That's that

I have referred many times to the problems thrown up by the relative adjective/pronoun that.

<digression>
Incidentally, this relative  that, though spelt the same as the subordinating conjunction, is phonologically distinct as it's always pronounced /ðæt/: examples – "I want thAt one"; "Don't give me thAt"), with the vowel never reduced to /ə/. The subordinating conjunction is often reduced to /ðət/: examples – "She told me that she had gone" (/ðət/) but "She told me that (/ðæt/) she had gone, not why".  My guess is that the /ðət/ form is the more often used, and that the chief exception is when there's contrastive ...

<aside>
Ho-ho. The infernal machine has given that word a red underline, and helpfully suggested I might mean contraceptive.
</aside>

...stress (as in my second example). Machine-generated speech often gets this wrong. The latest example I've noticed  was in the first of the new series of Ability.
</digression>

I've  mentioned the which/that controversy here :

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth"> 

Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one ... is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom*'s blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.' 

</grammar_point>

And earlier I had written here about the grammatical inflexibility, as a relative, of THAT in contrast to WHO and WHICH:

The mower that is in the garage is red 

The mower thats power source is petrol... 

The mower on that you can sit while mowing...

To sum it up, here's a table: (I'm not proud of the layout, but still...)

Case	THAT	WHO	WHICH
Subject	that	who	which
Object	that	whom (with or without preposition)	which  (with or without preposition)
Possessive	–	whose	whose (a rather old fashioned-sounding borrowing from WHO; most speakers today – especially younger ones – say of which)

This area of syntactical inflexibility  causes much grief. One can forgive Paul McCartney for "this cold and hungry world in which we live in"; in fact for years I gave him the benefit of the doubt and heard it as "... in which we're livin'". But people with a more thoughtful (if less creative) approach to the language are often left with egg on their faces. In a recent BBC News interview Jacob Rees-Mogg said (right at the start of that recording, about 14 seconds in) that "the EU should be careful for what it wishes for".

<possible_extenuation>
When I first heard it on the radio I thought he had just changed horses in mid-stream; the linguist's word for this is anacoluthon (mentioned before in early posts, here for example: the song I  mentioned in the last para of that post starts like this: [to the tune of Anna*, of course] 

Ana... [backing vocals continue: "...coluthon"] 

Is when a sentence starts one way

But then it begins to stray; 

You start out with one sentence structure 

But it's really different 

In the end  

[Some critics may notice that "structure" and "different" don't rhyme; delivery of this non-rhyme is a matter of performance: a degree of self-editing may be suggested.]

). He started out with the Mrs Thistlebottom version ("for what it wishes"), realized it sounded prissy, and went for the more demotic "what it wishes for"; so that what he said was "be careful f... (thinks: "no, that sounds like a caricature of an Old-Etonian prig") what it wishes for". 

But on a second hearing (recycled on the TV news) I decided my initial generosity of spirit was misplaced; he just got it wrong.
</possible_extenuation>

Enough for now.

b

* Incidentally, the attribution of the song to "J.P. McCartney" on that clip is wrong. This track was on the Beatles' first album, before they had settled on their default setting of <all-songs-home-grown>. In fact the idea of singers writing their own songs was so out of the ordinary that the pop media of the early '60s were full of the word "self-penned", new to me at the time (although, as so often with suspected neologisms, it had a long history before the 1960s – more than 100 years, according to Merriam-Webster). Some of their promotional literature at the time gushed  that Lennon and McCartney had written enough new material to keep them in the charts until 1975!!! (HD: as Wikipedia might say, "citation needed").

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)

Watching and seeing

A quick reflection on a quirk of collocation (words that go with each other).

I noticed the other day when my Daughter-in-law-Elect asked  'Have you watched <film_name>?' that here there was a difference between my collocation rules and hers. I  'SEE a film' and 'WATCH a television programme'. I looked in the British National Corpus, and found these results:

watch a film    number of instances:  7

see a film        number of instances: 19

But the sample size is quite small and quite old (100 million words; 1980-93). The larger and more recently-updated Corpus Of Contemporary Anerican (520 million words, 1990-2015)

watch a film    number of instances: 20 (a much smaller proportion)

see a film      number of instances: 61 (a slightly smaller proportion)

But, as we're looking at American usage in the case of COCA, perhaps these figure are more representative:

watch a movie   number of instances:  253

see a movie       number of instances:  293

And they give a much more evenly-balanced picture.

Besides, this generic vocabulary is rather suspect. I thnk it's probably likely that people would say 'I have seen The Magnificent Seven n times' or – to quote a primary school colleague of mine, of dubious taste (and no less dubious veracity) – 'I have seen The Guns of Navarone 15 times.' And I don't see how one could  frame a corpus query in a way that would catch all such collocations.

Perhaps, as the speaker who started this hare was a millennial, as they say, this just indicates the age and movie-consumption mores of the speaker. Whereas I and my contemporaries look on movie-going as going to a (big-screen) show (to see a film), younger speakers are more likely to catch their movies on a smaller screen (and perhaps watch a DVD or something streamed, or whatever these young folks do, m'lud). That could account for the much more even COCA figures.

Anyway, there goes a year of great notability (make that notoriety in some respects). See you on the other side. :-)

b

Update: 2017.01.01.15:00 – Added PS

PS And while we're on the subject of corpora, one of the many retrospective programmes that have been aired in the last week has reminded me of two things:

• Jeremy Corbyn's use of ram-packed
• my response to the question What's wrong with Google as a corpus?

Google reports nearly 17,000,000 results in a search for ram-packed. But Garbage-In-Garbage-Out. Here's BNC's search for *am-packed (as usual, just click on the link and sit back while the corpus does its stuff): spoiler – 21 jam-packed, 1 dream-packed, nothing else.  COCA has a different story: 266 jam-packed, and a single alternative; but that alternative is cram-packed (only three).

Ram-packed is an interestng neologism. It combines the idea of jam-packed with the idea of people being pushed willy-nilly into a carriage. As of 2017, I'd hesitate to call it a word; but that certainly doesn't mean it  will never be . This Google search shows that only 70-odd thousand of those 17 million results link ram-packed with Corbyn. So it's well on the way to... verbitude? Perhaps OED will name it  Word of the Year 2017.

Happy New Year. :-)

The end of the affair (stress on foreign words, part 2)

The other three words I had sur l^ea planche^r (a metaphor that will become relevant in the fulness of time: – avoir du pain  sur l^ea planche^r ≅ have work to do, have one's work cut out  [at the risk of confusing the baker with the tailor]) were

• Medici 
• Wallander
• /`mama/ (more likely /`mʌmʌ/)

Medici

I forget the context; it may have been the first half of a Sky Arts programme about The Eagles. An American referred to someone as "a sort of 20th-century Medici" (a lavish patron of the arts). The nationality is relevant, because I often notice that speakers  of American English tend to be more sympathetic (or even respectful) of foreign words' pronunciation. I imagine this is related to there being so many 1st/2nd/nth-generation immigrants there.

Anyway, he stressed Medici correctly, rather than using the common (British) anglicization Medici. The machine generating the sub-titles really went to town on this one, calling to mind the saying

To err is human, but if you want a real SNAFU use a computer

This latter-day Medici became a meta-chief.

Wallander

I can't work up much enthusiasm to write about this  travesty –  the abuse of word-stress (by several if not all the characters, as well as the BBC continuity people, whom I mistakenly gave the benefit of the doubt) should have warned me not to get my hopes up. There's two hours of my life that I'm not going to get back. For the record, stress is on the second syllable –  but you already knew that, didn't you, from the original sub-titled series.

/`mama/

If I'd seen the word mentioned in the salutation of each of the letters in  Love from Boy: Roald Dahl's Letters to his Mother that Radio 4 serialized recently I wouldn't have suspected an anachronism. Each letter began with what I thought must be 'Dear mama' (given the period and context – pre-war (in the first selection, at least) letters home from a boy at a boarding school). But I did some checking here and found that mamma was indeed stressed on the first syllable; his contemporaries would have written to Dear Mama, but young Roald would indeed have said /`mama/.

L'envoi

But what about that pain sur l^ea planche^r? Well, in last night's Cav&Pag (on BBC 4) I tuned in a bit late. In her intermezzo (as it were), between Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (the new Covent Garden modern-dress production) even the lovely Clemmy made Cavalleria rhyme with the English cafeteria – which was strangely appropriate, as the setting featured a panificio (bakery) .

But what made my metaphor particularly appropriate was that the first scene I saw (tuning in, as I said, a few minutes late) featured Santuzza singing and Lucia kneading dough. It wasn't yet du pain, and it wasn't on a planche^r (which I suppose is the board that a baker loads with loaves before putting a batch in the oven) – rather on some kind of work-surface; close enough, though.

On with the motley, as someone once said.

b

PS
And it's been a while since I gave you a clue.

Withdrew endorsement of researchers first, then called to mind. (7)

PPS
And I almost forgot  this:

Update: 2016.08.26.10:40 – Added PPPS, and added explanatory phrasing (they're not repairs exactly, just avoidance of infelicities) in red.

PPPS OK, time's up on that clue: REVOKED.

Update: 2018.02.15.09:40 – Corrected misremembered idiom (courtesy of Twitter:

)

Making whey (with whetstones?)

Almost a year ago I wrote here about words making way for other words in dictionaries. My use of the evanescent word burgher ...

<digression>
whose evanescence...

<meta_digression>
longtime readers may remember that I wrote here about the inchoative infix -ISC- {with its legacy of  English words that contain the letters 'sc' and have something to do with a  beginning or gradual process}
</meta_digression>

...has been dragged out over more than a century
</digression>

... led me to think, not about words replacing others but words dying out while others become more popular – even though they're completely  unrelated.

<digression>
This happened in the case of let (meaning obstacle), because of a pun caused by the Great Vowel Shift (which led to the words for obstacle – as in without let or hindrance or a let in tennis...

<rantette>
... and gawd 'elp me I'll swing for that tennis commentator who insists on saying "let-cord" (which is, for the record, hyper-correct)...
</rantette>

... and (not because of the vowel this time, but because of RBP's careless conflation of the sounds [w] and [ʍ]* into a single /w/ phoneme) in the case of whet (meaning sharpen).  

* [ʍ] is the "whispered" /w/, sometimes represented  in print as hw – still apparent in the spelling "wh" (making the word whispered strangely appropriate). 

AND I'VE COLOURED IN THIS STACK OF DIGRESSIONS 

TO MAKE IT SLIGHTLY EASIER TO MAKE SENSE OF. 

</digression>

In that blog I wrote of  "the burghers of Ealing"  – which itself seemed rather strange.

<digression>
Incidentally, burghers collocates with the and of about 10 times more frequently than burgher, as this BNC search shows; and for some reason the burghers of Ealing seems much less resonant than the burghers of Hamelin.
</digression>

But while I was looking up the spelling here I glanced down out of interest at the Usage Trends – which made me wonder what occasioned the change. Was the relative neologism burger involved?

The word burger was shortened from hamburger in 1939 – that is, 1939 was the earliest attested usage; it was no doubt gathering a head of steam throughout the inter-war years.

Here is what Etymonline says (about hamburger, as burger just has a terse cross-reference):

hamburger (n.) 

1610s, Hamburger "native of Hamburg." Also used of ships from Hamburg. From 1838 as a type of excellent black grape indigenous to Tyrolia; 1857 as a variety of hen; the meat product so called from 1880 (as hamburg steak), named for the German city, though no certain connection has ever been put forth, and there may not be one unless it be that Hamburg was a major port of departure for German immigrants to United States. Meaning "a sandwich consisting of a bun and a patty of grilled hamburger meat" attested by 1909, short for hamburger sandwich (1902).

So in 1902 hamburger sandwich was attested in American English; and a few years later the unrelated [w e l l... the burg- part of it was, via the placename, but the concepts burger and burgher are unrelated] burgher started to dwindle in  popularity.

Started to dwindle? How do we know? Collins helpfully lets you specify different extents for a word's changing fortunes, and taking the word frequency back another two hundred years we see something of a roller-coaster. The general trend was up throughout those first two centuries, though with many ups and downs; and there was a marked peak at about the turn of the century. But the story has been one of fairly consistent decline throughout the twentieth century and beyond – which I think justifies my use of the word started.

Of course, many other things have changed – politics, various kinds of context... Besides, I am the last (excuse the hyperbole, maybe ante-pre-penultimate) to make the rookie mistake of confusing correlation with causality. And anyway, the slide in frequency was well under way before the abbreviation was coined.. Still, it all strikes me as rather THINGish.

b

How low can you go?

A guest on a recent Midweek was Willard Wigan, the maker of very small sculptures. As his website says

Willard’s micro-sculptures are now so minute that they are only visible through a microscope. Each piece commonly sits within the eye of a needle, or on a pin head. The personal sacrifices involved in creating such wondrous, yet scarcely believable pieces are inconceivable to most. Willard enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat is slowed, allowing him to reduce hand tremors and sculpt between pulse beats. Even the reverberation caused by outside traffic can affect Willard’s work. Consequently, he often works through the night when there is minimal disruption.    

Willard’s artwork has been described by many as “the eighth wonder of the world”.... 

Willard Wigan‘s website

I'm not so sure about the Eighth Wonder thing. My tip for octavio-mirabilitude (I've no idea how English has managed for so long without a word for the quality/fact of being the eighth wonder) is the sculptures that are much smaller than "only visible through a microscope". I'm not sure of the numbers in relation to Willard Wigan's sculptures, but the technique of DNA Origami surely beats them into a cocked hat. In this video the narrator says that her nano models, in comparison with an origami model of about the size of a bag of sugar, had the relative size of a grain of sand to Mt Everest. They are much smaller than simply microscopic. More of this anon, but here's a taster (borrowed from  CAVmag 13 [after a little tweaking]):

And while I'm on the subject of scale,  my latest award of a Tezzy (first mentioned here,  but awarded irregularly several times since to a super-cool(ed?) site – best avoided if you've got a deadline to meet) goes to this. It's similar to an earlier version produced (also by NASA) that  I saw in the closing years of the 20th century (but not, I don't think, as another NASA page says

the most famous short science film of its generation ... Powers of Ten, originally created in the 1960s

).  But it's much cooler, and interactive, and takes only a few seconds to load – well worth the wait.

Wordwatch

This is a new one on me, but maybe it's been part of the jargon of Sales since time immoral.

What's the one thing sales teams generally suck at? Onboarding new sales reps.It isn't anyone's fault, though. It's difficult to nail down an effective onboarding program. According to research firm, TOPO: 72.5% of high growth companies hire sales reps with 0-1 year of experience. 

But most teams don't have an onboarding process. This sets reps up for failure. The sad part is they have the potential to become top performers, but only if they receive proper onboarding...

It seems to mean roughly the same as inducting, but with less strait-laced overtones. The spam that told me about this amazing opportunity linked to this page, which interested parties might want to upfollow.

b

Update 2016.03.09.16:00  – Added this PS:

In the early 1930s Pyotr Kapitsa persuaded his colleague Ernest Rutherford to spend £15,000 of a government grant to build a new laboratory in Cambridge. As the CU Department of Physics website says:

The Laboratory was built in 1933 by the Royal Society for Kapitza to continue his work into intense magnetic fields. During the building work, those passing the lab were surprised to see a figure in a brown monk's habit busily chipping away at the brickwork behind a tarpaulin screen. This was Eric Gill who had been commissioned by Kapitza to carve both a plaque of Rutherford and this Crocodile...

The reason for this, on the face of it, odd choice of subject is a cause for some debate. Everyone agrees that Crocodile was his nickname for Rutherford, but there are various versions of the reason behind it:

..."The Crocodile" [was] Kapitza's pet name for Rutherford, either because of his fear of having his head bitten off by him, or because his voice could be relied upon to precede his visits, just like the crocodile's alarm clock in "Peter Pan".

The first of these is pretty unimaginative; the more literary Peter Pan-based one strikes me as more interesting; and given science students' predilection for cult/fantasy fiction (which Peter Pan may have been at the time), it's the reason I favour.

Anyway, the crocodile sculpture is quite well hidden. In three years living within a quarter of a mile of it (and in two of those years less than half that)   I didn't see it until last Sunday, when I went back to Cambridge to sing Messiah.

The picture of the three crocodiles I borrowed from CAVmag is a little misleading – though not to a serious extent. I could, by estimating the brick size, have calculated the applicability of the caption Bricks 10⁰m. When I saw it in the flesh (or, I suppose, brickdust) I saw that this was a bit of an underestimate. The vertical extent of the bas-relief is indeed a little over 10⁰m (which to us non-mathematicians means, I think, 1m). But, even with its curled tail, it forms the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle with base ca. 0.8m; so its length is more like  √1.6 m. With its tail uncurled (like the middle one of the 3 crocodiles) it would exceed 1.5 m. This makes the size of the DNA origami crocodile even more impressive.

I had hoped to use my visit to Cambridge to see DNA origami in action, but the opportunity didn't arise. As this post has been visited more often than all but 4 of my posts – all of which have been around for 3 or 4 years, as opposed to this post's 3 or 4 weeks – I was looking forward to updating it with something  a little more substantial (rather than this somewhat trivial reflection on what is – I must admit – a pretty unimpressive Eric Gill pot-boiler

b


PPS

Here are two clues:

Such animal magnetism is a charm - sort of.  (8)

And a thematic  one:

Fancy folding, reversing, I'm a PO cheque. (7)

(Hint: the last two words make this nigh-on impossible for people with no experience of/in the UK. If you can't  bear the ignorance, look at the HTML source [where there's a comment].)

Update:2016.05.16.09:55 –  Answers: CHARISMA and ORIGAMI

Singing in tongues

A few days ago my attention was caught by this tweet:

I did what I was told, and read this post. It's a fascinating field, but I was side-tracked by a digression prompted by these words...

When copying an accent in song turns out, it is all about the vowels. “Singing is all about vowels. Language is altogether is really [HD – sic; I suspect a hasty edit {you''ll know the sort of thing if you've read some of MY stuff}] vowels interrupted by consonants. Although there are things you have to be careful of when singing consonants generally it’s the vowels you have to be careful of.” Nail the vowels and you can nail the accent...

... particularly the word consonants. When you think about it – and you may have noticed that thinking about words is something I do – it does what it says (in a way often pleasing for the etymologically minded). Vowels could be regarded as 'sonants'  (not to be confused with sonorants – which really are A Thing in the world of phonetics [and I see that my made-up word sometimes is used like that {as here}, Aw shoot ...]). My point is that vowels are things produced by the vocal cords, or – to use my attempted, but misfired, neologism – 'sonants'. Con-sonants are things that just hold them together. If you think of an utterance as a stream, the water is the vowels; the consonants are the stepping stones.

<digression> 

Recently I was watching a French drama with subtitles. A subtitle read 'Have you had one?' I tried to recapture the original from my short-term memory, but failed; in my defence, it was late evening; earlier I'd've been  listening and not reading. It might have been (though I can't guarantee it)  Tu en a eu une? Hearing and making sense of that calls for quite some linguistic skill [and, for the non-Francophone, plenty of practice with the /y/ phoneme – on which, don‘t get me started]. After the elision of en a the only two consonant phonemes among all those vowels are /n/ (twice) after the initial /t/. 

</digression>

The idea of accents in singing reminded me of a concert I sang in  nearly thirty years ago.

<autobiographical note>

Our conductor was a very young Paul Daniel. About two weeks before the concert, he started feeling a pain in his shoulder. He kept rehearsing us until the very last Thursday rehearsal, so on the Saturday we turned up for the dress rehearsal fully expecting him to be there. 

But on the Friday he had seen a specialist who told him if he conducted us the following day he might do serious damage. So, at almost no notice, we had a deputy to conduct us. The choir's records are sketchy, for so long ago. Paul Daniel was with us for 3 years (that's twelve concerts, of which he missed one), and there are records here of only 2 of his concerts. But there is also this:

Brian Wright had driven down that morning from Yorkshire. And when we sang 

Praise ye

The God of Brass 

he winced. He had been used to northern choirs, and was not expecting our /ɑ:/. I wonder what vowel Walton had in mind.

</autobiographical note>

I have long felt that the life of a choral singer would be made simpler if music publishers adopted use of the IPA. Amateur choirs don‘t have the luxury of foreign language coaches – mentioned by the opera singer interviewed in Faking the Funk::

I’ve long thought that it was easier to sing in an accent that isn’t your own than it is to speak in a foreign accent. This turns out to be somewhat true according to Bill Beeman, a sociolinguist at University of Minnesota. Beeman also happens to be an opera singer. He speaks and sings in multiple languages: English, German, Italian, French and Russian. However, his accent in each of these languages is acctually better when he sings than when he speaks.  

“My accent when I’m singing is very carefully constructed and we use coaches when we’re singing in order to be able to produce the language as perfectly as possible,” he says. 

        <autobiographical_rant>

I don't think I've ever sung Fauré's lovely Cantique de Jean Racine  [ranted about here] without a more or less protracted argument – repeated in rehearsals – about the false liaison of très with haut. And I've sung it at least a dozen times [in concerts and other performances, that is; getting on for a hundred rehearsals. On one occasion it was a tenor [who doesn't even sing the words in question] who complained: "We sang it that way [HD: the 'thirteen waters' version^PS/PPSon tour in Belgium and had no complaints." GIVE ME STRENGTH!

</autobiographical_rant>

It would make the life of a choral singer much simpler, as I said. And each choir that cared about these things would only have to have one member, learning at the most a few dozen symbols. Besides so many amateur singers are language teachers (I wonder why...?) that the relevant expert would be readily to hand in most cases.

But I put it to a man at OUP who convinced me that it would cause so much upheaval (and cost publishers such a deal of money, I think he meant) that it just won't happen. But a chap can dream....

Enough dreaming though. There are words to be learnt for Saturday.

b
Update 2015.11.19.15.15 – Added PS 

PS A misericord (in the metaphorical sense introduced here): 'Thirteen waters' = treize eaux [geddit? the words that provoke the false liaison are très haut]

Update 2015.11.22.19.35 – Updated the Saturday link, so that it points to something useful a review.

Update 2016.04.16.20.20 – Added PPS and deleted obsolete footer.

Just back from this:

A good   day‘s sing. We sang the Cantique, and – true to form – there was a smattering of the thirteen waters version. Oh well – these things are sent to ... evoke clichés

Bon, Bom, Bueno, Buono...

Today's piece is the happy product of a note from the Apple of my Eye (who was only a pip 26 years ago), who alerted me to this. Before I had even listened to the examples ...

<mini_rant reason="Grumpy Old Git">
a pleasure which I may well deny myself in perpetuity, as I am still scarred by repeated hearings of that unspeakable snatch of The World in Union, which, let's face it, was pretty naff at the best of times, and must have had Elgar spinning in his grave (at 33 rpm, if not 78) even before Paloma Faith got her heinous tonsils around it – ye gods, can't a chap watch a bit of rugby without having that unholy row inflicted on him every few minutes. And I apologize to the many readers who won't have the first idea of what I'm talking about, but believe me you're better off not knowing.
</mini_rant>

...or read the linguist's comments, I was saying to myself  "Aha. Dipthongization, I bet."

The thing is, when you lean on something it distorts. This applies both to sitting on a thinnish plank, books weighing down the middle of a bookshelf, and to sounds. I referred briefly to this here, and would have left it at that had this BuzzFeed article not brought it to my attention. I wrote in that post, about a failure to understand a non-dipthongized word,

The imperative singular of contar  was – according to the O-level grammar book I was using at the time – cuenta (the stress on the etymological o causing the diphthong). So, if I had reached the bit in the book that dealt with the position of object pronouns (doubtful), I would have expected cuéntanos in place of María Fernanda's 'Contános'.

The crucial bit is that parenthetical "(the stress on the etymological o causing the diphthong)". In the life of a language, a word such as the Vulgar Latin BONU[M], meaning "good"  can take various routes. Often the first syllable (tending to become the only syllable) is nasalized – as in French bon or Portuguese bom. But sometimes, like that bookshelf, the sound distorts when it's stressed; it changes shape and stretches, giving Spanish bueno and Italian buono. Sometimes, related words, with and without stress on the vowel, turn out with and without diphthongs, as in Spanish bueno/bonito. Still in Spanish, this happens with changing verb-endings – cuento/contamos (causing problems for the language learner, but not for the native speaker)

<autobiographical_note>
The young woman who said 'Contános'  that time, in Bilbao  in 1971, had the trick of using diminutive endings: her 'hasta lueguito' meant 'see you soon (but really quite soon'). Or for her, doing something early was often 'tempranito' (as temprano means "early").

I stored this away as a neat colloquial trick. But later, when I'd been formally introduced to dipthongization in my later Romance Philology studies, I did the same thing that toddlers do when overgeneralizing from a special case: "If the past of DRINK is DRUNK, the past of THINK must be THUNK"; so I took the irregular bueno/bonito as a model for luego/loguito [that u doesn't affect the sound, if you were wondering; it's just there to keep the g hard]. So my advanced colloquialism pose didn't come off, and my "Hasta loguito" was met with deservedly blank stares.
<autobiographical_note>

This is still happening. A class-mate of mine, who had lived in O Porto, told our teacher that he had heard native speakers (of Portuguese) starting to diphthongize their home town's stressed vowel, so that it was tending towards the modern Spanish Puerto. Linguists call this early form a "labile (sic, not labial) diphthong". And it happens too in those Indie songs.

In the light of this ...

<rant>
People of  the British Isles, if you mean "in the light of", it would make an old man very happy if you were to SAY it [for Pete's sake]. I'm not saying it's wrong to omit the the if that's the way your speech community behaves, but I come over all UKIPpy when I think about the reasons for this (one of which involves British English speech communities being influenced by people whose first language is not English and who have learnt ESOL from American English sources). 

Of course, that's far from being the only (or even most influential) reason. Ever quickening [that's not quite the word; still, it's better than fastening] communications ["Internet Major, I'm looking at YOU", as Mr Chips might have said], films, TV, celebrity culture... the growing villagification of the world in general make it COOL to pretend you were born in Oxford Georgia (or even Oxford, Nova Scotia) rather than Oxford Oxfordshire. And once a few people start doing it, etymological erosion takes over. I'm not saying it's wrong, I know it's a lost cause, but while yet a drop remains/ Of the lifeblood in my veins, to quote the dying Viking, it's not a form of words I'm ever going to adopt (affect?).

Here are some numbers, in support of my assertion that "We British just don't talk like that'. But they are based on the British National Corpus, which – based on usages culled from speakers and writers up to 2008 – doesn't reflect the current situation (which I suspect shows the change from in the light of  to in light of as being much less far advanced than [I regret] it is). BNC shows a strong preference for "in the light of" (meaning in view of,  considering, having regard to) over "in light of" (with no the). It has about 14 times as many hits (1798 as against 125).

COCA meanwhile, reflecting contemporary American usage, shows a much less strong preference in the other direction – 3 times as many hits for "in light of" as for its wordier rival: 4677 as against 1474.

In both cases, figures for the version with the are inflated by usages such as in the light of the silvery moon. In fact all COCA's hits may be of this kind (NOT meaning in view of, considering, having regard to). 

Oh well, I know I should  "lie back and think of linguistic determinism", but this sort of thing bothers me more than I know it should...
</rant>

Found in a park in Buenos Aires?

...derived words in languages with diphthongization can become irregular. The Jets say

Every Puerto Rican's a lousy chicken

But a native of Puerto Rican is un/a portorriqueño/a. [In fact, I have a feeling that in the original cast recording the Jets may have got it right,] And this might also explain the naming of Verbena Bonariensis. Its native land is South America; so it seems to me quite possible that the collector who first named it lived in Buenos Aires.

Time I was getting on.

b
PS A couple of clues:

Smart Alec, that is with a screw loose. (8)
Gin, for example, almost left a catch-phrase. (6)

Update 2015.11.22.11:20 – Added answers

WISEACRE and MANTRA.


Update 2017.08.15.17:40 – Removed old footer

'By oak and ash and bitter thorn'

Jack Orion swore a bloody oath -
By oak and ash and bitter thorn
Saying 'Lady, I never was in your house
Since the day that I was born.'
trad.

I was reminded of this song (itself brought to my attention by Bert Jansch's rendition many years ago, but I won't  put a link here because it seems to be impossible to visit a lyrics/music site without attracting a never-ending stream of ringtone-related spam) by a Richard Maybey programme I caught at the end of yesterday morning (which I haven't caught up with yet – but will do when The Schedule (for #WVGTbook) allows. At one stage, as I remember, Maybey said something like 'Ash comes from an old word meaning "spear"'; he may have said '...an Old English word....' – which would make sense as the letter 'æ' (incidentally, and I'm sure not coincidentally, called ash) is an Old English character.

My ears pricked up at that stage, as I caught a whiff of Proto-Indo-European. It seemed likely (and I'll write this before checking Etymonline) that the Old English word was related (by shared PIE ancestry) to the Latin word hasta. OK, here goes:

ash (2)
type of tree, Old English æsc "ash tree," also "spear made of ash wood," from Proto-Germanic *askaz, *askiz (cf. Old Norse askr, Old Saxon ask, Middle Dutch esce, German Esche), from PIE root *os- "ash tree"

Phew  – so far so good. But hereafter the definition sticks to the tree, mentioning the Latin ornus. I'm pretty sure hasta is lurking there somewhere though.

But what about that song? What had made Jack so angry? Well someone had been there before him, and he had guessed at the goings-on (prompted by her question):

'Whether have you left with me
Your hosen or your glove
Or are you returned back again
To know more of my love?'

No wonder he was miffed; presumably she had no sense of smell, or perhaps Tom had borrowed Jack's deod... whoops, anachronism alert. After his 'bloody oath', she confirms his worst fears:

'Oh then it was your servant, Tom,
That hath so cruelly beguiled me
And woe that the blood of the ruffian lad
Should spring in my body.'

Long story short, they all die, or as Stoppard's Player King puts it 'The good die unhappily, the bad die unluckily. That is tragedy.'‡

<autobiographical _note>
In my hitch-hiking days  I used to wile (sic†) away the time by singing. I had to watch my repertoire though. It took me a while to realize that songs like So Early in the Spring weren't conducive to drivers doing anything but put their foot down and leave the madman in the rear-view mirror, singing

'Oh curse your gold and your silver too 

And curse the girl that won't prove true...' 

†That's 'wile', as in 'beguile', cp other pairs like ward/guard, warranty/guarantee and so on. There's a strong move towards 'while away', and most people prefer the h spelling (which has the mnemonic advantage of referring to time). Far be it from me to say it's wrong; it's not. I'm just saying that when I omit 'the' h I mean to.
</autobiographical_note>

There's more to be said about trees and oaths/magic/significance, but it'll have to wait for an update (after I've listened to that programme).

b
Update 2013.06.27.16:20 Small addition (Esprit d'escalier)

Update 2013.06..28 Added this footnote:
‡Misremembered from a school visit ...

<inline_PPPS>
I say  more about this visit here,
in  a later post: Beware worm-holes? The Harmless Drudgery blog welcomes careful time-travellers.
</inline_PPPS>

....to a press preview of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead that I went to in the late '60s. What the Player King actually said was

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Update 2013.07.12 Added this PS:
Further to my wile/beguile footnote, I was rehearsing for this tour ...

<missing_link>
There used to be a link to the tour poster here, but I can't find it in the choir's archives. I reported on the tour here.
</missing_link>

...(which is only a week away at the time of this update) when I noted a phrase that I hadn't thought about before, in the madrigal All Creatures Now, written during the reign of Good Queen Bess ('See where she comes, see where she comes with flow'ry garlands crownéd...'). I have sung this madrigal before, and as I say I haven't given this phrase a second thought: 'Music the time beguileth'.  It doesn't seem to belong semantically (or musically) with either what comes before or after it. So previously I have dismissed this line as just an Elizabethan filler that doesn't mean very much.

But having so recently written That's 'wile', as in 'beguile'... (in this post, a few lines back) I realized that Bennet (the composer) was referring to the way music has a beguiling effect on the listener's awareness of the passage of time; it wiles time away.

Update: 2018.04.16.11.35 – Added inline PPS and various format tweaks.

Update: 2019.03.13.15.15 – Added inline PPPS.

'Everything that follows is debatable'

During my PGCE Teaching Practice , the difference between effect and affect became an issue; one of the young adults in my class (oh yes, this was FE, they weren't children any more) had got it wrong. 'What's the difference?' the teacher asked (rhetorically – she was incapable of asking a question without supplying the Right answer). 'Effect is a noun and affect is a verb.' I bit my lip. Perhaps there was  a reason for this gross over-simplification (or lie – just for the record they can each be either, but you know that. The noun effect is just much more common than the verb [the British National Corpus has 22,887 case of effect, of which a  mere 137 are verbal.] Similarly, the verb affect is commoner than the noun – much more so).

Throughout my first few weeks,  I heard many other teachers at the same institution saying the same thing, and began to think that there must be more to it than just one lazy teacher. Perhaps there was a website somewhere, run by Edexcel or someone, advising this Edmedioc version of the truth. As a teacher, one has to filter the truth depending on the level of the student; electricity flows from +ve to -ve until A-level and then does a volte-face (or should that be a volt-face?) – something about electrons I think. Maybe the holders of the pedagogical reins had decided that the verb effect and the noun affect were just 'un-parts-of-speech' for the purposes of their exams.

The same thing seems to have happened to the comma for the purposes of the KS2 SATS sample which filled me with deep sadness last week. I came a cropper at question 15. (Well, there were no answers given, so it was more of a quandary than a cropper. I just didn't know how they felt about commas.) Number 27 gave me the answer, because the wording of the question made it clear

Insert three commas in the correct places in the sentence below.

So, in their world, three commas (in a five-item list) were 'correct'.

My bible for matters comma-related is Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford. To quote a more recent edition than that:

 

Another quiz I saw more recently, with the gratification (I thought) of immendiate feedback, was the BBC's 10 questions on grammar. I got question 2 'wrong', because I have an old-fashioned affection for the sequence of tenses, and don't agree with the trendy distinction of may and might on grounds of strength of probability alone. I also got 3 'wrong', as they're wedded to the indiscriminate splattering of commas all over the place regardless. I could happily have got 4 'wrong' as well (as a cupful is a quantity), but I recognized their kneejerk predilection for infantile rules of thumb, such as If a number is nearby, say 'fewer.' I disagreed on 5 as well; and here's why. I don't rule out conjunctions at the beginnings of sentences, so I think they're fine after a semi-colon. The that/which distinction exercised in 7 is an old canard, beloved of the grammar checker in Microsoft Word but having no more credible authority behind it. Most grammarians don't bother with it. Question 9 was wrong too. There's nothing wrong with 'I was sat in the chair'. Consider 'After being led into the presentation, I was sat in a chair.' (Of course, I accept that it's often wrongly used; that's not the same as saying 'It's wrong'.)

That BBC article (and the quiz it introduces) starts by saying 'Everything that follows is debatable',  But I think the BBC's '[e]verything' was unduly concessive – dare I say 'mealy-mouthed'?  Many of the rules exercised in the quiz aren't debatable (although they may all be matters of register – so that there is often a discussion to be had about which rules should be adhered to in which register). There is a difference, though, between 'Everything that follows is debatable' and 'There is a discussion to be had about some of what follows.'

Report from the word-face

In my trawl through *ie* words, I've just met the word heliskier, not a headword but a derivative of heliskiing (which is).

Not from Hamburg

It's not uncommon in the world of etymology for part of a word to be misread as a separate root and then used in neologisms. So a sort of food once peculiar to Hamburg, a hamburger, was mis-analysed into the 'roots' "<sort-of-filling> + 'burger'", whence come the 'double-egg/cheeseburger' etc. And then the supposed suffix becomes a noun in its own right: So we get 'Burger and chips'

Something similar happened to the '-gate' in 'Watergate'. It had nothing to do with the way into a garden, say. (Nor, come to that, did the 'Water-' have anything to do with water, which at least the watergate at the bottom of Buckingham Street can boast –

the handsome water-gate that had once given access to the Thames but now opens on to the Embankment Gardens

–  as it said in Frank Cutler's obituary* nearly 14 years ago: pause for thought...) Since that scandal (Nixon, Deep Throat, and all that) more or less any scandal can be conveniently named '<subject>gate' (conveniently, that is, for journalists and the chattering classes in general) from Camillagate to plebgate (which should really have been called Gategate). A good account was published by the BBC recently.

The same sort of thing, but with the added complication of misplaced 'word'-endings, also happened with helicopter, whose roots are helico- (as in 'helix') and -pter (as in 'pterodactyl', 'lepidoptera' etc. The roots are not (as might be expected from various derivatives) heli + copter. My store of examples (helipad, heliport, mini-copter, gyrocopter....) has just been added to: heliskiing (='the sport of flying in a helicopter to a place on a mountain and then travelling over the snow on skis' CD-ROM © Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007. Text © A&C Black Publishers Ltd 2007.)

But I must get back to the word-bashing. I noticed recently (investigating the  alternatives briar and brier) that the *ia* section was not as completely finished as I reported last time; it looks OK but has no links to the dictionary website. I shall have to go back and retrace my steps. I am going out, and I may be some time...

b 
Update 2013.05.19:13.20: This morning on Radio 4's Broadcasting House I heard a very creative use of the '-gate' suffix: 'Swivel-eyed-loon'-gate (about an unattributed remark allegedy made during the
Tories' latest attempt at the Ferrets-in-a-sack Award).

*<autobiog subject="BobK99" date_range="1976-1978">
 Previously, I called OUP the provider of 'my first full-time job'. This is not strictly true. That was the first full-time job I did after abandoning all hope of a future as a folk hero. My first full-time job before that decision was given to me by Frank Cutler (or 'Mr Cutler', as we used to know him), owner at the time of a foreign language bookshop. As that obituary goes on to say:

(When the IBC [BK: International Book Club] had become Grant & Cutler's bookshop, a drawing of the gate decorated the firm's letterhead. Its rubric, "Close by the Watergate", did not then have the resonance that it was to acquire in the Nixon era, when some American foreign-language scholars believed that the firm was even closer to the centre of events than it actually was.)

 </autobiog>

Update 2013.09.30.11:10
HeadFooter updated

Update 2014.05.30.17.20
And again

Update 2014.08.16.11.30
Carl Bernstein, I heard on the radio this morning, decried the use of -gate in the way described in my May 2013 update, but the one case that he blessed with his imprimatur was 'Hackgate' – not just a scandal, but a cover up involving secrecy and duplicity in high places.

(I've taken this opportunity to update the footer again.)

Update 2015.06.15.11.40
Added picture (for the benefit of Pinterest).

Update 2015.06.16.11.20
Changed picture to keep the lawyers happy.

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources:  over 44,640 views  and well over 6,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,250 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.