Amalgamations

My attention was recently brought to this:

"Really old days?" I thought. Unigate was a concoction not heard of until 1959...

<autobiographical_note>
(when I was still an altar boy, before the longest cassocks started revealing my bare shins – a while ago, but hardly really old.)
<autobiographical_note>

.  If the really old days extend back as far as 1915, we find a fore-runner of Unigate – United Dairies. Also sprach  Wikipedia:

During World War I, there were dire shortages of men, horses and vehicles commandeered for the war effort, hampering any business which was reliant on the timely distribution of its products, such as a dairy company. United Dairies was formed in 1915 when Wiltshire United Dairies (established in Melksham in 1897), Metropolitan and Great Western Dairies, and the Dairy Supply Company merged in an attempt to pool their resources and keep their companies operating until the end of the war.

 A  rival to United Dairies was Cow & Gate.  And when the two companies came together in 1959 they did the sensible thing and melded the two names.

<aside,>
In later years in similar circumstances a manager would throw money at the idea and come up with some monstrosity such as the short-lived and ill-starred Consignia (discussed a while ago here)
</aside>

But in 1959 the world was simpler. A few years later, my middle brother had a holiday job at Griffin & George, which as it happens had a long history of mergers that treated the constituent company names like bits of Lego (although in view of the engineering context, Meccano would perhaps be a better metaphor).

The origins of this firm go back to circa 1881, when the company Baird & Tatlock was founded in Glasgow. In 1896, the partnership dissolves, Hugh Harper Baird going to London and John Tatlock staying in Glasgow. In 1903, the London company became Baird & Tatlock (London) Ltd. In 1915, the Glasgow firm also took the name of Baird & Tatlock, Ltd, spurring a big dispute over who had the rights of using that name. The two firms held the same name until 1925, when the Glasgow company merged with John J. Griffin & Sons, Ltd (a London firm of Glasgow origins), and began trading under the name of Griffin & Tatlock Ltd in 1929. In 1954, Griffin & Tatlock merged with W. & J. George & Becker Ltd. and Standley Belcher & Mason Ltd. to form Griffin & George Ltd., which is still in existence today.

Source

 <autobiographical_note>
(I remember a physics lesson that involved chemical beam balances with boxes of accessories marked Griffin & Tatlock and W. & J. George & Becker Ltd.  Even then, I thought aha.
</autobiographical_note>

 Well, time for my constitutional. Got to get in training for the Walk of Light tomorrow week. 

b

Update: 2020.05.05.16:55 – Repaired missing picture.

 

False Friends

In the memory of a language teacher and one-time learner of foreign languages the term faux ami looms large (what other way is there to  loom, come to think of it?). I first met it with reference to parent in a French lesson in the mid sixties. In those unenlightened days (this post introduces the idea of écriture inclusive, in case it has passed you by) the right way to say "my parents" was  mes pères (and your mère didn't count); as I remember, mes parents meant "my ancestors". But, language developing the way it does and given the spread of Globish, this is no longer the case;  the "ancestors" meaning survives only in the better dictionaries, but as a literary convention:

Larousse

And the term faux ami, in those days at least, was necessarily French. In my brief introduction to German I did not meet a falsches Freund (not sure about that ending; German best before end Nov 1969). The  German teacher said faux ami too (though she also taught French, so maybe she just didn't bother with code-switching in her meta-language). And in later studies I met neither falsos amigos nor falsi amici (although it wouldn't surprise me if of late such expressions have become current).

When, much later, I was training to teach ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages)  the term "false friend" had become all the rage  – even among francophone student teachers. So I've come to use the term. And in my various ramblings about language and translation I mention it here and there; two cases spring to mind:

• terrible (links to old post, but here's the relevant bit)
  

  French terrible doesn't mean 'terrible'; the adjective, in English, doesn't work like that. The adverb, though, does: something that is terrible (Fr) is terribly good. (I first became aware of this in a Johnny Halliday song; when I read the song's name on the sleeve [not having started to study French]...

  <2021_autobiographical_addition>
  It was an EP (look it up if age <50) with a big hole where the gramophone spindle went (pretty niche, this detail – the French multi-disk towers must have been different from ours, so we had to get an adaptor [or trust to the eye to get the disk centred, with sometimes cacophonous, not to say damaging results]). My bother had brought it home from an exchange visit; see here for more details of the Regnault-family-exchange-programme).
  </2021_autobiographical_addition>

  ... I assumed that Elle est terrible had negative connotations. When I heard it, it obviously showed approval; the tune was that of one I'd already heard: She's Somethin' Else [I had no clear idea of what it meant exactly, but it was obviously approving].)

• romanesque  (links to old post, but here's the relevant bit)
  

  This week's Book of the Week  on Radio 4 [HD 2021 – not THIS week, obv.] is a political biography that deals with Mitterand. In it, I caught the phrase 'the romanesque side of Mitterand's nature' (his tendency to fantasize); and my translator's ears pricked up. I though[2121: sic] it was Sarkozy who had high arches... [Think about it.... Arches....] Mitterand wasn't anything to do with architectural history. I thought the book must have been a translation  whose translator had misunderstood roman-esque – 'like a story (un roman)'. 

But there are probably others. 

<stop-press>

I just heard another case on BBC News coverage of the Grenfell enquiry. A representative of a French company that produced flammable cladding – even with an interpreter (who surely knew better) – said he had arranged for the panels "to pass the test". On the face of it, this looks nefarious – if not criminal... Except  that in this context passer doesn't mean "pass". Passer un examen is just sitting it; in order to pass it you have to être reçu (or, in what I would guess is a small majority of cases, être reçue). (The behaviour of Arconic was in many cases atrocious, but this particular atrocity is imaginary.)

</stop-press>

And a false friend that I've become aware of only recently... 

<parenthesis> 

(I say "become aware of" not because  of my natural sesquipedaliophilia [don't bother looking that one up, it's hot off the presses, meaning "predilection for using long words"] but because I've met it several times when my choir has sung Elijah, and only now notice that it's a false friend)

</parenthesis>

...is "quicken". And it's the sort of false friend that is easiest to overlook: the general meaning is right in some contexts, but it's behaviour changes in its precise grammatical context.

The question of whether and to what extent Mendelssohn's text for Elijah is a translation is not uncomplicated. I treated it at some (some would say obsessive) length here. In brief, a German libretto was started by Schübring, a friend of Mendelssohn's, years before the work's first performance ; but that  was an English version, and the "translator", Bartholomew, had sight of Schübring's incomplete version – not that he regarded it as "sacred" (or even competent; he was quite dismissive of it).

The verb "quicken" has a long history. It was much used in the 18th century.. The word had been around since the 13th according to Etymonline, but in the sense of giving life (based on the sense of quick that we see in "the quick and the dead" (Biblical, before the punning film title), "quicksilver" (mercurial, not the metaphorical sense often attached to footballers, for some  reason), and "quicklime". 

<tangent>

This sort of "quick" is the basis for an aperçu that I've recently had about an anomaly I met in the school chemistry lab. Some elements have seemingly random symbols, like K and Sn  and Hg. As a schoolboy I was content to just learn them; some of them, anyway,  had mnemonic value – tin and Sn shared an n; and s is close to t both alphabetically and with regard to where the tongue goes in forming it. But Hg?

 

Well the alchemists (or whoever) who first named mercury chose a different metaphor for its fluid behaviour ; not alive-silver, but watery-silver, not quicksilver but hydrargyrum.

</tangent>

And this was the sort of "quicken" I used to think was used in Bartholomew's English text for Elijah – a reasonable assumption, given the biblical associations of that sort of "quick".

Usually, the usage diagrams that Collins gives if you look hard enough (scrolling down three or four pages), doesn't pay attention to changes in meaning; so all the average navel-gazer can do is make suppositions about what changes in meaning were associated with what up-ticks or down-ticks happened. But conveniently, the Collins usage diagram showing the fortunes of "quicken" dates back only to the beginning of the eighteenth century; and as Etymonline says

Meaning "become faster" is from 1805. Related: Quickened; quickening. An earlier verb was simply quick (c. 1200), from Old English gecwician.

A drawback of these usage diagrams is that scale, units, and size of data-set, are all unspecified; but it's fairly clear from this chart that the "make faster" meaning diluted the usability of the word; having spent the eighteenth century flickering up and down quite wildly in the 2nd and 3rd strata (whatever they represent) for the next two centuries it languished (that's a word that may appeal to the Elijah cognoscenti) in the 1st.

Collins

Time I got to the point: Schübring's text in the chorus He watching over Israel is 

Wenn du mitten in Angst wandelt so erquickt er dich

(= something like "If you're walking in the midst of woes, he will speed you up")

Bartholomew, keen to use the new-fangled "quicken" to stand for the German erquickt didn't notice that our "quicken" doesn't work the same way. You quicken a heartbeat or a pulse or a pace, but not a person.  The nearest English comes to quickening a concrete noun is "quicken a heart" – but there "heart" is a metaphor (metonym?) for heartbeat. I mean to do some research* on that point, putting some numbers on my usage instincts, but this post is getting out of hand, so that's all for now.

b

 

Update: 2121.02.23.15:15 – Added footnote giving the promised  numbers.

* After a prolonged bout of DIY (which included a foray into Key Stage 4 Bitesize Physics on the subject of serial and parallel circuits) I've now spent some time in the British National Corpus justifying the breezy and unfounded claims I made last week about possible nouns used in collocation with quicken. If you want to see the BNC at work (fascinating but not appealing to all tastes) run this search. (it takes a while to get through everything, but if you just sit back and resist the temptation to keep prodding Return it gets there in the end). 

BNC search for quicken +NOUN

 

For the more faint-hearted I've  captured the most frequently used words – "most frequently" being a relative term, as only a single word (predictably, pace) occurs more than twice, and only seven others appear more than once (in a corpus that contains 100,000,000 words of text; these 27 cases are nearly half of the total [63]). The only one ...

 <parenthesis>
(apart from the initially perplexing WINDOWS, which it turns out refers to Windows, specifically a software product called "Quicken for Windows")
</parenthesis>

 ... that seems at odds with what I wrote last week (broadly, "no concrete nouns") is feet; but that is a metaphor for foot-steps (just as heart is a metaphor for heart-rate as I wrote before).

 

Update: 2121.02.26.10:15 – Expanded on Bitesize coincidence.

A word or two about my rather gnomic reference to Bitesize and its relevance to the DIY task I was engaged in. This Key Stage 4 Physics case almost exactly describes my kitchen lights. There are three, and after my first few hours fiddling, I uttered a triumphant Fiat lux and flicked the switch; one of them shone brightly, and the other two only got half the requisite voltage. The answer (as eny fule know) was to wire them all in parallel circuits. Duh.

Excerpt from spookily relevant Bitesize lesson

 

Update: 2121.03.03.13:05 – DIY/KS4 update

As some Frenchman put it (Chateaubriand? Talleyrand?) Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (often rendered as "Good enough is fine" or some such lame excuse for not doing things right [perhaps that word  gives a hint about a certain problem with my worldview]). I tinkered to make the job neater, and all  hell broke loose (where "hell" suggests the presence of Lucifer [the light-bearer]; whereas the absence of light  –  in two cases out of three  – was the problem).

Mr Montgomery (my old physics master) came to me in a dream; well, during a T'ai Chi session on Zoom to be precise. Cherchez l'homme, he said: V= IR (we were multilingual in my school  – a Latin man [VIR] was the mnemonic for Voltage = Current x Resistance.) My new/improved circuit included a length of flex with higher resistance, which reduced the current. The fix was trivial; but Chateaubriand seems increasingly attractive.:-)

 

And he shall purify

 Good old Liddel & Scott (Ancient Greek dictionary known by its authors' names to all students of Ancient Greek) lists a number of words having to do with purity:

The key prefix is кɑθ- (kath-). The name Katharine in its various forms is a member of a cluster of words in this general vicinity. The Cathars, had this in common with the Puritans, though not in their beliefs (except in that they espoused a particularly purist form of their religion).

Katharine refers to purity ...

<papist_aside>
The innocent-sounding Catherine wheel refers to a particularly gruesome method of torture, which was meted out to St Catherine – though she was by no means its first victim.
<papist_aside>

...and many other girls' names are positive-sounding abstract nouns: Charity, Felicity, Gloria, Grace, Honor, Joy,  Lætitia (Latin for the same thing), Modesty, Patience, Prudence, Ruth, Verity, Victoria...

<parenthesis>
(not so much boys' names, I think – a legacy of the sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice school? – Felix and Victor come close, but they means "happy"and "winner" respectively rather than happiness and "the fact of winning", and I suspect "Endeavour" was Colin Dexter's joke: this site calls it a girl's name. 

Maybe, though, there are boys' names that are positive-sounding abstract nouns; they're just less obvious than the girls' ones. Hmmm... 

<initial_thought> 

Is this just a function of an arbitrary (? – really? Maybe  the sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice school were involved in the assigning [that word is, of course, totally unrealistic. Language doesn't work like that. But the whole "school of thought"  idea is itself metaphorical – and language-users were involved in linguistic choices that shaped the language] of gender to those words... 

<a_bridge_too_far> 

But this thought is getting a bit more than "initial". Perhaps I'll do an update

<a_bridge_too_far>

...) fact about the Latin words for these abstract nouns – caritas, felicitas, gloria, gratia, honor, lætitia  ... etc. They are chiefly (all?) feminine; it'd be perverse to attach such a word to an unnamed male baby. 

</initial_thought>

</parenthesis>

.... I could (probably - given a bit of research) go on – not that I don't (go on, that is).

But what started me on this line of thinking (in case you've forgotten, kath- words) was

this article in the Observer, particularly this bit:

This is not the first time that a war of words has erupted over Greek.  [HD: The article is about the influx of Covid-related Anglicisms.] 

Arguments over the language, between proponents of change and traditionalists advocating a return to its Attic purity as a means of reviving the golden age, go back to the first century BC. Controversy continued through 400 years of Ottoman rule, becoming especially explosive in the run up to the war of independence in 1821.

The struggle over whether purist Greek, or katharevousa, officially inducted as the language of the state after the revolution, should prevail over demotiki, the commonly spoken vernacular, raged until 1976 when demotic officially replaced it.

 I first met the word katharevousa in 1979...

<autobiographical_note>
(or more probably 1980, having let the brooding presence of the huge scholarly manuscript haunt my guilt-pile for a few months. I say more about this daunting manuscript in an update to a very early post – the fourth, to be specific.) 

Arthur Toynbee's manuscript for The Greeks and their Heritages  

"[now out of print, but whose notes featured correctly inflected Latin abbreviations - not just idem , but eosdem, eamdem and so on]" 

early post

had been knocking around the editorial department at OUP's General Division for several years after the great man's death, ignored by less painstaking (or, let's be honest, wiser or at least  less stubborn) predecessors in my "Editorial Assistant" role.
</autobiographical_note>

Time I reappeared in the Real World.

b

Peregrinatio...

 ... or to put it more simply 'walking'. The word peregrinatio suggested itself because one of the earlier sources for Romance philologists is an account of a pilgrimage by a 4th-century woman (a nun? I expect Wikipedia might have a view) , known familiarly as "The peregrinatio", more formally Peregrinatio ad Loca Sancta (or various other formats) and this (the word, not the text) is the root of the word "pilgrimage".

When starting this post I did some research at the Crisis at Christmas site about a "pilgrimage" that I took part in:

<autobiographical-note type="self congratulatory">
I had already worked out the date, by remembering an unsuitable "Remploy"  hold-all I was carrying on the second leg. Had I done the whole walk I'd've had some kind of back-pack (though we didn't call them that in those days, favouring the more Germanic "rucksack"'; according to Etymonline back-pack has been with us since 1904;  but it hadn't reached the Knowles family [or rather, it didn't meet the stringent Presbyterian standards of our live-in grandfather, Archie, whose word on language {though not religion}was final]). But I was playing rugby on the Saturday, so missed the Canterbury to Gravesend leg.

Anyway, one of the seams came adrift, so I wrote to the manufacturer. And at the beginning of the letter I made reference to the fact that I was a "New Adult" – as it was shortly after my 18th birthday and we'd just been given the vote.  It was not a particularly memorable letter, and I don't know what resulted – if anything. The only thing that sticks in my mind is that one phrase  – which provides an autobiographical anchor.

<meta-tangent>
About this time I wrote a guitar instrumental in the style of Gordon Giltrap, (though, anachronistically, it had more the feel of Eric Bibb's Walkin' Home  – nothing like as cool, but similarly plodding and reflective) called Walking Home from Harrow, but the event it commemorated (involving a missed bus – a regular hazard faced by someone whose school, and therefore peers, were more than an hour away from home; and I think it was not the last bus, but the penultimate bus from Stanmore to Harrow) was a small fraction of the 25-mile second leg of The Bishop's March.)|

</meta-tangent>

 </autobiographical-note>

Anyway, that walk was my first and – so far  – only sponsored effort.  That is, the walk as planned had all the paraphernalia of these things: goals and targets and teams and signup sheets and what have you; but I didn't play the game. My contribution, if any, was negative. The organizers did all the admin – even booked a hall for the walkers doing the full 2-day pilgrimage – and I didn't pay my way.

But on 27 March I'll be joining this. (And in case you don't feel like clicking on that, here's an extract:

[W]alk with us as the sun sets, this Spring, from wherever you are. You even get to choose your own route and distance.

Whether you walk in memory of a loved one, to reflect on what has been a challenging time for everyone affected by blood cancer, or because you want to light the way to a brighter future – we’d love for you to join us!

) 

My JustGiving page is here, but as I say there (or maybe not – it's probably too long, in which case you saw it here first):

...I've set the bar really low, and started the ball rolling by covering it myself. I've already met the goal, so there's no pressure. But Blood Cancer UK is a worthwhile cause, so feel free to chip in.

There's no goal either for the distance I shall  cover, though it'll probably be a bit further than my usual daily jaunt - maybe a couple of laps of Langley Mead, water table permitting. The reason (apart from basic temerity) I didn't get any signatures back in 1969 was that I felt that making a donation of <so-much-per-mile> was arbitrary and pusillanimous (not pusillanimous in itself, but inviting pusillanimity: as though a donor might say "Aha, but I've checked in the AA book [no Google Maps in those days] and it's not 25 miles; more like 24 and two-thirds. So I have to pay ...[Let's see, that's 3 times 25, minus  1]  74 75ths [more mental arithmetic in those days too]. Have you got change of a ten bob note  half-a-crown?")

<inline_ps>
This was a while (just over a year) before decimalization, so the original calculation might have gone like this: 25 miles at 4¾ 6d a mile (that's old pence, or denarii to dress them in their Sunday Best) is  118½d or 9s 10½d  12/6. (In a display of magnanimity, the donor threw in the extra three halfpence. The revised total  would be 12/4.
</inline_ps>

Hell, if a cause is worth giving to, just give. ;-)

Time I showed my nose in The Real World.

b

Update: 2021.01.31.12:45 – Added inline PS.

Update 2021.02.05.14:20 – Updated inline PS to make the calculation more realistic. In fact the 74/75 calculation would be unnecessary as well, since 6d per mile  is 2d per ⅓ mile.

Update: 2121.03.01.14:10 – JustGiving coincidence

I was hugely surprised to get an update from the JustGiving people:

Someone has made a donation to your page

Well quite surprised by the notification itself; hugely surprised by the identity of the donor I learnt when I clicked on 

 He had; and  it was someone I haven't met since 1970. And he was a fellow walker on that first "sponsored" walk.

Betwixt and between

We are all on the cusp of language change, though some of us are more aware of it than others. My parents, to take a trivial example, gave the word secretary only three syllables, with stress on the first: /'sekrǝtri:/. My children give the same word four syllables, with stress on the third  (the one that is completely agglutinated in the older pronunciation): /sekrǝ'teǝri:/.

<parenthesis type="CYA">
There are other differences too, particularly the length of the last vowel. For fluency, ease, brevity, etc etc, I've used what is called a "broad phonemic transcription" (and the days when I could define those words with academic rigour have long gone). 
</parenthesis>

Caught between these two pronunciations, I use a bit of both, trying to suit my context. My mother ^{[whom saints preserve, and they better had]} was a (trisyllabic) secretary (the real deal, with Pitman's and everything), whereas a US politician is a quadrisyllabic (or should that be tetra-?) Secretary of State.

This matter of primary stress in polysyllables has come to the fore in my mind because of the word extirpate, beloved of many a singer of Elijah. (Baal is exhorted to do it by his devotees, and whatever it is it doesn't sound very pleasant.)

About the stress, if not the vowels, dictionaries...

<descriptivist-objection>
(but what do they know; it's my language, what people do is what it is.)
</descriptivist-objection>

... seem to be pretty unanimous: stress is on the first syllable (like extricate) rather than the second (like external). I haven't trawled through all 30+ found by onelook.com  (some of which – like Oxford for Pity's sake: Dominus obscuratio mea – exclude themselves (by my lights..

<mini-rant>
When a business gets big enough it starts throwing its weight around: 'What we do at FatCat.com is so widely used it has become a standard.' Adobe did this with PDF, Microsoft with Word... For heavens sake, the rules of the translation competition I just entered specified a .docx file...And the docx so-called "standard" compounds the insult by taking one roll-your-own "standard" (.doc) and hiding its chewing-gum-and-baler-twine reality behind a real standard (xml) ... 

<inline_ps> 
(and by this I mean a protocol but that is the result of collaboration between interested parties before anything hits the market with an implementation of that protocol. 
</inline_ps>  

...by tacking an x on. But I digress.
<mini-rant>

...) by using a roll-your-own transcription system) but here are three:

• Cambridge
  
• Macmillan

• Collins

                                

But  that last screenshot (which like the others isn't live, so if you want to explore further go to the actual  page), in an attempt to exclude extraneous stuff, truncates the word frequency blobs (there are five): so it's not 'quite frequent' but 'almost unheard of':

In the 18th century, it was quite common; when Elijah first appeared in the mid-19th century the word was a shadow of its former self, in the 20th century it hit rock bottom, and in the 21st I'd guess it was only ever heard in performances of Elijah.

Which is to say that it might as well be pronounced  any way that suits the music. And Mendelssohn requires stress on the second syllable; so that's what it gets. 

But our present Elijah is getting the Zoom treatment. Here's a review from happier times of our last rendition.

b

Update: 2021.03.20.12:40 – Added (inline_ps>

The PS that "jes' grew"

PS 

Another of the reasons for my absence of late has been my entry to the John Dryden Translation Competition 2020 - 2021 , which is nearly done. I'd give you  a taste here, but rules is rules and

Entries must be the original work of the translator and must not, as a whole or in part, have been previously published or accepted for publication, including web or self-publication...

So I'll content myself with recounting a near miss...

<tangent>
Surely the expression should be "near hit". A miss is as good as a mile, but what I nearly did was hit. Still, ours not to reason why. If I followed every such quandary to its logical conclusion I'd he here all d... Is that the time?
</tangent>

...Pride goeth before a ... <something or other, not "fall", I'll have to look it up >.

In the piece I'm translating, the leading character's maiden aunt (God-fearing, pious, devout, living in  a house that's more like a chapel than a home) is praying a terço, whatever that is. Dictionaries were no help. Collins, unhelpfully, said :

This was only very slightly better than Google Translate's third (I say "slightly better" because Collins at least rules out the ordinal third.)

I turned to what I should have tried  first – a monolingual dictionary. And among the unhelpful third-related definitions it gave one religious meaning, tierce (one of the offices). Aha, I thought, that's what she was doing – saying tierce.

Smugly I looked in a published translation, to see what they'd made of it: "rosary". Huh, I thought, one up to me.

But a little voice in my head kept saying "But  tierce is a morning office" and morning didn't fit the context (a visit paid after a character had been to work). I hung, Ptolemaically, onto my wrong idea: the character visiting after work was so work-shy (this fitted the background) that he knocked off in mid-morning.

But luckily my "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic" church background rang a warning bell. Why had the published translator plucked "rosary" out of the air? The answer comes from the way a rosary works.. Apart from the few introductory beads, the circle is made up of five groups of ten beads.  Each bead represents a prayer.

But the sayer of the rosary isn't just mouthing (or minding) the words. They are meditating on one of three groups of five Mysteries: the Joyful Mysteries, like "The Finding in the Temple"...

<background>
The occasion when Jesus was being bar-mitzvah'd (or whatever they did in those days  –  anyway he was only 12, according to Luke), his parents left Jerusalem where they'd been celebrating the Passover, Jesus hung about talking High-minded stuff with the elders (as is the wont of 12-year-olds [the getting lost bit, not the high-minded discussion}) and when he was found he came out with a put-down that seemed to me, when I first heard the story, incredibly priggish:

Did you not know that I must be about my father's business?    

(That's the Douay version  – the one that springs most readily to the mind of the cradle-Catholic.)

If I'd given my mother that lip when I was 12 I would have expected short shrift (or at least a Hard Stare).  In his defence, the verb (in Jerome's Latin) was in the plural (nesciebatis), so he was being lippy but not necessarily misogynistic; he was replying to Mary though, in the manner typical of stepsons throughout the ages: 'That schmuck isn't my real father.' 

<reflection>

Still, it's not fair to hold it against him; the words were probably dreamed up by some unnamed patriarch.  That's the thing about the Bible, it's full of incredible misogyny, racism, manifest bias, and what-have-you, but there's always a justification in the small print. 
</reflection> 

</background>

 ... the Sorrowful Mysteries (like 'The Crucifixion') , and The Glorious Mysteries (like 'The Resurrection'). There are 5 of each, one for each of the groups of ten beads (which I used to be able to list,  but nearly got egg on my fave by conflating 'The Presentation in the Temple' with 'The Finding in the Temple'...

<parenthesis>

(separated by twelve years,  both  Joyful Mysteries though. 'The Presentation in the Temple' is notable for being the context of the Nunc Dimittis text. Simeon, who the baby was presented to, had a deal with Yer Man, not to die until he'd held the Messiah in his arms. 'Lord, now lettest thou  thy  servant  depart in peace according to they word' was a kosher way of saying 'OK, you've kept your word, I'm for the bone-yard.'
</parenthesis>

...; and there are three laps in a full rosary.. So that's what a terço is: ⅓ of a full rosary.

AOB

And it's destruction that Pride goes before:

Pride [goeth] before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. 

That's all for now; competition admin to do.

b

Update 2021.01.25.12:55 – Added PPS

PPS

The translation has been submitted now. Onwards [and I do mean onwards, Microsoft] and upwards. No rest for the ... <not that bad, really; we're none of us human>. Per ardua ad nauseam.

The white heat of technology

Beau Brummel is widely reported as having said he was a late riser. The most banal expression of this is on a site devoted to Brummel quotations:

15: Brummell on mornings

Brummell used to say that ‘whether it was summer or winter, he always liked to have the morning well-aired before he got up.’ 

 

Source

You may share my doubts about the authoritative credentials of a site whose editor doesn't understand the conventions relating to indirect speech, but I've heard several variants of this, some too elegant to have been produced impromptu, though he no doubt had a lot of practice at extemporizing on this subject, along the lines of

 "I like my mornings as I like my shirts: well-aired before I appear in them."

Anyway, I feel that now the millennium ...

<parenthesis>

(which I vainly insist on spelling  with two ns, although Google finds nearly 96,000,000 cases of the single-n'd version [which I always think should be an addition to the periodic table, being an element with the atomic number 1000]. 96,000,000 is a pretty spirited showing against the correct ...

<meta-parenthesis> 
(ducking and covering here, as usual. Eppur si scrive cosí, as Galileo might have put it: "All the same, that's how it's spelt... 

<note_to_spellchecker> 
And if you think that's some kind of cereal, that's your problem. 
</note_to_spellchecker>

...)
</meta-parenthesis>

 ...version, which gets just under 180,000,000; a further example of what I have previously noted as the linguistic version of Gresham's Law: 

BAD LANGUAGE DRIVES OUT GOOD

).
</parenthesis>

...has reached its 21st year, it's well enough aired for me to get a smart phone 

And this isn't the only bit of new tech that I've acquired recently, which explains my silence since well before Christmas – jolly time-consuming, these labour-saving devices....

So there I was, Bluetooth Headphones paired with my phone, listening to an episode of Private Passions that I'd recommended to my guitar teacher at the beginning of December  (it was broadcast on the feast of Santa Claus, or St Nicholas, as we used to say in The One True Church; and I finally got around to catching up (a sadly eviscerated version: for rights reasons the music was sorely truncated) on 6 January. So it was mostly chat. Paco Peña, the guest, started by talking about the atmosphere in Spain immediately after Franco had come to power, which recalled to me an episode I recounted here a few years ago (the account, not the event):

When I was first in a Spanish train [2021 addition: in March 1971] I misread a sign about giving up your seat to a war-hero. I was new to Spanish and to Spain at the time, and had just started stumbling my way through a selected poems edition of Lorca, with the aid of a parallel translation. 

People who didn't offer their seat would be multados [2021 addition: "fined"] según la ley.... But with my head filled with Lorca's evocations of the dastardly, unruly, inhuman...(etc etc) Guardia Civil as Franco came to power, I was quite ready to believe that offenders, with legal sanction, could be mutilated.

His final selection was of his 'dear friend of several decades' John Williams, and if what John Williams said was true (and there's no reason to believe otherwise) in his introduction to an encore at a guitar concert I went to in the summer of 1968 at the Guildford Festival...

<autobiographical_note>
I know it was summer. because my big sister (whose floor I slept on) was cramming for end-of-term exams, and any time after 1968 I wouldn't have had to borrow her twin brother(Requiescant ambi in pace)'s sixth form scarf (as  part of my disguise as a student on the shuttle service from Battersea Technical College to Surrey University).
</autobiographical_note>

... I witnessed the beginning of that friendship.  I say more about that concert here.

My pin-ball mind has noticed other things to comment on, but I really must do something. Yesterday was my most ZOOMful day ever – 5 sessions in one day, and a complete wash-out in the Getting-stuff-done Stakes. White heat my foot. When do the children play?

b