Joys Seven

In a Zoom rehearsal last night we were introduced to a new setting by our MD of the carol Joys Seven.

In less pestilential times, before singing a more traditional (or less fiendishly difficult, perhaps) version of this carol I wrote:

We will be singing several pieces new to the choir, among them Joys Seven – which is, in jazz terms, a paraphrase of The Lincolnshire poacher.

<digression>
That's something they don't seem  to do in  Primary Schools any more  – communal singing of  what were known as "Folk Songs" before the Revival of  the late '50s–early '60s. I remember at St Gregory's RC Primary School singing with gusto

When me and my companions Were setting of a snare
'Twas then we spied a
    gamekeeper
For him we did not care
For we can wrestle and fight,
    me boys,
And jump o'er anywhere...

A one-time colleague of mine, who already played the piano and the violin, during her teacher-training was required to learn the guitar so that she could maintain eye-contact with her pupils. As a consequence of this sort of thinking, today's schoolchildren can sing Kumbaya but not Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill.
</digression>

The interjection "me boys" in that extract are significant in a mistake I am always tempted to make in Joys Seven, because the two-word interjection at the equivalent place is "good man" – and I find it hard to avoid the less devout version.

Words, though; they won't learn themselves.

And, in a update to the same post I added this oft-picked nit:

And while we're on the subject of the words to Joys Seven, the sixth verse (which needs a rhyme for six) evokes in me another conditioned reflex from my old  St Gregory's days, provoked by the words "To see her own son Jesus Christ upon the crucifix".

A cross is a cross; an image of someone on one (there have been thousands of people tortured to death that way, if not  millions, but Christ is usually the one depicted) is a crucifix. I thought I'd better confirm this bit of pedantry, and it seems that dictionaries tend to agree:

Cambridge

Macmillan

Cobuild

Still, they needed a rhyme for six, and there aren't too many. Besides, the Collins English Dictonary is more forgiving:

On re-reading this I didn't see at first what justified my word "forgiving"; but there is a reading of this (which would be clarified by a comma after the second word) that makes the last phrase apply exclusively to "image of a cross". (And I wouldn't put such low standards of punctuation past the editors. :-) )

But time's wingėd chariot is doing its usual thing; Phoebus's jolly old cart...

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

Quest-i-o

Now the dust has begun to settle on another Christmas-tide [and oh yes, I'm not talking about a generic ecumenical Seasonal Festivities – after all it's Christmas Carols that have got the juices flowing]) I am writing again partly prompted by a question I've been asked about io as in io-io-io.

I  have written several times about carols and their opaque lyrics; I awarded a FOGgie to "Hinds o'er the pearly dewy lawn early" here (where I explain:

...the FOGgies are annual awards for outstandingly bad writing. The idea for the name derives from Robert Gunning's FOG index, although these awards don't restrict themselves only to obstacles to readability measured by that index.

) And elsewhere I wrote about those children crowned all in white, who wait around at the end of Adeste fidelis (or Hokum, all ye faithful as it's more commonly known). [That one's quite fun, I think, TISIAS; so much so that I tried to rekindle the flame here (failing, I think, although this snippet leaps out as fairly quotable:

To summarize [the "where like stars" verse] , the souls of the righteous, wearing haloes (in the manner of well-dressed saints everywhere, especially in Heaven) are positioned all around Himself, ready to jump to attention.

)

But Ding dong merrily on high has hitherto escaped my exegetical pen.

The first thing that strikes me is its structure – which is pretty neat. The first verse is about something happening in Heaven. The second verse draws a conclusion (E'en so) about what should, as a result, happen down here: let steeple bells be swungen. And the third verse goes into specifics, specifying what should happen at Prime...

<brickbat_dodging>
I know, I know, this isn't a majority view. Still, it's what I think: Pray you Prime is a command about singing a particular office. An early editor, and ignoramus – a benighted heathen no doubt, who was not conversant with the format <utterance_word>+<office_name>, as in  for example "say Mass" – stuck a meaning-wrenching comma after you, making prime a ([n] improbable, it seems to me) verb. 

<inline_PPS> 

It just occurred to me that "chime Matins" fits the same pattern (although "chime" makes the format <utterance_word>+<office_name> a little over-specific [suggesting speech rather than just noise-making].)

</inline_PPS>

</brickbat_dodging>

... and at Matins; and then at the evetime song. In between. the praising etc. goes on, presumably.

But why sing io? There are people who sing /ɑɪ.əʊ/ (which led my correspondent to suspect a connection with Io). But the Oxford Book of Carols is insistent (to the extent of a footnote) that the pronunciation is "ee-oh"  (they don't trust readers with IPA symbols, but they must mean /i:.əʊ/).

Some years ago this question was raised in this forum,  As usual, comments should be weighed in the balance and some will be found wanting;  but they are fairly brief and not very numerous. There are many, often conflicting views:  

1. "i-o" is a corruption of the Latin "in excelsis Deo"
2. I-o is a contraction or corruption of "ideo," Latin for "therefore." The implied thought is "ideo... gloria in excelsis deo,".
3. "io" is a Latin interjection (usually an exclamation of joy)

I imagine the truth is a mixture of the last two. (The first sounds to me like the distinctive blend of fanatically Christian sanctimoniousness and inventive improbability so familiar to survivors of a God-fearing education.) But monks in a scriptorium fought off RSI by abbreviating anything they could; and the pre-existing Latin interjection gave them an off-the-shelf solution.

So "io io io – hoorah" for the New Year.

b

• Spooner‘s review of The Navy Lark: "acts without thinking". (6, 4, 3, 3)
  
• And not herons either – je ne regrette rien (2. 7)
  

Update 2018.01.04.11.45 – Typo fix (peary => pearly) and fixed link.

Update 2018.02.21.15.25 –  Added PS

PS: Clue answers: SHOOTS FROM THE HIP and NO REGRETS.

Update 2019.10.22.09.25 –  Added inline footnote

Far brighter than that gaudy...

LED luminaire. The little children's dower, in this case, is the traditional Christmas lights.

Traditional – there's a Christmassy word: trahe me post te, as the carol goes. I'm sure when people first used electric bulbs to light their trees, traditionalists mourned the gentler light of candles: to quote Gob (my one-time history master [introduced here] "semi-affectionately known as 'Gob' for reasons best known to his Maker (presumably not omniscient in matters of orthodontics)")

Be not the first
On whom the new is tried
Nor be the last
To cast the old aside

Maybe the quote isn't original, but I have always associated it with him.

Which is all very well. But LED lights, while environmentally more responsible than the incandescent Edisonian bulbs, and physically more efficient, are a bit too brash for my taste. I've lived with them for three days now, but I'm sure three weeks will test my patience to breaking point.

But my main focus at the moment – and the reason  for keeping this post shorter than usual – is Saturday's concert, which should be really good. At a time of year that's often characterized by wall-to-wall carols, a bit of Bach offers a welcome auditory oasis.

Music dotted with repeats, and with the normal two lines of text (one German and one English) becoming four (with the German even further from the notes than usual), though, calls for learning by heart  – which I must go and do now.

(Afterthought: And the text of the first line [when there's a repeat], is bound to become more familiar, through rehearsal, than the text of the second. So there's more than the usual risk of my resorting to mime. Here goes with that rote learning... :-)

b

The last post

NOT MY LAST POST YOU UNDERSTAND

just the last I make before the end of  (my) singing term

Last year I had a very festive 14 December. I sang at the Wokingham Choral Society's service at Sindlesham, then high-tailed it to Bearwood College theatre in time for the last number in the first half of Trinity Concert Band's Christmas Cracker (and all of the second half, I'm not so stupid as to...) to hear my daughter.



But this year the gods (or the elves perhaps?) haven't been so kind. The two concerts do coincide temporally, but not spatially. So tonight's rehearsal will have to be my last, before this:↴
←←←←←↵            

You don't have to miss it*  though, and if I were you I wouldn't (except I will...).

Tales from the word-face

Progress with the new book is glacial. I'm having to rethink my modus imprimanditurae,  as Cloud Convert (which I use to get from XLS to HTML) used not to do anything sensible with Comments in an XLS file, but now it does. So whereas I was writing my Comments including HTML markup, so that I could cut&paste them into an HTML file, I'm now having to strip out all the markup, and repunctuate them. Cloud Convert now collects them in a separate image file, which I can then <include>.

This is still not ideal. I'd rather have them in HTML. But maybe Cloud Convert would too. Keeping text in image files is, as they say in the trade, 'a bit smelly' (that is, sub-optimally elegant), so  the goal-posts may be about to move again – so I need to get a hot line into their future plans. In which case, maybe I won't have to strip out all the markup.   I am going out [to read the Help], and  I may be some time. They're pretty helpful, though.

b
PS

A clue to keep you going:

Loud,  by rote (sort of):  that's  what I said! (5)

Update 2015.12.11.10:10 – Added this footnote:

* My feelings are mixed about missing the concert. It includes one of my Top Ten carols, "The Shepherds‘ Farewell". But the acciacatura**  in the first bar, which Berlioz – presumably – scored for an oboe or a cor anglais (something reedy anyway).... It seems to me that in a church the obvious replacement is the organ.

But I have never, even when an organ was available, sung this piece without a piano accompaniment. On a percussive instrument like a piano this acciacatura sounds to me like something out of Zorba the Greek.

** Elsewhere I have explained this word:

Another double letter in musical terminology forms one of a pair of similar-looking little notes, distinguished only by a "/" through one of them: the appoggiatura and the acciacatura. In the second of these, the "i" softens the "c", so that the word has five syllables: [a'ʧakatura]. Again, the only pronunciation I have heard (admittedly rarely) is [aki.aka'tura]; and again I'm not suggesting that anyone 'should' do anything. 

...[T]he acciacatura is a sort of sneeze squashed in before the note it precedes. And music theoreticians about to raise an eyebrow at that sneeze metaphor will be interested – though possibly not convinced – by my mnemonic for remembering which is acciacatura/atchoo.

Finally, a festive clue:

Noël, we hear: manic carol arrangement, In dulci jubilo, for example. (9)

Update 2015.12.11.22:40 – Corrected Dog Latin; easier and better with -andi.
Update 2015.12.16.16:15 – Corrected clue. I haven't done the usual thing, preserving records of the update (which'd make it too easy).
Update 2015.12.30.16:50 – OK, time's up: crossword clue answer: MACARONIC

Update 2016.04.06.17:050 – Removed footer.

Who are you calling a fossil?

This post led  me to think about fossils, and [of course] the word's derivation. I ruled out a possible link to ossa (="bone", Latin) – though the coincidence is quite appropriate, and I won't pretend that a scurrilous explanation of the f didn't cross my mind. Then I toyed with a link to fossa (="ditch", also Latin). That wasn't too far off the mark (though I was initially inclined to dismiss the idea – as if a "fossil" were just something 'found in a ditch'. A true folk etymologist would go one better and make a fossil something found in a ditch – originally related to an archaeological dig near Fosse Way.)

But a ditch is DUG. And here's what Etymonline says for fossil:

1610s, "any thing dug up;" 1650s (adj.) "obtained by digging" (of coal, salt, etc.), from French fossile (16c.), from Latin fossilis "dug up," from fossus, past participle of fodere "to dig"...

Restricted noun sense of "geological remains of a plant or animal" is from 1736 (the adjective in the sense "pertaining to fossils" is from 1660s); slang meaning "old person" first recorded 1859. Fossil fuel (1833) preserves the earlier, broader sense.

There is another sense, widely used among students of linguistics, and explained in a footnote in When Vowels Get Together:

Which leads me back to that post (at the thought-provoking linguisten.de – though they dig up interesting stuff, and can't be blamed for its shortcomings):  it's an old Mental Floss piece. [HD: In this commentary, my numbers refer to their numbers.]

1. Not so much an error, more a missed trick. Of wend, Etymonline says 

 "to proceed on," Old English wendan "to turn, direct, go; convert, translate," from Proto-Germanic *wanjan (cognates: Old Saxon wendian, Old Norse venda, Swedishvända, Old Frisian wenda, Dutch wenden, German wenden, Gothic wandjan "to turn"), causative of PIE *wendh- "to turn, wind, weave" (see wind (v.1)). Surviving only in to wend one's way, and in hijacked past tense form went. 

The author of the Mental Floss piece is presumably a student and/or a non-native teacher of ESOL, and so more interested in the "outrageous" irregularity of go than in what seems to  me the more interesting link with wind. 

2.  Oops. The double s could have saved him here:

The "desert" from the phrase "just deserts" is not the dry and sandy kind, nor the sweet post-dinner kind. It comes from an Old French word for "deserve'.. 

This rather short-circuits the story. The Old French word was (or derived from), to quote Etytmonline,  servir "to serve" (see serve (v.)). ...  

Then ...Middle French dessert (mid-16c.) "last course," literally "removal of what has been served,"

So the word is related to "the sweet post-dinner kind'; that part of the story explains the extra s (which to the student just looks like a gratuitously irregular way of representing the /z/ phoneme – so irregular that in many cases (this Mental Floss blogger, for example) the student doesn't notice or remember it; really sophisticated students may even discount it as a typo when they see it written (as they often do: I wonder how many of the 341,000,000 deserts noted by Google should really be desserts.)

Again, the ESOL bias has interfered: remotely related to has been perverted into meaning nothing to do with because it's easier to remember that way. But it's also easy to remember the whole story, as long as you get the spelling right.

3. Again, not so much an error, more a missed trick. The author obviously knows his stuff. It was [accurate] news to me that eke "comes from an old verb meaning to add, supplement, or grow". But I did know the word (conjunction..? – well, sort of; often used to reinforce "and") eke as used by Chaucer . And I wondered at first why "an 'also' name" came to be a nickname; but the abbreviation aka put me on the right track: "also known as".
4. Another missed trick: sleight  is related to  sly.  but that word is not a commonplace in the ESOL classroom. In fact, English Vocabulary Profile [HD – there was once a link for this, but it required authentication] does not include it in the recommended vocabulary for even C2 level (in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages C2 is the most advanced level). [I think they'd probably question that use of 'recommended'. To quote their spiel,
   
   The EVP shows, in both British and American English, which words and phrases learners around the world know at each level - A1 to C2 - of the CEFR. Rather than providing a syllabus of the vocabulary that learners should know, the EVP project verifies what they do know at each level.
   
   But you get the gist: whereas a native speaker of English will find the link to sly useful (and of mnemonic value for remembering the derivation of the phrase sleight of hand), the student of ESOL is most unlikely to.]
5. And another, possibly for similar  reasons. Like sly for no. 4, dent is not included by EVP for any level of student vocabulary. But dent is involved, as this Etymonline link shows: 'dialectal variant of Middle English dint . Very interesting (and of mnemonic value). It also explains the line in Good King Wenceslas:
   
   In his master's steps he trod
   Where the snow lay dinted
   
   Not the sort of cultural background that a student is likely to have.
6. Yet another. Riding roughshod: as regular readers will know from this and maybe other posts, I am particularly interested in the way idiomatic expressions tend to refer to old technology (ride roughshod, hang up (a telephone), a flash in the pan.... etc etc ad nauseam) or are culturally specific (in the UK we steamroller things; in the US they railroad them). Even a well-known idiomatic usage like mailbox (in the context of email) refers to the US postal system rather than the UK (where we have 'letter boxes' if anything  – that's if we have a free-standing box at all).
   
   But I liked the blogger's '17th century version of snow tires'.
7. OK, although I'd question the 'Scottish'. Isn't the Scottish for 'from'  frae?
8. '..."hue and cry," the expression for the noisy clamor of a crowd'? Really? I thought it had a more specific meaning than that....Yes, Etymonline:
   
   ...Hue and cry is late 13c. as an Anglo-French legal term meaning "outcry calling for pursuit of a felon.
9. Not wrong, but another missed chance. Personally, I'd find it hard to discuss kith and kin without digressing to kindred spirit.  And  is kith related to... {yup}:
   
   
   couth (adj.) 
   old English cuðe "known," past participle of cunnan (see can (v.1))...
   
   The derivation of kith was new to me, but it led to a link with another obscure word –  much less common than either sly or dent, and almost certainly not in an ESOL student's vocabulary. In fact, it's only in mine when fossilized in uncouth. Again, the ESOL bias had prevented the blogger from making links of interest and mnemonic value.
10. '...the lurch you get left in comes from an old French backgammon-style game called lourche. Lurch became a general term for the situation of beating your opponent by a huge score' says the blogger. Really? I'm on thin ice here, but it seems to me the predicament idea of in the lurch would be more likely to refer to a difficult/impossible situation (not unlike a stymie in golf or a snooker in snooker or, similarly, but in pool, behind the 8 ball. I feel an update coming on, but must finish soon.)
11. OK. I'm glad of the information.
12. Again, a missed trick. The obscure word here is shrive, shrove, shriven – particularly shrove, as in 'Shrove Tuesday' (Mardi Gras), when believers in The One True Faith get shriven in preparation for Lent,
    
    <autobiographical_note theme="shriving" value="throwaway">
    As a veteran of many a Shriving, or the Sacrament of Penance as we used to call it...

<digression>

I remember a homework, when we had to list all the benefits of Confession. One boy was caned for plagiarism when he used the expression '...solaces a burdened conscience'. Father Steven did not feel  it had the typical attributes of a 12-year-old boy's vocabulary. (I may have invented the caning bit, but Fr Steven wasn't noted for his willingness to 'spare the rod...'.)

 Eheu fugaces...

</digression>

... I find the use of short in 'short shrift' a mite confusing. Brevity, in  my estimation, was to be regarded with relief on these occasions.
</autobiographical_note>

Some of the
uncritical applause

So, as I've remarked before (here), stuff on the web can be interesting and useful without being entirely satisfactory. I must say though that I find it a little irksome that several dozen people have applauded/like/reblogged ... it on the linguisten.de site without exercising any kind of critical thought.

It was good, but it could've been a whole lot better.

Update 2015.07.15:14:40 – As intimated: out on a limb, but Hier stehe ich... ("I don't know Andrew", as Martin Luther put it.)

I wrote yesterday that I wasn't satisfied about the embarrassingly big victory idea. I suspected that like stymied, snookered, and behind the 8 ball the idea of in the lurch should somehow refer to a difficult or unplayable situation.

My first port of call  for [in the] lurch was Etymonline:

lurch (n.2) 

"predicament," 1580s, from Middle English lurch (v.) "to beat in a game of skill (often by a great many points)," mid-14c., probably literally "to make a complete victory in lorche," a game akin to backgammon, from Old French lourche. The game name is perhaps related to Middle English lurken, lorken "to lie hidden, lie in ambush," or it may be adopted into French from Middle High German lurz "left," also "wrong."

Again, an out-and-out victory. [PS: Strike one.] 

This source was quite promising about the unplayable idea:

To be in the lurch was to be severely discomfited. Various phrases built on the idea, including to give someone the lurch and to have someone at the lurch, respectively to get the better of a man or to have the advantage of him. By the final years of the sixteenth century, within a short time of the word arriving in the language, to be in the lurch had appeared, meaning to be in difficulty and without assistance. After all, it wasn’t the job of the other player to give any help to the loser.

[PS: Strike two.] But the same site goes on:

...lourche or l’ourche, which the Oxford English Dictionary suggests may be from a regional German word recorded as lortsch, lurtsch, lorz  and lurz. A phrase, lurz werden, meant to fail to achieve some objective in a game. The term was taken over into French, not only as the name of the game but also in the phrase demeurer lourche, to lose embarrassingly badly.

There were other sites but they all referred to the same view and spoke of the lack of fully informed and authoritative sources. [PS: Strike three.] 

But by chance (I suspect the Blares have been at it again  – the blogging equivalent of the Lares, ['household gods' in Ancient Rome] mentioned before, here) Le Temps published a piece to celebrate Quatorze Juillet, based on an interview with

... Ulrich Schädler, le directeur du Musée du jeu sis au château de La Tour-de-Peilz....

La lourche relève donc du même ordre d’organisation de l’espace de jeu [BK jeux '..'orchestré[s] sur un plateau à deux compartiments'] , avec des règles comparables. Ulrich Schädler nous signale que le mot nomme en outre «une sorte de tactique dans ce jeu, lorsque l’on place des doublons sur plusieurs cases de suite». Une manœuvre pour placer ses pions, ou ses dames, tout en occupant des flèches...

That sounds pretty specific to me,.,,, and doesn't justify the fears expressed all over the Web that the details of the game are lost in the mists of time. The game is not so much not known about as not documented  – at least, not in English. Historians of French board games know perfectly well  how to put someone en lourche.

Of course, over time the meaning may have broadened or changed. Not everyone knows that stymie is a golfing term (quite like snooker, as it  leaves the opponent in a position with no direct shot at the target). Not^* knowing this doesn't stop people from meaningfully saying they're stymied.  And the meaning of in the lurch seems to have undergone a similar broadening in meaning.

There's a risk here, though, of what has been called elsewhere (see my footnote to this post) ‘The Etymological Fallacy'; things mean whatever they mean to whichever speech community is using them. (Knowing what they meant ONCE, though, is quite fun.)

Update 2015.07.19:19:05 – Added correction.
^*Of course, people don't need to know the original meaning of stymie in order to use it in its present sense.

Update 2018.04.09:14:05 – A few format tweaks for clarity,  and added inline PSs.

FOGgies (special Christmas Carol supplement)

(The story so far: the FOGgies are annual awards for outstandingly bad writing. The idea for the name derives from Robert Gunning's FOG index, although these awards don't restrict themselves only to obstacles to readability measured by that index.)

Special Seasonal Award for Outstanding Opacity in a Carol goes to Anon for

Hinds o'er the pearly
Dewy lawn early
Seek the high stranger
Laid in the manger
'Past Three A-Clock' (the spelling is traditional; I've never been in a choir  that didn't say O'clock')

The judges said

"WHAT? The last line makes sense (if you're primed with the right background). So we know Who the stranger is. But why seek him unless you're either one of the Magi, a shepherd^†, or Herod? And why would anyone seek him riding a hind. And is a dewy lawn ever pearly? (The notion of  a dewy lawn in Palestine is beyond question, falling under the general Willing Suspension of Disbelief that most Christmas Carols require.) This brilliant string of non-sequiturs reaches new heights in opacity."

A Break from the Awards 

Yesterday evening was a busy time. My choir's annual carol concert (that link will work only as long as the website isn't updated; thereafter you'll have to click on the Past Concerts tab). I kept a straight face when our MD said the choir would add a coda to the audience-assisted singing of the song 'Little Donkey'. As coda is the Italian for 'tail' it was a game of Pin the CODA on the donkey.

The concert was a great success, both musically and popularly – the hall seemed, from my point of view, full – and both the hall and the timing of the concert were new to the choir. The timing was important as it meant that more children could come; and, crucially for me, it meant that I could catch the tail-end (coda?) of my daughter's concert  (a bit over half). A busy and enjoyable evening.

Next time, more awards.

b

Update 2014.12.18.12:35 – Added this note:

† Duh. I got so near the truth here, but there's none so blind as them who haven't looked in a decent dictionary. A correspondent has just alerted me to this meaning of 'hind':

NOUN

archaic , chiefly Scottish 

1 A skilled farm worker. 

1.1 A peasant or rustic.

Origin
late Old English hīne 'household servants', apparently from hīgna, hīna, genitive plural of hīgan,hīwan 'family members'.

I suppose I could  have pretended I knew this all the time. I think, having got so close to a probable meaning, I did check – but made the elementary mistake of using only one source: Etymonline.

She mentioned its being a typical instance of Victorian arch archaism – a topic mentioned by Andrew Gant on Midweek yesterday. In his discussion of  'a partidge in a peartree' he didn't mention what I thought was the 'true' origin: et parturit in aperto [='and she gave birth in the open']. Which led me to check; and it's (as I should've guessed) a load of hooey – Holy Mother (to rhyme with bother) Chorch sticking her oar in again. I'm not sure whether to call this folk-etymology; the 'folk' were involved, but only after they'd been got at. But if you want some interesting speculation on the origins of this and other carols,  Christmas Carols: From Village Green to Church Choir sounds like a good starting point.

---

 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 48,600 views  and nearly 6,550 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.