Wither... shall... I wonder

 As I was mowing a small lawn the other day...

<parenthesis>
(its size matters, because it would have been silly to mow it boustrophedonically [that's 'up and down' to you],...

<meta-parenthesis>
(Marvellous word, "boustrophedonical"; the bou- bit means "bull" [think of bovine]. So the picture behind the metaphor is of oxen ploughing a field. I've only ever seen it used with reference to dot matrix printers like the one built into my Amstrad word processor 30 years ago...

<meta-meta-parenthesis>
(and I can date it because I used the Amstrad to write a novel entered for a competition for writers of under 40; I just slipped under the bar)
</meta-meta-parenthesis>

...that have a printer head that prints one line from left to right and the next from right to left.
</meta-parenthesis>

... so I went round and round)
</parenthesis>

...I wondered (again)  what they called "clockwise" before clocks were invented: counter-widdershins?

And the word "widdershins" came up recently in that Christmas book I mentioned in a recent post:

A story needs an opponent, a threat if not a monster, someone for the hero or heroine to defeat. Every protagonist needs a wiþer-wengel.

Wiþer-wengel (adversary) comes from [HD: sic, and I'm profoundly unimpressed with this form of words; let's just say "related to"] wiþer (against, in opposition) and... wengel? Wengel doesn't appear on its own in the surviving Old English texts, so it's hard to say what it means (if anything). Wiþer is unrelated to modern English 'wither', to become dried up or shrivelled up - that comes from [HD: ahem?] the verb 'weather'. A piece of outdoor furniture can be 'weathered' from the sun and rain. You can 'weather' a storm or even a serious illness. It is from this weather-'wither' that we get withering stares and glances, pointed looks meant to make someone feel ashamed.

The 'wither' that comes [HD: Enough already!] from Old English, meaning 'hostile' or 'against', became obsolete after the Middle Ages, although it still appears as a prefix in Scots: a 'witherweight' is a counterbalancing weight, and 'withershins' (or 'widdershins') is the wrong way, anti-clockwise.

<mini-rant>
And while we're on the subject of "the wrong way", I wish people would agree that turning things clockwise is doing them up and turning things anti-clockwise is undoing them. This applies to screws, but also to twistee ties in the garden or the Christmas tree [undoing those things can be a nightmare], taps. and anything else where rotation relates to doing up/undoing; window locks are particularly inconsistent in this regard. Is it too much to ask...? (time for my medication).
</mini-rant>

I didn't know it was Scots. I guess my mother's vocabulary was influenced by her parents Archibald and Bertha; with the result that I regard words like  "widdershins" and "outwith" as plain English.

Which brings us to "shall" (which sprang to mind because of the whither shall I wander? quote...

<tangent>
I wonder if gander ever rhymed with wander, or whether it's the sort of lame  eye-rhyme that writers of nursery rhymes thought they could get  away with because the little darlings wouldn't know any better. Hmmm..?
</tangent>

... but stayed there [in mind] because it was the answer to Tuesday's Wordle  (on which I registered a PB, and stifled an unwarranted warm glow of 'achievement'  when the app said "Magnificent". But then I thought

SHUT  YOUR PATRONIZING MOUTH; 

GETTING IT IN 2 IS DOWN TO LUCK

).

"Shall", as is often the case with words that are dying out, is the subject of many a prescriptive rule – the sort of shibboleths up with which younger users (and they're the ones that matter when it comes to usage trends) will not put. And it's those words (the moribund ones) that harbour exceptional pronunciations too; rather than learning and applying the rule ...

<rule>
Monosyllables spelt with the ending "-all" (like all, ball. call, fall, gall, hall, pall, small, spall, stall) have the sound /ɔ:l/. There are two exceptions: mall and shall, which typically have the sound /æl/. I say /mæl/ because that was a street name in the Ealing of my youth, and there are two (The Mall and Pall Mall) in London. But shopping malls (the most common habitat of the word in the 20th and 21st centuries) are usually /mɔ:lz/.
</rule>

... people just stop usinng the word. The usage graph given in the Collins English Dictionary Online shows this:

After an explosion at the end of the 18th century it declined steadily over the next two centuries.

<wot-no-data>
It was a shame when I first started using these graphs (in 2012) that the data came to an end in 2008. Now it's just embarrassing.
</wot-no-data>

The picture with "mall" is less smooth but more dramatic:

But the message is clear: words with exceptional pronunciations get used less often.

That's enough wondering for now.

b

Awake the harp

The first two words of the concert my choir is presenting next Saturday are Urah hanevel: "Awake the harp".  And the first time I saw them I thought (as one does, at least ONE does) Which word is which?

And, with less than a week to go, I thought I had it.

The dawning of this aha moment is based on a coincidence  involving another stringed instrument – the lute, which is related to the "oud".  An initial l can sometimes be a relic of an Arabic definite article. 

 

I mentioned this here:

<pre-script>

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

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

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

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

In this case the Portuguese preserved the whole al- –  alaude).
</pre-script>

Suppose that urah was related to "lyre" ; what then of hanevel? Well, isn't it obvious? (SPOILER ALERT: NO). What about "reveille"?

But beware of coincidences bearing aperçus. Before committing this brilliant deduction to print,  I checked here:

The Hebrew verb ‘urah means, “to be awake, to stir, to start to move, to agitate, to disturb.” 

Oh well. Back to the drawin...; no, I must learn the words. There are still seats, and it'll be great:

This Saturday's concert
(for earlier reflections, see here)

 

In other news. I've been thinking about Christian festivals overlaying  pagan ones. (for example Christmas falling just when there happened to be a pre-existing midwinter celebration, the Feast of All Souls and the Día de los Muertos, etc. A while ago, I wrote here,

<pre_script>
Ferragosto is the heathen name of the feast known to the One True Church as the Feast of the Assumption....This tourist site , though, suggests that (like most 'Christian' festivals) Ferragosto has deeper roots.:

Ferragosto, the Italian name for the holiday, comes from the Latin Feriae Augusti (the festivals of the Emperor Augustus) which were introduced back in 18 BC ..., probably to celebrate a battle victory, and were celebrated alongside other ancient Roman summer festivals . These festivities were linked to the longer Augustali period - intended to be a period of rest after months of hard labour.

</pre_script>

But reading a Christmas present (I'm possibly the world's slowest reader), I've come across a lovely example of this sort of cultural appropriation, with added linguistic jiggery-pokery. The author is talking about a tenth century text in which the writer, an English abbot, explains the derivation of the name "Bethlehem":

This reasoning from the tenth-century English abbot is lovely, metaphorical and appropriately Christian, but the name of the town existed long before Christ's birth. Over 1,000 years earlier, the polytheistic Canaanites settled in the region and dedicated their town to Lachama, a fertility god of the Chaldeans (who called him Lachmo). The town's name, Beit Lachama, meant house of Lachama'. When the Hebrews - faithful monotheists - arrived a millennium or so later, they decided a town named for a Chaldean fertility god would never do. They altered the name ever so slightly to Beth-Lechem, which was Hebrew for house of bread'. There was plenty of grain in this fertile region, so even before Christ, 'the living bread' [HD: quoted from the Old English text], came along, the name made sense. Really, it isn't surprising that Hebrew and Chaldean, both Semitic languages, share a common root for 'bread' and 'fertility'.

You've got to hand it to Christianity; it's awfully good at covering its tracks. 

b

Letters and phonemes

This. not for the first time, started life as an update but got bigger. I'm aware that my less-than-serious  reference to a "tetraphthong" ...

<apologia subject="dubious neologism?">
(a vowel sound having twice as many contributing vowel sounds as a diphthong has; I'm not sure if this is a word with a track record, but it is now)
</apologia>

...in my discussion of the word Kyiv here  may  have  seemed to suggest that I hold the naïve view that written letters must always represent phonemes – that Kyiv's yi must represent two sounds just because there are two letters there. This would be easy to argue against. My  When Vowels Get Together ...

<inline-ps>

Depending on your platform, you may need to instal an e-book reader (Google has a free one, where "free" has the usual online meaning: "terms and conditions apply..."; but in order to read this you've already put your neck in Google's cyber-noose. 😉)
<inline-ps>

...gave thousands of counter-examples in the case  of English, and I have no reason to think that something similar should not apply to Ukrainian.

In the Foreword to my unfinished sequel to that book I wrote

 <pre-script>

My justification for this [glossing over the distinction between letters and phonemes] is based on the history of language development. Sounds always precede letters (except in special cases such as acronyms). People don't feel the need to write until they have speech sounds to represent. Sometimes, the link between letters and phonemes remains firm (as in Castilian Spanish, which has a fairly reliable correspondence between letters and phonemes – nearly one-to-one, with a few exceptions). But in English this link is shakier.

The link is still there, though, when you consider the history of spellings. The common silent "gh" for example was originally an attempt to represent the sound /χ/ as in the Scottish "loch" or the German "Bach". In parts of Scotland, indeed, "night" is pronounced /nɪχt/ (as "night" was, at one time, in English); and in Northern Ireland a lake is a "lough", with (uniquely, among British English words – along with the Scottish "loch") the final consonant /χ/.

In some cases letters have no phonemic value – as is often the case with silent letters. There are various reasons for this. Two examples will give a hint of the (often meddlesome) justifications:

• The "b" in "debt" (Chaucer was writing "dette" in the fifteenth century, but later scholars imposed the "-bt" spelling in deference [some would say craven deference] to the Latin debitum.)
• The Greek "ρ" with a spiritus fortis (also known as a "rough breathing") persuaded scholars to take the word "rime" (as used by Coleridge, for example) and insist that it should be spelt with an initial "rh".

In other cases a "silent letter" spelling was imposed by false analogy with another word with a silent letter that had once had a phonemic value. For example both "should" and "would" had one of these "real" silent letters (the words were sceolde and wolde, the past tenses of sculan and willan). But the past tense of another word that came to be used as a modal verb (like "would" and "should") was a word that Chaucer, for example, had spelt "koude" – with no phonemic "justification" for a silent l. So, basing their suggestion on a false analogy, language "experts", (thinking "modal verbs that end /ʊd/ should share the spelling '-ould' "), introduced the spelling "could". (I wonder if the irony was intentional in Dr Johnson's definition of lexicographer as "a harmless drudge"; some would say that the harm that lexicographers have done has sometimes been a major contribution to the complexities of English spelling.)

But quite often (I would guess more often than not, excepting Magic E spellings [where the presence of the e makes its presence felt, audibly, although it itself is not sounded]) the presence of a silent written letter does have some force with reference either to pronunciation – at some stage in the development of the language – or to etymology.

So while it would be wrong to say that written letters in English correspond to phonemes, quite often they make some reference to a real sound produced at some time in the chequered history of English (though, on reflection, a chequerboard seems an inappropriately regular image; a fiendishly irregular patchwork quilt, with the colours bleeding into each other seemingly randomly, would be nearer the mark).

</pre-script>

I have no idea about  the details of Ukrainian, or to what extent written letters correspond with actual speech sounds in  that language. I'm simply saying that the spelling "Kyiv" suggests to me that there is something going on between the /k/ and the /f/...

<parenthesis>
(I think that's what the written v represents – based on info gleaned from a recent Newscast, at some time in the last two weeks [but I find the whole sorry tale too depressing to do the necessary legwork (earwork?}
</parenthesis>

... that is more than just a simple /i:/ sound. 

(In that parenthesis I nearly put "sometime", which reminded me of this notice:

Seen somewhere Oriental (where it seems slut-shaming is the norm. 😉) 

). Bye for now

b

Update: 2020.03.10.14.15 – Added <inline-ps />

 

"Stopping to VERB"

I've been thinking about prepositions, prompted by this picture posted in that Facebook group I mentioned last month:

Seen in Tierra del Fuego

This seems an unlikely mistake on the face of it: Spanish por => English "for"; why complicate things by changing the preposition? Shouldn't "L1 interference" (the influence of the language learner's mother tongue) have prevented this slip? But it's the verb that does the damage: visitar => "to visit". (And "thanks to" does have a meaning; just not the right one.

 I wrote about this sort of thing here.

<pre_script>
One of the most striking things we did on the first day of my CELTA course.was....

<half_remembered_context>
I think we  may have been brain-storming a list of problems confronted by learners of English. (although maybe that's a false memory – the course had too tight a curriculum for that sort of thing; more likely chalk and talk or perhaps felt-tip and... umm THING 

<2022_afterthought>  

Interactive whiteboards were a thing of the future, or possibly they were just coming onto the market – in which case my trainers  would certainly not have forked out for new technology. 

</2022_afterthought>

).
</half_remembered_context>

...).Anyway, we got onto the subject of phrasal verbs, and English's tendency to string together a verb and something else (often a preposition, but the right-thinking Phrasal-Verb-ese buzzword is particle) to form a new meaning  leading to memory-taxing seeming-paradoxes like You cut a tree down before you cut it up. There were 14 students on the course, and that activity I found so striking was that we each in turn had to construct a sentence using the phrasal verb pick up  in a way different from all previous ones. We managed 14; my trusty Cobuild dictionary lists 15 (though I'm sure various one-off contexts could support new coinings).

<2022_EXAMPLE>
As I remember, among those 15 one was something like "receive a radio signal"; but this could easily have two separate meanings as between these two contexts:

• "We can't pick up Times Radio; we don't have a DAB set."

• "We can't pick up Five Live Sports Extra down here; the signal's too weak"

</2022_EXAMPLE>

I hadn't realized, until I started to  teach ESOL, what a big hurdle phrasal verbs were. Try Googling English Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. You get (or at least I get – Heaven alone knows what customized search algorithms are at play) over 500,000 hits. That's a world of pain for ESOL students; who have to remember not only apparently-paradoxical meanings but a range of syntactic oddities. And to make things worse, we English-speakers keep inventing new ones.

</pre_script>

But, returning to the picture that started me down this avenue. It recalled for me a diagram (I won't say picture) that I used to use to show the difference between "stop + infinitive' (the right-thinking word in the ESOL world is "to-infinitive"...

<parenthesis>

(come to think of it if the teacher in the Tierra del Fuego tourist office had made the to-infinitive/bare-infinitive distinction maybe the writer of that sign wouldn't have been misled down the 'to visit' route)

</parenthesis>

... and "stop + gerund*"
):

And by chance I heard an example of this slip (with the same verb as I used in my diagram – "stop" is a real problem for users of English as a second language), on the radio last night: Moral Maze (about 10½ minutes in); a fluent speaker of academic English says "they [young people in Russia] have stopped to know what it means to live in an autocracy".

But I must stop writing for now.  (That's the problem; I'm always stopping to write😉)

b

Update: 2022.03.04 – Added footnote.

*

<eppur_si_muove>
[for which, incidentally, the approved CELTA-speak is "-ing form", which always seemed to me an over-simplification too far. A gerund behaves like {that is, is} a noun – as in "Eating is necessary", whereas a present participle is an adjective – as in "they were eating"; that is a distinction worth making, and it seems to me to be patronizing, insulting to the intelligence of the student, to act as if students of ESOL needn't be aware of it.]

</eppur_si_muove>

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.