The lesser of the two weevils

The Académie Française takes a dim view of écriture inclusive – the proposed script reform that attempts to make French gender-neutral in spite of itself. The Times last week referred to a "mid punctuation  point", a glyph that French keyboards are soon to include. And they gave as an example cher⋅e⋅s ami⋅e⋅s [HD: their impoverished fonts presumably don't go as far as an è]. You can sidestep the Infernal Firewall by looking at this Indie article.

Their one English academician, Sir Michael Edwards, calls the result "gibberish"  – missing the point rather  (écriture – the clue's in the name); I don't think the words with the mid punctuation point are supposed to be read aloud – any more than the solidus is supposed to be read aloud in our "his/her". It just lets the reader's mind skip over the gender variation without missing a beat. So when the university of Nancy addressed imminent graduates as Futur⋅e⋅s diplômé⋅e⋅s it was simply doing them the courtesy of accepting that they might be of either gender, rather than, as heretofore, even in a class of 99 diplômées and a single diplômé, addressing them all as men.

<silly_aside>
Perhaps those more sexist times should be evoked as "as hisetofore". He is certainly to the fore.
</silly_aside>

One sententious self-important windbag, the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, speaking on Europe 1 Radio, denounced it as "an attack on syntax by egalitarianism". 

<observation>
Generally, I've noticed that people who complain about "an attack on <abstract_noun>" tend to be blowhards.
</observation>

But language  is pretty insidious stuff. George Orwell (pace David Crystal, as I've said before) was right on the money when he warned about the influence of language on political power; Big Brother and Donald Trump have a lot in common: if something you want to be true isn't, say it is and keep saying it. If the existence of someone in history doesn't suit your politics, make them an unperson; people will stop talking about them if their identity has been erased... If you want to change a social reality, changing language is a good place to start.

And one system that has been thriving for millennia is the undervaluing and belittling of women. Which brings us to another topic (which turns out to be part of the same story). Harvey Weinstein got away with his pitiful predatory behaviour for so long because the system facilitated it; a pretty significant part of that system (hmm, "significant"... What would de Saussure have to say about that?) is language. If you want to excuse or ignore something, hide it behind a jokey euphemism, like 'casting couch', say. Many a protégée turns out to have been a victime. Disrespecting women ...

<tangent>
Incidentally, I was surprised to learn from Etymonline that "disrespect (v)" pre-dates "disrespect (n)":

1610s (v.), 1630s (n.), from dis- + respect. Related: Disrespected; disrespecting.

Just because I met the noun first, just because I heard the verb as a bit of a newcomer, I assumed the noun had greater "validity" in some way (not a way that a linguist should take any pride in). Of course, 20 years one way or the other in a word that goes back about 400 years is neither here nor there. But still...
</tangent>

...is something that involves language, and the language of patriarchy (at best – a more appropriate word escapes me at the moment, that's the thing about something being unspeakable) underpins the male-dominated status quo, not only in La La Land but...well, just about everywhere.

And physical assault is just the tip of the iceberg – the visible loathsomeness that is supported by a raft of tiny acts of disrespect. The other night I saw a repeat on BBC 4 of a programme made nearly ten years ago – a fascinating account of where we come from (<spoiler alert>: out of Africa) . Dr Alice Roberts was treated to this amazing exchange (about 16 minutes in to The Incredible Human Journey):

REWOP from The Incredible Human Journey

Woman:
That's like a little spearhead.

Man:
Yes that's exactly what it is. We think it's actually the ... [looking for the right word, to avoid blowing her little mind with the AWESOMENESS of his findings]  ...TIP to a ...SPEAR.

Perhaps I'm being over-sensitive here; perhaps there was no slight. Almost certainly there was no slight intended. (They were two specialists, repeating something for the benefit of a less well-informed public.) But it just felt a bit patronizing to me.

It was 20-odd years ago that English-speaking female actors started to complain about the term actress. A Quora article, basing its conclusion on the Guardian's archives, said

In 1994, the word actress appears 1150 times in the Guardian, and actor appears 2418 times, so about 2:1.

In 2003 the word actress appears 1173 times in the Guardian, and actor appears 3948 times, so about 4:1. That dates the change to 10-20 years ago.

although AMPAS (as the Oscar-dispensing organization is called – not without irony ...impasse?)  has yet to catch up. But if actors in France want to be addressed as act⋅eur⋅rice⋅s what's the problem? OK, it looks a bit ugly; but there are worse things.

b

Update: 2017.10.17.15:50 – Added PS

PS – And here are a few clues:

• I‘m muscular (or perhaps something like it). (10)
• Editing...editing.., until smoke began to rise? (7)
• Trees that bear fir cones. (8)

Update: 2017.12.31.15:35 – PPS added.

PPS: The answers: SIMULACRUM, IGNITED, and CONIFERS – (which, last, may have taken as long as 5 μs to get).

'I'm in a bit of a rush' said Tom...

... Swiftly. <bou_boum_and_indeed_tsh>

The topic of Tom Swifties was broached in this week's Museum of Curiosity (starting at about 14'30"). The Tom Swifty is an amusing ... form (I nearly wrote "art form", but to say that would be to depend on an overly etymological understanding of the word art; wordsmithery would be nearer the mark).

This mention of Tom Swifties reminded me of  an online community I used to be a part of. It was based on a 1980s bulletin board system – ahead of its time (in those days) called variously Notes, Notes 11, VAX NOTES, and ultimately (marking DEC‘s nod to UNIX – ULTRIX) DEC Notes.

The halcyon days of NOTES are detailed in an article published in Knowledge Management magazine (which explains the abbreviation used in the text – KM). It's pretty long, but this gives a flavour:

...The ability to find a subject matter expert quickly and get the answer to a question or assistance in solving a problem, is a key KM priority. It saves time (and money), enhances customer relationships and ensures that knowledge transfer happens to the right person at the right time. And yet we also know that tools are not the whole answer. Even the best tools will not give you a return on investment unless the employees of the company are committed to helping one another.


Employees of Digital Equipment Corporation worked in an environment that got this combination of technology and culture about right, back in the 1980s. The technology was a simple collaboration tool called Notes... that ran on Digital’s worldwide network, supported by the company’s VAX/VMS... software development tools group. Among the people who worked at Digital during that time, the nostalgia for that tool and the culture it enabled (and that enabled its success) assumes Camelot-esque proportions.

More here

<historical_aside>
Notes was what in Reading UK was known as a midnight hack, and in the USA a skunk-works project (done in the engineers' "own" time – not that they had any [in the eyes of the corporate lawyers: the contract of employment was referred to by one wag as "a certificate of brain donation" my own very late name for it – the staircase for this bit of esprit has been grinding away {must have been an escalator} for about thirty years – is a writ of HABEAS MENTEM]). It was a vehicle of creative collaboration between users of DECnet (the internal network used by over 100,000 employees).

<autobiographical_note>
The midnight hacking did not stop with DECnotes. In the mid-'90s a US engineer (whose name escapes me) wrote a PC client to run on Windows NT (maybe other flavours of Windows too); this was just a client – the server ...

<explanation type="more egg-sucking">
At the time (and possibly even now...yes) the client/server model was a common and very useful system for designing software. We normal punters usually aren't aware of it – anything we get to use is a client. But if you use an app on your mobile phone you already know what a client looks like. The server is the beefy code running somewhere Out There, supplying services as required by the many clients.
</explanation>

...still had to run on a VAX or ULTRIX machine.  I wrote the online help for this client (volunteering, of course, in a way that exemplified that ability to find a subject matter expert quickly – through Notes).

I don‘t know if  later, in the unfortunate but inevitable jargon, this PC client was productized.
<autobiographical_note>

I was told that the Project Manager wanted to enhance it so that it could handle, in addition to text, all sorts of other media. Her bosses said No, she took the idea to Lotus, and the rest is herstory.  I can't vouch absolutely for this story, though this extract from a user suggests that it might be true:

Len Kawell wrote Notes-11 (his LinkedIn profile says that this work was done “in his spare time”) and later worked with Ray Ozzie on Lotus Notes. Notes-11 was then taken on by Benn Schreiber and Peter Gilbert as a “skunk works” project within DEC Central Engineering and resulted in VAX Notes

More here  (my emphasis)

Anyway, apart from being used for work-based collaboration, there were Notes files devoted to leisure interests. As that memoir goes on to say, 

...[I]n August 1989, some 10,355 VAX Notes conferences were active inside DEC, 390 of which were dedicated to employee interests such as “Good restaurants in the South of France”...

One of these employee-interest conferences was called JOYOFLEX, and harboured various sorts of discussion about language. A note in this conference was my introduction to Tom Swifties.
</historical_aside>

The Tom Swifties in this note had a twist: the punchline had to be the name of a language (but after a few weeks some latitude came into it – a contribution of mine, referring to the UNIX variant SCO and the name of the dialect spoken in Liverpool, was "'I prefer UNIX' said Tom, a Scouser". No...? SCO-user. Ah well. Some fell on stony ground. This one's less contrived: "Pass me the f...ing spanner' he called in French."

The idea of the Tom Swifty, at the time, was new to me. I expected that by the time I had got it (it wasn't very fully explained, as US-based employees already had the necessary cultural background), the well would have run dry  –  after maybe a dozen or so replies. But, rather like the holiday experience of Jack Waley-Cohen on Museum of Curiosity, the idea smouldered away for weeks, amassing eventually several hundred replies.

The memory stirred up by that programme was of my favourite (though I say it as shouldn't – TISIAS)

"'Just because the bread-mix is too dry, 

surely the recipe didn't say to do that' 

he said in Indo-European".

b

Cultural metaphor

Earlier this week, on the first of Robert McCrum's Shakespeare and the American Dream  (well worth a listen), the presenter allowed through a reference that didn't work, at first sight (hmm... on first hearing), on radio but was repaired by the context (eventually). But I didn't need that contextual clue, as I know Robert. He was interviewing James Shapiro about the importance of Shakespeare to the USA, and Shapiro described a temporary army posting in the 1840s, where to  maintain morale in a hole (I think that was the word Shapiro used) ...

<digression>
in Corpus Christi, Texas (which shares its name, coincidentally, with the place where I met (and was directed by in a stage version of Alice in Wonderland) the aforementioned interviewer
 </digression>

... the army diverted themselves by putting on a production of Othello (a fairly bold choice, in Texas at  that time). The original casting of the soldier playing Desdemona was obviously ridiculous, said Shapiro. "He was your size – too big to play Desdemona." The replacement for the part was a young Ulysses S. Grant.

Viva Verdi

I made a note of this, meaning at some stage to write about this sort of cultural metaphor, but the only other example that came to mind at the time was Verdi's Nabucco, with its Hebrew Slaves chafing at their subjugation  – famously echoing the feeling of the Italian peoples (there being no country of that name at the time, except when used as "a geographical expression"  [Metternich, I think: Wikipedia would know]). Instead of Va pensiero sull' alle dorati (that chorus) the Italian nationalists could proclaim Viva VERDI (privately [and subversively] knowing that the composer's name was an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele, Rei D' Italia). (This is covered in the English Wikipedia entry for the composer; but in the Italian version there is a whole article (admittedly not a  long one) dedicated just to this phrase: Viva Verdi.)

But the very next day, on Midweek, I heard Daniel Evans talking about how his work on The Full Monty in Sheffield (losing its steel-based industries with associated unemployment and social disruption) was  redolent of what happened to the Rhondda when he was a boy. His latest venture, Showboat is itself a piece that opened people's eyes to an issue that at the time (of its first performance) was not discussed in polite society. And it went straight for the jugular, in the first word. It's a word that is one of the last taboos, timorously hiding behind its initial. In later versions it was attenuated (to "Darkies all work on the Mississippi" I think) and when Francis Albert covered it he sang "HERE we all work...". Oscar Hammerstein, someone mentioned on this morning's programme, was using Showboat to investigate his own feelings about racial tensions and miscegenation.

I seem to remember, from background information picked up during my A-level exposure to L'Etranger, that Camus'  La Peste was really about Vichy France, the body politic being infected by Nazism. In fact it's generally true that opposition to repressive/totalitarian regimes is not infrequently expressed through works of art that use this sort of cultural metaphor. And the more I think about it the more examples spring to mind. But it's late and I must get this Out There while it's still hot (and before I think of any more).

b
PS Here are a couple more clues:

Six-footers and over involving last of many quantity surveyors (8)

Rival bench in turmoil following leader of opposition's sign of peace. (5,6)



Update 2016.04.22.16:45 – Added PPS:

PS A striking part of the McCrum programme was the statement that American  readers regarded Shakespeare as belonging in some way to them, whereas over here we think he's ours  – though I should tread carefully here, given these Blogger stats for visits to this blog: the lower extract shows all-time visits, and the one on the right shows visits in the last month – suggesting a pretty constant 3:1 bias:

This is a point that David Crystal makes in his Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation:

The forms of English spoken around the world often include traces of regional and/or dialectal morphology, phonology, lexis – all that good stuff – of the British-born speakers who emigrated hundreds of years ago.  As the note to that Crystal extract says:

This PPS has been for the most part a digression, so I'll wrench it back to my main point (about cultural  metaphors). It's not just Othello and race that is particularly relevant in the USA. Internecine conflict (that's Civil War in Newspeak) make all the "Wars of the Roses" plays apt. Besides, we are talking about  myriad-minded man (Coleridge I think, but showing off his Greek) so all Shakespeare's output is relevant. But OP makes it more so.

Update 2016.04.23.15:30 – Shakespearean PPPS

PPPS It is ironic that an article in today's Times, dealing with misattribution conspiracies, participated – in an off-hand and unknowing way – in a related misattribution. A caption to two pictures of people who've had Shakespeare's works attributed to them referred to THAT portrait of "Marlowe" (cropped so as to hide the writing that points the finger of blame).

The Pseudo-Marlowe portrait: 
a wish fulfilled

In an article with that title , published posthumously in The Letter (published annually by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge – No. 93) the late Professor Oliver Rackham wrote:

I'm tempted to observe, in the words of some Elizabethan hack

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

Update 2016.11.22.14:05 –  Added PPS

PPS Answers: TALLYMEN; OLIVE BRANCH

On lines and slopes

I keep hearing, on weather reports, '... isobars close together, so high winds...'. And this reminds me of my short membership of the Meteorology Club

<autobiographical_note>
In 1964-65 – spanning the end of the Lower VI and the beginning of the Upper VI [the UCCA season, during which 17-18 year-olds created a cv that might interest a university admissions officer –  UCCA being the forerunner of UCAS] of the founder cum chairman cum <you-name-it> Edmund Nickless; we lesser mortals, in short trousers, were just UCCA-fodder.
</autobiographical_note>

One of the few things that stayed with me from that short-lived enthusiasm was the mnemonic "Winds blow from high to low" – a jingle that leads me to  reflect on a metaphor that will mean nothing to millennials (as I gather young whipper-snappers are called nowadays). Poor, deprived, benighted souls; for them, physical maps with contour lines have had their rightful place usurped by the Google Maps Satellite view and various other 3-D displays – available at the touch of a mouse/stylus/finger (in ascending order of hi-techery: O tempora, as I have said before,  O mores the pity.

For them, isobars will just be squiggly lines on weather maps, as long as they remain meaningful to a few grey-beards. Then they'll just be dropped, I shouldn't wonder, and replaced by some other graphic device with a vague meaning something to do with the roughness of the weather.

Chixculub, 261km-162m
(Is God metric? – that anagram
can't be just blind chance.)

But they're quite like inverted contours^*. A depression is marked by isobars that indicate lower pressure as they approach a centre, not unlike the contour lines on a physical map that shows The Devil‘s Punchbowl or, on a larger scale, the Chixculub Crater.

In contrast. a mountain is the analogue of an anti-cyclone, with lines marking progressively higher altitudes as they approach a peak. When contours are closer on a physical map, the slope in the Real World is steeper. A marble dropped at one level will quickly roll down to ground that could be marked by a contour line that indicates a lower level; the steeper the descent, the quicker the marble.

<digression>
In my school we sliced half a potato into smaller and smaller discs, and traced round them to reveal, on our exercise books, the shape of the potato (reduced to two dimensions); magic. But where is the lowly potato in today's geography classes? Maybe geography teachers still use this trick – but they were brought up with physical maps. What will happen when they retire?
</digression>

Similarly, with isobars, winds blow from high to low. Air in a place marked by an isobar flows "down the hill" to a spot marked by a lower-value isobar. But that's not the whole story:  presumably because of the Earth's spin, winds blow around a pressure system. My mnemonic works only in the Northern hemisphere (but, like Newton's physics, it works for me): imagine yourself writing a capital L  –  that's for low pressure; your mental pen travels anti-clockwise, down the upright and along the "foot".

<digression>
And that's another thing. What was the word for clockwise before clocks were invented? Counter-widdershins?
</digression>

For an anti-cyclone you have to take a lower-case ℌ (and a rather florid one); you produce it with two strokes, starting the upright at the base-line and moving clockwise up to the curly top. There, with a rather strained manuscript ℌ, you have your memory aid for wind direction round a high-pressure system. (This trick will only work if as well as living in the Northern Hemisphere you remember the phenomenon of hand-writing.)

Enough of this metaphor. Time for DIY.

b

PS: And here's a crossword clue:

Potential victims surrounding island race - quite attractive. (6)

Update 2015.12.06.18:15 –  Added this footnote:
^*Now I come to think of it, they could be called isoheights; but that would risk confusion with "isohyets" which are already A Thing.

And here‘s another clue:

Marx in reprint at the helm of a chat-show. (5)

Update 2016.01.11.17:15 – Crossword answers: PRETTY and OPRAH (respectively). I thought Oprah was pretty neat, until I saw that I was coming late to the party.

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.

Downtime

The next few weeks will be characterized by English mouths struggling, with varying degrees of success, with Brazilian names. I am not God's gift to Brazilian Portuguese, preferring the Continental sort   

<rantette>
[to the extent of resenting the fact that Brazilians seldom if ever bother with the 'Brazilian' bit, just like their northern cousins who refer to 'football' as if anyone with any goddam nous would know they meant the 'Murrican sort whaddayou crazy if I meant SOCCER that's what I'd say.]
</rantette> 

...

<autobiographical_note date_range="1973">
In Lisbon just before the revolution I was once taken to be a Brazilian. This is not a testament to my fluency in Portuguese, but rather to my height – that and the fact that my grasp of the language was good but tainted with a tendency to give vowels the sounds of their Spanish analogues.^†

<digression>
I was tempted to reinforce this with reference to Wikipedia's comparative chart of national average heights. But I did a bit of digging and found that the apparently magisterial overview hides some pitifully small sample sizes. And of course the dates were relatively recent. What interested me was average heights of young adult males in the early 1970s, and I could find no online source of that sort of observation.
</digression>

</autobiographical_note>

... but there's one among these grapplings with  'problem sounds' that I find particularly irksome: the many and various attempts at the diphthong ão. Gone are the days of Falcão, who dominated the mid-field in the '80s and '90^‡‡; but São Paulo will always be with us. And what's a British commentator to do with this outlandish sound. 'I mean, really, we have nothing like it in English!'

Of course we do, although if you're hung up on orthography – or 'spelling' as we used to say – you're unlikely to notice it. Nasalized vowels are not phonemic in English; that is, you can't change the meaning of a syllable by making the vowel nasal (diverting the air so that instead of coming out of the mouth [or buccal tract] it comes out of the nose). This doesn't mean that no part of any vowel in English can be nasalized; and when a nasal consonant (/n/, /m/, or /ŋ/) follows a vowel it is not humanly possible to avoid adding some nasality to itthat vowel.

Take a word like downtime. Because of the way it's spelt it's hard to avoid believing that it is made up of the sounds /daʊn/ and /taɪm/. But think about what happens where the two syllables meet. The airstream is directed up and through the nose. Meanwhile the tip of the tongue is resting behind the dental ridge (where it is to form an /n/). To form the /t/ it has to start in the same position. Air pressure builds up behind that closure, and then explodes forwards as the closure is released; that's why linguists call /t/ a plosive.

But before the release, the closure isn't complete. In making the /n/ the speaker  has left a way through the nose for the 'buzzing' sound. In other words, the /aʊ/ vowel is being nasalized. Normally, when pronouncing the syllable /daʊn/, the speaker releases the /n/. When it's followed immediately by a plosive that uses the same tongue position though, the release often doesn't happen. So the /n/ in downtime isn't realized as an [n]; it's realized as the nasalization of the previous vowel.

Returning at last to our football commentators, they have no need to regard that ão as outlandish. Granted, the vowel sound itself,  before nasalization, is not exactly the same; but it's close enough. We can make a passable attempt at that Brazilian ão without straying from known English sounds: take a word like downtime^‡ and say the first syllable only (taking care not to release the /n/). [This is reminiscent of my zloty-story, I've just realized. Our minds are quite accustomed to instructing our vocal equipment to make 'outlandish' sounds, phonemic in other languages – it's just that we've learnt not to hear them (as a necessary part of becoming native-speakers of English).]

b

Update 2014.06.12.22:45 – Small tweak to clarify 'it'.

Update 2014.06.13.09:45 – Added this note:
^† Last night in Brazil there was a TV interview that provided a good example of this difference between Continental and Brazilian Portuguese. A demonstrator was reporting something that had happened to a professor – with three clear vowels. In Continental Portuguese this would have only two syllables, and the first would not have an [o].

Update 2014.06.14.22:25 – Added this note:
^‡ I have used this example in the past to help students to get to grips with name of the wine Dão. In the context provided by São Paulo, a word like 'sounding' would be more appropriate. The argument is, mutatis mutandis, the same.

Update 2014.06.27.17:05 – Added this note:
^‡‡My mind's ear is dogged by a horribly persistent memory of someone (David Coleman?) calling him /fæl'keɪəʊ/. Oh horror.

Update 2014.06.27.18:30 – Added  coda (in maroon).
(...Updated 2014.06.28.12:30 – Added correction in bold.)