The Great Escape

After more time than I'd like spent in hospitals...

<parenthesis>

That's right, two not to mention the  dozen or so I've been in in the past, though only once overnight...

<autobiographical-note>
Tonsillectomy in the King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mattock Lane, Ealing W13. As I was a larger than usual rising 11 year-old, and they had me down as plain '10', they found that I didn't fit in any of the pyjamas in the children's ward. So, it being 1962 and all that that implied in terms of awareness of PTSD, they put me in the adults' ward rather than move the pyjamas (which was probably more than someone's job was worth). It was not the happiest fortnight of my life, and is it any wonder that I'm not perfectly house-trained?
</autobiographical-note>

...  The one where I first went to A&E didn't have the facilities to deal with my subdural haematoma...

<autobiographical-note>
Details are a bit vague, but I've said before that, whereas some people are ambi-dextrous, I am ambi-sinistral (and don't bother looking that up, unless I've chanced on a real word for two-sided cack-handedness – a result,  perhaps, of the Wrong Pyjamas [see above])
</autobiographical-note>

... so they kept me in there for 48 hours' observation... 

<autobiographical-note>
The 48 hours expired on the afternoon of the Sunday before Bank Holiday Monday...

<parenthesis>
(non-UK readers need know only that Bank Holiday is when nothing happens [except in the NHS, which soldiers on with more than usual under-staffing] )
</parenthesis>

... and it took the diplomacy and tact of my daughter to spring me from 'durance vile' , when they threatened to keep me in for another night.
<autobiographical-note>

...and they sent me home until the head-aches got worse and I went to A&E again, who  gave me a second CT scan and blue-lighted me to the John Radcliffe in Oxford, where they have the appropriate nut-crackers. 
</parenthesis>

...I'm home again and sleeping soundly (not at this very moment). While I was banged up I reflected on how there's an arms race between more and more urgent-sounding alarms and the way the nursing staff (with only one pair of hands) react; but I don't feel like writing about it just now. There's a possible update to come, but don't hold your breath.

b

PS my post-operative stupor was interrupted by an email saying that I'd been shortlisted for the u3a short story competition (which, appropriately enough, had the theme "Escape" – though hospitals didn't come into it when I wrote my entry). If it wins, it'll be published in the next edition of Third Age Matters.

 Update: 2024.10.03.20:50  – Added PPS 

PPS

Man proposes and clerical errors dispose. The short story short-listed – read  it here if you like, but don't believe the byline...

<inline-ppps>
They've now updated that  page.
</inline-ppps>

... – isn't mine. Mine is here. In my – not entirely unbiased – view, it's better; though I'm not too disappointed, as I wrote it about thirty years ago and just added a phrase or two to make it fit the 'escape' theme.

In other news, those nutcrackers missed a bit; and a second haematoma on the other side...

<guess type="untutored">
(preumably a contrecoup injury that didn't show up on the first CT scan)
<guess>

... needed to be drained as well. I'm home again after a second operation, and on the mend. 

 Update: 2024.10.04.10:50  – Added <inline-ppps />

 

 

Babel

 

With  unusual speed I have just finished reading a Father's Day present (don't judge; < 3 months is good going for me). When I first received it I initially feared (as did MrsK) that I'd done my usual trick of not updating my wishlist  and being given a duplicate of something I'd already read. But no; the two books had crucial similarities and jacket designs

:

<anal-observation> 

Babel is neater, as the colours repeat at regular offsets (down 2 rows to get the next column:  

B > A > B... etc [restarting at the top row when you reach the bottom, natch]. The letter colours for LINGO are ALL OVER THE SHOP. What was the designer thinking? 

) 

</anal-observation>

Lingo was a book of which I once wrote here   '(a book that I'm deferring judgement on, as it refers to much that I don't know about but is not totally sound on the few things I do know about).'

Well, I feel the same about Babel only more so, at least as regards the extent of my ignorance; natural language really is quite extraordinary.

The Introduction sets the scene

The figure of 6,000 struck me as rather ungenerous. 7,000 is an estimate I've met – I'm not sure where.. But anyway, it's dwindling at an alarming rate, though maybe  not as fast as some would have us believe: a recent edition  of More or Less discussed this.

The Introduction to Babel goes on

As preparation for work on the book, Dorren began to study Vietnamese:

The '1-15' attempt  at gleaning a meaning reminds ne of an image I once used when speaking to a student, to refer to the opacity of another language: You're in  the dark, with only a pencil beam of light  occasionally, with Strobe-like flashes, giving you a partial view of what's next.

More to come, but guitar practice is overdue. An update will have to wait.

b

Update: 2024.09.03.17:14  –  Added PS

PS 

In the treatment of Spanish (English and Spanish are, argues Dorren, 'almost  uncannily similar' in one respect ...

<parenthesis>
(read the book to find out which – paraphrasing in this case is beyond me [without seriously oversimplifying])
</parenthesis>

...Babel divides ways of handling the idea of pssession into five 'types':

1. possessor possesses possession
   25% of all languages
2. possession is with possessor
   another 25%
3. (with respect to) the possessor there exists the possesssion
   20%
4. the possession is at/on/with the possessor
   20%
5. the possessor's possession exists
   10%

And this is typical (and editorially impressive) of the book: general observations about language are  made when they arise in language-specific cases. So each of the 20(-ish) chapters deals with one(-ish)...

<for.further-study>
Everywhere you turn in this world there's an-ish. I imagine some of these have provoked  no end of trollery on xitter ( Urdu vs Hindi...one or two? calling it 'Hindustani' worked before the Partition), but this sort of identity jiggery-pokery is par for the course when dealing with language.
</for.further-study>

...language, but ends up dealing with some general point about language and/or scripts. I found it hard work, but fascinating.

As usual with this author I occasinally had my doubts: why, for example, is the Spanish ñ only 'considered a separate letter'? It is one in my book (and is alpabetized as one in any Spanish book)...

<come-to-that>
And, on the subject of alphabetization, I wonder if elle (like enye [the IPA transcriptions /εljε/  and /εnjε/ underline the point]) shouldn't be 'considered a separate letter'': calle falls alphabetically after calzo, not after caliente.

<clincher type="aperçu not available to bookish research">
A fellow student on an Open University course pointed out that Spanish children (he had been one) have  alphabet blocks with separate 'l' and 'll'.  I wonder whether Spanish typesetters have a separate glyph for elle, rather than just a pair of ls (which might seem a bit loose).
</clincher> 

</come-to-that>

But I'm glad I read it, although it made me all too aware of just how un-understandable this stuff is.

 

The third envelope

 The newly-appointed CEO found that her...

<not-making-THAT-rookie-mistake>
Didn't expect me to assume the default CEO was male, did you?
</not-making-THAT-rookie-mistake>

... predecessor had left three numbered envelopes, marked

Mentally editing the instruction...

<criticisms>

To be opened: Why not just 'Open'?

In order: What else would you do with numbered envelopes?

In case of emergency: Errm.... isn't that just an emergency?
</criticisms>

... she gave them to her PA to file.

After the usual honeymoon period, the company got into difficulties. She epoened the first envelope. A note inside read

BLAME YOUR PREDECESSOR 

She did, and eventually the share price recovered. 

In the fullness of time the the company  fell on hard times again, and she opened the second envelope. A note inside read:

BLAME ADVERSE MARKET CONDITIONS

As you might expect...

<Storytelling-101>
I didn't just fall out of the coconut tree; what else was going to happen?
</Storytelling-101>

... eventually the company got into trouble a third time. Not knowing what else to do...

<Storytelling-101>
(but knowing how these things work)
</Storytelling-101>

....she opened the third envelope. The note inside read:

PREPARE THREE ENVELOPES

Call me Æsop.

b

N or M

Last Saturday's The Times mentioned...

<tangent>
(or perhaps homed in on [Self-referential, moi? ])
</tangent>

a point that I wrote about here) – the variation between 'home in on' and 'hone in on'. Rose Wild observed in the Feedback column  that the N-version was more common in American English than in British English, agreeing with the observation I made in that post, starting with a visit to the British National Corpus:

<pre-script>

'That's right' I thought; 'Only one instance. A solitary ignoramus got it wrong.'

<parenthesis>
Oh dear. Me and Cnut...

<HD24>
As usual with stuff I've written, I couldn't make sense of this at first . What I meant was that there was a tide in the usage, and my feelings about it didn't signify.
</HD24>

</parenthesis>

On the other hand there were many of the M-version ('hoMe in on') :

 

...[HD 2024: whereas in American English]

'Home in on' is the commoner of the two, but only by a whisker.

Finally, I used my favourite newly discovered language-related software tool to compare the two.

The expression 'home in on' took off about the same time as computers and related technologies used in guided weaponry, and for twenty years it had the field to itself. Then 'hone in on' appeared, but until the mid-'80s it never represented more than a quarter of its soundalike. Then, from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s something strange happened: 'home in on' marked time, and 'hone in on' took advantage. It is as if a significant number of M-users tried the N-version as an experiment, and stuck with it; and this infected...

<parenthesis>
(is my prejudice showing?)
</parenthesis>

... the people who had not yet adopted either expression, with the result that for the next two decades the N-version rose in popularity more steeply than the original. Since then, shares have remained roughly stable, with the MEANINGFUL version outnumbering the NONSENSICAL one, but not by much.

</pre-script>

She wrote...

<parenthesis>
(in fact she attributed it to a correspondent, but she was sparing with quotation marks, so it's hard to tell who supplied the bit about  'making sense', which rather stuck in my craw.)
</parenthesis>

... that the substitution of 'hone in on' for home in on' was "an eggcorn – a phrase based on a mishearing that sounds like the original and catches on because it makes sense (sic: my emphasis)" . A hearer can make sense of it; I'm not convinced that is the same as making sense. Or perhaps it is. Discuss.

Interestingly (for me at least thinking, about unjustified Ns cropping up in popular usage) the previous week's Feedback column had referred to the tendency  in American English for 'careened' to occur when right-thinking people would have expected 'careered'.

<autobiographical-note>
(I first noticed this while listening to the Mud Slime Slim album, and assumed that James Taylor was the prime culprit.)
</autobiographical-note>

  But N seems to be a repeat offender here.

<brickbat-dodging>
And 'offender' is the wrong word of course.'He only does it to annoy/Because he knows it teases'
</brickbat-dodging>

In another case,...

<covering-his-back>
(not the same case – this is not a matter of N replacing another letter in the course of ongoing language use, but rather a matter of N spontaneously occurring in the course of language development – but still, it is a case of an N appearing where it's not expected)
</covering-his-back>

...'message'  has spawned 'messeNger', 'passage'=>'passeNger'... There must be others...

But I have promises to keep, etc.

b

A pigeon come home to roost

I was smugly glad to be proved right last week when a BBC newreader ascribed to the  Vice President an undeserved punctuation mark for a name. In May 2021 The Times published  a profile of Kamala Harris, originally published in a US journal. An American English speaker said something like 'It's pronounced  'Comma-la'. I wrote about this at the time.

Long-time readers of this blog will be accustomed to my banging on about how misleading 'sounds-like' pronunciation guides can be, especially in a teaching context. For the full pro-IPA rant see here,  but my point is simple: 'sounds-like' pronunciaton guides are useful only when they refer – and are understood to refer – to a particular speech event. In the case of that article, the speech event was between users of American English. For a user of British English Kamala is NOT pronounced 'Comma-la'. Here's the letter I wrote to The Times back in 2021:

<prescript> 
As a retired teacher of English as a foreign language I was disappointed to read Dana Goodyear's misleading and unhelpful pronunciation advice ('it's Comma-la'). 'Sounds-like' pronunciation aids, as I was always telling my fellow teachers, are no better than the memory of  a speech event. This speech event involved two people who were both speakers of American English. So 'comma-la' tells us about the stress but nothing about the vowels. A speaker of British English will be misled by this memory aid:

• there is no /ɒ/ in the first syllable
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  /ɒ/ is the vowel sound in 'bot', 'cot', 'dot' etc. I realize I am hoist by my own petard here but I've got to allow for the lack of IPA-fluency in my readers
  </HD24>

• the schwa at the end of  'comma' is more-or-less the same in British English and in American English
• even a speaker of American English would have no idea about the last syllable (/ɑ/, /ɑ:/, or /ə/)
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  It doesn't much matter what these represent, as I now realize there are many more possibilities. 

  </HD24> 

When I first read the Goodyear article I wronged the writer, assuming she was British and had  misled her readers by slavishly regurgitating her notes of what Harris had said. But what she wrote turns out to have been true for her speech community, and just misleading for speakers of British English (as I presume most of your readers are).

</prescript>

The 'Sounds like "Comma-la"' guide works only for stress, not vowel sounds. But some BBC Newsreaders (not all), presumably having read that article, insist on the /ɒ/.

<tangent subject="word-stress">
And while I'm on the subject of word-stress, Wimbledon is a regular source of linguistic entertainment: foreign names that Radio Five Live commentators have been blithely mispronouncing for the rest of the year suddently get the Radio Four treatment. Their newsreaders turn to the Pronunciation Unit on, for example, Medvedev:

In the case of Medvedev, we have had to compromise: we cannot expect non-Russians to pronounce this name in a perfectly Russian way because this would require broadcasters to have detailed knowledge of Russian pronunciation, which is not feasible.

Having carried out detailed research and consulted with Russian speakers, including a Russian phonetician, we concluded that correct stress placement and reflection of the soft (palatalised) 'v' in the stressed syllable were the most important aspects to highlight in our anglicised pronunciation.

The surname Medvedev stems from the Russian word for 'bear' medved' (with stress on the second syllable), so that it is important to retain this stress in the surname, hence our recommendation muhd-VYED-uhff.

Source 

For years tennis commentators have been using this name. For all I know, Medvedev himself may have abandoned all hope of getting Anglophone commentators to stress the second syllable. But when Wimbledon comes around the Pronunciation Unit comes to the fore; and BBC radio reports on different programmes often have headlines that seem to refer to two different people.
</tangent>

Returning to Kamala. Trump, of course, gets it wrong. This may be intentional, as a Harris campaign video deals expressly with the name's pronunciiation; or it may just be the old political trick of deliberately mispronouncing an opponents name, as Churchill did with the Nazis and Thatcher did with Gal-ti-e-ri.

<tangent>
(which ...

<whatExactly>
[the sound /eə/]
</whatExactly>

... reminds me of the 'Spanish' speaker in a recent radio play I heard, who in the course of his espeech used the uniquely English /eə/ sound when saying the third syllable of 'Buenos Aires'; it's a diphthong all right, but the spelling is a clue to which one. I wish soi-disant foreigners in plays put a bit of effort into getting it right. Perhaps they could ask the Pronunciation Unit...
</tangent>

'Nuff said.

b

PS

My translations have gone off. Now I just have to wait by the phone for a few months

 

 

Ne plus(-size) ultra

 

On 8 July Medsape published a piece on Ultra-Processed Food

What Is Ultraprocessed Food, and What Are Its Effects? 

with this intriguing note:

This story was translated from the Medscape Portuguese edition using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.

Seldom  missing an opportunity to be intrigued, especially where Portuguese is concerned, I followed the link to the original, published  nearly a week earlier:

Alimentos ultraprocessados: Uma ameaça tão evidente quanto a crise climática?

The story is not 'AI-mediated mistranslation misrepresents important research'. As far as I can tell without the sort of fine-tooth-combery which I don't feel like doing at the moment, the two articles are broadly similar. But there is a fairly signficant editorial difference, at least in tone (particularly as far as the headline is concerned). It doesn't take a Portuguese expert to see that 'uma ameaça' (the English cognate is 'menace') is more value-laden than the gentle 'what are its effects? And the comparison in tone is even more stark when the 'menace' is characterized as being 'as evident (obvious? unarguable? urgent? 'real and present"?) as the climate crisis'. 

Another difference is socio-political. Where the English version has the subhead Proof of concept the Portuguese version (Brasilian I imagine, as the 2010 conference was held in São Paolo) has the defensive 

Avaliando a contradição: o canadense que testou a NOVA 

(how can a mere norteamericano put a Brasilian concept to the test? The effrontery!)

<inline_ps>
You may need a little help guessing what this means. Avaliando ≅ 'assessing/the value of/weighing up'; contradição ≅ 'contradiction' {obv}; canadense ≅ 'Canadian' (but I get a hint of the passive-agressive – nationality [identity] is more important than academic qualification); testou  ≅ 'tested' {obv}; NOVA ≅ the Brasilian report that. introduced the concept of UPF

</inline_ps>

But I'm inclined to think that the comparison with the climate crisis may be apposite:

Monteiro ... highlighted a study showing that people with assessing diets rich in ultraprocessed food consume many more calories, often exceeding 5000 per day, thus resulting in weight gain. The post hoc analysis of this study suggests that the hyperpalatability and high caloric density of these foods are the main factors contributing to this excessive consumption. Another point raised was the deterioration of the nutritional quality of foods due to ultraprocessing, which reduces the content of beneficial phytochemicals, such as flavonoids. According to Monteiro, these characteristics are "a recipe for diseases." Processing also "creates chemical contaminants, such as acrylamide and bisphenol, which have proven harmful effects on health," he added. He also addressed the problem of dependence on ultraprocessed food. About 14% of adults and 12% of children in the United States show signs of addiction to these foods, he said. Addiction may be amplified by aggressive marketing.

The issue is summed up in Dr Chris van Tulleken's award-winning book:

Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

 

And the question at the end of the title is not rhetorical: we can't stop because UPF is designed to be addictive.

<paranoia-alert status="query">

This isn't just another right-on hippy conspiracy theory. There aren't evil boffins rubbing their hands like the animated germs in the '50s toothpaste ad, saying 

We'll hurt her teeth and drive her crazy 

It's her fault for being lazy' 

There's no evil conspiracy. It's just good old Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'. UPF sells more, so the behaviour that leads to it is reinforced, putting a gastronomical spin on Gresham's Law: 

Ultraprocessed drives out wholesome

</paranoia-alert>

He goes on:

Worth waiting for. Nuff said (more than enough).

b

Update: 2025.01.11.16:05 – Added <inline_ps /> 

 

 

 

A porte manteau too far

 Oops – deleted in error. This may reappear if I feel it's worth the effort. Sorry (that'll teach you to read these words of wusdom hot off the presses.

b