What goes around...

In the early weeks of the present little local difficulty ("Nice and damp treatment [and catching] (8)") I wrote here

[Ed: In September 1985] I had my audition for Wokingham Choral Society with their new MD Paul Daniel. I persuaded him to take me on, despite my limitations when it came to reading music (and at the time I didn't even have a keyboard of any kind at home to help with note-bashing) on the strength of my having "recently" sung Beethoven's Mass in C (WCS's concert piece that term) with MagSoc's choir. That recently was something of an exaggeration, but it sounded more persuasive than the more accurate 'about 12 years ago when I was looking for an unauditioned choir having been kicked out of the chapel choir').

<peccadillo>
After three years with that choir (three years that coincided with Paul Daniel's tenure, before he went on to greater things) I left WCS, to return in the early noughties, under Aidan Oliver. On the strength of being a returning member I escaped without audition. (This may have had something to with the maestro's attitude to red tape.)
</peccadillo>

The post the other morning brought the music for next term's offering ...

<parenthesis>
(if that's the mot juste – as there is no offeree, "so shaken as we are, so wan with care" as wossname put it). We'll be having virtual rehearsals. So individual choir members will hear themselves, but there won't be an audience. 
</parenthesis> 

And the main piece for our Zoom rehearsals was the same mass. So my introduction to SATB choral singing...

<autobiographical_note>
There had been "the sixth form choir", but that was just a (transparent?) ruse to flesh out our UCCA forms ("UCCA" being the fore-runner of UCAS) in the Lower VIth. Our repertoire extended to "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" set for two parts, in Latin  (it was a Catholic school after all) For years this was a party piece for me and my brother.

Before that there had been a primary school choir (back before the philistines rewrote the curriculum), and a Gang Show (from which I can still see the Banda'd ...

<parenthesis>
A Banda was a sort of pre-Xerox duplicating system (Wikipedia calls it a spirit duplicator), involving smudges and a strong whiff of meths. It's a wonder to me that there was not a rash of Banda-sniffing among school children (perhaps there was though; we had a very sheltered childhood)
</parenthesis>

... copies, complete with a baffling typo at the end of "Steamboat Bill". The widow's words addressed to her children should have been "bless each honey lamb"; but our copies said "bless each honey bole" a mistake that my memory can't shake whenever I think of the tune. (We had no idea what a "bole" was at the time, but much of the socio-historic environment was foreign to us anyway: What was a steamboat?, what did "Crêpe on every steamboat" signify? What was a "honey lamb" and did it differ in any meaningful way from a "honey bole"?

</autobiographical_note>

... was Beethoven's Mass in C. And I can't wait to hear what our MD makes of the first movement's less than decisive tempo marking. But what do I know? Far from indecisive it might just be extremely persnickety (and if I was feeling stronger I'd've stuck to my guns when the Autocorrect monster told me to break that last word up with an S). 

"Andante, but moving on a bit, in fact fairly vivace, come to think of it almost Allegretto. But don't overdo it."

The other piece is Brahms' Schicksalslied – a piece that's new to me. But one critic is quoted ...

<dodgy_reference>
Wikipedia gives only a secondary source, so I'm not naming either the quoter or the quotee. More'n my job's worth.
</dodgy_reference>

...as saying "Had Brahms never written anything but this one work, it would alone have sufficed to rank him with the best masters." 

That's all for now.

b

Two bites of the cherry

Some years ago on this blog I devoted a post to sporting metaphors, mentioning in passing a couple of expressions that have to do with cricket. But  I'm returning to it because it's a particularly fruitful source.

And fruit is relevant I've never  heard a football commentator say 'That was a peach of a ball'. But for a cricket commentator a whole range of fruit is available. A ball (that is, the delivery of a ball rather than the ball itself) can be either "a peach" or "a Jaffa" (a kind of orange, named after its home area)...

<tangent>
(The normal pronunciation today is with an /ʌ / [as in "apple"] in the stressed syllable. But in a version of a comical song based on "the 'phonetic' alphabet" [whatever that is, but you know the sort of thing A for 'orses, B for mutton, C for yourself {a more niche variation, learnt from my mother [whom saints preserve, and they better had] had "C for th'Highlanders"} ...] I once read "J for oranges" – which suggests a pronunciation with /eɪ/ [as in "cake"]. I wonder if this was ever a normal pronunciation of "Jaffa", or if was just a rather strained [and unsuccessful] part of the joke. In its earliest form – that is, the earliest form I know – it had the wartime "Q for rations", but this was later given the less time-sensitive "Q for the cinema" [though this is itself time-sensitive in that it refers back to a time when queues outside cinemas were a commonplace ].)
</tangent>

.... The ball itself can be either "a cherry" or "a nut", and the word cherry can be recycled in the expression "two bites of the cherry". I haven't played much cricket (only two semi-serious games, involving whites and a hard ball, that is...

<autobiographical-note>
Both were at  Cambridge – one for the chapel choir, and one for Cambridge University Ladies (I did say semi-serious). The latter was a social fixture between a Corpus XI (not the Corpus XI, though it included one or two serious players) and the CU Ladies (or was it "Women"?). As I, an intended spectator (it being a Sunday afternoon affair), had made the dual mistakes of wearing white and having long hair, I made up the numbers.

In deference to the social nature of the event, the men were allowed only a short run-up. But no such allowance was made for me, and the pent-up hostility of their fast bowlers was unleashed. They were no doubt disappointed that I lasted for so few (I think 3 balls – my memory is mercifully sketchy on this traumatic episode). The first missed everything, the second hit my bat (with little or no direction on my part) and went to the boundary. The third reduced my wicket to match... 

<parenthesis> 

(Does a cricket ball – making a direct hit – ever reduce stumps to anything other than matchwood, I wonder? If not, and the groundsman has done his job with the watering can, the ball knocks a stump cartwheeling out of the ground.  If there is no direct hit, the metaphor is different. The ball misses the wicket by a coat of varnish.

</parenthesis> 

</autobiographical-note>

)... but I've heard and watched a  lot.

There are arguments for and against the exercising of the option (after a number of overs depending on the match conditions – typically 90) that the fielding side has with regard to the use of a new ball. A new one is harder, and adds to a fast bowler's fierceness. On the other hand, whereas a soft old ball is harder to score off, a new ball flies readily to the boundary.

<parenthesis>
(It is also more likely to carry to a fielder's hands...

<tangent>
(Yet more metaphorical foodstuff: unless he or she has "butterfingers")
</tangent>

...and here the figure of speech is a metonym (part for whole) with added synechdoche I think (though the naming of parts in figurative speech was never my strong point): a catch is achieved if the bowler "finds the edge".
</parenthesis>

Now then, that "two bites..." thing. Towards the end of a session, the fielding captain may take the new ball, so that the bowlers can use it before play ends (for a day or playing session) and then again, when it's still relatively new, after a rest.

 If a ball is not a "peach" or a "Jaffa", but rather the reverse, it is either "filth" or a "pie" .

<parenthesis>
(I don't have an authoritative explanation of this one, though it might have something to with such balls being "as easy as pie" to hit [though that just shifts the question away from the cricket pitch: what is so easy about pie? ] One popular "explanation" involves clowns, and the inexact throwing of custard pies; I'm not convinced.)
</parenthesis>

It is a sad but inevitable fact that most good cricketers have a Public School background ...

<rant>
(and regular readers of this blog will be used to this convention (ils sont fous ces Bretons, as Astérix would say). In the UK a Public School is not [as in  many less linguistically deceitful parts of the world] a state school. A UK Public School is a fee-paying school (public to the extent that anyone with money can go...

<meta-rant counter="scholarships"type="autobiographical">
But what about scholarships? some people ask. Scholarships schmolarships. At age 11 I won a "free" place to such a school in the street where we lived, but couldn't take it up because my mother (WSPATBH [see above]), a young widow with five children and an ailing father to look after, couldn't afford the uniform.
</meta-rant>

...). Such schools can afford not to sell their playing fields [as increasing numbers of state schools must, in order to pay for little luxuries like pencils and paper, or coursebooks published relatively recently – say this century. They can also afford a groundsman, equipment, a teacher with first-class experience...
</rant>

and such schools often have a "CCF" (or some similar cadet force). So many cricketing metaphors refer to the military. 

But those must wait for an update.

b

Update: 2020.08.14.10:50 – Added PS

PS on military metaphors:

• Military 
  The word "military" itself is used in cricket of inoffensive bowling: "military medium". The reference is to military displays, where extremes are avoided.
• Ram-rod straight
  This is another example of the persistence of old technologies in metaphorical language, mentioned not infrequently in this blog. A ram-rod was used to load a muzzle-loading firearm.
• Gun-barrel straight
• Shoulder arms
  When a batsman "shoulders arms" he doesn't play a shot and makes a flamboyant display of not doing so by resting his bat on his shoulder. The expression "shoulder arms", in its original context, was a command issued to soldiers on parade
  
  Shouldering arms – from
  https://www.trentbridge.co.uk/assets/images/32/1507549656_chris-broad.png

"Nesciens" - know what I mean?

... 'having no [carnal] knowledge of'.

Nearly 7 years ago, having mentioned german-ness (that is, I suppose, if you'll excuse the neologism (come to think of it, whether you excuse it or not) teutonicity, I remembered something I heard in a Golden Age lecture ...

<parenthesis>
Everyone in the Spanish Department seemed to assume I'd know what 'Golden Age' meant in the context of Spanish literature. With most of my colleagues (who'd been studying Spanish literature for 2 or 3 years) this was a reasonable assumption. As I was starting from scratch, without the benefit of Wikipedia, I didn't know that

[t]he Spanish Golden Age (Spanish: Siglo de Oro [ˈsiɣlo ðe ˈoɾo], "Golden Century") is a period of flourishing in arts and literature in Spain, coinciding with the political rise of the Spanish Empire under the Catholic Monarchs of Spain and the Spanish Habsburgs. It started in 1492, with the end of the Reconquista, the Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World, and the publication of Antonio de Nebrija's Grammar of the Castilian Language. It ended with the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 or in 1681 with the death of the Pedro Calderón de la Barca, the last great writer of the age.
Source 

</parenthesis>

...in my first year as a student (or "gentleman in statu pupillari" as we were known by the powers that ... were?  might be?)

I added this clarification:

<digression theme="germaneness(sic)">
That's germanness. But while we're in Spain, I'm reminded of various Romance words for brother. In Italy (fratello), French (frère) (and I'm sure many others, which I can't recall off-hand) they used the Latin FRATRE(M) [and you really should recognize this convention by now; if you don't, have a look here]. But in the Iberian peninsula, this wasn't enough. As I remember (but don't have chapter and verse) according to one estimate there was a time when it was said that 1 in 3 adult males were in holy orders of some kind^PPPS; for this sort of 'brother' they used Spanish fray, Portuguese frade, Catalan frare.... A brother by blood, or a germane brother became in Spanish hermano, in Portuguese irmão, in Catalan   germã  .... As we've seen before (here again) an adjective in a Noun Phrase often comes to be a noun.
</digression>

And in that PPPS I added (years later):

I have long felt, in a Wikipaediesque sort of way, that this needs further citation. I don't have it from a book, as I heard it from the mouth of Professor E. M. Wilson, dedicatee of the snappily-titled...

<digression>
This compound escapes my hostility to "titled" in a literary context, expressed in the rant here.
</digression>

...Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age: Presented to Edward M. Wilson (30) (Coleccion Tamesis: Serie A, Monografias) 

[He was] author of the Calderón chapter in the standard work on Golden Age Drama. In  fact, now I think of it, his influence may have been behind the CU Hispanic Society's choice of the play that marked my only outing as a tragedian, mentioned  here. Anyway,  whether the statistic (1 in 3 men in Holy Orders) was from his own (or one of his students') research or that of some other scholar, he regarded it as authoritative – good enough for me.

Now then (getting to the point at last ;-)), if you will refer back to that Wikipedia snippet, the Golden Age is known among Spanish students (and Spanish people in general if truth be told) as "el siglo de oro"; which brings me to my main reason (excuse?) for writing: a virtual performance of  Mouton's ...

<inline-PS>
Revenons?
</inline-PS>

...Nesciens mater given by the choir Siglo de Oro

To hear the piece, click here.

It's a lovely piece, and brilliant in its intricate structure. To quote the note provided by their MD (and formerly Wokingham Choral Society's MD):

It's ... a quadruple canon at the fifth, at a distance of two measures. What that means is: the singers who start on the left of the screen are singing exactly the same music as those on the right of the screen, except a perfect fifth higher, and two bars later.

Sublime. Out of this world. But I must return to the land of lawn mowers, hedge-trimmers, and curtain rails (don't ask, but that sorry tale made me forget... [no, I won't go there; time for my walk]).

b

Update 2020.08.04.11:55 – Added inline PS (a bit of esprit d'escalier)

At the end of the tunnel

Two years ago I wrote about a Voices Now  survey of choral singing in the UK.

The census estimates (conservatively) that over 2 million people sing regularly across the UK. This is similar to the number of Britons who go swimming on a weekly basis, and 300,000¹⁰ more than those playing amateur football each week^.11 However these two sports receive considerable public funding, in part because of the widely recognised benefits of regular¹² sports practice for mental and physical well-being and their role in local communities.

​

  10  2.52M swimming once a week (source: Active People Survey 10)

​

11 1.84M playing football once a week (source: Active People Survey 10)

12  Football - £30 million per year (source: Full Fact.org).
    Swimming -  £10 million(source: Sport England)

Aha – I interjected – but sport has physical and psychological benefits. Doesn't that explain the difference in government support? The Voices Now survey again:

Professor Graham Welch, Chair of Music Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, found that the health benefits of singing are both physical and psychological. “Singing has physical benefits because it is anaerobic activity that increases oxygenation in the blood stream and exercises major muscle groups in the upperbody, even when sitting. Singing has psychological benefits because of its normally positive effect in reducing stress levels.

Psychological benefits are also evident because of the increased sense of community, belonging and shared endeavour. 

​6 Heart Research UK, Singing  is Good for You, 2017

That was then and this is now. Choral singing has a new enemy that uses biological warfare, despite the fact that, as a recent study says, "[T]here is no secure, peer-reviewed data on the dangers of singing itself – taken in isolation, that is, from other potential contributors to outbreaks...". It goes on to list examples: "...close contact, shared drinks and snacks, as well as poor ventilation", all of which can be managed – some, admittedly, with more difficulty than others.

The study investigates

...how dangerous singing and playing woodwind and brass instruments are in the spread of Covid-19. Serious outbreaks of the virus were linked to choirs from countries including South Korea and the Netherlands this spring. Most notable was the terrible case of a choir rehearsal in Skagit County, Washington state, on 10 March. Out of 61 attending practice, 52 people fell ill. Two died.

<parenthesis expertise="0">

Part of a test. For the full picture,
see the original article

"...playing woodwind and brass instruments"?  Singing I can understand – despite the lack of peer-reviewed evidence against it.  But it seems to me that a woodwind or brass instrument is as good (as far as the mouth is concerned, and I'm not sure why a player of a wind instrument would want to waste air by breathing out through the nose – which leaves only sneezes...

<meta-parenthesis> 

[and surely, isn't sneezing nature's way of telling you not to go to a rehearsal?]

</meta-parenthesis>

...) as  any cloth mask (if not more effective) in the inhibition of aerosols. For bio-secure rehearsals I imagine there would have to be protocols for  disposing of the condensate (that's a euphemism for "spit"), but the air coming out of the instruments themselves is surely not a possible vector for the virus – not that the air moves that vigorously anyhow (a professional trombonist speaking in a BBC news interview observed that it was next to impossible to blow out a candle placed by  the bell of the instrument).
</parenthesis>

But this is getting dangerously close to gloomy rumination, which – despite evidence to the contrary  – I'm trying to avoid.

The report of the recent research continues:

The study that Costello has set up with Reid and other colleagues – funded by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and sponsored by Public Health England – aims to insert some facts into the discussion. The researchers hope to publish their findings in a matter of weeks – incredibly fast by the usual standards of peer-reviewed academic publishing. 

Here's hoping.

b

PS My latest nomination for a FOGGY (recognizing bad writing - see here, and here's a taste):

The idea for the name derives from Robert Gunning's FOG index, although these awards don't restrict themselves only to obstacles to readability measured by that index.

Here it is:

Is this a recall notice? It claims to be, but the text doesn't say anything like 'Take this back for a full refund. You really really ought to do this ASAP". It's more as though some official department or other has said 'Recall this" and B&Q have decided to save money by falling back on bad writing.

The word "advise" works to ways in English (at least two ways, but these two are the relevant ones):

• advise + to-infinitive [that's ESOL-speak for what many  language learners know  as 'the infinitive"]
  Meaning: It would be wise to do this
  Example: He advised me to forget it
• advise + that + indicative
  Meaning: Here's some information. Act on it or not – it's up to you
  Example: Transport for London advises passengers that engineering work will...

But B&Q have conflated these two. They are saying 'Here's some information: do with it what you will.' (the second sort of advise), but disguising it as the first sort (with a subtext of "Anyone with any sense would take care with this jerry-built rubbish. The Health and Safety people say we've got to recall it, but we're not going to waste money like that.")

Update: 2020.07.27.09:30 – Added saxophone picture

Mute-you-all benefits

Four years ago, I wrote (here)

A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.

Well, in this brave new (lockdown)  world it's happened again. Earlier this month our multi-talented accompanist, Ben,  has taken advantage of this opportunity to use Zoom to hold a series of virtual rehearsals on the last 3 Fridays of July...

<stop-press>
(and the series goes on now, as he's holding further such rehearsals: details here)
</stop-press>

...The first was Parry's I Was Glad, which I've written about more than once (here and here, and possibly elsewhere). This was the first in the series, and I hadn't done any preparatory note-bashing...

<weasel-words reason="He would say that, wouldn't he?">
Ben was at pains to say this wasn't necessary. But we lesser mortals need to do some prep. I thought, having sung the piece many times before, I could busk it; but it's just as well that in Zoom rehearsals no one can hear anything...

<zoom-pun>
Whenever a Zoom host says "I'll mute you all" it strikes me that it's to our mutual [geddit?] benefit that we can't hear each other.
</zoom-pun>

...(except in the final sing-through, when we've got a recording to sing along to).
</weasel-words >

Next up is the dum-dee-dum bit from the Vivaldi Gloria. I've sung this more often than the Parry, but still need to do some note-bashing,  Fortunately it's in F, so I have a good chance of picking out the notes.

<autobiographical-note>

My least prepared rendition of this was towards the end of last century. One of my son's colleagues in Berkshire Youth Choir (and in a barbershop quartet it spawned) was also organist at his local church in Finchampstead. He was organizing a performance of parts of the Gloria.

As I was on taxi-duty that day, and knew the piece well, I became a singing chauffeur.

</autobiographical-note>

The last Friday session is the Hallelujah chorus, which will be in most amateur choir members' repertoire. Although I must have sung this more often than any other piece, I will still need to do some preparatory note-bashing. One stretch of repeated "Hallelujahs" always catches me out however often I rehearse it.

The swan-song of Ben's mini-season is also, as happens, a piece I've sung before, as it was one of the pieces featured in a WCS workshop some years ago (10-ish?) held by another Ben. I'm not sure I can make these sessions (and admittedly my enthusiasm for the music is not great), We'll see.

But I must put in an appearance in the land of the living. (Having been away in Norfolk for a week, I felt the need to show that the blog still has a pulse.)

b

Up the Gunners

Writing here back in 2013, initially about "magazine", I moved on to 

Another perfectly innocent storage word from Arabic has been... bellicosified (don't bother looking that up; it means 'given a martial meaning' ). The word in question derives from what looks to me like a phrase in Arabic: dār as-şinā‘ah (maybe Arabic can create composite nouns by joining smaller words together –  as indeed English does: Etymonline tells me dār means 'house' and as-şinā‘ah means 'art/craft/skill' –  a rather up-market sort of 'workshop'; come to think of it, English has borrowed from French le mot juste, an 'atelier').  

This spawned various words in Italian and its many dialects. In standard Italian the word is darsena – 'wet dock'. Moving north, the Venetian equivalent was arsenal, which was applied to a complex of naval dockyards and armouries, the Arsenale di Venezia. Various other languages got their foot in the door and borrowed that word, but shorn of its peaceable storage-and-work-related meaning. It wasn't until some workers from the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich formed a football team ('The Gunners') that  swords were beaten into ploughshares and the word was rehabilitated.

So  the Venetian dialect has given us the word "arsenal". which referred originally to a particular complex of buildings devoted to war at sea but has come to be used to refer to any store of weaponry.

Venetian also gives us (and many other languages) the word "quarantine", mentioned in passing (I was talking about dozen at the time) here:

In French -aine is a suffix that can make any number approximate; in English, though, dozen is the only ...

<digression>
I was hoping that, in recognition of the fact that flowers are sold in 10s and 5s, the word dizen would evolve (French dixaine). Sadly. it hasn't happened.
<digression>

...such word we have; quarantine is related, but came via Italian quarantina giorni – the period that ships from plague-ridden countries had to wait in the offing [never thought I'd use that one, except in the song "Blow the Wind Southerly"] before putting in at 17TH-century Venice.

That reference to Venice agrees with the received etymological wisdom (Susie Dent mentioned it in a recent Radio Times). But more recently (here) I mentioned Dubrovnik as a possible locus for the coining – though the Venetian dialect would have been influential there at one time, as Dubrovnik was under Venetian rule at the time.

Another Venetian word that, like "arsenal" gave English a word with a general application based on a particular usage in Venice is that place where Shakespeare housed Shylock – in the ghetto:

The term was originally used for the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, as early as 1516, to describe the part of the city where Jews were restricted to live and thus segregated from other people.
Source

But when Elvis used those words "in the ghetto" referred to 'a cold and grey ...

<parenthesis>
(Come to think of it, it was probably gray)
</parenthesis>

... Chicago morn'. In fact, many cities now have ghettos.

Another legacy of Venetian will have to wait for an update. It's time for tea.

b 

Update – 2020.07.06.13:55: Added  PS and fixed date in first line. 

PS

And here it is:

Another word that has come to us from Venice is "gazette". Here's what Etymonline has to say:

gazette (n.)

"newspaper," c. 1600, from French gazette (16c.), from Italian gazzetta, Venetian dialectal gazeta "newspaper," also the name of a small copper coin, literally "little magpie," from gazza; applied to the monthly newspaper (gazeta de la novità) published in Venice by the government, either from its price or its association with the bird (typical of false chatter), or both. First used in English 1665 for the paper issued at Oxford, whither the court had fled from the plague.

The coin may have been so called for its marking; ...The general story of the origin of the word is broadly accepted, but there are many variations:...

That page goes on to give details, which are many and varied, but the common threads are the bird (although one of them adds the rather sniffy "but it does not appear on any of the oldest Venetian specimens preserved at Florence") and the idea of idle chatter (Twitter comes to mind, a little anachronistically)...

<tangent subj="translation">
Speaking of anachronism, I am still fuming at the award-winning World's Classics translation of Os Lusíadas which sidesteps a rather tricky translation point by ignoring the original and inventing a 'heavy anchor chain' on a sixteenth century caravel, when the anchor chain was not invented until the nineteenth century – when ships started getting too heavy for hemp hawsers. And even then, a ship as light as a caravel wouldn't...

<inline-PPS>
This made sense when I wrote it, but probably needs a bit of explanation. I'm entering for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, as mentioned in a recent post. Part of my preparation involved looking at another translation, which

• Won an international prize 
• Is rubbish

</inline-PPS> 

But I must let it go.
</tangent>

...England had just such a coin , the farthing (a quarter of an old penny, so a 960th of a pound, about 00.01 oops, correction: .1 new pence, but the bird was not a gazza (thieving or otherwise). It was a wren:

Update – 2020.07.07.09:55:  Added inline PPS.

Desktop iconoclasm

<rant>
I blame the desktop publishing  software ("DTP"). When I was at OUP, many moons ago, all was right (recto) with the world. A recto was, as the name suggests, a right-hand page; and on its back, as the name suggests, was a verso. Page numbering started at 1 (or i in prelims, if you were old enough to be fussy about that stuff) on a recto. Except that,  as it was the title page, or the first page of text – in either case a display page – it had no page number (or folio, if you're toeing the Hart's Rules line). A satisfying mixture of Latin, arbitrary rules, and even more arbitrary exceptions, made publishing workers feel special, acolytes in an arcane priesthood.

Then along came DTP, and any Thomasina, Ricarda, or Harriet had the keys to the tabernacle of editorial arcana; they started spraying page numbers around willy-nilly as if there were no rul... Well, I suppose there aren't any more...

<meta-rant>
(and that's another thing; "any more" as one word)
</meta-rant>

...rules, that is.

<meta-rant>
(and that's another  'nother thing; automatic hyphenation. The-/rapist, ency-/clopedia, leg-/end, te-/aching; who writes these misbegotten algorithms? Why not spend some time doing it manually... thoughtfully before dreaming up a bit of software that's guaranteed to go on getting it wrong until Hell freezes over?)
</meta-rant>

</rant>

But what it is is "enabling  technology" – a Good Thing, I suppose. Gutenberg...

<parenthesis>
(or Gänsfleisch, to give him his proper name:

According to Heinrich Wallau, writing in The Catholic Encyclopedia:

Gutenberg was the son of Friele (Friedrich) Gänsfleisch and Else Wyrich. His cognomen was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors "zu Laden, zu Gutenberg". The house of Gänsfleisch was one of the patrician families of the town, tracing its lineage back to the thirteenth century."

 So, as I said here.

Johannes was as much Johannes Gutenberg as Leonard Woolf was Leonard Hogarth  (whose business just took its name from Hogarth House) 

)
</parenthesis>

...revolutionized the means of disseminating information in the fifteenth century. This put the power to spread the word in the hands of anyone who had access to a printing press (whereas previously – in the West, at least – that  power had been in the hands of  the Church, so that there were strict limitations on what that Word could be). The Church was understandably annoyed  at this encroachment on their monopoly, and argued strongly that such empowerment was a Bad Thing. (Rightly; there do have to be standards; there do have to be rules to prevent perversions of justice. But the Pope doesn't have to  brandish his imprimatur ...

<etymological-note>
and trust Holy Mother Chorch. as Father Steven used to say in my history classes, to hide the agent of a ruling behind the passive voice and in an obscure language: "it may be printed". 

</etymological-note>

... like a spoilt teenager, just because).

So, going back to my opening  rant, you may have noticed that I used the metaphor priesthood. So where does that put me in the case of the Church and Gutenberg? I have to admit, through clenched teeth, that DTP was a Good Thing. (That doesn't mean. though, that I find its giving power to the people comfortable.

<inline-PS>
My feelings on seeing an odd page number on a left-hand page, when someone's cutNpasted from a published source and then re-paginated ...

<rant rejoinder= "Eppur si muove">
(without having the common courtesy to add blank pages to keep the spreads right)
</rant> 

... need have no repercussions in the real world, however violent they may be.
</inline-PS>

 )

Enough for now.

b

Update: 2020.06.2912:05 – Added inline PS.