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. 

Joining up

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

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

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

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

</digression>

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

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

Words can be like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next on The Week's list  is copter.

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

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

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

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

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

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


b

PS: A couple of clues:

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

Update: 2018.10.08.11.35 – Added PPS

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

Update: 2018.10.12.11.45 – Added footnote

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

Update: 2019.03.09.12.30 – Added PPS

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

What's in a name?

"Inc." (that's A Thing – sort of news/media/comment/coaching Thing) just published

A Study of 600,000 People Shows the Secret to Managing Millennials Is to Quit Thinking of Them as Millennials

Source

Hmm –  Well, yes, in a trivial sense.

<autobiographical_aside>
I dislike being called a Baby Boomer – as if I had been conceived in a frenzy of post-war optimism more than 5 years after VJ Day  Of course the term has a certain statistical value, but calling me a Baby Boomer says no more about me than – say – that my father was a Daily Mail reader: true, but lazy and misleading. (Besides, the context is very different – the Mail, last time he read it [1961] was... not the same [not to put too fine a point on it].)
</autobiographical_aside>

But that Inc. piece starts 

I just did a Google search for "manage Millennials." I got 28 million results. That's total overkill...

<autobiographical_note>
I struggled to avoid an automatic lip-curl reflex (LCR)  at the abuse of the word overkill (which has a particular political/military/economic sense –  a world away from the almost meaningless Jolly Big sense evoked by the author, 'Contributing Editor' Jeff Haden), but  life's too short to get upset about  this sort of illiteracy...
</autobiographical_note>

... especially since a recent study published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology shows there are much greater attitude and behavior differences within generations than between generations.

I tried out the first of Mr Haden's links, hoping to see further evidence of that Google-based finding. But no ... it's a link to another Inc. article.

<fact_check>
For the record, when I search for manage Millennials (two separate  words, no quotes) I get just over 23 million hits, and when I search for "manage Millennials"  I get fewer than 17,000.  I suppose Mr Haden's overkill figure is based on the first of these (with the extra 5 million being attributable to poetic (that is, lazy/Internet) licence.
</fact_check>

In other words the link does not lead to relevant information. Vannevar Bush (inspiration for Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext [that's what the H and the T stand for in  HTML]) would turn in his grave; what it does is irrelevantly drive traffic to another Inc. page.

<irony_alert>
Which I've just done. Oh well...
</irony_alert>

But the grass has started growing again. Nunc est MOW-endum, as Horace might have written (if only Latin had a W).

b
PS: A couple of clues –

• Plunge into millpond, say, making for fortunate coincidence (11)
• Christian? About time for a trouble-maker. (4-6)

Update: 2019.02.05.13:00 – Nested paren. fixes (natch) and added PS

PS

Crossword answers: SERENDIPITY, ANTI-CHRIST

Calling a spade a bloody shovel

Petroc Trelawney caused a stir the other morning on Breakfast (about 5 minutes before the end) by asking:

Why is a boatswain a /bǝʊsǝn/ but a coxswain is still a /kɒksweɪn/?

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we expose an area of ignorance to the Twittersphere. The Radio 3 twitterfeed was swamped by corrections, some more and some less gentle.

My first thought was that it was a dysphemism (antonym of euphemism, like fall off the perch, pop your clogs, push up the daisies in place of die). Dysphemisms like this are often a sort of "whistling in the dark": I'm not going to pop my clogs for a good few years yet.

But another common use of dysphemisms is as a signal of membership of some specialist group. In some circles, fiddle rather than violin is a term of disparagement. But among violinists it's the norm – except when a violinist makes a principled stand ...

<counterexample>
(as, I seem to remember, Biggles did when he told his group not to use the dysphemism kite instead of aeroplane. But the fact that this fictional hero did forbid it shows that real-world pilots used it.

<tangent>
This is reminiscent of a regular tool in the philologist's armoury: lists of mistakes not to make. Entries in such lists prove two things:

1. The mistake was being made
2. Somebody thought it mattered

They call attention not only  to what was thought to be a mistake at the time, but also to a turning point in the history of a word. The Reichenau Glossary is the example that most readily springs to mind, and in an earlier post I traced the French chauve-souris to a supposed (and deprecated) Vulgar Latin "owl-mouse".

But I digress...
</tangent>

Anyway, a crash was still a prang, and a pilot who died bought it).
</counterexample>

Similarly, players in the finest of symphony orchestras  refer to it with the dysphemism band. Showing such irreverence is a way of ironically suggesting real reverence – while also signalling membership of the in crowd.

Another example which I have no direct experience of (maybe I heard it in a forgotten lecture, maybe I invented it – though it's unusually specific for a flight of fancy) is archæologists' pronunciation of ceramic with a /k/; this is not unlike the original meaning of shibolleth (pronouncing it one way indicated which side you were on).

Which brings us back to Petroc's "error". Presumably he knows and speaks to people who row in Cornish racing gigs. It seems to me not improbable that a coxswain in such a boat calls himself a /kɒksweɪn/,  quite intentionally thumbing his nose at the "correct" pronunciation laid down by they furriners from outside Kernow. In that case it was not a dysphemism, but a pure and simple gesture of defiance against linguistic hegemony.

b

PS A couple of clues:

• Queen tucking into a Dubonnet and lemon? How refreshing! (10)
• Higher octane propellent for this incendiary energy source? (7,4)

Update: 2018.11.26.12:45 – Added PPS


PPS The answers: LIBERATION and LIGHTER FUEL

The Brexicon

Whether you parse my subject line as Br[itish]+ exit + lexicon or Br[itish] + exit + con[fidence trick] is a matter of personal conscience. I couldn't possibly comment (well, I could,  but as the whole sorry shambles reduces me to incoherent/impotent rage, my comments woudn't have much force either way).

On 25 March of 2018 The Westmnster Hour included an item that dealt with the language of Brexit "[f]rom Cakeism and Remainiacs, to Regulatory Alignment and Insufficient Progress" as the iPlayer blurb puts it. The programme as a whole is not available, but iPlayer's largesse makes up for this, by making available a "clip" of about 8 minutes.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly told us that Brexit means Brexit. But what do the words associated with Brexit mean? The Westminster Hour's John Beesley has been exploring the etymology of the Brexit lexicon. 

More here

Graeme Davis, Profeeor of Humanities at Buckingham University, gives the interviewer some basic pointers to start with. It all started with Grexit – which, as you may remember, referred to a putative exit of Greece from the Euro. Britain was never in the Euro, so Brixit [sic, with an i – an early form that didn't catch on] wasn't just about money.

Brexit spawned various spinoffs, includind Brexiter and Brexiteer. Dr Davis calls the first of these  "I suppose, relatively neutral" [hmmm – not sure what that "relatively" is doing; just –  I  suppose  – academic feigned diffidence] and the second "has quite a positive spin on it".  Again, hmmm; I think the direction of the spin depends on the attitude of the hearer. If you think Brexit is A Bad Thing, then Brexiteer has more of the negative spin of racketeer (one might link this word with capitalists with off-shore wealth profiteering from the chaos which is bound to... No Bob, don't go therre. Even words like privateer and buccaneer have spin that can be either positive or negative, depending on which end of the cutlass is involved. 

And the addition of the prefix arch- seems to me to impart renewed negativity. If I call Jacob Rees-Mogg an arch-Brexiteer, I don't think there's much risk of my being thought to  approve of his antiquarian antics. 

<apologia>
Excuse the gratuitous assonance; I can't hear a word without being tempted down playful back-alleys. At least I spared you the 'Jacob Real-Smug' gag...

<whoops>
No I didn't.
</whoops>

</apologia>

In the end, I didn't find the Westminster Hour clip very enlightening. But I did find the words of Kathleen O'Grady ("a journalist with a special interest in linguistics") interesting:

German is currently the most widely spoken native language  about 16% of the EU speaks German as a native language. But once you take into account people who speak various languages as a second language, English then quickly overtakes both German and French, and also Italian – which is quite widely spoken. So 38% of adults in Europe speak English as a second langage. If you compare that to the total of German speakers – both native and as a second language – that's only 27%.

And she goes on to refer to research that suggests the use of English may be boosted by Brexit:

After the UK leaves, most people speaking English in the EU ...

<you_what?>
Most people? Perhaps she has some Astérix-like vision of a redoubt of hardy native speakers of English among all the second-language speakers – perhaps led by Nicola Sturgeon in the Astérix role, with Alex Salmond playing Obélix...
</you_what?>

will be on the same footing. If everybody's on the same footing, everybody's speaking it as a second language, people might be more happy to use it.

This is strangely reminiscent to me of David Crystal's work in Original Pronunciation (OP)  and his observation that OP gives non-UK actors ownership of the text. I heard this at a British Council talk a few years ago., but the same point is made by David Crystal's son Ben:

The accent draws him [HD: the actor using OP] more out of the head of the standard accent and into the heart. This, he believes, brings “an ownership over Shakespeare that is rare,” both for the actor and the audience. Americans, he notes, have sometimes told him that they feel like Shakespeare isn’t theirs because “we can’t do your accent,” but that many of the vowel sounds in O.P. may in fact be more accessible naturally to Americans than to modern Brits.

More here

So Globish will go sailing off pluckily into the unknown, leaving us speakers of RP clinging to the wreckage.

But this isn't getting the lawn patched. Bye for now

b
PS: A couple of clues:

• Hostile response to insult, with intervention of mountain bike in reverse; formidable. (11)
• Men and girl conspiring to put a spanner in the works (7)

Update: 2018.07.12.09:30 – Shame-faced typo-fixes (involving acute accents).

Re-requiem

The other day  an edition of Notes from the Stave reminded of a piece I'd written in the early days of this blog on Gabriel Fauré's Requiem. One of the people commentating on the manuscript also featured as a boy soprano in the King's College Choir recording – Bob (credited at the time as "Robert") Chilcott. (In particular it alerted me to a mistranslation of mine, now fixed. To make matters worse, it was in a section that corrected a common mistranslation [of In Paradisum as *in paradise – which it doesn't mean]).

...In can mean many things  in Latin, but when followed by a noun in the accusative it doesn't mean 'in'. If the words were In Paradiso they would mean 'In Paradise'; but they are In Paradisum ... going on ...deducant Angeli : 'May angels will lead you into Paradise...' One of many other meanings of in, this time followed by the dative, is exemplified in the next phrase: in tuo adventu: that's closer to 'in' in meaning, with a sense something like 'on the occasion of', though I'd favour a simpler translation: 'When you arrive...'.

More here

My mistake (future simple rather than subjunctive) was perhaps explained (though not of course justified – mea maxima culpa) by Fauré's own attitude to the Requiem as a lullaby of death. I let his view of death as a peaceful return to a state of eternal rest influence me. As Michael Lewanski‘s blog says

Unlike nearly all other works in the genre, it [HD: Fauré's Requiem ] contains none of the drama, anxiety, or fraught emotions one tends to associate with human thinking about death.  Nearly all references to the last judgement from the Catholic liturgy (and trust me, there are plenty) are excised. 

This nonchalance  in the sense of "not getting  hot under the collar" misled me into  assuming on the part of  Fauré a certain (not to say sanctimonious) belief that angels would lead the departed into paradise.

The manuscript, and thus the stuff of the discussion, was an unbound version without some movements added later (Offertorium, Libera me, etc.); it was, in the words of the Bibliothèque Nationale's Head of Music Manuscripts a manuscript de travail working copy rather than a draft of something to be  published.

Bob Chilcott makes frequent additions to the discussion based on his experience as a chorister;   from the sublime (David Willcocks‘s observation that the high strings after the triumphant Hosanna  represent  the angels flying off  into the distance) to the ridiculous (after the recording of  Pie Jesu, when the sound engineer asked if Chilcott wanted to listen back to his efforts, the response was "Sorry Sir, he's gone off with  Marriner [Neville‘s  son Andrew] to buy sweets" [not the exact words – check Bob Chilcott's memory in the 17th minute of the programme]).

At one point (maybe more than one) Bob Chilcott calls attention to Fauré's word painting, which put me in mind of my own favourite example, discussed in an old post of mine:

My choice of 'listen out' [HD: the post was discussing phrasal verbs in  a context that had nothing to do with music] as an example is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem, which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano tune marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

And in the same post I returned to the theme of 'listen out':

<autobiographical_note>
At the funeral of a grande dame yesterday... I witnessed an underlining of the importance of this Ex-  [HD: in exaudi]. We were in the middle of one of those interminable call-and-response prayers, with the congregation saying ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘ again and again. And The Angelus butted in. (For the uninitiated:  The Angelus is a very noisy Call-to-prayer^† – much noisier than the Islamic version: ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause..._{has it stopped?}>  <oh dear me NO, suckers> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING... [ad nauseam]).  And the congregation was bleating (that‘s one for the etymologists: grex = ‘flock‘) ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘. Here was the perfect opportunity for something more robust: ‘Listen out for my prayer‘.
^† Not all believers would recognize this as a call to prayer exactly, but the name 'Angelus' is the first word of the prescribed prayer.                            

<inline_pps>
So it's a call to – and an accompaniment to – a particular prayer, to be prayed wherever the hearer happens to be, rather than [as in the Islamic case] a call to the faithful to come and pray at the mosque.
<inline_pps>

</autobiographical_note>

But this isn't getting the lawn repaired (Don't ask; in short I'm doing a Rooney [transplanting bits of "turf" from where it's spread over a path – though it's not turf exactly; it's just a bit greener than the weeds that are in the "lawn"].)

b


PS And here are a couple of clues:

• Hatter in cahoots with odd characters from Idaho returning to get rich. (11)
• Neat ass at the Gare du Nord on track for underhand trickery (9) 

Update 2018.08.29.13:00 –The answers: MILLIONAIRE and CHICANERY. And, swatting away hornets ("...Because he knows it teases") I've added an inline PPS in red.

Advertorial or what?

Generally speaking, I'm in favour of the BBC. No prizes, though,  for detecting a none-too-faint whiff of adversity (or but-ness) in the offing.  A while ago the first of three facinating programmes was aired. The second and third programmes were a vast improvement...

<rant>
 (although it's hard not to judge the acuity of the analysis  on the basis of a scarcely credible abuse of incredulously 15'17" into the third, as if bacteria were going around scratching their tiny heads – but one shouldn't be snobbish about... hell yes I will:

this is BBC Radio 4 for pity's sake, and we
can expect at least a MODICUM of literacy

<loaded_term value="literacy">
Tricky word that one. I've seen it used in the context of an infant ...

<etymological_fallacy risk="high">
And I have to admit that when I use the word "infant" I have a perhaps over-zealous regard for its root. Sorry, but I regard 'infant who has not yet learned to talk' as pleonastic; infants haven't.
</etymological_fallacy>

...recognizing and responding to the golden arches indicating a certain McFood outlet. But here I'm using it in the specific sense of ability to use words to convey meaning. And don't try any clever-clever stuff about "the meaning of meaning"; you know what I'm talking about.
</loaded_term>

         )

</rant>

But the later programmes were less of a hook-line-and-sinker regurgitation of a press release from the company that has the very same name as the BBC series (which took the name verbatim from the market leader in this area: The Second Genome...

<small_mercies>
At least they didn't add the ^TM. Here's the  iPlayer link
</small_mercies>

...) At the time of the series I made a note in a draft that I was inspired to dust off by last Tuesday's Life Scientific, which dealt with the immune system. To quote the programme's précis:

Traditional descriptions of the human immune system bristle with military analogies. There are "lines of defence" against "enemy invaders"; "border guards" at "strategic points. And when barriers are breached, there's "a call to arms". That's before you mention Natural Killer Cells.

But Professor of Immunology and Public Engagement at the University of Manchester, Sheena Cruickshank, tells Jim that as well as the war-like descriptions, our immune system is now being understood in terms of its capacity for diplomacy too. Jaw-jaw as well as War-war.

Our immune system has to know when to tolerate the trillions of microbes that live on us and in us, to hold fire but also to know when full-scale immune activation is required.

^{More here}

But the whole thing  is well worth a listen. Give it a go.

I, meanwhile, must go and learn my words for this – less than 3 weeks away as I type:

 

(One or two notes could do with some attention as well.) 

Sadly it'll be our  Musical Director's UK swansong with the choir; I say 'UK' specifically because he and the choir will be performing in France in August.

b

PS: A couple of clues:

• Blackbird embracing upstart noose in a big way (10)
• Mistaken queen preceding onerous with queen coming first. (9)

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

...when we try to organize our thoughts about language ...

<digression>
(and it's no accident that the idea of weaving is at the root of the word text – 'from PIE root *teks- "to weave, to fabricate, to make; make wicker or wattle framework."', as Etymonline puts it. They quote Robert Bringhurst, from The Elements of Typographic Style:

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

</digression>

I've written before about the damage done by thinkers about language, who create their whole petty world of Mrs Thistlebottom's "rules", policed by Strunk & White, purveyors of jackboots to all discerning grammar Nazis. Here, for example, I wrote

When Dr Johnson defined a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge' I think he knew what he was doing. Lexicographers can make life much more difficult for students. They say 'Look, what a boon is standardization'; but look at the mess they make!

(Interested readers can look in that post for examples of the mess.)

But, as  a representative of a pattern-loving species I have to put my hand up for the fault of  seeing rules where there is only (messy, almost chaotic) usage.

In The Changing English Language (my entree into Linguistics, which I first read in the late 1960s), Brian Foster wrote:

Nouns ending in "-ee" have long been a feature of the English  vocabulary, and such a modern-looking  formation as "payee"  goes back to the 18th century, while "recognizee" (the person to whom one is bound in a recognizance) is dated 1544 by the SOED, These particular examples show the fairly characteristic passive meaning implied by this suffix..

There are many examples of this passive sense. The Macmillan English Dictionary (not a notable authority, but the publisher of the dictionary software I happen to use) lists addressee, amputee,  appointee, deportee, detainee, employee, evacuee, franchisee, inductee, internee, interviewee, licensee, nominee and payee – all unarguable  patients of the verb in question. An element of indirectness is discernible in referee: the person is not referred; what is referred (to the referee) is a point of fact or interpretation. Devotee is also different, in  that the actor and the patient of the act are one and the same – except in the case  of forced conversions (where "devotee" would in any case be a misnomer). And the passiveness in the case of retiree is questionable; some people "of pensionaable age" are happy to put their feet up; it is only their more dedicated colleagues who fit the passive pattern and are retired  against their will.

But Brian Foster goes on to say

Such indeed is the usefulness of this device that an endless succession of nonce-words based on it  is made possible,  like the one made up by Gilbert Harding when he wrote in his Book of Manners that '... a hug from the Russian bear might well crush the huggee to death.' This semi-humorous [HD Only semi- ? Well, maybe not a rib-tickler, but definitely jocular] procedure is not a new one, for in Mr.  Sponge's Sporting Tour, published in 1853, R. S. Surtees refers to a person being toasted as the 'toastee'.

But, he goes on

... the possibility of using this suffix in an active sense is old-established, because 'absentee' goes back to 1537 and 'refugee' came into the language in 1685, the year of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV when many French Huguenots fled the country to escape persecution. Escapee is attested in 1865...

Hang on, I thought when I read this. S'abstenir is reflexive anyhow, so someone who does it to him/herself is an absentee with no problem for the seeker after passives. And both  s'échapper and se refugier are as my old French master would have said verbes de déplacement: someone who has escaped s'est échappé[e], and someone who has sought refuge s'est refugié[e]; again, there's no problem for the passive-o-phile. (If you've met the argument about 17th- and 18th-century grammarians making the mistake of trying to force English into the grammar of Latin [so, for example, no sentence-final prepositions], you may get a sense of dêjà vu here: it's just that the mistake here is the adducing of French grammar.)

So despite evidence to the contrary, I still have a quiet resentment of arriviste non-passives like attendee.

<autobiographical_note>
This issue came to a head when I was in a working group that had rotating minute-takers. Many of my colleagues had knocked up a clever bit of time-saving software that highlighted differences from meeting to meeting. As I was their junior, and they expected a flag to mean Something's new rather than Bob's at it again, I soon learnt not to change Attendees: to Present:
</autobiographical_note>

But that evidence to the contrary  (to the contrary, that is, of the passive implication of -ee endings) keeps mounting. Attendees are joined by resignees, even dilutees (unskilled workers who dilute the skill-level of a group of skilled workers).  I feel that these new -ee words with no passive implication are in some sense regrettable. But they happen, and a student of language can only recognize it and avoid creating yet another angels-on-a-pinhead  "rule" for the unwary to stub their toes on (and yes, I did write their).  

b

PS 

Some clues:

• Before? After? Get up, with last going first. Ridiculous! (12)
• Truncated Hamlet done recast as contemporary political thriller. (8)

Update: 2018.11.22.10:30 – Added PPS.

PPS: The answers: PREPOSTEROUS and HOMELAND.

Memories are made of this

Part of my repertoire of random odd memories is that I revised for my Greek O-Level ...

<glossary audience="millenials and post millennials">
GCSEs are an amalgam of GCE O-Levels and CSEs (though I bet the official line would involve using  a much longer and nuanced explanation than the bare word  amalgam).
</glossary>

...on Broadstairs beach.

Detail from this site

This is a sufficiently incongruous juxtaposition of ideas for it to stick in my brain. I trotted the memory out again today, and in the process put some flesh on the bones – stuff I hadn't associated with the memory before.

<digression>
A book I recently read pointed out that when we remember something it is not the event itself that we recall, but our most recent recollection of it. Teachers know this, and keep reminding their charges that revision needs  to be little and often. If you start your revision in week two of a course, you won't go far wrong.

<autobiographical_note>
Or, as my Tai Chi teacher's husband says, if you want to commit a movement to memory, practise it before you get home – park the car and do it (if only mentally –  although ideally physically).
</autobiographical_note>

Stupidly, I kept no note of the book's title, or even its author (although I do remember that he was an  Argentine...).
</digression>

First, the dramatis personae: the  name of one participant stuck in my mind  – I don't know why, but I imagine sex may have been a factor (I was 17, and she was a trainee teacher, so Katie George may well have been a PHI [Person of Hormonal Interest]). She was a New Zealander (or Australian?), supporting a world tour with bouts of teaching. In 1968...

<authority type="PPS">
This is an easy one. Forty-odd  years' worth of CVs  have meant that this datum-point  has been  recycled again and again.
</authority>

... she was working at my old Primary School.

But where did she fit in –  maybe my little sister was there at the ti...? No, the dates don't work. That's when another memory kicked in: my mother (whom saints preserve [and they'd better]), was a dinner lady there, and she had a talent for picking up young waifs and strays.

Now, the date. It was in the middle of a fairly extended exam period, so it must have been late Spring/early Summer – which narrows it down to the Whitsun holiday (as it was in those days; now it's the Late Spring Bank Holiday), probably the Monday (3 June).

So there we have it; the memory gets better and better – although of course the more detail it accumulates the greater the risk of false memory.

Ho hum – I should be revising for my concert on Saturday. Don't miss it.

b

PS: And here's a clue:

• Sweet singing in the choir? After a fashion! (8)

Update: 2018.03.23.10:50  – Added inline PPS

Taking the cake

A proverb that bothered my younger mind has come to unwonted prominence, in the fertile soil provided by the context of Brexit. And recently a Prospect blog written by Professor Simon Horobin cast some light on this:

The well-worn proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it” is enjoying something of a revival in the heated exchanges over Brexit. Ever since Boris Johnson characterised his policy on cake as “pro having it and pro eating it too,” Brussels has sought to alert the British negotiators to the impossibility of adopting such an attitude.

In October 2016, European Council president Donald Tusk, taking a rather literal approach to the aphorism, called upon proponents of the ‘cake philosophy’ to carry out a scientific experiment: “Buy a cake, eat it, and see if it is still there on the plate.”

A month later a Tory MP caused a certain amount of embarrassment when, emerging from a Downing Street briefing, his handwritten notes were photographed in the barefaced admission “What’s the model? Have your cake and eat it.” 

<advanced_riposte>
And NO, the "?" doesn't absolve the miscreant. The question  is “What’s the model?...". The answer is "...Have your cake and eat it.”
</advanced_riposte>

My impression is that this slip gave rise to the neologism cakeism, used strictly in the context of Brexit.

Horobin's blog explains the source of the confusion mentioned in my first sentence:

The reason for the confusion is that the original form of the phrase has been reversed in its modern incarnation. Here it is in a 16th-century book of proverbs: “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?” The idea, then, is that once you have eaten your cake, you can no longer continue to possess it; that is, sometimes you are forced to choose between two irreconcilable options.

In France, the approximately equivalent idiom is vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre which I have seen translated as “to want the butter and the money from the butter”  – confusingly. What does "from the butter" mean? (I suspect the intervention of an abused dictionary, as 'du' can (sometimes) mean 'from [the]'). But this is the translation that Professor Horobin uses, although I imagine he's not the original dictionary-abuser – rather that he knows French and overlooked the inadequacy of the translation.

What English does for this sort of "de" is that it simply prepends the beneficiary/recipient: e.g. "dinner money", "fag packet" ... L'argent du beurre is "the butter money" or, if you like, "the money reserved/designated/intended... to pay for the butter", or, more briefly (but rather clumsily), "the money for the butter".  For, at  a push, but not From ". The money from the butter" could be used if somebody were selling the butter.

Which brings us to the afterthought sometimes added to intensify Vouloir le beurre et l'argent du beurre ...: et le sourire de la crémière. The crémière does perhaps collect "the money from the butter". This intensifier was presumably the source  of  the Luxembourg Prime Minister's: “They want to have their cake, eat, and get a smile from the baker.”

<hat_tip>
This is a pretty impressive bit of linguistic pyrotechnics  – not so much L1-interference  as L1-interpretation or just L1-riffing; he even adds "get" where the French model has no verb, and then changes the supplier appropriately. And all in a second (or even possibly third) language.
</hat_tip>

Another culinary metaphor to receive a new lease of life from Brexit is cherry-picking. This can be understood in one of two ways: either picking dessert cherries from a mixed fruit-bowl (not a way I've ever seen cherries served),  or – greedily and selfishly – picking a glacé cherry from the top of a bun/cake,  and thus unknowingly but carelessly marking the residual carbs as tainted. Or maybe, now I think of  it, the image evokes someone viewing a bowl of cherries and picking the ripest.

I'm not sure I buy everything Professor Horobin says. For example, I don't think even he believes it when he says 'The belief that the mouth was designed principally for its consumption is suggested by the slang term “cake-hole.”'. "Designed principally"...? Does he know what principally means?   But his blog is worth a read. And when he points to "with a cherry on top" as a possible intensifier to "the icing on the cake" I'm reminded of that crémière (whose smile is used to intensify the beurre metaphor).

b

PS: A couple of clues:

• Championship is moreish in a sense. (8)
• Orchestral manœuvres after withdrawal of leftist extremists before Part Three finale, Nijinsky, for example. (9)

A mole by any other name

Last week MrsK tried a new recipe for something called Turkey Mole. I had never met the word mole in a culinary context – though the fact that one of the ingredients was chocolate should have alerted me to the likelihood of a South American origin.

New words are like buses, you spend years not meeting a word and then two come along at once. In Saturday's Times Giles Coren  was reviewing a restaurant specializing in Mexican food, and he mentioned that one of the dishes came with a mole. I knew what it was,  just-in-time,  and tried to find other related words. Staying in South America, guacamole is a sort of mole – so there was another mole, hiding in plain sight.

Could this be related to our molars – the grinding teeth? Everyday English doesn't have any other word that preserves the "o" in a grinding word (as do Spanish and Italian [moler/molere] and no doubt many others. In French, it's become "ou" in moulin (and even the most monoglottally Anglophone will have met this in the trade-name  Moulinex). In English and German, different leaves of the PIE tree, we have mill and Mühle.

<digression>
Another way of smashing things up to release the flavour (apart from grinding, that is) is pounding or crushing, and words related to that are derived from the Latin pestare. The most obvious derivative from this is pesto, made with a pestle. This shows how a word that refers to a process can come to be used to refer to a sauce made with that process.
</digression>

Detail of the image in that video

But let's look more closely at that derivation of guacamole.   I knew before that avocado, the main constituent of  guacamole, is nothing to do with the similar-looking advocacy. Rather, it derives from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl (Nahuatl being the language spoken by the Aztecs).

<scatological_digression>
Watch the video here  to see that avocado means testicle – presumably because of the way they hang.
</scatological_digression>

But I had no idea until the last weekend in February that the "guaca-" of guacamole derived from ahuacatl.  Etymonline says:

So, it all looks pleasingly neat: Sp. moler, Pg moer, It. molere, Prov. molre, Cat. modre. Eng. mill, Ger. Mühle, Nahuatl molli ...{?} Hang on though, not so fast. Why should the language of the Aztecs (which pre-dates the Spanish which didn't begin to taint it until the late 15th century)  have anything to do with a PIE language? This is inviting further investigation, though I suspect the seeming relatedness between words to do with grinding (which on the analogy of pesto can  be used to refer to a sauce made with that process) and the Nahuatl molli is illusory and accidental. Shame....  Very probably molli has as much to do with grinding as ahuacatl has to do with advocacy.

b

PS – A couple of clues:

• Bi-polar longing to spill the beans. (6)
• Deserving opprobrium about sort of tail wrapped round first of belligerents. (13)
  

Update: 2018.06.04.12:05 – Added PPS

PPS
The answers: SNITCH and REPREHENSIBLE.

The law of accumulating returns

Agonists and antagonists – things have an evil anti-thing;

<ipa_joke origin="tweeted once, but never caught on">
Jim Al-Kalili's anti-person would be "Midge Acid-id". Midge/Jim isn't an obvious pair, but /mɪʤ/ versus /ʤɪm/ looks a lot better.
</ipa_joke>

This site explains "the expanding sphere of radio signals traveling outward from the earth":

As depicted in the beginning of the movie ‘Contact’, the earth has an expanding ‘bubble’ of man-made radio signals expanding outward at the speed of light. The first of these early radio transmissions were short range experiments that used simple clicks and interrupts to show transmission of information in the 1890s. In 1900, Reginald Fessenden made the first — though incredibly weak — voice transmission over the airwaves. The next year saw a step up in power as Guglielmo Marconi made the first ever transatlantic radio broadcast.

This means that at 110 light-years away from earth — the edge of a radio ‘sphere’ which contains many star systems — our very first radio broadcasts are beginning to arrive. At 74 light-years away, television signals are being introduced. Star systems at a distance of 50 light-years are now entering the ‘Twilight Zone’.

But hold on to that Twilight.  "Rage against the dimming of the light" – the Lichterdãmmerung. That site goes on:

As radio signals leave earth, they propagate out in a wave form. Just like dropping a stone in a lake, the waves diffuse or “spread out” over distance thanks to the exponentially larger area they must encompass. The area can be calculated by multiplying length times width which is why we measure it in square units – square centimeters, square miles, etc. This means that the further away from the source, the more square units of area a signal has to ‘illuminate’.

Another way to think of it, is that the strength of a radio signal will be only 1/4 as great once you are twice the distance from the source. At ten times the distance, the strength of the signal would only be one hundredth as great.

Because of this inverse square law, all of our terrestrial radio signals become indistinguishable from background noise at around a few light-years from earth.

Of course, the Inverse Square Law works in both directions The Cosmic Microwave Background radiation didn't start life as, say, I Love Lucy, but by the time it reaches us it doesn't have a very high signal-to-noise ratio; my guess is that it's 0, as near as dammit.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is thought to be leftover radiation from the Big Bang, or the time when the universe began. As the theory goes, when the universe was born it underwent a rapid inflation and expansion. (The universe is still expanding today, and accelerating for unknown reasons). The CMB represents the heat left over from the Big Bang.

Source

An image of the cosmic microwave background radiation, taken by the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Planck satellite in 2013, shows the small variations across the sky

Credit: ESA/Planck Collaboration

That space.com account goes on:

... the CMB was first found by accident. In 1965, two researchers with Bell Telephone Laboratories (Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson) were creating a radio receiver, and were puzzled by the noise it was picking up. They soon realized the noise came uniformly from all over the sky. At the same time, a team at Princeton University (led by Robert Dicke) was trying to find the CMB. Dicke's team got wind of the Bell experiment and realized the CMB had been found.

Both teams quickly published papers in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965, with Penzias and Wilson talking about what they saw, and Dicke's team explaining what it means in the context of the universe. (Later, Penzias and Wilson both received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics).

A year after the Nobel Prize was awarded, I also found something by accident, and it has a strangely metaphorical relevance (to signals being broadcast rather than those received).

<autobiographical_note>
I was on holiday in the Pelopponese,  in the then only slightly developed fishing village of Tolo. (For some reason Wikipedia says "in Katharevousa known as Tolon [Τολόν]" – as though that purifying semi-artificial language were unique in using case-endings.

<ducking_and_covering>
I suppose that "semi- artificial" may raise a few hackles. Do put me straight if I have wronged the Wikipedi-scribe.
</ducking_and_covering>

The village is on a tiny coastal strip. There were no big hotels at the time, and the roof of the sea-front taverna I was staying in had views  in one direction of the Aegean and in the other of the range of mountains (or rather, hills –  but quite rugged ones) that constituted that Pelopponesian finger.

Early one morning, before even the squid-basher had started his daily tenderizing tattoo, I walked up the hill to try to make sense of Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn"; of course, in order to see the sunrise I had to get away from sea-level.

At the top of the hill I was indeed surprised, but in a bad way. Beyond the skyline (tourist-line, perhaps) was a tip – thousands of binbags and plastic bottles, the waste-matter of a few years' tourism (as tourism was a relatively new import at the time). I touched on this plastic time-bomb here.)

(I never did get to the bottom of that "rosy-fingered" thing).
</autobiographical_note>

Like that careless and improvident excretion of rubbish out of sight. our growing sphere of spent radio signals is a sign of our disruptive presence. And if we are really to take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints we need to find a way of catching our radio-frequency detritus before it makes more of a mess. Perhaps Elon Musk could take a break from wantonly adding to space pollution (see where that roadster is here if you must) and turn his mind to the problem of making money somehow by clearing up after 20^th and 21^st century technology's messes.

b
 PS And here are a few clues:

• Lack of viciousness characteristic of  this sort of apprentice.(6)
  
• Solitary predatrix's loss of second ring underlines her lack of team-mates. (10)
  
• Getting the better of, with redoubled energy, is source of shock. (8)
  

Update 2018.06.25.10:15 – Added PPS, and new diagram.

PPS: The answers: NOVICE,, LONELINESS and BEESTING.

A participle is not a particle

Play. That‘s what it means:  

Press this to make the thing play. 

Similarly, Pause:

Press this to make the thing pause.

That's the way  it's been since the dawn of ti... technology (the 20th-century sort, that is: specifically, audio equipment). But globalization has undermined these comfortable certainties.

I have an MP3 player, characterized by the typical uselessness of its user "manual" (which is at least stapled together in the form of a book, better than the many self-styled "manuals" I've had to grapple with – often just a single sheet of A4). Like many bits of technical wizardry, it seems to have been generated by engineers who felt that their brainchild needed no written support.

<autobiographical_note>
Many an engineer thinks this, mutatis mutandis. I remember a conversation I had  with a Software Engineer more than 30 years ago, shortly after I started work with the Digital Equipment Corporation as a Technical Editor. He was trying to work out just what Technical Writers did (at the time I was at one remove from that, but if he could only get to grips with what Writers did he could then see what I did).  I  said things about making information clear and consistent and with repetition only when appropriate, and he raised an eyebrow and said "What, like the comments we put in our code?"

Self-documenting software has long been the Holy Grail of Software  Engineers, but the final and most insuperable obstacle is the ego of the creator: 

My stuff is self-evidently Good.

</autobiographical_note>

But this MP3 player had more than the lack of documentation to overcome; and  it wasn't just the infelicity of  the  "translation". Its problem is incorporated into the GUI ...

<buzzword>
That's Graphic User Interface. Most of us see them  regularly on the screens of PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The engineer who designed it may well not have known he (she? – I wonder whether female engineers are as rare in China [that's where it's from] as they are in the West) was using one at all. But the device has functions, and controlling those functions involves manipulating icons. So there's a GUI.
</buzzword>

...itself.

Which brings us to those particles (mentioned in my subject-line). Chinese has a funny way with verbs. It doesn't inflect  them. But it achieves a fully nuanced set of what I can only metaphorically describe as "verb forms" (more accurately, syntactical constructs that give context to verbal ideas). And one of the syntactical devices Chinese languages use is particles. So whereas most Western languages have participles, Chinese doesn't. Particle is a near-miss, orthographically, but unrelated.

So there's no one-word translation of Playing or of Paused – which, confusingly, are what those "universal" music-playing symbols mean on my MP3 player: the little right-pointing triangle means Playing (that is, the precise opposite* of Play), and the middle-less "H" means Paused (again, the precise opposite* of what it seems to promise). And it's specifically (usually, impossibly) a one-word translation that a user of a second language wants.

"One-word translation" – so often a mythical beast, but still believed in by so many.

b

PS: A couple more clues:

• Vegan embracing angry (upset) one of less extreme practise (10)
  
• The end of a tournament to waste away (7)
  

Update: 2018.02.13.16:10 – Added footnote.

*This phrase is open to misinterpretation. Playing is not  the opposite of Play in the same  way that black is the opposite of white, or true is the opposite of false. In this context I just mean Making it start as the opposite of  Making it pause.

Update: 2018.08.15.16:00 – Added PPS

The answers to those clues: VEGETARIAN ,  ATROPHY

Update: 2019.01.40.08:55 – Added PPPS

Just when you thought this post was finished, I've noticed another misconstruing, in this player's GUI, of a participle. It has a function that lets you lock the dial; after you've done it (that is, when it's locked) the display shows a little locked padlock. Fair enough.  But the text tells a different story: LOCK, it says. Similarly, when you have unlocked it there's a picture of an opened padlock. Again, fair enough. But the caption says UNLOCK.

Pedigree collapse

The other day my eye was caught by a BBC report:

Boris Johnson 'is descendant' of mummified Basel woman

more  here

Well GOLLY, I thought. A while ago More or Less dealt with a similar issue; in fact, the event was so Earth-shattering that Google will find it with the string Dyer Edward III.  1,560,000 hits. The Great Relatedness to Edward II Factoid leaves our Danny having to "take a moment" while the stupendousness (banality?) of the discovery sinks in. (Not quite banality – but what was extraordinary was not that he was a descendant: [after all, most people of English heritage are] but that his heritage could be documented.)

So when I heard about  the good woman of Basel's mummy I was underwhelmed. Huh, I scoffed, aren't we all descended from her? Well no; I had failed to consider the difference between the two cases: two or three centuries on the one hand, as opposed to  six or seven  – to give the Factors-of-2 magic its chance.

I was not the only sceptic. Stephen Fry tweeted:

But his tweet was met by a flurry of corrections (rebuttwals?): GNEURR Mr Smartypants Fry <eye-roll>, haven't you heard of pedigree collapse?






Nor had I. Fortunately, last week's More or Less explained (about 18 minutes in). Taking advantage, I guess, of  Stephen Fry's presence in Wogan House (or wherever) mentioned in this tweet...

 ⇒

... Tim Harford recorded a request from the genial polymath (from about 20'20") and went on to explain.


In his extreme case, if a man marries his sister they share a single maternal great grandmother (not four, as unrelated people have). Of course, very few of Edward III's descendants went in for this degree of inbreeding, but the general case is clear: the closer the consanguinity, the fewer the maternal great grandparents. This pedigree shows how 1st cousins marrying share only three maternal great grandparents.

When 1st Cousins M and F Marry

<digression>

This reminds me of the issue of pedigree's pedigree ... Hmm... [See PPS]

</digression>

But I'm missing this week's More or Less.

b

PS: A couple of clues:

• I will do it again (despite this key skills deficit). (10)
  
• Do they turn up trousers before droning on?. (8)
  

Update: 2018.02.05.12:30 – Added PPS on pedigree's pedigree

PPS  – As prefigured in my last digression., I've been looking into the derivation of pedigree. The version I was told 40+ years ago, and still favoured by many authorities (including the OED and Etymonline – but not having the wholesale  support of some current scholars ...

<example_scepticism source="Anatoly Liberman">
This offering from the OUPblog asks Does the current etymology of pedigree [pied de grue] have a leg to stand on?
</example_scepticism>

... ) is pied de grue. As Etymonline says

pedigree (n.)

early 15c., "genealogical table or chart," from Anglo-French pe de gru, a variant of Old French pied de gru "foot of a crane," from Latin pedem accusative of pes "foot" (from PIE root *ped- "foot") + gruem

According to this derivation, the pun with degree (in the sense of descent) was a happy accident of Middle English.

To quote that OUPblog again

In 1895 Charles Sweet, the brother of the famous Henry Sweet, and Round put forward the same explanation: according to them, the mark used in old pedigrees had the shape of a so-called broad arrow, that is, a vertical short line and two curved ones radiating from a common center, like three toes of a crane’s foot, with an allusion to the branching out of the descendants from the paternal stock.

So the jury's still out.

What we do know is that English crane and French  grue are related. Etymonline's entry for crane says:

Old English cran "large wading bird," common Germanic (cognates: Old Saxon krano, Old High German krano, German Kranich...from PIE *gere-no-, suffixed form of root *gere- (2) "to cry hoarsely," also the name of the crane (cognates: Greek geranos, Latin grus, Welsh garan, Lithuanian garnys "heron, stork"). Thus the name is perhaps an echo of its cry in ancient ears...

But what bothers me is this statememt from  the same entry:

Metaphoric use for "machine with a long arm" is first attested late 13c. (a sense also in equivalent words in German and Greek)...

And in French of course .  Scholars who question the crane's foot derivation of pedigree seem to be very concerned about the vowel: Isn't degree a more likely root for pedigree, preserving the /i:/ of degree? They seem to overlook the fact that the tongue positions for English /i:/ and French /y/ are very similar (if not identical –  many a language teacher uses this device for teaching /y/: Get ready to whistle and try to say /i:/); the main difference is in the lip-rounding.

OK, crane and grue are related. But if the first attested version of the lifting machine  dates from the 13th century, who thought of the metaphor first? Or is this a case of "convergent etymology".  Either an English builder thought

Pierre has named this machine after a bird that stands on one leg. That‘s a good idea. I‘ll do the same. Right, this hitherto unnamed device, which he calls une grue will henceforth be a crane. 

Or a French builder thought

Les Rozbifs ont donné à cette machine le nom d‘un oiseau qui se tient d‘une seule jambe. Formidable. Je ferai également. D‘accord: d‘ici en avant ce truc sans nomme, nommé outre-manche a crane sera une grue.

Well, no, that‘s silly. It‘s hard to imagine how people felt about language in the 13th century, when French, Latin, and English vied for... no, even that is an over-simplification. There was no "vying";  people just used whatever communication mode was suitable. And on a 13-century building site, with rulers setting impossible deadlines...

<Building_Times date="1250">
"I want a cathedral here in two years".  

"But sire, there  are not enough stone-masons in all Anglia."  

"Then get some from Francia. Two years I said.")
</Building_Times>

...the linguistic picture would have been very fluid.

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Update: 2018.06.18.11:40 – The answers at last: ILLITERATE and WINDBAGS