Little birdies in their nests agree

I came late to Twitter, though late is relative (I followed Stephen Fry ...

<apologia>
Don't judge. I'm not just a star-struck celebrity-stalker. we are fellow near-contemporaries (a few years apart) at CU Footlights, and have a number of connections and interests in common.
</apologia>

...before he reached 20,000 followers and he's now at about 13 million). At the 2008 Language Show I saw a talk given by the amazing Joe Dale, and he recommended it. But I resisted until I saw him again at the 2009^PPS Language Show, and since then I've been an aficionado and a user (rather more than some might wish. :-)

But  the other night two tweets reminded me of one of my many reasons for loving Twitter. The first was this:

This doesn't use the #mfltwitterati tag, so I have no reason to suppose the tweeter is a language specialist (though she might be – I know the Retweeter of the second tweet is).  But the first two words set me off on a fascinating trail – scent perhaps.

CANICULUS. Long-time followers of this blog will recognize the -ULUS ending (it's a little one of whatever it is – the magic words are diminutive suffix). And related words such as English canine and, less obviously, French chien (and canaille, someone on the radio has just told me...

<digression>
I've checked, but not in my usual source for this sort of thing, Etymonline (which presumably doesn't... whoops, it does. Still)... 

More here 

</digression>

...), point to the doggy part. CANICULUS -> Canis Minor.

According to this site

Canis Minor contains two primary stars and 14 Bayer/Flamsteed designated stars. It’s brightest star, Procyon (Alpha Canis Minoris), is also the seventh brightest star in the sky. With an apparent visual magnitude of 0.34, Procyon is not extraordinarily bright in itself. But it’s proximity to the Sun – 11.41 light years from Earth – ensures that it appears bright in the night sky. 

More

And from there we get to the Dog Days:

The dog days or dog days of summer are the hot, sultry days of summer. They were historically the period following the heliacal rising of the star Sirius, which Greek and Roman astrology connected with heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck. They are now taken to be the hottest, most uncomfortable part of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Wikipedia

So an alerte canicule is not just a "dogs die in hot cars" warning, although that is something worth considering during the Dog Days.

Attentive readers will have noticed an unexplained inflation in the size of the dog. French canicule derives from CANICULUS (which should be Canis Minor) But the Dog Days are related to Sirius, which is in Canis Major. The only explanation for this that I can see is that, to quote that Universe Today site, Canis Minor‘s brightest star is "Procyon ... the seventh brightest star in the sky". And then:

The star’s name is derived from the Greek word which means “before the dog”, a reference to the fact that it appears to rise before Sirius (the “Dog Star”) when observed from northern latitudes.

So, when Procyon rises, it makes sense to think "Here come the Dog Days".

The second tweet gives less food for thought; it's just an example of the sort of linguistic trouvaille (never thought I'd use that word  :-) ) that Twitter tends to throw up.

Note for Anglophones: mec means something like "bloke". I think this is much more elegant than "mansplaining", which seems to me to suffer from the same neologizing crudeness as "chocoholic" or "gyrocopter" (just lumping two bits of words together, regardless of their structure). I‘m not hung up on origins; but I like neologisms to hang together like other words do, morphologically.

<rant type="another bugbear">
And I'm unreasonably hostile to "atpersand" (for the sign @). Its model is obviously the word ampersand. but the structure of that is "and (per se and)". So the at-based analogue should be ATPERSAT.  

"SHOULD? – that's the way it is.  Ask Google." says the little descriptivist dæmon on my shoulder  Still...
</rant>

But I'm missing the cricket.

b

PS And here are a couple of clues.

• Is introduced to soupçon, pesky thing! (8)
• Legal document introducing sort of Elgar maestoso; really clear. (4,5)

Update: 2017.10.03.11:15 – Added footnote (and crossword answers).

^PPS With some regret, I have cancelled my @BobK99 account (because of Twitter's new Ts&Cs, the gist of which is "Everything you write or link to is ours to do with as we will, and we have the right to pass it on willy-nilly to third parties of our choice"), keeping my toe in the water as @WVGTbook^P4S – which won't point to my blog. But as a result of this rejigging I've noticed that the account dated back to 2008; I must have signed up in the fog of post-Language Show admin. I just didn't start using it until 2009.

Crossword answers: NUISANCE and WRIT LARGE

Update: 2017.10.13.11:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS: A while ago I noted another of those marvellous tweets that reveals something about another language:

... Les planches as metonymical reference to the theatre. An English actor treads the boards, but "boards" and planches aren't cognates.  I  wonder which came first...?

Update: 2018.01.03.10:45 – Added P⁴S

P⁴S Correction: on mature reflection I've renamed this account to @leBobEnchaine, which your Twitter interface may display as BobK Lite. 

<minirant>
And among the many things I dislike about Twitter as it has developed over the years, is the way the Twitter handle has become a secondary thing. What with that, the change from Favorite to Like, the move from 140 to 280 characters... Anyone'd think they were trying to reduce their user-base.
</minirant>

Fever isn't such a new thing

Everybody's got the fever, that is something you all know

Fever isn't such a new thing, fever started long ago.

Romeo loved Juliet, Juliet she felt the same*

When he put his arms around her, he said "Julie baby you're my flame"

Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell wrote about the physiological effects of sexual attraction "around 1955", says Wikipedia. By the time of Elvis Presley's cover, the example of Cap‘n Smith and Pocahontas had been introduced; a New World example from the seventeenth century added to an Old World example from the sixteenth.

But the clue is there in Cooley and Blackwell‘s lyrics:

Fever isn't such a new thing, fever started long ago...

... thousands of years ago. in fact.

Sappho was born around 630 BCE and very little is known about her. One of Natalie Haynes‘s Stands up for the Classics programmes (a series now in its third season of what I hope will be many) deals with this "distinguished Lesbian" (as she was described in a fairly recent academic French work – in which she had a blank page devoted to her).

Natalie Haynes says, about 19 mins in:

She pathologizes love in a way that nobody had before. So when Sappho writes about love it‘s a medical condition... She has fever... She‘s afflicted with madness... She‘s going green...She‘s sick... She calls Eros, at one point, a "melter of limbs". Literally any time you listen to any love song, and someone says "you give me fever",  it‘s Sappho...'.

So, assuming Sappho started producing poetry (not publishing, this was before the advent even of alphabetic script) in the mid-7th century BCE, Cooley and Blackwell‘s 'long ago' – written in the mid-20th CE – meant "well over 2½ millennia.

Just sayin'. But Kindle Direct Publishing calls.



PS A few clues:

• Out-of-town stadium with the aid of redrafting. (6)
  
• "Him!" moaned this sort of argument. (2,7)
  

Update: 2017.08.26.20:45 – Added this footnote:

*When I first heard this song – possibly in the mid-fifties (the Peggy Lee version , my oldest brother being a fan)...

<autobiographical_note>
[on one notable occasion he raised eyebrows by walking down Ealing Broadway in those unenlightened times singing : 

"I‘m a woman, W - O - M -A - N"  – 

</autobiographical_note>

... I heard this line as "Juliet she fell for same"  – a bit over-formal, I thought.

Update: 2017.12.30.18:45 – The answers: ETIHAD (a bit  gnomic, I‘ll admit, for those ignorant about the beautiful game); and AD HOMINEM.

All the world's a stage

Carrying on with a very irregular series of posts relating to metaphors with a shared background (I've done card-games, war & weapons, transport, food, drink, sport... maybe more, – no time for research though), I've drawn up a list (far from comprehensive) of metaphors relating to the theatre.

All  singing all dancing

This is ASM shorthand for everyone: over the tannoy in the dressing rooms cast members are summoned by orders such as Beginners on stage. that is, any cast member who doesn't appear in Act I Scene 1 can carry on doing whatever the Health and Safety Executive allows; I was going to say smoking, but that's a fire risk.

Centre stage 

An obvious one: this is the place of most significance

Fiasco

The word is derived by a circuitous route from the Italian far fiasco, from the late Latin flasco [="bottle"]. The Italian expression means, says Etymonline, "suffer a complete breakdown in performance". I once heard a historian of popular theatre (Roy Hudd?) suggest that it might be related to the phrase used for the member of a street-theatre group who collects money (originally in a bottle – the bottle-man). This strikes me as interesting but improbable; in any case, it's unnecessary to an understanding of the original Italian.

[The] final act/curtain/curtains 

The expression "the final curtain" may have been popularized by Paul Anka, but certainly curtains (to mean death) was in use long before My Way came to prominence in the late '60s. The expression the final act opens the door to a range of other types of drama: comedy/tragedy/farce...

Limelight

Before electricity was used for theatrical lighting (see also the next item but one) lime was burnt to produce an intense flame, which could be focused by a mirror and used to pick someone out. As well as the commonly used general term limelight, actors' jargon still includes lime with the meaning spotlight.

<autobiographical_note>
(Quite possibly it's only used by people who want to impress: I have heard it used only once, in a student production, in the mouth of a primadonna (qv) who interrupted a  Technical Run-through with the complaint ''I THOUGHT I was going to have a lime here.' But he did go on to become an actor, so maybe he wasn't usinig the word  just for show.
</autobiographical_note>

Play a supporting/leading/crucial... role

Spoonfeed, moi? This one's so obvious it's easy to miss. (I'd been collecting theatrical metaphors for  several months before it struck me.)

"The play's [not] worth the candle"

Some time ago, blogging about the frugality of candle-use anywhere but Hollywood, I wrote this (and I've edited in the quote, which was originally in an update) about...

...the expression not to be worth the candle. In 1611, Randle Cotgrave published
A dictionarie of the French and English tongues, where the expression appears in the form Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle...

Cotgrave entry

..., but its first appearance in English was ca. 1690 in Sir William Temple's Works:

"Perhaps the Play is not worth the Candle."

Maybe Sir William was making a bilingual pun on jeu , as I believe he may have been talking about lighting a theatre; he didn't make enough in ticket receipts to pay for the lighting.  Lighting a theatre, like lighting a cathedral, required a significant outlay

Source

Play to the gallery

The gallery is where the cheap seats were. Someone playing to the gallery is catering for common tastes.

Primadonna

Obviously, this is the leading lady (but possibly a drama queen of any sex).

Steal someone's thunder

The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume IV tells of the 'peevish dramatist' (as Wikipedia calls the 18th-century dramatistt John Dennis):

Mr. Dennis happened once to go to the play, when a tragedy was acted, in which the machinery of thunder was introduced, a new artificial method of producing which he had formerly communicated to the managers. Incensed by this circumstance, he cried out in a transport of resentment, 'That is my thunder by G—d; the villains will play my thunder, but not my plays.'

Other accounts have neatened the story (not unusually), by making him say The villains have not simply <done_something (there are many variants)> they have stolen my thunder. The meaning 'take credit for someone else's idea' is a generalization from this very specific technological device (not unlike flash in the pan, which I mentioned here).

Flash in the pan – in a flint-lock, the trigger sparked off an explosion in a pan which itself set off the main explosion. Sometimes there was a flash in the pan, but the main charge was unaffected

[It's] showtime

This one needs no explanation (though I suspect some research would confirm my belief that it's a relatively new one – perhaps from a film script).

Take a cue from someone

Nor this one.

Take a bow

Nor this one.

Upstage

Stage directions are back-to-front; for example, Exit stage left means Exit to the RIGHT as seen by the audience. The meaning of the verb upstage refers to a bit-part player, standing upstage of the main action – that is, at the back of the set – spoiling a dramatic moment by doing some business to distract the audience from the main action.

But, there is a horticultural biomass crisis in the back garden; so

Finita la commedia

b

 PS: A couple of clues:

• Soft-core sex allowed, and - hold on a tick - you can see everything! (8)
  
• Renegotiating or browsing for loans. (10)
  

Update: 2018.01.05.12.20 – Added afterthought in blue. And the answers:  EXPLICIT and BORROWINGS.

Tailpiece

... or, as the Italians would have it, coda. This post started out as an update to my last, but it jes' growed.

On a tour founded on an extraordinary coincidence (family members singing in the same cathedral on the very same day, but 17 years apart), I noted two other coincidences (not quite so notable, but still mildly striking).

While chatting over coffee with a fellow choir-member, I noticed a sign on a pub, pointing to the almost hidden Church of St Lawrence. By way of conversation. I observed that Lawrence was my confirmation name and my companion was gobsmacked (I think that's the word) as his confirmation name was also Lawrence.

MrsK was not deeply impressed. As myself and my interlocutor were of an age, she imagined the name Lawrence was just popular at the time. She also wanted know why we Papists had to have an extra name. At the time, not feeling it would advance the conversation, (Ils sont fous, ces [Catholiques] Romains), I didn't mention the theological background.  Confirmation marks the beginning of the first stage in one of those trinities so popular in the doctrines of the One True Church.

The three are the Church Militant (we mortals,  striving), the Church Penitent (in Purgatory), and ...

<digression type="autobiographical">
When I was first in a Spanish train I misread a sign about giving up your seat to a war-hero. I was new to Spanish and to Spain at the time, and had just started stumbling my way through a selected poems edition of Lorca, with the aid of a parallel translation. 

People who didn‘t offer their seat would be multados según la ley....(The memory came to me because the Church Penitent weren't just suffering, they were paying their fines.) But with my head filled with Lorca's evocations of the dastardly, unruly, inhuman...(etc etc) Guardia Civil as Franco came to power, I was quite ready to believe that offenders, with legal sanction, could be mutilated.
</digression>

...the Church Triumphant (reaping their rewards in Heaven). People becoming a miles [Latin, "=" soldier] needed – not inappropriately – a nom de guerre. And the confirmand – not sure if that's a word, but in any case it is now – chose it.

<digression subject "choice">
The choosing was significant. Whereas you got your first name(s) at somebody else's whim ...

<example>
In my case,"Robert" to placate my maternal grandfather [a staunchly Presbyterian Scot, kicking against the papist pricks]), and "Joseph" [to placate my father, educated by Jesuits]).

But I chose my confirmation name. (You may detect a theme here: no women were involved in the process of naming; my mother [whom Saints preserve] had no say (although she did have a role – holding the ring between her father and mine :-).)
 </example>

... the confirmand (see?) did the choosing.
</digression>

People who know me may imagine how contrary I was even at that age. Usually, people chose solid Biblical names like David or Michael or Joseph, or John or....  I knew nobody who had chosen Lawrence.

So I think finding another Lawrence was a bit of a coincidence.

The other coincidence, not quite so notable,  is that our MD had studied at post-graduate level at the same college that I had – although a good 30 years later.

b

PS
Finally, a post-tour coincidence. BBC Radio 3‘s Breakfast Show has a slot where they invite suggestions for a thematic piece. The latest  is Musical Youth. On 31 July, I tweeted this suggestion:

Later the same day, Rowan Pierce sang the same aria  on In Tune., (at about 43‘30").

PPS
(Oh, and on the subject of music  in schools, try this blog-post.)