Litigious software engineers?

This extract, particularly the use of actionable, was in line for a FOGGY. But I thought better of it. The word, as they say, does what it says on the tin, so what grounds have I to be sniffy about it?

Each day, our society creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (that’s 2.5 followed by 18 zeros). With this flood of data the need to unlock actionable value becomes more acute
Source: Coursera

The word actionable is not in the Macmillan English Dictionary  (except, of course, in the legal sense) or in Collins English Dictionary or Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, or in the 1913 edition of Websters. In the first of these the word has a URL that suggests it is 'American' (a common, usually mistaken, gibe – but that's another story, brushed on in this blog,  passim).

But Webster's New World College Dictionary has the new sense: 

This has taken two steps away from the Path of [prescriptive] Righteousness:

1. 'Action' is verbified
2. The 'new' verb (which is not really new) has had the suffix '-able' applied, to turn it into an adjective (with the 'suffixer' oblivious to the fact that the neologism treads on the toes of a  pre-existing word that has an unrelated meaning).

And the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary has caught up with the second meaning too. 

It's a change that has been coming for some time, which is indicated by the Collins frequency graph showing actionable's frequency (although, as I've noted above, Collins doesn't note the new meaning):

Frequency graph from Collins English Dictionary

I suspect, though proving as much would take more corpus-query nous than I have^*, that the rapid rise from the mid-'80s...

<autobiographical_note>
When I started my involvement with writing about  computer networks, in 1984, I had to get used to (and learn to live with) several new applications (there's one, for example) of words I'd been happily using for years. One of these was 'actionable', frequently used in the world of nets&comms where, as I understand it, it is used to describe a chunk of data that the software knows what to do with [and excuse the personification – that was another trick I had to get used to: a software engineer who means ‘the software assesses the data and sends it to X' {where X is another software module being developed by engineer N} says ‘I sniff the data and hand it to N'; a neat bit of jargon, but one that calls for quite a bit of decrypting]. This Google search shows that on a single site (w3.org  – home of the relevant geeks) there are 1,750 hits.
</autobiographical_note>

... is due to the spread of the new meaning.

All of which is pretty plausible... Except that I have conveniently cherry-picked my data.  Going back a further 50 years the same Collins site shows this frequency:

A tale of litigiousness in the Roaring 20s?

So what's the message? Perhaps this just underlines a point  made by David Crystal in his treatment of the 100th word, twittersphere, in The Story of English in 100 Words:

What causes language-change? Events, dear boy, events – among other things.

b

Update 2015.11.10.20:40 – added this note:

^*It was easier than I expected. This BNC search throws up 87 hits for "actionable". Of these, 66 are marked as academic, and of those 64 have the sub-class W_ac_polit_law_edu. So, making the safe assumption that the ones in that sub-class had the legal meaning, there were only 23 to trawl through by hand. Out of the 87, all but 2 have the legal sense.

Update 2015.11.11.09:20 – added this PS:

PS This note, I now realize, suggests the precise opposite of  what I wanted it to. I wondered if the American story would be different. This COCA search shows that things are very different for American English:

This calls for further reflection, but not now. 

Update 2015.11.12.22:20 – Updated TES stats.

Update 2015.11.15.19:20 – made addition in blue to autobiographical bit.

---

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

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

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

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

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

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,900 views  and nearly 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.

Taking things to ♥

In last night's talk at the Great Hall, Reading, David Crystal mentioned a change on Twitter (a tweak?) that has caused ructions. Not being a daily user of Twitter –  a twenizen or twabitué – I was aware of it but could not date it so precisely; a⋆ has become a ♥ ; at my latest visit, I just noticed and thought  Whyever did they do that?
The ⋆had a pleasing ambiguity. I have used it in the past for two things:

1. As a marker for the last tweet  I had read (back in the days when I tried to at least cast an eye over all the tweets in my timeline). This mimics the First Unseen command of my one-time great love VAX Notes – which I may have mentioned before.
2. As a way of keeping a record of tweets I wanted to remember (typically, pointers to web pages).

Unlicensed screengrab from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9lmCpIzhFo

So, as I saw it,  the star was a marker for my use. I had not, then, come across the concept of a social media Like. In the world of social media there is a growing trend in favour of expressing approval of things, by awarding a Like (not a precise synonym for 'a like' in the analogue world – which is a habitual preference, as in likes and dislikes). Well, to call it  'a growing trend' is something of an understatement; it's more an outpouring of unEnglish bonhomie, which is gradually seeping into British English among users of social media. A digital Like is a notch in your digital gun (or, for Not The Nine O'clock News fans, a hedgehog symbol on the cab of your lorry). It's something to be proud of, and a public statement of your worth.

I realized the importance of this distinction when posters of tweets that I had marked with my ^no. 1 sort of 'like' (when the nearest sense to liking was in the implied You [i.e. I –  this is an internal monologue, remember] may LIKE to note that you've seen everything before this one) started thanking me.

A questioner after the talk asked whether Crystal expected the reinstatement of the ⋆ alongside the ♥.  Many users of Twitter had complained, Crystal had said – particularly (or at least most vocally) journalists, who didn't want to Like a picture of a beheading,  for example, when they just found it noteworthy. And this called to mind an example from a forum thousands of times smaller than Twitter.

<autobiographical_note> 

When I first started using UsingEnglish.com there was no way of symbolically expressing approval. This was in 2006, when many users still had slow dial-up lines. It was frustrating to spend <however long> (90 seconds?) downloading the latest reply to a note you were subscribed to, only to see the word Thanks (or even just tx or ;) ). So the powers that be introduced a Thanks button. 

But the forum, which used the vBulletin package was, in time, social-ized. You could have Groups and Friends and stuff – all those social impedimenta that we nerds are uncomfortable with. And as part of this social-ization (or in its wake [I'm not sure of the relative dates]) the Thanks button was re-labelled Like. 

This was not popular. People wanted to be able to give Thanks without the emotional incontinence of spraying Likes around like an over-excited puppy. Some time afterwards  – I don't know how soon after the change to Like, as a job intervened and I took a sabbatical from my moderating duties  – a new Thanks button was introduced alongside Like. This effete contempt for Likes has backfired. The Facebook page for WVGTbook has amassed a pitiful 60-odd Likes in about 2 years. He who lives by the ... umnm, this sentence has lost its way. 

 </autobiographical_note>

So, if I were a betting man, I would put money^† on Twitter following suit with their symbols. Look out for a ⋆ alongside the  ♥.

b

PS My occasional award of a Tezzy (for the Time-Wasting Site of the Year) goes to this site. Unlike previous Tezzy laureates, it's not really the site itself that is the time-waster – but rather the activity that the site invites.

Update 2015.11.09.10.10 – Added this note:
^†Crystal-watchers will note that this prediction is at odds with the Professor's insistence on  avoiding predictions  about language-change (except the certainty that something will change). I  – no doubt unwisely  –  am less careful.

For example, in a recent reply in the UsingEnglish forum I wrote:

If I were to say 1 is wrong [HD – the question was about a dog 'perking up' or 'pricking up' its ears], I would expect a chorus of disapproval from people who thought I wasn't aware of how language changes. And one of those ways is the ultimate acceptance of something that initially was a mistake. Elsewhere I wrote

The word VESPERTILIONES was glossed in this document [an early list for travellers of equivalent phrases and mistakes] as CHAUVE-SOURIS. Elcock goes on:

.... In fact, bats are not noticeably bald..., and one is tempted to infer that CALVAS SORICES is a product of 'popular etymology', hiding a quite different word. In most French patois bats are called 'flying-mice' or 'bird-mice'; it may well be that CALVAS is in reality *KAWAS [the asterisk is a convention used to mark a supposed, not attested, form], the Germanic word which survives as the root of Fr, chouette 'owl'.

'Owl-mouse' - for chauve-souris - would make much more sense. But what caused the change from *KAWAS to CALVAS? ...

So I would say the use of 'perk up' given in 1 is not entirely acceptable yet, but it's understandable and therefore becoming more widely accepted. If you ask the same question in 50 years, the answer might be 'Yes, it's right', but somebody else would be answering!

---

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

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

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

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

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

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,800 views  and nearly 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.

Fantasy footfall

My theme today is remarkably stupid bits of pseudo-academical 'truth' that are readily swallowed by the gullible. I have two cases in mind, though the meme (or trope as we used to say in those heady days 'Before The Selfish Gene') is a common one.  Besides, meme seems to be now, Anno Dawkinsii, coming to mean something like video-of-funny-looking-pet-doing-something-improbable.

The first was gross enough to rouse the sleeping blogger from purdah (or should that be blurdah?). David Crystal, who has better things to do, wrote this, ending thus:

...It's yet another example of how the tabloid media masquerades fiction as fact, in the interests of what they think is a good story. TheGuardian, for example, ran a piece debunking the myth, but that will hardly have an impact on the many readers of the Mirror and the Daily Mail (which also ran the story prominently) who will have read it, believed it, and repeated it. It's really depressing. This kind of journalism makes the job of a linguist so much harder.

Here's that article: Guardian  by an Australian commentator (which explains the Is and wes):

...[I]t was with considerable amusement that I read the explosion of chatter about the alleged origins of the Australian accent this week. Dean Frenkel, a public speaking expert, wrote in the Age:

Our forefathers regularly got drunk together and through their frequent interactions unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to our national speech patterns. For the past two centuries, from generation to generation, drunken Aussie-speak continues to be taught by sober parents to their children.

(It got worse from there: “It is possible that our national speech impediment is a symptom of inferior brain functioning.”)

The second is a ridiculous piece of 'research' published in Current Biology a few years ago and only coming to my attention last week (in the too short Robert Newman's Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution series, relevant episode here) . A Daily Telegraph article discussed this research, which mentioned (among other things)  an apparent preference for pink among women, and a suggested palaeo-genetic reason for its selection:

The reason could have its origins in the hunt for food on the African savannah millennia ago.  

Evolution may have honed women's preference for pink, perhaps because it helped them to find ripe fruit ... 

"This shifts their colour preference slightly away from blue towards red, which tends to make pinks and lilacs the most preferred colours," said Prof Hurlbert. 

She said she could only speculate about the preference for blue: "Here again, I would favour evolutionary arguments. Going back to our 'savannah' days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signalled good weather. Clear blue also signals a good water source."

Stands to reason, dunni'?

...Except that colours as flags signifying gender (Blue Peter for boys and Red Duster for girls?) weren't always that way. As a Smithsonian article, reviewing Jo B. Paoletti's Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America puts it:

The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out... 

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” 

Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

So all that hunters → blue, gatherers → pink stuff is not only stuff  but also nonsense, or as Crystal puts it, with reference to the drunken Aussies story, bol... (but no, you can read it here – in the first para).

b

Update, 2015.11.02,22:10 – Fixed dodgy text (sorry) with small addition in blue.

---

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

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

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

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

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

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.

Tortilla humps

Some time ago, in a PS to this,  I wrote:

The Tortilla Tie

A while ago (too long ago for me to find an exact match on the M&S site) I was given a tie quite like this. And the pun in my title has reminded me of its stock ID: Sartorial tie. But the person who programmed the stock control software – the magic stuff that makes receipts say so much – must have been dyslexic (or maybe it was just a Friday afternoon). As a result, the receipt said that what MrsK had bought was a TORTILLA TIE. 

And here it is, by the magic of Bluetooth.


Yesterday, the Tortilla tie had one of its rare outings, on the occasion of the wedding of two friends for whom I wish all good things; at last they have made honest women of  each other. All my love to Karen and Catherine.

Interesting word tortilla.... It is, etymologically, a 'little torta', or 'tart'. but it is savoury, and takes two forms.

<autobiographical_note>
The first meaning  I met improbably, at St Gregory's RC Primary School in the late 1950s (in the assembly hall, as it happens). We sat on the floor in the hall to listen to BBC Schools Radio (or whatever it was called then), though we didn't know it was radio. It was a huge lump of loudspeaker, a veritable ziggurat of a thing, too big to stand on a table, with none of the controls (none visible, that is)  that would have identified it as a wireless [or TSF as I would learn to call it a few years later, when I wondered Why does 'Barren telegraphy' mean radio? {Geddit? Sans fils. Bou-boum/Tsh}], except for a large Bakelite on/off switch. 

The programme was an 'opera' called, I think, The Midnight Thief, set in Mexico.  It was full of funny words. The opening chorus, for example, ended 

Cock-of-the-rock and cuckoo
Are our comrades and hobnobbers
But we think it right
To shoot at sight
All bandits thieves and robbers 

The main characters were Fernando and Frasquita, and I played the G chime bar. At one stage, Fernando 'packed his tortillas with cheese'.
</autobiographical_note>

This is the pancake-like tortilla. The other I met about 10 years later – the omelette-like sort.

<potential_digression reason="hedge-trimming">
Omelette, now there's a word....
</potential_digression>

Gotta go.

b

---

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

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

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

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

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

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.

.

Lies, damned lies, and general drum-beating

Every now and then I do a post about how Harmless Drudgery is doing. It started in October 2012, so that the first full year's visits had been recorded by the end of October 2013. Since then I've got (courtesy of Blogger) more than two years'  worth of stats, which make for a bit of a long graph – more of a frieze; so I've taken every fourth one to produce this quarterly picture of growth – healthy, but no more than linear.

Revised figures at end of October

It would be unrealistic, I think, to expect a similar near-doubling readership over the coming 9 quarters;  and, besides, it takes quite a bit of (writing) effort to maintain interest – which is at odds with the original purpose of the blog [which, longer-term visitors will know, was to support my other writing efforts].

Also, I'm aware (and slightly envious) of the example set by David Crystal's blog, which is very sporadic. He ends his most recent post with these words:

There's nothing like dictionary compilation to take you away from the real world. It's not like any other kind of writing, where you are in control of your content. In a dictionary, the content controls you, in the form of the alphabet. The object in question will be out in March,The Oxford Dictionary of Shakespearean Pronunciation. It's at the copy-editing stage, and next month I have to record the audio version and soon after go through the proofs. Believe me, there's nothing more blog-destroying than a set of dictionary proofs.

In 2012-13, at the time of initial work on When Vowels Get Together's various work-in-progress editions, I remember sharing this tunnel-vision. I posted to the blog fairly frequently, but often in smaller posts – often scarcely more than a screenful (although many of those earlier posts have had Updates added. And there was also the footer, which fleshed them out [at the expense of up-to-date statistics]).

For the first year, it was feasible to update footers quite regularly; but with a backlog ...

<digression>
At last, an etymologically deferential usage (which is not to say, of course, that words' meanings should be – or indeed can be – preserved in aspic; here's an interesting post that describes The Etymological Fallacy) . This post discussed the word backlog.
</digression>

... of getting on for 240 posts. the task of updating them has become a mixture of Sisyphean and Augean. Besides, I've worked out how to do it properly, with tabs. So stay tuned for a NEW DEAL.

b

PS – A clue:

Starry-eyed rallies disorganized – releasing endless cry. (8)

Update 2015.10.21.18:05 – And another:
PPS Way to show deference to French chef, say – two-wok version. (6)

Update 2015.10.31.20:55 – And another:
PPPS An office assistant toys with reprisal, but thinks again. (11)
(I also updated the graphic.)

Update 2015.11.04.22:25 – And yet another:
P⁴S Nuts – sociopaths without ring involve copper's nark in fit-up (10)

---

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

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

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

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

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

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 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 nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.

.

Faithful or attractive, take 2

"Since some time I have begun an oratorio [BK – Elijah], and hope I shall be able to bring it out for the first time at your Festival..." 

Mendelssohn to the organizers of Birmingham Music Festival, 24 July 1845

'Since some time'? 'Bring it out'? Mendelssohn was an imperfect  speaker of English, though his English was a lot better than my German  (which, as I have said before, was Best Before End November 1969), and Elijah appeared first in English; all his correspondence with the Festival organizers and with his English publishers was conducted in English.

F.G Edwards, in his History of Mendelssohn's Oratorio 'Elijah' wrote:

The music of "Elijah" was composed to German words; an English version was therefore necessary. Mendelssohn had no hesitation in assigning the task of making the English translation to Mr. Bartholomew—"the translator par excellence," as he called him—who is so well known as the translator or adaptor of Mendelssohn's "Athalie," "Antigone," "Œdipus," "Lauda Sion," "Walpurgis Night," the Finale to "Loreley," "Christus," and many of his songs and part-songs.

According to Edwards,

William Bartholomew (1793-1867) 

 

William Bartholomew (1793-1867) was "a man of many accomplishments—chemist, violin player, and excellent flower painter." In 1841 he submitted to Mendelssohn the libretto of a fairy opera, entitled "Christmas Night's Dream"; and in this way an acquaintance commenced which developed into a(49) close friendship between the two men—a friendship severed only by death.

Perhaps Mendelssohn's estimate of Bartholomew's excellence as a translator could be questioned. Perhaps Mendelssohn just meant that he was biddable, and ready to offer dubious and/or risible versions of the German texts as long as they approximated to the rhythms and sounds of the original. Here are some bits of the German, with Bartholomew's English text (I admit I was tempted to add some derisive quotation marks to that English); in the event I have just coloured offending^‡ versions in red.

verbig dich am Bache Crith

   =(?) thither^† hide thee by Cherith's brook

so ziehet hin, greifet ihn, tötet ihn!

    =(?) So go ye forth; seize on him! He shall die!

Wir haben es gehört  

    =(?) We heard it with our ears

noch sind übrig geblieben siebentausend in Israel, die sich nich gebeugt vor Baal

    =(?) for the Lord hath yet left Him seven thousand in Israel, knees that have not bowed to Baal

That last one is hard to deliver without laughing. At a first reading, I thought the seven thousand knees were just an encouraging spin on the notion of only 3,500 faithful. But look at the German: 'siebentausend..., die sich nicht...'  The die are the 7,000 faithful. The 'knees' are a figment of Bartholomew's imagination [and the resultant chaotic syntax is his fault].

But I don't underestimate the difficulties of verse translation; I'm a one-time practitioner, as mentioned here. And I'm not suggesting the wholesale revision of dated works; I pointed out here, for example, that in The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves Verdi set the archaic word Ove where modern Italian would have Dove; archaisms come with classic works of art. I'm just saying that the publishers of the next edition might usefully spend some money on a less unreliable English version; after all, they must have recouped the £250 [+ £100 ex gratia to Mendelssohn's widow] they paid for the copyright.

(I shouldn't have to add, but perhaps I'd better, that this doesn't make Elijah any less exciting to sing or listen to. I'm looking forward greatly to singing it with my choir next month. )

^†This is a puerile attempt at sounding archaic. Thither doesn't just mean there; it didn't in 1846 and it still doesn't.

b

Update 2015.10.14.16:20 – Added clarifications in maroon.

Update 2015.10.15.15:25 – Umble [sic] pie eaten.

^‡I have wronged Bartholomew. He was presumably influenced by biblical translations (not always the ones relevant to the Elijah story). Of the four lapses I identified, three are explicable:

1. seize on
   This is used only once in the King James Bible (which I'm assuming is the one Bartholomew was conversant with), and in the New Testament. But a biblical snippet like this would naturally have come to mind when Bartholomew was looking for words to match the rhythm of the German.
2. we heard it with our ears^§
   Again, this isn't taken directly from the Bible text, but it's strongly reminiscent of this:
   Then spake the priests and the prophets unto the princes and to all the people, saying, This man is worthy to die; for he hath prophesied against this city, as ye have heard with your ears.
   [Jer. 26:11] 
3. knees
   This is not in the German text in the Novello edition, but it is in the King James Bible, almost verbatim:
   Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal
   [1 Kgs 19:18]
   And it is also in the Lutheran bible that Schübring based his libretto on:
   Und ich will übriglassen siebentausend in Israel: alle Kniee, die sich nicht gebeugt haben vor Baal
   more
   In the KJV text, I think the all the makes it sound slightly less silly. But it's a fair cop:
   Pride [goeth] before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. 

Update 2015.10.19.15:15 – Final obsessive? shaft – added this footnote:

^§ In an afterthought added to item 3  in this list of dubieties

<digression>
...I almost wrote infelicities – which would have been pleasing [in view of the composer's given name  – geddit, b-boum/tsh] but perhaps a little excessive. Besides, I rarely pass up the chance to use a word as luscious as dubiety ...
</digression>

...I cited the Lutheran Bible's Kniee (which I had previously said was 'a figment of Bartholomew's imagination'). The associated syntax, I had said, was 'his fault'.

Well, in a sense, it WAS. I was put onto the track of this line of enquiry by this extract from the Lutheran Bible (of the extract from The Book of Jeremiah, which I gave as precedent for '[we] heard it with our ears'):

Und die Priester und Propheten sprachen vor den Fürsten und allem Volk: Dieser ist des Todes schuldig; denn er hat geweissagt wider diese Stadt, wie ihr mit euren Ohren gehört habt.
More

Again, the bit of text that I had found questionable was in the Lutheran Bible [as far as I can tell from the only Lutheran text that I have found on the Internet – which can't have been the one Schubring knew [unless he had a DeLorean in the garage], but was not in Schubring's German text. Possibly (I think probably would not be an overstatement) there are many other bits of Bartholomew's translations that reinstate bits of Biblical text which Schubring had suppressed – presumably with Mendelssohn's approval (as their correspondence is quite detailed).

Bartholomew had a low opinion of the original librettist. On 23 June 1846 he wrote to Mendelssohn:

...I know not how so bad a scribe as he who penned the libretto could have been found;  words, nay even sentences were omitted... 

(Quotations from this and other correspondence are taken from F.G Edwards'  History of Mendelssohn's Oratorio 'Elijah' )

Poor Mendelssohn! Only months before (just before Christmas 1845) he had written at length to Schubring:

My dear Schubring,—I now send you, according to your permission, the text of 'Elijah,' so far as it goes. I do beg of you to give me your best assistance, and return it soon with plenty of notes in the margin (I mean Scriptural passages, etc.)... 

...Speaking is a very different thing from writing. The few minutes I lately passed with you and yours were more enlivening and cheering than ever so many letters.—Ever your
Felix

Bartholomew's 'so bad a scribe' must have tried Mendelssohn's loyalty.

For the revised version, Bartholomew seems to have largely had his way, with Mendelssohn struggling (successfully, in the case of the 'couch-watering' widow) against Bartholomew's scriptural conservatism. On 3 March 1847 he wrote to Bartholomew:

My dear Sir,—I have just received your letter of the 24th, and hasten to reply. I like all the passages of the translation you send me with but two exceptions. In No. 30, 'that Thou would'st please destroy me' sounds so odd to me—is it scriptural? If it is, I have no objection, but if not, pray substitute something else. And then in the new No. 8 [the widow scene]—the words from Psalm vi. which you hesitated to adopt are, of course, out of the question; but I also object to the second part of the sentence which you propose to add to the words of Psalm xxxviii. {6}, viz.: 'I water my couch,' etc. [Psalm vi., 6.]—I do dislike this so very much, and it is so poetical in the German version. So if you could substitute something in which no 'watering of the couch' occurred, but which gave the idea of the tears, of the night, of all that in its purity. Pray try!

But enough of this. I should redirect my energy into LEARNING THE NOTES.

Update 2015.11.22.12:25 – Added post-choral PS

PS One last reflection on Bartholomew: How long was the drought?

I don't have the text in front of me (as after the concert last night –  the fullest I've ever seen the Great Hall, and the first time I've ever heard such an enthusiastic ovation [deserved, especially by a brilliantly electrifying Elijah] – I returned my hired score), but Google tells me the German text, as originally set, in the passage where Elijah decides to go to Ahab, is Heute, im dritten Jahre, will ich mich dem Könige zeigen..., The original curse, mentioned in the opening bars, is these years there shall not be dew nor rain but according to my word – that is, it was up to Jehova when the water supply was to be reconnected. The baritone tune (in this later section, N^o 10) mirrors the opening curse, and the 'these' of the opening bars becomes 'three'.

This belief is no doubt partly due to that dritte. A simple textual translation of those German words would be "Today, in the third year, I will show the king..." But Bartholomew's extraordinary translation makes it oddly specific: 'Three years this day fulfilled, I will show myself unto Ahab..." Oddly specific and improbably, if you think about it; if it stops raining in, say March, it's not going to start again at precisely the same time of year; that'd be a MIRACLE. And Bartholomew has also mangled the sense in another way. Heute ... will ich zeigen...; it just happens to be im dritten Jahre [="in the third year"], not "precisely, to the day, at the end of the third year" [or as Elijah puts it in Bartholomew's text "three years this day fulfilled"].

I'm forced to the conclusion that the only way to be true to Mendelssohn's intentions would be to sing the German – not a welcome suggestion among singers who look forward, every few years, to singing words like "extirpate". 

Update 2015.11.23.15:40 – Added clarification in green.

Update 2015.12.05.23:30 – Added PPS

PPS: One last thing. Elsewhere I wrote this:

The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes).

I quoted from a couple of pieces (with a pretty interesting reflection on the way Fauré plays with his audience's expectations, TISIAS) , and was aware at the time that this tally needed adding to. I've just noticed one in Elijah, and though that post seems the obvious place to put it I think that would be an update too far –  it would be the fifth PS.

Earth-Heaven = 1 octave
(Excerpt from Elijah)

When in  the second half of the oratorio, Elijah is taken up bodily into Heaven (none of this rotting business – so common) the music steps up an octave, starting with the basses on E♭.

And Mendelssohn repeats the scale, and then gives both extremes to underline the point.



Update 2015.12.06.11:30 – Improved music snippet, updated footer and added this crossword clue:

Mine sea cow – sounds like our kind. (8)

Update 2021.01.15.11:30 –  Deleted old footer; and  tried to dredge up the answer to that clue after six years. My knee-jerk answer would be manatees, but I can't think how that works.