Hoist with his own "favoletta"

In the aftermath of the terrible events in Genoa on the eve of Ferragosto...

<glossary>
Ferragosto is the heathen name of the feast known to the One True Church as the Feast of the Assumption...

<meta_digression>
I was once asked 'What do Catholics assume on 15 August?' Well, lots of things. But the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a belief in an extraordinary end to the extraordinary life of the mother of Christ. Not for her the messy business of dying and rotting (before, of course, being raised incorruptible); she was assumed (i.e. taken up) into Heaven. I forget the details, but there were probably various meteorological shenanigans at the time (as there were when Elijah 'went by a whirlwind to Heaven'...

<text source="Excerpt from Mendelssohn's Elijah">

</text>

... A bit like Dorothy going to Oz, except not in Kansas of course.

This tourist site , though, suggests that (like most 'Christian' festivals) Ferragosto has deeper roots.:

Ferragosto, the Italian name for the holiday, comes from the Latin Feriae Augusti (the festivals of the Emperor Augustus) which were introduced back in 18 BC [PS – HD: a good half century before the end of Mary's earthbound phase], probably to celebrate a battle victory, and were celebrated alongside other ancient Roman summer festivals . These festivities were linked to the longer Augustali period - intended to be a period of rest after months of hard labour.

</glossary>

... La Stampa reported that Beppe Grillo, not inappropriately for a clown, had got egg on his face by a remark in his blog lampooning public infrastructure spending.

I first heard about this faux pas in a BBC news report, hedged about with the sort of weasel words that suggest it is dealing with mere rumour; but it should be a simple matter of fact, I thought – Did he write it or not?

This page was no help either, at first :

"We have been told about the little fairy tale of the imminent collapse of the Morandi Bridge." That is how Five Star Movement co-founder Beppe Grillo reportedly referred to warnings about the collapse of the bridge on his blog. [My emphasis]

 But the same page goes on:

The blog post was apparently removed yesterday but a screenshot of the post has been published by Ligurian local daily Il Secolo XIX.

Aha. "I think the little legal department knows something about it", as they used to say (more or less) at the end of Bill and Ben. He wrote it, but events on Tuesday made it a bit of an embarrassment, so he unwrote it.

I'm not convinced he should have, though. On the face of it, it was a bit... tactless. But the administration of the bridge maintenance looks like a bit of a gravy train; and money spent on the administration of maintenance  does seem not to have gone exclusively into actual maintenance. And, as always with the Internet, someone somewhere was bound to have kept a screenshot. So rather than trying to hide his embarrassment, only to be caught red-handed – shamefacedly, with his finger on the <Delete> key: "Who me?" – I reckon he should just have toughed it out, with an update to the blog.

I'm glad about one thing, though – the whole sorry issue has introduced me to the word for "a little fairy tale": Una favoletta. Take away the diminutive suffix and you're left with una favola (stressed on the first syllable). Screw your eyes up and you can see the word fable. You live and learn.

b

PS And a couple of clues:

• They're polar opposites, capisce? (7)
• Set values anew or make a bit clearer (11)

Update: 2018.08.18.17:20 – Inline PS, in red.

Calling a spade a bloody shovel

Petroc Trelawney caused a stir the other morning on Breakfast (about 5 minutes before the end) by asking:

Why is a boatswain a /bǝʊsǝn/ but a coxswain is still a /kɒksweɪn/?

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we expose an area of ignorance to the Twittersphere. The Radio 3 twitterfeed was swamped by corrections, some more and some less gentle.

My first thought was that it was a dysphemism (antonym of euphemism, like fall off the perch, pop your clogs, push up the daisies in place of die). Dysphemisms like this are often a sort of "whistling in the dark": I'm not going to pop my clogs for a good few years yet.

But another common use of dysphemisms is as a signal of membership of some specialist group. In some circles, fiddle rather than violin is a term of disparagement. But among violinists it's the norm – except when a violinist makes a principled stand ...

<counterexample>
(as, I seem to remember, Biggles did when he told his group not to use the dysphemism kite instead of aeroplane. But the fact that this fictional hero did forbid it shows that real-world pilots used it.

<tangent>
This is reminiscent of a regular tool in the philologist's armoury: lists of mistakes not to make. Entries in such lists prove two things:

1. The mistake was being made
2. Somebody thought it mattered

They call attention not only  to what was thought to be a mistake at the time, but also to a turning point in the history of a word. The Reichenau Glossary is the example that most readily springs to mind, and in an earlier post I traced the French chauve-souris to a supposed (and deprecated) Vulgar Latin "owl-mouse".

But I digress...
</tangent>

Anyway, a crash was still a prang, and a pilot who died bought it).
</counterexample>

Similarly, players in the finest of symphony orchestras  refer to it with the dysphemism band. Showing such irreverence is a way of ironically suggesting real reverence – while also signalling membership of the in crowd.

Another example which I have no direct experience of (maybe I heard it in a forgotten lecture, maybe I invented it – though it's unusually specific for a flight of fancy) is archæologists' pronunciation of ceramic with a /k/; this is not unlike the original meaning of shibolleth (pronouncing it one way indicated which side you were on).

Which brings us back to Petroc's "error". Presumably he knows and speaks to people who row in Cornish racing gigs. It seems to me not improbable that a coxswain in such a boat calls himself a /kɒksweɪn/,  quite intentionally thumbing his nose at the "correct" pronunciation laid down by they furriners from outside Kernow. In that case it was not a dysphemism, but a pure and simple gesture of defiance against linguistic hegemony.

b

PS A couple of clues:

• Queen tucking into a Dubonnet and lemon? How refreshing! (10)
• Higher octane propellent for this incendiary energy source? (7,4)

Update: 2018.11.26.12:45 – Added PPS


PPS The answers: LIBERATION and LIGHTER FUEL

Sensing Style

Some time ago I wrote (here) about a review of Steven Pinmker's The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (another candidate for the pipe-dream entertained in this post).

<aforementioned_pipedream>  

<original subject="David Crystal, The Stories of English">
My fantasy – though I haven't discussed this with the good Professor – is to win a large amount of money and become a proper publisher. My Rights department would negotiate with Allen Lane to acquire the rights for a properly designed book, and my Design department would make this book CanDo Publishing's lead title.
</original> 

In the case of the Pinker book, a large section (about 30%, I'd guess, though the tabulated sections are interspersed with full text) is presented in four columns:

 Word/Usage  Preferred Usage  Problematic Usage  Comments/
                                                 discussion/                                                             advice

The printed width of the page, net of margins and inter-column spaces, is about 4 in / 10 cm.

<I_know_I_know> 
If I were showing off my (slight) understanding of book design  I'd be using the printer's measures of points and picas; but why send my readers off on a voyage of either confused ignorance or web searches?
</I_know_I_know> 

In the nature of things, the fourth column is the fullest. But with such a tiny column width (the columns are more-or-less evenly distributed) there is often a single word on a line, and the comment section continues its frantic okey-cokey for an inch or two (sometimes even more), accompanied to the left by three blank columns. The Sense of Style would be a good deal more stylish (not to say readable) if it were redesigned.
<aforementioned_pipedream> 

Steven Pinker's advice is generally sane:

In considering questions of usage, a writer must critically evaluate claims of correctness, discount the dubious ones, and make choices which inevitably trade off conflicting values

And sometimes his advice is amusingly pithy: "Look it up" he says (more than once, I think, but I didn't  take notes).

I have to admit that a number of issues I blamed on the Independent's review (which was a filler, topped up with a number of the reviewer's pet hates) – even one that I pooh-poohed in this cartoon...

...were Pinker's. In my defence, though, Pinker refers to the confusion of the participles (interred vs interned) and the review (I think – the original seems to have been truncated)  refers to the inter/intern pair.

I don't agree with everything Pinker says (and indeed there were bits of it that I didn't follow; I was  on holiday, and it isn't your typical holiday read). And sometimes his side-swipes are unargued and capricious: on presently (used to mean now) he writes "About half the Usage Panel [of the American Heritage Dictionary] reject it, but for no good reason". I suspect that he himself accepts it (and it seems to me possible that he rounded up that "about half").

And sometimes he glosses over an interesting issue: of  flaunt/flout he writes

A malaprop based on the similar sound and spelling, together with the shared meaning "brazenly". 

Hmm???. What is shared is part of their meaning, an aspect of it. If they shared the meaning they'd be synonyms (which they're not, as Pinker obviously knows). Initial fl- is a phonesthetic marker. There is a family of fl- words that have to do with flamboyance of movement or something else. They share not a meaning but an aspect of their meaning, and flaunt and flout just happen to be most readily confused:  flounce,  flip,  flop, maybe even  fly,  flame  flamboyant... But phonæsthesia (the way sounds suggest things,  the basis of onomatopœia) might not fit in the tiny column width; so Pimker has to cut corners. (Seriously, I think he sometimes trivializes an argument or misses a trick just because of that pesky column width.)

Generally, though, the book is worth  reading (and referring to).

But the garden calls.

b

Update: 2018.07.18.08.45 – Added two words (underlined) to ante-pre-penultimate para; I had been making the same mistake as the original reviewer of Pinker's book: "Now with added Linguistics". In my case the added ingredient was phonesthetics.

The Brexicon

Whether you parse my subject line as Br[itish]+ exit + lexicon or Br[itish] + exit + con[fidence trick] is a matter of personal conscience. I couldn't possibly comment (well, I could,  but as the whole sorry shambles reduces me to incoherent/impotent rage, my comments woudn't have much force either way).

On 25 March of 2018 The Westmnster Hour included an item that dealt with the language of Brexit "[f]rom Cakeism and Remainiacs, to Regulatory Alignment and Insufficient Progress" as the iPlayer blurb puts it. The programme as a whole is not available, but iPlayer's largesse makes up for this, by making available a "clip" of about 8 minutes.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly told us that Brexit means Brexit. But what do the words associated with Brexit mean? The Westminster Hour's John Beesley has been exploring the etymology of the Brexit lexicon. 

More here

Graeme Davis, Profeeor of Humanities at Buckingham University, gives the interviewer some basic pointers to start with. It all started with Grexit – which, as you may remember, referred to a putative exit of Greece from the Euro. Britain was never in the Euro, so Brixit [sic, with an i – an early form that didn't catch on] wasn't just about money.

Brexit spawned various spinoffs, includind Brexiter and Brexiteer. Dr Davis calls the first of these  "I suppose, relatively neutral" [hmmm – not sure what that "relatively" is doing; just –  I  suppose  – academic feigned diffidence] and the second "has quite a positive spin on it".  Again, hmmm; I think the direction of the spin depends on the attitude of the hearer. If you think Brexit is A Bad Thing, then Brexiteer has more of the negative spin of racketeer (one might link this word with capitalists with off-shore wealth profiteering from the chaos which is bound to... No Bob, don't go therre. Even words like privateer and buccaneer have spin that can be either positive or negative, depending on which end of the cutlass is involved. 

And the addition of the prefix arch- seems to me to impart renewed negativity. If I call Jacob Rees-Mogg an arch-Brexiteer, I don't think there's much risk of my being thought to  approve of his antiquarian antics. 

<apologia>
Excuse the gratuitous assonance; I can't hear a word without being tempted down playful back-alleys. At least I spared you the 'Jacob Real-Smug' gag...

<whoops>
No I didn't.
</whoops>

</apologia>

In the end, I didn't find the Westminster Hour clip very enlightening. But I did find the words of Kathleen O'Grady ("a journalist with a special interest in linguistics") interesting:

German is currently the most widely spoken native language  about 16% of the EU speaks German as a native language. But once you take into account people who speak various languages as a second language, English then quickly overtakes both German and French, and also Italian – which is quite widely spoken. So 38% of adults in Europe speak English as a second langage. If you compare that to the total of German speakers – both native and as a second language – that's only 27%.

And she goes on to refer to research that suggests the use of English may be boosted by Brexit:

After the UK leaves, most people speaking English in the EU ...

<you_what?>
Most people? Perhaps she has some Astérix-like vision of a redoubt of hardy native speakers of English among all the second-language speakers – perhaps led by Nicola Sturgeon in the Astérix role, with Alex Salmond playing Obélix...
</you_what?>

will be on the same footing. If everybody's on the same footing, everybody's speaking it as a second language, people might be more happy to use it.

This is strangely reminiscent to me of David Crystal's work in Original Pronunciation (OP)  and his observation that OP gives non-UK actors ownership of the text. I heard this at a British Council talk a few years ago., but the same point is made by David Crystal's son Ben:

The accent draws him [HD: the actor using OP] more out of the head of the standard accent and into the heart. This, he believes, brings “an ownership over Shakespeare that is rare,” both for the actor and the audience. Americans, he notes, have sometimes told him that they feel like Shakespeare isn’t theirs because “we can’t do your accent,” but that many of the vowel sounds in O.P. may in fact be more accessible naturally to Americans than to modern Brits.

More here

So Globish will go sailing off pluckily into the unknown, leaving us speakers of RP clinging to the wreckage.

But this isn't getting the lawn patched. Bye for now

b
PS: A couple of clues:

• Hostile response to insult, with intervention of mountain bike in reverse; formidable. (11)
• Men and girl conspiring to put a spanner in the works (7)

Update: 2018.07.12.09:30 – Shame-faced typo-fixes (involving acute accents).

Re-requiem

The other day  an edition of Notes from the Stave reminded of a piece I'd written in the early days of this blog on Gabriel Fauré's Requiem. One of the people commentating on the manuscript also featured as a boy soprano in the King's College Choir recording – Bob (credited at the time as "Robert") Chilcott. (In particular it alerted me to a mistranslation of mine, now fixed. To make matters worse, it was in a section that corrected a common mistranslation [of In Paradisum as *in paradise – which it doesn't mean]).

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

More here

My mistake (future simple rather than subjunctive) was perhaps explained (though not of course justified – mea maxima culpa) by Fauré's own attitude to the Requiem as a lullaby of death. I let his view of death as a peaceful return to a state of eternal rest influence me. As Michael Lewanski‘s blog says

Unlike nearly all other works in the genre, it [HD: Fauré's Requiem ] contains none of the drama, anxiety, or fraught emotions one tends to associate with human thinking about death.  Nearly all references to the last judgement from the Catholic liturgy (and trust me, there are plenty) are excised. 

This nonchalance  in the sense of "not getting  hot under the collar" misled me into  assuming on the part of  Fauré a certain (not to say sanctimonious) belief that angels would lead the departed into paradise.

The manuscript, and thus the stuff of the discussion, was an unbound version without some movements added later (Offertorium, Libera me, etc.); it was, in the words of the Bibliothèque Nationale's Head of Music Manuscripts a manuscript de travail working copy rather than a draft of something to be  published.

Bob Chilcott makes frequent additions to the discussion based on his experience as a chorister;   from the sublime (David Willcocks‘s observation that the high strings after the triumphant Hosanna  represent  the angels flying off  into the distance) to the ridiculous (after the recording of  Pie Jesu, when the sound engineer asked if Chilcott wanted to listen back to his efforts, the response was "Sorry Sir, he's gone off with  Marriner [Neville‘s  son Andrew] to buy sweets" [not the exact words – check Bob Chilcott's memory in the 17th minute of the programme]).

At one point (maybe more than one) Bob Chilcott calls attention to Fauré's word painting, which put me in mind of my own favourite example, discussed in an old post of mine:

My choice of 'listen out' [HD: the post was discussing phrasal verbs in  a context that had nothing to do with music] as an example is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem, which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano tune marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

And in the same post I returned to the theme of 'listen out':

<autobiographical_note>
At the funeral of a grande dame yesterday... I witnessed an underlining of the importance of this Ex-  [HD: in exaudi]. We were in the middle of one of those interminable call-and-response prayers, with the congregation saying ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘ again and again. And The Angelus butted in. (For the uninitiated:  The Angelus is a very noisy Call-to-prayer^† – much noisier than the Islamic version: ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause..._{has it stopped?}>  <oh dear me NO, suckers> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING... [ad nauseam]).  And the congregation was bleating (that‘s one for the etymologists: grex = ‘flock‘) ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘. Here was the perfect opportunity for something more robust: ‘Listen out for my prayer‘.
^† Not all believers would recognize this as a call to prayer exactly, but the name 'Angelus' is the first word of the prescribed prayer.                            

<inline_pps>
So it's a call to – and an accompaniment to – a particular prayer, to be prayed wherever the hearer happens to be, rather than [as in the Islamic case] a call to the faithful to come and pray at the mosque.
<inline_pps>

</autobiographical_note>

But this isn't getting the lawn repaired (Don't ask; in short I'm doing a Rooney [transplanting bits of "turf" from where it's spread over a path – though it's not turf exactly; it's just a bit greener than the weeds that are in the "lawn"].)

b


PS And here are a couple of clues:

• Hatter in cahoots with odd characters from Idaho returning to get rich. (11)
• Neat ass at the Gare du Nord on track for underhand trickery (9) 

Update 2018.08.29.13:00 –The answers: MILLIONAIRE and CHICANERY. And, swatting away hornets ("...Because he knows it teases") I've added an inline PPS in red.

Advertorial or what?

Generally speaking, I'm in favour of the BBC. No prizes, though,  for detecting a none-too-faint whiff of adversity (or but-ness) in the offing.  A while ago the first of three facinating programmes was aired. The second and third programmes were a vast improvement...

<rant>
 (although it's hard not to judge the acuity of the analysis  on the basis of a scarcely credible abuse of incredulously 15'17" into the third, as if bacteria were going around scratching their tiny heads – but one shouldn't be snobbish about... hell yes I will:

this is BBC Radio 4 for pity's sake, and we
can expect at least a MODICUM of literacy

<loaded_term value="literacy">
Tricky word that one. I've seen it used in the context of an infant ...

<etymological_fallacy risk="high">
And I have to admit that when I use the word "infant" I have a perhaps over-zealous regard for its root. Sorry, but I regard 'infant who has not yet learned to talk' as pleonastic; infants haven't.
</etymological_fallacy>

...recognizing and responding to the golden arches indicating a certain McFood outlet. But here I'm using it in the specific sense of ability to use words to convey meaning. And don't try any clever-clever stuff about "the meaning of meaning"; you know what I'm talking about.
</loaded_term>

         )

</rant>

But the later programmes were less of a hook-line-and-sinker regurgitation of a press release from the company that has the very same name as the BBC series (which took the name verbatim from the market leader in this area: The Second Genome...

<small_mercies>
At least they didn't add the ^TM. Here's the  iPlayer link
</small_mercies>

...) At the time of the series I made a note in a draft that I was inspired to dust off by last Tuesday's Life Scientific, which dealt with the immune system. To quote the programme's précis:

Traditional descriptions of the human immune system bristle with military analogies. There are "lines of defence" against "enemy invaders"; "border guards" at "strategic points. And when barriers are breached, there's "a call to arms". That's before you mention Natural Killer Cells.

But Professor of Immunology and Public Engagement at the University of Manchester, Sheena Cruickshank, tells Jim that as well as the war-like descriptions, our immune system is now being understood in terms of its capacity for diplomacy too. Jaw-jaw as well as War-war.

Our immune system has to know when to tolerate the trillions of microbes that live on us and in us, to hold fire but also to know when full-scale immune activation is required.

^{More here}

But the whole thing  is well worth a listen. Give it a go.

I, meanwhile, must go and learn my words for this – less than 3 weeks away as I type:

 

(One or two notes could do with some attention as well.) 

Sadly it'll be our  Musical Director's UK swansong with the choir; I say 'UK' specifically because he and the choir will be performing in France in August.

b

PS: A couple of clues:

• Blackbird embracing upstart noose in a big way (10)
• Mistaken queen preceding onerous with queen coming first. (9)

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

...when we try to organize our thoughts about language ...

<digression>
(and it's no accident that the idea of weaving is at the root of the word text – 'from PIE root *teks- "to weave, to fabricate, to make; make wicker or wattle framework."', as Etymonline puts it. They quote Robert Bringhurst, from The Elements of Typographic Style:

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

</digression>

I've written before about the damage done by thinkers about language, who create their whole petty world of Mrs Thistlebottom's "rules", policed by Strunk & White, purveyors of jackboots to all discerning grammar Nazis. Here, for example, I wrote

When Dr Johnson defined a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge' I think he knew what he was doing. Lexicographers can make life much more difficult for students. They say 'Look, what a boon is standardization'; but look at the mess they make!

(Interested readers can look in that post for examples of the mess.)

But, as  a representative of a pattern-loving species I have to put my hand up for the fault of  seeing rules where there is only (messy, almost chaotic) usage.

In The Changing English Language (my entree into Linguistics, which I first read in the late 1960s), Brian Foster wrote:

Nouns ending in "-ee" have long been a feature of the English  vocabulary, and such a modern-looking  formation as "payee"  goes back to the 18th century, while "recognizee" (the person to whom one is bound in a recognizance) is dated 1544 by the SOED, These particular examples show the fairly characteristic passive meaning implied by this suffix..

There are many examples of this passive sense. The Macmillan English Dictionary (not a notable authority, but the publisher of the dictionary software I happen to use) lists addressee, amputee,  appointee, deportee, detainee, employee, evacuee, franchisee, inductee, internee, interviewee, licensee, nominee and payee – all unarguable  patients of the verb in question. An element of indirectness is discernible in referee: the person is not referred; what is referred (to the referee) is a point of fact or interpretation. Devotee is also different, in  that the actor and the patient of the act are one and the same – except in the case  of forced conversions (where "devotee" would in any case be a misnomer). And the passiveness in the case of retiree is questionable; some people "of pensionaable age" are happy to put their feet up; it is only their more dedicated colleagues who fit the passive pattern and are retired  against their will.

But Brian Foster goes on to say

Such indeed is the usefulness of this device that an endless succession of nonce-words based on it  is made possible,  like the one made up by Gilbert Harding when he wrote in his Book of Manners that '... a hug from the Russian bear might well crush the huggee to death.' This semi-humorous [HD Only semi- ? Well, maybe not a rib-tickler, but definitely jocular] procedure is not a new one, for in Mr.  Sponge's Sporting Tour, published in 1853, R. S. Surtees refers to a person being toasted as the 'toastee'.

But, he goes on

... the possibility of using this suffix in an active sense is old-established, because 'absentee' goes back to 1537 and 'refugee' came into the language in 1685, the year of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV when many French Huguenots fled the country to escape persecution. Escapee is attested in 1865...

Hang on, I thought when I read this. S'abstenir is reflexive anyhow, so someone who does it to him/herself is an absentee with no problem for the seeker after passives. And both  s'échapper and se refugier are as my old French master would have said verbes de déplacement: someone who has escaped s'est échappé[e], and someone who has sought refuge s'est refugié[e]; again, there's no problem for the passive-o-phile. (If you've met the argument about 17th- and 18th-century grammarians making the mistake of trying to force English into the grammar of Latin [so, for example, no sentence-final prepositions], you may get a sense of dêjà vu here: it's just that the mistake here is the adducing of French grammar.)

So despite evidence to the contrary, I still have a quiet resentment of arriviste non-passives like attendee.

<autobiographical_note>
This issue came to a head when I was in a working group that had rotating minute-takers. Many of my colleagues had knocked up a clever bit of time-saving software that highlighted differences from meeting to meeting. As I was their junior, and they expected a flag to mean Something's new rather than Bob's at it again, I soon learnt not to change Attendees: to Present:
</autobiographical_note>

But that evidence to the contrary  (to the contrary, that is, of the passive implication of -ee endings) keeps mounting. Attendees are joined by resignees, even dilutees (unskilled workers who dilute the skill-level of a group of skilled workers).  I feel that these new -ee words with no passive implication are in some sense regrettable. But they happen, and a student of language can only recognize it and avoid creating yet another angels-on-a-pinhead  "rule" for the unwary to stub their toes on (and yes, I did write their).  

b

PS 

Some clues:

• Before? After? Get up, with last going first. Ridiculous! (12)
• Truncated Hamlet done recast as contemporary political thriller. (8)

Update: 2018.11.22.10:30 – Added PPS.

PPS: The answers: PREPOSTEROUS and HOMELAND.