Summery (sic)

The other morning (well last week, probably, given that I have a concert on Saturday) Radio 3 celebrated the summer solstice with lots of appropriate music. One of the pieces chosen though provoked these tweets:

This was an idea I had written about while my choir was meeting over Zoom two years ago and we sang this:

Manuscript from Reading Abbey, but probably produced in Oxford.
(see David Crystal, The Stories of English [2005], p. 108)

At the time I wrote:

But why Sumer? Isn't it the wrong bird? The cuckoo arrives in Britain in April. Crystal gives the answer:

There was no contradiction, because in Middle English sumer was the only word available to describe the period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The word spring to refer to the season is not recorded in English until the mid-sixteenth century.  

The Stories of English

In this case there was a delay of well over two centuries between the two similar-sounding words (the medieval Reading/Oxford sumer and the mid-sixteenth century [and later] 'summer'). But this clash of similar-sounding words put me in mind of another word that no longer means what it meant when first applied: red  as in 'red kite', 'red squirrel', 'red deer', 'redhead',  'robin redbreast' .... Like 'sumer', 'red' once had a wider meaning than we attach to it now....

<autobiographical_note>
My  middle sister (of three), a redhead, always hated my grandfather's nickname for her: 'Rusty'. In fact it was a source of great friction at the time, and I'm taking a bit of a risk reminding her.  It seemed to me at the time that rusty was a more accurate description of the colour than red.

<wimbledon-related-aside> 

The hawk used at Wimbledon to keep pigeons away is called Rufus. I imagine the 'Ru-', like the 'ru-' of Rusty, refers to the colour (although the hawk in question may not be so coloured – the name when coined would originally have been applied [I guess] to a redhead). 

<background-reading> 

For more on this 'ru-' thing, see this:

... from a PIE root *reudh- "red, ruddy," the only color for which a definite common PIE root word has been found. It also is the root of native ruddy, rust, and, via Latin, ruby, rubric, russet, etc.

 </background-reading> 

</wimbledon-related-aside>

</autobiographical_note>

...

And the gap between the two usages of 'red' was much less than the two or three hundred years that separated 'sumer' and 'summer'. Etymonline dates 'red' to the mid-thirteenth century, and (of course) compounds came later....

<example>

 

</example> 

So the European robin was dubbed 'redbreast', although his breast was not particularly red:

Erithacus rubecula

there was no word for the colour of its breast in English at the time, until the recently imported orange provided (in the early 16th century, says Etymonline) a colour word that meant  

"a reddish-yellow color like that of a ripe orange."

 

 So there was an explanation for the mischromaticization (don't bother looking that up ; it's hot off the presses) of the European  Robin. There's no such explanation for that of the American Robin, a totally different bird, named at a time when the word 'orange' had long been available:

Turdus migratorius
(a rather blue-collar fellow, 
it seems to me)

 

But American English is full of mystery for me. For example, the 'sycamore tree' in the song isn't a sycamore (acer pseudoplatanus); it's an American Plane (platanus occidentalis)...

Anyway, I'm missing the tennis. So that's it for today.

b

Old technology revisited

I often write about the way metaphors come into use because a new technology or scientific discovery makes a new figure of speech possible, but then persist long after the technology has been superseded. We spool back or or rewind or fast-forward or cut to the chase in a story because spools and tape and scalpels and sticky-tape were once involved in recording and editing. A bowler's delivery is ram-rod straight even though muzzle-loading rifles ...

<parenthesis>
(or should I say 'long-barreled firearms?', as the earliest muzzle-loaded guns had no rifling – the spiral grooves that increase range and accuracy; maybe they also keep the barrel cooler...? – what I don't know on this subject could hardly be more extensive)
<parenthesis>

...are a thing of the past. I've written before about a flash in the pan, a metaphor that's still going strong, although it refers to long-gone firearms:

Flash in the pan – in a flint-lock, the trigger sparked off an explosion in a pan which itself set off the main explosion. Sometimes there was a flash in the pan, but the main charge was unaffected.
Source

My attention, though, was caught this week by something else entirely, although it involves a word that – incidentally – does this metaphorical freeze-frame trick: the word is 'charabanc'. A char in French is some sort of wheeled vehicle – a hay-cart ...

<parenthesis>
('cart' and char are related, of course, as are Carolus and 'Charles', and many more c/ch pairs)
</parenthesis>

... or a carnival float, or even (in a military context) a tank. But when the cart was to be used for carrying large numbers of people, it was fitted with benches – a char à bancs.

For a few years after horse-drawn vehicles had given way to the combustion engine the word 'charabanc' was used to mean a motor-coach. But then it started to go out of use, and became to all intents and purposes extinct. This graph from Collins shows the decline:

But that 'to all intents and purposes' was (as so often... 

<autobiographical-note>

(I'm reminded of a lesson I used to give to my advanced ESOL students about 'dead wood' – essentially meaning-free phrases that bulk a text out but don't contribute to [and sometimes diminish] the structural soundness; what they do diminish is comprehensibility [so do big words like that].) 
</autobiographical-note>

...) ill-chosen. Words don't always ...

<hmm>

 (ever??? Discuss) 
</hmm>

...become extinct. If you're that way inclined, and don't share my pathological hatred of pay-walls, you might want to read Old words don’t die, they just wait to be rescued. And this is where 'charabanc' came to my notice. It was in a recent edition of Newscast (don't ask me which; probably June 13 or 14) and someone was talking about the damage Covid had done to the transport system – planes, buses, cars, trains...'the whole charabanc'. 

At first I thought I must have misheard; then, given the speaker's background, I supposed that 'charabanc' must be a word he had met, and he had made a slip of the tongue – with 'charabanc' slipping unnoticed into the slot "/ʃ/<something>/bæŋ/" – especially easy since 'shebang' (the more common occupant of the phrase 'the whole ~') is marked by dictionaries with a despairing Origin unknown. 

But that 'more common' doesn't mean 'right'. For me (your search parameters may vary) a Google search of 'the whole shebang' yields About 2,620,000 results. On the other hand, 'the whole charabanc' yields About 1,170,000 results. So the less common version isn't knocked into a cocked hat; it's certainly more than the slip of the tongue that I at first suspected. 

But I should be learning my notes in preparation for the Bach on Saturday week. Bye for now. 

b

Update 2022.07.21.17:10 – Added PS/footnote

^PS Another of these technological fossils, relating to analogue recording but living on in a digital age is footage. A journalist will say things 'Have you seen the footage?' although no linear recording medium (film) is involved.

Solastalgia

This week, after the World at One on Radio 4, there is a series about climatic tipping points (not climactic ones, which would be a bit extreme: The Climate Tipping Points). And at the end of the first episode it alerted me to a new word...

<parenthesis>
(new both to me that is, and to traditionally published dictionaries,  although Onelook does find three online ones. And if anyone bothers to publish hardcopy dictionaries in a few years' time it may find its way into one; I doubt it though. 

The etymology given by a site called Word Spy suggests that it has two roots: solacium and -algia: 

Word Spy's definition

But this simply repeats (and over-simplifies) the explanation by the man who coined the word in a 2005 paper. If the roots are just solacium and -algia, then where does the st come from? Professor Albrecht, in that paper, cited the influences of both nostalgia and desolation – which, come to think of it, has a pleasing (if linguistically irrelevant) suggestion of land being stripped of topsoil (solum being Latin for – inter alia – soil).

</parenthesis>

This extract from the paper gives an idea of the thinking behind the word:

That mini-series (and also podcast) on Radio 4 gives pause for thought. Tuesday's Newscast had an interview with "Climate Change Correspondent" (who  knew there was one?) Justin Rowlatt (who wrote, researched and presents that podcast) talking about, among other things, the future of coastal communities. And he quoted a US climatologist called Ben Strauss, CEO of Climaestionte Central, (a US research organization) characterizing our legacy to future generations as "a necklace of ruins around the coasts of the world". And to finish the interview Adam Fleming invited him (by way of an 'And finally...') to name a song or songs that would sum up the situation. The one that sprang immediately to my mind was Brenda Lee's I'm sorry....

Another podcast that I've been following is The Climate Question (originally a series on the World Service, The latest had the dispiriting (not to say ominous and threatening) title Is destroying the planet a vote winner?

But what is more important for my state of mind is the need for biomass reduction in the garden (specifically, mowing the lawn).

b 

PS the "Ten Green Bottles Principle" revisited:

On Breakfast this morning they played a Gaelic setting of Psalm 46, "God is our refuge and our strength", which sounded pretty unusual to my Western European sassenach ears. But the tune (if that's the word) was strangely reminiscent of the usual tune given to Amazing Grace, supplied by the American composer William Walker. I wonder whether there was any conscious borrowing, or if this is just another instance of the "Ten Green Bottles Principle", explained here:

...words spoken by an MD of my youthful acquaintance: 'There has only been one tune written in the history of the world - "Ten Green Bottles".' (This may not be original, but I had never heard it before). 

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