It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul....

Poster in a shop window
on Holy Island

....Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,.
It is the causeway.

On the way over to Holy Island last Saturday with a touring party from my choir (at about ⅓ strength – but still a good 30 or 40) I wondered about the derivation of the word causeway.


Well, the way part is fairly obvious; as Etymonline says:

But why cause? The most obvious candidate for radicalism (and I use the word in what regular readers should recognize by now as either creative or wrong, depending on  point of view) – I mean 'being the root' (latin radix = root) – was causa, which gives Catalan, Italian  and Spanish cosa, Portuguese coisa and cousa, French chose ... (plus many other languages and dialects of course).

What might a cause, though, (or a thing, as in all those Romance examples) have to do with a road raised above regularly flooded shallows?  The answer is – not inappropriately  – NOTHING (no thing, geddit?).

There were two distinct meanings of the Latin word calx. Its primary meaning was the English heel – in fact  the word is still used in an anatomical context. But after a fairly promising start in the 18th century its use has became quite infrequent as this usage chart shows:

Word frequency chart here

The other word calx (it's a separate headword in my (19th-century) Latin dictionary (there's a picture of a sadly mistreated end-paper here), although in that Collins entry there's only one headword and the order of priority is  reversed – with heel coming last) is a pebble, or a playing piece in a board game such as draughts/checkers, or limestone. In Vulgar Latin a via calciata was a paved road. This gave rise to the old North French cauciée and ultimately to the Modern French chaussée. On the way, it spawned the Middle English cauceweye, meaning a raised road.

But in Late Latin  there was a new verb, calciare, with the meaning "trample down with the heels", derived from the genitive of calx  –  calcis.  And it's not clear to me whether what was trampled down for a causeway had to be limestone.

Returning to Holy Island, though, the presence of many quarries and kilns in Northumbria indicates a long-standing industry based on limestone. So that causeway may have been both made of limestone and trampled down with the heels. I suspect (OK, it's more of a WAG, or Wild-Assed Guess) that the two meanings of words derived ultimately from Latin calx became inextricably linked  in a way  that is not dissimilar to The R That Came From Nowhere in the word for ink derived from the Greek word borrowed into Latin as encaustum that  just happened to be used in monasteries – in chiostro ("in cloisters"). I wrote at more length about  this supposed derivation here.

On 23 July we sang at St Mary's in Holy Island   – which is linked to the mainland by  a causeway – some wonderful music, and were thanked and congratulated by some American pilgrims, who were walking St Oswald's Way ("Good job!" was the way one of their number put it pumping my hand as though it were a hand-pump). And one of the pieces was Felix Mendelssohn's Verleih uns Frieden, the music for which reminded  me, sometimes, of the more-or-less contemporary hymn "O come and Mourn with Me Awhile" written by Frederick William Faber in 1849. But the tune I remember from a misspent youth isn't the one most readily thrown up by Google searches (St Cross), and things need doing in the garden, so I'll have to save any further investigation/discussion for an update.

b

PS And here's a clue:
Optimise with heart of new arrangement  to constitute a prime example.  (9)

Update 2016.07.30.12:50 – Added PPS.
PPS
While in Holy Island, I (and many other choir members) spent some  time here. Among other slips, whereby hangs a tail, I dropped my National Trust card. This morning I opened an envelope sent by the landlord returning my card. Do stop there if you're passing.

Update 2016.07.30.18:10 – Added clarification in blue.

Update 2016.08.11.20:30 – Added clarification in red (to account for an otherwise unaccountable gear-change).

Update 2017.06.02.14:15 –The answer to that crossword clue (at last ;-): EPITOMISE

Bon voyage M. Dumollet...

♪♫ ♪ ...À St Malo débarquez sans naufrage 
Bon  voyage M. Dumollet

Et revenez si le pays vous plaît.

A quickie for the Quatorze Juillet

On 8 July 2016, the frigate Hermione sailed out of St Malo ...

<autobiographical_note>
("charming walled town city on the Emerald Coast of Brittany", as long-standing readers may recall from this – the blue bit at the end )
</autobiographical_note>

...bound for Brest (a little after we steamed out of St Malo – which accounts for a less than memorable photo. There are plenty of better ones here.

The Hermione is a 32-gun Concorde class frigate fitted for 12-pounder guns, completed in Rochefort by the Asselin organisation in 2014. She is a reproduction of the 1779 Hermione, which achieved fame by ferrying General Lafayette to the United States in 1780 to allow him to rejoin the American side in the American Revolutionary War.

Wikipedia entry for French_frigate_Hermione_(2014)

For the week leading up to the Quatorze Juillet there was a festival of world music at St Malo. On the 8th, one of the offerings was from an Argentine group. I imagine they knew of their link to St Malo, but I'll assume you share the ignorance I had until fairly recently

In September 1763 Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville  (later to distinguish himself in that same war) set sail from St Malo on a voyage of discovery (as many ocean voyages were, at the time). In January 1764 he put in at an unclaimed group of islands, which – like so many explorers before and since – he named in a autocentric way (is that a word? Well it is now.) This is a theme I've visited before. here,)

He called the landing point Port Louis after the French king, and he named the islands after his point de départ: Les Îles Malouines. The islands were those known to Les Rozbifs as .... [but no, I know better than to spoon-feed my readers].

<autobiographical_note>
In the newspaper article about the festivities marking the end of the festival I saw the name of one of the groups playing at the Fest Noz that night. They were called Startijenn. This word had meant nothing to me until the night before, when I was reading the chapter on Breton in Lingo (a book that I'm deferring judgement on, as it refers to much that I don't know about but is not totally sound on the few things I do know about). 

But an amusing and intriguing feature of the book is that each chapter in this Language Spotter's Guide to Europe concludes with a word that comes from the language covered but has no equivalent in English. For Breton, it is startijenn.

No equivalent, that is, in formal language. But a fairly close gloss is provided by the colloquial kick-start. A startijenn is "a kick of energy, such as you get from a shot of coffee". Gaston Dorren, author of Lingo, calls it "probably derived from English start". I'd say  it's almost certainly cognate, though derived suggests rather more than that. I'll see what the  Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch has to say, if anything. 

</autobiographical_note>

But that'll have to be in an update.

b

PS A clue:



Floor-covering including great, if questionable,  book. (5)

2016.07.15.11:30 – Report  on  Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch

PPS Sorry – nothing. At a guess, I would suggest that the word is a combination of two roots:

• Start
  In the words of Etymonline
  ...from PIE root *ster- (1) "stiff." 
  
  From "move or spring suddenly," sense evolved by late 14c. to "awaken suddenly, flinch or recoil in alarm," and by 1660s to "cause to begin acting or operating." Meaning "begin to move, leave, depart" (without implication of suddenness) is from 1821. 
• -jenn
  Again from Etymonline, sv genus
  ...from PIE root *gene- "to produce, give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to family and tribal groups. 
  ...Cognates in this highly productive word group include Sanskrit janati "begets, bears," janah "race," janman- "birth, origin,"  jatah "born;" Avestan zizanenti"they bear;" Greek gignesthai "to become, happen," genos "race, kind," gonos "birth, offspring, stock;" Latin gignere "to beget," gnasci "to be born," genius"procreative divinity, inborn tutelary spirit, innate quality," ingenium "inborn character

Update: 2016.07.18 – Added PPPS

PPPS One possible (if linguistically naïve) objection to the derivation suggested in my PPS is that it makes startijenn a mongrel – derived from two sources (a supposed aberration, according to some observers).  But, as I wrote here, it is ridiculous for any language to lay a claim to a word  for all time – it's  a question of where you choose to stop the etymological clock [a metaphor I introduced here].

Television is my stock example of a word derived from two sources – a Greek prefix and a Latinate stem. A purely Greek version would be teleopsy; a purely Latin version would be ultra-vision. Another less obvious example (discussed here) is morganatic, a happy mixture of Germanic and Latin, which is more relevant as it mixes a Germanic stem with a classical affix (as startijenn does, if my guess is right).



And here are a couple more clues:

Arab returning soon, says Cockney (5)
Bloody truncheon here? (5, 5)

Update: 2016.07.2016.16:30 – Added P⁴S (last one, honest)

P⁴S Another mongrel that had always confused me until my recent visit to Bretagne is polyvalente – usually seen in the phrase Salle polyvalente; come to think of it, quite possibly some chemicals are polyvalent in English (yup). That word has a Greek prefix and a Latinate stem. In English a hall that can be put to various uses could be described as all-purpose, though in practice I've seldom met it in that context (except in special cases like "all-purpose sports hall"); we usually just say something more homely, such as village hall – although I'm probably betraying my South-Eastern commuter-belt background there. It goes without saying that such a hall is suited (or valid) for a range of purposes

This demonstrates the point first brought to my attention by M. Baring-Gould, that French tends to prefer hi-falutin (though he probably used a more diplomatic term) vocabulary.

<autobiographical_note>
The example he gave to class 2Ba...

<Pedagogical_Correctness_gone_mad> 

Oh no, none of this elitist ABC stuff, our classes were named after the first two letters of the teacher's name; it was entirely accidental that the boys who had come up from 1A had a as the teacher's second letter while the boys who had come up from 1C went into class By 

</Pedagogical_Correctness_gone_mad> 

...was carié. English does have the word carious, but the register is different. Dental professionals use it, but not the patient-in-the-chair.
</autobiographical_note>

So the words salle polyvalente, common on hitherto baffling signposts everywhere I've been in France, mean (presumably  – I haven't checked, it just seems obvious to me [NOW]) is just an all-purpose hall.

b.
Update 2017.10.01.15:15 – Added P⁵S   (so P⁴S  wasn't so final).
P⁵S: A few clues, the first being topical.

• I'm upset before one and after her– Harry's peer. (8)
• This way in Paris – about time! Gasp for a communard. (11)
• Adjustment to famine's a statement about direction of travel. (9)

And answers:
In PS: LINGO
In PPPS OMANI and BATON ROUGE (where it was relevant at tle time)

Update 2018.04.14.20:15 – Added P⁶S

P⁶S The answers: HERMIONE, PARTICIPANT, MANIFESTO
And here are some clearer photos from AFP.

Dangeur! Diphthongues inattendues!

In Brittany last week, home of NECESSARY BABIES (of which we had some once), and tourist bumph that recommended a visit to St Flavour's (St Saveur), and somewhere where we could see an extraordinary triomphe l'oeil painting (a bit like The Fighting Temeraire, I suppose  –  but it was raining so we didn't find out) I spotted what I assumed was a typo at the foot of a carte de vins. (I still think it was; I'm just covering myself with that assumed):

Attention: l'abus de l'alcool 

est dangeureux pour la santé.... etc

I thought little of it at the time, dismissing it as just another semi-literate typo; or, conceivably – if improbably – there was a thitherto unknown pair of words: dangéreux and dangeureux (the second having some specialist application – perhaps in official pronouncements). More likely, though, as MrsK said at the time, it was just the sort of spelling mistake that people make – even foreigners. (She also questioned my spelling – but I am a forgiving man.)

The following evening, though, I saw it on another carte de vins – reinforcing, to my chagrin, the official pronouncement hypothesis. On further reflection I found two other possible explanations, both with an interesting linguistic foundation.

1. Both cartes took their spelling unquestioningly from an official source (that just happened to have a typo in it). This would be reminiscent of the way students of philology can trace the provenance of a manuscript through their accumulation of  traits in successive generations. I mentioned one such manuscript-based linguistic happenstance in an earlier post about bald owls BATS (not exactly the same, but similarly depending on a chance mistake, concretized in subsequent usage).
2. A really interesting possibility, based on the phonology of Breton. A glance at  a map of the region will show several examples of place-names (the last refuge  of etymological nuggets) such as Saint Domineuc –
   
   
   
   – with the digraph eu where one would expect an i. Perhaps one could extend this to apply to vowels such as é (also a front vowel – one produced towards the front of the mouth [as opposed to back vowels such as a, o, or u]). Is Breton phonology characterized by a tendency to substitute  eu for a front vowel?*
   
   In that case, the dangeureux typo would be more likely to occur in Brittany than elsewhere in France – a possibility that is intriguing (if unlikely to succumb to further research, given the state of the hedge [which is in urgent need of a haircut]) 

b
Update: 2016.07.11.22:45 – Added clarificatory parenthesis in red.

PS And a trilingual crossword clue (a  new invention – the clue is followed by its character count and indications of three languages, the first two representing languages used in the clue, and the last indicating the language used in the answer)

Expression of gratitude interrupted just before the end by article reversing, for example, Ash. (8,  Fr – D – Fr)

Update: 2017.01.06.11:15 –  Added PPS

PPS: Answer: MERCREDI (Came to me in a boulangerie [with an horaire {mot juste?} showing opening times]).

Update: 2018.03.31.12:35 –  Added PPPS

PPPS: Added explanatory parenthesis in blue to PPS. Without it, the detail was pointless – just an old man's memory (which it was, of course; but my point was that seeing the word was the stimulus for the cruciverborhoea [and don‘t bother looking that up 😐] )

Update: 2018.10.12.16:15 –  Added footnote.

* This lumping together of e and i for special treatment is not random. As an example , consider what happens tn to a c in Spanish or Italian when it precedes an e or an i. The sound becomes /𝜃/ or /s/ in the former case. and /ʧ/ in the latter. (This does not involve the modification of the vowel sound itself – my argument is just about anything [any linguistic change, that is] that happens only to e and i and not to other vowels.)

Thinking up new phrasal verbs

Just over three years ago I wrote this, decrying the raw deal...

<autobiographical_note> 

I can't use the expression raw deal without remembering a conversation I once had with someone who thought he had been mistreated, as I had. The details of the alleged mistreatment don't matter – we've all passed a lot of water since then and there's no sense in crying over split peas – but he said  "I got a similar raw deal from <miscreant>". I felt that I'd been a bit hard done by, but calling it a similar ordeal seemed to be coming it a bit strong. 

</autobiographical_note>

...being given to young people. On the subject of tuition fees I wrote:

This solves another problem for the young. They have little chance of getting a mortgage.  'But they couldn't repay a mortgage anyway while they're repaying their student loan.  It's a Win-Win!' 

So young people's paranoia is fed for the first quarter of their lives. Until they're about 20. But the hell-hounds weren't finished yet.   'How else can we load the swings and roundabouts of outrageous fortune against the young...? Got it. Housing Benefit.'  [There was, at the time, a proposal to raise the qualifying age for Housing Benefit.] 

We're filling the streets with angry young men. And somehow I don't think it's just a revolution in theatre we're fomenting. Today's Jimmy is armed not just with an ironing board but with the power of the Internet. 

I wish I could see an up-side to this, but 'hell' and 'handcarts' spring to mind.

I don't want to contribute to the growing store of Brexi-doom-mongering, and again I hope there's a silver-lining out there somewhere; but I think Giles Coren was right on the money in last Saturday's Times calling for a re-run with a much younger electorate: I think he suggested 16–60. I'd like to suggest a small amendment in the light of the fact that younger voters don't rely on traditional news media. My suggestion is simple, though I admit I haven't thought it through fully: keep coverage of the re-run off the mainstream media. That way it needn't bother me.

Anyway, I'm acutely aware of the risk of talking the economy down. So I've been changing the subject, and not thinking too hard about Brexit, in an ostrichy sort of way, thinking instead about that phrase – talking down.

One of the most striking things we did on the first day of my CELTA course.was....

<half_remembered_context>
I think we  may have been brain-storming a list of problems confronted by learners of English. (although maybe that's a false memory – the course had too tight a curriculum for that sort of thing; more likely chalk and talk or perhaps felt-tip and... umm THING).
</half_remembered_context>

...Anyway, we got onto the subject of phrasal verbs, and English's tendency to string together a verb and something else (often a preposition, but the right-thinking Phrasal-Verb-ese buzzword is particle) to form a new meaning  leading to memory-taxing seeming-paradoxes like You cut a tree down before you cut it up. There were 14 students on the course, and that activity I found so striking was that we each in turn had to construct a sentence using the phrasal verb pick up  in a way different from all previous ones. We managed 14; my trusty Cobuild dictionary lists 15 (though I'm sure various one-off contexts could  support new coinings).

I hadn't realized, until I started to  teach ESOL, what a big hurdle phrasal verbs were. Try Googling English Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. You get (or at least I get – Heaven alone knows what customized search algorithms are at play) over 500,000 hits. That's a world of pain for ESOL students; who have to remember not only apparently-paradoxical meanings but a range of syntactic oddities. And to make things worse, we English-speakers keep inventing new ones.

Returning to talking down, my Cobuild lists only two meanings, apart from talk down to. They are:

1. the one used in disaster movies: the hero amateur pilot, who's told by the control tower "You can do it  kid, we're counting on you" [cut to control tower conversation off-mic: "Jeez, he'd better be up to it, there's only five minutes of fuel.... etc etc" – you get the gist]
2. the one I'm trying to avoid in present circumstances: saying things that cause economic and/or political  harm.

But as I said of pick up "various one-off contexts could  support new coinings". One of those suggests itself without too much thinking (perhaps this meaning has appeared relatively recently – my Cobuild,  at the age of nearly ten years, is a valuable relic; [I'm sitting on a gold-mine, though I think MrsK might have a different way of characterizing my collection]): talking down is what people do to potential suicides about to throw themselves off a roof/bridge/ortcetera.  In fact,  Collins Online does add to Cobuild's two meanings: what people do in negotiations to make someone charge less, but it still doesn't  include the potential-suicide meaning.

And, with an ever-broadening range of meanings, look what happens to usage:

 

from Collins Online

Looks pretty straightforward; but ...

<not_so_fast reason="There's more to this than meets the eye">

But the phrasal verb didn't spring fully-formed out of the ether at the turn of the 18th century.  It had been around for over a century before that: 

I wonder why...? (No time now though.)

</not_so_fast>

b

PS Another clue:

Mischief-makers' solidarity? They'll get away with it. (8)

Update: 2017.02.09.15:15 – Added PPS, and afterthought in bold.

PPS The answer: IMPUNITY

I went down to St James....

Among the LPs I listened to in the 1960s (with ‘microgrooves’ it said on the sleeve – cutting-edge technology) were two notable ones:

• A jazz collection that included the St James Infirmary Blues
• The soundtrack of My Fair Lady. 

On the latter, I remember being nonplussed by Eliza Doolittle’s

One day I’ll be famous

I’ll be proper and prim

Go to St James so often

I will call it “St Jim”

I wasn’t to know that she meant St James’s Piccadilly. For all I knew, it might have been any St James’s ...

<digression> 

Of course I couldn’t hear the apostrophe, but the warm embrace of Holy Mother Chorch meant that I could guess that what Eliza called /seɪnt  ðeɪmz/ was a church – (…and sic, by the way – she did not reduce the diphthong, or assimilate the /t/)  

</digression>

...St James’s , Marylebone, for example.

Under the benign gaze of a statue of St Mary the Good^†, I sang, on Tuesday night, with a few members (4 or 5 – well precisely 4, but our versatile [‘multi-vocal’, perhaps  – though not quite omni-vocal, as I don't remember him singing soprano] MD helped out as needed) of Siglo de Oro. The pieces we sang were by Byrd, sailing quite close to the Protestant wind as they were settings of English, with themes such as deliverance and captivity.

It was marvellous for an amateur choral singer to sing alongside a professional. And it was temptingly easy to think "I can do this". I could during the first hour, before Ben (the professional bass) was redeployed from being next to me to a fairer (more central) position – the third of five basses. Then I was positioned between  another fallible bass like me and a tenor, so that it was clear just how good (that is, bad) my sight-reading was.

And sight-reading was needed. I realized – when my crutch was so rudely snatched away ( :-) ) – that I couldn't watch the conductor as much as I (and, no doubt, he) might have wished, and relied on listening rather than watching.

It was not cheap. After paying for the train and the ticket there wasn't much change from £40.  But,  I  thought, You're only old once. I had joined the trend mentioned on Start The Week recently, of buying experiences rather than stuff. And this was an experience worth buying.

b

^† In an earlier post I discussed this possible derivation of the word Marylebone. One site holds that:

...In the thirteenth century when the language of the aristocracy was French, St-Mary-by-the-Tyburn would have been St-Mary-a-le-Bourne (‘bourne’ being the French for a small stream) and from this we arrive at the word ‘Marylebone’ as we know it today. 

Based on this etymology and a progression of phonetics, the correct way of pronouncing ‘Marylebone’ is widely considered to be ‘Marry-leh-bon’ – although in reality this is rarely heard.

I went on, not unstuffily (“Once a pedant…”)

As to the meaning of "a progression of phonetics" your guess is as good as mine – though I imagine it may mean something like 'a number of both phonetic and phonological changes' ; after all, those 13th-century origins pre-dated the Great Vowel Shift. 

I once gleaned, from a source that I regarded at the time as authoritative (although as this was in the late '60s I no doubt set the bar pretty low), that ‘-le-bone' just meant 'the good', as le was feminine at the time,  and the convention of doubling a word-final consonant before adding an e for the feminine (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette,…etc) …. had not yet been adopted…

Still, -a-le-bourne is plausible enough, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it either way. On the one hand, beware folk etymologies, especially on special-interest web sites; on the other hand, what's the point  of saying 'St Mary the Good' at all, unless there were a... aha, maybe Mary Magdalene was 'Mary the Bad' (not so 'bad', though, as to stop her being canonized in the end [for all that, by all accounts, she was no better than she SHOULD be, if you catch my drift, and note the colour of this parenthesis. St-Mary-the-Not-So-Bad-Really-(just-not-the-one-in-the-blue-frock), perhaps]).

PS A few clues:

• Club rodent or use one of these to similar effect – (9)
• Gunning down means easier to read, says this – (3, 5)
• Openreach made to  monitor communications – (9)

 Update 2016.10.13.13:50 – Added PPS

PPS

Answers: MACERATOR, FOG INDEX, CHAPERONE (! – pretty cool, this last one, doncha think?)

An aperçu and a coincidence

For years I have had a snobbish distaste for the word comradery. I assumed it was just an uncouth anglicization of cameraderie, with the first vowel 'corrected' to that of comrade.  I was about to inveigh about this assumed vulgarism, but thankfully did a spot of research before putting finger to keyboard.

It seems that both words exist.  Not all dictionaries recognize both, but the Collins does; and has corrected the mistake I deprecated some time ago (in this blog somewhere I can't trace) by making its word frequency feature more visible; it used to be right down at the bottom of the page; it is now more central, both vertically and horizontally.

 But the two words do not have the same popularity, although both first appeared late in the 19th century. A few years after a World War (14 years after WWI and 8 after WWII), comradery has a spike:

spikettes (spikelets? stilettos?)
 in 1932 and 1953

The Collins frequency graph isn't documented (as far as I can see), although perhaps (I hope) this is work-in-progress, as a part of the raising of the graph's profile; so I've no idea what a frequency of 0.1 means (which is what it says on mouseover as I regret they say); but I assume it's a good deal less than the 0.44 racked up by camaraderie at its height:

My "coincidence" also comes from this frequency graph, but it was instigated by a recent Radio 4 programme about The Dream of Gerontius.  It started (in the first 30 seconds) with a quotation from Elgar, presumably from a letter (the radio presenter just said "writing to his friend..."). He used the word illimitable  – not a word that springs regularly to the lips today. I expect Conrad used it, but I admit I wasn't sure when I heard the Elgar quotation whether he was coining it himself to do justice to the Malvern Hills (the context was "that illimitable horizon"). Collins shows this frequency graph:

The plateau throughout the second half of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century happens to coincide neatly with Elgar's life (1857 – 1934). Of course I'm not suggesting that Elgar was the sole or main user of the word, but the coincidence is, I think, quite neat (and, coincidentally, it gives a particularly limpid example of the etymology of the word co-incidence).

Must go and do some prep for the forthcoming tour of my choir.

b
PS A couple of clues:

Hear me out:  it's WAGs' quarters (6)
Endless flak about spies – you've got a nerve!   (7)

Update 2016.09.09.14:50 – Time's up: HAREEM and SCIATIC

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

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

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

Medici

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

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

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

This latter-day Medici became a meta-chief.

Wallander

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

/`mama/

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

L'envoi

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

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

On with the motley, as someone once said.

b

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

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

PPS
And I almost forgot  this:

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

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

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

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