A Tale of Two Concerts

The first was at Cadogan Hall last Tuesday:

It featured three choral pieces, all of which I have sung both with my choir  and with others. The first two were short pieces, interspersed in the first half with two familiar orchestral pieces – Vaughan Williams's Toward the Unknown Region and his Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus ...

<parenthesis>
(and while we're on the subject, I do wish those people on Classic FM would stop using the inappropriate Romish pronunciation. In the speech of Vaughan Williams [who studied Latin before the vogue for Italianate pronunciation in choral works] the stressed vowel in Dives [as also in Benedicite] was the very English diphthong /ɑɪ/)
</parenthesis>

...as I like to think of it Variations on The Star of the County Down).

<note type="obituary">
Incidentally, RIP Paddy Moloney, who plays on that track.
</note>

The other orchestral piece was Ravel's Pavane pour une infante ...

<more_Classic_FM_snobbery>
NOTHING TO DO WITH CHILDREN FOR PETE'S SAKE. An Infante can be any age. The present Infanta Elena, for example, is in her late fifties; and the Infanta Eulalia died in her 95th year. Catherine Bott, the other week, said the music conjured up the image  of a "young princess". (Well they were all young once of course, but never princesses.)

Not that that matters. According to the program notes. Ravel had no image in mind, and just liked the sounds. (And I suspect the reason for that was the three distinct nasals [not just two, as it would be if the infante was just a child.)
</more_Classic_FM_snobbery>

...défunte.

The other  choral piece was Fauré's charming Cantique de Jean Racine, written...

<PROGRAMME_NOTE exception="not last Tuesday's though">
when (as programme notes insist on saying he entered it for a "school prize". Sometimes they even say 'when he was only a schoolboy!!!' [if you'll pardon the screamer-orrhea]. But he was not a schoolboy in the Just William sense; he was nineteen, studying at the École Niedermeyer de Paris,)  

More here 

</PROGRAMME_NOTE>

And here's an extract from something I wrote a few years ago (not essential reading but quite fun, I think  –  though I say it as shouldn't):

<2015_quote>
[In the Cantique] The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great dis-covery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well.... 

More here 
</2015_quote>

But the main choral offering was Fauré's Requiem. The choir (the excellent City of London Choir, whose diction outdid the soloist in my favourite part of the Libera Me.

<parenthesis type="distance between heaven and earth">
Their double /t/ and rolled r in et terra was momentous (portentous?... one of those -entous words anyway); whereas the soloist was less percussive (while philologically more sympathetic – think of the Italian e [sometimes i], the Spanish y  [sometimes e], the french et (where the written t is just an orthographic convention, and doesn't resurface [as does the last consonant of est] even before a vowel...

<autobiographical_note >
I remember a sixties classmate making the unnecessary elision, so that the Claude Lelouch film acquired the surprising title "A man is a woman" (a fore-runner of The Danish Girl, perhaps).
<autobiographical_note>

...). 

The rest of this parenthesis is eminently skippable. The concert just brought it to mind.  

I wrote some time ago (here) about the musical difference between heaven and hell:

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of Libera me [part of his Requiem].

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judg-ment: Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.' 

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom. 

††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

</parenthesis>

Whether by accident (Covid-spacing) or design, the idea to put the Soprano in the gallery for the Pie Jesu was well-judged – a mixture of the angelic and the celestial – though I did wonder how they'd coordinate her curtain call: a system of wires up the staircase, carrying a silent message?  An SMS?

<note type="Health & Safety">
In the event, she came down onto the main stage; I trust she wasn't wearing heels, though she did have three numbers to negotiate all those stairs.
</note>

The concert was conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton, who I first heard of a few years ago (probably more like ten, in view how fast time flies for the septuagenarian) presenting the sadly short-lived Masterworks programme on Classic FM. It was axed (or at least not recommissioned) after one or two series...

<parenthesis subject="Masterworks">
This was an educational programme aired on Sunday afternoon, based on the GCSE music syllabus (in those halcyon pre-Gove days when more than a handful of children still studied music at school). 

<inline_ps> 

Since taking this fairly off-hand swipe at the Coalition Government's introduction of the eBacc in 2010, I have been feeling the need for some documentary backing. Well here it is. And here's a pretty telling graph from the article:

Moreover, the report adds 

A similar pattern was shown even more starkly in last week’s A Level results, when Music A-Level students were revealed to have halved in the last decade, falling from around 10,000 to around 5,000 a year.

(Of course, as this was in August 2020, there had been especial problems of access to music facilities/hands-on teaching.  Home schooling, anyone? Still...). 

<inline_ps>

<parenthesis>

... He was having a whale of a time, waving his arms like Mick Jagger. It was clear that he had sorely missed music-making and was making up for lost time.

The second of my two concerts – Kevin Loh at King's Place  – is in doubt. We may not go.

<rant>
And I'm sick of this Trump-like insistence on politicizing the wearing of masks. latest example of this was in Giles Coren's piece in The Times last Saturday "Done The Times, now I need to do the crimes" – all the more insidious because of its puerile resentful acquiescence (more befitting William Brown than a grown-up like Mr Coren): "I wear a mask on the tube because Sadiq Khan says I must" (or words to that affect).

I quote from the TfL conditions of carriage, section 2.4:

Given the coronavirus pandemic, all passengers over the age of 11 years must wear a face covering when travelling on our services, until further notice.

You must wear a face covering when in our bus and rail stations, on our platforms, Emirates Air Line terminals and river piers and on our bus, tram, train, Emirates Air Line, Dial-a-Ride and Woolwich ferry services.

Your face covering must cover from the top of your nose to the bottom of your chin, and attach behind your ears or tie behind your head, unless you are exempt from this requirement.

If you are not exempt and you fail to comply with this requirement or directions given by an authorised officer, you may not be allowed entry or may be asked to leave our premises.

Nothing to do with Sadiq Khan, although being a responsible adult, rather than a smart-arse  overgrown public schoolboy,  he approves. This is not the overweening nanny state, it's a simple capitalist contract: you ride our network, you wear a mask: that's the deal. And the mealy-mouthed TfL announcement that says "some people may  have difficulty wearing masks" is plain risible. Some people can't wear masks; nobody "has difficulty" wearing them; a little inconvenience maybe.

<hindsight>
I can't help thinking of male surgeons spreading puerperal fever  by not washing their hands when leaving autopsies to go to a maternity ward; today we can't believe anyone would be so stupid, but then there was huge resistance (especially among privileged men) to what we see today as simple hygiene. Similarly in a few years, with hindsight, it will be impossible to fathom how stupid it was not to wear masks.
</hindsight>

It's not politics; it's hygiene.  I wish entertainment venues followed TfL's lead  and made mask-wearing a contractual obligation

</rant>

But I must "tread upon the ground" (as Old Daddy Fox used to say (or maybe I'm thinking of a similar song  – anyway time for my rehearsal).

Update 2021.10.23.14:05 – Added <inline_PS />

 

How can I help?

Veterans of early versions of Microsoft Word will recall the animated paper-clip, which stuck its nose in every now and then, saying things like "You seem to be writing a letter, would you like to use a template?"

<IT_urban_legend>
Word has it [not that sort of Word. duh] that the original prototype for this busybody was designed by Melinda Gates, and was called "Bob".

<IT_naming_apocrypha>
it was also said that in an early version of the worldwide web, the prefix WWW...

<meta_tangent>
(an interesting abbreviation in that it has three times as many syllables  [/dʌbəlju: dʌbəlju: dʌbəlju:/] as the words it stands for – an indication, perhaps, of the way the early web was concerned only with text and not with sound)
</meta_tangent>

...was TIM (standing for Tim's Information Machine). This smacks to me of CERNo-mythopoeia. 

<meta_tangent>
The making of myths. Interesting word-bit (alias morpheme), poei-; turns up where you least expect it: from poet to erythropoietin (EPO – for the drug-cheats in the audience) – anything that involves the making of something.
<meta_tangent> 

/IT_naming_apocrypha>

</IT_urban_legend>

I've recently been haunted by a high-tech analogue of this: the Google Assistant. At seemingly random intervals – usually when I could do without the redirection of my, at the best of times, butterfly-like focus – it cuts in and says "Hi (painfully informal, and over-familiar, I feel) How can I help?"

My first instinct was to say "You can help by keeping the heck out of my face", but I'm sure this would get us nowhere, possibly prompting more specific irrelevant question like "Would you like to know the lead in Shrek" (they set a lot of store by vowel sounds, these speech recognition doofers). Then I thought (a more mature response): There must be a setting; switch it off.

But the people at Google seem to have thought I might do this, and have implemented some byzantine system of nested dependencies, with the effect that whenever I switch it off some other setting automagically switches it back on.

<rant type="cyber-paranoid">
Besides, call me old-fashioned but I've already signed over much of my personal data to the tech giants, and I'm blowed if I'll add bio-metrics to the damage. For this reason I'm not letting them get their hands on my voice-print; and for the same reason I haven't accepted the siren requests that I should "Make my life so much easier" by using a face-scan or a fingerprint to open my phone...

<tangent>
And while we're on the subject, whenever I see a TV cop opening a phone by thrusting it in the face of a resistant perp, I think "Surely you can stymie the facial recognition software by girning."
</tangent>

...My face-scan isn't going to fly off into the cloud somewhere... (Unless... oh gawd, Don't tell me... It's there already, isn't it?) Well anyway I'm not going to knowingly hold the door open for the identity thieves by saying "This is my face and Google can do what it likes with it".
</rant>

L'Envoi 

And I'll close with a not entirely irrelevant speculation about a name that features in a G&S operetta based on confused identities. In HMS Pinafore the nurse sings

I'm called Little Buttercup
Dear Little Buttercup
Though I could never tell why

The last line struck me when I first heard it as a rather pointless non sequitur, whose only justification was to provide a rhyme for "Little Buttercup I" (itself a bare-faced  makeweight). But I saw it in a  painfully chaste convent school production, which certainly wouldn't have added the inviting (and probable – given Gilbert's obsession with all things mammary...

<parenthesis>
(Another case: In Iolanthe Strephon sings 

In babyhood upon her lap I lay
With infant food she moistened my clay
Had she withheld the succour she supplied...

And the chorus have a nudge-nudge-wink-wink moment, hearing "sucker".
</parenthesis>

...) bit of stage-business, hitching up her ample bosom: Buttercup the cow, milk, wet-nurse – geddit?

Tha'sall. Time I prepared for tonight's rehearsal.

b

 

 –

The lure of the one-word-fits-all "dictionary"

 A few years ago I was writing, as I sometimes do, about Gutenberg, and quoted Wikipedia's

His surname [my emphasis] was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors ...

Wallau's [HD2021: the writer who Wikipedia was citing] word was cognomen. Johannes was as much Johannes Gutenberg as Leonard Woolf was Leonard Hogarth  (whose business just took its name from Hogarth House). I imagine the wikipedioscribe saw cognomen, wondered what it meant and looked in some benighted dictionary that went for tight-lipped and simplistic one-word "equivalences" such as Dictionary.com's

 

... without bothering to read the rest of the definition. 

Old blog post

I was reminded of this the other day while watching Pointless when the round involved the meanings of French words for parts of a house. The contestants had had their go, and the host (Alexander Armstrong) was providing answers to the remaining questions. They came finally to grenier, and he said (uncertainly, I thought as I was watching live, though on a second look I see I was wrong, "barn") and his sidekick (the ubiquitous Richard Osman) "corrected" him to "attic". My first thought was that Armstrong didn't speak French and was guessing on the basis of a similarity to our "granary" (a good guess, as Wiktionary confirms:

From Middle French grenier, from Old French grenier, gernier, guernier, from Latin grānārium. Equivalent to grain +‎ -ier.

). And you can add to the related words not only "granary" but also "garner"...

<philological_point>
(in which case, spot the metathesis; and if you're not sure what that is start here)
</philological_point>

....

But I was wrong about Armstrong's  francophony . His second offering, drowned out by the "right" answer, was "attic" (which, admittedly, is more of a 'part of a house').  And, turning to the oracle, I find that Larousse confirms Armstrong's order of possibilities:

Larousse

And note also that 3rd usage. In French grenier fulfils the same metaphorical role as our "bread-basket"; (this is one of the many advantages of monolingual dictionaries - the way they cast fascinating new light into the language by means of serendipitous revelations; I've only just met this usage, but it's one I don't think I'll forget).

For the faint-hearted ...

<mini_rant>
, or those who went to school after that obscurantist vandal Michael Gove made the learning of foreign languages optional (at any serious level), giving the privately educated yet another unfair advantage over the cattle-class of public eduation,
</mini_rant>

...here's a French-English version:

Collins

So Armstrong's first answer was not far off the mark (the translation was OK though the context was wrong - and his only mistake was not realizing that the context was not a text but a quiz question.).

<autobiographical_note>

And at the mention of grenier the vision came to me of my French master (referred to in various posts in this blog), when Le Grand Meaulnes arpentait la salle in the attic overhead, miming arpenter - although Meaulnes didn't do it in a threadbare and tattered master's gown.

</autobiographical_note>

Tha'sall she wrote. 

b

Update 2021.10.03.18:30 – Various tweaks and typo fixes.

Mr Biden and the serviette

Last week I was listening to a repeat of an episode from A History of the World in a Hundred Objects...

<autobiographical_note>
(which, when it first appeared, gave me the idea for A History of English in a Hundred Words – an idea that I planned and actually started on, before David Crystal published 

 The Story of English in 100 Words 

to my  disgruntlement, especially as in his Introduction to the earlier 

The Stories of English

he had written:

(which I felt at the time –  somewhat petulantly  I now admit –  disqualified him from writing the story]; though I think he made a better job of it than I would have).
</autobiographical_note>

.... and this particular episode (about a map drawn on buckskin, recording a nefarious deal done between The Wabash Company and  the Native Americans they were trying to exploit. The exchange showed up (and indeed in a sense depicted) the clash of cultures between the fly-by-night, exploitative westerners and the people who just didn't have the notion that land was something that could be traded.

<inline_ps>

To quote from  the BBC's blurb:

Today he[Neil MacGregor]  tells the story of a map, roughly drawn on deerskin that was used as the colonists negotiated for land in the area between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. It was probably drawn up by a Native American around 1774. Neil looks at how the French and the British were in conflict in the region, and examines the different attitudes to land and living between Europeans and Native Americans.

</inline_ps>

 That short programme is well worth a listen.

Later that week I was getting up to date with Lyse Doucet's  excellent and thought-provoking  A Wish for Afghanistan . This (last week's) episode features an interview with Hamid Karzai (former president of that long-suffering and deeply-wronged country). Hamid Karzai recalls a meeting he had over dinner with then Vice President Biden in 2008; Biden  was complaining about corruption in the Afghan administration. The President's answer was that yes there was petty corruption in the Afghan administration but to an extent dwarfed by that done by the US Army and their contractors; what was unconscionable was the hundreds of civilian casualties. Afghanistan would be better off without their interference.

 

I can believe that – not that I necessarily do believe it.

<autobiographical-note>

But as my big sister (who lived much of her adult life in Northern Ireland) used to say "Give people in uniforms weapons and control over a civilian population and you will get misbehaviour, you know?"

</autobiographical-note>

At this point Mr Biden lost his rag (the rag in question being his table napkin – or in the non-U Karzai report his serviette) : "He got up and he got angry and threw his serviette and left". The child is father of the man, or rather the 66 year-old is father of the 79 year-old. That is what now-President Biden has just done; he has thrown down his serviette and stormed out, calling over his shoulder "I've had it with you people". Here again was a bit of fabric exemplifying, as did the buckskin map, the gulf between two cultures and the reason for bloodshed between Western progress and any non-white resistance to it.

Anyway, the latest Wish for Afghanistan has just appeared (or dropped as  they say in the trade) so I must go and get my fix. 

b

Update: 2021.09.24.10:55 – Added <inline_ps />

They also serve...

 Well, I wasn't standing and waiting......

<speculation>
(and I suspect that snippet of half-remembered verse refers to waiting in the '"being available to serve" sense , like what a waiter does, or the children crowned all in white in the carol [who don't "wait around" on street corners comparing ASBOs, but wait ready to serve The Man]. </speculation>

...Yesterday, though, was a bit of a waste.

I had to pick up some new meds – a special 70th birthday treat; and these meds were of a sort that can't be dispensed by any old High Street pharmacy. So I went to London (a four-hour round trip}  I spent a useful half hour or so talking with a doctor and Nurse Specialist, and filling in a Consent form. After that  I just had to "go down to the Pharmacy and pick up the meds". This was what I'd come for. But that's when the wheels fell off 

The man at the counter warned me that the order would take more than an hour to fill, so I took a seat in the waiting area, watching the VDU (well, that's what we called them when I was a lad) and seeing my number progress from In progress to... erm... a black hole. It just disappeared from the screen – an un-number. 

But it did its disappearing trick in its own good time. And, having been warned to expect a delay, I didn't chase it for a good 90 minutes. Asked why my order had disappeared from the screen, the man said they'd had to order the meds and could I pick them up tomorrow? IN A PIG'S ORIFICE, I could.  And I still don't see how they could put the stuff on order, take the order number off the screen, and not think to tell the poor putz who had wasted a day and over £20 in travel costs. 

<peccadillo>
Well, £20 is a bit of an exaggeration, because my train back to Reading was about half an hour late, with two results:

• I could catch it at all, as it left Paddington 10 mins late before starting its relentless crawl to arrive at Reading 26 mins behind schedule
• I could claim a mess of potage (that is, the price of my mid-morning latte).

</peccadillo>

Win/win. A small victory (not without a little naughtiness) that brought my blood pressure back down.

And now, to cleanse the palate after that vitriolic memory, here's a curriculum cantoris that was going to live in Words & Music ...

<prerequisite software="ebooks reader" />

...if I'd ever got round to it:

<palate_cleanser type="readily skippable">

From the mid-'60s to the mid/late-'70s my  musical endeavours were chiefly solo or in small groups (mostly what were called at the time "folk groups". ) I've mentioned these days in a not-too-distant post, here. 

<inline_ps> 

That old post only told the late '60s story. The '70s were my heyday,  chiefly as a soloist. I played and sang in folk clubs and with the CU Footlights at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1975 and with the Oxford Theatre Group both in their revue and in an on-stage band in something less frivolous. 

In the mid-late '70s I made a (part-time) "living", and continued to feed  the attention-craving beast (after going straight and getting a proper job)  in  OUP  staff shows. 

</inline_ps>

I sang in SATB choirs a few times at Cambridge, and in the late-'70s I stood in as surrogate father with a friend whose young brother‘s school had a parents' choir – his actual parents being out of the country and his big sister being in loco matris.

In the early '80s my musical efforts were productive of books rather than sounds. I worked as an editor with various musicians – Julian Bream, William Pleeth, Barry Tuckwell... I also worked on James Galway‘s Flute, though not with the man himself (as he was well protected by his agent). But my interests weren't fixed at one end of the musical spectrum; one of my regrets of that time was not being able to resurrect a John Renbourne book – long under contract, but my instructions from on high (although "on high" and Robert Maxwell are improbable bed-fellows) were to cut him loose...

In the mid-'80s I started snging again, with a three-year spell at Wokingham Choral Society (which coincided with Paul Daniel's brief tenure as MD: I passed the audition only because that term's piece was Beethoven's Mass in C, which I had sung at Cambridge in my first SATB choir [MagSoc]). 

<tangent> 

MagSoc ran an unauditioned choir based at Queens' College. My son also sang at Queens', but in the proper (auditioned) choir, as a visiting tenor.

</tangent> 

From the late-'80s to the mid-'90s I sang with Reading Haydn Choir, and then after a brief stay at the University of Reading's Town and Gown choir, and occasional concerts with various RU music students, I returned to WCS. 

After a Zoomful 18 months from March 2020 to September 2021 (during which we produced this), we are now back to rehearsing live (jabbed, tested, spaced out, etc.), preparing Handel's Messiah for a concert in the University of Reading's Great Hall on 13 November 2021. 

</palate_cleanser>

But the picnic bench, a shadow of its former self, needs attention. I am going out, and I may be some time.

 b

Update: 2021.09.16.12:50 – Added <inline_ps />

 

A tale of two cities

My latest discovery is Radio3's Inside Music. In it a leading musician discusses an eclectic range of music, and their approach to it. Ten days ago I was listening to Aylish Tynan's edition, and she was talking about the importance of text. She sang a Fauré piece, which I heard as Les roses disparantes. In her introduction there was no mention of the author of the poem, so in my subsequent search for the poem I drew a blank.

So, without being able to check the text I assumed that disparantes in the context  meant dying or fading, or just no longer being in season. There was the remote possibility that the piece was referring to shades of pink (as the masculine rose is not a flower but a colour) in which case the disparants would refer in context to fading or disappearing. But, as the only other word I could make out was jasmin, I felt safe enough to assume the piece was talking about flowers and bunged off this flippant tweet

Over the next few days there was no response, and I began to fear I might have got the tone wrong.

<tangent>

On Word of Mouth this week I heard an extraordinary statistic about misunderstood texts; the figure was "50%", but I don't see how they could measure it in any meaningful way.

<autobiographical-note>
This reminded me of a misunderstood mail I sent in the early '90s, involving the words 

I could be wrong; there are recorded instances. 

(I often used this line, so it may be familiar to some of you.)

I might have known that this wouldn't have the intended cheeky-chappy effect in a trans-atlantic mail, and it made for difficult professional relations over the following few months. The recipient probably still thinks I'm an arrogant prig (if she remembers the incident at all; she seemed to me to be a more or-less inveterate taker of umbrage at perceived male slights, so I imagine her memories of this sort of thing must be quite crowded).
</autobiographical-note>

 </tangent>

But with relief I saw this response  The "thoughtful insights" might have been ironic, but anyway I deserved it 

In a further tweet she linked to this site. The poem in question starts:

Les roses d’Ispahan dans leur gaine de mousse,

Les jasmins de Mossoul, les fleurs de l’oranger

Ont un parfum moins frais, ont une odeur moins douce,

Ô blanche Leïlah! que ton souffle léger.

So my disparant was (not inappropriately) a fantasm. And to make matters worse, the poem I had misheard was one I had met...

<autobiographical-note>
(I wouldn't use the word "studied" – it was more a matter of scanning two or three poems by Leconte de Lisle (the author of Les roses d'Ispahan) and deciding that Baudelaire was more fun .)
</autobiographical-note>

... in my first year as a "gentleman in statu pupillari" (to use the local lingo).

So the first of my two cities is "Isfahan"...

<philological-observation>
(and the p of the French Ispahan  is a small mitigation of my invention of disparant. I suspect that the fricative in question is neither the French p (a bilabial plosive) nor the English f (a labio-dental fricative) but /ɸ/ – a bit of both, a bilabial fricative ("you just put your lips together and blow")

<inline-ps>
(Nearly all the "ph" spellings in English words – probably all, in words that are pronounced with an /f/ sound – represent the Greek ɸ.)
</inline-ps>

</philological-observation>

My second is mentioned in Leconte's poem: Mossoul,  known in English as "Mosul".  Mossoul is the source of the fabric name mousseline, known in English as "muslin". So Mosul joins Genoa ("jean"), Nîmes ("denim"), Kolkata ("calico"), and presumably more cities that gave their name to a kind of cloth.

That's all for now, though I'm thinking about an update about Leconte's muse, Leilah – which'll take a bit of research.

b

Update: 2021.09.03.11:30 – Added <inline-ps />; and I suspect Leilah was just Leconte's latest squeeze rather than a reference to any of the dozens listed here.

 

Update 2022.01.18.15:00 – Added PPS

Last year's Update was over-hasty....

<correction>
(in two ways:

• in intention (I meant this page – which lists 50-odd possibilities, actual and fictional, in a range of spellings)
• in fact (I got the link wrong)

)

</correction>

...and I now think the reference is fairly obvious:

Meaning & History

Means "night" in Arabic. Layla was the love interest of the poet Qays (called Majnun) in an old Arab tale, notably retold by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi in his poem Layla and Majnun. This story was a popular romance in medieval Arabia and Persia. The name became used in the English-speaking world after the 1970 release of the song Layla by Derek and the Dominos, the title of which was inspired by the medieval story.
Source

"Derek and the Dominos" is the well-known/thinly-veiled pseudonym of Eric Clapton, who was naturally inspired by a story of devotion to a married woman (in his case, Pattie Boyd):

The story of Qays and Layla or Layla and Majnun is based on the romantic poems of Qais Ibn Al-Mulawwah (Arabic: قيس بن الملوح) in 7th century Arabia, who was nicknamed Majnoon Layla (مجنون ليلى), Arabic for "madly in love with Layla", referring to his cousin Layla Al-Amiriah (ليلى العامرية).^[3] His poems are considered the paragon of unrequited chaste love. They later became a popular romance in medieval Iran,^[4] and use of the name spread accordingly.
Source

Whether, in the case of  Clapton and Boyd, the love was either "unrequited" or "chaste" – to use Wikipedias's words – is none of our business (though there is no doubt speculation in circles that concern themselves with that sort of thing).

<inline_ppps>
This isn't the only case of  Clapton taking inspiration from other art forms in this context. I mentioned here the similarity between Handel's Silent Worship and Wonderful Tonight. 

<parenthesis type="pppps">

While we're on (i.e. off) the subject, why not go even further? I was struck recently by the formal similarity between the first of Bartók's Roumanian Folk Dances and the early Beatles song All My Lovin' (though it would of course be fanciful to suggest that Bartók actually pinched it from Lennon and McCartney).

</parenthesis> 

</inline_ppps>

Returning to Les Roses d'Ispahan, presumably Leconte de Lisle was following the many other poets who took their inspiration from this medieval romance.

Update 2022.01.19.12:50 – Added <INLINE PPPS/>

Update 2022.01.19.17:00 – Added (nested) pppps.

Newspeak

Irony of ironies. A winner of the Orwell Prize has been defenestrated for her failure to use Newspeak (originally envisaged by Orwell...

<glossary>

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express..."

More on Newspeak here.
</glossary>

...). Last Saturday's Times had an article headed 

Authors must stand up against language police 

(itself possibly a nod to Orwell's Thought Police)..., which begins like this:

 Yet another of the faithful [sic – a hastily accepted spellcheck for fateful?]...

<autobiographical-note>
I'm paranoid about these: I recently wrote to the editors of CAM about what I thought was a brace of typos:

When, on page 20 of issue 93, I saw reference being made to "racialised [sic] minorities" I assumed that a hastily used spellchecker had been allowed to substitute "racialised" for "radicalised", but when on the next page I saw the reference to a "Pakistiani [sic] boy" it became clear that no spellchecker could have been involved - unless the putative spellchecker incident had already happened in the quoted work (in which case a "sic" would have been helpful). Or perhaps in some horrid hyper-woke world people do  actually use the term "racialised" to mean "taught by a racially isolated environment to discriminate on grounds of race"; I hope not, 

I was wrong though. The article had been written by an academic whose language was acutely conscious of the possibility of no-platforming. 

Note: The online text in that CAM link has been fixed, so you'll just have to take my word on the "Pakistiani".

</autobiographical-note>

...swirls in publishing's "purity spiral" before disappearing down the drain. Kate Clanchy has been censured for offences against ever-more-stringent modern orthodoxy in her memoir about teaching in British state schools, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, specifically for referring to "chocolate-coloured skin" and "almond-shaped eyes". The book won the Orwell Prize in long-ago 2020, back when our standards of sensitivity were criminally lax.

After a burst of consternation, the author apologised - in today's predatory cultural climate, a sign of weakness and always a mistake. "I am not a good person," she grovelled. "Not a pure person, not a patient person, no one's saviour." Picador, her publisher, also apologised for the "anguish" the book had caused, although the experience of shooting down a prize-winning author is likely to occasion an emotion closer to "glee". The publisher will soon release a new version of the memoir that is cleansed of sin.

"Authors must..."? To judge by her retraction, which smacks of an ISIS hostage video, I'll bet Clanchy fell on her sword (or should that be pen) at the craven instigation of Picador, who no doubt have her sewn up good and tight: "Retract or you're in breach of  contract and we want the advance repaid with interest." The author had to rely on irony to signal her lack of what, in our Catechism classes, we were taught was a condition of the sacrament of Penance: "a firm purpose of amendment".

Returning to the subject of that suspected spellcheck-o. My wild surmise of "some horrid hyper-woke world [where] people do actually use the term 'racialised'" turned out to be a nightmare in the real world rather then a flippant dream in the world of whimsy. 

The verb "racialise" is a recent coining, as this Collins trend graph suggests:  

The fact that their data runs out more than a decade ago is a shame, but the trend is clear. The word was scarcely heard of until the end of the twentieth century, but usage rose steeply after that. Assuming a growing steepening of the slope, it has now got a fairly firm foothold. But Collins is the only print dictionary found by Onelook ...

<OK-OK>
Of course, the link is to an online source, but it's backed up by the credibility of  "a proper dictionary". This is the way language progresses in a networked world. Online sources record new usages first, and they are confirmed in print after a decent interval.
</OK-OK>

...in a search for "racialise". and it is only secure enough in its understanding of the meaning to give it seven words (which don't  reflect the politically correct version):

The past participle has a slightly firmer foothold:

<ducking-&-covering>

An early instance of this self-editing is the suffix "-man". I first began to feel this in the early '70s. Because of its superficial similarity to the word "man" it began to fall out of use. Take "chairman"; it was replaced either by the mealy-mouthed "chairperson" or the laughable "chair". (Should a "spokesman" be a spokes or an "ombudsman" an ombuds?)

The borrowing ombudsman points to the flaw; in the related German there are two words: Mann and man, and only the first is marked for sex. In English, we only have sounds: a /mæn/  is male and a /mɘn/ is not.

I'd better stop digging; but I'm filled with admiration for any woman who calls herself a "chairman".

</ducking-&-covering>

Hmm. This doesn't hang together the way I thought it would. But for real randomness it's hard to beat  the unholy juxtaposition imposed by alphabetical order: I was listening recently, on my MP3 player, to the Buena Vista Social Club. After a pause, Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri ...

<tangent>

(Another potential spellcheck-o. The computer wants me to make that nostril).

</tangent>

...changed the mood rather abruptly

b