The War Against Error, Take 2

Not too much of note happened in the last week of November 2015. Infoplease defines it with its two termini : the downing of the Russian aircraft in Turkey on the 24^th  and the beginning of the Climate Talks on the 30^th (both of which may come to generate much of import in the future (the latter for good and the former for ill) – but in between  the world news cupboard was bare. So the Independent published a strange filler:

The 58 most commonly misused words and phrases

(58; not a solecism more, not a solecism FEWER, as Jeffrey Archer might have observed.)

The piece starts out promising to be a review of  Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style:

The book is like a modern version of Strunk and White's classic "The Elements of Style," but one based on linguistics and updated for the 21st century.

Hmm. I'm not convinced by this use of linguistics as if it were some kind of magic added ingredient – Now with added Linguistics, they say, much as the makers of Pedigree Chum used to say Enriched with nourishing marrow-bone jelly in the '60s (not sure why that illustration swam up from the mental depths). Writing a style guide using insights provided by a study of modern linguistics (not "based on linguistics" whatever that means) is a good idea. I don‘t think "like ...Strunk and White..., but ... based on linguistics" quite does justice to the idea.

But the last six words of this sentence (a paragraph later) let the cat out of the bag (revealing it to be a pig in a poke...? a mixed metaphor too far, perhaps):

We've highlighted the most common mistakes according to Pinker using examples directly from his book along with some of our own.

As a result, it's impossible to identify the source of some of the slips (many of which I suspect aren't Pinker's, although I detect in some of his preferences that linguistic conservatism common in countries with a history of British colonialism: Canada, USA, Australia, India...).

You might be shocked by how many words you've been very slightly misusing.

it warns in the sub-headline. Well, no and no. I first discussed such nostrums here. More recently I wrote this. But this topic seemed worth yet another visit.

There is, in this list, a clutch of the Usual Suspects disinterested/uninterested, hung/hanged...

<autobiographical_note>
which I can never read without hearing, in my mind's ear,  Rex Harrison's

By rights he should be taken out and hung

For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue

in the soundtrack recording of My Fair Lady. Oh how we larfed.
</autobiographical_note>

... depreciate/deprecate, flaunt/flout, irregardless, practical/practicable, proscribe/prescribe, protagonist/proponent, unexceptional/unexceptionable, effect/affect (which I looked at a couple of years ago in a post entitled "Enother old favourite"}, lie/lay...   AHA

<eureka certainty="iffy">
Perhaps alphabetization/lack thereof in  the Independent's list is a clue to the provenance of different items: Pinker's are alphabetical and the Indy threw in a few at the end to make it up to a round ... hmm, not so much...58.
</eureka>

But there are odd omissions and strange choices, identifying a problem area but citing an uncommon  symptom – credulous, for example, rather than credible whereas the chief solecism I've met is incredulous/incredible (which aren't mentioned). BNC finds 35 cases of credulous and 428 of credible but 171 of incredulous and 1174 of incredible. OK, a total of 1345 instances of incredulous/incredible don't imply that many instances of confusion, but they far outweigh those for credulous/credible (3:1) – that's three times more occasions of sin (as my RE teacher would have said).

The fatal inter/intern confusion

And has anyone ever used urban myth to refer to someone like Al Capone,  confused meretricious with meritorious, or used New Age to mean futuristic? Does anyone confuse averse/adverse, inter/intern...? Maybe they do in Canada.

Also, there are assertions of "mistakes" that aren't mistaken, as for example:

Cliché  is a noun and is not an adjective

OK, some people believe that; British English dictionaries assert it. But Merriam-Websters, for example, accepts it as either a noun or an adjective. I suspect the Indy's simple (and simplistic...

<linguistic_mechanism>
Incidentally, this is how these once-decried (first deprecated, then depreciated, and ultimately accepted as standard) confusions commonly bear fruit. Cases arise where either is acceptable; and the process grinds on. And not just with words; also with grammatical forms. Guy Deutscher, recounts in The Unfolding of Language how the 'going to' future arose from usages that referred to both travel and futurity:  'they are going to see him'. More of this in an update...
</linguistic_mechanism>

 ...) "A not B" does not reflect Pinker's careful academic aloofness. I suspect that the careful avoidance of etyma (who could define "meretricious" without referring to ladies of the night?) derives from Pinker's studious avoidance of the Etymological Fallacy – discussed in several Harmless Drudgery posts. This "A not B" approach reflects that of the Reichenau Glossary, discussed here: VESPERTILIONES was right; CALVAS SORICES wrong. But, irregardless, a French bat is a chauve-souris. 

So I must read Pinker's book; surely the Indy's howler-ridden piece can't do justice to it?  Who knows what Santa may bring?

b

PS And here are a couple of clues:

Profoundly disappointing: baby's male – begone! (7)
Parental – sort of care before parturition. (8)

Update 2015.12.21.11.10  – Added afterthought in blue.

Update 2015.12.22.11.50  – Added picture; really must get an artist 

Update 2016.04.06.17.25  – Added answer to 2nd clue (still working on the first...anyone?) and removed footer.

PS PRENATAL

Update 2016.07.30.12.15  – A couple of typo fixes. I STILL can't get that first clue. 

Time off in Looe

Today's title is brought to you by courtesy of TiredPunsᴚus (Inc.)

Milles zexcuses, as they used to say in the FRENCH notes file ...

<glossary>
(Notes files were a collaborative tool used in the world-wide DECnet network [of, in its heyday, more than 100,000 users], and one of my favourites was FRENCH – which gave me access to thousands of Francophones [not unlike Twitter in some  respects, only 25 years earlier and with no limit on character count]. For further information on Notes files, a feature of my work life in the '80s and '90s [when recreational notes files were stamped out by the bean counters], see here. )
</glossary>

...for the recent radio silence. Deadlines have been crowding together. Yesterday I  submitted my entry for the Stephen Spender Prize ("for Poetry in Translation" to give its old, useful name, now suppressed for unknown [and probably unfathomable] reasons). And this morning I had mail from the organisers of the John Dryden Translation Competition, announcing the latest in a series of Covid-related judging delays. So my cup will run over in September, when both sets of results are due, although the submissions were five months apart. (The also-rans  get to hear later but  a fellow can dream).

A word that has come into its own recently (Covid-assisted via the NHS app), and which I've been thinking about for some time, is PING.

<autobiographical_note>
In the late '80s I came across UNIX (an operating system) – or more specifically ULTRIX (the flavour of UNIX designed to run on DEC systems). I was not a heavy user of UNIX, but its online help was delivered by way of something called a MANPAGE(I imagine this was just an abbreviation for "manual pages" as they were really simple text files), and I had to understand UNIX enough to produce MANPAGEs and get them to display appropriately. So I found myself fairly close to the coining of a backronym that has now been in use in the computing world for nearly forty years; and I suspect it may have influenced the spread of a non-digital ...

<glossary>
(by which I mean "having nothing to do with computers"; but computers and IT people and their jargon are never far from modern business – and if one  IT person says to another "I'll ping you" [meaning "I'll test the network between our machines using the PING protocol"] it's not impossible that a computer virgin might have overheard it and assumed it was just a cool synonym for "make contact with"...

<tangent>
To take  another example of  technical jargon leaking into business-speak I remember my first sighting of "Can we take this offline?" – meaning "Let's discuss this later" – delivered by a besuited man [whose main use of IT was to use a batch-job...

<meta-tangent>
In the VMS world, a batch-job was a way of automating a repetitive  process
 </meta-tangent>

... {written by a tame engineer} to read his mail and print it all out every half hour]. Of course, he seldom got round to reading it, and the print room was consequently full of his arrangements to "do lunch". And this was in the days of fan-fold paper and line-printers, so we are talking serious pollution.
<tangent>

...) 

</glossary>

... homonym in the business world

PING was named,according to its writer, after  an analogy to his student work on sonar systems: 

From my point of view PING is not an acronym standing for Packet InterNet Grouper, it's a sonar analogy. 

Horse's mouth

 But a backronym was soon formed; according to  that source (who ought to know, having invented it). It was Packet InterNet Grouper. In Wikipedia's account, even the original word Grouper [sic] didn't survive: it is the Packet InterNet Groper. I have no idea what "Grouper" means in  this context; it might even be a typo for "Groper". But Groper strikes me as irrelevant, and pretty lame even for an IT-related backronym (a rich field, headed by SPAM).
<autobiographical_note>

 But having spent the afternoon dodging the showers...

<tangent>
(which reminds me of some Knowles juvenilia, probably dating from the time when I thought Cyril Fletcher  (of Odd Odes fame) was the Rat's Pyjamas:

Showers
Be they ne'er so scattered met
Are yet
As wet

</tangent>

...while deploying a lawn mower (or rotary cat-sh1t distributor) I must go and get on with Stuff.

b

Quicken - the backstory

When I wrote a piece on faux amis recently – "false friends"...

<inline-pps>
(words that seem, to a language learner, like an easily memorable translation word, but which don't mean the same as the presumed "equivalent")
</inline-pps>

 – the context (unstated at the time) was a virtual recording. Back then it wasn't clear that the finished product would be presentable, let alone something to be proud of:

(I'm not sure if this attempt at embedding works. If not, go to this YouTube link.) The use of quicken (and of languish, which I also comment on, occurs in the passage starting with the tenors at 0'56" ...

<rumblers-parenthesis comment="_I_ know about the apostrophe, but the virtual compiler wouldn't like it.">

(an entry I'm  glad not to have  been involved in :-) )

</rumblers-parenthesis>

.... The process of producing the virtual recording lasted several weeks.  I'd heard about the tribulations involved for the compiler/sound mixer.  (This is a Cambridge Alumni Festival event that took place last autumn [Northern hemisphere, Fall if you must] being a sort "brains' trust" of people in the university involved in  music...

<in line-ps>
(one of whom discussed at some length the problems she had had with this sort of venture)
<in line-ps>

...), but that work was all done with impressive efficiency by our MD. All the singers had to do was record the sound and the video (separate recordings, sync'd...

<parenthesis>
(I understand this is not the only way these recordings can be done [which accounts for all the other virtual recordings you see that show singers wearing headphones; this, for example: {spot the family resemblance, in almost the same position on the screen, 2nd row}
])
</parenthesis>

...). The synchronization involved a clap (doing the same job as a clapper-board in a film studio). My first two takes of the video were false starts, as it was so fiddly balancing a mobile phone on a music stand and getting myself in the frame. On Take 1 I missed the clap on the guide video (showing the conductor), and on Take 2 I clapped all right but realized that my hands weren't visible at all. I suppose James (our MD) could have watched for my shoulders to twitch; maybe not.

Recording the audio was easier, although the (few)  days I spent in recording studios as a would-be troubadour in the 1970s were enough to  tell me that it was bound to take an hour or two. The main problem was that I had a mental block over the word quicken; It took me until Take 6 to avoid singing

Should'st thou walking in grief languish
He will cripple thee

Another singer found, when she listened back to what she thought would be the final take, she had been singing

He walking over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps 

I imagine we weren't the only ones to stumble in this way.

But the bulk of the work was done after we'd submitted our recordings...

<unexpected-network-error>
(which – the submission itself – was a whole 'nother kettle of worms: I brought the network to its knees at one stage)
</unexpected-network-error>

All quite satisfying, not to say surprising, in the end. Many thanks to our MD cum sound mixer cum artistic director cum help desk, to our multi-talented accompanist, to the ad hoc socially distanced vocal quartet that sang on the guide video, and to all the backroom choir members who made our first recording possible. What's next?

 

b

Update 2021.03.31.12:30 – Added inline PS, and fixed some typos.

Update 2021.04.01.14:45 – Added inline PPS.

 

Amalgamations

My attention was recently brought to this:

"Really old days?" I thought. Unigate was a concoction not heard of until 1959...

<autobiographical_note>
(when I was still an altar boy, before the longest cassocks started revealing my bare shins – a while ago, but hardly really old.)
<autobiographical_note>

.  If the really old days extend back as far as 1915, we find a fore-runner of Unigate – United Dairies. Also sprach  Wikipedia:

During World War I, there were dire shortages of men, horses and vehicles commandeered for the war effort, hampering any business which was reliant on the timely distribution of its products, such as a dairy company. United Dairies was formed in 1915 when Wiltshire United Dairies (established in Melksham in 1897), Metropolitan and Great Western Dairies, and the Dairy Supply Company merged in an attempt to pool their resources and keep their companies operating until the end of the war.

 A  rival to United Dairies was Cow & Gate.  And when the two companies came together in 1959 they did the sensible thing and melded the two names.

<aside,>
In later years in similar circumstances a manager would throw money at the idea and come up with some monstrosity such as the short-lived and ill-starred Consignia (discussed a while ago here)
</aside>

But in 1959 the world was simpler. A few years later, my middle brother had a holiday job at Griffin & George, which as it happens had a long history of mergers that treated the constituent company names like bits of Lego (although in view of the engineering context, Meccano would perhaps be a better metaphor).

The origins of this firm go back to circa 1881, when the company Baird & Tatlock was founded in Glasgow. In 1896, the partnership dissolves, Hugh Harper Baird going to London and John Tatlock staying in Glasgow. In 1903, the London company became Baird & Tatlock (London) Ltd. In 1915, the Glasgow firm also took the name of Baird & Tatlock, Ltd, spurring a big dispute over who had the rights of using that name. The two firms held the same name until 1925, when the Glasgow company merged with John J. Griffin & Sons, Ltd (a London firm of Glasgow origins), and began trading under the name of Griffin & Tatlock Ltd in 1929. In 1954, Griffin & Tatlock merged with W. & J. George & Becker Ltd. and Standley Belcher & Mason Ltd. to form Griffin & George Ltd., which is still in existence today.

Source

 <autobiographical_note>
(I remember a physics lesson that involved chemical beam balances with boxes of accessories marked Griffin & Tatlock and W. & J. George & Becker Ltd.  Even then, I thought aha.
</autobiographical_note>

 Well, time for my constitutional. Got to get in training for the Walk of Light tomorrow week. 

b

Update: 2020.05.05.16:55 – Repaired missing picture.

 

And he shall purify

 Good old Liddel & Scott (Ancient Greek dictionary known by its authors' names to all students of Ancient Greek) lists a number of words having to do with purity:

The key prefix is кɑθ- (kath-). The name Katharine in its various forms is a member of a cluster of words in this general vicinity. The Cathars, had this in common with the Puritans, though not in their beliefs (except in that they espoused a particularly purist form of their religion).

Katharine refers to purity ...

<papist_aside>
The innocent-sounding Catherine wheel refers to a particularly gruesome method of torture, which was meted out to St Catherine – though she was by no means its first victim.
<papist_aside>

...and many other girls' names are positive-sounding abstract nouns: Charity, Felicity, Gloria, Grace, Honor, Joy,  Lætitia (Latin for the same thing), Modesty, Patience, Prudence, Ruth, Verity, Victoria...

<parenthesis>
(not so much boys' names, I think – a legacy of the sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice school? – Felix and Victor come close, but they means "happy"and "winner" respectively rather than happiness and "the fact of winning", and I suspect "Endeavour" was Colin Dexter's joke: this site calls it a girl's name. 

Maybe, though, there are boys' names that are positive-sounding abstract nouns; they're just less obvious than the girls' ones. Hmmm... 

<initial_thought> 

Is this just a function of an arbitrary (? – really? Maybe  the sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice school were involved in the assigning [that word is, of course, totally unrealistic. Language doesn't work like that. But the whole "school of thought"  idea is itself metaphorical – and language-users were involved in linguistic choices that shaped the language] of gender to those words... 

<a_bridge_too_far> 

But this thought is getting a bit more than "initial". Perhaps I'll do an update

<a_bridge_too_far>

...) fact about the Latin words for these abstract nouns – caritas, felicitas, gloria, gratia, honor, lætitia  ... etc. They are chiefly (all?) feminine; it'd be perverse to attach such a word to an unnamed male baby. 

</initial_thought>

</parenthesis>

.... I could (probably - given a bit of research) go on – not that I don't (go on, that is).

But what started me on this line of thinking (in case you've forgotten, kath- words) was

this article in the Observer, particularly this bit:

This is not the first time that a war of words has erupted over Greek.  [HD: The article is about the influx of Covid-related Anglicisms.] 

Arguments over the language, between proponents of change and traditionalists advocating a return to its Attic purity as a means of reviving the golden age, go back to the first century BC. Controversy continued through 400 years of Ottoman rule, becoming especially explosive in the run up to the war of independence in 1821.

The struggle over whether purist Greek, or katharevousa, officially inducted as the language of the state after the revolution, should prevail over demotiki, the commonly spoken vernacular, raged until 1976 when demotic officially replaced it.

 I first met the word katharevousa in 1979...

<autobiographical_note>
(or more probably 1980, having let the brooding presence of the huge scholarly manuscript haunt my guilt-pile for a few months. I say more about this daunting manuscript in an update to a very early post – the fourth, to be specific.) 

Arthur Toynbee's manuscript for The Greeks and their Heritages  

"[now out of print, but whose notes featured correctly inflected Latin abbreviations - not just idem , but eosdem, eamdem and so on]" 

early post

had been knocking around the editorial department at OUP's General Division for several years after the great man's death, ignored by less painstaking (or, let's be honest, wiser or at least  less stubborn) predecessors in my "Editorial Assistant" role.
</autobiographical_note>

Time I reappeared in the Real World.

b

Peregrinatio...

 ... or to put it more simply 'walking'. The word peregrinatio suggested itself because one of the earlier sources for Romance philologists is an account of a pilgrimage by a 4th-century woman (a nun? I expect Wikipedia might have a view) , known familiarly as "The peregrinatio", more formally Peregrinatio ad Loca Sancta (or various other formats) and this (the word, not the text) is the root of the word "pilgrimage".

When starting this post I did some research at the Crisis at Christmas site about a "pilgrimage" that I took part in:

<autobiographical-note type="self congratulatory">
I had already worked out the date, by remembering an unsuitable "Remploy"  hold-all I was carrying on the second leg. Had I done the whole walk I'd've had some kind of back-pack (though we didn't call them that in those days, favouring the more Germanic "rucksack"'; according to Etymonline back-pack has been with us since 1904;  but it hadn't reached the Knowles family [or rather, it didn't meet the stringent Presbyterian standards of our live-in grandfather, Archie, whose word on language {though not religion}was final]). But I was playing rugby on the Saturday, so missed the Canterbury to Gravesend leg.

Anyway, one of the seams came adrift, so I wrote to the manufacturer. And at the beginning of the letter I made reference to the fact that I was a "New Adult" – as it was shortly after my 18th birthday and we'd just been given the vote.  It was not a particularly memorable letter, and I don't know what resulted – if anything. The only thing that sticks in my mind is that one phrase  – which provides an autobiographical anchor.

<meta-tangent>
About this time I wrote a guitar instrumental in the style of Gordon Giltrap, (though, anachronistically, it had more the feel of Eric Bibb's Walkin' Home  – nothing like as cool, but similarly plodding and reflective) called Walking Home from Harrow, but the event it commemorated (involving a missed bus – a regular hazard faced by someone whose school, and therefore peers, were more than an hour away from home; and I think it was not the last bus, but the penultimate bus from Stanmore to Harrow) was a small fraction of the 25-mile second leg of The Bishop's March.)|

</meta-tangent>

 </autobiographical-note>

Anyway, that walk was my first and – so far  – only sponsored effort.  That is, the walk as planned had all the paraphernalia of these things: goals and targets and teams and signup sheets and what have you; but I didn't play the game. My contribution, if any, was negative. The organizers did all the admin – even booked a hall for the walkers doing the full 2-day pilgrimage – and I didn't pay my way.

But on 27 March I'll be joining this. (And in case you don't feel like clicking on that, here's an extract:

[W]alk with us as the sun sets, this Spring, from wherever you are. You even get to choose your own route and distance.

Whether you walk in memory of a loved one, to reflect on what has been a challenging time for everyone affected by blood cancer, or because you want to light the way to a brighter future – we’d love for you to join us!

) 

My JustGiving page is here, but as I say there (or maybe not – it's probably too long, in which case you saw it here first):

...I've set the bar really low, and started the ball rolling by covering it myself. I've already met the goal, so there's no pressure. But Blood Cancer UK is a worthwhile cause, so feel free to chip in.

There's no goal either for the distance I shall  cover, though it'll probably be a bit further than my usual daily jaunt - maybe a couple of laps of Langley Mead, water table permitting. The reason (apart from basic temerity) I didn't get any signatures back in 1969 was that I felt that making a donation of <so-much-per-mile> was arbitrary and pusillanimous (not pusillanimous in itself, but inviting pusillanimity: as though a donor might say "Aha, but I've checked in the AA book [no Google Maps in those days] and it's not 25 miles; more like 24 and two-thirds. So I have to pay ...[Let's see, that's 3 times 25, minus  1]  74 75ths [more mental arithmetic in those days too]. Have you got change of a ten bob note  half-a-crown?")

<inline_ps>
This was a while (just over a year) before decimalization, so the original calculation might have gone like this: 25 miles at 4¾ 6d a mile (that's old pence, or denarii to dress them in their Sunday Best) is  118½d or 9s 10½d  12/6. (In a display of magnanimity, the donor threw in the extra three halfpence. The revised total  would be 12/4.
</inline_ps>

Hell, if a cause is worth giving to, just give. ;-)

Time I showed my nose in The Real World.

b

Update: 2021.01.31.12:45 – Added inline PS.

Update 2021.02.05.14:20 – Updated inline PS to make the calculation more realistic. In fact the 74/75 calculation would be unnecessary as well, since 6d per mile  is 2d per ⅓ mile.

Update: 2121.03.01.14:10 – JustGiving coincidence

I was hugely surprised to get an update from the JustGiving people:

Someone has made a donation to your page

Well quite surprised by the notification itself; hugely surprised by the identity of the donor I learnt when I clicked on 

 He had; and  it was someone I haven't met since 1970. And he was a fellow walker on that first "sponsored" walk.

The white heat of technology

Beau Brummel is widely reported as having said he was a late riser. The most banal expression of this is on a site devoted to Brummel quotations:

15: Brummell on mornings

Brummell used to say that ‘whether it was summer or winter, he always liked to have the morning well-aired before he got up.’ 

 

Source

You may share my doubts about the authoritative credentials of a site whose editor doesn't understand the conventions relating to indirect speech, but I've heard several variants of this, some too elegant to have been produced impromptu, though he no doubt had a lot of practice at extemporizing on this subject, along the lines of

 "I like my mornings as I like my shirts: well-aired before I appear in them."

Anyway, I feel that now the millennium ...

<parenthesis>

(which I vainly insist on spelling  with two ns, although Google finds nearly 96,000,000 cases of the single-n'd version [which I always think should be an addition to the periodic table, being an element with the atomic number 1000]. 96,000,000 is a pretty spirited showing against the correct ...

<meta-parenthesis> 
(ducking and covering here, as usual. Eppur si scrive cosí, as Galileo might have put it: "All the same, that's how it's spelt... 

<note_to_spellchecker> 
And if you think that's some kind of cereal, that's your problem. 
</note_to_spellchecker>

...)
</meta-parenthesis>

 ...version, which gets just under 180,000,000; a further example of what I have previously noted as the linguistic version of Gresham's Law: 

BAD LANGUAGE DRIVES OUT GOOD

).
</parenthesis>

...has reached its 21st year, it's well enough aired for me to get a smart phone 

And this isn't the only bit of new tech that I've acquired recently, which explains my silence since well before Christmas – jolly time-consuming, these labour-saving devices....

So there I was, Bluetooth Headphones paired with my phone, listening to an episode of Private Passions that I'd recommended to my guitar teacher at the beginning of December  (it was broadcast on the feast of Santa Claus, or St Nicholas, as we used to say in The One True Church; and I finally got around to catching up (a sadly eviscerated version: for rights reasons the music was sorely truncated) on 6 January. So it was mostly chat. Paco Peña, the guest, started by talking about the atmosphere in Spain immediately after Franco had come to power, which recalled to me an episode I recounted here a few years ago (the account, not the event):

When I was first in a Spanish train [2021 addition: in March 1971] I misread a sign about giving up your seat to a war-hero. I was new to Spanish and to Spain at the time, and had just started stumbling my way through a selected poems edition of Lorca, with the aid of a parallel translation. 

People who didn't offer their seat would be multados [2021 addition: "fined"] según la ley.... But with my head filled with Lorca's evocations of the dastardly, unruly, inhuman...(etc etc) Guardia Civil as Franco came to power, I was quite ready to believe that offenders, with legal sanction, could be mutilated.

His final selection was of his 'dear friend of several decades' John Williams, and if what John Williams said was true (and there's no reason to believe otherwise) in his introduction to an encore at a guitar concert I went to in the summer of 1968 at the Guildford Festival...

<autobiographical_note>
I know it was summer. because my big sister (whose floor I slept on) was cramming for end-of-term exams, and any time after 1968 I wouldn't have had to borrow her twin brother(Requiescant ambi in pace)'s sixth form scarf (as  part of my disguise as a student on the shuttle service from Battersea Technical College to Surrey University).
</autobiographical_note>

... I witnessed the beginning of that friendship.  I say more about that concert here.

My pin-ball mind has noticed other things to comment on, but I really must do something. Yesterday was my most ZOOMful day ever – 5 sessions in one day, and a complete wash-out in the Getting-stuff-done Stakes. White heat my foot. When do the children play?

b

A sorry tale

 I have just discovered Americast and am slowly working through back-numbers...

<tangent type="suppressed">
(There's a crossword clue there, something about  epidurals [GEDDIT?] – no time now though.)
</tangent>

... (which are notable for the outrageous flirting that goes on between Emily Maitlis...

<tangent type ="spellchecker">
Sure you don't mean mantillas?
 </tangent>

and Jon Sopel [who is old enough to know better]). I've just reached one that starts off with an apology. Reflecting on this, Emily Maitlis uses the phrase "Dominic Cummings's mantra 'Never apologize, never explain'".

De mortuis ...

<tangent type="no such luck">
(but let us rejoice that the Poundland Rasputin has been turned out of the corridors of power )
</tangent>

...nil nisi bonum (and I've never been a fan of that use of mantra, so my knee-jerk reaction [How very dare she suggest he was the first to say it?] was possibly a little intemperate: she probably didn't mean to imply that anyway).

But it took me back to the  first time I heard it...

<autobiographical_note FX="harp music to mark reminiscence">
In 1980, one of my first jobs at OUP was to read the page-proofs of Patrick Devlin‘s The Judge (long out of print, or  ‘exhausted‘ as  they say  in Spain, as is the author  [RIP]). My boss (if that‘s the word) was a great cultivator of authors, mentioned (here).

... A recent edition of Great Lives started with Matthew Parris asking 'Why hadn't I heard of him before?' Well I had, by chance. During my brief stay at OUP in and around 1980, my friend and mentor Richard Brain (sadly no longer with us) edited a book about the extraordinary Muir of Huntershill, and as his assistant I had some dealings with it (not as many as I should have, as Richard – for all his many talents – was not terribly good at delegating, but the author was a personal friend).

So I didn‘t see much of Patrick Devlin (who Richard would have preferred to credit as Lord but the great man would have no such thing). The last time I saw him was  just after publication. when I admitted to having let slip a very obvious error. The typesetters had lost a whole line. missing out the end of one of one long and abstract sentence and the beginning of the next, leaving a string of words that was unusually long even for the noble Lord but without any of the  satisfaction of a peak well-scaled on reaching the bourn of a full-stop. I admitted it not by way of apology, although one was due (it was a case not so much of Homer nodding as of Homer nodding OFF). With unfounded optimism I was thinking in terms of an erratum slip in a reprint, or even a corrected paperback edition.

What he said was "Never apologize, never explain, never make the same mistake twice", which seemed to me to have the resonance of a Quotable Quote, possibly from somewhere like Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son. But I haven't been able to find it quoted anywhere; the nearest I get is that old stick GBS saying "I never explain" – which can hardly be regarded as the seed for Lord Devlin's tripartite advice. Perhaps Lord Devlin, after a lifetime of rhetoric, knew the rule of three and rounded off the rather banal "Never apologize, never explain" with his own rhetorical flourish.
 

And I've just realized he was talking to me, rather than saying what he would do if anyone noticed. DOH.  :-) (I'd make this an emoji, but Blogger seems to insist that the first image in a post must become the icon [in, for example, social media].)
</autobiographical_note>

Emily Maitlis reported (in the most recent edition I've heard, which dates back to the days when – would you believe it? – Trump  was still  crying Foul) that she had been told that the latest casualty from the Mad Hatter's Te er... Trump Cabinet had been sacked because he drafted a concession speech – or some such  adult admission of reality. What seems to be happening is that a depressingly large majority of Republicans have hold of a tiger by the tail and daren't let go for fear of the teeth at the other end. The sorry spectacle is a 21st-century version of The Emperor's New Clothes – The President's Second Term.

L'Envoi 

And my almost-unnoticed Word of the Year  is "rollout" and its associated phrasal verb "roll out". Etymonline dates it to 1957, which makes it fairly old but coined in my lifetime: when I was knee-high to a grown-up. I met it in what must have been one of its first outings, at the rollout of the Vulcan at the Farnborough AirShow (though in my experience of English engineers they have an extreme ...

 <INLINE_PS>

(some would say pathological)

<INLINE_PS>

...sensitivity to perceived Americanisms, so it probably didn't appear ... 

 <INLINE_PS>

(so much for that memory)

<INLINE_PS>

...in the sales bumf at the time). And it transferred by a gentle extension from the aeronautical usage to motor shows, when a car that wasn't fully developed (maybe it had no engine) was rolled out onto the showroom floor.

Then marketeers  got their greedy little neologizing teeth into it, and any product was fair game for a "rollout". In nearly twenty years of writing for a US-based multinational I became inured to the idea of more-or-less anything  being rolled out.

But it really came into its own in 2020. PPE is rolled out, Test and Trace is rolled out, vaccination is rolled out.... It didn't make the OED's Words of the Year, but it must have come fairly close.

 

 

b

Update 2020.12.20.13:35 – Added <INLINE_PS>s

No sex please, we're French

On the last Saturday in November (that's  how long I've been worrying at this bit of linguistic gristle) an article in The Times mentioned a reader who had been working away at an anagram for over 3 years. My mail to the Feedback column fell on stony ground, but here it is:

Leigh Carter‘s three-and-a-half year computer-assisted anagram search may have used tools that incorporated the "rule" my French master taught me more than 60 years ago: that cookery words that are based on a name are preceded by an implicit  "à la mode" and are therefore feminine - bourguignonne, mayonnaise... and dauphinoise.

However, I have often reflected, as a student of philology, that rules like this are usually the sign of a linguistic change in progress; I discuss a fascinating case here (about an early Roman Latin master's list of rules proscribing common errors). My most recent dictionary (Concise OED, 2013) lists dauphinois as a headword and relegates dauphinoise to a parenthetical "(also ...)". But Onelook (a web-based finder of dictionary entries) finds only one entry - Oxford's. (In contrast, it finds four - including Oxford's) for dauphinoise.)

 Following the Onelook link I found that, although the headword is dauphinois, most of the examples, have daphinoise. In fact, in the first screenful of examples, there are only two cases of dauphinois to nine of dauphinoise, and all the cases of dauphinoise refer to a manner or mode (both feminine nouns in French) of cooking. So what explains the two cases of dauphinois?

..ois or ...oise?

The answer is suggested by the second example and confirmed by  all four cases of dauphinois in the next screenful  (with dauphinoise still in the majority, but less so: 7 out of 11). Wherever dauphinois occurs it can (mistakenly) be parsed as an adjective qualifying gratin. There are no dates on the examples, but I suspect that these "adjective qualifying gratin" examples predate the first case in my first screenful: dauphinois as an adjective qualifying gratin becomes a justification for dauphinois understood as a free-standing noun.

The second screenful

But this does not apply only to dauphinois, for which Onelook finds only one entry. In the case of bourguignon (which I vainly, and – let's face – it mistakenly) whinged about here:

... (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette, Bourgignon/Bourguignonne... 

<mini-rant status="stillborn">
No, I won't but... If people would just pronounce the /n/ when they say Bœuf Bourguignonne.  PLEASE.
</mini-rant> 

... etc.)

The fight in defence of the rectitude of bourguignonne (according to the "B-G rule" [B-G being the French master who taught me it]) has been well and truly lost. Google finds 

About 9,010,000 results for boeuf bourguignon 

but only 

About 311,000 results for boeuf bourguignonne.

And the ...gnon version really has the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Teachers laying down rules are a sure sign that language is on the move.

b

I read the news today

An OTP (One-Time Passcode) I was sent this morning (partial of course, and I'm not saying what for – you never know what Nigerian princes are lurking out there) started 158... and it took me back to the top deck of a 158 bus in late May 1967. I know it was a 158 (although I could  catch either a 158 or a 114 for the first leg of my journey home from school at the time) because a friend was there ...

<parenthesis>

I've mentioned John before, here back in the days when this blog paid more attention to its byline ["a snapper up of unconsidered trifles"] and recounted chance observations)

</parenthesis>

...and he lived in Ruislip (which wasn't on the 114 route).

John was reading from the sleeve of an album...

<tangent>

Now there's an interesting word – yet another example of a metaphor continuing to refer to an old technology long after the technology has moved on (mentioned  in this blog, too often to mention, like hanging-up a phone or [trivially] giving someone a ring, when most mobiles don't ring anyway). 

Latin album  means "white [thing, in this case]", and collectors of various things (stamps, press-cuttings, photos...) used to keep them in a book with blank pages. Meanwhile, back at the gramophone, the old 78 rpm records used to last  only about 3 minutes.  (The length of early popular songs in the recorded music era reflects this...

<autobiographical_note>

And novelty recordings like Danny Kaye's story of The Little Fiddle had to be turned over halfway through. At least, that's what we did until the elder of my two brothers broke it, and had to mend it by sticking thick card to one side. Thereafter, we had to make do with just the second half of the story.

</autobiographical_note>

 )...Any longer, and you had to have a number of discs;  for a symphony, say,  there would be a dozen or more). These were sold in ledger-like volumes, containing separate sleeves. This was an "album" as the sleeves were blank. I've always wondered whether the designer of the Beatles White Album knew this. (But maybe it's a well-known item of pop trivia: "let your fingers do the walking" [to use another metaphorical anachronism] if you're interested enough to check.)

</tangent>

... which included full lyrics on it. To quote Wikipedia: 

The album's lyrics were printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP.

This was important, some say, because it was a "concept" album (though what the alleged concept was isn't clear to me. OK, so there was a band. And then....? [as they say in that telling French question Et alors?]). What's that got to do with the other songs?

Still, it was exciting, and John read the lyrics aloud on that 158 (top deck, of course).

One last observation re "the news today": RIP Dave Prowse. His two chief roles were Darth Vader and The Green Cross man; but I  first remember him as the figurehead of the Bullworker^TM advertising.

<autobiographical_note>

My two brothers and I clubbed together to buy one at the Ideal Home exhibition "special" price of 32s 6d. The older one, who had a job in the Selfridges crockery department (which indirectly caused the Little Fiddle Affair, as he was demonstrating how you could drop a plate without breaking it), paid £1/0/0. The two younger brothers, reflecting our relative amounts of pocket money, contributed 10s. and 2s. 6d.

 

</autobiographical_note>

That's all for this week. I'm missing the cricket.

b

 

Shibboleth schmibboleth

OK, it's a fair cop. Pedantry is not a stranger to  me.  I've dealt, often in this blog, with linguistic pedantry; one of my more visited posts is this one, the first of two trottings out of one of my most cherished bons mots, about "pedants of the world having nothing to lose but their chains" (make that three trottings out).

<background>
New readers start here: it's an etymological joke (i.e. absolutely hilarious), about the root of the word "pedant": Greek pedai (which means "chains").
</background>

I'm not a fan of this sort of pedantry; not that that spares me from being prey to it from time to time. It's hard not to be , the way people throw words around quite disirregardless of their proper meaning,

<irony_warning>
And, as they say in the UNIX world, send complaints about that use of "proper" to /dev/null/.
</irony_warning>

A bridge between linguistic pedantry and the sort of pedantry I want to address now is somewhere in this (which I have no time to trawl through just now for the sake of a spot reference, and besides, "no names, no pack drill") someone who had put together a virtual choir said that the effort involved increased exponentially with the number of recordings and he or she...

<parenthesis>
(well, I know which, but to specify which would spill the beans as – apart from the ring-mistress – there was only one wo..[oops])
</parenthesis>

... said "and I don't need to explain about exponential growth" (or words to that effect). And it's clear that the speaker wouldn't have been able to explain it. My savings, with varying interest rates (averaging not much more than than 1.5%), grow exponentially, but the exponent in question is about 1.0015. With an exponent of significantly more than one, exponential growth is indeed very fast and getting faster and faster (roughly what people mean when they use the word), but if the exponent is one-and-a-smidgen the growth rate is nugatory, and when the exponent is less than one....

<home_study_recommendation>
Somewhere on the net you'll find a story about someone doing a service for a Chinese emperor (aren't they always?) who says – do they never learn? – "Ask of me anything you want". And the doer of the service spots a chessboard (there's usually one lying around) and asks the emperor to give him one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth etc. doubling all the way to 64, and aggregating all the contents of the previous squares. The total is (as I remember) astronomical (really) – anyway, it's huge (not that all those kilos of rice would fit on the squares, if I'm being honest). There the exponent is 2, and the growth really is great.
</home_study_recommendation>

...But she knew what she meant. and everybody else did . So I should give her a break.

Anyway, this is the sort of pedantry I want to address: arithmetical pedantry – usually influenced by a teacher or teachers. At my primary school, when we started adding and taking away ...

<autobiographical_note type="Oh, the naivety">
At secondary school "taking away" was scorned in favour of "subtracting". I still have a vision of Doc Lewis's withering scorn...

<tangent>
Excuse the cliché: is there any other sort? <blush />
</tangent>

 ...when people on Countdown say "times it by..."; "The word is multiply, boy."
</autobiographical_note> 

 ... we were told to label the columns "H/T/U". A "1" in the H column stood for "100". In fact, although we hadn't yet thought about the wonders of this new-fangled zero thing (the Romans managed without it), that's what the zeros in 100 are doing – making sure the "1" stays in the H column and doesn't migrate to somewhere else where it would mean something different.

/More next week

AOB

I must get on.... But my mind has been occupied of late with this carol competition. I've been following this on Radio 3 Breakfast for a few years now, but it's always seemed beyond me. People submitted complex 4-part settings of modern poems.

But  numbers must have been falling off...

<rant>
 (one could ask a woeful succession of Education Ministers why, I suspect; but is there any wonder that people in this benighted country couldn't tell a melisma from a melanoma? )
</rant>

..., and now they've moved the goalposts; the competition people simply want a melody, which I  can just about do ("Has ability but is disinclined to use it musically" wrote my music master, in the days when teachers were allowed to put what they liked in school reports.)

The rules require a melody for one verse, suitable for all the others.  How can you do any word-painting when you don't control the arrangement?

Still, it's done now:

Well, I'm not holding my breath, although for other reasons I'm counting down the days to 18 November...

Bye for now

b

Update: 2020.11.07.16:20  – Added PS

PS: Another prejudice...

<parenthesis>
(by which I don't mean to deprecate the belief; thinking about it I find it innumerate, lazy, and misleading. I'm simply saying I feel this antipathy without thinking about it.)
</parenthesis>

 ...ingrained in me by Doc Lewis  is the habit of many commentators (particularly sports commentators) to keep the HTU words even after the decimal point: "reducing the world record to nine point twenty-four seconds". No. no, no. in the expression "9.24 seconds" the 24 isn't twenty-four; twenty is represented by a 2 in the Tens column; in 9.24 the .24 stands for two tenths and four hundredths. Calling that sort of 2 "twenty" is making the same mistake as calling 31 "twenty eleven", because when you get 11 in the Units column you put down a one and carry a one – every fule no that.

Of course, there is a language that – while not saying "twenty eleven" – does say "sixty eleven": soixante onze: a Guardian Notes & Queries page explores the tip of the septante huitante nonante issue,  which is partly (as far as quatre vingts is concerned) due to the fact that the Celtic language spoken in Gallia Transalpina before the Romans came and taught them how to speak proper used a vigesimal (base 20) counting system. In fact, that vigesimal counting system affects English dialects as well. A friend of mine with a holiday home in Swaffham once heard a farmer talking about "half a score of pigs".  (The word score itself suggests a vigesimal counting system, but the phrase "half a score" seems to me more persuasive, as it deliberately avoids the word "ten".)

Still more numerical navel-gazing to come, but I must show my face in the Real World.

 

b

Well said, that man

In this week's Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, Rowan Williams was talking about his new book The Way of St Benedict., which led me to think about the many appearances of Benedict in my life.

The first was as near home as you can get. When looking for a house to buy, my father had three priorities: nearness to church, RC school, and Ealing studios (in that order). He got the first two spot on: the church and the school were within walking distance. The journey to Ealing Studios (where he worked at the time)  would have taken a little longer – maybe 15-20 minutes in the Standard Vanguard (known, for reasons I never questioned, as "the Green Lizard"):

The church and school were named for St Benedict, as was indirectly... 

<parenthesis>

Very indirectly. Father Ben (sic  – younger and trendier than most of his peers) named the youth club he started after the bird that figured on the school's emblem: "the Corbie":

 

<subparenthesis>  

And there are twa. I wonder.... Probably not though. I suspect the corbies were just a heraldic pun referring to the great Benedictine foundation in Picardy: Corbie Abbey. (Although perhaps the designer of those arms knew the song.) 

</subparenthesis>

</parenthesis>

... the folk club that was the scene of my first guitar-related efforts.

Benoît ....

<you-at-the-back command="Wake up">
Do I really need to point out that this is one of several French names cognate with "Benedict"?
</you-at-the-back>

... was "my" member of the Regnault family, who lived in Motteville.

<background-info>
Throughout the 1960s my family took part in a number of exchange visits with a family made up of conveniently spaced children. Jo exchanged with Odile, Mick with Denis, Angela with Vincent, I with Benoît, and Yag [don't ask] with Nicolas (note the names; we were matched in religion, an important consideration at the time,  as well as age).
</background-info>

Which brings me to Bene't – presumably the anglicized version of Benoît.  My college at Cambridge was built next to St Benet's Church – and at one time was known colloquially as "Bene't College". The church stands in Bene't Street, scene of a bit of unconsummated ésprit d'éscalier recounted here: 

A few years ago I was in Cambridge, and missed a trick. I was at the front of the crowdlet in front of the Chronophage [HD: See here], and a tourist behind me wondered aloud what the inscription meant: 

Mundus transit, et concupiscentia ejus 

It took me a while to work it out, as two of the less obvious words (everything except transit, et and ejus) had glyphs that hid the letters un and en behind the conventional stone mason's tilde, giving ũ and ẽ. But what it says could be rendered as The world passes, as does its concupiscence. (I think the comma justifies my as does).

The trick I missed was the opportunity to give the tourists the impression that round every corner (the Chronopage is on the corner of Bene't St) in Cambridge there lurks a Vulgar Latinist. (And if you want to know more about concupiscence, read that post.)

There are other Benedicts in my life; a nephew, the celebrant of my little sister's wedding, the patron saint of Europe (who seems to have taken his eye off the ball spectacularly in the last few years), my choir's multi-talented accompanist ...

But what of my subject line, particularly the expression well said?  Well, according to Wikipedia, ...

Etymologically it [HD: Benedict] is derived from the Latin words bene ('good') and dicte ('speak'), i.e. "well spoken" [HD:my emphasis] 

...which strikes me as broadly true (though I wonder what 'dicte "speak"' is supposed to  mean...

<tangent>
Why the inflexion -e on dicte? Why cite a root in the ablative? I suspect the writer had only a passing acquaintance (if that) with Latin, and maybe once had a penpal called Bénédicte.
</tangent>

...) but crucially irrelevant. A person who in Latin is benedictus is not "well-spoken" but is BLESSÉD*. In the words of the Sanctus "he who comes in the way name of the Lord" is blesséd:

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini

<tangent>
"He who comes in the way name of the Lord is well-spoken?" Just as well, really. We don't want any of those ill-spoken yobs coming in the name of the Lord.  What would people think?
</tangent>

The speaker of the good things is Himself – and it would be either anathema or pointless or meaningless (depending on your beliefs) to pass judgment on His elocution.

That's all for now

b

Update: 2020.10.02.10:05 – Added PS

PS

When listing Benedicts in my life, I missed an obvious one, which I might have remembered if I'd read the WCS rehearsal schedule for last night before I hit Publish. We were due to sing the Benedictus  from Beethoven's Mass in C (although in the rehearsal we overran on the Credo and didn't get round to it).

<parenthesis>
And when I said "in the words of the Sanctus " I meant it. Most composers treat the Sanctus and the Benedictus as separate movements (though often there is an actual or implied attaca linking the two, and each is followed by a Hosanna with broadly the same notes). But the Benedictus is part of the same prayer – at least it was in my altar-boy days.
</parenthesis>

Update: 2020.10.09.10.15 – Fixed misquote. Mea maxima culpa.

Update: 2020.10.24.14.15 – Added footnote

* I've just become aware of a case of contrasted benedicts versus Bad Lots that will be well-known to singers of various Requiems. The Ur-Requiem in my mind is Mozart's: in the Confutatis maledictis an ominous figure in the lower voices is interrupted by an angelic Voca me cum benedictis in the upper voices ("Call me [to be/to stand/to stay] with/among the blesséd [as opposed to the maledictis]. The music forces an interpretation that isn't strictly there in the prayer. The infernal tune and lower voices mark the maledicti. The angelic tune and upper voices stand for the benedicti ...

<inline-p⁴s>
(strictly, I suppose, benedictae)
</inline-p⁴s>

.... But in the prayer there is only one voice – that of a soul awaiting judgment: "When the wrong-doers have been condemned to Hell [confutatis maledictis] ...

<inline-pps>
(Some of the more attentive readers, if not deprived of the schooling in Latin that is everyone's birthright,  may have recognized the ablative absolute here –  "Caesar having thrown a bridge across the river" sort of thing.)
</inline-pps>

 ...call me ...". It's a bit like when a teacher is choosing the worthiest in the class: "Ooh me, pick me".

Update: 2021.03.31.15:00 – Added <inline-pps />

Update: 2021.12.22.11:35 – Added PPPS

PPPS

I've only just learnt, from an alumni magazine [incidentally, I wonder when "old boys/girls" became "alumn-i/-ae"] of another instance of "Benedict" turning up in my back-story: this fore-runner of that termly publication:

The Benedict was first published in 1898, and continued under that name (with a break in 1914-18) until 1928.

Update: 2022.12.31.15:00 – Added <inline-p⁴s>

Nascent, adolescent, dehiscent, and crepuscular

Nearly eight years ago here in the first months of this blog (when this blog was nascent [before  its adolescence and – some would say – senescence]) I first visited the idea of inchoative infixes. Etymonline skates over them, rather missing the point, I would suggest, by calling -escent a suffix...

<weasel-words>
(in case anyone actually bothers to follow that link, I'd better admit that Etymonline doesn't actually use the word "suffix"; but it does call -escent a "word-forming element", showing a cavalier disregard for Occam's razor and ignoring all the -asc, -isc, and -usc- cases hinted at in my subject line.

<FFS> 

<order-order scurrility-quotient="0"> 

And no, the  S doesn't  stand for "sake". FFS means "For Further Study". 

</order-order> 

There may well be an -osc- word to complete the picture, but I can't think of it off-hand. Maybe "osculate" is all about puckering up before you O someone. Or "proboscis"...? But what's starting or growing about a proboscis, except in a special case such as Pinocchio? (That's not a serious suggestion, although some research into whatever preceded Latin might be interesting.... Probably not though.)
</FFS>

...What Latin did with an inchoative infix was take a verb like florere (="to flower") and add an  -esc-   before the ending to make it mean "start flowering"/"burst into flower": florescere. 

<road-not-followed> 

(Which, incidentally, is where our verb "flourish" comes from [ultimately].) 

</road-not-followed> 

And while I'm in the realms of full disclosure, I should admit that experts say infixation only happened with -esc- and -isc-; I'm not so sure, although those two infixes are by far the most common.
</weasel-words>

But this coining of new inchoative words by using an infix was not what linguists call "a productive mechanism" in the forming of Romance languages; they simply took the verb form and did what suited their needs. As I wrote in  that old post

In fact Elcock, in The Romance Languages says 'of all the innovations in the active verb of Vulgar Latin, perhaps the most noteworthy is the extension of the -ESC/ISC infix'...[which was] more influential as a basis for the formation of Romance language verbs [Fr.  finissons/finissez/finissent/etc from  finir, etc] – where there is no sense of 'inchoateness', and the infix just introduces this 'regular irregularity' to French -ir verbs;... 

<INLINE_PS> 

This one took me a while to work out after eight years. I suppose readers at the time just dismissed it as further evidence of a confused mind. What I meant by "regular irregularity" was just that "-ss-" suddenly appears from nowhere in the new verb paradigm. 

<INLINE_PS>

...in Spanish and Portuguese they didn't use it as an infix at all, and used -ESCERE as a rather long suffix. to create verbs such a aparecer – 'appear' – presumably distantly related to Latin aperire   'to open' (as in French, careful readers will notice that it happens only to –IRE verbs). 

And this all started with a harmless reflection on the word "opalescent".  Like "fluorescent" and "iridescent"  the idea of inchoateness (="beginning/becoming", roughly) is here only in the sense that the image is always becoming something else. It is, to use a word coined by the wearer of the opal in question many years ago, sprickly. 

b

 

 

PS A chance observation. There exists in English the word flatty. Its primary meaning (among several) is a sort of shoe:

But it's not that common a word. Collins gives this usage graph:

It was quite popular (with some meaning) in the eighteenth century, went downhill in the nineteenth, and has been next to moribund since then (but not so moribund as to escape my attention: I first met it when such footwear was prescribed for my oldest sister when she played a pirate in HMS Pinafore).

Now good old M&S  has resurrected it, and not without effrontery they have even slapped a trademark on it. Flatties^TM  are escalopes of chicken tenderized/marinaded in various ways. They are quite pleasant to eat; I'm not sure what makes them trademarkable though.

 

And this is not the first time a shoe name has been used to refer to a foodstuff. In 1982 "a baker in Adria, province of Rovigo, Veneto, Italy [created them]  in response to the popularity of French baguettes", says Wikipedia. Whereas the French called their sort of bread "drumsticks" (which takes us in a coincidental circle back to chickens) he called his new loaf a ciabatta (which means slipper). And don't talk to me about choux buns [Bou-boum]

 

But there is an ongoing biomass crisis in the garden that I must attend to. 

 

b