Harmless Drudgery

Friday, 23 November 2012

What You See Is ... Just The Demo

Apologies to readers expecting the usual whimsy. I'm seeing if the strange popularity of my Wachet auf! blog is due to its giving information about lexicographical progress.

There is a story, going the rounds in the early years of this century (before I, as the immortal bard so nearly put it, 'was from the IT world untimely ripped'), about a man doing a pact with the devil on the basis of a preview of Hell, which was not so bad after all; more of a holiday camp. After various Faustian misdeeds he dies and goes to Hell - the fire and brimstone sort. He complains that this was nothing like what he'd been led to expect, and Satan's answer is 'Well, that was just the demo.' This story comes to mind whenever I see a product that claims it's 'WYSIWYG'.

Anyway, the nearest to true WYSIWYG I've met (and don't talk to me about Interleaf...) is a tool called 'HoTMetaL [geddit?] Pro' - produced originally by Softquad but now in an unsupported limbo. It ran happily on Windows XP, and Windows NT when I first used it, but on Windows <hawk-spit> 7 it limps along with various patches and downloads and workarounds, without a help library. This is the tool I work with when first progressing from handwritten notes for the next release of my When Vowels Get Together. It is sort of 'WYSIWYG Plus' - you can see the code, WYSIWYG, and various other views. And it does lots of checking of code and internal and external links (by now I'd know a lot more about what extras it has to offer, if only the help file worked on Windows <hawk-spit> 7).

However, the thrice-blessed Kindle Direct Publishing provides various documents supporting self-publishing that refer only (in detail) to their own engine which produces an EPUB file on the basis of the HTML generated by the latest flavour of Word - not the tool that, faute de mieux, I am used to (Word 2003 - I know, I know, I should be using Open Office anyway). Now, I know a little (I've said in an earlier blog 'perhaps two modica') about HTML, so I'm blowed if I'll wrestle with a new version of Word just in order to generate the sort of HTML that KDP wants - in a single HTML file FFS!

The problem is that KDP's conversion engine adds things like a 'Logical TOC (NCX)' - which you can't do with pure HTML. (The quote is from the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines, and the particular feature is mandated in section 3.3.1 - there are various other mandatory requirements though.)

The answer to this problem is Sigil, which is also a WYSIWYG HTML editor - though not as friendly and multipotent (I wouldn't go so far as to call it 'omnipotent') - but it also generates EPUB files; also, it accepts as input both pre-existing HTML files and XHTML files - though it only generates the requisite meta-data (for EPUB files acceptable by KDP) when the input is XHTML.

Now, here's the sneaky bit. I am conversant with HTML, and I know a tiny amount about XML, but XHTML is a closed book to me. Sigil produces XHTML as soon as you open it (a blank in the WYSIWYG view, but in the code view the headers and footers necessary to produce a conformant blank page). Having used good ol' HoTMetaL Pro to generate and validate HTML, I cutNpaste it into the (XHTML) code view (having removed the old headers). At the moment of transition, there's a horrible clash of code that makes Sigil complain bitterly; but I hold my nerve, and it's all right in the end. Then I can add all the bits and pieces that KDP expects in an EPUB file.

Where I am at the moment with -EA- spellings is starting to move from handwritten notes to HoTMetaL Pro. I am painfully aware of the slowness (sloth?) of progress, but I hope this gives some idea of the process. (Suggestions for improving the process are welcome; after much trial and error I've found a rather labour-intensive method that works, and rather than researching a more elegant solution I'm just putting my head down and doing it. It is, in the words of a colleague on an OU course I once did, 'a JFD situation' - just do it. The F is silent.)

Normal navel-gazing will be resumed in the next episode of Harmless Drudgery.

Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.0: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU, and IA-IU, and – new for V4.0 – OA-OU. If you buy it, contact @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**, and 4,400 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 1570 views/700 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.

Tuesday, 20 November 2012

On the cloudy side of the street

This isn't going to be a very long post. Not that I'm superstitious or anything, but my 13th post is going to be more of a '12a'th. (The subject of superstition calls to mind the Romance Languages' range of propitiatory euphemisms to refer to the weasel; another time, perhaps...)

In blog no. 12 I remarked on (that is, animadverted to) how English has a negative-sounding range of collocates with heart. Shortly after writing that I came across this observation by David Crystal, in The Story of English in 100 words.

I once went through a dictionary pulling out all the ways there are in English for saying 'good' things about the world (such as wonderful, happily, a marvel) and all the ways there are for saying 'bad' things (such as awful, clumsily, a disaster). I found 1,772 expressions of positive sentiment and 3,158 expressions of negative seniment.

So far so good, and I was giving myself a mental pat on the back for reaching Crystal's conclusion before he did; well, not before, as his 'once' may have been fifty years ago - in fact it probably was (this ploughing through dictionaries taking notes is a young man's wor... Doh); but my observation preceded my reading. But he goes on in the next sentence:

It's almost twice as easy to be critical in English, it seems.

In the next sentence. The syntax makes it clear that this is a conclusion. But it's syntax itself that calls his conclusion into question. The lexicon provides the stuff of twice as many criticisms as fillips. But the word-bank is not all we have. The resources we have to express approval are not inconsiderable (and the use of double negatives is one of them)!

On which subject, I should say that I'm more than a little perplexed, though by no means displeased (OK, I'll stop this) that Wachet auf is by far the most popular of my posts so far - at least twice as many hits as most of the others, and nearly seven times as many as 'the least of its brethren'. Hmm ...

b

Monday, 19 November 2012

Today we have naming of parts

A recent visit to the Royal Armouries at Leeds began with an impressive display of massed mortars - but rather small ones. Such weapons often get a friendly-sounding nick-name. In 1945 there was Little Boy (much friendlier than, say, 'Genocidal Jenny'*), followed by Fat Man.

In the previous round of Beggar-my-neighbour-no-make-that-blow-him-to-bits, the pet-name Big Bertha had become popular, applied to various bits of heavy artillery. It strictly applies to one particular howitzer named after the heiress Bertha Krupp (according to various sources, for example Bull and Murphy [now out of print but you can pick up a second-hand copy for a mere 250 smackers!] though this attribution is pooh-poohed by Willy Ley, writing in the Journal of Coastal Artillery, Feb, 1943 (says Wikipedia, and life's too short to chase down killjoys like that - who cast doubt on perfectly plausible bits of etymological trivia).

Big Bertha was one of the kanonen that came out of the Krupp works. One of the earlier bearers of the name, before Krupp's became the largest private company in the German empire, was known as 'the Cannon King'. The image of the cannon had been used centuries earlier by Spanish soldiers (conquistadores, I think, though the dates in The Etymological Dictionary call this into question) used to describe a sort of long straight valley of a kind unknown to them in their homeland. They called it un cañón, borrowed into English as 'canyon' - Spanish ñ being the conventional manuscript abbreviation for an original Latin -NN-. So in English we now have both 'cannon' and 'canyon', both derived from the Latin for 'reed'. So the tradition of giving unthreatening pet-names to weapons had been, in a sense, pre-figured by using a weapon's name to refer to an unthreatening rock-formation.

As early as the fifteenth century the metaphorical tide had changed direction, with Mons Meg. Two centuries later there is said to have been Humpty Dumpty, but the East Anglia Tourist Board appears to have started the hare (I'm afraid that's what it is - and Tourist Boards [and the tourism industry in general] have a lot to answer for when it comes to disseminating dubious folk-etymologies) in 1996. Albert Jack, in Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes, retells the story. In a previous book (The Real Story of Humpty Dumpty, now out of print) he claims to have seen two lost extra verses, which further substantiate the derivation. But the alleged 'lost verses' are not in the style of the ... canonical (sorry) rhyme, as is argued in an article with the unequivocally sceptical title 'Putting the “dump” in Humpty Dumpty' in the BS Historian.

So I started out with one of those 'plausible bits of etymological trivia' I mentioned earlier, but now have my doubts. It was an interesting journey though, and the use of pet-names for weapons of war is beyond dispute.

b

Update, 25 November 2021: PS I've just thought of another word derived from Latin CANNA [='reed']. This is not world-shattering news; I'm sure the Indo-European word bank is full of them. But this particular one offers a pleasing contrast to the noise of cannon: it is the French for fishing-rod, canne à pêche (this, incidentally is the first time I've linked to a foreign-language web-site - not very helpfully I imagine, and some of my readers may not speak French - but I couldn't resist the opportunity).

Update 2016.08..08.12:55 – Added footnote

^* This joke is almost certainly anachronistic. Little Boy was dropped in early August 1945. As Wikipedia says, in its article on Raphael Lemkin:

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on December 9, 1948.

Bilingual plaque in memory
of Rafael Lemkin

Little Boy was named, presumbly, some time before August 1945, but – given the timescales on The Manhattan Project – not long before. That Lemkin article's first paragraph calls Lemkin "a lawyer of Polonized-Jewish descent who is best known for coining the word genocide....[which he did] ...in 1943 or 1944".

So, if the word genocidal had been available for the naming of Little Boy, it would have been a pretty close-run thing.

Thursday, 15 November 2012

Hearts may fall as well as rise

My Ji Qong teacher – not a native speaker of English – was talking yesterday morning about some improvements she's having done to her kitchen. 'Now I can see out, and when I see the garden my heart sinks.' From the context (we were exercising outside on a coldish and not particularly bright November morning) I knew that she meant the opposite; but what's that – 'my heart leaps'?

This made me think about collocations with heart. I did a search in the British National Corpus for 'heart' followed by a verb. Of the nearly 3,000 hits, 'heart sank' came a very respectable third, after 'was' and 'is'. With the addition of 'heart 's' at no. 11, these 3 account for over a fifth of all instances.

Meanwhile, 'heart leapt' was down at no. 17 and 'heart leaped' well below that at no. 31. And closer inspection of those numbers yielded an interesting bias. Of the 30 instances of 'leapt', 25 had the source 'W_fict_prose'; and of the 15 instances of 'leaped' 12 had the same source. And of those 37 'W_fict_prose' hits, in 29 cases (over three-quarters) the possessor of the heart is a woman. Now I don't know precisely what 'W_fict_prose' is, but perhaps I could be forgiven for guessing that the jackets are predominantly pink.

But what about the other verbs? Looking at just the top 51 (all the collocations with 10 or more hits) there are these indications of a dysfunctional or uneasy heart:

thumping – no. 8
thudding – no. 10
attacks – no. 13 (the mesh of my search net should obviously be finer; hearts don't attack!)
stopped – no. 14
racing – no. 18
lurched – no. 20
pounding – no. 22
hammering – no. 25
missed – no. 26
thudded – no. 28
jumped – no. 29
bypass – no.40 (another anomaly that shows how I need to brush up my search skills)
bleeds – no. 41
ached – no. 43
sink – no. 45
sinking – no. 49
skipped – no. 50
stop – no. 51 (an appropriate end to the list)

Meanwhile there are a similar number of 'unmarked' ones (with connotations that are neither positive not negative) like turn and seem; and just a handful of unequivocally positive ones: just leap, to accompany the past forms. English hearts just don't seem to have a particularly positive outlook.; swell and swelled are down at nos. 67 and 99 respectively. I wonder if this is a particularly Anglophone bias. I invite comments from speakers of other languages.

I should really see how COCA compares. But times a-wasting and I've got a long weekend (when I'll be off-line) to prepare for.

b
Update 2014.02.08.20:20 – Updated footer

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

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 37,250 views and 5,200 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 1867 views/867 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.

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

'As the ancient Romans say...

'...festina lente', to quote Lord Snooty - or whatever his name* was - in Iolanthe. I've been toiling away at the vowel pairs starting with e for my book of lists. It is very slow going. But at least I have -eu- already done as part of the ELTON submission last year - my entry was short-listed and forms the basis of the book I'm working on at the moment. And e is the most common vowel, so I shouldn't expect too much.

Here's what I've got so far (as well as pages and pages of handwritten notes that are about to be exposed to my legendary typing skills - upwards of five words per minute):

Vowel sounds represented by the spelling 'EA'
There are 21 sounds represented by the pair -ea-, but three of these are part of the trigraph -eau- and are dealt with in the -au- section [x-refs tbs].

Of the remaining 18, /i:/ is by far the most common, with nearly twice as many representatives as its nearest rival, and those two together outnumber all the rest by a similar margin.

/i;/

/e/

[16 more TBS]

As well as these sounds, there are words with one syllable ending in e and the next beginning with a. In these cases, the two vowels do not normally interact. the e just works its magic on the preceding syllable...

And bridging between that G&S song I quoted at the outset and his big aria, Strephon accused, of 'attaining ['partaking'? 'a-taking'?] of his dolce far niente' [to rhyme with 'festina lente'] with Iolanthe, protests:

My Lords, of evidence I have no dearth
She is - has been - my mother from my birth

That dearth is a representative of the '16 more TBS', which it's time I got back to.

* 'Tolloller', Wikipedia tells me. 'Earl Tolloller', it says, but one has to forgive Americans for not understanding titles.

Update 15 November 2012 - trivial maths corrections (18-2=16).

Sunday, 11 November 2012

Requiem

Just a quicky - Sundays should be IT-free, but Friday pm and most of Saturday were wiped out by a system problem.... And as it's a 'requiemmy' sort of day:

Next week I'll be singing a bit of Fauré at a funeral - and at the rehearsal I fully expect the leader of the rehearsal to say to the sops 'What are you singing about? In Paradisum. "In Paradise". You sound as if you're singing about what you had for breakfast....' (Conductors mostly seem, in my experience, to regard breakfast menus as the nadir of interest.)

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

Interestingly, deducere can also mean 'mislead', but I doubt if Fauré had this in mind - though Barrie Jones, collector of his letters, doubted his piety (on p. 24 of the 1989 edition). His most pious work, the sublime Cantique de Jean Racine (survivor of many a choir's mispronunciation: Verbe égal aux très-haut: 'Verb equal to thirteen waters...' - give me strength! - and de tes dons qu'il retourne comblés : 'of your teeth which he gives back because they're ... impacted?', was written in his teens). And in his later years he may have taken after his friend and teacher Camille Saint-Saens, who - according to one biographer - prescribed for his funeral a short service, if it had to be religious at all, and proscribed the singing of 'Pie Jesus' (sic - Either that final s is the biography's typo, or it was Saint-Saens's attempt to spare Fauré's feelings: 'I don't mean your setting of Pie Jesu.')

But 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof'. The imagined solecism will probably not be perpetrated.

(And that's another thing: perpetrated/perpetuated. But I must stop. Duty calls.)

Update: 11 Nov pm - updated TESconnect stats, and tweaked second para.

Update:12 Nov am - Added to third para. and added the fourth

Update: 2018.06.12.14.55 – Correction to deducant translation.

Friday, 9 November 2012

But NObody says /potahto/

My text for this morning's Harmless Drudgery is the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors:

The rival claims of -ise and -ize spellings have been argued with varying degrees of heat for centuries. Sadly, the ubiquity of software that checks spelling and grammar has recently dealt what may in the fulness of time (but over my dead body!) transpire to be the beginning of the end of -ize spellings in British English: 'The infernal machine says I can't spell that way and retain my UK citizenship. Oh well'; and we appease the majority opinion holders. Today, most ESOL teachers say things like '-ise is the standard spelling in British English' (this quote is somewhere in the UsingEnglish forums, verbatim - though I can't at the moment find chapter and verse). Less well-informed commentators go so far as to say - when asked the difference between authorise and authorize -

No difference at all ... only that americans spell it different cos they feel the need to be different . The correct spelling is with an -s-

Oh dear. In one such discussion I said

There's nothing unBritish about the spelling 'apologize'. It has been the house style of The Times for well over a hundred years, and is used by many large and influential publishers (Oxford University Press, for example). I'm tired of being accused of flirting with modernity and excessive American influence, just because I use a spelling that millions of British people use (so long as they haven't been got at by generations of school-teachers peddling misinformation).

That may have been true of The Times at the time of writing, but 'the times they are a-changin''. A few cases of '-ize' pass the scrutiny of the subs' eyes - especially when there is a strong etymological justification - as in the case of 'baptize' (where there is a zeta rather than a sigma in the original Greek); but fewer and fewer.

The important word in that ODWE quote is the first - 'Where'. Sometimes there is not an option. Words such as 'televise', 'demise', 'enterprise'... (the indispensable - or should that be -ible? -
Hart's Rules: The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors lists over two dozen) can only be spelt -ise. And this is true of American English - although naturally there is more tolerance for a wrong -ize ending in these words in a national variant that generally prefers -ize.

And in the -ise/-ize war, certain innocent bystanders have been caught in the cross-fire; words such as 'analyse', with no sensible justification for a z (biased, moi? - well, I am influenced by etymology [there is a sigma in the Greek] though not totally in thrall to it) have an s in British English and a z in American English. As Hart says:

Incidentally Alistair Cooke insisted that the correct pronunciation of 'intelligentsia' used [g] because English had borrowed it directly from Russian. Imagine the problems if we tried to impose the same standard in the case of -ise/-ize. In that 'authorised/authorized' discussion I mentioned, one contributor pointed out '[A]uthorize and authorise come from Old French autoriser which comes from Medieval Latin auctorizare.' For each word we'd have to know not only its root but also the route that it took to get into modern English. A distorted and inverted form of this belief - as it happens - was the justification for Professor Richard Cobb's dispensation from the OUP's house-style favouring -ize endings where possible. He was a Francophile, and for him even words like 'baptize' - whatever their origin - were seen through a francophone filter: if it was -iser in French it was -ise in English.

But, to quote myself, bowing out of another discussion,

In some cases (very few) '-ise' needs to be used instead of '-ize' in Br Eng spelling; and (invariably, I think) '-yse' instead of '-yze'. AmE ironed out these exceptions; so Z spellings are characteristic of AmE. But they're not exclusively American. (I can explain the exceptions if you want, but I think people's eyes would start to glaze over.)

In time (several centuries) it may become true that -ize spellings become unacceptable in British English, but this Cnut will always have his finger in the dike.

b

Update: 10 Nov: tweaked first line to fix format: someone's playing silly Bloggers.

Update 2014.07.07.11:40
PS This post reminded me of the usefulness of a knowledge of etymology in matters of spelling; the @Pronuncian piece is about pronunciation, but the two are related (to varying extents – and depending on how deeply embedded a borrowed word is).

<digression>
I have mentioned this 'embeddedness' issue before – here:

/u:/ is preceded [in British English] by a glide [j], becoming [ju:] in largely predictable contexts – at the beginning of a word, after stop consonants (/p t k b d g/) , after the sonorants (/l m n /) and after /h/ and /s/. The very recent borrowing 'gulag' keeps its native Russian pronunciation (as far as the 'u' is concerned; pronunciation of the consonants and of the 'a' is a different matter!) Similarly, the name 'Putin' (in an English-speaking context) has no glide before the /u:/, whereas the name 'Rasputin' – borrowed, for the use of English in less linguistically sensitive times – has a /ju:/. (The singers of Abba were unaware of this!)
<digression>

I said 'USEFULNESS of a knowledge of etymology'. By this I don't mean indispensability. In fact, this is often a matter of differentiation; some students will benefit more from (and be more interested in) a knowledge of etymology. For example, I had a Spanish student who wondered why 'symphony' (sinfonía) had a y whereas 'philosophy' (filosofía) had an i. She was a classics student. So my saying that English spelling reflected the etymology (υ versus ι in the Greek original) clarified hundreds (maybe thousands) of apparently arbitrary 'i versus y' spelling quandaries. But this etymological insight would not have been useful in a full class context (although it might be tempting for the exhibitionist teacher eager to show off his knowledge

).

Update 2018.03.05.11:40 – Deleted old footer.