You say "[welcome] to NATO' and I say "bare-faced empire building"

Last week, an episode of The Political Butterfly Effect posited the thought-provoking notion that an incident at sea, by scotching the electoral chances of Al Gore in Florida (in  his presidential campaign in 2000), resulted in a big hit for global warming.

<parenthesis>
At first I thought this was a spectacular own goal for Gaia; but then I realized that this was (typically – in the Anthropocene) anthropomorphic. Gaia doesn't care about global warming: So it wipes a few species out.... And?
</parenthesis>

The previous presidential campaign, in 1996, was mentioned in an article I heard mentioned in an interview with Jeremy Bowen on the BBC news last week. It was George Kennan's Op-Ed article in the New York Times shortly after Bill Clinton's second inauguration (25 years ago). In it Kennan wrote (prophetically) that

...expanding NATO would be 'most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era;' ...[and] that such  would inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion and have adverse effect on development of Russian democracy 

His opening paragraph argues:

Laterr in the same article he writes:

Such a decision [expanding NATO] may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.

Nobody in their right mind...

<predictable_exclusion>
 (which, of course, excludes Donald Trump, who is filled with admiration for the criminally insane psychopath:

"You gotta say, that's pretty savvy....This is genius. Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine ... Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful."

Source

)
</predictable_exclusion>

...could defend the fiendish excesses of Putin, but one couldn't say NATO  hasn't been coat-trailing for the last 30-odd years. Well, now the wounded and caged bear has lashed out, just as Kennan predicted. And the West looks on in horror mixed with shocked fascination, just as the crowds did in former times at many another bear-baiting. (In that case the smart money was on the dogs, but this time I'm not so sure....)

b

Update: 2022.02.28.16:25 – Added PS

PS to underline Kennan's point, here are his last two paragraphs:

Russians are little impressed with American assurances that it reflects no hostile intentions. They would see their prestige (always uppermost in the Russian mind) and their security interests as adversely affected. They would, of course, have no choice but to accept expansion as a military fait accompli. But they would continue to regard it as a rebuff by the West and would likely look elsewhere for guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves.

It will obviously not be easy to change a decision already made or tacitly accepted by the alliance's 16 member countries. But there are a few intervening months before the decision is to be made final; perhaps this period can be used to alter the proposed expansion in ways that would mitigate the unhappy effects it is already having on Russian opinion and policy.

Those 'few intervening months' slipped by unused about 25 years ago, and see what's happened.

<rant>

Incidentally, I see the BBC are following the Wikipedia-endorsed phonemic pronunciation

not reading to the end of the sentence (to get the phonetic nitty-gritty):

Kyiv (/kiːv/ KEEV; Ukrainian: Київ, pronounced [ˈkɪjiu̯] ...

But writing comes after speech, and when they transcribed that sound they felt that two distinct letters were needed. I don't buy the /ki:v/ pronunciation, and will continue with the /ki:ev/ pronunciation that has been current in British English throughout my life. And when Clive Myrie et al. trot out their monophthong as if they had a monopoly on Slavonic phonological rectitude it gets up my nose rather more than somewhat. 

I don't know what is right; besides, should one use the right Ukrainian or the right Russian? But I would lay money on its not being a monophthong; judging by the Ukrainian spelling, it could even be a tetraphthong (don't bother looking that up – it's hot off the presses 😉)^PPS
<rant>

The eye of the beholder

This post started out as an update to my previous post. But it just growed.

Ten years ago I wrote here (with reference to the word "pupil") 

<pre_script>
What do you see in someone's pupil? - an image of yourself, but tiny. A little person. (And the image of yourself is enhanced if the person into whose eyes you gaze has used belladonna to dilate the pupils; but bella donna, or 'beautiful woman', is another story. [HD 2022: new emphasis]) The Latin for 'little girl' is pupilla (French speakers will remember poupée; and the -illa ending is just a diminutive suffix.
 </pre_script>

Well, here it is – the other story. Etymonline entertains two explanations for the link between deadly nightshade (belladonna) and a beautiful woman (bella donna):

1590s, "deadly nightshade" (Atropa belladonna), from Italian, literally "fair lady" (see belle + Donna); the plant so called supposedly because women made cosmetic eye-drops from its juice (a mid-18c. explanation; atropic acid, found in the plant, has a well-known property of dilating the pupils) or because it was used to poison beautiful women (a mid-19c. explanation).

I favour the first, partly because it is what I was taught when I was studying this stuff, partly because it's what I used to tell students during my brief stint as an ESOL teacher, and partly because it just makes more sense:

<putative_monologue likelihood="-1">
There is this poisonous plant – what shall we call it? I know, let's use it only to poison beautiful women, and call it something fancy – Italian, maybe. Got it: bella donna!
</putative_monologue>

(19th century writers were just obsessed with poisoning beautiful women – I blame the parents.)

Belladonna came to mind because of the appearance of "kohl" in that list from the University of Ghent study...

<not_just_an_update>
(referred to here.)
</not_just_an_update>

...(keep UP won't you? "Words known better by [females] than by [males]") Kohl and belladonna aren't the same, but they're both eye-related cosmetics. And here's what Etymonline has to  say about "kohl" :

"powder used to darken the eyelids, etc.," properly of finely ground antimony, 1799, from Arabic kuhl (see alcohol).

And under  alcohol it says

1540s (early 15c. as alcofol), "fine powder produced by sublimation," from Medieval Latin alcohol "powdered ore of antimony," from Arabic al-kuhul "kohl," the fine metallic powder used to darken the eyelids, from kahala "to stain, paint." The al- is the Arabic definite article, "the."

<philological_aside source="Harmless Drudgery">
In an early post I wrote:

[T]he Moors who invaded Spain in the year 711 {and stayed there, in varying territories, for nearly 800 years} had Arabic as a second language and prepended the definite article to their nouns: that's why many Arabic borrowings in Spanish and Portuguese have an a[l]... tacked on at the beginning – sugar, for example, azucar/açúcar in Sp/Pg is zucchero in Italian, as the Arabs who invaded Sicily  had Arabic as their mother tongue.

 </philological_aside>

Paracelsus (1493-1541) used the word to refer to a fine powder but also a volatile liquid. By 1670s it was being used in English for "any sublimated substance, the pure spirit of anything," including liquids.

The sense of "intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor" is attested by 1753, short for alcohol of wine, which then was extended to "the intoxicating element in fermented liquors." The formerly preferred terms for the substance were rectified spirits ....

So the root of the word "alcohol" is cohol. But that makes no difference to what happens to  it when people want to coin new words, such as "workaholic" or "chocoholic".

<parenthesis>
A similar fate befell the pter (=wing; think of "pterodactytl" and "lepidoptera") of "helicopter". Any new flying machine (such as a "gyrocopter" or "quadcopter") is some sort of -copter; indeed, a helicopter is, colloquially, a "copter". Which, come to think of it, happened to "bus" (slightly differently, in that it chopped a whole word off [omni- , from the originally Latin omnibus – (="for all"}]) , leaving just part of the -ibus ending). This isn't the whole story though. Omnibus had already been imported intact into English as "omnibus", so there was no awareness that "bus" was just part of a case ending (-ibus, which can, in its native habitat, be appended to any third declension noun or adjective, vehicular or otherwise).

Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes, -oholic.
</parenthesis>

And further, like "copter" as a free-standing word, "holic" has now been seen as an admittedly jocular reference to addiction of any kind; probably, I've just realized, "shopaholism": 

(I'm not sure where this picture comes from. It was posted to a Facebook group with an international readership.)

Ho hum, there must be something that needs doing...

b

I must not

Last Saturday's copy of The Times had a piece about a recent find in Egypt, which showed that the practise of giving recalcitrant children a repetitive writing task was more than 2,000 years old.

<doubt gravity="slight">

The Bart Simpson reference is to an earlier illustration

(at least, that's what the writer thought; I feel the example shown could have just as easily been interpreted as the repetitive efforts of someone learning to write... 

<autobiographical_note> 

I remember, in one of the three or four times when I was learning to write [for reasons best known to a series of English teachers, who all failed to get me to write legibly], filling pages with a single letter [or part of a letter] 

</autobiographical_note>  

Possibly, though, other examples, not shown, offer more persuasive evidence – the hieratic equivalent, perhaps, of "I must not waste papyrus.". 

</doubt>

Writing on potsherds seems to me an inappropriately fiddly operation; still, that seems to be what they did. The potsherds were called ostrakoi, which on first reading I thought ...

<autobiographical_note>
(because of yet another piece of misinformation force-fed to me by my Greek master, who said that the word "ostracize" came from the Athenian practise of writing the name of a miscreant on an oyster shell and casting it outside the city walls)

<tangent>
Paul Simon got it right: 

When I think back on all the cr@p I learned in highschool

It's a wonder I can think at all.

</tangent>

I can only apologize for my passing on this misapprehension in this post (and to the dozens of ESOL students I've told – with any luck, they weren't listening.)  

</autobiographical_note>

...must be a metaphorical reference to oyster shells. But the metaphor had already been coined (in Egypt, if not before) when the Athenians used it.

L'envoi

I was going to resurrect the old TEZZY awards ('Time-wasting site of the year') when I saw this tweet:

But after a bit of digging I found that it doesn't qualify, as there's no website – just this document. So my dream of poking about among hundreds of pointless comparison charts was just a dream. Still, it deserves recognition with a special award: The not-a-website-really THING of the year?

<inline_PPPS>

STOP PRESS: That TEZZY is kosher. There is a website – the test that formed the basis for the paper. This throws up many more questions about the charts. The sample size is entirely self-selecting (you need a networked computer to participate, for a start). I suspected, as the spelling is American ...

<example> 

I must live in the ignominy of not having recognized "fetor"; I'd've had a chance with 'foetor'. Oh well that's just a cross I'll have to bear.
</example>

... that it came from the US somewhere, or maybe Canada; but it is in fact the work of the University of Ghent (where, of course, they speak American English). It would be interesting to know where respondents came from. (they probably say somewhere: For Further Study). 

My first throw of the dice (you can take the test as many times as you like, and be tested on a different selection of words (and "nonwords") yielded a score of 84%; 84%, in a test based on a total of  61,858 words; gosh, what an intellect! But hang on: estimates of the size of the English lexicon differ widely, but I remember David Crystal, in a talk sponsored by the British Council a few years ago, suggesting that well over a million words was not an over-estimate. So a test based on a lexicon orders of magnitude smaller doesn't cut much ice. It's fun though.
</inline_PPPS>

The "Mars versus Venus" chart is interesting (if predictable – in a "Sugar and spice and all things nice" world, is it surprising that little girls grow up knowing words like tulle, chignon, chenille, ruche, damask, taffeta, sateen. voile...?):

Indeed, it would be surprising if the word prevalences failed to reflect social biases (the paper probably says as much – and I'd pick out a quotation, if I didn't have a guitar lesson to prepare for).

b

PS One of the pink words is "kohl" which reminds me: I must do an update on the word "alcohol". Stay tuned...

Update: 2022.02.15.16:40 – Added PPS

PPS 

When I wrote that I remembered filling whole pages with a single character, I didn't mean to imply that I never did the other sort of repetitive writing; I am a veteran of lines-writing, having started my career before I could do joined-up writing.

<autobiographical_note>
I rtemember the fact of not doing joined writing, because there were four children involved – my older brother being away in Aldershot (National Service), and my little sister being too young to be

 

a destructive hooligan who wrecks the house and paintwork

The number of lines we had to write depended on age; I had to do only ten.
</autobiographical_note>

Update: 2022.02.16.16:05 – Added <inline_PPPS />

Update: 2022.02.22.12:50 [I decided not to style it out, and wait  22:22 to post] – Added P⁴S

That planned update turned into a new post.

The dearth of nuance

Streaming services have been in the news, with Spotify having trouble with their blue-eyed peddler of misinformation Joe Rogan; pecunia non olet, as I believe one Roman emperor said in justification of a tax on sales of urine...

<caveat>
Check this before quoting me ;-)
</caveat>

... and Spotify, presented with the choice between a money-spinning shock-jock and a pair of rock stars past their prime (but with significant back catalogues) held their nose and took the money. Read more about it here. (Wednesday morning's The Death of Nuance referred to the increasing frequency of such confrontations.)

Streaming services, it turns out, have been with us for longer than most of us (including me, until earlier today) think. What changed my mind was this Facebook post:

"The first streaming music service' is coming it a bit. 

<autobiographical_note>
It reminds me of a claim by Robert E Horn (grand-daddy of Information Mapping), which I read back when my job required me to read stuff like Mapping Hypertext: The Analysis, Organization, and Display of Knowledge for the Next Generation of On-Line Text and Graphics.' I did A COURSE on it: such fun. He wrote that the first instance of hypertext was an edition of the bible with copious annotations and extended quotations from cross-referenced text in separate columns. Up to a point, Lord Copper, I thought. That annotated bible had the seeds of an idea that would ultimately be developed into hypertext; to argue that it was hypertext is facile and virtually meaningless. 
</autobiographical_note>

Still, it's an interesting bit of technology, and it's further proof of nineteenth-century innovations in sound transmission, another instance of which I discussed some years ago in this post.

But returning to that Spotify brou-ha-ha, though still tangentially (you know me), I read a comment piece in the Guardian recently about anti-vaxxers. I couldn't follow it all, though you may have more luck. I did note (and concur with) this:

[I]f you find yourself in a culture war, figure out whether your opponent is persuadable or implacable. “Persuadable” is wondering what the  civil liberties implications are of mandatory vaccination;   “implacable” is thinking vaccines are really a plot by a cabal of billionaires to wipe out sheeple by making them infertile.“Implacable” is QAnon, it’s climate change or Holocaust denial, it’s white replacement theory, it’s any idea that relies on a secret, concerted, long-range conspiracy that, if you know anything about humans (their ability to keep a secret, for one), you know to be functionally impossible 

There’s no point trying to persuade the implacable, but you do have one job, and it’s the very devil of a job: to stop them persuading anyone else. I think maybe “Keep them off Question Time” [the subject of the piece was Fiona Bruce's ill-conceived contribution to the BBC's race to the bottom] is [a] good start but I am – and I hope always to remain – persuadable.  

Source

I nearly gagged, in my last sentence, on the word 'anti-vaxxers'. This is yet another example of  a tendency I decried not so long ago on the subject of 'shielding': in a pandemic, the first casualty is language:

<apropos enemy="covid19", first-casualty="language" >

Which reminds me: I'm finding it hard to say 'I'm shielding' (which is the magic word for people especially at risk).  The health chappies (Witty et al.) are obviously not conversant with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – which sprang partly from Benjamin Whorf's experience working with insurance claims. He recognized that the way people described situations often contributed to misfortunes; for example, the phrase "empty petrol cans" encouraged people to underestimate their flammability, as "empty" can mean null or void or having no effect – as in "empty threat" "empty promise" and so on.  

Similarly (at last, the point) the verb shield implies strength. A (hero) shields B (vulnerable person) from C (danger). So saying 'I'm shielding' invites the belief that I'm strong. So when I was recently ordering some pills online I asked for them to be delivered to my home address rather than asking MrsK  to queue outside the pharmacy (which I gather we're saying now instead of chemist – I'm tempted to do the full Shakespeare and say apothecary). But I didn't want to say "I'm shielding" in case someone who spoke English misinterpreted it. (On the international stage I reckon this might be more of a problem. People exposed daily to Wittygrams know all about this (ab)usage; but not Johnny Foreigner.)

Just saying. People planning resistance campaigns of all kinds need to think about the language they're using.

</apropos>

'Anti-vaxxer' joins' shielding' and 'boost' as a casualty of this Thing.

<parenthesis comment="Slipped that one in">
What is boosted by the vaccine is resistance/immunity/<whatever>, but the Government are making a Big Thing of their 'Get boosted' campaign (as if the jabbee was getting a fillip of some kind; a boot up the backside, perhaps).
</parenthesis>

As I said: the first casualty. But I've been done.

<autobiographical_note type="skippable; no, really">
Some of us (clinically extremely vulnerable are the magic words) qualify for an extra one. When MrsK and I were vaccinated for the third time last year, hers was a booster and mine (the same amount of the same vaccine) was a 'third primary dose'. I booked my booster on 31 January, foolishly scheduling it for immediately after a consultation.

The consultation overran of course, and I was late for my vaccination, but only about ten minutes, so I hightailed it out of the building to another entrance. I was told there that it was elsewhere in the hospital, and they very helpfully offered me an escort. I followed her through the hospital, past the point where I had started (now 15 mins late), to another building, where she showed me to a lift and said.  'It's on the first floor, I think.' The receptionist on the first floor said 'Not here; try the third floor.' On the third floor they said 'Not here, follow me', and  led me back down to the ground floor (where my original escort had left me). He took me out of the building (now 20 mins late) and down an unmarked passageway to a door that said: Covid 19 vaccinations. At last. This led down a narrow corridor to a vestibule where there was a notice saying 

Out for lunch. Back at 13.30.

Leaving a trail of bread-crumbs so that I could find my way back, I went and ate my sandwiches.  Over lunch, I went to their online booking service and reserved the next available slot, in case they couldn't fit me in before.

But ttey could. There was a harassed woman at the desk, and a growing queue in the increasingly crowded corridor. There was an unexpected hold-up in the jabbing area, so the queue kept growing (and squashing together), not helped by the fact that one person who had been jabbed needed a wheelchair and a carer – both waiting for a hospital porter (arranged by the harassed woman). All-in-all, not very socially distanced. But in the end I emerged, barely two hours after my appointment.
</autobiographical_note>

I've more to say about vaccination (the debate about mandates and freedom, further confused by meaningless political witterings (such as Sajid Javid's immortal "It is no longer proportionate to require vaccination as a condition of deployment through statute.") But this has gone on too long already, so it'll have to wait for an update.

b

Update 2022.02.07.11:00 – Added PS

Here's a map that shows The Peregrinations of Bobby-4-Jabs (but -3- at the time). The brown line marks the initial hightailing, the red line marks the return to the beginning (and beyond), the blue loop marks the Grand Old Duke of York session in the lift, and the orange line marks the final push.

Peregrinations of Bobby-4-Jabs

Update: 2022.02.09.14:35 – Added PS

I wrote earlier that I had more to say about what is known as "mandatory vaccination". That "What is known as"  is a way of skirting round a problem with this discussion. In a paper published at the ed of January 2022, Daniel Sokol, PhD,  a medical ethicist and clinical negligence barrister and the author of "Tough Choices: Stories from the Front Line of Medical Ethics" presented several arguments on this subject...

<autobiographical_note>
(in a format that recalled for me a work written by Juan de Valdés. which I read in the early '70s. It was called Diálogo de la lengua, and took the form of a number of points that the author then disagreed with. Sokol's paper was a sort of diálogo de la vacuña).
</autobiographical_note>

....  – a format that had me fooled for a while, because the arguments against "compulsory vaccination" were prined in bold, and I thought at first that this suggested the drift of the whole argument. So I was inclined just to dismiss it; but I suspected that there might be some good things in it (though I couldn't imagine what), so I made a note to read it when I was feeling stronger.

He wrote:

Calling the policy 'mandatory vaccination' is a misnomer.  The policy is more accurately described as 'vaccination as a condition of deployment'.  In brief, the policy requires all persons over 18 with direct, face-to-face contact with patients to provide evidence that they have received a complete course of approved vaccines against Covid-19 by no later than April 1, 2022.  Those who fall foul of the policy will either be redeployed to roles that are not patient-facing or dismissed.

 (This explains my 'what is known as "mandatory vaccination"'; though the point is a very fine distinction, to the extent that Sokol himself undermines it in the rest of the paper by using the contentious phrase unqualified. But the distinction is a nice one, and rather than repeating "known as" every time I use the phrase I shall follow Sokol's [not altogether courageous] example.)

Sokol's last sentence here also explains what I objected to in that Sajid Javid quote I originally ridiculed. I thought he was using "deployment" as NHS jargon for "employment"; but it's not that. The point is that someone who chooses not to be vaccinated will not lose their job  (except if they choose to define "my job" as the job they've thitherto done; they won't, if you want to split hairs like that, lose their employed status; they'll be moved to a job with less certainty of infecting patients.

Sokol's paper is worth a read (particularly in the light of the proposed suspension of this requirement (which strikes me as stupid beyond words). I'll leave you with his closing remarks:

Most of the decisions during the CoVID pandemic, whether about lockdown, social distancing, travel restrictions or anything else, involve trade-offs between competing values, such as personal liberty and protecting the medically vulnerable.

The decision regarding mandatory vaccination is no different.  The policy will cause distress to some healthcare workers and may strain the health service by creating staff shortages, reducing morale, and affecting patient care.  On the other hand, it could afford greater protection to patients, staff and all those who work in or visit healthcare institutions, will uphold the high ethical standards of the medical professions, and send the right message to the public about the value of vaccination. 

On balance, I believe the benefits of the policy outweigh its risks and harms.

RIP that policy; and let us hope that its detractors live to regret their short-sightedness.

Old Friends

I've reflected before about how a choir member knows he's getting on when concerts include works already sung (sometimes more than once). This time it's the entire programme:

• Fauré: Requiem
  (third or fourth time, with my present and other choirs)
• Bernstein: Chichester Psalms
  (so long ago that I was fit enough to cycle the dozen-or-so mile round trip for the concert-day rehearsal)
• Vaughan Willims: Five Mystical Songs
  (last sung in 2011; our Past Concerts link also lists the 2020 concert which had to be cancelled

Fauré: Requiem

I posted here about an edition of Tales from the Stave, fortunately still available, and well worth a listen. As I wrote it more than 3½ years ago, I've cut/pasted most of it here; if you read it then (in which case thanks for the loyalty) you can skip the indented chunk that follows:

<pre_script>

One of the people commenting on the manuscript also featured as a boy soprano in the King's College Choir recording – Bob (credited at the time as "Robert") Chilcott. (In particular it alerted me to a mistranslation of mine, now fixed. To make matters worse, it was in a section that corrected a common mistranslation [of In Paradisum as *in paradise – which it doesn't mean]).

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

More here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

</autobiographical_note>

</pre_script>

Bernstein: Chichester Psalms

In July 2021 an edition of Radio 3's Building a Library dealt with the Chichester Psalms; the programme itself is no longer available, but there is this podcast – also well worth a listen (but be warned: the reviewer is a bit sniffy about the organ/harp reduction, which for obvious reasons is much the more common in local churches rather than professional concert halls: as he says, though, any version that brings this music to a wider audience can only be a good thing).

As Bernstein wrote at the time:

For hours on end I brooded and mused

On materia musica used and abused

Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos

With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos,

Played with the forearms, the fists and the palms;

And then I came up with The Chichester Psalms.

These psalms are a simple and modest affair,

Tonal and tuneful and somewhat square:

Certain to sicken a stout John Cager

With its tonics and triads in E♭ major.

But  while tonal and tuneful I certainly wouldn't call it square. In fact, when the Dean of Chichester suggested "Why do the nations..." as a possible text, writing that the setting could have "a hint of West Side Story", he can't have suspected that Bernstein would set that psalm – though not in full – using some unused material left previously unfinished from that very show: the Jets and the Sharks "furiously raging together".

<inline_ps>

And the word they break in with is lama – which, all unbeknownst, is one of the few words in Hebrew that most English people with a church education, will have met (though in a different context: Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani): why?

</inline_ps>

And at the end, in a conclusion strongly reminiscent of the last peaceful bars that accompany the informal funeral cortège at the end of West Side Story, Bernstein has all the voices coming together in unison on the word yahad (which means "together" – a typically brilliant piece of word-painting)

L'Envoi

I have nothing to say about the Vaughan Williams, certainly not enough to justify a Subhead (as for the Fauré and the Bernstein).  And mindful of Schönberg's advice to young conductors (discussed in this blog by our MD – "never be witty" – I shall resist the temptation to mention last week's rehearsal, when George Herbert's "I got me flowers" brought to mind Eliza Doolittle. (Except I didn't.)

But make a date for 19 March:

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Update 2022.01.25.17:20 – Added <inline_ps>

Update 2022.03.21.12:55 – Added link to review, to give you a taste of what you missed.

The devil's interval - fifty years

Fifteen months ago,  I wrote here about something I had only just noticed:

<pre_script>
The idea for this  post has been bubbling away on the back-burner for some time, but something  struck me today – or more probably the day before yesterday by the time I hit Publish – that has brought it to the fore.  And "Something" is an appropriate choice of words, as it relates to the song Something's Coming at the beginning of West Side Story; specifically the introductory words, when Tony's still stacking bottles of pop ...

Could be,  

Who knows?

... before deciding to sing.  Each ...

<inline_pps>

Correction: only the second – I misremembered.

</inline_pps>

of these lines includes a tritone [HD 2022: three whole tones].... 

[And] In the later song Maria (and Maria transpires to be that something)  the same tritone is there, but spelt differently (it's a rising diminished fifth this time, rather than a falling  augmented fourth). Bernstein is telling the audience something, and it's only taken me sixty-odd years ...

<autobiographical_note>
The film (which the older of my brothers saw in the West End) premiered in 1961, but I heard the original Broadway cast recording in the late '50s.
</autobiographical_note>

...to notice it. I wrote "later song Maria", though Something‘s Coming was an afterthought (as explained here), so Bernstein knew de antemano as they say in Spanish...,

<tangent>
And there's another thing that I've no time to pursue: calques, or "loan translations". Which came first, de antemano or beforehand? ante = before, and mano = hand (where those "=" signs have a fairly loose sense of equivalence).
</tangent>

...what the "Something" was, and what it would lead to....
</pre_script>

And this is no accident. It's not  only in the introduction to "Something's Coming"; it's the first interval in the verse ("It's only just...") and the last interval in the song resolves it to a perfect fourth ("Something great is coming").

On television, some time in the festive miasma (just before Christmas, I think) I saw West Side Story - The Making of a Classic, which mentioned tritones and pointed out that they appeared all over the place in Bernstein's score – in the opening whistle (that's what the programme said, although it doesn't involve all three notes, just the 2nd and 3rd) and in "Cool": "Boy, boy..."

 "Pshaw!", I sneered to myself. "I spotted that years ago". But not so fast: the programme was a repeat, first aired on Boxing Day 2016 (well, the Feast of St Stephen, though like 26 December 2021 it was probably some nondescript Bank Holiday); and I may have seen it then (though if I had I would have expected to remember one of the presenters, Bruno Tonioli, who I associate with neither music nor the history of musical theatre (though maybe there are hidden depths there). So my "spotting" of tritones may not have been original (although, even so, the link between "Something's Coming" and "Maria" was).

The occasion for the re-showing of the Making of... programme was the fiftieth anniversary of the original film and the (hardly coincidental, I imagine) release of the Spielberg remake – which I saw at the weekend. 

<progress_indicator>
Aha... Llegando al grano, as they say in Spain (="Arriving at the grain", in other words "Getting to the point". 
</progress_indicator>

I had mixed feelings; the obvious first question is "Why? Why try to improve on a masterpiece?" That's an easy one: bums on seats; money.  And to have Pop's widow (a sprightly young Rita Moreno, at a mere 90) singing "Somewhere"? What would they do? Change the words? It's addressed by a lover to a lover.

The opening seemed to confirm my fears. The opening whistle, as I said, has a tritone ...

<parenthesis>
I wrote above "three whole tones" (unsurprisingly: we all know what tri- means). But I find it more helpful  to think of it as six semi-tones. The tritone is either an augmented fourth (a semi-tone more than a perfect fourth, e.g. F -B) or a diminished fifth (a semi-tone less than a perfect fifth, e.g. B-F).
</parenthesis>

...between the 2nd and 3rd notes; that is, according to Bernstein's score it has. But the whistler in the 2021 recording overshoots by more than a quarter-tone:

Prologue

So that the resulting note is nearer a perfect fifth than a diminished fifth; an imperfect fifth, perhaps. Given the importance of the tritone throughout the score (read my post and/or watch that Making of... programme for more details) it's surprising that Gustavo Dudamel (who, as conductor, might be expected to have exercised a bit of quality control) let it pass.

But things got better after that. The CGI available to Spielberg meant that the slum clearances were more credible, which supported a general stiffening up of what was in 1961, a fairly flimsy plot. And the reality of the racial tensions (supported by racially-sympathetic casting) was brought further to life in the a capella song sung by the Sharks when Lieutenant Schrank tells Bernardo to leave. He says vamo' to his followers, but his defiance is clear; in the words of their song, Despierta de ese sueño Qu'es tiempo de luchar.... Vamonos... (meaning, roughly, "Wake up; stop dreaming. It's time to fight.... Let's go...").

<inline_ps>
The soundtrack recording lists the Sharks' defiant a capella chant as La Borinqueña, which surprised me at first for two reasons:

• the lyrics include the word "Borinqueño" (helpfully glossed by Wikipedia in their English translation as "boricua")
  
• the words were not – at first sight – those of La Borinqueña (the national anthem...

<hang_on query_term="national">
Well yes, it is, in certain contexts – the Olympics, for example: see this. for some background
</hang_on>

...of Puerto Rico). But in the end it all made sense: a Borinqueño is an inhabitant of Puerto Rico, and the word (with the -o ending) does figure in La Borinqueña. And the words sung by the Jets are not the namby-pamby "hello trees, hello clouds" politically correct words written by  Manuel Fernández Juncos and adopted in 1903 (which read like a particularly starry-eyed travel brochure):         

The land of Borinquén

where I was born

is a flowery garden

of magical beauty.

A constantly clear sky

serves as its canopy.

And placid lullabies are sung

by the waves at its feet.

...etc. Those "placid lullabies" are a far cry from 'Wake up; stop dreaming. It's time to fight". Those words are taken from  what were,  as Wikipedia says, the Original 1868 revolutionary lyrics (dating from a time when Fernández Juncos was still a babe in arms)

</inline_ps> 

The back-story is more credible too, especially Tony's as a once-violent nearly homicidal but now reformed ex-juvenile delinquent. And even "Somewhere" works, as the camera shows a photo of Valentina (Rita Moreno) and Pop on their wedding day; so that it becomes a statement of hope in a mixed-race marriage, and in a multi-racial society in general).

And Tony as a barely-competent deus ex machina ("I've fixed it. It'll only be  a fist-fight, one on one") was a bit hard to swallow in the original. Showing his abortive attempt at peace-making (and moving "Cool" to before the rumble) worked well (although bits of the original dialogue playing in the background [my mental background, that is] – "I wanna get even" etc. – were a bit distracting).

To balance the technical advantages that Spielberg had, he had to think about anachronisms (whereas fifty years ago that's just the way things were). There was plenty of the low-hanging fruit (like "daddyo" and "copacetic"); but one linguistic slip that stood out for me was in the scene where the Jets are getting tooled up for the rumble. One of the (unwilling, but... you know...OK if you twist my arm) adults uses the term "mutual assured destruction" –  a phrase not coined until 1962 (so at least a year after the original film was in the can, and several years after the Broadway show):

The term "mutual assured destruction", commonly abbreviated "MAD", was coined by Donald Brennan, a strategist working ... in 1962.
Source

Of course, a new word or phrase is often in the zeitgeist for a year or two before it's first recorded in print, but in a case like this I think Wikipedia is probably reliable: the term simply wasn't around until Brennan coined it "ironically, to argue that holding weapons capable of destroying society was irrational" (i.e. millions of people, not just a handful of punks).

Altogether, though, I thought the Spielberg version was enjoyable and worth seeing.

Meanwhile, back at the Real World, I have a translation to submit.

b

Update: 2022.01.07.12:50  – Added <inline_ps />

'All you within this place'

Now to the Lord sing praises all you within this place
And if 'this place' is No. 10  each other now embrace...

A cheap shot, I know, but really though; what a shower. Boris could take lessons in leadership from Fred Karno.

I'm going to address omicron. But before you tune out with forebodings  of more bad news let me assure you that mine will be not a virological point of view; rather a linguistic one. The word has been mangled in all sorts of ways: I've heard omicrom, omnicron...

<parenthesis>
I've heard this latter at least twice on Newscast. The first time. the speaker was a Brit award-winner, and I raised a supercilious eyebrow...

<etymological_note>
(Incidentally, that's what supercilious means.)
</etymological_note>

...But the second was Dr Angelique Coetzee, discoverer of Omicron ...

 <meta_parenthesis>  

(originally dubbed nu [ν]  – in fact the 26 November edition of Newscast was the called The 'nu' variant.  But then someone realized that calling the old variant nu, after sigma is discovered [at some point in 2022, before they run out of Greek letters and have to adopt  the Only Connect method of using Egyptian hieroglyphs – I wonder who'll be first to catch the "Eye of Horus variant"...], might be confusing; they've also decided that xi [ξ] would be bad for relations with President Xi. 

</meta_parenthesis>

and darling of many a Tory ostrich. The slip occurs at 26'25" in this episode.  But I digress...

</parenthesis>

<autobiographical_note>
(and my Greek master had a talent for metathesis [see here for more about this sort of phoneme-swapping], so that he called this little o omricon; another of  his more common slips was referring to Mesopotamia as 'between the Tigris and the Euphatres')
</autobiographical_note>

....But a knowledge of etymology, as so often (except in Mr Towey's case...

<orthographical_note>
Another example is ancillary vs auxiliary. People who don't know the background aren't sure how many ls and how many is there are.

But an ancilla was a maidservant; (maybe there was a masculine, but ancilla is the only version I've met, inscribed on a ring unearthed (unashed) at Pompeii, and discussed here:

Ring found at Pompeii;
it is to be hoped that the wife of the dominus didn't find out.

<parenthesis>
(I was going to copy&paste the picture from that old post, but it's too heavily annotated there. Don't let me stop you from doing some background reading though; I think it's rather fun.)
</parenthesis>

And auxilium is help. So, armed with this information, you need never write anciliary again.

</orthographical_note>

...) should prevent this.  Ancient Greek had two sorts of o: o-mega and o-micron – 'big o' and 'little o': simples.

The little o, like any other god-fearing o, was tucked in between n and p (ν and π); (strictly speaking, ξ was there too; but let's not cause a diplomatic incident). But big o, o-mega, was in pride of place, right at the end of the alphabet. 

<silliness_warning>

I suppose the beginning would have been even more prestigious; but then it would be the omegabet
.</silliness_warning>

And 'the Alpha and Omega' is the bee's knees. In this early Christian word square...                                      

... the words tell the confused, arbitrary and multilingual story of sower. But the words weren't chosen at random. As this account says

The square reads the same up or down as well as forward or backward. However, the words do not collectively seem to mean anything. Individually, sator means "the sower", tenet "holdeth", opera "the works", rotas "the wheels [accusative case]". Arepo is not a Latin word; it is perhaps related to a Celtic root meaning "plough", an interpretation known in XIV Century Byzantium

...(though how a medieval Byzantine word found it's way to 1st century Rome beats me: a miracle , perhaps.) 

The same account observes that the letters in the square can be organized like this

A                P                O

 A
T
E
R
P A T E R N O S T E R
O
S
T
E
    O                R                A    

with the left-overs put in the corners. (as I said before in a post whose graphics have gone the way of much seven-year old html)

(My use of the term left-overs shouldn't be read as implying anything dismissive: 'I am the Alpha and Omega' has biblical resonance. Those letters even find their way into the Christmas Carol Unto Us is Born a Son: 

'O and A and A and O' 

Cum cantibus in coro...

And during the preparations for Easter Midnight Mass [in the Roman Catholic rite, of course{!}] the celebrant prepares the Paschal Candle with chips of incense [I think – I never got that close] inserted into the wax in the form of those two letters [repeated in the 'quadrants' defined by a crucifix]. Those two letters, repeated round about a crucifix, are by no means random 'left-overs'.)

 Duty calls.

b