Is this a blip I see before me?

No big  news, but a quandary. From  time to time you may have noticed, I make an observation based on Blogger stats; and here's the latest. I have become accustomed over the years to see United States at the head of the Bleader Board. And that's where they still are (when you consider visits over the last year):

Russia accounts for less than ¼ of US visits – about 350 less per month. (Russia's absolute visits were closer to 100 per month.)

But over the  last  month (to nearly the end of May 2016) the picture is very different:

The US average has fallen from about 1400, while the Russian average has increased by a little over ½. (Of course, ignoring May, the increase has been much more,)

Of course a visit from an IP address that claims to come from Russia doesn't necessarily come from there; and the same applies – perhaps more so – to "US" addresses. Still, something seems to be going on.

<autobiographical_note> 

A recent BBC TV programme (not that recent, but I first saw it last week – although that "first" needs qualifying) was Zoo Quest in Colour. It was based on the Zoo Quest programmes, made about 60 years ago and broadcast in black and white. Even in  an anachronistic world in which it had been broadcast in colour*,  we would have seen it in black and white, as my father had bought a TV only  to view the Coronation. 

One of the later series, Zoo Quest for a Dragon was something I remembered seeing when I was 5 – remembered seeing through rose-tinted spectacles, one might think. But an explanation of the film making process ( in the first few minutes of that Zoo Quest in Colour programme) is crucial to an understanding of how the later programme came to be made; and to an understanding of how wrong that rose-tinted gibe would be. 

David Attenborough couldn't have made the programme he wanted to make using the gargantuan 35mm cameras the BBC insisted on using. Attenborough wanted to use a small hand-held 16mm camera. The BBC Powers were hostile to the idea; the definition would not be up to the standard expected of the BBC. After what sounds like a heated discussion, the young Attenborough had his way. But the quid pro quo for his 16 mm camera, was that he should improve definition by using colour stock. 

This decision had two consequences:

• In low light, as in the crucial climax of the dragon programme (the live trapping of a komodo dragon) he had to revert to black and white stock

• 50 years later, the original film could be reprocessed  to make colour images

On our little set (14"? 12" Less?) I remember not being impressed by the dragon in that trapping scene; it just didn't compare with the ones in my Rupert Annual . 

</autobiographical_note>

Thassall for this month. I have some serious weekending to do.

b

Update: 2016.05.31.11:50 – Added footnote:

* This would have been impossible, as IMDB simply – and frustratingly – says "black and white". Having seen the TV programme "live", and failed to understand the deal between the BBC technical department and Attenborough (who could use a handheld camera on condition that he used colour film) , I looked to IMDB for an explanation. But there was none, so I just had to go back to iPlayer.

Look Back in Bangor

In the recent broadcast of Look Back in Anger I noticed two things (apart from the performance of wossname of course):

• Use  of the expression "the $64 question"
• Use of the expression "the Big Bang" to refer to a possible nuclear holocaust

The $64 Question

This has been the victim of hyperinflation. It dates back to the American radio show Take It Or Leave It first broadcast in 1949, based on a number of questions with prizes starting at $1 and doubling in each subsequent round. After each successful answer, the contestant was offered the chance to Take It Or Leave it? The big prize was $64. that article goes on:

In 1947, the series switched to NBC, hosted at various times by Baker, Garry Moore (1947–49), Eddie Cantor (1949–50) and Jack Paar (beginning June 11, 1950). On September 10, 1950, the title of Take It or Leave It was changed to The $64 Question. Paar continued as host, followed by Baker (March–December 1951) and Paar (back on December 1951). The series continued on NBC Radio until June 1, 1952

A very similar format was first broadcast in the UK in 1955 with the title Double Your Money, but instead of the rather crude demand "Take It Or Leave It" the catchphrase was a polite question: "Do You Want To Go On?".  If memory serves me correctly, the neat doubling was suspended after £64 though, and the subsequent prizes then dropped to £125 before resuming that stately binary progress on to £1000. (I was going to write £1000.00, but in fact  it was more like £1,000 0s. 0d.)

The Big Bang

Fred Hoyle coined the expression Big Bang on a BBC broadcast in 1949. Look Back in Anger post-dated that by six or seven years but the adoption of the cosmological usage can't have caught on very quickly as Jimmy Porter's reference was obviously to annihilation rather than creation.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1968-9">
Jimmy Porter clearly had no thoughts of stardom. My own were thoughts rather of cometdom. It centred on an amateur production of Iolanthe (which must have taken place during my Lower VIth, as in those days the full frenzy of Thinking About the Future was held back until the Upper VIth (rather than, as in our own enlightened times, at Primary School [Oh Christ, that ever this should be! as Coleridge put it –  they'll be using kids as chimney-sweeps next!]). 

My own 42nd Street dream centred on the Sergeant-at-Arms in Iolanthe. I was a peer, but I dreamt of  standing in at the last minute for the fellow bass who had that part – not a huge one (I wasn't that ambitious –  he had one song, at the beginning of Act Two (in that YouTube clip the song starts after about 1 min.), as I remember: "the ice-cream slot", as it was archly referred to among the wiseacres of the Cecilian Players [not the chamber ensemble, an amateur operatic society based in SW London in the 1960s and '70s] – the first turn after the interval, when the audience are at their least attentive).  I was going to "Go out there an unknown and come back a st... well, a bit-part player".

No amateur production of a G&S operetta is complete without a topical reference. Ours was in the second  verse:

When in that House MPs divide 

If they've a brain and cerebellum too 

They have to leave that brain outside 

And vote as Harold Wilson tells 'em to

(Heur heur, geddit?)

W. S.  Gilbert wrote And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to, but our version spoiled the rhyme for the sake of a not very relevant topical reference. The director and the Musical Director were both teachers at my school, and I thought – as any self-respecting sixth-former would –  they made the mistake because they were just stupid. It would have been much better, I thought at the time, as And vote as Ted and 'arold  tell 'em to. Not only does it preserve the rhyme, but it refers to the sort of  mindless two-party situation that Gilbert was writing about. I was going to sing my version, thus at one fell swoop both shaking the foundations of the amateur operetta world by my brilliant performance and improving the line (which would thereafter be adopted for the rest of the run).

On reflection nearly fifty years later, I've realized – though there's no way I can check – that the writer of this ad lib  did not just have a tin ear (as far as the rhyme was concerned) but was also probably (ironically, in the context) a Tory.* 

</autobiographical_note>

Well – time for a bit of amateur plumbing.

b
* The MPs Edward Heath (Conservative) and Harold Wilson (Labour) exchanged the position of Prime Minister several times. Fans of The Beatles may have noted the backing vocals singing "Mr Wilson" and "Mr Heath' in George Harrison's Taxman.

PS Reportedly imitation pot sherd has features of two genres – (4-4)

Update 2016.05.23.16:00 – Added esprit d'escalier in blue

The 'en/dove time

Venez dans mes bras

Closer to me dear 

Donnez-vous à moi 

Set aside all fear 

Restons enlacés pour léternité 

Yes you shall be mine 

Till the end of time.

Followers of The Tunnel (who may not include me for much longer, as it is becoming decreasingly plausible – I wonder if the writers of the first series have moved on) will recognize this little piece  as the title music (written by Charlotte Gainsbourg, yes that one, though I should warn you that the article has such authoritative claims as " Her career in music influentiates a lot of artists").  A little while ago we switched over to this series from a tennis match, for which we had the sub-titles on.

Machine-generated sub-titles can be a hoot. A gem from the tennis commentary was a mangled version of "nipped it in the bud". We had just reached peak-Shakespeare, and the sub-title-o-tron (or whatever it's called) very creatively (it must have had some sort of AI) read "nicked it in the Bard" (sic, even the capital B) – evoking thoughts of Autolycus, the original "snapper-up  of unconsidered trifles" [so THAT's where he got it from]. But dealing with French was rather more dictionary-based (or perhaps that should be -biased?).

<disclaimer>
I'm sailing fairly close to the wind here, as my theoretical linguistics knowledge is Best Before End May 1974 (though bolstered a bit by later language courses). So what follows is subject to ovifacial disfigurement [="getting egg on my face" #bouBoumTsh] . But...
</disclaimer>

The voice that sings this is whispered; and the sub-title-o-tron's mistakes* led me to think about whispering. The game Chinese Whispers is almost guaranteed to work, chiefly because of the lack of voicing  – '...we're going to advance' becomes '...we're going to a dance' partly because of the inaccurate transmission of the voiced /v/. I say partly because the change is strongly influenced by the fact that 'Send reinforcements...' has been misheard as 'Send three and fourpence' (though the 'has been' there is misleading as the misinterpretation is holistic – given this unreliable string of speech sounds, what interpretation can be put on the whole  message? the hearer asks themselves). I think, though, the trigger for the misinterpretation is the /v/.

In the three lines of French  in that lyric the sub-title-o-tron made only one mistake (involving a voiced consonant), and one also in the four lines of English. The mistakes were:

Set aside your fear 

and

Restons sans laisser

Taking the French  one first, the problem consonant is the /z/ between Restons and enlacés. In this whispered voice the /z/ sounds like an /s/ . So, despite "hearing" the liaison correctly in the third line, the machine goes to its dictionary (possibly it's some kind of lexical software module, though possibly the machine hands over some queries to a human post-editor, who uses a real book) and returns  with sans laisser. I haven't met that as an idiom, and the idiomatic sans cesse suggests that the infinitive is questionable in that context – although sans can certainly be followed by a verb in the infinitive in other cases. This leaves only the unstressed vowel in [z]enlacés/sans laisser:  /a/ becomes /ɛ/  – no great surprise in an unstressed syllable

As for the English one, it doesn't depend so clearly on a voiced sound. The sonorant /l/ (which occasions this mistake) has voiced and voiceless allophones, but – as the word sonorant suggests – it's more "l-like" when it's voiced. So "all" becomes "your".

Simples [possibly].

Back to the grindstone,

b

PS Some crossword clues:

Disappeared without resistance, covered with decorative coating.  (9)

Turning effect engulfing partial success giving part of work. (8)

Update 2026.05.19.08:40 – Added PPS

* Watching the next episode the other night, I noticed that the two errors covered in this post) had been fixed. Either the subtitles are generated anew every week, or the translators' work is subjected...

<mini_rant>
And there's a difference between subject to and subjected to, which I wish writers of official notices would observe. If trains – for example – are "subject to delay" they might be delayed. If they are going to be delayed sure as eggs is eggs they will be "subjected to delays".
</mini_rant>

to some kind of scrutiny, or m-m-m-maybe I'm being w-w-w-watched....Ooer...

Update 2026.06.01.14:15 – Added PPPS

<further_reflection type="post-series" theme="ha'porth of tar">
A crucial character – multifaceted, as is the tiresome custom in these dramas [aha, she's not a baddy after all, oh yes she is, but no, err... yes, etc ad nauseam, vamp till fade] – after one of her habitual changes of face last night, being a fluent speaker of Russian, asked "Do you know what maskirovka is?" By chance, though I don't speak Russian, I did know, because last year I had heard an Analysis programme that explained this Russian-style system of deception (that was the word they used, though I'm still not sure what's special about it). 

I don't have Sky-Go, or whatever it is that lets you catch-up on Sky Living broadcasts, but I'm pretty sure the actress got it wrong. She used the word twice, and the first just put me on the Qui vive;  but I'm pretty sure whatever she said the second time matched the first and didn't begin /mask.../ (which is as much as I remembered). Shame. I wish actors would  check up on these things. My Willing Suspension of Disbelief daemon  was already working its little socks  off, without having to deal with linguistic paradoxes.
</further_reflection> 

Stating the obv... hang on though ...

See the original here.

This comes with the cachet (or should that be caché?) of the saundz.com stable, so presumably one should pay it some heed. I have to say, though, that whenever – in the past – I have looked at their site for purposes of preparing a lesson I found that it was (intentionally, I suppose) heavily, if not entirely biased in favour of American English. OK, that makes sense. There are many more native speakers of American English than of British English, and students of ESOL usually want to learn American English in preference to British English; or else they don't care either way.

<mini_rant force="Just saying">
But my reaction to sites that say just "English" when they mean "American English", or for that matter "Portuguese" when they mean "Brazilian Portuguese", or sports commentators who say "World Champion" when they mean "US-wide Champion" get my goat.
<mini_rant>

A few counter-examples from the rule as stated there – one for each word:

1. BELIEVE
   I believe I am being taken for a sucker.
2. UNDERSTAND
   I understand you have seen the figures...?
3. KNOW
   I know you were there.
4. DOUBT
   I doubt  if we‘ll ever know the truth.
5. LOVE
   I love what you did with the lentils.
6. WANT
   I want to be going first thing tomorrow.
7. ADMIT
   I admit I am being blackmailed.

Of course I'm ignoring (or at  least overlooking) context – not the context surrounding the situations in the examples, but the context of the lesson itself; the rule is given to students who just haven't met any other tense than the present, so that it is implicitly preceded by the words WHEN ANY OF  THESE WORDS IS FOLLOWED BY A VERB IN THE PRESENT...

But even so,  there must be a typo in the opening sentence (unless this is a bit of American English syntax that I haven't met). State verbs are usually used 

with [THE – does the writer have difficulty with articles?] Present Simple instead [OF, surely...?] with [THE ...?] Present Continuous

And the lack of articles can't be blamed on "typographical  licence" – the  last two lines in that four-line extract (the exhibit I started with) are plenty loose enough to accommodate a few extra characters.

Besides, only a few days' exposure to the Western world is going to expose students to the infamous I'm lovin' it (which vies with 10 items or less for the

Most egregious tweaker of Grammar Nazis' chains 

award). This really does break not only the spirit but also the letter of the law (Present Continuous rather than Present Simple). But students will quickly realize that rules are not so much made to be broken, in the words of that tired cliché...

<digression>
Isn't TIRED CLICHÉ itself one of those ... erm, THREADBARE commonplaces?
</digression>

... as defined by actual usage. The repeated failures of practice to match up with theory have to be accommodated by weasel words like that USUALLY.

b
PS As I write I have the BBC‘s Julius Caesar in the background; and the line Who is it in the press that calls on me leapt out at me with its two anachronistic puns: press and call on. And this reminded me of a recurrent annoyance, apparently irrelevant but similarly depending on an anachronistic pun sadly repeated ever and anon (is that Shakespeare?) by people who should know better: the roots of OMG:

This one’s for all you amateur internet archaeologists out there: The first recorded use of the ubiquitous texting abbreviation OMG wasn’t uttered by a precocious tween in the 1990s, but by one Lord Fisher in a letter to none other than Winston Churchill.

          Time report

Well well; silly us! There‘s everyone thinking that abbreviation's a child of the late 20th Century. How wrong we were! Umm,  no. Lord Fisher‘s "OMG" was a joke based on the names of honours such as "OBE" and "CMG". Here's the context:

To cite it as the etymological basis of the SMS-based abbreviation "OMG" is to indulge in an anachronistic pun – the sort of textual "discovery" that is increasingly common in these days of easily accessed electronic text  databases. In the words of that prescient ophthalmologist Friar Lawrence

What a pair of spectacles is this?

PPS And here‘s a clue:

Measurement of time absorbing one new virtue (7)

Update 2016.05.03.22:35  – A couple of typo  fixes (including a deletion), + this clue:

Cutting short brusque indisposition. (11)

Update 2017.09.25.14:15  – PPPS
 PPPS Second answer first, as I'm sure of it: CURTAILING. The first one could be HONOUR, but if so I counted wrong (and it's a pretty dodgy clue anyway).

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