Drill baby drill

At the end of last month, an article in New Scientist  announced a research project that, if it goes ahead ( I wonder if USAID is involved in the funding somewhere down the line), will investigate a little-understood...

<understatement>
(ie NOT understood)
</understatement>

... source of oxygen: 

 

Dark oxygen: New deep sea expedition to explore mysterious discovery

The shock discovery that metallic nodules could be producing oxygen in the deep sea made headlines last year – now the team behind it is launching a new project to confirm and explain the findings

Manganese nodues

Marine scientists who made headlines last year with their discovery that deep sea nodules could be producing “dark oxygen” are embarking on a three-year research project to explain their findings.

Amid swirling controversy over their research, project lead Andrew Sweetman at the Scottish Association for Marine Science says he hopes the new scheme will “show once and for all” that metallic lumps of rock are sources of deep sea oxygen and start to explain how the process is working. “We know that it’s going on, and what we need to now do is show it again, and then really start getting at the mechanism,” he says.

Predictably, potential exploiters are queueing up to destroy the millennary bounty before there's a chance to understand it; it stands to reason, given the splendid job we've done turning Africa into a desert.

In a recent BBC radio programme – which I've tried and failed to find again, using BBC Sounds' pitiful indexing tool...

<tangent>
Honestly, it's worse than useless. They pollute the airwaves with repeated claims about their unrivalled back-catalogue, but the chances of finding anything in it are nugatory (excuse my French, it's a bit like nougat). Perhaps it's just a matter of time, and the programme was just too recent to have been properly indexed yet.
</tangent>

 ... –  Daron  Acemoglu...

<parenthesis>
(Nobel Laureate economist, recognized for his contribution to research into the link between automation and inequality)
</parenthesis>

...was talking about AI, and  different possible approaches: the Musk/Trump unregulated expensive and wasteful pro-inequality model ...

<half-remembered-quote>
'If China didn't exist the Silicon Valley elite would have to invent it.' This was said in an interesting comparison between AI-development amd the Manhattan Project..
</half-remembered-quote>

...  amd the more realistic and attainable regulated version.. If I find the programme, expect an update (but don't hold your breath).

L'envoi

This term's concert (HD 2025: mentioned in a recent post)... reminded me of this old post of mime...

<autobiographical_note type="mea maxima culpa">
(back in the halcyon days before Blogger: issued a 'much-improved' update of their indexing tool that made it virtually impossible to use, so that the word-cloud of index tags covers the first nine-odd years of this blog, but not the latest five. I should really do something about this (like hide the whole thing on the grounds of diminishing currency), but feel a strange attachment to the earlier stuff.
</autobiographical_note>

 ...which referred to a television programme about Alan Bennet's Diaries:

<prescript>
The television programme was loosely based on an edition of Private Passions, notable (to my hyper-sensitive – not to say anal – ear) for Michael Berkeley's mis-quoting of the words he had just heard (from The Dream of Gerontius): "Softly and gently, dearly ransom’d soul". He said "dear departed soul".  Come to think of it, it may not be a misquote but a quotation from elsewhere in the text, made to sound like a misquote because of the editing. He surely can’t be that cloth-eared? (Though, come to rethink of it, the angel, in the Celestial Arrivals Lounge, surely wouldn't have addressed Gerontius as departed ; he'd only just got there, for Heaven's sake.)

The collocation “departed soul” is a pretty strong one; and the syllable-count and stress pattern are right ... But it makes dear define soul, whereas in the original – by John Henry Newman –  dearly modifies ransomed.

<autobiographical_note type="hair-splitting">

A lot of ransoming goes on in Christianity. In the second line of the version of “O come O come Emmanuel” that I learned at my mother’s knee (which was never far from Aunty Katy’s, genuflecting away like billy-o,...

<digression>
(a coincidentally – I didn't know until I checked the spelling – but strangely appropriate word,  given one of the possible derivations of the word; as The Phrase Finder says,

...Alternatively, the derivation is said to be from Joseph Billio, the zealous 17th/18th century Puritan preacher. Billio preached at the United Reformed Church in Market Hill, Maldon, Essex, in and around 1696. He was an enthusiastic 'hellfire and damnation' preacher and, given his name and reputation, ought to be a serious contender as the source of the phrase. They are certainly convinced in Maldon, and it must be true - they have a plaque to prove it. 

                    But, as I was saying, genuflecting....)
                    </digression>

...as only knees can [that’s one for the etymologists]) was And ransom captive  Israel. In the  C of E-preferred version I have sung since then, the words of that line are Redeem thy cap/tive Israel. Wha...? Israel's not Emmanuel's captive  – not guilty, yer 'Onner  –  it's Pharaoh's captive. Israel was (in the 15th-century, when the carol surfaced in France) a metaphor for Christendom, and in the words of Elgar's angel, the ransom (the price paid for redemption) was dear (in the expensive sense): the soul may be dear to some people, but the point is that it was dearly ransomed.
</autobiographical_note>

</prescript> 

Anyway, here's the lowdown:

It feels like it's going to be a brilliant occasion, in a beautiful setting. Don't miss it (or the Earlybird offer – you've got just under a week to save a fiver!)

b

 

 

Moreish

 Last July I wrote (here) about Ultra Processed Food (UPF), a concept introduced by Dr Carlos Monteiro at a conference in São Paolo in 2010. My post looked at the difference....

<conspiracy-theorist type="moi?">
(in sub-editorial tone, not in substance)
</conspiracy-theorist>

... between a Medscape article about UPF and the Portuguese article it was a translation of...

<sic>
(and if you wanted me to write '... of which...', see my  earlier posts, passim. In brief there are silly pseudo-grammatical 'rules' that you have to break whichever way you deal with a subordinate clause that contains a prepositional verb: 

• 'a shibboleth about which I have written' ("should" be 'that I have written about' – that in a defining subordinate clause" insists Miss Thistlebottom

<tangent> 
(and Microsoft Word's accursed grammar checker: if you want something really fouled up, use a computer...

<meta_tangent>
I'm reminded of Amol Rajan's description [on this week's Today Podcast] of social media as 'the industrialization of confirmation bias'.
</meta_tangent>

...).
</tangent>

• 'a shibboleth that I have spoken about' (but that leaves a preposition at the end of the sentence, breaking another silly 'rule')   

As I have written before, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. and I've chosen my path to perdition.)

</sic>

In the third of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures one of the guests...

<parenthesis>
(Dr Chris van Tulleken, cited in that July post, presented the three lectures, but he had  a dozen or more guests, and I didn't note all their names.) 

</parenthesis>

... concocted a soft drink, saleable in today's market, which he said was dominated by products that trade on the difference between WANTING and LIKING, starting from the predictable base of water.  The first additive was six teaspoonsful of sugar...

<not_THAT_easy> 
I know I know I know. They use less fattening sweeteners. This was just a demonstration of a principle. Food scientists use cheaper/less wholesome ingredients and mask any undesirable side effects by engineering with food-like additives.
</not_THAT_easy>

... which the guinea-pig (Dr VanT) found unpleasantly sweet. The next additive was citric acid, to counteract the sweetness. Again the doctor found a reason for disliking the improved drink, and again the guest added something else. This went on for several more steps, with the additives getting more and more arcane,  and their net result was a drink that started out with an excessive amount of sugar (an amount that the body was wise enough to reject), but that had that natural feeling of satiety cloaked; the body wanted more and took it before it had a chance to realize that the sweetness was not a healthy amount.

According to the OED, English has had a word for this since the late seventeenth century, but had scarcely any use for it until the late twentieth century, when discoveries – and exploitation of those discoveries – popularized it: moreish. In fact, it was so rarely used that unlike many other words (most? – Discuss) it has retained only one meaning for over three centuries:

(Don't bother clicking on any apparent links; this is just a dumb screenshot.)

And this Ngram from Google Books shows that for the first 290 years of its 3⅓ centuries' life the word was flying below the radar, virtually invisible; then it rocketed up (to use a slightly less inappropriate [but pleasingly aeronautical] metaphor:

While researching this post I was struck (or do I mean stricken?) by a phrase in the Medscape article quoted in my July post  that referred to UPF's 'hyperpalatability and high caloric density'. I suppose 'hyperpalatability' just means 'moreishness'; and 'high caloric density' means 'hidden ability to make you eat more than is good for you'.

<Newspeak_reflection>
The apparatchik that strung together those words (I'm not sure such a person would deserve the term 'writer') was, in Newspeak terms, a 'doubleplusgood duckspeaker'.
</Newspeak_reflection>

At the risk of confirming my nearest and dearests' feeling that I always see the dark side of the Sun, I'm inclined to conclude that there's a red flag here: if you describe something as 'moreish' it's almost certainly UPF.

That's quite enough.

b

Not letting the facts interfere with a good headline

'Well don't say I didn't warn you', as Stephen Hawking might have said. What he actually said was this:

“Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it,” ...

“Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy.”   

         Source 

Last week Apple put their foot in it, in a mistake that, while essentially trivial, had  huge implications for journalism. This extract from a  BBC report of the (ridiculous) event ends 'Apple has made no comment.' But that doesn't mean they did nothing. In my search for traces of the story I was often stymied by 404 errors, and I suspect there has been an attempt at a web-wide clean-up attenpt, thankfully resisted by the BBC

A major journalism body has urged Apple to scrap its new generative AI feature after it created a misleading headline about a high-profile killing in the United States.

The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione.

The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.


Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.

T

Screen grab of AI's Grossest Hour
(not its finest)

The BBC was not a;lone:

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said this week that Apple's AI kerfuffle, which generated a false summary as "Luigi Mangione shoots himself," is further evidence that artificial intelligence cannot reliably produce information for the public. Apple Intelligence, which launched in the UK on December 11, needed less than 48 hours to make the very public mistake. 

"This accident highlights the inability of AI systems to systematically publish quality information, even when it is based on journalistic sources," RSF said. "The probabilistic way in which AI systems operate automatically disqualifies them as a reliable technology for news media that can be used in solutions aimed at the general public."

Because it isn't reliably accurate, RSF said AI shouldn't be allowed to be used for such purposes, and asked Apple to pull the feature from its operating systems.

Source

But an expert speaking last week on BBC News did not fully agree that 'AI shouldn't be allowed to be used for such purposes'. She said that there should always be a human being 'in the loop...

<tangent>
She really did say that, I'm afraid. 'Which loop?' I remember thinking at the time. When there are several people sharing information, and a boss says 'Keep me in the loop', that makes sense. It's still gross managerese, it's still a lamentable cliché, but at least it makes sense. In this case, though, an AI engine is exposed to thousands of reports and millions of possible summaries, and regurgitates a patent lie. Where's the loop in that?
</tangent>

... '

The Byte reported the mistake thus:

"I can see the pressure [HD: on? for? to get?] getting to the market first, but I am surprised that Apple put their name on such [a....

<tangent>
With acute regret I have to concede that the speaker may have meant to omit the article – he was, after all, a 'professor in media policy' (whatever that is).
</tangent>

...?] demonstrably half-baked product [HD's emphasis; I just applaud the phrase]," Petros Iosifidis, a professor in media policy at City University in London, told the BBC. "Yes, potential advantages are there — but the technology is not there yet and there is a real danger of spreading disinformation."

However, this danger is one that's fundamental of [HD:sic...

<tangent> 
'Oh dear', as my grandson might say. This bit of writing really leaves a lot to be despaired. Meanwhile back at that article...
</tangent> 

...generative AI, and not just Apple's flavor of it. AI models routinely hallucinate and make up facts. They have no understanding of language, but instead use statistical predictions to generate cogent-sounding text based on the human writing they've ingested  

 And finally..

 On 22 March 2025 my choir  is joining forces with Bracknell Choral Society. for a performance of The Dream of Gerontius:

<autobiographical-note>
The first time I sang this extraordinary piece my mother (whom saints preserve [and they better had]) was in the audience.
</autobiographical-note>

You've got just over a month (as from publication date) to snap up the Earlybird deal.

b

Unspeakable

My latest discovery in the podiverse is Unspeakable. I first became aware of this last February when the BBC aired (unexplained initially, I think – at least, the announcer didn't say that the next edition would be in more than eight months). On that occasion  MrsK and I reached for the Off button as soon as we heard that it was 'a new gameshow presented by Phil Wang', though she beat me to it (a measure of her antipathy – I'm more tolerant of self-satisfied not-very-funny comedians).

There are four sorts of contributor to Unspeakable:

• Phil Wang, who I suspect may be an acquired taste (though if so I've no interest in acquiring it)
• Susie Dent
• A panel of comics
• The audience (audience participation seems to be de rigueur nowadays)

Each of the panel champions a new word to express a thing or feeling unexpressed in English; they each suggest also a word they could do without. The only contributor who is reliably worth listening to is Susie Dent, though some of the others have their moments. In an early edition (it's been running for over a month, and I didn't make a note of the precise reference...

<inline-ps>
Found it, here. She also pointed that the first 'harlot' was a man
</inline-ps>

...) she explained something that has been puzzling me for years.

<brain-teaser time-served-in-idle-speculation="40-50 years">
Why does bimbo have a masculine ending (-o not -a) when it refers (NB: today) to a sort of woman?

Bimbo is an affectionate diminutive of a word that already has the diminutive suffix -ino: bambino (a haby boy....

<erm-not-sure>
Italian is one of my sketchier language 'conquests' (border skirmish is more like it) and for all I know the one word may serve for any baby.

<aha-but...>
But just this week I heard, on the news, an Italian woman to her bambina. Which points to bambino not being confusingly unisex.
</aha-but...>

The name 'Bambi' looks to me like a back-formation from bambino, coined perhaps by a first- or second-generation Italian-speaking immigrant to the US....

<tangent type="side-swipe, silly">
(If so, what would be the title of an Italian translation of Bambi? Babe? [I warned you it was silly.])

 <meta-tangent type="more-serious">
(But the "first- or second-generation Italian-speaking immigrant to the US" idea doesn't work, as the Disney fim is based on a book by an Austrian, whose only link to Italy that comes immediately to hand (well, to browser, actually) is that in the same year as publishing Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde [the book the film is based on] he also published Der Hund von Florenz [a novel set partly in Florence] – which at least suggests that he may have spoken Italian].

</meta-tangent>

 </tangent>

</erm-not-sure> 

The modern English 'bimbo' refers to a less than intelligent wonan, so why isn't it bimba? 
</brain-teaser>

Susie Dent explained that the original bimbo was male. (I'm paraphrasing there. I doubt if she would have said 'original', as the etymolgy is confused and uncertain, Etymonline suggests that the word started life in the early nineteenth century, referring to a drink.)

But by the end of that century it referred (mostly) to a person:

From 1860-1910, Bimbo as a proper name is frequent: It is the name or part of the name of several race horses, dogs, and monkeys, a circus elephant (perhaps echoing jumbo), and a jester character in a play. It is in the title of a three-act musical farce ("Bimbo of Bombay"), and the name of a popular "knockabout clown"/actor in England and several other stage clowns. Also it appears as a genuine surname, and "The Bimbos" were a popular brother-sister comedy acrobatics team in vaudeville.

A separate bimbo seems to have entered American English c. 1900, via immigration....

By 1919 it began to be used generally of a stupid or ineffectual man, a usage Damon Runyon traced to Philadelphia prize-fight slang.... The word ...turn[s] up in Philadelphia papers' accounts of prizefights (e.g. "Fitzsimmons Is No Bimbo," Evening Public Ledger, May 25, 1920). The male word bimbo continues to appear as a derogatory term for a thug or bully through the 1940s ....

By 1920 the female word with a sense of "floozie" had developed, perhaps boosted by "My Little Bimbo Down on Bamboo Isle," a popular 1920 song in which the singer (imploring the audience not to alert his wife) tells of his shipwreck "on a Fiji-eeji Isle" and his "bimbo down on that bamboo isle... she's got the other bimbos beat a mile."

This Google Ngram shows how 'Bimbo' as a name (the red line) had a clear lead until about 1980, when 'bimbo' (without an initial capital, represented  by the green line) starts to ramp  up steeply, until by 2006 it is in the lead.

L'Envoi

(And I wonder if some wag at Google  decided that the Trumpian – ALL CAPS – version should be represented by an orange line.)

That's enough. This has already been long overdue.

b

Update: 2024.12.18.16:05 – Added <inline-ps />

Fanny MendelsTochter

<explanation>
Perhaps the title of this post needs a bit of explanation. Fanny, the daughter of Abraham  Mendelssohn, was educated musically alongside her brother Felix (four years her junior). But after a few years her father (who was worldly-wise enough to append the name 'Bartholdy' to his name before becoming a pillar of the bourgeoisie) decreed that her destiny was as a mother and home-maker, so he would fritter away no more on her education; she was banished from the music room, except for ornamental purposes.  

But Mendels Sohn (Mendel's son) was Felix, who by a chromosomatic accident 'merited' a musical education; so any of the names usually given her by historians (Fanny Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel.... autcetera), seems to me a little demeaning. I have adopted the Icelandic naming convention (used by several female composers of contemporary music such as Karólina Eiriksdóttir, Selma Björnsdóttir,  Haldis Bjarnadóttir...

<hmmm possibilty-of-update="5">
The Wikipedia list of female composers includes four -dóttirs, all born since 1951. I wonder if this naming convention is a recent phenomenon.
</hmmm>

...) whereby a man is a -sohn and a woman is a -dóttir. This still leaves the woman as a man's chattel, but at least the father has some genetic input. And I've kept her German-ness: Fanny MendelsTochter.

</explanation> 

Abraham wrote to Fanny, (then in her early teens) in 1820:

Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.  

Thus fortified in her resolve to be a composer of significance, she wrote (mainly) songs, rather than anything designed for the concert hall, and this limit to her ambitions was something that she herself embraced (rather pathetically – but what else could she do that wouldn't involve her incarceration as a lunatic?):

I lack the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency. Therefore lieder suit me best, in which, if need be, merely a pretty idea without much potential for development can suffice. 

Letter to Felix, 1835

 By the time she wrote this she had been married for five or six years, and her generous and supportive husband, William Hensel, encouraged her to publish (previously discouraged by her family...

<oops>
Not content with simply discouraging it, they actually involved her in a musicological fraud, allowing her to publish six of her lieder as part of her little brother's opus 8 and 9. This led to an embarrassing mistake made during Felix's tour to Great Britain, when he was invited to Buckingham Palace to accompany Queen Victoria (soprano). She chose one of 'his' lieder – presumably because she found some sisterly fellow feeling in it – and he had to admit that it was his big sister's.

</oops>

...) and sponsored musical soirées that attracted the great and the good from the local musical scene. But she published as 'Fanny Hensel' and is known to history as either Fanny Mendelssohn or Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel.

Prime Video are showing a fascinating program called Fanny: the Other Mendelssohn. It's 2 hours long and I'm working my way through it. If you can, it's worth a look.

That's enough for now

b

 

Third time lucky?

In 2014 I wrote (here) about, among other things, the song sung by Catherine Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 'Ne me quitte pas'. Revisiting that post in 2018 I added an afterthought that was meant to clarify my earlier piece but was unlikely to, because it assumed readers would go to YouTube and listen to the song in question. To make it even less scrutable, my 2018 note used a bit of French teacher's jargon – e-muet. All things considered, it was a pretty duff attempt at communication.

 <prescript>
Those words had been set to a very different tune (Very different?... Discuss) about five years earlier by Jacques Brel. It's hard to say exactly how long before, as the gestation period of  a song is presumably much shorter than that of a sung-through film, so 'about five years' will have to do. Brel's Ne me quitte pas was followed a few years later by Dusty Springfield's If you go away to the same tune. But this time, it seems to me that the English version does preserve the sentiment of the original. [2024 note: I had previously objected to the translation of the film song.]

The line Ne me quitte pas starts out, uncomfortably for the translator, with two unstressed syllables. So the two obvious options are 'Never go away' (which is pathetic) and 'Don't you go away', which is bathetic (it sounds as though it should be followed by something like '...you little minx'). The Parapluies de Cherbourg song avoids the problem by splitting the unstressed words over two lines; even then, I don't think the underlay (as we say in the trade – the way the words fit the tune) would get a very high mark in a Grade V Theory exam. The amour's stress is wrong, and the ne is left out on a limb.

<2018_PS ref="YouTube clip">
The guilty setting is from 1'45" to 1'52", and I missed  – when first writing – another serious deficiency. I gave only two problems: the stress on amour and the isolation of ne at the end of a line. I missed a third: the stress on the e-muet at the end of quitte.
</2012_PS>

Anyway 'If you go away' works for me in the Jacques Brel song.
</prescript>

Here's a third attempt.

The words Catherine Deneuve sings (to the tune known to us impoverished Anglophones as 'I will wait for you') are

Mais mon a-mour ne

Me quitt-e pas

<misericord>
(I should explain the tag misericord, for non-students of monastic choir stalls furniture. There is, surprisingly, a website that tells you all about misericords if you've got time to kill. But I'll save you the bother of doing your own research. A misericord was a sticking out bit attached to the bottom of a hinged seat in choir stalls. It allowed a monk singing Prime at some ungodly...

<parenthesis>
Perhaps not le mot juste 
</parenthesis> 

... hour to take the weight off his feet – thus affording misericordia.   An English version of that French lyric is here. The equivalent lines are sung from 0'37" to 0'46".

I have used this device, which takes pity on the user's infirmity in some physical respect, as a metaphor for an explanation that takes pity on a reader's presumed ignorance.

</misericord>

She stresses the first syllable of amour, which (like all French polysyllables is stressed, in spoken French, on the last); this leaves the ne (not complete in meaning until it gets its pas, so not meriting stress) in an automatically stressed position at the end of a line.

We come now to the last sentence of my 2018 PS, and the central word in it, e-muet. I don't know whether French teachers today use the word 'e-muet' but mine did. 

<autobiographical-note>
He – Cedric Baring-Gould...

<meta-autobiographical-note>
[the reason, incidentally, for my choice of  college, as a former pupil of his had been the first in my school to go to Cambridge]
</meta-autobiographical-note>

... – also used a huge Grundig reel-to-reel magnétophone. He schlepped this multi-kilo apparatus, day in day out, from classroom to classroom, realizing  – unusually for the time – the importance, in modern language teaching, of giving learners the actual sounds of native speakers. Today's MFL (modern foreign language) teachers have recourse to YouTube for examples from real-life foreign speakers, thus avoiding curvature of the spine; not so for poor old Cedric.)

</autobiographical-note>

And  another thing:

<autobiographical-note
In the many Berkshire Youth Choir concerts I attended during the early Noughties my least-favourite (and therefore seemingly most common) piece was Gwyn Arch's setting of The Sound of Silence.

<brickbat-dodging>
That's not BYC in the clip, I hasten to add. But it's the Gwyn Arch setting.
</brickbat-dodging>

Where Paul Simon has 'Neath the halo of a-a streetlamp' Gwyn Arch has 'Neath the halo of a streeeetlamp'. And while a solo voice can just about get away with that 'a-a' it seems to me that a few dozen voices singing streeeetlamp'. sound plain ridiculous.
</autobiographical-note

'Up up my friend and quit your blog

Or surely you'll grow double' 

as Wossname put it. That's enough.

b

All about that base

The recent kerfuffle about the Chagos Islands was covered in detail by the Independent. These opening paragraphs give a flavour of the piece:

An extraordinary blame game has erupted dragging in Liz Truss and James Cleverly following Sir Keir Starmer’s shock decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

The deal is meant to secure the future of a secretive military base on the island of Diego Garcia, but it has left the UK without sovereign territorial control over a piece of land that is crucial to Western security in the Indian Ocean. The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia, but this latest development has led to fears that China could achieve its goal of setting up bases on the Chagos Islands.

The sudden announcement was rapidly followed by a furious tweet from Tory leadership contender James Cleverly calling the Labour government “weak, weak, weak”. However, it quickly emerged that the talks to hand over the islands were instigated by Mr Cleverly himself before being halted by his successor as foreign secretary David Cameron.

This piece reminded ...

<inline-ps>
sic for heaven's sake., does nobody proof-read this stuff?
</inline-ps>

 ...of a post I wrote iin the early days of this blog, (more than eleven years ago) about how the word 'plagiarist' was derived from the Latin plagiarius.

<prescript>
'A plague/pox on...' was a popular curse in Shakespeare's time. Some time later (I have a feeling I first met it in Regency Buck [ – in my early teens I was led astray by the literary tastes of my older sister] a cuss-word with similar force was 'Zounds' (which I originally mentally misvocalized to rhyme with 'sounds'). It is derived by attrition from the expression used by Chaucer's Pardoner: By Goddes Wounds; but by the time the Regency Buck got hold of it any explicit reference to God, or even the wounds of Christ...

<2024-addition>
(one in each hand and foot, and one in his side [whence unda fluxit et sanguine, as singers of Mozart's sublime setting of Ave Verum Corpus may remember]). There were many others, whose relevance will become apparent: read on.
<2024-addition>

 

... had been ironed out:        'S 'ounds.  

In the 1970s, the UK committed the act of a plagiarius (keep up...a kidnapper or underhand dealer) in doing the Chagossians out of their birthright so that the Americans could build an airbase within easy range of the Soviet Union). And in 2010 the UK government (the smylere with the knyf under the cloke) established a marine conservation area in the archipelago (butter wouldn't melt...) which – with its no fishing law – would (gosh, fancy that) prevent the islanders from returning.

Diego García: an airstrip surround by a marine conservation area

 

When that news broke in 2010 I wondered about the name of the archipelago. The colonizing powers (I'm thinking chiefly of Spain and Portugal, who had the appropriate religious background) were wont to name islands with religious references: Trinidad or Dominica , for example, the latter named after the Lord's Day– when Columbus 'discovered' it. Even El Niño refers to a particular Niño, whose official birthday is celebrated at the time of that meteorological phenomenon off the coast of the Spanish-speaking Chile.

So, feverishly, I supposed that the Chagos Archipelago must have five islands (one for each hand – or wrist if the preacher was of the hell-fire persuasion – one for each foot, and one for the lance in the side). The atlas disproved this, so I moved on to a more numerous source of wounds: the scourging would have left hundreds of  marks.  But the fever of folk etymology passed: Goddes Wounds were not chagos but chagas. Another fine mess a little learning had gotten me into!
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This old post came to mind when the long-overdue return of the Chagossians' birthright (greeted by some unconvincing, not to say disingenuous, transparently self-serving, and plain silly) protests from Tory hopefuls.

When I first heard about the settlement with Mauritius – particularly the 99 year lease on Diego García – I thought "Hmm... That old "99 year lease"' trick didn''t turn out so well with Hong Kong, did it?' But let's face it: the chances of humanity surviving into the 22nd  century aren't great one way or another (war, pestilence, meteor-strike etc [ably assisted by climate change], and besides by 2223 most if not all of the Chagos Islands will be under water anyway; according to the Foundation for Environment, Climate and Technology:

There is considerable interest in the long-term consequences of global warming on sea level, both globally and at the regional or local level. The current consensus is that global mean sea level has risen at a rate of about 2 mm yr-1 during the 20th century, and at about 3.2 mm yr-1 over the last 20 years, but there is also large variability in the magnitude at regional scales. In the Indian Ocean, in particular, recent studies have highlighted the large degree of spatial variability in sea level. According to the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current estimates project a sea level rise of 0.5 to 1.2 meters by 2100, with the possibility of several more meters beyond.

Rising sea levels are of particular relevance to low lying coastal areas of the world, including the coral atolls and islands of the world’s tropical oceans. In this context, the coral atoll islands of the Chagos Archipelago are vulnerable, although they lie close to an area of the Indian Ocean where studies have suggested that recent sea-level rise may have been small. The island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is a critical logistics hub for U.S. and British forces in the Middle East. Due to its exposure to the extreme weather in the Indian Ocean, changing temperatures and increasing rainfall, Diego Garcia faces the threat of coastal erosion and flooding. The highest point above sea-level is 22 feet, but the island’s mean height above sea-level is 4 feet. Diego Garcia is threatened by the effects of climate change because its average height above sea level is just over one meter. A sea-level rise of a several feet would force the US military to undertake a costly and difficult military relocation process. 

Source

That's enough for today; I hope the Chagossians now shivering in Crawley finally get Mauritius (an improbable lattter-day colomial power) to re-home them – preferably somewhere where they're allowed to fish.

b

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