Preventatives - better than cures

Whenever I hear the word "preventative" I think of – if you'll pardon the expression – haplology  (or rather, the inverse of haplology, which is the shortening of a word by dropping a repeated syllable: "probly", for example...

<tangent>
I rather wish, not without a generous dash of whimsy, that the lecturer who introduced me to the word had called it "haplogy" (but there's only so much whimsicality a body can stand...)
</tangent>

...). The word (preventative, this time) makes  me wonder two things:

• What's the difference (if any) between "preventative" and "preventive"?
• Is  "preventive" just a haplologized (dunno if that's a word, but it is now – I suspect that in the linguistics world some mealy-mouthed circumlocution would be preferred; something like
  "form that has undergone haplology"

Ask Google if there's a difference, and one of first hits is unequivocal:

Dictionary.com gives the same definition for both preventive and preventative. Merriam-Webster.com places a direct link to preventive instead of a separate definition for preventative. The words mean the same thing. {my emphasis}

The source for this unbending certainty is the Gramarly blog (which long-standing readers of this blog will recognize from an earlier rant of mine, about ten years ago). It goes on:

Around 1635, someone had the idea of adding the -ive suffix to the verb prevent. Around the same time, preventative evolved as a variant spelling. According to Google Ngram Viewer, preventive is and has always been the more popular choice.

The Google Ngram Viewer is a new discovery for me; I think it probably deserves a Tezzy (that's my invented award, mentioned fairly often in this blog: "Time-wasting Site of the Year") but I haven't put it through its paces ye... (Hang on though, "putting it through its paces" will constitute time-wasting: so I should just cut to the chase and award a Tezzy).

Here is the output for the two prev-ive words:

The shorter word has a clear edge; a simple Google search suggests it's around four times more common; But "preventative" crops up more than 100,000,000 times, though; so it couldn't be called rare. That Gramarly blog, though, says it's virtually unused across the Pond:

As usual, there is a difference between American and British English. Preventative is only a little less common than preventive for the Brits, whereas Americans rarely use it. 

Hmm... Do they really "mean the same"?  Etymonline dates "preventive" to the 1630s and "preventative" to the 1650s. That Gramarly blog splits the difference and gives "Around 1635...[re: preventive, and] Around the same time ... [re preventative]."

I suspect that "preventive" appeared first, and at least half a generation later (I'm not sure this justifies Gramarly's 'Around the same time') someone made a false analogy with words like preserve/preservation/preservative to invent the triplet prevent/preventation/preventative. Going by the Google Ngram Viewer output, "preventative" scarcely got off the ground for the first 100 years. If this is what happened (and  the preserve/preservation/preservative triplet had been around for well over a century before the 1630s, so the model was at least available for wordsmiths), my feeling is that, unless there  is a strong collocation for "preventative" [I'm looking into this;  stay tuned for an update] "preventive" is preferable.

b

Update: 2023.02.27.15:40 – Added PS

PS

In the British National Corpus, hits for 'preventive' are found in only 97 collocations (when directly preceding a noun); and of those only the most common nine make it into double figures; while hits for 'preventative' are found in only 38 contexts; and of those only the most common five make it into double figures:

In COCA  meanwhile (ten times bigger, having a billion words [as compared to  BNC's paltry 100 million]) so it includes more one-off collocations (that is, ones that are represented only once), hits for 'preventive' are found in 362 collocations (when directly preceding a noun); and of those only the most common eight make it into treble figures; while hits for 'preventative' are found in only 208 contexts; and of those only the most common fifteen make it into double figures: So 'preventative' is less common in American English than in British English, but it's far from "rare".

<mea-culpa>
I was too quick, though, to accept the near-certainty of the Gramarly blogger.

North America is a big place, and the blogger was probably reporting a tendency present in their own speech community. In fact, this is the sort of issue that brings out the worst in self-styled grammar-guardians, and a single college lecturer may have passed on a prejudice against "preventative" (one that I share, not that I'm proud of the instinct) to  hundreds of trainee teachers, who then passed it on to tens of thousands  of students, who now go around saying things like "Americans rarely use it".

</mea-culpa>

My, my, my

When I first heard the song Delilah, in the late 1960s...

<parenthesis subject="Uncertainty over date">
Wikipedia has the song recorded by Tom Jones in December 1967 and winning an Ivor Novello Award in 1968, but the footnote to the win links to an irrelevant page; and while the song's writers did win an Ivor Novello Award in 1968, it was not for Delilah (it was for the execrable The Last Waltz (what could the judges have been thinking of?). The same two writers (lyricist and composer) won the Ivor Novello Award for 'Britain's International Song of the Year' with Delilah (International? Why?) in 1969. So I may have heard the song  in December 1967, but it could have been much later (not that it matters)
</parenthesis>

... I  assumed that the 'My, my, my' was a variant. of 'Goodness me'. This was a fairly naive interpretation, I admit, but the song was (and is, in my view) trivial and undeserving of anything better; the lyricist wanted a makeweight to balance 'Why, why, why?', and 'My, my, my' was the best they could do.

But the latest edition of Antisocial has made me think again. That episode is all about the context of songs involving murder, and changing attitudes to them, centring on the fuss surrounding the singing of Delilah. It is, if you haven't heard it (and if you haven't I'd say there were better things you could do with your time than to make good that lack of experience), a murder ballad (oh yes, it's an official genre) about a man killing his lover for sleeping with someone else.

She stood there laughing

I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more

Murder ballads involve various victims and killers: in Bruton Town the killers are two brothers:

'I think our servant courts our sister

I think they have in mind to wed.

I'll put an end to all their courtship.

I'll send him silent to his grave.'

The murdered servant appears in her dreams, and blabs:

'Your two brothers killed me cruelly,
In such a place you may me find.'

<literary-aside>
If you know the Keats poem Isabella, or the pot of basil it's broadly the same story, and dates back to Bocaccio (if not before).
</literary-aside>

In Cruel Sister it's one sister killing another (over a knight, wouldn't you know?) by pushing her into the sea:

'Your own true love that I'll have and more...

But thou shalt never come ashore.'

In Frankie and Johnny it's the woman (Frankie) killing the man... and so on. Sex is usually involved, and the man is often the aggressor. And one speaker on that edition of Antisocial points out that this sort of violence isn't the exclusive province of The Great Unwashed: Carmen involves a murder of passion.

<tangent>

And high culture infects other areas: a recent edition of Radio 3 Breakfast was slumming it for a moment, playing Joan Baez singing El preso número nueve, and the presenter said it was about a man going to the Underworld to find his 'true love'. Now maybe the sleeve notes gave this impression to the announcer. I rather think though that she (no names, no pack-drill, though if you were having Alpen for breakfast you'd be only two letters short of her name) had romantical notions inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice.

The prisoner in question is about to be shot for the double murder of his love (anything but 'true') and his rival. He tells his confessor 

'Padre, no me arrepiento...

Voy a seguir sus passos

Voy a buscarlos al más allà' 

He's unrepentant (which, as any Catholic will tell you – at least in those less morally flexible times – meant he accepted that he was not going to be absolved). They had sinned in their adultery, he had sinned in his murder, and he didn't want absolution; he wanted a ticket to Hell so that he could  follow them al más allà and make their eternal lives (deaths) a misery. (OK, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but cut the poor bloke a bit of slack; he was upset.)
</tangent>

So, with all this talk of domestic violence, and dodgy statistics (which may lead to an update at some stage) I've realized that 'My, my, my Delilah' is an assertion of possession (which 'justifies' his behaving like a man possessed (geddit?)).

But I must do some note-bashing for this: 

Just over a month to go...

b

Update: 2023.02.15.14:50 – Added PS

PS

I first sang Monteverdi's Beatus Vir in CCCCCC (that's Corpus Christi College Cambridge Chapel Choir)...

<autobiographical-note>
(which was the first real choir I sang in, apart from my school's "VIth Form Choir", which was less a choir than a scam to bulk out our UCCA form – predecessor of UCAS – and my primary school's contribution to a massed children's choir that sang Jerusalem at Ealing Town Hall in the late 1950s)
</autobiographical-note>

... in 1971. It sticks in my mind for three reasons:

• I sang one of the soprano lines, as in those unenlightened days there were no women in the choir and the baritones sang the soprano lines (at their pitch). 
• I was standing rather precariously on a bench (and even now the refrain Beatus vir qui timet dominum makes my legs tremble). The bench also contributed to the amplification of...
• ... the disturbance caused by my foot-tapping, which a fellow baritone told me was 'not the sort of thing a chap did'

Update: 2023.02.19.19:30 – Added PPS

PPS

I've been thinking about that man on death row (El preso número nueve). I gave him too much credit for clarity of thought when I said he wanted to go to Hell; he thought he was going to heaven (at least until his time for judgement): yo sé que allá en el cielo el ser supremo nos juzgará ('I know that up there in heaven the supreme being will judge us'); he just assumed that the supreme being would share his warped view of what's right: a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. In fact he shares with the singer of Delilah the same self justifying 'it was all I could take' attitude: Ardió en su pecho el rencor/E no se pudo aguantar ('Anger flared up in his breast and he couldn't stop himself' – not unlike Tom Jones' 'Forgive me Delilah, I just couldn't take any more'). 

And just what happened at the scene of the crime? The lyrics say el preso... iba la noche del duelo...and there are no prizes for guessing what duelo means. On a first hearing I thought he just saw the two together (...al mirar a su amor en brazos de su rival...), lost it, and killed them both. But a duel is one against one isn't it? So did he find the two, have his one-on-one, and then kill her (with malice aforethought, execution style)?

Perhaps I'm over-thinking this...

Update: 2023.03.10.16.00 – Added PPPS

PPPS
You may have noticed that one of the works in tomorrow week's concert is <ching> Beatus Vir (well,. the programme just says Beatus Vir, but ever since this realization (read on for details) I have come to regard the <ching> as an important part of the title.

When I first saw the score for this piece it struck me that it would have made sense to start the syllable Be- on the up beat to a new bar ...

<parenthesis>
(I'm not sure whether  Monteverdi cared much about the concept of bars; but the idea was curent – if fairly novel – in his day. Anyway, I imagine it's safe to assume that the barlines in the current published score are editorial.)
</parenthesis>

So why does the piece start with a <ching> on the harpsichord (catching the sopranos napping if they're not careful)?

And, over 50 years after I first saw and wondered about this, it's finally come to me. If the Be- did  fall on the up beat to a new bar the word Vir would fall on the fourth beat, which is no place for a butch word like Vir (='man').

....[C]onsider: 1+2+3+4+. The 1 and 3 are the strong beats and the 2 and 4 are the weaker beats. But the subdivided beats represented by the + are even weaker. The concept of stress in both music and in lyric has to do with meter. In a sequence of notes of equal length, some parts of the sequence are perceived as having a stronger emphasis.
Source

When the piece starts with a <ching>, Vir falls naturally on the strongest beat of the second bar. I'm not sure this makes a whole lot of difference  to the way the music is perceived (after all, this Vir is Joe Blogs [albeit a fairly devout one], as opposed to the person identified in Ecce homo, so he doesn't especially merit a strong syllable), but it's satisfying to know why the editor did it

Suffer the little children...

 '...don't they?', in the words of a monologue I co-wrote (in the days when this wasn't such an Old joke).

<autobiographical-note>
The naming of this monologue, which had a vicar delivering a sermon...

 'The Lord My God is a jealous god, and he coveteth 10% of the gross' ... 'For behold, I am with you, even though ye walk in the Balls Pond Road'.                

...marked my one and only collaboration with Douglas Adams: he was running the review where I hoped to deliver it, and suggested the title The Cross and the Switchblade. 

(Perhaps 'collaboration' is over-egging the pudding a little.)

</autobiographical-note>

The effect of social media on young people (on old people too, but especially on the young) has been of much current concern. In the light of the recent Independent article on young people's exposure to Internet porn, I thought a recent Medscape article  might be of interest. It wasn't.

The U.S. Surgeon General says 13 years old is too young to begin using social media. [HD – Gosh!]

Most social media platforms including TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook allow users to create accounts if they say they are at least 13 years old.

"I, personally, based on the data I’ve seen, believe that 13 is too early. … It’s a time where it’s really important for us to be thoughtful about what’s going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children," U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, told CNN. [HD – I, personally, make a point of ignoring any sentence that starts 'I, personally, ...', unless it expresses a personal opinion rather than, say, a professional one. Who cares what he thinks as a private citizen?]

Research has shown that teens are susceptible to cyberbullying and serious mental health impacts from social media usage and online activity during an era when the influence of the internet has become everywhere for young people. [HD – Who writes this stuff? 'Research has shown...' {jeez} 'the influence... has become everywhere']

But there was some value  in the Medscape article: it linked to one that actually said something – an artiucle from Pew Research, with the title 

Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022

It leads with an interesting graphic that shows the relative popularity in this age-group of various social media apps (and for a definition of 'this age-group' read the small print; presumably a teenager [a word I still use, fuddy-duddy that I am] of 18 or 19 is not 'a teen'). And if you're looking for the start of the Tik-Tok line, it didn't exist at the time of the earlier survey.

But stand by for damned lies. The survey was done in the USA, where the winner of a local race is 'the world champion', and where 'the world series' is played between teams based in the USA. The findings are similarly skewed:

Since 2014-15, there has been a 22 percentage point rise in the share of teens who report having access to a smartphone (95% now and 73% then). While teens’ access to smartphones has increased over roughly the past eight years, their access to other digital technologies, such as desktop or laptop computers or gaming consoles, has remained statistically unchanged.

The survey shows there are differences in access to these digital devices for certain groups. For instance, teens ages 15 to 17 (98%) are more likely to have access to a smartphone than their 13- to 14-year-old counterparts (91%). In addition, teen boys are 21 points more likely to say they have access to gaming consoles than teen girls – a pattern that has been reported in prior Center research.

"95% of teens have access to smartphones." Oh yeah? What about those in sub-Saharan Africa? Another survey (2018) from the same source says

Majorities in sub-Saharan Africa own mobile phones, but smartphone adoption is modest

And the first graphic shows how uneven the coverage is: 1 in 2 adults in South Africa, but fewer than 1 in 7 in Tanzania:

And that's just the adults. So the next bit of clickbait that screams 

95% of teens own a smartphone

...take it with a pinch of sa... no, make that a squirt of BBQ sauce.

b 

Update: 2023.02.07.16:55 – Added PS

When I first read that '95% of teens article' I thought 'Oh yeah? I bet the percentage is in single figures in Africa'. I was under-estimating the uptake of cell technology in Africa...

<parenthesis>
(in a way reminiscent of the racism reported in a recent Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, which makes it easier for Western conspiracy theorists to believe that aliens built the pyramids than that Egyptians did it themselves [and without, pace my primary school history books, using slave labour])
</parenthesis>

... .  But I should have known better.

<autobiographical-note>
One of my last teaching jobs, in 2013 or 2014, was at the Newbury HQ of Vodaphone. The student I was working with was concerned with the marketing of mobile phones in Africa, and in one lesson I reviewed and commented on a presentation she was going to give to her department ('all part of the service, ma'am'), with lots of figures about market penetration there and projections for the future. I have no clear memory of the details, but at the time they were surprising; and with the advent of smartphones I might have guessed that sales there – nearly 10 years later – would be considerable. 

A World Bank collection of data, quoting figures from the ITU (International Tele-communications Union) gives an idea of the speed of this uptake: it is, as marketers would say, a hockey-stick curve. My Vodaphone lesson took place fairly early on, in the foothills of that near-vertical bit of the curve. As I had previously worked in the field of communications, and was used to marketing executives seeing such hockey-sticks round every corner, I was unconvinced at the time. But since that lesson the number of cellular subscriptions has more than doubled. 

</autobiographical-note>

Not all of these are smartphones though, and the spread of smartphones is very patchy.

That 2018 Pew Research article gives an idea of this patchiness:

In the lower three cases, in the two later years (and as the article was published in 2018 those two years are not bang-up-to-date) the rate of the increase was – at most  – 2% per year. In the top three cases the rate of increase was – at least – twice that; in the case of RSA, it's nearer 5%.

AI - mightier than the sword?

Distinguished linguist Professor Naomi Baron, whose new book Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing is 'under contract' (which could mean anything...

<autobiographical-note>

In my brief time editing at Macdonald & Co. (soon, when I arrived, to become part of Robert Maxwell's ill-starred empire BPCC), I inherited dozens of titles that had been under contract (and repeatedly not delivered) for years. My chief responsibility, I soon realized, was to cancel them; I didn't last long.

</autobiographical-note>

...but I look forward to the book's apperarance).

In the meantime she has written about ChatGPT. an article whose discovery is an example of the chief reason for my contuing to maintain a very modest presence on Twitter as @leBobEnchainé; it lets you get to hear about interesting stuff that's in the pipeline.

Tools like ChatGPT are only the latest in a progression of AI programs for editing or generating text. In fact, the potential for AI undermining both writing skills and motivation to do your own composing has been decades in the making.

The academic world was intially fearful about tools like ChatGPT on the grounds that they would make cheating easier to do and harder to detect. But the possibilities are much more serious and far-reaching than that. She goes on:

In literate societies, writing has long been recognized as a way to help people think. Many people have quoted author Flannery O’Connor’s comment that “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” A host of other accomplished writers, from William Faulkner to Joan Didion, have also voiced this sentiment. If AI text generation does our writing for us, we diminish opportunities to think out problems for ourselves.

One eerie consequence of using programs like ChatGPT to generate language is that the text is grammatically perfect. A finished product. It turns out that lack of errors is a sign that AI, not a human, probably wrote the words, since even accomplished writers and editors make mistakes. Human writing is a process. We question what we originally wrote, we rewrite, or sometimes start over entirely.

This seems to be serious; and possibly it is. But some years back I wrote about the advent of desktop publishing and my kneejerk reaction against it, and then on mature reflection my growing sense that – although uncomfortable for the publishing industry – it was probably a Good Thing. I'm not convinced in the case of AI, but I am aware that when new technology changes things, people with a vested interest in the past oppose it – often by pointing at what we're losing; what they ignore is what is to be gained by the change. So I'm not going to rush to judgment (and yes, spellchecker, I do spell it that way).

<autobiographical-note>
Somewhere in Knowles Towers there is a copy of an unpublished article that I wrote - many years pre-blog - about how authors writing on computers meant that users of libraries bequeathed literary archives would no longer be able to piece together the genesis of a literary work, with substitutions and crossings out and reorganizations.
</autobiographical-note>

The naming of characters 

Just reporting an aperçu here. I was watching the new Pinocchio over Christmas (or rather the first 10 minutes; Oscar? Can't see what all the fuss is about). And as a result found that the eponymous wooden boy was named after the tree that his 'father' cut down; it was a pine tree – un pino.

<parenthesis>
And I suppose the creation of the name may have been influenced by one of the church-goers who reacted against the graven image ('... or the likeness of anything, either in the heavens above or the Earth beneath' as we used to say in RC circles). She used the term malocchio (='evil eye'). But I don't know whether this was a later addition by Guillermo...

<autobiographical-note>
The older of my brothers – in his mid-teens when I was learning to talk – was sensitive about being addressed with a name that sounded ( in my version of 'William') like 'women'. He had recently had a holiday in Spain, and knew the word Guillermo. So he tried to get me to use that instead. Until I could get my tongue around 'William'  I called him 'Gammo'.
</autobiographical-note>

...del Toro's scriptwriter. 
</parenthesis>

If he had been made from a balsa tree, he might've been called "Balsacchio", which might be thought to be a bit near the knuckle.

Word-watch

I met a new word earlier this week: alexithymia (which loosely translates to “no words for emotion” ' as Wikipedia puts it [I wonder who was the subject of that conversation]. As I usually do with words new to me, I tried to break it down into bits of words already familiar to me. The a- (as in 'aphasia') was obvious enough, and the -lexi- (as in 'dyslexia'). But what about the -thym-?

This is where a distant memory came to my rescue. In the 1950s, when advertising copy writers had a classical education,  household products had names with a classical pedigree like Vim (strength), Lux  (light), or Bovril (beef). There was a brand of toothpaste whose name  seemed strange to me when my family used to use it. 

Some of these products have survived more or less unchanged, and  Euthymol is one (with a reassuringly archaic design). And at last all is clear: eu- as in 'eulogy',' euthanasia', 'eucharist'...; -thym-' as in ... ALEXITHYMIA. It's all about feeling well. Whoever thought of that must have been very proud of themselves, but I don't imagine many of the product's users know or care.

L'envoi

And, in re HMRC and the tax dispute, I'm sick of people sanctimoniously trotting out that thing about the age-old British principle of 'Innocent until proven guilty'. That's about criminal proceedings, and we're not there (yet?). A decent person would have stood down pending investigation. Never mind 'Innocent until proven guilty'. What about 'Decent until proven duplicitous'?

Things to do.

b

Net Contribution to the Age-appropriate Supply of Housing...

... or  NCASH.

The sadly-limited range ....

<autobiographical-note type="I can remember when all this was fields">
When I moved out of London nearly 40 years ago Spencers Wood was semi-rural.  Now it's almost exclusively urban – with few of the benefits of a largely green environment combined with the drawbacks of nose-to-tail traffic,  precious few buses, and a dearth of social and commercial infrastructure.
</autobiographical-note>

...of walks in my vicinity  include routes through two housing estates (well several, actually, but two of relevance here) , one developed in the 1970-'80s and one developed more recently (and still they come). The older one has a fair few bungalows; in fact it has a range of building types. The newer one is a mono-culture suitable for families (young and established) with a few flats for young professionals. Nothing suitable for older people; I shudder to think what it'll be like in 50 years.

An article in the latest edition of Third Age Matters mourns the lack  of suitable new housing for the less spritely:

...Third Agers often feel that suitable smaller housing is not available. The much maligned bungalow is still the housing of choice for many older people as they usually have all the facilities of a house, including private garden and off-road parking, but with the additional benefit of single-level living. But they are in short supply.

It goes on to discuss the reasons for this, which all boil down to one thing: the planning system is seriously flawed. It is based on a single-minded, short-term,, simplistic metric: occupancy per hectare . The only way to get more people onto each hectare is to build upwards. So older people can't buy new  properties –  except in purpose-built ghettoes...

<old-joke> 

Some wag doctored a road sign marking Dover for the Continent and Eastbourne. The additional words were for the incontinent.

</old-joke>

... – either these, or sheltered housing/assisted living/...<insert-euphemism-here>.

Meanwhile, older householders are rattling around in multi-storey houses that they can't maintain and want to move out of; as that article says:                        

Press reports have highlighted the massive amount of housing space tied up by pensioners, often living alone in four-bedroom houses. A report from Legal & General estimated some 7.5 million rooms could be available if the occupiers were to downsize to smaller accommodation.

But old people need to live with young people, and vice versa. My family home in the '60s-'70s was a sort of informal youth club, open all hours, to the benefit of all involved whatever their age.

<modest-proposal comment="This is my theory, and it is mine. Ahem.">
To ensure a healthy mixture of young and old in new housing estates (which will not be new for long, and  they need to continue to house a mentally healthy population) occupancy standards need to be changed to take into account the net effect of new developments. If a developer can arrange for an old householder to buy a bungalow, they should be able to factor that person's property into their calculations: planning standards must be based on NCASH.
</modest-proposal>

And fonally ...

<sic> 

This isn't a typo, or rather it was a typo in 1972 in a script I contributed to a review called 'How Big Were Luther's Theses?' – but ever since then whenever I think 'And finally' my private monologue misreads it.

</sic>

...

My habitual equanimity is frequently disturbed in the last few weeks by the TV trailer for the new series of  Waterloo Road, which has a voiceover saying 'At Waterloo Road we pride ourselves in (sic)...'.

At this stage I lose focus, and can't take in what they're proud about, because in my world you 'pride yourself on something'. I suspected when I first heard this that there had been interference –  or crosstalk –

<autobiographical-note>
'Crosstalk' is a bit of jargon I came across when my middle brother (RIP) was an apprentice at DECCA. In a vinyl record, the interference between one groove and its neighbouring groove is crosstalk. Come to think of it, it's not a very  illuminating metaphor; it's just a memory that   occurred to me, and I thought I might as well clutter your minds up with it too.
</autobiographical-note>

... from the expression 'take pride in', which just happens to inhabit the same semantic area (although not being a synonym). And having thought this, I felt I should put some numbers on it. Here they are, based on two corpuses (or corpora if you must   –  ...

<autobiographical-note>
I've been suspicious of $10 words like that ever since a GP diagnosed my unexplained slight temperatures (in boyhood) as 'PUO'. 'PUO' stands for Pyrexia of Unknown Origin, or in other words 'he has a temperature and I don't know why'.
</autobiographical-note>

 .... Fancy words are often a disguise for ignorance) the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American.

First pride ourselves *n (the * is just a wildcard; I could make the enquiry more general: pride *sel* *n, to include myself, themselves... etc, but I've already spent too long on this):

This seems fairly clear, In an admittedly small corpus (relatively small, that is, among corpuses, but still pretty extensive), 'Pride ourselves on' outnumbers the 'in' version 10:1  (11:1 if you include 'upon').

And the 'take pride in' expression is more unanimous; nobody says 'take pride on' (well not yet anyway).

Meanwhile in COCA the difference is less marked, though still over 4:1.

And the 'take pride *n' variants are pretty unanimous, although a tiny percentage of users (0.0022%) have written 'take pride on' (which I'd put down to interference in the opposite direction – from 'pride oneself on' to 'take pride in').

But this is beginning to fail in the 'So What? Stakes'.

b

Update: 2023.01.12.20:55 – Added PS

PS
I can't be the only one who found 'pride ourselves on' disturbing (or at least distracting). There's now a new version of the trailer, with the same images but a new opening line.

And now all this

De-noelification has occurred. (And don't bother looking that one up; it's home-made). None of this 'The decorations stay up until twelfth night' business; not chez Knowles. The old year was be-tinselled (another roll-up, I'm afraid). But it is a Knowles tradition that New Year's Day is marked by the removal of all signs of merry-making, accompanied by the New Year's Day Concert from Vienna. The lion's share (lioness's share, come to  think of it) of the removal was done by MrsK, but it fell to me to disentangle the two strings of lights after their hasty (and somewhat unscientific, if you ask me) removal from the tree.

<autobiographical-note type ="rant">
It was the work of minutes to separate the two, apart from one loop; so it should have been a simple matter of removing one end of the wire from the plug and passing it through the loop. But I reckoned without the Health and Safety Executive. There was a 'safety plug' (a sealed unit, un-unscrewable), so I had to either cut one wire and then join it together again (how would the HSE like that?) or cut the idiot-proof plug off and replace it with a proper (i.e. serviceable, no really, serviceable) one.

I opted for the latter, not without a searing sense of annoyance at having to waste half an hour doing the thing properly, because of being taken for a numpty. Just because a few idiots can't be trusted to wire a plug safely the rest of us have to waste time on workarounds for things that shouldn't need to be worked around. But I digress.
</autobiographical-note>

Monday's job was the dismemberment of the Christmas tree (the stripping of the tree, I suppose, neatly book-ending the process that started with the dressing of the tree). And I was struck again by a question that doesn't occur to the blissfully uncluttered minds of those who know the song only in the English version:

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,

How lovely are thy branches!

But the Tannenbaum, to give it its due, isn't like that at all:

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

Wie treu sind deine Blätter.

Not 'branches', 'leaves'; not 'lovely', but 'true/loyal/faithful/ constant...'.

<tangent type="Aha, not thought of that in a while">
In  both German and English, the words for 'leaf' and 'sheet of paper' are the same. Another Germanic language, Norwegian, has the famous periodical (originally a 'daily [news]-sheet', though now it's a tabloid) Dagbladet.  Latin too, though I'd guess the Romans didn't have much cause to talk about sheets of paper, pre-Gutenberg. Etymonline makes the English usage a borrowing from Late Latin:

</tangent> 

Two recent memories

Yuletide media consumption has sparked a couple of memories:

Sign salvaged from
the ABC Forum, Easling

• A TV repeat of Zulu on New Year's Eve reminded me of the guilt that prevented me enjoying the latter part of the film when I first saw it, aged 12, at the ABC Forum in Ealing (since its redevelopment in 1975,  commemorated chiefly in this sign, shown here):
  
  Egged on by my middle brother (a Bad Influence, RIP), we paid for the 1/9s (that's just under 9p) and moved, via the gents, to the half-crown seats (12½p). I was sure for the rest of the film that we were going to be called out as juvenile delinquents.
  
  
• Hugh Bonneville, interviewed on a post-Christmas Newscast filler, recalled what to some listeners must have seemed an improbably violent attack made on his sister with a sledgehammer because she had stuck her tongue out at him. Sisters sticking their tongues out can inspire acts of improbable violence in the most peaceful of boys. In my case it was half a brick, rather than a sledgehammer.
  
  She (I'm not sure she was alone, but I'm pretty sure my middle sister was the tongue-protruder) was retreating up a fire escape leading to the habitable part of the house.. The missile fell far short of its target, between two treads (there were no risers), and smashed the window of the semi-basement's bathroom (newly refurbished as a self-contained flat), chipping the newly installed bath.
  
  I remember no repercussions. Daddy (who died the day before my 10 birthday, so he's still 'Daddy') was probably abroad at the time, and my mother (whom saints preserve and they better had) understood how annoying older sisters can be.

Onward and upward.

b

WHAT sort of boeuf?

The present state of the kitchen (with two saucepans fresh from the oven) reminds me of this piece, which I wrote two years ago – almost to the day:

<pre-script> 

On the last Saturday in November (that's  how long I've been worrying at this bit of linguistic gristle) an article in The Times mentioned a reader who had been working away at an anagram for over 3 years. My mail to the Feedback column fell on stony ground, but here it is:

Leigh Carter‘s three-and-a-half year computer-assisted anagram search may have used tools that incorporated the "rule" my French master taught me more than 60 years ago: that cookery words that are based on a name are preceded by an implicit  "à la mode" and are therefore feminine - bourguignonne, mayonnaise... and dauphinoise.

However, I have often reflected, as a student of philology, that rules like this are usually the sign of a linguistic change in progress; I discuss a fascinating case here (about an early Roman Latin master's list of rules proscribing common errors). My most recent dictionary (Concise OED, 2013) lists dauphinois as a headword and relegates dauphinoise to a parenthetical "(also ...)". But Onelook (a web-based finder of dictionary entries) finds only one entry - Oxford's. (In contrast, it finds four - including Oxford's) for dauphinois. 

</pre-script> 

There my main area of concern (linguistic concern, that is  – I wouldn't like anyone to think I  get properly upset about stuff like this; what kind of nutter do you take me for?) was the ending of dauphinois/e. But that old post went on:  

<pre-script> 

[T]his does not apply only to dauphinois, for which Onelook finds only one entry. In the case of bourguignon (which I vainly, and – let's face – it mistakenly) whinged about here:

... (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette, Bourgignon/Bourguignonne... 

<mini-rant status="stillborn">
No, I won't but... If people would just pronounce the /n/ when they say Bœuf Bourguignonne.  PLEASE.
</mini-rant> 

... etc.)

The fight in defence of the rectitude of bourguignonne (according to the "B-G rule" [B-G being the French master who taught me it]) ...

<2022-afterthought>
(and rather neatly it repeats the initials not only of M. Baring-Gould but also of the first two syllables of the word in question)
</2022-afterthought>

...has been well and truly lost. Google finds 

About 9,010,000 results for boeuf bourguignon 

but only 

About 311,000 results for boeuf bourguignonne.

And the ...gnon version really has the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Teachers laying down rules are a sure sign that language is on the move.

</pre-script> 

That last sentence is worth underlining. In  the second paragraph of that unpublished letter, where I refer to a Latin teacher (or tourist guide, or whoever it was that compiled a list of common mistakes and the "correct" version) I touch on one of the main sources of information of use to students of the history of languages: contemporary advice about "correct" ways of talking. In What's BALD about a bat? I discuss the warning not to say CALVA SORICEM but rather VESPERTILIONEM (the source of our pipistrelle...

A pipistrelle bat (far from bald)

...) But the mistake (which seems to be based on a pre-existing underlying local word (the fancy word is "substrate") that meant owl; so that CALVA SORICEM, meaning 'owl-mouse' (making much more sense than 'bald-mouse', which it's manifestly not), is the source of the standard French chauve souris.

That's all for now.

b