As I came through Sandgate

Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 is Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain which the BBC has shortened to the pithier, and less dry-sounding, Black Gold by Jeremy Paxman. In the first episode he explained why they needed a special kind of boat to get down the Tyne (as usual, this quote is from the book, and may not be a verbatim record of the radio version, but the gist – if not the text – is the same):

What they 'hardly had' was a keel, explained by Etymonline as the

"lowest and principal timber of a ship or boat," mid-14c., probably from a Scandinavian source (compare Old Norse kjölr "keel," Danish kjøl, Swedish köl)

 and I suspected that this was an instance of what linguists call a homonymic clash (but 'new presbyter is but old priest writ large' as Milton said; it's a pun), like 'let' with its various meanings (discussed here)

When the Great Vowel Shift made the impeding sort of "let" and the allowing sort of "let" uncomfortable bedfellows, one of them had to go; so now "let" almost always means "allow" (except for fossils like the ones ... on passports, say – even on the red-covered pre-Brexit ones).

And Etymonline goes on to say:

OED and Middle English Compendium say this word is separate from the keel that means "a strong, clumsy boat, barge" (c. 1200), which might be instead from Middle Dutch kiel "ship" (cognate with Old English ceol "ship's prow," Old High German kiel, German Kiel "ship"). But the two words have influenced each other or partly merged, and Barnhart calls them cognates. Keel still is used locally for "flat-bottomed boat" in the U.S. and England, especially on the Tyne.

I looked at Collins, which at first seemed to be  fixated on the wrong sort of 'keel'. But after scrolling down for a bit I came to this:

The question that now arises is What, if any, relation is there between Middle Dutch kiel and Old Norse kjölr?  "For further study" (but don't hold your breath).

Another one of these words is 'gate', which in southern English place-names (like "Aldgate") refers to a gate but in Northern place-names can mean 'thoroughfare'; I wonder if the Newcastle road that sprang to mind unbidden when Paxman mentioned 'keels'...

<parenthesis>

As I came through Sandgate....I heard a lassie sing:
Well may the keel row...that my laddie's in.

</parenthesis>

... is that sort of gate. When I was in Newcastle for the choir tour mentioned here I happened on the road of that name. And there had been an archway there (built on sandy foundations), so I suspect the two sorts of gate cross-fertilized and reinforced each other much as the two sorts of 'keel' did: in the words of Etymonline 'the two words have influenced each other or partly merged'

But, speaking of the choir, I must do some note-bashing in preparation for this:

<inline-ps>
And it's not just the choir's 70th Anniversary; it's also mine. So I'd better do it justice. I'm sure we will. Anyway, as I said here,  Bach is Knowles-proof.

 <inline-ps>

It's a marvellous piece. Be there (and come early for the pre-concert talk).

b

Update: 2022.06.01.12:40 – Fixed an embarras de typos, and added an <inline-ps />.

The Cuckoo, John Duarte, and sympathetic magic

I recently enjoyed a guitar recital given by my guitar teacher...

<parenthesis>
(now in the past, but you can still contribute to the DEC fund for Ukraine at his JustGiving page, and keep an eye out for future concerts...

<forthcoming proviso="at time of going to press">

• Wednesday 8 June, 2pm  Windsor u3a* : Spanish Guitar lecture recital
• Tuesday 5 July, 2pm Woodstock u3a* : Spanish Guitar lecture recital
  
• Saturday 1 October, 7:30pm,  English Guitar Orchestra. Witney, Oxford

*Editorial note: This style isn't the same as at Gary's diary page, but one of the more exciting and controversial changes in the u3a recently is the change from "U3A".

</forthcoming>

...)
</parenthesis>

 And the programme included John Duarte's English Suite, part of which is based on the folk song The Cuckoo, which

sucketh white flowers for to keep her voice clear

As the words went through my head, I wondered (for the first time in my thitherto unquestioning life) "Why white flowers?"

But the answer came to me almost as soon as the question formed: sympathetic magic. Like the mandrake root, shaped – if you screw your eyes up...

<du-côte-de-chez-Wikipedia>
Because mandrakes contain deliriant hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids and the shape of their roots often resembles human figures, they have been associated with magic rituals throughout history...

Source
</du-côte-de-chez-Wikipedia>

...– a bit like a homunculus, and so endowed with magical powers (and I think the little hallucinogens know something about it, as the narrator of Bill and Ben might have said), there is a sympathetic resonance between the whiteness of the flowers and the clarity of the voice – not that the cuckoo's call is particularly clear (although I suppose there's something to be said for the clarity of that falling minor third, repeated ad nauseam).

<bugbear>
That's nauseAM please. The phrase ad infinitum isn't a licence to mangle case endings. If I had a hot dinner for every time I've  heard ad nauseum I'd be a rich man.
</bugbear>

So much for cuckoos. Where was I? Answers, please, on a postcard.

 

L'Envoi

While we're on the subject of guitars, my Metaphor of the Month is cejilla. You may have come across the more common "capo" (short, I think, for "capo d'astro"...

<speculation>
Did guitarists borrow the term from piano-makers, for whom it is

Part of the cast-iron frame, the bar that presses down on the treble strings and defines the speaking length of the strings on the tuning pin side. 

Source

I wonder?
</speculation>

...) The capo is the little doofer that is clamped in some way to the neck of the guitar with the effect of shortening the string and so raising the pitch; and I said it was "more common" because Google finds nearly 2 billion instances of it ("About 1,940,000,000 results" for me): whereas cejilla yields a paltry million ("About 1,080,000 results ").

What qualifies it for Metaphor of the Month though is that the Spanish ceja means "eyebrow", so a cejilla is a little eyebrow – a charming image.

That's all she wrote.

b

Das Rechnung

I've been listening to a 3-part series on Radio 4 (and of course BBC Sounds. It is an intriguing ...

<autobiographical-note type="juvenilia">
(which brings to mind a character I never found a plot for, a spy named Baxter St Trigue [geddit?  – backstairs in... aw forget it])
</autobiographical-note >

...account of the death of Christopher Marlowe, based on and presented by the author of The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, whose subtitle makes it clear that in the author's view it was a bit more than just a death. It was interesting, although I found the rather portentous manner of the author a little trying, and it reminded me of a visit to Cambridge documented here, when I saw THAT PORTRAIT (you know the one, it's dredged up  whenever Marlowe is mentioned, and the book uses it, predictably, for its jacket). 

And the author sets a great deal of (uncritical) store by it; the first of the three episodes even takes the Latin motto (in translation) as a title. This is what he says in the preface to the book (repeated on the radio [probably verbatim, though I haven't checked]).

'A portrait', he writes,  assuming that it is a portrait of Marlowe. Well, almost everyone  does. 

 

And later he says (i.e. writes, with the same provisoes as before):

 

'The smyler with the knyf under the cloke', presumably.

 

But at that dinner back in 2015, in the sight of the painting in question, all the talk was of how the subject was almost certainly not Marlowe. In the Michaelmas 2014 edition of The Letter (formerly The Letter of the Corpus Association, and I can find no online version, I'm afraid) Professor Oliver Rackham, a former Master of Corpus Christi had written an article entitled...

<ducking-and-covering>
YES 'entitled', and I don't care what US style guides (and therefore the world of academe more generally, kow-towing to their demands) say. If you want a more reasoned argument, see the rant here.
</ducking-and-covering>

... 

The Pseudo-Marlowe portrait: a wish fulfilled

He starts with some fairly dry background about how it was found, and how it was repaired  ('but they [HD – the restorers] are long extinct, their archives are untraceable, and – deplorably – we kept no record of what exactly they did'...

 <parenthesis>
(isn't that 'deplorably' wonderful? In the world of First World Problems, the Groves of Academe have a whole continent to themselves.)
</parenthesis>

Then he describes the portrait itself:

The picture is by an accomplished artist, painted on two boards of best Baltic oak from Poland or Lithuania; unequal boards, so that the crack between them avoids the sitter's face, although the face is bisected by a later split. The subject, like the arti &st, is nameless. The sole hope of identification is from the words painted on the picture: ANNO DNI 1585 ÆTATIS SVÆ 21 Year of [Our] Lord 1585, of his own age 21' and the motto QVOD ME NVTRIT ME DESTRVIT 'What nourishes me destroys me'

People have argued that the 'ANNO DNI 1585 ÆTATIS SVÆ 21' clinches it; but it does nothing of the sort. Professor Rackham goes on:

The age doesn't fit

It was easy to make a rough calculation: 'Marlowe was born in 1564; he was aged 21 in 1585; therefore the picture is either of Marlowe or of one of 50,000 other Englishmen who were his contemporaries. The motto echoes a widespread sentiment of the time, although the actual words have not been identified anywhere else ....It might be the sort of motto that Marlowe might have had if he had had a motto. Feeble as this evidence is, it is all that links the picture to Marlowe. The College has never endorsed the attribution, but the reservation about 50,000 others gets weaker over the years. 

 

Reality is not so simple. Marlowe was not born in 1564. New Year's Day in  England at that time was 25 March –  as it still is for the income-tax year, which begins on 5 April, the equivalent of 25 March in the present calendar. Marlowe was baptized in St George's church, Canterbury, on 26 February 1563, so would have been born around 19 February. His baptism was the last-but-one event in the church register for 1563. Some meddling biographer emended his birth date to 1564 without saying so, and has been copied by all other biographers, creating false evidence.

If Marlowe was born (according to the reckoning of his time) on 19 February 1563, the first year of his age would have been 19 February 1563 to 18 February 1564.  The twenty-first year of his age (when he was aged twenty) would have been 19 February 1583 to 18 February 1584, not 1585. Therefore the portrait is not of Marlowe.

One hears the argument that the artist could have made a mistake over the date. This is clutching at a straw. It might be legitimate if there were some additional reason for identifying the sitter. If the picture contained his name, one might stretch a point over the date, provided there was no other man with that name who fitted the date better. But the date is the only link between the portrait and Marlowe. If the date is wrong, the picture could be of anyone of roughly the same age: Marlowe, or Shakespeare, or Fletcher ([who attended] Corpus [starting in] 1591), or Webster, Tom, Dick, or Harry.

In summary, Professor Rackham gives this order of events:

Our portrait was painted for some unrelated family and not labelled. Three or four generations on, they forgot who the sitter was. Somebody gave it to the college as a pretty picture, or an undergraduate left it behind in his rooms. It fell apart and was thought worth keeping but not worth repairing and was lost. In 1850, Marlowe was rediscovered as a member of the College. Later still, he re turned to fame. Marlowe's fans needed a portrait, and the College inadvertently supplied one.

Thus a scholarly joke was taken seriously and grew into a wish-fulfilment. There was never any chance that our portrait could be Marlowe... but the dates would fit Shakespeare, or some other of the 50,000 contemporaries of Shakespeare.

'A scholarly joke'.  But if you Google image: Christopher Marlowe you get (at least, I get – your search algorithms may vary) about 1,000,000  variations on more or less the same image...

<apologia-pro-approximatio-sua>
That is, nearly 2,000,000 all told, but some are of other images to do with the various ephemera surrounding the Marlowe cult; I'm assuming that about half of these are of the pseudo-Marlowe.
</apologia-pro-approximatio-sua>

...

The story is interesting, and the research it is based on seems on the face of it to have been thorough (if limited in the case of the portrait). But The Reckoning (the modern German Das Rechnung still has the sense of what was presented to the four men in Deptford before the killing, the bill or 'recknynge' for a day's browsing and sluicing [not my words, but rather good – as might be expected of Wodehouse]) is worth a listen.

What's next?

b

Sieges

A recent Start The Week had Marwa Al-Sabouni, Jo da Silva and Jessie Childs discussing rebuilding shattered cities, with Helen Lewis. All three guests had very different backgrounds involving (but not exclusively, particularly  in the case of Jo da Silva, Director of International Development at Arup Group) sieges.

Marwa Al-Sabouni, an architect, was a survivor of the siege of Homs,

... a military confrontation between the Syrian military and the Syrian opposition in the city of Homs, a major rebel stronghold during the Syrian Civil War. The siege lasted three years from May 2011 to May 2014, and resulted in an opposition withdrawal from the city.^[4]

^Source

For Dame Jo da Silva,  siege is only one of the sorts of disaster she deals with; tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and so on vie for her attention along with the more man-made disasters seen at Aleppo, Stalingrad, Dubrovnik, Homs,  Mariupol... the list is depressingly endless.

Jessie Childs provided a historical flavour to the discussion. She is the author of the forthcoming (if you're reading this before 19 May 2022) The Siege of Loyalty House: A new history of the English Civil War, which, despite its all-encompassing sub-title, centres on The Siege of Basing House

<parenthesis>
(a few miles from Knowles Towers as the cr... [no, make that] red kite flies)

<autobiographical-note>
(making for an irrelevant coincidence, as the presenter of that program grew up only a few miles from the starting point of Jessie Childs' story, Fort  Royal) 
</autobiographical-note>.

. 

</parenthesis> 

. In her treatment of the siege at Basing House, Jessie Childs says

...the Parliamentary forces literally [HD – sic, an admirably accurate usage] sat down  in front of it: that's where the word "siege" comes from – sedere,"to sit down" ...       

...which won't be news to readers of my 2016 post:

<pre-script>
Now though I can hear the word Aleppo without that irrelevant memory popping its irreverent head over the PC parapet. 

<post-script> 

I've left this in because  of  the coincidental mention of Aleppo. If you want to know about the 'irrelevant memory', you know what to do.

<post-script> 

Now it's the word siege. that distracts me momentarily from the horror.

I discussed  chairs a while back, here, but said nothing about siege at the time. In Mallory's Morte d'Arthur the vacant seat at the Round Table was the siege perilous, and this was the earliest meaning: a chair. Etymonline says

siege (n.) 

early 13c., "a seat" (as in Siege Perilous, early 13c., the vacant seat at Arthur's Round Table...[F]rom Old French sege "seat, throne," from Vulgar Latin *sedicum "seat," from Latin sedere "sit" ...

Only then does the entry go on:

...The military sense is attested from c. 1300; the notion is of an army "sitting down" before a fortress.

That is to say, siege had been around for about a century with the meaning chair before it acquired its military sense. Sadly (considering the fate of the besieged) the military sense became the predominant one

But that "Vulgar Latin *sedicum" (and its more reputable Latin relatives) left many other traces, from courts in session to recording studios (with session musicians); in a less formal musical environment, a guest musician may sit in (and of course they don't just sit). In Portuguese, where Spanish has catedral (which Portuguese [Continental Portuguese, that is; to call my grasp of Brazilian Portuguese rudimentary would be a gross overestimate]  can also use, having many such pairs*... 

<repositioned-footnote>

*Eça de Queiroz  is notable for using such pairs: a bottle, for example, is sometimes uma botelha and sometimes uma garrafa.for example 

.</repositioned-footnote>

 

...), the word is sé (in Coimbra, in the summer of 1973 I used to catch the eléctrico at a stop called Sé Velha). The Holy See is a Santa Sé. 
</pre-script>

<tangent type="dead-end, I don't know why he bothers">
Thinking about sieges, it occurred to me that the almost homophonous Catalan coastal town of Sitges...

<autobiographical-parenthesis>
(where I enjoyed lunch as the guest of a diamond geezer called Reg, when I was down and out in Barcelona in the spring of 1971, before an ignominious, and fairly disturbing, arrest detailed here [in the 2nd paragraph  of that post]); and in the mouth of Reg (a cockney) 'Sitges' was a precise homophone of 'sieges.'
</autobiographical-parenthesis>

...had any military associations. But no. It turns out that

The meaning of the name Sitges (“sitja” in Catalan), comes from silos, deep pits in the ground used for grain storage and suggests this could have been an area where these underground silos were frequent.

Read more here.
</tangent>

Time for tea.

b 

 

                                                                       

And they're off

 The 2022 cycle of the Stephen Spender Prize opens for entries (poetry in translation) on 4 May.

<autobiographical-note>

Going through some old papers recently I came across the typescript of my award-winning entry for the Camões Award...

<not-THAT-one>
(now defunct, along with its sponsors at Canning House, not the Camões Prize which is

...awarded annually by the Portuguese Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Biblioteca^[1] (National Book, Archive an Libraries Department) and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional^[2] (National Library Foundation) to the author of an outstanding oeuvre of work written in Portuguese. The monetary award is of €100,000, making it among the richest literary prizes in the world.

That was first awarded in 1989, 15 years after my coup. And  I didn't get so much as a half-crown ...

<anachronism-alert>
In fact it was 3 years after decimalization, so the half-crown was a thing of the past.

</anachronism-alert>

...postal order). 

</not-THAT-one>

On it were some comments from my teacher at the time, Teresa Amado; and I wondered what might have become of her.

At about the same time I was choosing a Portuguese poem to translate for the Stephen Spender Prize and was beginning to do some research into the poet Vasco Graça Moura, described by Wikipedia as

...a Portuguese lawyer, writer, translator and politician, son of Francisco José da Graça Moura and wife Maria Teresa Amado da Cunha Seixas Navarro de Castro, of Northern Portugal bourgeoisie....

He was Library Director of the Cultural Foundation Calouste Gulbekian ^{[sic - no dubt they meant "Gulbenkian"]}

He married three times, firstly in 1964 to Maria Fernanda de Carvalho de Sá Dantas, secondly in 1985 to Clara Crabbé da Rocha (daughter of Miguel Torga) and thirdly in 1987 to Maria do Rosário Bandeira de Lima de Sousa Machado (b. c. 1951)....

Now, writing as someone who was born precisely in 1951, and as Teresa was  a postgraduate (and so not much older than me, if at all [as, with a September birthday, I was older than most of my peers]) I put two and two together and  made something other than four.

It was the chance juxtaposition of "Teresa" and "Amado" that led me astray, as that first sentence refers not to Graça Moura's wife but to his mother; the strange (not to say unnecessary) inclusion of the word "wife" in that sentence didn't help.

So Teresa, (who may well have been Maria Teresa, as are many Portuguese Teresas) probably had nothing to do with Graça Moura. But she did point me towards a scholarship awarded by the Calouste Gulbenkian foundation, so may have had a family connection. Probably not, but it afforded a jaunt down memory lane.
</autobiographical-note>

Noticed in passing

• In this week's edition of the Westminster Hour Carolyn Quinn used the expression 'showed a bit of ankle' to suggest that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had indicated a willingness to – maybe – consider something (a windfall tax on the oil companies, or something like it – sugaring the pill in some way  that would make it acceptable to a majority of  his colleagues. This was an unusual image to use (akin to the more raunchy 'open the kimono'   – used in laddish business circles by middle managers I used to work with. But it occurred to me at the time that at the back of the speaker's mind there might have been an awareness of Richie Sunak's trouser length.
  
  
• In a recent edition of The Climate Question a Spanish speaker used the expression 'You cannot put all your baskets in one egg' (sic –  messy) to refer to the idea of committing Chile to renewable energy to the exclusion of fossil fuels. I thought he had simply misremembered an idiom; but the interviewer didn't miss a beat in repeating it in her summary (at about 15'12" into that podcast). I wonder if she simply missed it, or whether she felt it would be tactless to correct him (which would have made sense in a conversation, but not in the editing suite).
  
  
• Catching up on my Christmas reading, I've come across a beautiful picture of a snail shell that demonstrates the role of a mathematical series in its growth. It is based on squares of increasing size following a series suggested by this clue:
  
  
  Continue on a path of mendacity, Mr Gemmill,
  one hears, one hears, two hear, three hear,
  five hear, eight hear, etc. (9)
  
   

Ho hum. I must put my translator's hat on.

 

b

Update: 2022.04.04.20:40 – Added PS

And here's a picture based on one in that book:

How a snail shell forms (with apologies for the freehand bit)

I'm sure you will have solved that clue by now, but here's a hint: I could have replaced...

<mini-rant>
And while we're on the subject, "change A to B" = "substitute B for A". When people on the correction round in Richard Osman's House of Games say "change A for B" I die a little. I blame Ray Davies. 

<inline-pps reason="correction"> 

Not him; it was The Who.

</inline-pps> 

</mini-rant>

..."Mr Gemill" with "a poetic cockroach". 

Update: 2022.04.05.12:20 – Added <inline-pps />

Jumping to conclusions

The other day I met a word that was new to me, in a brief  More or Less programme. The contributors to that discussion used the pronunciation /'sʌbɪtɑɪz/, which gave me no idea about what it might mean – which is "to perceive at a glance the number of items presented" to quote Collins.

The reason for this is, I'm tempted to suggest, plain ignorance. The word has nothing to do with sub (/sʌb/) meaning "under". It's not about estimating numbers under 4 (as they said on the radio just now...

<parenthesis> 
[Collins was more generous, allowing estimates of up to 7, but who's counting? {That was a rhetorical question.}] 
<parenthesis>

...) But anyone who has a smattering of Italian (subito) or French (subite) or indeed Latin (subitus), or anyone with a passing knowledge of musical tempo markings...

<rant>
Any half-literate speaker of English, for the LOVE OF MIKE! as my mother...

<meta-parenthesis>
(and she would have known, although like many a woman of her day she left school at 12 – well, her father was a dominie (Scottish for 'teacher') and she was 'only a girl'
</meta-parenthesis>

..whom saints preserve [and they better had] would have delicately put it. Why is it elitist to expect a modicum of education on the BBC?  But I digress...)
</rant>

... would  guess that it has something to do with doing a thing quickly. A pronunciation with the sound /u:/ in the first syllable would make the word much more readily understandable; but that pronunciation seems to be rare.

A Onelook search for subitize yields this:

 

Most of these have /ʌ/. Some have no indication of pronunciation, and one (which shall be nameless ) has a meaningless roll-your-own system in which the vowel is anyone's guess. Only Dictionary.com has an unequivocal /u:/. But the Collins entry could suggest what may have been going on in that More or Less programme.

The first version it gives is something that it chooses to call "British English" (for reasons  best known to the editors); and for this it gives the pronunciation /'sʌbɪtɑɪz/. But scroll down a bit and you see this:

So possibly the US authors of Making Numbers Count (who were being interviewed) have got the idea that the British way (the obscurantist /ʌ/ pronunciation) is best for this interview (on the World Service of the BBC); and they'll revert to saying /'su:bɪtɑɪz/ once they're back home. I doubt it though.  I imagine that the people who coined the word (which is rare, and  chiefly  used in the field of psychology) knew about the etymology and used the /u:/ pronunciation. 

Subsequently it became all the rage in educational circles (My Learning Springboard gives a taste of the breathless earnestness that advocates this "important math skill") and people who thought it had something to do with subtraction did their worst with the pronunciation. But the this-is-a-new-word.-Just-learn-it school, who care nothing for the derivation of words, is in the majority, and  I'm afraid the linguistic version of  Gresham's Law (which I've mentioned before) has won the day: the meaningless (and misleading) pronunciation has driven out the etymologically sensitive one, but the language as is is what we have to live with. (But I know what I know, and if ever I use the word I shall use the /u:/)

L'Envoi

Amid all the anniversary shenanigans last week (commemorating the Falklands War) I heard this BBC programme. Towards the end a local was saying how she couldn't understand the attitude of Argentinians ...

<inline-ps>
(hostile and belligerent – she used the term 'sabre-rattling')
<inline-ps>

...('It's a little bit exhausting' was the way she put it) as both the Falkland Islanders and the Argentinians were remnants of European colonial powers. This reminded me of a piece I wrote six years ago, when  I reflected on the French origins of the name used by the current Argentine Prime Minister, Alberto Fernandes, in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of their defeat a regañadientes (sort of 'with clenched teeth', but with a subtext of entitlement and smouldering resentment): 

'Las Malvinas fueron, son, y serán Argentinas'

(The Malvinas were are and will [always] be Argentina's)

But that name represents yet another European power, not English, not Spanish, but French:

In September 1763 Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville  ... set sail from St Malo on a voyage of discovery (as many ocean voyages were, at the time). In January 1764 he put in at an unclaimed group of islands, which – like so many explorers before and since – he named in an autocentric way (is that a word? Well it is now.) This is a theme I've visited before, here,)

He called the landing point Port Louis after the French king, and he named the islands after his point de départ: Les Îles Malouines. The islands were those known to Les Rozbifs as .... [but no, I know better than to spoon-feed my readers].

That's all. Now the green blade riseth; biomass reduction is the order of the day.

b

Update: 2022.04.20.11:35 – Added <inline-ps />

Update: 2022.04.20.15:35 – Clarified screengrab (links not live)

To Wordle or not to Wordle

You may have come across those shared grids that have begun to infiltrate the anti-social media. A picture being worth a thousand words, those 5x6 grids of squares of increasing verdure...

<parenthesis>
(which sounds inappropriately botanical; I just mean greenness, green being  the signifier of success – olive green for the right letter in the wrong place, and emerald green for the right letter in the right place)
<parenthesis>

... or 5x5, or 5x4, or 5x3, or even 5x2 (my PB^UPDATE, though someone interviewed on a fairly recent Newscast had got a first-time guess) say "look how clever I am" or, depending on your point of view, "Look how much time I've wasted", or "Look how sad I am, not waving but drowning in a sea of pointless guesswork."

But what's a winning strategy?

 

Ever since Sherlock Holmes told us, we've known that E is the commonest letter in English: "Elementary, my dear Watson"...

<parenthesis>

(which, in Conan Doyle's text, the great detective never said, although what happens in plays or on film or TV is anyone's guess)

</parenthesis>

.... Where would we be without E.? Lmntary my dar Watson. And Conan Doyle's source was presumably Samuel Morse's calculation:

Source

But look at the sample size – fewer than 110,000 letters, which, using the rule of thumb used in my publishing days (about 6 letters per word), amounts to fewer than 18,000 words. And that means that the balance is skewed towards whatever kind of text the "sets of printer's type" happened to include: if they were, say, recipe books, then words like boil and heat and teaspoon would be over-represented; it's hardly a representative sample.

As that Notre Dame page goes on to say, the problem of this tiny sample size is solved by using a dictionary as the source...

<parenthesis>
(and strangely, for a US seat of learning, they chose the OED  rather than say Webster's.)
</parenthesis>

See here for an explanation of the 3rd column

 

...with the result that, whereas Morse calculated that E was 24 times as common as Q, in the OED it is nearly 57 times more common.

More common in glossed words that is. Not content with this, real Wordle-nerds have calculated the relative frequencies of letters in 5-letter words...

<reservation>
Not that letter-frequency is anywhere near the whole story. What matters more is morphemes (word-building blocks, represented by groups of letters). To take a trivial example from a recent answer:

<example>
The target was CHUNK. By chance, my first guess ended CH. So I got two olive green (right letter, wrong place) squares. If I had been a devotee of the  "letter frequencies of  letters in 5-letter words" school, I'd have had to consider 4 possible alternative places for C AND 4 possible alternative places for H. But I imagine (if I were a betting man, I'd put money on it) that in any word... 

<inline-pps> 

(particularly in any short word; in composite words there are more opportunities for c to follow h; in spatchcock, for example, there's an -hc-, but 5-letter words don't allow for that sort of juxtaposition)

</inline-pps> 

...that includes both C and H, the odds are that they will fall together and in that order. So instead of the 4x4 set of possibilities, there were just 3; and among those 3, CH??? was by far the most probable.
</example>

Morphemes matter more than letters.
</reservation>

..so if that sort of thing floats your boat ...

<tangent subject="5-letter vessels">
CANOE, KETCH, SKIFF, SLOOP, YACHT...

<meta-tangent>
(incidentally, one of the few words that fit the pattern ??CH?; Onelook lists only 63 "common" words here, but a definition of common that includes words such as "zuche" and "elche" seems to me rather dubious.)
</meta-tangent>

</tangent>

... a Google search will lead you further down this rat-hole. And only wimps stop at a mere five letters;  there are more variants than most viruses.

But that's enough for me; and more than enough for now.

b

 

Update: 2022.04.15.15:40 – Added PS in red.

Update: 2022.04.10.17:20 – Added <inline-ps />

Update: 2023.06.04.17:25 – Added a few interesting solutions (where "interesting" is, as we used to say in the software engineering world, a signed variable.)

I've done it in 2 before
bu not after so inauspicious a start

A Christmas tree, and all bright green

1,2,3,4,5, and still bright green

Not so symmetrical
just frustratingly regular

And an epic fail

ning

Update: 2023.06.08.16:25 – Added PPPS.

PPPS A rather different five-letter based word game is this.

Update: 2023.08.18.19:45 – Added P⁴S.

No longer: this happened this morning:

The app, which comments on a successful guess, was rendered nearly wordless: 'Genius'. I'm not so sure. Maybe Someone was saying 'Ha! Thought you could kill another 10 minutes? Think again, sucker.'