Cultural metaphor

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

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

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

Viva Verdi

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

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

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

b
PS Here are a couple more clues:

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

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



Update 2016.04.22.16:45 – Added PPS:

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

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

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

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

Update 2016.04.23.15:30 – Shakespearean PPPS

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

The Pseudo-Marlowe portrait: 
a wish fulfilled

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

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

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

Update 2016.11.22.14:05 –  Added PPS

PPS Answers: TALLYMEN; OLIVE BRANCH

Tonic sulphur

Today's  area of interest is stress,  which I've looked at several times already – here and here, for example, but the word cloud in the right margin will guide you to others. This time, though I want to look in particular at stress as it relates to tone.

When a linguist hears the word tone they automatically think of Chinese (or, if they have some background in more exotic languages, some other language that uses tones to make semantic distinctions). I (like most Eurocentric linguists, I imagine) think of Mandarin Chinese, because that's the most widely-spoken tonal language.

And I imagine everyone who learns to cite Mandarin Chinese as a tonal language also learns the same word as an example (four words, actually): ma. There are many MANY others though.  I learnt ma, but I was not surprised to see that Wikipedia used it as well. It‘s certainly worth a visit to the original, as it has an accompanying audio example; that‘s what I call "exempli gratia".

The four different MAs mean four different things: mother, hemp, horse and scold, respectively.

As that article says,

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words.^[1] All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages...

I suspect, as the order of the tone/meaning relations is the same, that Wikipedia‘s source for this example was this. But maybe I'm doing them an injustice; the voices in the two examples are different, and there might for all I know be some technical or just traditional reason for observing that order.

Anyway, that's not the sort of tone that concerns me here.  In discussions of stress, it's common to use the word tonic to refer to the stressed syllable, and a family of related words – atonic, oxytone, paroxytone.... Etymologically, these all refer back to the Greek τονος:

..."vocal pitch, raising of voice, accent, key in music," originally "a stretching, tightening, taut string," related to teinein "to stretch" (see tenet)

Arma virumque cano. CANO  ("I sing)".  I remember coming across a speculation once about what the diacritics in Homer signify: just stress, just tone (musical pitch, frequency), a mixture of the two...? It may have been in one of the first books I edited  – The Greeks and Their Heritages, published very posthumously as Arnold J. Toynbee died 6 years before it was published; so unless he was writing it on his deathbed the typescript had been knocking around at OUP for longer than that, waiting for someone to get stuck in.

<autobiographical_note>
In  the one and only (nope, make that two and only. although the technique was the same the second time around) seminar I led, I marked up my script with "diacritics" as a guide to ensure my meaning got across.
</autobiographical_note>

There is, in Spanish, a usefully self-referential word for a proparoxytone (as I'm afraid linguists call a word stressed on the last syllable but two  –  or, to use another $10 word antepenult. The word is  esdrújula; and esdrújula itself is an example, geddit? – so it's a lot easier to remember than proparoxytone. So is proparoxytone of course;  but so also is paroxytone, and so is oxytone, which spoils the party rather.

So I'll stick with esdrújula. Esdrújulas cause problems in language transmission (to a learner, that is). In languages that are predominantly, as regards words of more than one syllable,  paroxytonic (dah-dee) there is a tendency for the esdrújula stress pattern to be ironed out.

Take, for example, the esdrújula (Latin) word cathedra, which referred originally to a sort of chair (the sort a bishop sits on – we still refer to a bishop's seat [and in Portuguese a cathedral  is uma sé]. When the Pope makes an important  pronouncement, he delivers it from the papal chair – ex cathedra. But this is commonly rendered mis-stressed as ex cathedra. The choir of that name is often (almost always, on Classic FM) referred to in that way. In fact, they may have taken the pragmatic decision to go with the flow – as did Vladimir Horovitz in another case of mispronunciation.

<digression theme="Horovitz">
Until he started performing in the West the legendary pianist kept his native initial /g/^PS – written "H" in Cyrillic script. But, when Western agents and promoters started pronouncing his name with an /h/, he effectively changed his name.

<meta_digression>  

I suspect Einaudi may have taken a similar course; this needs further attention.

</meta_digression>

 </digression>

Ex machina is another esdrújula often mistreated (ex machina), and  – a frequently suffered trial  in the life of a choir member  – Carmina Burana (Carmina).

<rantette>
And another thing, while I'm on the subject. That tenor/conductor's name is Plácido  Domingo ("peaceful Sunday" [what I'm hoping for now the grass is all mown]) – that's why the accent's there. Think of the English "placid". It isn't the (metrical) twin of "placebo".
<rantette>

Underlay, the relation between notes and words (mentioned here), is often a guide (when the composer speaks the language). Here are two examples from a piece I'm singing in June:

Ove_olezzano tepide_e molli

That Verdi bloke would've absolutely aced  his Grade V Theory (setting a text): the stressed syllables, including two esdrújulas , fall on the stressed beats in the bar. In fact, if Verdi had written it – boringly  (he didn't) – in ¾ time, they would each have fallen on the first beat of a new bar. And in that uninteresting ¾ version, although both the te- and the pi- of tepide start a new bar, it's clear that te- is the more stressed syllable because its note is longer and pitched higher.

But any more on this topic will have to wait. I'm outta here.

b

PS A clue:

Adverse camber, a cause for apprehension? (6)

Update: 2016.04.29.15:20 – Explanatory typo fix in blue parens [sorry about that – took me a while to work out what I meant], and added PPS:

PPS On the subject of stress and tone, another song we're singing in our forthcoming concert is It ain't necessarily so – which includes the words "He made his home in that fish's abdomen". The underlay forces stress on the second syllable, which – on a first hearing many years ago – I put down to American English. But many dictionaries give both (though always, in my experience, with abdomen having pride of place). I had previously assumed that the British English stress was the one given unequivocally in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary:

No option given there,  whichever side of the Pond you're on.

But I'm regularly struck by my Tai Chi teacher's (her mother tongue not being English) pronunciation of "abdomen". And I think I may have found a clue (though not an explanation). Various editions of, for example, the Free Dictionary have foreign voices carefully pronouncing examples with all vowels given their canonical sound (as though stressed): the Netherlands one gives clear stress to the second syllable; these two are less clear, as both vowels are as if stressed – French and Spanish. But it seems as though languages with the same spelling for the word abdomen don't change their stress when they speak English*, so end up with the abdomen stress, as given in the English Language Free Dictionary audio example.

Hmm... But time's a-wasting.

b

And here are a  couple more clues;

Be present, finally – about time! (6)

Parrot, that is, instead of a clown. (7)

And time's up on the first one (set nearly three weeks ago): MACABRE

Update 2016.05.16.10:40 – Added footnote:

* Come to think  of it, you can bet your life that Moishe and Rose Gershovitz's native language had stress on the -do-, so naturally their son Ira pronounced it that way.

 Update 2016.11.22.14:00 – Added PS

PS The answer to the second clue: PIERROT. Sorry, the first (of the last two) has me beat :-)

Update 2017.04.13.23:15 – Added PPS

PPS: ¡En fin! The answer I couldn't fathom has come to me: ATTEND.
 

Update 2017.05.07.15:30– Added PPPS/footnote

^PPPS This is rubbish, though nearly right in a sort of way. I got letters and phonemes the wrong way round (the info had been dormant since 1982 [when I was editing a book on Horowitz]). The sound is [x] and the Cyrillic is G. He didn't change his name, but he changed his spelling to stop (non-Russian) people calling him Gorovitz. I had been worrying about this for some time, but a Russian interviewee on the news this morning, saying the Eurovision Song Contest was a modern-day "Sodom and Χomorrah" alerted me to the error.

Long time no screed

See what I did there?

I was thinking last week about Maundy Money, and of course its derivation – the derivation not just of the word Maundy but of the ceremony itself (the distribution of largesse [well, not that LARGE]). What was given  out at the ur-ceremony was not so much largesse as a service.

The One True Church commemorates this in The Washing of the Feet.

<autobiographical_note theme="Been there, done that">
At the service on Maundy Thurday

<digression>
THINKS: must look up the other day names: I can do Easter Sunday, Holy Saturday, Good Friday, Maundy Thursday OK, and I think it's Spy Wednesday (ridiculous, really, as if Judas was a Fifth Columnist rather than a flawed bloke – as was Peter in the same story); but I have a feeling there are epithets for Monday and Tuesday too.
<digression>

The celebrant (priest numero uno, in my case Father Abbot) re-enacts Christ‘s emblematic washing of the apostles' feet – except that they were really dirty after a typical dusty Palestinian...

<digression>
Always with the dust,  already. In Saturday‘s concert we sing, in Laudate Pueri, about the Lord de stercore erigens pauperem, "translated" as "raising up the poor from the dust". But dust was the least of your worries in ancient Palestine; stercus means something a lot more organic than dust: dung, says Etymonline under scatology. (And if you think you've detected metathesis there – see Letters playing leapfrog [and elsewhere] – you're learning)
</digression>

... day in sandals, rather than still smarting from Auntie Katy‘s attentions with nail brush and pumice stone (as the part of the apostles was played by a dozen altar boys).<autobiographical_note> 

Mandatum novum do vobis, ("I give you a new commandment...") said Christ (according to the Vulgate).

French made this order mandé, and that nasalized a became in English aun.* At least, that was the story we were given at the time. In later years I have to admit that I suspected a trace of pious folk etymology – as with the Doomsday Book (which I long believed came from Domus Dei, an inventory of newly Christianized Britain (not that Christianity hadn't been around for several centuries – it's just that William was a True Believer): the House of God. Plausible, but rubbish).

So I did a bit of checking, and found that Maundy is related to  mandé:

          Maundy Thursday 

Thursday before Easter, mid-15c., from Middle English maunde "the Last Supper," also "ceremony of washing the feet," from Old French mandé, from Latin mandatum "commandment" (see mandate)...

(Courtesy of Etymonline as usual, with no apology for recourse to the usual source; I can't afford an OED subscription. But in case you want another reference, they're easy enough to find. Here's one, for example or  here, or ...)

And while we're on the subject of the etymology of Easter words, try this. Fancy simnel cake being related to semolina (spot the phonological change process: hint – look at the consonants in simnel/semolina).

But I must go and prepare for the Big Day. –

b

PS: a couple more clues:

• Nothing but going over the same ground again and again – dull as ditch-water,
  for example. (12)
• Onset of season after climate change makes a climber. (8)

Update 2016.04.04.17:35 – Added link to review.

PPS – And here's a review of last Saturday's concert.

Update 2016.04.19.11:00 – Added footnote:

* Looking for something else (as ever) I just saw this confirmation of the "French -an => English -aun" spelling on David Crystal's blog:

 ...France is usually spelled France in the First Folio, but it is spelled Fraunce when the French are speaking (suggesting a pronunciation of 'frawnce'). Henry is also given this spelling when he is trying to speak French to Kate - and he has it just once when he is speaking English. 

Update 2016.05.16.10:25 – Crossword answers: ALLITERATION and CLEMATIS

Ex unibus plurum - "wuggen" revisited

In my last post I stumbled, in passing, on an idea; some of you may have noticed the "hmmm". I thought it might take the form of an update, but it has turned out to be a bit more substantial than that. The idea was to quantify the different ways English has of forming a plural. When I wrote this post nearly two years ago it didn't occur to me to wonder. I was content to say

English has lots of ways of pluralizing a noun – no change (sheep, fish...), change -us to -i (radius → radii...), add -en (ox → oxen [or do something else involving '-en' {child → children, brother →  brethren...}]), change -ex or -ix to -ices (matrix → matrices)^† etc, but by far the most common device is to add an s (though this simple idea hides several options [/s/ {rabbits}, /z/ {gardeners}, /ɪz/ {radishes}]. What is the word for 'more than one wug'? Wugs, of course, with /gz/.

It's fairly obvious to a  native speaker that the most common way is to  add an s. In fact, this rule becomes apparent whenever a young language learner mistakenly adds an s to an irregular plural – sheep becomes sheepS rather than sheep, for example, and when an adult corrects mouseS to mice, the compulsion to keep faith in the add-an-s rule is so strong that the next attempt is quite often miceS.

But I wondered how I could put a number on that. The obvious source of data seemed to me to be the British National Corpus, though it is relatively small, at a mere 100,000,000 words. Some of the publicly available corpuses...

<I_know_ I_know subject="corpora">
There are people  who  say that corpora is the"correct" plural; some readers may have had the misfortune of being taught by someone who believed so; Firefox is trying to correct my spelling.  The latinate plural is not wrong, but I adhere to Fowler's belief (in The King‘s English)

 ...that all words not English in appearance are in English writing ugly and not pretty, and that they are justified only (1) if they afford much the shortest or clearest, if not the only way to the meaning ... or (2) if they have some special appropriateness of association or allusion in the sentence they stand in.

Elsewhere (maybe Modern English Usage) he gives the advice that you‘re less likely to make an embarrassing mistake (like mistaking a latinate -us word for a second declension noun instead of a 3rd [such as corpus] or 4th declension one [syllabus, for example], and giving it an -i ending), and more likely to be understood, if you use a native English s plural ending whenever it's possible.
</I_know_ I_know>

... have many more.

It is possible in principle to construct a query that requires a search engine to return all the nouns in it that end with a certain string. But accompany me, if you will, in a thought experiment. Suppose for the sake of argument that in any text in the corpus the percentage of nouns  is N%.

<back_of_fag_packet> 

A few examples, followed by the count of plural  nouns:

1. The cat sat on the mat.                               N=0 
2. There is a tide in the affairs of men...      N=1
3. Softly softly catchee monkey.                   N=0         
4. The wages of sin is death.                         N=1
5. When shall we three meet again?            N=0
6. Honey I shrunk [sic] the kids                    N=1
7. Where have you been all day?                 N=0

In this mini-corpus (perhaps I should make that nano-corpus) there are 3 plural nouns out of a total of 50 words. They're not too common, plural nouns; 6% in this case, though in for example a recipe book the figure would be much higher. In BNC, that would be 6%  of 100,000,000 – 6,000,000. 

This is admittedly  a VERY dodgy sample; but my point is that even a tiny value for N leads to a big number in a corpus such as BNC. 

</back_of_fag_packet>

At the British National Corpus I asked for all the plural nouns that end -s. This would catch a few non-standard plurals, like indices or theses; but those would add up to no more than dozens, or hundreds at most, among millions. But the query timed out after finding the first 7500 distinct words (the most common of all was things at 40,453 – a clear 11,000 ahead of the field), by which stage the search had only worked its way down to words that had a total of 27 hits.  For comparison, in plural nouns ending -n, the search worked its way down to 23 (there was  no 24, 25, 26 or 27) after listing about 96% of all possible hits. Extrapolating from that we can estimate that if a search reaches 27 after 4.5M hits there will be a total of something like 5,000,000 (N = 5 – so my fag packet calculation wasn't too far out).

I've crunched some numbers, thinking at first in terms of some pretty pie charts. But the difference between -s plurals and all the others was so great that pie charts wouldn't be very interesting: most non-s endings would get a tiny (often nearly invisible) sliver. I've shown my working here (none too legibly I'm afraid):

More legible version

In fact, rather than a pie chart, a more helpful image would be a clock-face. The sector occupied by all non-s plurals added together would be the area between 12 o'clock and about 4 minutes to. The only families of non-s plurals that would account for more than a minute or two would be irregular English plurals of all kinds (folk, men, children, feet, teeth,...) and Latin plurals  – mostly ending with -i, but sometimes ending with -a, or e; the few Latin plurals that end -ūs  (in Latin, as for example syllabus does) are of course lost among the -s endings  – if there are any in BNC.

There. There are some numbers. I may try a similar trick on another corpus; on the other hand I may get on with #WVGTbk2. 

b

Update 2016.03.21.14:30 – Added PS

PS  Here's a clue:

Stubborn – gathering information on the way (12)

Update 2016.03.23.14:50 – PPS

Added link to spreadsheet.

Update 2016.04.25.11:35 – PPPS

PPPS Time. The answer to that clue: INTRANSIGENT

Update 2018.06.10.10:25 – A few typo fixes

Update 2018.10.23.14:05 – Updated linked spreadsheet (but left old screen-grab as is – I'm sure anyone who's interested in the figures will look in the spreadsheet anyway).

Asking questions

Addenda agenda corrigenda memoranda propaganda pudenda...

The time has come, unfortunately, for the pointless, annoying, never-ending discussion about the plural of THE R WORD.

Let's take as our starting point  The Speech of Cicero for Aulus Cluentius Habitus:

This referendum ad populum ["the putting of a question to the people"] was soon abridged to plain referendum; but the phrase shows that the word was, in Latin, a gerund. Now I'm not going to argue that English has to follow the rules of Latin. That ridiculous notion has long plagued studies of English. But to quote one distance learning site:

Forming the gerund: The gerund is formed much the same way... . All gerunds are considered neuter nouns and there is NO nominative case and NO plural form.

OK, there is no plural of referendum  in Latin; so how do we form it in English? There is little doubt about how plurals are formed in English. In most cases (and I wonder how to quantify that most – hmmm) the rule is simple: add an s. Phonologically it's not quite that simple: dependent on what's being pluralized, you add either /s/ or/z/ or /i:z/ or /ɪz/. But there are quite a few exceptions: sheep/sheep, man/men, ox/oxen, basis/bases...

Then there are foreign borrowings: Latin – medium/media, Greek  – criterion/criteria, Hebrew seraph/seraphim... as many as the language has borrowed, and as many as will be borrowed....This gives many opportunities for linguistic snobbery:

My dear, did you hear that?  "Criterions" – Where did HE go to school?

Naturally, in the face of this, hypercorrect forms such as criterias are common. People think they should use the foreign pluralizer, but  the native one interferes. And sometimes a foreignified version becomes so commonly used that it becomes standardized. This seems to be what has happened to referendum. It wasn't until I started researching for this post that I came across this:

Well as long as I live I'll keep saying referendums. But I'm afraid the feeling that "formal" contexts call for a parade of ignorance is gathering momentum.

b

PS

Here's a crossword clue:

Exaggerated merits of left-hand page in old wrapper – (8)

Update 2016.10.11.16:50 – Time's up: OVERSOLD

Update 2017.05.15.11:55 –  Added PPS

PPS 

I saw a programme in the Les Hommes de l'Ombre series last night, and it reconfirmed my belief. I have referred before to Gaston Dorren's Lingo . It's still on my Guilt Pile, but some day I'll finish it; and I have read the chapter on French, unfortunately called Mummy Dearest. Dorren's point is that the French language always has an eye on its mother, Latin. There are, of course, many Francophones who know no Latin; but his point is about the relation between the spoken and written language. When a French person says, for example, ils aiment, the -nt has no phonemic value. But in writing it resurfaces. Sometimes, one of these Latinate fossils reappears (resounds?) in speech, because of a phonological rule: il est aimable, for example.

extract from Lingo

Dorren's point could have been more carefully made (that chapter heading, for example). But there is a grain of truth in it:modern pronunciations in many Romance languages hark back to a Latin spelling; elsewhere I have mentioned Italian pronunciations of -ezzo:

...Italian native speakers pronounce mezzo with the voiced affricate /ʣ/ and prezzo with the unvoiced affricate /ʦ/ without – for the most part – knowing the reason: that the one with voicing is derived from MEDIU(M) and the one without voicing from PRETIU(M). Yet I've never heard a mezzo-soprano called (in English) a /meʣəʊ/. Of course I'm not saying the English pronunciation 'should' have the /ʣ/;  it's just interesting that it doesn't.

But French prends la galette, as it were, when it comes to harking back in this way: Latin is never far from the surface of French, and English has no equivalents of Augustan poets like Corneille and Racine. Pope comes close, but his classicism strikes me as more superficial.

Returning to that TV programme, one  of the characters said "Je n'aime pas les référendums". When I heard this I was relieved to learn that French hasn't been infected by the rot of  supposedly formal hypercorrection.

And here are a few more clues:

• Nips back for a spot of political track-covering, (4)
  
  
• In Cardiff perhaps, initial aspiration for reformed Luddite without it may – in case of emergency – involve these, (6)
  
  
• Hidden talent ripe for development. (7)
  
  

Beware the Kalends of March

It beats me how those early Romans ever got round to writing letters.

<autobiographical_note>

I remember a Latin lesson given in 1965. Very confused, those ancient Romans. Even some years before the beginning of Anno Domini – about 4 years after the birth of Christ, I think (current scholarship seems to put it somewhere between 7 and 4 BC) – they had to start their letters with the abbreviation a.d.

Father Aloysius explained to us the dating system used by the ancient Romans, based on a number of key dates in each month (the Kalends, the Nones and the Ides). Before starting your letter, you had to work out when the next such date was due, and count back from it: hence a.d. – ante diem. It must have been a great relief when your letter-writing coincided with one of these key dates; there was no need for the counting back. 

But not much of a relief; the Nones and the Ides jumped around – maybe the Kalends* too; this isn't something I've researched that closely. Luckily for me in that lesson, I was sitting next to a new boy, who had joined us from a prep school (fee-paying, non-state). He had done some Latin before, including this date malarkey. So he knew this mnemonic:  

</autobiographical_note>

So when they sat down to write a letter they had to spend the first half an hour fiddling about with dates and counting. I don't know if they had almanacs back then, but if they had it would have made life a lot easier.

Another memory – at a previous school, named after a Pope Gregory, but not the one associated with calendars – exposed me to the idea of Name Days. The Polish children (of whom there were many at that school in Ealing) celebrated their Name Day rather than their birthday. For most of them this was quite straightforward, but not for those born at the end of February. The feast of St Matthew,  for example, had to change from its more common date of 24 February to the 25th in a leap year. In a leap year, the 24th is an intercalary day; it doesn't exist as far as Name Days are concerned.

This was discussed by John Chambers, former Head of the Time Service at the National Physical Laboratory, speaking on PM on 24 February (from about 47'30" – and get it while it's hot, it'll only be on iPlayer until the twenty-somethingth of March [24th?, 23rd?, 25th? – search me]).  His wife is Finnish, and it was a Finnish almanac that alerted him to the issue.

I think I remember first learning what the French for Leap Year was – une année BISSEXTILE. I knew enough Latin to know that six came into it somewhere but what about the bi? And what did six or two have to do with Leap Years anyway?

I should have noticed the double s, which occurs also in the rarely-used scholarly English word BISSEXTILE.

<digression>
When French audiences want to see an encore, they don't say Encore. What they say is bis.
</digression>

The prefix was not bi- but bis-.

The bis- prefix crops up in Spanish too. A great-grandfather – a grandfather being un abuelo – is un bisabuelo. So in a bissextile year, something happens twice . But what? Presumably something to do with six? And here's the answer: the thing that happens twice is 24 February (with the alias "25 February"):

The ante diem date
courtesy of Fr Z's blog.

Thankfully, this all changed at the end of the Millennium (whenever that was – 2000, probably; no idea what all those fireworks were for on 31 Dec. 1999). The Finnish almanac in 1996 marked 25 February as the feast of St Thomas. But thanks to Mr Chambers (who suggested to the Finnish authorities that the extra day in a Leap Year should be recognized as 29 February, in accordance with the popular belief that that is obviously when the extra day is), in 2000, also a leap year (thanks to Gregory VII's divisible by 400 rule), the feast of St Matthew was 24 February.

Happy 29th.

b

Update 2016.03.01.11:45 – Added footnote:

* Incidentally, the similarity between Kalends, Latin calendae, and English calendar is – of course – no coincidence. But it is a pleasing (to me, at least) irony that the source of the word calendar reflects that variability/uncertainty.

Every month, the priests would observe the moon and formally proclaim when the new month started. Etymonline says this:

calendar (n.)  c. 1200, "system of division of the year;" mid-14c. as "table showing divisions of the year;" from Old French calendier "list, register," from Latin calendarium "account book," from calendae/kalendae "calends" the first day of the Roman month -- when debts fell due and accounts were reckoned.

This is from calare "to announce solemnly, call out," as the priests did in proclaiming the new moon that marked the calends, from PIE root kele- (2) "to call, shout" (see claim (v.)). In Rome, new moons were not calculated mathematically but rather observed by the priests from the Capitol; when they saw it, they would "declare" the number of days till the nones (five or seven, depending on the month). The word was taken by the early Church for its register list of saints and their feast days...

The link to claim is worth following up as well. 

<extra-credit>

For extra credit, the most punctilious of students will also investigate the association of month with moon. As Etymonline again says:

month (n.)  Old English monað, from Proto Germanic *menoth- ... related to *menon- "moon" (see moon (n.); the month was calculated from lunar phases)...  

</extra-credit>

As usual, it's all related: calendar ⇨ solemn announcement of lunar observation ⇨ month; and when you start pulling on one thread, the whole thing unravels [if you have the time].)

b

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