'Local' colour again

Some years ago I wrote here about local colour, and last Saturday's Zola adaptation on Radio 4 [that takes you to iPlayer's TOUGH LUCK page, though I imagine the programme will in due course be resurrected on BBC Radio 4 Extra] re-wakened me to its importance. I noticed (with a mixture of regret and contempt) some strangely inappropriate background music: it was the thirteen waters* version of Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (although the extract started after the words Très-Haut, so they may not have committed that particular solecism).

It starts at about 31'30"  of that iPlayer recording, and it is the unaccountable music played at a ball in the Tuileries. I say unaccountable not because of any anachronism (although to quote Wikipedia

<niggle>
"Zola's 20 Rougon-Macquart novels are a panoramic account of the Second French Empire. They are the story of a family principally between the years 1851 and 1871" and – as  the Cantique was published in 1866  –  it was a close-run thing – the Tuileries was burnt down in 1871. [Perhaps the entertainers at the ball were singing from a proof copy...  ]) But contemporaneity is not my biggest problem.
</niggle>

I just wonder whether sacred music with an organ accompaniment was a likely accompaniment to a glittering society ball in Second Empire Paris (for a start, how would they have got the organ through the doors of the Tuileries?...Unless it was already there. But then it would have  been in what Wikipedia calls "The little-used northern wing of the palace, which contained the chapel, Galerie de la Paix, and the Salle de Spectacle [which] would be called into service only for performances, such as the Auber cantata performed the evening of Napoleon and Eugénie's civil wedding ceremony, 29 July 1853,"). Perhaps it is an ironic comment on the narrative, but I don't see how.... (unless Racine's "tout l'enfer" stood  for what was going on at the ball; nah, much too subtle).

What made the music grate so painfully, though, was that the singers were English:

 /repɒn su:r nu: lǝ fǝ dǝ tæ græsǝ pwi:sɒnte

kwǝ tu: lɒnfǝ  fwi: ǝʊ sɒn dǝ tæ vwɑr/

.../ki: læ kɒndwi:  æ lu:bli: dǝ teɪ lwɑr/ ... 

(OK, I'm exaggerating a teensy bit; as with most choirs, only a few singers get it flamboyantly wrong, but those few stick out like a bear with a sore head).

What does this tell us about local colour? It had better be pretty damn good if it's to avoid breaking the spell of whatever it's supposed to be adding colour to.

b

PS A bit of an unfair clue, but quite pleasing (for me, at least):

"Bufo" for organic pest control? (8)

*This reference is explained here. When I say "it was the thirteen waters version, but they didn't sing those words" I'm not just being gratuitously contrary; it seems to me reasonable to suppose that before more egregious mispronunciations later in the piece they would have made the false liaison of très and haut.

Update: 2018.06.18.11:05 – Clarified footnote. And that answer is NEMATODE.

Bless each honey bole

In the second of his Radio 4 series on the Robber Barons, Adam Smith (stop sniggering at the back – it's just a name) played a clip from The Ballad of Casey Jones in the background of his account of the life of Jay Gould. The link was clearly appropriate: Gould made his millions from railways.

But it brought to mind an early board-treading occasion in the life of the young... well, me.

<autobiographical_note>
In a Gang Show produced  in the very early '60s (or even late '50s) the 20th Ealing (St Benedict's) Wolf * Cubs sang what I presume was a precursor of that ballad:  Steamboat Bill. I say presumably because either way it was a pretty close-run thing. The song narrates a steamboat accident suffered by Steamboat Bill "trying to beat the record of the Robert E. Lee" – and that record was set during Casey Jones's childhood (in 1870, a few months before his 7th birthday.)

And  the last lines involved the captain's widow telling her children ("Bless each honey bole lamb" [the hastily typed script featured that gross typo, and I always remember the  meaningless version, and then wonder why it doesn't rhyme with the last line:

 The next papa you have'll be a railroad man

] – which suggests that Peak-Steamboat preceded Peak-Railroad, although there was a fair overlap between the two forms of transport.
 <autobiographical_note>

Anyway, as I wrote elsewhere songs interbreed and cross-fertilize quite prolifically in the Folk Process, and my reaction on hearing the tune – Why are they playing Steamboat Bill in the background of a piece about railroads? – was unreasonable.

Word Watch

As I was listening to the TMS commentary this morning, my mind was arrested (I don't think  that's too strong a word) by a commentator saying that someone had "wrestled the initiative". "Doesn't he mean wrested?" I thought. And then I had the further thought "What's the difference between wresting and wrestling?"

As often, I looked to the British National Corpus for answers, and came up with these two results:

Search results for "Wrestle the <noun>"

Search results for "Wrest the <noun>"

Regular readers may have noticed that I haven't done my usual thing of giving links to actual searches, because in this case my point is made by the results rather than by their relative weights (although it's true that "wrest the <noun>" is three times more common than "wrestle the <noun>"). The more significant difference is that the objects of wrest are generally abstract, whereas the objects of wrestle are generally concrete.

But here are some links anyway, as my screengrabs aren't too clear:

wrest the <noun> | wrestle the <noun>

(Update: 2020.08.18.17:05 – BNC has stopped supporting these links.
I'm leaving them in the no doubt unrealistic hope that
Things Will Change For The Better).

<autobiographical_note> 

This calls to mind an ertswhile colleague's answer to the question  "What's the difference between hardware and software?" Hardware hurts when you drop it on your foot. 

</autobiographical_note>

In other words (as a dictionary might have told me, though most [if not all] modern dictionaries are corpus-based, and I generally prefer primary sources) the words mean different things. They are, of course, etymologically linked. The $10 word, for what it's worth, is frequentative; the ending -le often marks a frequentative – usually in verbs (like tinkle and tingle), but often in other word classes; a frequentative, for example, is at the root of puddle.

puddle (n.)

early 14c., "small pool of dirty water," frequentative or diminutive of Old English pudd "ditch," related to German pudeln "to splash in water" (compare poodle). Originally used of pools and ponds as well. Etymonline

So that cricket commentator, when he said "wrestle the initiative", was .... (I hesitate to say wrong; maybe just...) 'at the leading edge of yet another simplifying language change that I, pointlessly, regret'.

b

PS Here are a couple more clues:

• See angry hens with alibi when subjected to reformation or some other blip in Church history. (11,6)
  
• The misfit rethought anachronistic point of view. (9)
  
  

* Re this old-style name of what are now called Cub Scouts, see the PS to this.

Update: 2016.10.21.19:55 – Added BNC links.

Crash--testing for dummies: hidden mesages

A little over a year ago I wrote,  in defence  of using an INTELLIGIBLE transcription system when writing about pronunciation, I ranted thus:

Excuse my use of IPA symbols...

<rant flame="simmer">
I have ranted about this before, somewhere  in the UsingEnglish forums, but I can't find where. So some readers may get a sense of déjà-lu  – but probably not. (And I did mean -lu.) Anyway, here I go again. 

When you know your audience (and that word is crucial  – when people can hear you) it's OK to say things like 'lear sounds like leer'. 'Sounds like' is meaningful only if there's a known sound to compare. But when you're writing – say, in an online forum – it's not so easy. What  if one of your readers has just learnt bear, pear, tear (NOT the lachrymal sort) or wear, so that the /eǝ/ sound is uppermost in their short-term memory of English sounds? You've told them that leer is pronounced  /leǝ/. 

Or suppose one of your readers mispronounces law as /lǝʊ/  –  a common enough mistake in an ESOL classroom   –  and you write that a word  'sounds like law'. Again, you've misinformed them. And I don't think that's too strong a word, at  least not in a language-teaching context.  If the teacher wants to communicate something, it's part of the job to make sure it's understood correctly. 

People complain about 'having to learn a whole new alphabet'. That's nonsense, particularly in the case of English  – which can be adequately transcribed using the letters of the alphabet (most with 'their own' sound – b ⇨ /b/, k ⇨ /k/, s ⇨ /s/, and so on) with a dozen or so new symbols). The system can be taught in a few lessons, makes dictionaries infinitely more informative, absorbing and rewarding, makes modelling and  correcting sounds easier and clearer, supports increased learner autonomy.... And yet many learners (and even quite a few teachers, to my utter bewilderment – as I can't conceive of learning a new language [except by total immersion] without using the IPA) resist the idea of learning/teaching IPA symbols. 

</rant>

And now the Mail has done it. Not that I'm surprised; I don't know of a more obscurantist publication. But it reminded me of  my ire. Unfortunately I failed to strike while the ire {SIC] was hot, and now the guilty party has covered his traces – a table that showed (?! perhaps show isn't quite the verb I'm looking for) how a word was pronounced in different regions, using a home-grown "system"  of phonetic transcription  based entirely on regular alphabetical characters (revealing, for the linguistically aware, more about the writer's accent than about the speakers').

I find it interesting how much a meaningless document can convey about the writer. A recent tweet alerted me to the latest parliamentary howler (the phrase crying out to Heaven for vengeance comes to mind from a God-fearing background, though I admit that an element of exaggeration may  have crept in there).  It is an opposition motion followed by a  hotch-potch of words masquerading as an "amendment" in the sense codicil that emasculates and sucks the life out of a document:

Exhibit A: the Motion

Exhibit B: the Amendment

Out of interest, I ran the text through the Text Analyser at Using English.com. Exhibit A shows the analysis of the original motion. Exhibit B is the analysis  of the amendment. They are broadly comparable – even to the word-count. They both have a preponderance of 2-, 3-, and 4-letter words; in fact the amendment has a slightly bigger proportion of them. But the amendment has a greater Lexical Density (defined in the tool's help  page in this way:

The lexical density of a text tries to measure the proportion of the content (lexical) words over the total words. Texts with a lower density are more easily understood.

). The two texts are equally easy to understand (? – I would suggest that the total lack of punctuation [57 words without so much as a comma.... Can they seriously expect anyone to make sense of that?] in the amendment makes it significantly harder to understand; in fact it seems to me almost impossible to even parse: "into which will take place" ...???) But when I asked 'Can they seriously expect anyone to make sense of that? ' I expect the answer was  

"NO, OF COURSE NOT.  
MAKING SENSE IS NOT THE POINT, SILLY.

WE ARE KICKING DUST
IN THE EYES OF THE OPPOSITION"

The importance of the amendment becomes more apparent when (as they will be when put to the House): the motion and the amendment become one text. The Fog Index nearly doubles.

This is no surprise, given that the Fog Index is defined like this: 

The Fog Index is a readability test designed to show how easy or difficult a text is to read. It uses the following formula:

Reading Level (Grade) = (Average No. of words in sentences + Percentage of words of three or more syllables) x 0.4

If Fog Index is so closely linked with sentence length, and you double the word count without adding any punctuation...

There's  more to be said about that amendment, but the final  crop of blackberries is waiting to be picked, and fruit crumble doesn't taste the same if your fingers aren't tingling with splinters (whatever's in the freezer. :-)

b

PS A couple of clues:
Turn winch to have a good chat. (7)
Catchphrase uttered softly and repeatedly: gin, perhaps. (7)

Update: 2017.01.06.16:10 – Added PPS

PPS –The answers: CHINWAG, MANTRAP

I don't really mien this

Is Latin really a cloak of secrecy?

<digression theme="The wonders of spell-checkers">
I originally spelt that cloac, and the spell-checker helpfully suggested that I might have meant cloaca. :-)
</digression>

Diane James is said to have written vi coactus after her signature, indicating that she was signing under duress:

The document formally notifying the Electoral Commission that Ms James had taken the Ukip helm was submitted on Monday with the phrase “Vi coactus” after her name, meaning “under duress”. The term is used in the belief that it invalidates signatures on legal papers. 

More here

I don't see how this works. If it's widely known what the Latin tag means ...

<digression>
...especially among the public-school educated ... 

<meta-digression>
(and for non-British readers, and maybe some  British ones who make the naive assumption that words mean what they say] I should clarify that this is the reverse of what you think unless you  know better – a "public" school, by a historical accident, is not at all public [in particular, it's not in public ownership]; it is public only to the extent that it is open to all – "like the doors of the Ritz", as some disputed quotee once famously said)
</meta-digression>

... people like Dulwich College alumnus Nigel Farrage
</digression>

... what is the point of using it as a coded message? Maybe it was a double-bluff: surely a grammar school girl and student of "tourism with languages" like Diane James would have known that if the phrase meant that she was under duress it should have been vi coacta. In that case there are three possible conclusions:

1. Ms James meant that some other (male) person was under duress.
2. Someone else wrote it in after she had signed, and simply made a mistake.
3. Ms James was making a deliberate mistake to indicate, secretly, that she wasn't acting under duress (although she wanted to give the impression – to witnesses of the event – that she was. Too clever by three quarters)

My brain hurts. Anyway she's gone. And squabbles and niggles and scuffles and ... and all other sorts of mayhem with the ending "-<double-consonant>le" have broken out. The name Strassbourg Oaths, known to me because of a seminal document in the history of French (discussed here and in many other places in this blog) now takes on a new reference – the language that presumably  preceded the alleged shenanigans.

b

PS – a clue:
Turn winch and have a good chat. (7)

Confounded diphthongs

On Saturday evening, at Reading's Great Hall, listening to Trinity Concert Band, I was reminded of the power of music in stimulating memory (much greater, I'd say, than the overrated Madeleine Effect). Earlier this year I wrote here about my thespian debut:

My own 42nd Street dream centred on the Sergeant-at-Arms in Iolanthe. I was a peer, but I dreamt of  standing in at the last minute for the fellow bass who had that part – not a huge one (I wasn't that ambitious –  he had one song, at the beginning of Act Two [in that YouTube clip the song starts after about 1 min.], as I remember: "the ice-cream slot", as it was archly referred to among the wiseacres of the Cecilian Players [not the chamber ensemble, an amateur operatic society based in SW London in the 1960s and '70s] – the first turn after the interval, when the audience are at their least attentive).  I was going to "Go out there an unknown and come back a st... well, a bit-part player".

And on Saturday, when the band played the opening chords of the Peers' March, I was back in the Questors Theatre, at the back of the audience, ready to process down to the stage. The words of the chorus came back to me:

Bow, Bow ye lower-middle classes

Bow, Bow ye tradesmen, bow ye masses

And with that memory came a memory of the MD ...

<autobiographical_note>
..."Budgie" Byrne, my music teacher (though it wasn't a school production) who, in the days when teachers were allowed to write what they thought in school reports, wrote of me "C+ – has ability but is disinclined to use it musically"...
</autobiographical_note>

...warning us not to enunciate the /ʊ/ of /bɑʊ/ until the last moment (a warning repeated by countless MDs over the next 50 years in other contexts).

One of those MDs warned me about another diphthong (tricky chap, Johnny Diphthong), rehearsing Haydn's Te Deum. This time, it was a diphthong to be avoided; the opening word was not /teɪ/ but /tɛ/:  not having the resources of the International Phonetic Association, she told us to imagine it was spelt teh (at the risk of anachronism I suppose she might have said it rhymed with meh). And that warning too has been repeated by my present MD (as we will be singing the piece, inter alia, at the Great Hall [where I started this post]).

I have mentioned word painting several times before; but one particular instance has caught my attention in the Te Deum. The tritone ....

<autobiographical_note>
(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)
</autobiographical_note>

... is known as diabolus in musica. I don't expect Haydn was ignorant of this. An entry in the Guardian's Notes and Queries section summarises:

...the augmented fourth was the only augmented interval that appeared in the modes used before the emergence of the major and minor scales. Using only the white keys on a piano, the interval of F natural to B natural is the only augmented one (also known as the tri-tone) and was considered so unnatural and discordant in pre-tonal times as to be known as the Devil in Music

There's much more there, of varying  quality and accuracy. Caveat emptor ; I for one don't buy

THIS chord was banned because it was very hard to sing.

The devil's interval

Near the end of the Te Deum, the basses sing  Non confundar – "Let me not be damned" – ending on a B. And there, in the soprano line^P4S , is an F.  F  to B – "the devil's interval". The sopranos' F is a good few octaves above the basses' B, but the devil is hiding there. Sneaky.

Aunty Katy (mentioned many times before) was right: he was always lurking where a good Christian least expected it.

Idle hands, though. I must be getting on.

b

PS: A couple of political clues:

• Regurgitated nasty brioche that he left to make left-winger. (10)
• Not 'ard Brexit – no way; after haggling, very costly. (10)

Update 2016.10.04:14:15 – Added footnote

* 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 nor Pythagoras.)

Update 2016.10.16.22:15  – Added snippet of Te Deum score.

Update 2016.12.30.11:45  – Added PPS

PPS: Crossword answers: CORBYNISTA and  EXORBITANT

Update 2017.03.02.16:15  – Added PPPS

PPPS Fixed the link in the footnote, having initially got my Galileos mixed up. I was referring to the father,  lutenist and music theory pioneer – although I can't imagine that the boy didn't assist in his father's investigation of string-lengths.

Update 2017.10.16.15:55  – Added P⁴S footnote

^P4S It's not only the sopranos with that distant F. The bass accompaniment is marching relentlessly towards an F, and gets there in the fourth beat of the bar.