I wrote

I think I've already mentioned (somewhere in this blog) Vulgar Latin's preference for first and second declensions over the less regular third, fourth, and fifth; less to remember – and we are often dealing with Latin for speakers of  a Second or Other Language (LSOL?)

And that preference for regularity extended to  the choice of verbs made by those early speakers of LSOL – not only the choices, but the modifications they made (taking an irregular verb and changing the ending to make it behave like a regular one). This happened to the verb that means give: the irregular

do, dare, dedi, datum

became, in some parts of the Roman Empire, the regular

dono, donare, donavi, donatum

So give in current Spanish is dar, but in current French it is donner.

The last words of Stabat Mater,  a Christian Hymn that dates back to the 13th century,  are

Quando corpus moriétur,  fac, ut ánimæ donétur  paradísi glória. And the rather florid translation given by Wikipedia is While my body here decays, may my soul Thy goodness praise, Safe in Paradise with Thee.

Not only florid, but also fanciful, particularly in the third line. The soul (not necessarily mine) does not do anything; it doesn't praise anything. It is the recipient of something; and to mark it as a recipient it has the dative ...

<digression>
(a word that, incidentally, derives from the irregular sort of "give" verb)
</digression>

... ending -ae (in THIS case). The prayer is that the soul may be given the glory of paradise. And the word donaret derives from the regularized form of the word.

Update: 2019.02.17.18:40  – Added inline PPS (see above)

Update: 2019.03.01.11:40  – Added PPPS

PPPS
The double nn and -er ending of the French example I gave in the first update may give some readers pause. The history of French phonology and orthography are a mystery to me (for reasons I've explained before – basically a lazy choice of study options on my part)...

<rant flame intensity="the heat of a thousand Suns">
I can't use that expression without flashbacks of the horror I (not infrequently) feel when people use "on my behalf" as though it  meant the same.
</rant>

... but I'm happy to regard them as a given (which, after all, they are).

So perhaps another example would be more illuminating. The word donation is also probably derived* (ultimately; via the Old French donacion) from the regularized DONARE. I say "probably" because although there is no hint of an n in any part of do, dare, dedi, datum, there is an obvious direct line from DONATIONE(M) (I've explained this typographical convention before; a classical Latinist would be content to say donatio, -onis).

Update: 2019.03.17.10:40  – Added footnote.

*On further reflection it seems to me that this word is not le mot juste. My mistake was to think in terms of one word directly influencing a new word. But what really happens is a systemic pressure for change to words in a particular  field. Given DONATIONE(M) a new system of words was formed, centred on DONARE.

Joining up

<digression subject="linking">
A recently broadcast and less than memorable TV drama (The City and the City) was set in a divided city. Wordplay was a feature of the writing and the linking building between one side and the other was called "Copula House".  Students of language will have met the term copula; many of the actors though, not having met it, assumed there had been a typo and said "Cupola House".

It  was this sort of ignorant slip that made suspension of disbelief impossible, so I didn't stick with the series. (With the growing trend of wacky cerebral TV dramas, there needs to be some way of getting the actors to understand the reality they're playing with, or the silliness just gets compounded.  Alternatively, of course, one could just get a life and switch off.)

<meta_digression>
Checking out the Wikipedia entry on copula, I notice that while many languages (like English) have a copular verb (be, in that case), some languages use a suffix to do the same job (linking a subject to its predicate), which ties in quite neatly with today's theme. To see how, read on.
 </meta_digression>

{Thinks: All these digressions and he hasn't even started yet.}

</digression>

My eye was caught last week by an old article in The Week  – one of those '10 things you didn't know about <thing>'  articles. It makes a number of interesting points and – not unpredictably – misses a few tricks. It starts with a quite telling image:

Think about when you were a kid discovering the wonder of glue. Hey, why not glue Barbie to this teacup? Let's glue Daddy's fancy pen to Mommy's ceramic figurine! But when you try to unglue them, you discover that glue can be strong — sometimes stronger than the things you were gluing. Now Barbie is permanently holding a teacup handle and Daddy's pen has a ceramic arm on it.

Words can be like that.

This is pretty suggestive (in a good way), and I'm afraid I missed it at first, thinking Where's the beef? and starting right in on the list – looking for trouble: what do they mean? The very idea of me not knowing something! (In fact, the slight wasn't "you didn't know", but just saying words were badly broken; I had one foot in the stirrup of my high horse, ready to say "words can't be badly broken, except if you're the sort of nincompoop who complains about words like decimated that come to be used in a way less stringent than that required by Mrs Thistlebottom and her ilk.

But, having read that first paragraph, I now  see that "badly broken" doesn't mean "seriously mangled" (referring to a supposed "lamentable decline in linguistic standards, why in my day kids... etc etc") but to a bad (that is, misplaced) break between a root and a prefix. And as a result the expression "the glueline" struck me at first as a rather arch metaphor.

My fault-finding zeal was not, however, entirely misplaced. In the first word on the list, for example:

Are any of your apps broken? Your app is! You know it's short for application.

Well yes, up to a point. That's where the new word comes from. But you can't therefore take it that "App and application mean the same thing; 'app' is just a shortened form of 'application':  the two are interchangeable".  They're not.

An application, or to give it its full dress name an application program (one that does stuff of interest to a user, unlike a systems program – which just makes the computer behave) does not need to have a Graphical User Interface;  many don't. An app does, and it has to run on a hand-held device. Also, an app almost always interacts with the Internet in some way. The ones that don't tend to be used once and uninstalled at the first opportunity; even obvious counter-examples – like graphics apps – often tie in with the Internet for things like clip-art libraries.

Next on The Week's list  is copter.

Ask someone what helicopter is made from, and they'll probably say heli plus copter. But actually it's helico- ("spiral") plus pter ("wing"), same as in pterodactyl, "wing finger". Obviously nobody says it like "helico-pter" — pronunciation trumps etymology. So this is one whirlybird that flies even when broken off badly.

There's a missed trick here; the (misconstrued) "ending" copter has taken on a life of its own, not only as a free-standing word (meaning helicopter) but also as a suffix used to name new inventions such as the gyrocopter.*

The item dealing with demo was new to me, for which thanks. The last line, though, was a bit of a throwaway (in two senses – both an unpursued possible digression and a gratuitously wasted opportunity): "There's also a bit of a history in English of making short forms that end in o." This tendency is more common in some parts of the world. In Australian English , for example, a relative is a relo. And I suspect the ready adoption into informal British English of the abbreviation arvo (for afternoon) owes something to early scripts of Neighbours and Home and Away.

But the lawn needs attention, not to mention the pyracanthus.

<autobiographical_note>
I usually prefer to leave the pyracanthus to get straggly, so that the smaller birds have first dibs on the less accessible berries. After I've done my boring topiary, life's too easy for the fat pigeons gorging themselves on the tabula rasa, leaving the tits to clear up the berries left in the less accessible places. But needs must...
</autobiographical_note>

So I'll leave you to read that The Week article; it's definitely worth a visit.


b

PS: A couple of clues:

• Mischief-makers interrupting least dark recycled document. (10)
• Turned up with every other unsisterly character, but fashionably outmoded first. (10)

Update: 2018.10.08.11.35 – Added PPS

And the same thing (bad break between prefix and word) can happen to names too. Santo Iago (St James) became Santiago, leaving (after an underdone abbreviation) the name Tiago. (And whether/how Tiago and Diego are related is a matter of some debate. Start here if this sort of thing floats your boat.)

Update: 2018.10.12.11.45 – Added footnote

* Researching other neologisms such as gyrocopter (are there any?) I (having accused them of missing a trick) missed a trick. There are two survivors of a bad break  – what comes before (heli- in this case) and what comes after (-copter). Heli- has had a much more productive career: the Macmillan English Dictionary lists  helipad, heliport, and heli-skiing, but others crop up regularly: heli-boarding, for example.

Update: 2019.03.09.12.30 – Added PPS

PPS
The answers to those clues: PALIMPSEST, RETROUSSÉ (quite pleasing, that one TISIAS)