A picture paints a thou...

No it doesn't. 

<parenthesis>
The saying 'A picture is worth a thousand words' started to make an impression on Google Books – anachronistically, but you know what I mean – towards the end of the nineteenth century, but it really took off in the twentieth:

The value of a picture
(and the meaningless arriviste)

 

It's a useful rule of thumb for any writer:  showing is much more effective than telling. 

But this century, mercifully – for the most part – since I hung up my pen (professionally, that is; I still knock out the odd word), a meaningless variant has reared its ugly head. If I were writing for a living now I fear I would repeatedly be 'reminded' that 'a picture paints a thousand words'.
</parenthesis>

Composers of music have a tool that does the same sort of job: word painting. Choral singers are constantly remined of this. I have written many times about this. One of my favourite examples of this comes in Fauré's setting of Libera me: Libera me... in die illa tremenda ... quando coeli movendi sunt... et terra, dum veneris judicare saeculum ("spare me ...on that terrible day... when the heavens move... and the earth [too ...

<word-painting_note>
It's the music that underlines this addition: Quando coeli movendi sunt (reaching the tonic, after a repeat)...

<human-reaction>
A clap or two of thunder never hurt anyone.
</human-reaction>

]...et terra...(plunging down a seventh –  not quite an octave)

<human-reaction>
Oo-er. Feels more like an earthquake. Maybe I should be taking this more seriously
</human-reaction>

</word-painting_note>

]... It's the music that underlines this implied too.

<word-painting_note>

...dum veneris... (Now it's a full octave.)

<human-reaction>
!!!

<language-teaching-note>
English is unique in my (limited – the few languages I have studied in any detail are all Indo-European) experience in that it treats verbs in this sort of future as being in the present tense. But the future here is important; we make this sort of point in English by saying something like 'And it's a matter of when rather than if'. The octave drop makes it clear that this coming is inevitable.

<forthcoming-concert>
Coincidentally, I was impressed during a rehearsal for A night at the movies (see below) by Stephen Sondheim's exploiting of this in the words to America, which I have previously mistakenly 'corrected' in my memory to 'I think I'll go back to San Juan'. Sondheim needed to maintain the rhythm of da-da-da-'go back...'; so the singer says, in her Puerto Rican accent, 'When I will go back to San Juan...'. Brilliant.
</forthcoming-concert>

</language-teaching-note> 

</human-reaction>

</word-painting_note>

.... In an earlier post...

<deja-lu>

Longtime readers may get a feeling of having read this before. They have; but I wrote this before fully realizing how useful these pseudocode chunks are. So I've tried again.
</deja-lu>

...I concluded that an octave represented the distance from heaven to earth . But during our recent performance of Beethoven's Mass in C, with an orchestra, I noticed a bit of word painting that made me revise this view.  In the Credo, after the words descendit de coelis ("he came down from heaven") there are a few instrumental bars before the soloists take over from the choir. And just before the words et incarnatus est ("he was made flesh") a bassoon solo steps down two octaves:

The two octave plunge

So the number of octaves isn't relevant. The descent is represented by a number of octaves (or, if acoustics is your Thing, division of the frequency by 2 or 4 or...).

Returning to our forthcoming concert, a choral suite based on songs from West Side Story...

<forthcoming concert>
A night at the movies features vocal classics (some choral, like 'O Fortuna'...

 

 

<tangent>

from Carmina Carmina .../Let's Carl the whole thing Orff

(not my joke, but a good one)

</tangent>

 

...as used in many a horror film, some less formal like 'Siddown you're rockin' the boat': 

 

) 

</forthcoming concert>

... is the centrepiece. And West Side Story is my preferred source of singers' mnemonics...

<singers-device>

To make sight-reading less daunting, a singer often remembers intervals with  reference to particular songs. A perfect fifth, for example, is 'Ba-ba black sheep'. That's a common one. But each singer will have their own list. For me, a minor seventh is Andy Williams's 'I'm a home-loving man'. (Very fond of minor sevenths, Mr Williams; 'Now solitaire's the only game  for me', etc.)
</singers-device>

for the tritone 'bane of a child violinist's life', as I have said elsewhere:

<pre-script>
(bane of a child violinist's life, especially in the key of Bb if memory serves*, not that I stuck at it for more than a year or two; couldn't stand the noise) 

<footnote repositioning-rationale="for later post"> 

*  Close, but no cigar. I was thinking of the key of F major  (which involves a tritone stretch on the A string. (It all comes flooding back: An inch boy, an inch. Don't you know what an INCH looks like? My teacher, a dreadful old woman, was a fan of neither Galileo ... 

<clarification>  

(the father, that is, though doubtlesss the son "helped" with his father‘s experiments on string lengths and pitch) 

</clarification>

...nor Pythagoras.)

<eppur-si-muove date="2026">
Come to think of it though,  Bb would probably work as an example, as I seem to remember it involves a similar stretch. But F major was the one that came to mind – as it was my first exposure to the dreaded tritone.
</eppur-si-muove> 

</footnote>  

</pre-script>

But my thoughts about tritones in West Side Story will have to wait for an update. There's stuff to do in the garden.

b

PS

Don't miss the concert on 10 June.

Changing the record

The Dickswinger-in-Chief (DiC – sorry, I can't take this clown seriously) has had the crass mixture of temerity and effrontery to usurp the memorial to Jacqui Onassis's first husband and rename it the Trump-Kennedy Memorial Center. 

<up-to-a-point>
Well, this is what the Center's website calls it. The wording on the building tells a different story:

The shadows (of the scaffolding?) reduce the punchiness of this picture,
but you'll get a (nasty) taste of the braggadoccio and 
bare-facedness of the DiC's coup.~ the second 'the' sticks out ;ike an prange thumb

</up-to-a-point>

I do hope someone sues – for a billion or two, perhaps. There must be a Kennedy or two left  who resents this usurpation? (Not Bobby of course; he's drunk the Kool Aid.) Has the Incredible Orange Hulk no shame? (Rhetorical question: Of course not.) 

 I have been aware for a few weeks now of the DiC assault on Culture, mostly informed by The Rest Is Politics (US). But I've been waiting for a more measured critique (Anthony Scaramucci –  'The Mooch' to us insiders [and indeed to anyone else] – is amusingly vituperative, but I wouldn't call his views measured.)

A recent episode (13 February) of the Guardian's Politics Weekly America provided the well-researched nudge I was waiting for.

Also from the Guardian (but not that podcast):

Trump announced a two-year closure of the Kennedy Center, citing construction needs to make the “finest performing arts facility of its kind, anywhere in the world”.

Writing on Truth Social on Sunday evening, Trump added that the center’s closure will pave way for a “new and spectacular entertainment complex”. 

<parenthesis>
(The DiC's 2-year moratorium is presumably a face-saving exercise – giving the adminstrators a chance to put together a programme of artists who don't mind supporting white supremacist homophobes ...

<tangent> 
These cancellations are a two-way street (though there are dozens more who pull out than are told their services are not wanted) The Wikipedia list  of cancellations includes the withdrawal of an invitation to the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C.
</tangent> 

...in a monument to 'Murrican tastelessness. Wikipedia's list of those who pulled out before the closure later this year stand at 40 [and counting?])
</parenthesis>

You have been warned. 

But the idea of an autocrat slapping his (a female perp doesn't spring to mind) name on anything that... doesn't move isn't new. The ICC T20 World Cup final last Sunday was played in the Narendra Modi Stadium in  Ahmedabad. And the tradition of autocrats eponymizing (don't bother looking this one up; it's all my own work... 

<parenthesis>
[at least, I thought it was. A few dictionaries recognize it.]
</parenthesis>

...) willy-nilly goes back at least as far as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. (I imagine Mausolus helped draw up the plans.) And only a few years later Alexander named his new capital Alexandria. Autocrats name things after themselves; they always have done, and they always will do. (Come to think of it, there's a red flag here: if a ruler starts eponymizing,  stand by to protect your constitution.)

That's all she wrote.

b

Donning my 'haubregon de fer'

Last Saturday I joined 157 other singers ...

<archivists-note nitpicking="Missing apostrophe explained>
(I was the 158th)
</archivists-note>

...to sing Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man. I have sung this piece three times in various formats...

<parenthesis>

• The whole piece, imam and all
• The concert suite – just the choral settings of the traditional movements of the Mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei (more accessible for both singers and audience, but omitting the song L'homme armé, which seems to me to be rather the point)
• Last Saturday's version  (much the most successful). The score for the concert suite asks the pianist to simulate a marching drum by tapping the piano with their bass hand – a feat of leftidigitation; but we had a percussionist with full drum kit. There was also a trumpeter, marked by the composer as 'optional' (though I'd rather have said 'crucial' –  especially her spine-tingling Last Post).

</parenthesis>

...  and every time I sing it I see the note in the score, which says it was commissioned by the Royal Armouries to mark their move. This note invariably triggers a memory of the visit to the Royal Armouries that led to this post back in November 2012.

The 2000 recording of the London Philharmonic with the National Youth Choir of Great Britain pronounces The first L'homme in the opening line...

<parenthesis>
(L'homme, L'homme, l'homme armé)
</parenthesis>

... ['lɔmɛ].

<parenthesis>
(You must excuse my use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Regular readers will know how I feel about 'sounds like' transcriptions. If you want to understand the depths of my loathing, click on IPA in the word cloud on the right. For the purposes of reading on, the funny thing that looks a bit like a reversed 3 represents an open e)
</parenthesis>

... rather than a schwa – as one would expect in modern French.

This sound is historically likely, though not to my liking – and not preferred by Saturday's MD George de Voil. The song L'homme armé was a popular French medieval French song:

L'homme armé
from the
Mellon Chansonnier
(late 15th cent.)

And generally, in Romance languages, (ones derived from Latin) nouns are derived from the accusative (linguists prefer the term 'objective', as in Vulgar Latin a generalized object noun was added to a <verb + preposition> pair,  rather than following a verb with a declined noun (one with case endings: CREDO IN UNUM DEUM rather than CREDO UNO DEO). Romance Philologists (a group of which I was a fully paid-up member 50 years ago, though I'm still an enthusiatic amateur) use the convention CAPITALS+(last-letter-of-accusative) to give Vulgar Latin spellings: for example HOMINE(M) [='man']; giving homme. This early post says more about this convention in some real-world cases..

Over the years, various bits of original words were eroded and/or changed in some way –  depending on the contexts they were used in; and the open e of the original HOMINE(M) evolved into the schwa of the modern French homme.

 <inline-ps>

The illustration I used here is potentially misleading, as it suggests that it represents the tune used by Karl Jenkins (which is true of the first three lines and the fifth. But this analysis from the Early Music Muse website ...

L’homme armé – The armed man – first appeared in the 1450s or ’60s and was a popular melody for two and a half centuries. ...

Antoine Busnois was a singer in the Burgundian court of Duke Charles the Bold, as was Robert Morton. One of these two singers composed a quodlibet, a song which combines elements of other songs in counterpoint. This particular quodlibet, Il sera pour vous, was based on L’homme armé. Translated, the words are:

It will be fought for you
against the Turk, Master Simon,
certainly it will be,
and the axe will beat him.

...

These words are sung while the tenor sings:

The man, the man, the armed man,
beware of the armed man.
Everywhere is the cry:
Into battle
With an iron breastplate.

..seems to me to change the meaning. In the version we sang, the armed man is someone who should be regarded with suspicion (doibt on doubter); he might be a goodie or a baddie. In this version there's no question: Kill him. (And I've no idea where that 'breastplate' came from; an haubregon  de fer is just chain mail, like a hauberk, but without arms (according to this website).

<tangent>
Strikes me as something of a false economy, but what do I know about armed combat? Maybe that's  what  'unarmed co...' too silly to finish.
</tangent> 

Whatever the meaning, à l'attaque (or rather – at least, in this manuscript – à l'assault) is a much more likely candidate for the ringed words in the illustration than que chascun se viegne armer (the words given in the Wikipedia article).

This strikes me as a flaw in the (generally admirable) Wikipedia model. The person writing, however well-intentioned, is always a potential prey to  the 'needs citation' rubric (which governs  anyone writing for Wikipedia), so may end up providing examples of limited relevance just because they are easy to cite. 

</inline-ps>

So the e was open in say 100 CE, and it was schwa  by say 1850 CE....

<apologia-pro-indolentia-sua excuse="laziness">
These guesses are completely off the top of my head; during my studies I avoided a paper called The History of  French because there was too much conflicting data to wade through, and a tedious lecturer who had written the one, overlong, set book.
<apologia-pro-indolentia-sua>

...in medieval France, when the song first appeared, the odds are that it was fairly open.

<objection>
But what about the -MI-? That's why I said 'various bits of original words were eroded and/or changed in some way'. Unstressed syllables are often the frst things to go; DOMINA(M), for example, gave Spanish doña (where the ñ is a sign of the two nasal consonants left after the -MI- disappeared; it went one step further in Portuguese dona).

<meta-objection>
Only one? Spelling is only part of the story. The final a was reduced, becoming schwa.

<autobiographical-note>
In my time as a technical writer I worked on some software that had the internal  codename de Gama (pronounced with a schwa). I had come to the project too late to correct this to da Gama. See what I have to suffer?
</autobiographical-note>

</meta-objection>

This post says more about this sort of erosion, including a case involving an unstressed -MI- (in an inscription on a ring unearthed [unashed?]  at Pompeii).
</objection>

But what about that haubregon de fer? (This has gone on too long already. The haubregon will have to wait for an update, if I ever get a round tuit. Words for our next concert won't learn themselves.

)

b

Update: 2026.02.27.12:50 – Added <inline-ps />

Update: 2026.03.02.21:55 – Added PS.

PS
Afterthought: this is largely (entirely?) inconseqential so if this sort of thing (implied by the tag-pair <autobiographical-note>...</autobiographical-note>) doesn't appeal, you can skip this bit.

 <autobiographical-note>
To end our forthcoming concert we are singing Hansel and Gretel's evening prayer, which reminded me of this one, which I learned in the mid-50s, at St Scholastica's Kindergarten:

As I lay me down to sleep

Pray the Lord my soul to keep.

Four corners to my bed,

Four angels round my head.

One to  watch and one to pray

And two to keep me safe alway. 

<tangent>
I'm not sure about the last word. My memory may have been influenced by an early twitch of my characteristic red pen, deleting a final s to repair the rhyme.
</tangent>

FOUR angels – that strikes me as plenty to guarantee a safe night's sleep.  But Hansel and Gretel aren't satisfied with so few. And they want not just twice as many; not even three times as many: 3½ times as many: vierzehn Engel.

To add to my reaction against such profligacy, the basses' underlay (the way words fit the notes) omits two of them. So while the higher sopranos itemize the angels...

2 round their head; 2 by their feet; 2 to the right; 2 to the left; 2 to tuck me in; 2 to wake me;

2 to lead me to Heavenly paradise

<parenthesis>
Those last 2 are analogous to the last 2 in my 4-year-old's version. So the comparative values are effectively 12 vs 2; Hansel and Gretel's angel-count is 6 times as many as St Scholastica's.
</parenthesis>

...the basses (together with all the other voices apart from the S1s) enumerate only 12 of the 14. It's a lovely setting, but I can't help feeling the angel-count is a bit excessive.
</autobiographical-note>

Ex unibus plurum - gumbo diplomacy

 It's all very tiresome. The one  who 'loves uneducated people'...

<tangent>
Wisely he doesn't go on to say '...because they're easiest to fool into voting for me.'
</tangent>

...can be expected to behave like a spoilt toddler, but Rubio...

<tangent>
(who is virtually an acrostic for Rules-Based International Order)
</tangent>

... is a disgrace. As for Vance, he richly deserves the oblivion for which he's being so patently groomed. He confirm's archy the cockroach's observation that when politicians do get an idea they usually get it wrong....

<tangent>
'Needs citation', as our Jimmy would say. The wording is approximate. He (I think he was a he; he was certainly a foil for mehitabel, who often referred to herself as the old dame) said it in archy's life of mehitabel.
</tangent>

The one good thing about the reality TV show in Venezuela... 

<tangent>
(Natalie Haynes, a regular but occasional guest on Strong Message Here, recently observed that when Trump said 'It was literally like watching a TV show' her automatic 'Literally'-Abuse Antennae sprang  into action – only for her to realize that this use of 'literally' was unimpeachable...

<tangent ip="mine not hers"> 

(possibly a first for this president, who does so much else that is impeachable) 

</tangent> 

</tangent>

...is that it has thrown light on my feeling that American English is peppered with more accurate pronunciation of some foreign names, while  at the same time harbouring other foreign names that are less accurate.

It is a sort of linguistic Monroe Doctrine.

<parenthesis>
(The early nineteenth century, largely defensive, statement of a hemispheric 'sphere of inluence'. It was saying, in  the teeth of European powers wielding colonial (extractive, when not plain exploitative) might in Africa and Asia, 'Hands off anything in the Western Hemisphere; it's nothing to do with you and everything to do with us [you heard: US]'

Later it was Roosevelt that made it offensive (changing from  'Hands off' to 'We can do what we want', and Trump that made it OFFENSIVE ('We can do whatever the hell we want and anyway my daddy's a policeman.')

My understanding of the Monroe Doctrine is based on a Post-Graduate Diploma in Latin American Studies (Best Before End May 1975), and is sketchy. You can read more about the Monroe Doctrine and its Corollaries here (Wikipedia) or for more detail (but less actuality) try here – of which this Introduction gives a taste:

 

 

 

</parenthesis>

Foreign languages spoken in the Western hemisphere (and also in Europe, for obvious historical reasons) get a sensitive treatment in American English, 'Venezuela' gets an /s/ where BE has a /z/. But foreign languages spoken outside the Western hemisphere get a less sympathetic treatment: /ɑjræk/ ('Iraq') springs to mind.

I had in mind a reaction to the National Security Strategy, but that will have to wait for an update. Tempus as my maths teacher used to say, 'has fugitted'.

b

PS

If having a sing is on your list of resolutions, give this a go:

Of course, not singing is an option, but singing spots are about to sell out, and I wouldn't  want to disappoint.

A Quantum of Menace

I've been thinking about quantum computers (in a very limited way – one that doesn't involve understanding either them or quantum physics).

<background>
The tricky thing about quantum mechanics, as exploited in quantum computing, is this thing called superposition. (I know: Mind the boggles.) A bit, in a quantum computer (a qubit), is like Schrödinger's cat; but instead of being both dead and alive it is both 0 and 1. This is all very well, but the implications for binary arithmetic are enormous. An 8-bit byte (yes, I used to think that was the only size, but Computer says No) has 64 values simultaneously. This makes quantum computers faster than ... any comparator you can think of. Here's what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

Quantum computers can be viewed as sampling from quantum systems that evolve in ways that may be described as operating on an enormous number of possibilities simultaneously, though still subject to strict computational constraints. By contrast, ordinary ("classical") computers operate according to deterministic rules. (A classical computer can, in principle, be replicated by a classical mechanical device, with only a simple multiple of time cost. On the other hand (it is believed), a quantum computer would require exponentially more time and energy to be simulated classically.) It is widely believed that a quantum computer could perform some calculations exponentially faster than any classical computer. For example, a large-scale quantum computer could break some widely used public-key cryptographic schemes...

<tangent partial="a bit of that link, but there's much more">
As of 2025, quantum computers lack the processing power to break widely used cryptographic algorithms... however, because of the length of time required for migration to quantum-safe cryptography, cryptographers are already designing new algorithms to prepare for Y2Q or Q-Day, the day when current algorithms will be vulnerable to quantum computing attacks. Mosca's theorem ...

<meta-tangent partial="as aforesaid">
In the field of cryptography, Mosca's theorem addresses the question of how soon an organization needs to act in order to protect its data from the threat of quantum computers. A quantum computer, once developed, would have the capacity to break the types of cryptography that have been widely used throughout the world, such as RSA. Although this is a known risk, no one knows exactly when a quantum computer will be created. Mosca's theorem provides a risk assessment framework... that can help organizations identify how quickly they need to start migrating to new methods of quantum-safe cryptography. 
</meta-tangent>

...provides the risk analysis framework that helps organizations identify how quickly they need to start migrating.
</tangent> 

...and aid physicists in performing physical simulations. However, current hardware implementations of quantum computation are largely experimental and only suitable for specialized tasks

</background>

This reminds me of the Y2K problem, in that it is a technical problem with enormous ramifications that can and will (probably) be fixed at a cost of squillions of person-hours and forgotten almost immediately and/or pooh-poohed by everyone outside the IT industry – inspiring this early rant:

<rant flame="low-mid">
Which reminds me of all the smart a*s (=ALECS, of course) who say things like "Remember all that Millennium Bug nonsense. The IT sales people used it as an excuse to sell a load of new kit. And what happened? Nothing! Not a thing, except that we all have to fill in 4-digit dates. I mean who needs to scroll down through dozens of 21st century dates when they're opening a new bank account, say?.... Er... maybe that's not the best of examples."

Well no, you bozo, I think. Nothing happened, not a thing, because for the last two or three years of the 20th century IT engineers were busy making sure it didn't.
</rant>

So anyway, although (as all the conditional language that you see in that article implies) quantum computing is not an everyday reality yet, when it is it will make traditional 'security' insecure: unless the industry has done a lot of preparation, public key encription (the jiggery pokery that makes it safe to store a credit card at a website) will be easily broken.

L'envoi

In May 2020, as the Johnson shower...I mean HMG, was starting to take Covid seriously (to the extent that 'taking seriously' was possible, given the juvenile lead) I wrote this. 

<prescript type="partial">
The post the other morning brought the music for next term's offering ...

<parenthesis>
(if that's the mot juste – as there is no offeree, "so shaken as we are, so wan with care" as wossname put it). We'll be having virtual rehearsals. So individual choir members will hear themselves, but there won't be an audience. 
</parenthesis> 

And the main piece for our Zoom rehearsals was the same mass. So my introduction to SATB choral singing...

<autobiographical_note>
There had been "the sixth form choir", but that was just a (transparent?) ruse to flesh out our UCCA forms ("UCCA" being the fore-runner of UCAS) in the Lower VIth. Our repertoire extended to "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" set for two parts, in Latin  (it was a Catholic school after all) For years this was a party piece for me and my brother.

Before that there had been a primary school choir (back before the philistines rewrote the curriculum), and a Gang Show (from which I can still see the Banda'd ...

<parenthesis>
A Banda was a sort of pre-Xerox duplicating system (Wikipedia calls it a spirit duplicator), involving smudges and a strong whiff of meths. It's a wonder to me that there was not a rash of Banda-sniffing among school children (perhaps there was though; we had a very sheltered childhood)
</parenthesis>

... copies, complete with a baffling typo at the end of "Steamboat Bill". The widow's words addressed to her children should have been "bless each honey lamb"; but our copies said "bless each honey bole" a mistake that my memory can't shake whenever I think of the tune. (We had no idea what a "bole" was at the time, but much of the socio-historic environment was foreign to us anyway: What was a steamboat?, what did "Crêpe on every steamboat" signify? What was a "honey lamb" and did it differ in any meaningful way from a "honey bole"?

</autobiographical_note>

... was Beethoven's Mass in C. And I can't wait to hear what our MD makes of the first movement's less than decisive tempo marking. But what do I know? Far from indecisive it might just be extremely persnickety (and if I was feeling stronger I'd've stuck to my guns when the Autocorrect monster told me to break that last word up with an S). 
<prescript>

"Andante, but moving on a bit, in fact fairly vivace, come to think of it almost Allegretto. But don't overdo it."

This is the piece my choir will be singing next term; but for now what's uppermost in my mind is this:

Be there or be elsewhere.

b

Update: 2026.01.09.21:50 – Added PS

PS Two points:

• Quantum stuff is more tricky than you can imagine, even if as a starting point you assume that everything you know is wrong. This recent podcast (well it was a plain old programme when I heard it, but now it's a podcast) gives you an idea.
  
  My introductory paragraph on quantum computing leaves much to be despaired. I addressed with reason (a false friend if ever there was one in the quantum world) the subject of the many-valuedness of the qubit, without considering the role of quantum entanglement (which involves particles knowing about each other however distant from each other they may be. I KNOW. Don't ask.)  There's much more to it than I suggested. But rather than try (vainly) to repair what I wrote, I'm leaving it as a historical document.
  
  
• I concentrated on one aspect of the crimes made possible by quantum computing; financial security will be a thing of the past, until the financial world catches up. In the meantime, all those saved credit-card details will be a sitting duck.
  
  But a recent podcast from the Goalhanger stables, The Rest is Classified, discusses other – possibly more consequential – implications concerning a differenr sort of security...
  

  <tangent>
  A bit of background on that podcast:
  
  

  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  </tangent> 

  ...There are gigabytes of encrypted messages collected by national spy agencies, just waiting for quantum decryption. When that becomes possible, the revelations will make several ententes far from cordiales.

Harking back

 

I've been harking back...

<tangent>
(an interesting expression that I've only recently found out about, from this Etymonline entry:

The reason for my investigation was that I heard  someone saying 'harkening back' and thought 'Hang on, what's it go to do with harkening? Surely it's a different sort of hark – no idea what sort though.' More of this quandary anon – but I'd better finish my sentence or people may think I've lost it (as if that ship hadn't already sailed).

</tangent>

...to a successful prediction I made here. (To be precise, that 2021 post implied the possibility of an error I had warned against in a letter to The Times the year before,  about a 'sounds-like' pronunciation aid they had published in an article about Kamala Harris:

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...

<postscript date="2025">
(Viz: Harris herself and the journalist, not a Times hack but the American writer of a syndicated article)

 <tangent>
Heavy users of the Internet may have come across the term RSS feed, whose derivation is explained in this Merriam-Webster note: 

During my professional life I only ever met 'Really Simple Syndication'. (Software engineers were fond of such demotic explanations; another was PGP – 'Pretty Good Privacy'.)
</tangent>

</postscript> 

...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...

...). Ever since (and my memory for mispronunciations is positively elephantine)  I have been noting speakers of British English falling into this trap; they have, presumably, read this article, or perhaps some other article (maybe the BBC reporting Harris's guidance, and thus misguiding speakers of BE). The latest two are Clive Myrie (whose introduction to Mastermind must surely qualify for the "Self-important Pillock of the Year" award, if only there was one)...

<tangent>
(and on the subject of Clive Myrie, who  wrote that 'your BBC' nonsense, and how can he bring himself to deliver it? 'We've got you covered...You think you're winning...'. Who is this shapeshifting  you?)
</tangent>

...and Alexander Armstrong (though that was on a repeat of Pointless, so he may have learnt the error of his ways by now). 

'Hark back' has a long history, during which it has been more common than 'harken back' by varying factors – about 3:1 in 2022,  about 40:1 some 100 years before,  and usually somewhere between those extremes

 

But in the last about ten years 'harken back' seems to have got (a lamentable [in my view]) new lease of life. (This detailed snapshot relating to the last few years gives a gentler slope to the change, as the x-axis (or do I mean y?) is so magnified. But in the last 10-odd years 'harken back' has risen from 25% ( that's ¼ in old money)  as common as 'hark back' to 37% (well over ⅓). I wonder why (it being an abomination, as I've said)

My initial feeling (well trained by Archie – my grandfather, an old presbyterian dominie with the strictest of views about the language) was that the Americans were the guilty parties. But look at these Ngrams:

From  38%  up to 59% over the 22 years from 2000 to 2022 (as recent as the Google Ngram Viewer gets) – about 1% per year (less if you compound it). This is a steady small increase.

Meanwhile, in BE:

 

From 0.05% up to 18% – a much steeper climb, almost the same in absolute numbers, but starting from a much lower base; speakers of BE, seeing a bandwagon, have jumped on it.

Enough already.

PS

While we're on the subject of revisited predictions, I'm not saying 'I told you so' (because I didn't) or that I smelt a rat when I saw the infamous doctored Trump rabble-rousing speech (which I didn't), but when the Beeb fessed up  I wasn't surprised (except for the obvious 'Surely Auntie wouldn't  do that'). The intonation in  the crucial 'sentence' which, unlike most sentences, started 54 minutes before it finished) sounded strange – but I put that down to  the idiosyncracy of Trump's delivery, rather than a ham-fisted edit by someone doesn't deserve the description 'journalist', bringing the BBC into disrepute. I suspect cock-up rather than conspiracy: I agree with what Alastair Campbell said on a recent The Rest Is Politics – that someone, at a late stage in the edit (which wasn't biased) needed some background snapshots; maybe they asked an intern ([HD: this is not Campbell's supposition, it's mine]; anyway, not a serious political contributor); besides, Trump's $1bn is for the birds. As Armando Ianucci said on today's Strong Message Here, the edit was 'sloppy'; rather than 'biased'.

<tangent>

But the damage is done. I was watching Global Eye  on BBC2 the other night, and found myself wondering if the reportage could be relied upon – of course it could, but still it left a horribly uncertain feeling (like having survived an earthquake and waiting for the next aftershock). Shame...

</tangent>

The Podcast Kid

 In the matter of podcasts...

<etymological-note>
(a porte-manteau word that preserves in the aspic of common usage, two words neither of which is relevant and the latter of which never was: iPod and boadcast – a recent guest on Armando Iannucci's Strong Message Here {Stuart Lee?} pointed out the inappropriatemess of 'broadcast' [which podcasts aren't], though the historic nature of the iPod had been bothering me for years. Well, not exactly bothering me – I just noticed it and added it  to my mental list of words like 'hang up' or 'tinder-box' or 'fast-forward' or 'the final reel' – expressions that preserve an obsolete technology in current vocabulary.

<tangent>
I was once the proud owner of an iPaq (when PDAs – personal digital assistants – were all the rage). This was  in the '90s, before Apple had bagsied words with an initial i- and Compaq came late to the PDA market. I wonder how Apple and Compaq came to a peaceful settlement; presumably a Cease and Desist order was issued,
</tangent>

</etymological-note>

... I am a relative newcomer, in that I have stuck mainly to ones that spun off from BBC radio programmes ...

<parenthesis>

on which subject I was initially sceptical when some time ago (at the beginning of the retirement shenanigans) someone on the BBC described Melvyn Bragg as {≅} 'a pioneer of podcasts at the BBC'. 

But I see now that he was, provided that the last three words are borne in mind (which this 'AI Overview doesn't do:)

He realized that he could extend a 44 minute program by overflowing into the new medium. Pretty good for 1998, but not really Davy Crockett-like.

</parenthesis>

There are thousands (millions? Anyway, oodles) of non-BBC podcasts. As I wrote here when I first dipped a tentative toe  in the misinformation-infested waters ...

<tangent>
I've been  listening recently to A Carnival of the Animals – a series of  very short (3/4 minutes each) pieces on endangered animals, by Katherine Rundell. She memorably just said words to the effect of 'There's no such thing as "shark-infested waters", just as there's no such thing as "child-infested schools". They belong there.'. [Just saying.]

<etymological-note>
I wonder if Rundell (or her producer) had in mind the theory (that Etymonline dismisses as 'folk etymology) that carnevale (Italian, 'Shrove Tuesday', literally 'farewell to flesh') has something to do with leave-taking. As the series is about the depradations done to the planet during the anthropocene...

<meta-tangent>
{the period when the Earth's systems have been changed by homo sapiens (sapiens? More like homo gastator ['wasteful/spendthrift'], if you ask me, if not homo <shooting-himself-in-the-foot> (my latin's not up to that – auto-pedal-something I suppose). Perhaps homo exmordens-manum-nutrientem ['biting-off-the-hand-that-feeds-him']}
</meta-tangent>

...it seems to me that this farewell thing is a possible explanation, although as the theme music is an extract from the 'Aquarium' movement of the Saint-Saens work, and the series is about animals,  perhaps I'm over-thinking it. Over-thinkimg? Moi?

.... 

</etymological-note>

    </tangent>

...of the podosphere:

<prescript date="Aug. 2021">
One can get sucked in to a black hole of true crime and unsolved mysteries; there is a lot of dross out there. And there are vain attempts at sticking to a format that must have seemed worth sticking to at some stage: a prime example is British Scandal (not BBC so interlarded with toe-curling advertisements): the  creators seem to think that scandal means "any-old fairly noteworthy thing that caused a bit of a stir once and involved skulduggery of some kind".
</prescript>

There is a way to avoid these toe-curling ads (made worse by being voiced [sometimes] by the hosts themselves), but it nvolves paying to be a privileged member and getting ad-less podcasts (and other perks). But MrsK and I have just changed power supplier, and as it happens our new supplier is giving away The Rest Is Politics Plus membership. But to get it, you have to click on a TRIP+ link, which we didn't do.

I threw myself on their mercy, and after an initial 'Sorry, too late' they relented. So, for the next year I'll get loads of perks (that I'll never use),  but at least I don't have to listen to those HP ads (which, as I said here) underline the pension injustice that I'm not obsessing about, honest.

b

Update: 2025.10.27.20:20 – Added link in last sentence, and typo fixes.