I went down to St James....

Among the LPs I listened to in the 1960s (with ‘microgrooves’ it said on the sleeve – cutting-edge technology) were two notable ones:

• A jazz collection that included the St James Infirmary Blues
• The soundtrack of My Fair Lady. 

On the latter, I remember being nonplussed by Eliza Doolittle’s

One day I’ll be famous

I’ll be proper and prim

Go to St James so often

I will call it “St Jim”

I wasn’t to know that she meant St James’s Piccadilly. For all I knew, it might have been any St James’s ...

<digression> 

Of course I couldn’t hear the apostrophe, but the warm embrace of Holy Mother Chorch meant that I could guess that what Eliza called /seɪnt  ðeɪmz/ was a church – (…and sic, by the way – she did not reduce the diphthong, or assimilate the /t/)  

</digression>

...St James’s , Marylebone, for example.

Under the benign gaze of a statue of St Mary the Good^†, I sang, on Tuesday night, with a few members (4 or 5 – well precisely 4, but our versatile [‘multi-vocal’, perhaps  – though not quite omni-vocal, as I don't remember him singing soprano] MD helped out as needed) of Siglo de Oro. The pieces we sang were by Byrd, sailing quite close to the Protestant wind as they were settings of English, with themes such as deliverance and captivity.

It was marvellous for an amateur choral singer to sing alongside a professional. And it was temptingly easy to think "I can do this". I could during the first hour, before Ben (the professional bass) was redeployed from being next to me to a fairer (more central) position – the third of five basses. Then I was positioned between  another fallible bass like me and a tenor, so that it was clear just how good (that is, bad) my sight-reading was.

And sight-reading was needed. I realized – when my crutch was so rudely snatched away ( :-) ) – that I couldn't watch the conductor as much as I (and, no doubt, he) might have wished, and relied on listening rather than watching.

It was not cheap. After paying for the train and the ticket there wasn't much change from £40.  But,  I  thought, You're only old once. I had joined the trend mentioned on Start The Week recently, of buying experiences rather than stuff. And this was an experience worth buying.

b

^† In an earlier post I discussed this possible derivation of the word Marylebone. One site holds that:

...In the thirteenth century when the language of the aristocracy was French, St-Mary-by-the-Tyburn would have been St-Mary-a-le-Bourne (‘bourne’ being the French for a small stream) and from this we arrive at the word ‘Marylebone’ as we know it today. 

Based on this etymology and a progression of phonetics, the correct way of pronouncing ‘Marylebone’ is widely considered to be ‘Marry-leh-bon’ – although in reality this is rarely heard.

I went on, not unstuffily (“Once a pedant…”)

As to the meaning of "a progression of phonetics" your guess is as good as mine – though I imagine it may mean something like 'a number of both phonetic and phonological changes' ; after all, those 13th-century origins pre-dated the Great Vowel Shift. 

I once gleaned, from a source that I regarded at the time as authoritative (although as this was in the late '60s I no doubt set the bar pretty low), that ‘-le-bone' just meant 'the good', as le was feminine at the time,  and the convention of doubling a word-final consonant before adding an e for the feminine (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette,…etc) …. had not yet been adopted…

Still, -a-le-bourne is plausible enough, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it either way. On the one hand, beware folk etymologies, especially on special-interest web sites; on the other hand, what's the point  of saying 'St Mary the Good' at all, unless there were a... aha, maybe Mary Magdalene was 'Mary the Bad' (not so 'bad', though, as to stop her being canonized in the end [for all that, by all accounts, she was no better than she SHOULD be, if you catch my drift, and note the colour of this parenthesis. St-Mary-the-Not-So-Bad-Really-(just-not-the-one-in-the-blue-frock), perhaps]).

PS A few clues:

• Club rodent or use one of these to similar effect – (9)
• Gunning down means easier to read, says this – (3, 5)
• Openreach made to  monitor communications – (9)

 Update 2016.10.13.13:50 – Added PPS

PPS

Answers: MACERATOR, FOG INDEX, CHAPERONE (! – pretty cool, this last one, doncha think?)

Lies, damned lies, and intonation

A few months ago I discussed (here) the strange way that reported speech not only attenuates the intonation of direct speech but actually misrepresents it.  On a train more recently I noticed a case that is just totally artificial – lying in wait for the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) student just when they are at their most vulnerable, and providing a model of inaccurate intonation. A recording comes over the Tannoy:

We will shortly be arriving at <station-name> 

If one said this in the course of normal conversation (in a rather Ionesco-esque surreal universe?) the intonation would be something like this:

But instead of recording We will shortly be arriving at Iver, We will shortly be arriving at Langley, We will shortly be arriving at Slough ... etc etc ad nauseam, and running up enormous recording bills, they have recorded just We will shortly be arriving at ... (note the "...", what happens when there‘s nothing to be said is ironically quite significant) ...

...and separate recordings  of individual station names.

So what the disembodied voice says is

There are two problems with this, both having to do with the way a native speaker strings sounds together, one of which works in the student's favour:

1. Pro
   There is no assimilation – the squidging of sounds together to make connected speech. For example, the /æt/ (or, more probably, /ət/) can (and often does) change in sympathy with whatever follows. If the next station is Maidenhead, for example, starting with the bilabial /m/, a native speaker saying the whole sentence might say /əp 'meɪdənhed/ (with the dental /t/ becoming the equivalent bilabial stop /p/).
   

   <festive_note theme="point of articulation">
   In Rutter‘s Shepherd's Pipe Carol the refrain starts 

   Angels in the sky

   Came down from on high.... 

   ... a bit of a tongue-twister I find (nearly every Christmas). Musing on points of articulation, I recently realized why; although clarity of enunciation isn't my forte, anyone might find the second line a bit of a trouble-maker (aided and abetted by the context established in the first). The consonants in came are the velar /k/ and the bilabial nasal /m/; down starts with a /d/ (dental) and ends with another dental (but this time it's the nasal /n/); from starts with a consonant pair – but the first is the labio-dental /f/, and at the end there's another bilabial nasal. 

   So the points of articulation (places where sounds are made, but in this case [beginnings and ends] articulation also works in  the same way as it does in an articulated lorry):

   
   

   CAME                                                      Velar (back of mouth) 

                                                                           last: Bilabial (front of mouth)
   

   DOWN                                                     Dental (halfway back) 

                                                           last: Dental (again) 

   FROM                                                   Labio-dental (not quite  

                                                                                  the front, but pretty near)

                                                 last: Bilabial 

   Just considering the first consonant in these three words (marked in bold), there is no problem: 

    Came down from... 

   Velar => Dental => Labio-dental – the point of articulation is moving steadily forwards. But factoring in the ends of the words, the peaceful (pastoral?) picture is disrupted. After the bilabial nasal at the end of Came there is the temptation to take the path of least resistance...

   <digression> 

   The path of least resistance is often significant in the way speech sounds develop, but... Update, maybe.

   </digression>  

   ...and say from; besides, came from is a temptingly Christmassy collocation – came from afar/the East/Nazareth... 

   So I often find myself singing Came from down... and it's not until I bump  into the down/high paradox that my voice peters out.
   </festive_note>

2. Con
   When the component bits of recording are spliced together, the intonation is totally wrong. There are two components: the first ends in an upward flick, a sort of auditory serif, that  has the meaning  "..." (in conversation  this rising tone warns: I HAVEN'T FINISHED YET, SO DON'T INTERRUPT); the second starts the place-name with a rising tone, which again gives the wrong message (as a rising tone often signifies HERE COMES A NEW TOPIC).

On the homeward journey I listened again to the Tannoy. And surprisingly (not to say inefficiently, on the same service run by the same company, but just in the opposite direction) the intonation pattern was different: it still wasn't right, but at least the first bit didn't have the misleading upward flick at the end; and the intonation at the beginning of each place-name at least did not start by rising.

Still unnatural, with the tone leaping up to mark the splice, but not so bad.

But ESOL students arriving from their home countries certainly have their work cut out. 

b

PS And here's a clue:

Sat up 60% of the way through loud passage, but too late for this. (9)

Update 2016.02.11.14:15 – Fixed a few typos, deleted old footer and added PPS.

PPS The possible update mentioned in the digression from the festive note (which itself was something of a digression) has taken the form of a new post. And here's another clue:

Beseech Barnaby (fat chance!)  (8)

Update 2016.02.12.10:30 – Added PPPS

PPPS A further thought on the subject of point of articulation, that arose last summer and may be of interest to choral singers. My choir was singing a setting of these words (from The Merry Wives of Windsor):

Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about,
Till candles and star-light and moonshine be out.

These are the last words of the piece, with very quick notes and an extreme diminuendo, so it's important to watch the conductor. It seemed to me that the only way to do this was to learn it by heart. So far so unsurprising. The three nouns in the last line were a problem; how to remember the order?

Then I realized how clever (intuitive?, lucky?) Shakespeare had been. The points of articulation of the initial consonants move from the back of the mouth to the front:

/k/ (velar) > /s/ (alveolar ridge) > /m/ (bilabial)

So, as the music dwindles away to nothing (or a niente, as the Italians have it) the choir can whisper more and more with the point of articulation moving closer and closer to the audience and maintaining clarity.

Update 2016.03.12.17:50 – Supplied crossword answers:

FORETASTE and BEGRUDGE

Insanae et vanae curae

In bibliographies quite often the abbreviation ed. appears.  I met  it often during the work mentioned here, which involved getting information about quotations. I was at first confused, though, by Italian sources (which had their own way of saying ed. – a cura di).

So what's the problem? asks a voice in my head. There's an obvious link between a cura di and the verb "curate".

Well,  y - e - e - s ...

<digression>
Did you catch that vocal fry? [not that I'm an adolescent female trying to imitate Britney, (whoever SHE is m‘lud) {as suggested here}, I'm just not entirely convinced that whole-hearted agreement is appropriate]
</digression>

... but that use of curate (a verb meaning something like pull together lots of information from disparate sources for the benefit of other potential consumers of that information), although it's been around for a long time (in art galleries, museums, and libraries, mostly, but also –  in commonwealth/cricketing countries, where British English use groundsman in place of the West Indian/Australian/New Zealand/Indian curator), was not in wide use at the time of my initial uncertainty (1978/9).

I looked first for confirmation of my intuition to the usage frequency chart provided by Collins. But there were two problems (apart, of course from the one I remarked on in an earlier post – the absence of a scale):

• One curve was made to serve for both the noun and the verb
• The data stops just when I think the change started (the end of the first decade of this millennium)

Web-based curating couldn't  get started until the necessary tools (such as Pinterest) became available. And this extract from the whois database speaks for itself (not that Pinterest is the only such tool – it's just a widely used one):

The topic of curating occurred to me a while ago as suitable for a blog when I caught, on BBC Radio 4 Extra The TED Radio Hour. But before I put finger to keyboard the series finished. Now, though, the series has hit the big time, and is being aired on BBC Radio 4 [no link, because iPlayer automagically reroutes you to Radio 4 Extra].

We are used to US hours lasting a few minutes short of 50; they are the Jack Bauer "Hours" that mean that the boxed set ...

<digression type="potential">
When was it that boxed sets lost their participial suffix? In my days at OUP we knew what a boxed set was: it was a set of books that had been or were to be (in editorial discussions) boxed. The -ed is assimilated to the....But this is beginning to be more than just potential ...
</digression> 

... of 24 short-changes the buyer to the tune of about 5 hours. A bit like pints. They're just different Over There.

The TED Talks are a great place to browse... great in more than one sense. The size of the archive, and the breadth of topics it discusses, is huge – and can be daunting. But help is at hand; every week in The TED Radio Hour Guy Raz takes a topic, selects bits of TED talks on that subject, and interviews the speakers (and other experts in the field).  This is curating at its best, guaranteed to lead the way to and through some brilliant, if time-consuming, ideas.

Speaking of which, is that the ti... I'm outta here.

b

PS

<crossword_clue>
Smarmy scam going down. (13)
</crossword_clue>

Update: 2017.04.04.11:40 – Removed old footer, added an exceptional use of the verb curate (in blue), and (after some thought ) solved that clue: CONDESCENDING.

I, Robert

<autobiographical_note> 

It was The Legacy that brought this issue to my attention (hemp, canvas, cannabis and related words).

</autobiographical_note>

I started by consulting Etymonline; and all roads lead back to cannabis:

          cannabis (n.) 

1798, "common hemp," from Cannabis, Modern Latin plant genus named (1728), from Greek kannabis "hemp" ... and English canvas and possibly hemp. 

Source: Etymonline

          hemp (n.) 

Old English hænep "hemp, cannabis sativa," from Proto-Germanic *hanapiz ... probably a very early Germanic borrowing of the same Scythian word that became Greek kannabis (see cannabis). 

Source: Etymonline 

          canvas (n.) 

"sturdy cloth made from hemp or flax," mid-14c., from Anglo-French canevaz, ..."made of hemp, hempen," noun use of Vulgar Latin adjective *cannapaceus"made of hemp," from Latin cannabis, from Greek kannabis "hemp"... 

Source: Etymonline

All those "..."s hide lots of examples from every language under the sun.

I don't like all those possiblys and probablys though.

<bilingual_pun value="nugatory, sophomoric"> 

(which raises the possibility of Signe demonstrating the versatility of hemp by making a picnic hamper out of hamp  [the Danish for "hemp" being hamp]. And the Swedish for "hemp" is hampa; so if she were Swedish it would be even better.)

         <afterthought viability="stillborn">

Hang on though.... Maybe that's why it's called a "hamper". Etymonline says not though. But there's that probably again....

</afterthought>

</bilingual_pun>

And finally I'll give myself a post-Fathers-Day, non-cannabis-related (except for the first syllable) pat on the head. One of the peripheral baddies in Humans has the name "Capek". Maybe this will be worked into the plot in the fullness of time, but I imagine it's just the writer's hommage (or just chapeau, perhaps)... all right, NOD...to the Czech playwright Karel Čapek (who I thought, before doing a bit of digging, coined the word 'robot' – he didn't: it's just Czech for 'worker'). Presumably the actor who said the name in episode one didn't pick up the reference. They said it with a /k/ instead of the whatever – something palatal, I think.

b

PS: And here's a clue for ... whatever these things are for:

Bishop embraced revised rite before anyone could write about it. (11) ^*

PPS A little later, the same day:

But the point (without which this post is pretty flimsy) is, what is  the mechanism for the development of *nab* to *mp*? The short answer is apocope – or perhaps syncope, I forget –  and assimilation. The longer and more helpful answer is the dropping of an unstressed vowel between two consonants. and then one of those consonants changing so that it shares some characteristic with the other: /n/ is a labiodental nasal but /p/ (/b/ after voicing's been dropped) is bilabial. So, after the unstressed 'a' has been dropped, the /n/ assimilates to the /p/, becoming the bilabial nasal /m/.

<aside>

In the case of words that use the Greek ɸ, such as 'emphasis', 'symphony', etc. this assimilation is masked. (There are  languages that do use the voiceless bilabial fricative (IPA [ɸ]), but English doesn't.)  The Castilian equivalents show the change: énfasis and sinfonía. Meanwhile, in words such as 'conflagration', the assimilation of the original Latin cum has gone ahead without anyone ticking the NO PUBLICITY box. In 'inefficient/impractical' there is the opposite change  – not from m to n, but from an original n to m.

<aside>

<example>
An interesting example of assimilation turned up on the news last  night – in the report on  a bionic eye. The context was generally optical, so when the reporter referred to a cure for sight loss I thought I heard a cure for Cyclops. I was just thinking this through, and correcting what I thought had been a mis-hearing, when MrsK asked "Did he just say a cure for Cyclops?" 

Here's why. In forming an /l/ the sides of the tongue touch  approach the sides of the mouth (which is why the $10 word for describing /l/ is lateral – there's a central closure, and the air escapes at the sides of the tongue ). Depending on the thickness of the speaker's tongue and the curvature of the palate, this can cause a closure between the body of the tongue and the palate, normally associated with /k/. So the reporter's /ǝ kju:ǝ fǝ saɪt.../ became /ǝ kju:ǝ fǝ saɪk.../ and the listener's expectations supplied the final /ps/.

So this is an example of the sort of  'accidental' assimilation I mentioned many posts ago, here. 

..well, not assimilation to another phoneme. I think it was John Trim (mentioned elsewhere in this blog: let the word-cloud do its thing if you're interested)  who pointed out that a speaker's  simply closing his/her mouth at the end of an utterance could make a final consonant 'assimilate' to the appropriate bilabial phoneme... 

The example he gave at the time was when people say 'Fine' at the end of a conversation it  can often make the sound /faɪm/.

</example>

Update 2015.06.23.14:25 – Added afterthought:

PPPS
When I started writing the PPS I stumbled over the first consonant [in cannabis/hemp], but parked the problem [as they say in some circles]: how does [k] become [h]? It's been simmering away on the back burner, and so far all I've got is an example of hyper-correction in the Satyricon.

In Roman Italy there were many speakers of Greek, and resultant borrowings of Greek words that used both κ and χ[; an educated speaker knew where to make the distinction, and a poseur made similar distinctions when there were none to be made]. One of Trimalchio's guests is a social climber, and like the English social climber adding unnecessary /h/s in words that have no 'h', he adds a χ-like sound in words that have a simple [k]: in Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds James Clackson [sic, not him] writes

I'm not saying this is where 'hemp' got its "h", but is seems to me possible, given the κ as the initial – attentive readers will remember Etymonline's

... from Latin cannabis, from Greek kannabis "hemp" 

Update 2015.06.24.08:55 – Added clarifications in red.

Update 2015.07.21.16:30 – Added answer to crossword clue:
^*OK ‐ Time's up. PRELITERATE.

Update 2015.07.22.15:00 – Added inline example in purple and shortly afterwards a correction highlighted like this.

---

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.

Hah, Bumhug

A seasonal thought to mark the beginning of Advent

As the strains of Wachet auf fade away (and I missed O come O come Emmanuel anyway [ a suitable case for iPlayer]) I reflect that orange didn't have its n by the time it was borrowed from the Old French in the 13th century. So the possibility of the n dropping out by false assimilation (that is, suspected assimilation where there had been none) from 'a norange' seems to me unlikely, although it is true that the initial n was there if you look back far enough, through Arabic naranj, Persian narang and Sanskrit naranga (where the trail goes cold, with the dispiriting words 'of uncertain origin' ['of uncertai norigin'?]):

c.1300, of the fruit, from Old French orange, orenge (12c., Modern French orange), from Medieval Latin pomum de orenge, from Italian arancia, originally narancia(Venetian naranza), alteration of Arabic naranj, from Persian narang, from Sanskrit naranga-s "orange tree," of uncertain origin. Not used as a color word until 1540s. 

           Etymonline 

I favour the 'perhaps influenced by French or "gold"' idea suggested further on in that Etymonline article. This would tie in with the Italian name of another fruit, though not the one excluded by WISE MEN (catch the topical reference? Magic  ) from a fruit salad: pomodoro.

But, in that quote from Etymonline, note the last sentence: Not used as a color word until 1540s. This explains the inappropriate ascription of red in many English expressions. The colour was named after the fruit; so if only the word 'orange' had been used to name that colour before it lost its n, we'd be talking about the norange squirrel being out-competed by the grey ones, the  norange deer 

<autobiographical_note date-range="late '50s?" theme="PG Tips British Wild Life series"> 
 a rarety, as I remember, not like the fallow deer, which seemed to appear in every other  packet
</autobiographical_note>

and – back on topic at last  – the robin norange-breast  – a bit of a mouthful, that; maybe that cheerful little cheeky-chappy would have evolved a name based on its colour, so that our Christmas cards would have been decorated with pictures of little NORRIES.

<autobiographical_note date-range="1989-1991" theme="double-lettered bird names">    

Back in the '90s, when I was starting (and indeed ending) my career as a compiler of 3-dimensional crossword puzzles [which call for a double letter when a word reaches a corner of the cube], I remember noticing the commonness of double letters in bird names:

albatross, bittern, booby, bullfinch, buzzard, chaffinch, cockatoo, coot, crossbill, cuckoo, dipper, dunnock, great tit, guillemot, gull, hoopoe, kookaburra,  mallard. moorhen, parakeet, peewit ('vanellus vanellus', since you ask), puffin, rooster, ruff, reeve, rook, sparrow, swallow, willow-warbler, woodpecker,  yellowhammer ...†‡

At the time I filled several pages of a notebook with obscure bird names that shared this trait. I can't see how this could be anything but coincidental, but still.... It seems to apply to other bird-related words:  broody, egg, cheep, chirrup, hoot, lesser-spotted, roost,  stoop, trill, tweet, twitter... But maybe this is some (possibly well-known) bias – whatever you're looking for [in some sort of corpus of data], you find it. Hmmm...

</autobiographical_note>

But it wasn't like that. Redbreast, says Etymonline, is 'early 15c., of the English robin, from red (adj.1) + breast (n.)'  – at least a century before the colour got its name. Until then, red – 'the only color for which a definite common PIE root word has been found' – had to do for all colours spectrally south of yellow. In that, though at the other end of the spectrum, it was like Russian and, I think, Mandarin (at least that's what my Tai Chi teacher said when I asked whether the dragon  was blue or green – though, now I come to think of it, maybe that was just iridescent ) 

Things Chinese provoke the thought that a piece on the mandarin might be more topical than one on orange – another time, maybe.

b

† Update 2014.12.01.21:14  – added afterthoughts in brown.
‡ Update 2014.12.12.16:25  – added afterthoughts in norange.

---

 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:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 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 over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 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.

Letters playing leapfrog

... or 'metathesis' as we say in the business - it's what relates 'wrought' ('strong' past form of) to 'work' (displaced in more recent English by the regular  past form 'worked'), and is why Chaucer called birds bridde and a widow a widwe. On the radio this morning (or yesterday morning, by the time I publish - and OK, it was Woman's Hour) Nigella Lawson pronounced 'mascarpone' à la Delia Smith - /ma:skǝpǝʊni:/. And this pronunciation accounts for all the 'mask a pony' jokes - if you haven't heard any yet, you can easily add to the corpus (delicti?).

Now I'm not a stickler for pretentiously 'correct' pronunciation of foreign words. But even with purely British English phonemes the word would be /mæska:pǝʊni:/. So I'd expect Nigella Lawson, who studied for a year in Italy (many years ago - but she has recently given live TV/radio interviews in Italian to at least ('when I split an infinitive it stays goddam split') use an English pronunciation that respects the Italian spelling. 'Jumping Jesophohat', I thought, 'so Delia Smith's not the only one, she just happened to be the first I heard - maybe this is metathesis.'

In a not-so-recent discussion in the UsingEnglish forums. We were discussing the expression the dog's b@llocks. I suggested:

I've heard from a fairly reliable source (Stephen Fry I think) a derivation for 'dog's bollocks' that is not mentioned on that Phrase Finder page. Some commodity (it may have been the toy construction set, 'Meccano') was listed in a catalogue as '<whatever> - Box (standard)/ Box (deluxe)'. From this we get two idioms; "bog standard" and "dog's bollocks".

Two for the price of one - neat! I'm not sure I believe, but I'm impressed.

This was questioned: one contributor said the idea involved 'a linguistic jump', and I replied:

'Linguistic jump'? Speaking as a student of philology, I can say that it's hardly a jump at all. Consider the French guirlande and the Spanish grinalda. We can ignore the u, as it just keeps the g hard.

So we've got French

G + I + R + L + A + N + D + <unstressed final vowel>

versus Spanish

G + R + I + N + A + L + D + <unstressed final vowel>

The beginning and the end are the same, but four of the middle five phonemes are in different positions, and the only 'stable' one changes in quality (it's nasalized [in French, because the consonant that follows it has changed - clarification for blog]). In language development, phonemes jump about.

I first noticed this, before I embarked on this field of navel-gazing, in a sea shanty, Bring 'em down:

Up the coast to Vallipo,
Northward to Cally-o
Them Vallipo girls I do admire,
They set your riggin' all afire!
Them Vallipo girls puts on a show ...

I shall draw a veil (sail more like) over the details of the show. Valparaíso => "Vallipo";  Callao => "Cally-o". This leads me to a bit of home-grown folk etymology, which I expect to be dismissed by readers who decry the efforts of the imaginary body CANOE - the 'Committee to Ascribe a Naval Origin to Everything'^† ).

In a sea battle, the part of a ship where you could do most damage to an enemy ship was the poop (Spanish  popa) - the seat of 'intelligence'. A ship whose poop you had blown off could be said to be con ninguna popa - 'with no poop' - directionless, not unlike a dumb barge. Just give that phrase to the sailors who used 'Vallipo' for Valparaíso, and Bob's your hare-brained philologist.

However this is unproven, and - I think - unlikely. The n separated from p by an unstressed vowel could easily assimilate to the p, giving -mp- (because p is bilabial and so's m: there are about 400 English headwords* that  include the consonant  cluster /mp/ and few  - fewer than 100, more than half of which are 'un-' + <initial-p>' - that include /np/. [That volume of my dictionary - consonants - is a long way off but consonant clusters starting with a sonorant will be fairly high up the priority list.] Also, a few of the ones that have the spelling '-mp- don't have the phoneme 'p' - for example 'emphasis', 'emphysema'..., which have /mf/. And if an accident of word-building throws up such a cluster [as in 'unpleasant'] in informal speech the assimilation takes place, giving that word the same first syllable as 'umpire'; similarly a phrase like 'in present company' often starts with an /ɪmp/.) If anything, the derivation is suspect because there is too little change in the sounds. And g>c - that is, /g/ to /k/, is a change in the wrong direction.†

But I'll leave anyone who's that interested to do some research - starting from that Wikipedia link to Lenition  and pursuing this line of thinking to a more reliable source. In short, as in Latin acute ('sharply') being at the root of Spanish agudamente, a /k/ 'should' become a /g/ (and a /t/ a /d/ etc etc...), not vice versa - as for the -mente suffix, that would be a meta-digression. When I've got some reasonable progress on the book under my belt, though...it's extraordinarily interesting and well worth waiting for.  This digression (which doesn't involve metathesis) has already gone on far too long. As has this post - Christmas tree to light.

b

Update:1212.13:17.15 A few tweaks to the 'nincompoop' digression.)

Update: 2013.10.02.16:20
Footer updated.

Update: 2013.10.27.19:25
Added PS: 
*PS
.... in my dictionary of choice (but only because it is installed and lets me do useful wildcard searches): the Macmillan English Dictionary.

Update: 2014.04.22.15:05
Added PPS: Metathesis crops ups all over the place: I've been thinking recently about the derivation of Simnel Cake. Here's what Etymonline says:

"sweet cake," c.1200, from Old French simenel "fine wheat flour; flat bread cake, Lenten cake," probably by dissimilation from Vulgar Latin *siminellus (also source of Old High German semala "the finest wheat flour," German Semmel "a roll"), a diminutive of Latin simila "fine flour" (see semolina).

Just thought I'd mention it...

Update: 2014.09.29.14:15
Here's that -MENTE digression...

Update: 2014.10.02.14:25 – Added this PPPS
†PPPS I've come across what looks, on the face of it, like a counter-example (to the tendency of a /k/ to evolve into a /g/, rather than vice versa). When she was about a sixth of her present age (though she's never allowed to forget it –  aren't families wonderful?)  my daughter used to call spaghetti /pəsketi:/ (another case of metathesis, as it happens). The /g/ has become a /k/ though, not by a magical reversal of that lenition I linked to before but by another linguistic process – assimilation: briefly the voicing of the /g/ assimilates to the voicelessness of its new neighbour, /s/, and so becomes /k/.

Update: 2015.08.10.15:45 – Added this P⁴S

P⁴S A common source of metathesis in everyday speech is in the bastardization of borrowed words. People who should know better (#GBBO passim) often call crème pâtissière 'crème pâtisserie' , and you  don't have to listen to Classic FM too long to hear Cavallería Rusticana called /kævǝ'li:ri:ǝ.../. In both these cases, and often elsewhere, liquidity of phoneme-position (appropriately as /r/ is a liquid in the argot of phonologists) tends to favour phonemes near /r/.


Update: 2018.06.08.11:25 – Added this P⁵S

P⁵S
† This imaginary body is mooted in the penultimate paragraph of that piece on the derivation of brass monkies.

Update: 2018.10.03.09:25 – Added repair in red. (Over the years something got accidentally deleted.)