It depends what you mean by "bee" and "bonnet"

The latest issue of Third Age Matters has the usual contribution by professional stick-in-the-mud Eric Midwinter, to which a sub-editor has contributed the ridiculous idea of theft (as if a meaning, whatever that may be, could be "stolen"):

For many years...

<digression>
(I was about to write "sixty-odd", but that would imply that when the word was coined in 1958, I [extraordinarily gifted child that I was] immediately adopted it into my seven-year-old's working vocabulary; improbable, I think)
</digression>

...I have used the word (ABused it, from the point of view of Mr Midwinter) in the way suggested by the New York Times interview quoted by Etymonline

It's a quite simple bit of word formation. As aristocracy is rule by the best (aristoi) and theocracy is rule by God (theos), meritocracy is rule by people judged on merit. But nous avons changé tout cela as le bourgeois gentilhomme was told, and as Mr Midwinter would have it; strictly, though, the Midwinter version would be "almost everyone has changed it, but they're wrong".

Michael Young, writing in an introduction to the 1994 edition of his work, wrote:

The case against meritocracy (the one and only true meaning of meritocracy, in the view of Midwinter and his ilk) is that people who get into a position of power on the basis of merit then protect their progeny regardless of merit. In other words, meritocracy works once, and thereafter arrogates power and influence to the privileged, regardless of merit. To insist that this flawed sort of one-time meritocracy-followed-necessarily-by-mediocracy-in-perpetuity is the only sort – the TRUE meaning of "meritocracy" – deprives the word of any useful meaning.

Over time, meanings change. Here I give lots of instances of  change, sometimes complete reversals, finally getting round to this explanation  of "backlog":

The words back and log were first fused together (to use an appropriately fiery metaphor) in the late seventeenth century. They referred to a log placed at the back of a fire. Such a log was desirable; it was a Good Thing. It protected the fire from going out. But about two hundred years later it was used metaphorically to mean a Good Thing in the commercial world: a stock of unfulfilled orders. 

Here's where the reversal in polarity happened, possibly influenced by another meaning of log. The metaphorical ledger ... could be the record of a Bad Thing – work that hasn't been done and gets more and more embarrassing as more is added to the mountain faster than it can be done.

But no sane observer scans the airwaves, searching obsessively for people using "backlog" to refer to a Bad Thing and complaining that they've stolen its meaning. Like Aung Sang Suu Kyi, flipping from fêted to fœtid overnight.

Mr Midwinter thinks "meritocracy" is another case of such a flip – but from Bad Thing to Good Thing, rather than vice versa. I think he's simply wrong; that "meritocracy" does what it says on the tin,  and the satirical background to the first use of the word doesn't affect that meaning – the notion that the word can only ever be used to refer to one side of a multi-faceted argument in the original work of fiction that gave it its first airing more than 60 years ago is frankly ridiculous.

(Not that this prevents Mr Midwinter from writing to any organ that will publish him, accusing various public figures of this "abuse":   with the search string Eric Midwinter meritocracy I get over 14,000 Google  hits –  never, in the history of human apiculture have so many bonnets attracted so many bees, vainly swatted at by so few).

On a more festive note, I'm reminded of words I sang in last Saturday's concert, in Ralph Vaughan Williams' charming Fantasia on Christmas Carols:

God bless our generation who live both far and near.

This was not Roger Daltrey's My G-G-G-Generation. I was not singing God bless all baby-boomers  but nobody else. Words change their meanings, and when someone's  meaning is clear  it's unproductive  – not to say patently absurd  – to insist that they are among the great majority who are all out of step.

b

Update: 2019.12.20.12:50  – Added PS

PS I have belatedly found a source for Midwinter's article online. Here's a taste:

It is just over 60 years since Michael Young, co-founder of our marvellous U3A movement, published his perceptive and prophetic text The Rise of the Meritocracy.
He had foreseen that social mobility worked fully only once, recruiting a new oligarchy of power, influence and wealth which, like all former ruling castes, then ensured the power, influence and wealth was bestowed on its children. 

Social mobility does not obey the law of gravity; very, very few go down the social ladder to be replaced by an urgent climber-up. It is not normal to find the children of the privileged among the homeless or the customers of food banks – and vice versa. 

I fear his word has been abused to the point of it sounding like a good thing, not least in the mouths of prime ministers, including a speech by Theresa May some months back in which she used the word “meritocracy” 20 times, with perhaps unconscious irony, as if it were something for which to aspire. 

This led me to write a correcting letter to the press and I quickly evade the charge of political bias by pointing out that Tony Blair was an even worse offender, to the point where a despairing Michael Young, a short time before his death, published an article pleading with the then prime minister to refrain from using the coinage “meritocracy” as the opposite of what it actually meant.

Found in translation

In an early post I looked at the mistranslation of a single word that jumped out at me while I was listening to a Book of the Week. The word was "Romanesque" – used in a context that had nothing to do with architecture. It referred to President Mitterand, whose predilection for seeing himself as a character in a roman provides a strangely appropriate parallel with a fictional  character who shared the first four letters of his name: Walter Mitty. (The source of the mistranslation was well hidden, and is arguable; if you're interested, feel free: here.)

But the reason for picking on that one word  is clear,  given my interest in the process of translation. More recently though I've found another case of mistranslation, that doesn't make the same kind of sense unless David Baddiel (the single-word-mistranslation-hunter in this case) has a similar background to mine (which I doubt). Wikipedia may cast some light, though I'm not minded to spend much time on it.

The case was documented in an article brought to my attention by an accident (I was toying with the phrase freak accident, but thought better of it. "Freakish" is an accolade that I think is too easily attached to accidents. Freakish is the accident that unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls, say, and this Baddiel cutting was unearthed less dramatically in a stash of documents that referred not to the early days of Christianity but to an era that could be described as BHD (that is, before this blog started in late 2012).

<digression subject="'-eak' words in clichés">
I'm sure it's just an accident ('-eak' attributes becoming meaningless), but the latest Radio Times claims to have a "sneak preview" of a new Doctor Who series. The "sneak" bit added something once (when there was an unofficial and/or unsanctioned foretaste of some media event) but in this case there was nothing sneaky about  it. The PR department wanted the preview to appear. What's unsanctioned about that?
<digression>

The one word (well two if you want to be pedantic) was Careers Officer. A Baddiel novel used this expression, and it was rendered in the German translation as 'Reintegration into the Working Process Responsible Person'. (the "original" German was Wiedereingliederung-in-den-Arbeits-Prozeß-Betruer  – as opposed to the more predictable [not to say less RSI-inducing] Karriereoffizier). Baddiel met the German translator at some publishing shindig and asked why she had done this. The answer was, in my translation,

'Because I felt like making up a word, regardless of your intentions. I thought it'd be cool.'

In an update to an old post about local colour, I mentioned a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and wondered whether the word Rolleiflex had survived in the translation. In a later update I added:

 The good news is that it [HD 2019: the translation] has kept the Rolleiflex. The bad news is that it has introduced an irrelevant bit of cleverness:

I took your picture with my trusty Rolleiflex
And now all I have developed is a complex

Why can't translators just
GET OUT OF THE FRIGGING WAY ?

Five years earlier, if I'd read that edition of The Times, I could have cited yet another instance of overweening  translatorrhoea.

That's enough for today. In a later post I mean to look at the rest of this stash  of early-21st-century cuttings – a number of pieces from the Ben Mcintyre Last Word column. Now though I must go and do a bit of note-bashing for our carol concert: 14 December, 6.00 pm, All Saints', Wokingham.

b

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

For the duration of the one-sided leaders debate ("one-sided" because both participants were more-or-less avowedly Eurosceptic...

<I-know-I-know>
(or in Corbyn's case "Euro-agnostic" according to the party line [which some people find hard to credit – first Cameron renegotiated UK's deal with the EU, then May negotiated a withdrawal agreement, then Johnson tinkered with that.]
</I-know-I-know>

...privileged, white men) the Conservative Press Office's Twitter profile enjoyed a name-change: "CCHQ Press" became "FactcheckUK".

James Cleverly tried to justify it by saying that the Twitter handle was not changed, so there was no attempt to deceive. This is disingenuous  at best, and at worst – to use Emily Maitlas's choice of words – dystopian.

<autobiographical-note>
"The Twitter handle" has become diminishingly significant. When I started using Twitter about 10 years ago, the Twitter handle was all you saw in the way of ID. People had witty/creative handles that said something about what they did and what their interests were. I followed, for example, @langwitch because all I knew about her was that she was an intelligent teacher of modern languages. I didn't know her name or want to know it; if I wanted to know, wouldn't that make me a stalker (or at the  very least plain nosey)?

Then Twitter screwed this up by letting people rename their accounts while keeping the same (scarcely visible, depending on the client or app you use) handle, by doubling the maximum word-count, and by a plethora of other little time-wasting tweaks that have made Twitter a virtual no-go area for me and for anyone who resents its attention-grabbing trickery.
</autobiographical-note>

This caused a predictable Twitter storm The Guardian had the unequivocal headline

Tories pretend to be factchecking service during leaders' debate

The public have increasingly turned to factchecking websites, such as the independent Full Fact, the BBC’s Reality Check, Channel 4 News’ FactCheck and the Guardian’s Factcheck, to verify claims made by politicians. 

During Tuesday night’s debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservative party renamed their main media account as “factcheckUK”, changed its logo to hide its political origins, and used it to push pro-Conservative material to the public. 

More here

Cleverly and his ilk would have chosen a different verb from that pretend, and in his Newsnight interview he made an unconvincing defence of the brainless wheeze dreamed up by some low-ranking minion, saying that he would continue to "call out the lies".  But that‘s not what the misbegotten rebranding of the CCHQ Press Twitter account did. Dressing up as policeman before trying to get your own way is simply a crime. The Cleverly defence is as jaw-droppingly inappropriate as a sign that says

POLITE NOTICE

NO PARKING

It doesn't fool anyone. When is a fact-checking service not a fact-checking service? When it's bare-faced Tory spin.

b

The Etymological Clock

Last year, in a belated update to this very early post, I recalled how a bit of wartime parlance happened to get adopted into the Knowles family lexicon.

<TO-BE-EXACT>
I say "Knowles family lexicon" as I haven't come across this usage anywhere else. But the word "salvage" may have a wider application in this sense.
</TO-BE-EXACT>

Recycling waste paper is not as trendy a thing as some of the greenwash we get from politicians might lead one to think. In my childhood, in the 1950s we distinguished between household waste (which went in the bin)  and clean waste paper (which went in 'The Salvage Box'). We had no idea, nor any need to know, what salvage meant; the linguistic 'clock' just happened to stop in WWII, when salvage mattered.

This is what I have called in that  post and elsewhere the etymological clock...

<weasel-words>
(I may not have used those precise words; but the post did use the Corpus Chronophage [look it up] as a metaphor for linguistic change)
 </weasel-words>

... – the engine that drives the coining of new words and expressions, and just stops at seemingly random moments, leaving us with  a reference to some arbitrarily fleeting expression like "nine days' wonder" or the semantically similar "flash in the pan", whose provenance most present-day English speakers don't know about and neither care nor need to know about.

<EXAMPLES which="Those two">

• Flash in the pan
  A reference to a long-gone firearms technology, which I've mentioned before – more than once. Here, for example:

[I]n a flint-lock, the trigger sparked off an explosion in a pan which itself set off the main explosion. Sometimes there was a flash in the pan, but the main charge was unaffected.

• Nine days' wonder

In 1600, William Kemp, an Elizabethan clown actor, who is thought to have been the original Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing,1599, danced a morris dance between London and Norwich. He took up the challenge for a bet and covered the distance of a hundred miles or more in nine days (spread over a few weeks). Some doubted that he had achieved this and, to quell dissent, he wrote 'Kemps nine daies vvonder', published in 1600:

More

 But that's not the last word on that derivation (or rather it's not the first word) as further reading of that Phrase Finder excerpt explains. In short, the expression had been around for about 300 years when Kemp used it (dubiously). As so often, the etymological clock just happened to stop at a juicy (and quite old) publication date. 

<and-another-thing>
Another example, heard on the radio just now, is "Parts of the Australian outback are a tinderbox". Tinderboxes haven't been in regular use for over two hundred years, but the metaphor lives on.
</and-another-thing>

</EXAMPLES>

Where was I? .... Got it: a Radio 4 programme about Bonfire Night food led me to recall another instance of such wartime jargon (words such as salvage, that is) becoming domesticated. (The context – food – was irrelevant to the memory, so I‘m not bothering with a  link; it just triggered the memory of what I used to wear  on 5 November in the  mid ‘50s.)

The garment was in modern parlance a onesie  though Lexico dates this word to the 1980s,  "... from Onesies, a proprietary name for a garment of this type, based on one + -sy."  But this was a good 30 years before that word was coined. We called it a siren-suit...

<CULTURAL-APPROPRIATION defence="Moi?">
I say "we", though in this case the words  had a much wider application. For Wikipedia's take, click away.
</CULTURAL-APPROPRIATION>

.... Being the second youngest of six children,  I  have a brother who was alive during the war, and at the time was about the right size to bequeath me this hand-me-down. When the air-raid siren sounded at night, a siren-suit was a one-piece garment to wear over pyjamas.

Enough for now. This post was originally intended for a 5 November publication date. Events, doncherknow.

b

Fortnite out[r]age

Epic Games' wildly popular battle royale game, Fortnite, was unavailable to play for several days in preparation for its next iteration: Fortnite Chapter 2.

So said CNN Business earlier this week. This was quite an event. the outage map went mad (or, rather, presumably, it just went black).

<autobiographical_note>
When I started working for DEC in 1984, and first met the word outage a colleague and fellow arts graduate explained that this was a typo for outrage. My initial resistance to the neologism...

<digression>
(well, relative neologism. Etymonline dates it to 1903 [in a US context] but it didn't impinge on my consciousness until the early 1980s
</digression>

...has been worn down since then. I'm not "the first on whom the new is tried", but neither am I "the last to cast the old aside". I have become inured, or as the medics say (of some regrettable thing you just have to live with – tinnitus, say) habituated.; what once made your life a misery becomes just wallpaper.

</autobiographical_note>

In the words of a speaker on the Media Show:

The servers ... went down for a full weekend, and nobody was told it was going to happen. It... just ...a black hole appeared ...and people kind of lost their minds about it...Nobody was told about it. They had no access. It was essentially the equivalent of your mum taking your X-box off you, and you not having it [HD – for a weekend], but for millions of people.

Media Show, 16 Oct 2019, from 21'15"

The Earth did not stand still. As another guest on that programme explained, it was the equivalent of any commercial website with a big software update to implement announcing that its service will be unavailable for a few days...

<RANT subject= "Santander, who treat their customers like beta testers">
...or sometimes weeks. Any old rubbish bit of kit held together with chewing gum and baler twine, they just stick it up and wait for someone to complain, leaving it to their overworked (and largely impotent) help desk staff to fend off the predictable brickbats. But I  digress.
</RANT>

This is the sort of minor irritation that 21st century customers are used to. But in the case of Fortnite the customers weren't regular commercial users accustomed to the vagaries of software updates; and they weren't told what to expect. They were, for the most part, children, quick to detect the end of the world. The weekend is for many their chief (or only) relatively unfettered playing time.

And the owners of Fortnite were happy to trade on their users' naivety. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that they intentionally made it feel like the end of the world, to underline the fact that it was the end of the world as far as Fortnite, Chapter 1 was concerned.

Radix malorum, as  Chaucer's Pardoner was fond of quoting, est cupiditas.

<usual_disclaimer>
Pardoner's Tale quotes best before end May 1968.
</usual_disclaimer>

 In other words, Cherchez la canaille capitaliste.

Time for my constitutional.

b

Assassins and Dutch courage

The starting point for today's ramblings is the word assassin. Followers of The Old Man of the Mountains (shaik-al-jibal) were known for (in the words of Etymonline)  "murdering opposing leaders after intoxicating themselves by eating hashish." It goes on:

1530s (in Anglo-Latin from mid-13c.), via medieval French and Italian Assissini, Assassini, from Arabic hashīshīn "hashish-users," an Arabic nickname for the Nizari Ismaili sect in the Middle East during the Crusades, plural of hashishiyy, from the source of hashish (q.v.).

The Etymonline entry for hashish reads

hashish (n.) 

also hasheesh, 1590s, from Arabic hashīsh "powdered hemp, hemp," extended from sense "herbage, dry herb, rough grass, hay."

and quotes English Words of Arabic Ancestry:

Its earliest record as a nickname for cannabis drug is in 13th century Arabic. Its earliest in English is in a traveller's report from Egypt in 1598. It is rare in English until the 19th century. The word form in English today dates from the early 19th century. The word entered all the bigger Western European languages in the early to mid 19th century if you don't count occasional mentions in travellers' reports before then.  

That mention of cannabis invites the reflection that the English word canvas is related. Unstressed vowels between consonants (like the second a in cannabis) are, as students of language change over time say, unstable: they tend to disappear.

Here , relatively early in the life of this blog, I was writing about a spiral ring found in Pompeii,  with an inscription that included the word domnus (sic, no i).

... no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10-15 cm spiral ring, for one little I, or that this one-stroke character was too complex for an otherwise impeccable craftsman! No, people were dropping the unstressed I in speech; and this accounts for words like the Italian Donna and Spanish Doña when the  Latin was Domina . (I changed the sex of the lordly person, because in the masculine the attrition of an unstressed vowel has gone one step further in Spanish – Don [which dropped its unstressed vowel {HD 2019: that is, after dropping the unstressed i it dropped the unstressed u}].)

It would have been less contentious to cite the Portuguese donna, as in current Spanish the change has gone further, with the introduction of the ñ.

Anyway, the same happened to the unstressed a in cannabis (though in a different context, of course – not, as linguists are wont to say diachronic) to produce the word "canvas" – woven from that "herbage, dry herb, rough grass, hay.".

The -in of assassin is, incidentally,  a false  plural, like "a criteria", "a panini", "a cherubim".

<THE_USUAL_PROVISO prescriptivism="0">
(I hasten to add that that "false" is an indication of how the word was formed, not a value judgement. Some of these mistakes are becoming standardized.  I won't say "a panini" but at some stage that sort of finger-in-the-dikery will become misplaced  A mistake is at the root of many words. My favourite, and oft-cited, example is the French  word for bat – discussed at length here. [I recommend that piece, but if you don't have time the short version is this: a chauve-souris is not a bald-mouse but an owl-mouse.])
</THE_USUAL_PROVISO>

If the notion of a fighting force getting high before spilling blood seems odd, try your preferred search engine with the string US Army Vietnam drug-taking. I get nearly 22 million hits.

But Vietnam was by no means the first theatre of war that encouraged....

 <QUOD_SCRIPSI_SCRIPSI translation="Youi'd better believe it">
 "Substance abuse in the Vietnam War wasn’t just limited to the marijuana and heroin enlistees could buy on the black market. Military commanders also heavily prescribed pills to help improve soldiers' performance."

History.com
</QUOD_SCRIPSI_SCRIPSI>

 .... drug-taking. The Phrase Finder writes

'Dutch courage' derives from the English derision of the Dutch which came about during the Anglo-Dutch wars. 

Strictly, the Phrase Finder is at pains to point out that the use of alcohol to "stiffen the sinews" wasn't the chief aim of the original users of the expression. Rather, the Anglo-Dutch wars encouraged the use of 'Dutch as a pejorative:

• Dutch bargain - a contract made when one is drunk.
• Dutch concert - where several tunes are played at the same time.
• Dutch feast - where the host gets drunk before the guests.
• Dutch treat - a 'treat' at which one has to pay one's own share.
• Double Dutch - nonsense.

I'm not sure I buy the pejorative idea. After all, a "Dutch auction" isn't a substandard or risible auction, it's just a different sort of auction  So I am not so quick to dismiss the idea that Dutch fighters had a nip of the hard stuff before an engagement. They wouldn't have been the first to do it, and gin was cheap and plentiful

Time to return to real life.

b

Where have I heard that before?

Listening to BBC Radio 3 the other day I had an aha moment like the one I discussed here  – when I thought I had detected a link between Delius' On hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and an American folk song. I had initially thought Delius must have been influenced by the cowboy song  Goodbye old paint while he was in Florida, but in the end (having heard a Tales from the stave programme on the Delius piece) I realized there was another reason for the similarity:

The influence I mistakenly suspected was from an American folk song to Delius. Many years ago, when my ability to read music was even more hesitant than it is now, I found the score of Goodbye old paint in a collection  of American folk songs. It wasn't a melody I knew, but the book provided chord symbols and I eventually worked out A tune that fitted the harmonies. But my grasp of the actual notes petered out after the first phrase

When I later heard the Delius piece I thought  AHA. While Delius was living in Florida he must have been exposed to Goodbye Old Paint.

But the BBC has now disabused me of this. The Delius piece was not an original idea (although I've never been a stickler for originality – as I've said often enough in this blog,  here for example); he got it from Edvard Grieg who he was with in Leipzig in 1887...

Grieg's source was the Norwegian folk song In Ola valley, which he included in a collection of piano transcriptions in 1896. But as that radio programme made clear, the atmosphere of the piece was very different. The story behind In Ola Valley is rather Scandi Noir:

More here

The Scandi Noir bit  is  a lugubrious tale about a lost (and ultimately dead) boy. The falling third of Delius' cuckoo represents, in Grieg's piece, a bell tolling. So On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring turns out to be not the direct descendant of Goodbye Old Paint, but the first cousin once removed (the Delius piece via Grieg's transcription, the cowboy song being a direct descendant of the Norwegian folk song).

My more recent aha moment happened 55'35" into an Early Music Show Special: Al-Andalus!

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>
I'm not a card-carrying early music nerd, but in the early 1980s I was working in OUP‘s office in  London, formerly the General Division‘s home, but then the home of a few General Division stragglers working on the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (3rd edn – the one with the pretty green  cover [and you must not forget the quincentenary colophon on the spine, Best Beloved]). The main body of the General Division (an internal admin  thing that is probably irrelevant to the present structure of OUP and  is of no great import) had moved to Oxford. 

The Early Music Department, working on another quincentenary  book The Oxford Book of Madrigals, were also left in London, and I joined a group of singers who sang from it at the launch party. One of the madrigals we sang was The Silver Swan, which became a favourite of  mine and – as the bass line is so  melodious  as a solo  – my usual audition piece (in the days when I did that  sort of thing).
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE> 

I  haven't listened to the whole thing, so this little observation may not be news to everyone, but the fact  that the programme was called Al-Andalus is indicative of a quirk of Spanish/Portuguese borrowings from Arabic.

The Berbers who occupied various parts of the Iberian peninsula between 711 and 1492 had Arabic as a second language, and they automatically tacked on the definite article to nouns; this accounts for borrowings that start with al- (algebra etc) or a- {Sp. azucar/Pg açúcar...

<PER_CONTRA>
[meanwhile the Italian for sugar – as their borrowing came from mother-tongue Arabs – is zucchero. Similarly Sp alcotón/Pg. algodão  but It. cotone, the root (via France) of  our "cotton"]
</PER_CONTRA>

...) or sometimes just l- (the word lute is derived from words that mean the-oud, the oud being a stringed instrument.

<GUESS likelihood="minimal, but who cares?">
I suspect that Spanish láud may have been influenced by an imagined etymological association with the Latin laus (=praise) as in "praise Him with... stringed instruments", but don't quote me on that; it‘s just supposed folk-etymology. )
</GUESS>

In this case the Portuguese preserved the whole al- –  alaude.

Where was I?... Got it, 55'35". I didn't catch the title of that Hebrew song, 'Adonai <something>', but it's strongly reminiscent of the cor anglais tune at the beginning of the second movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez...

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>
I've been there (Aranjuez)... no. Irrelevant self-indulgence.
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>

... and some of the ornaments before the voice comes in are just like the later guitar reprise of the tune.

Time I was doing stuff  outside before it starts to rai.. Bugrit.

b