It depends what you mean by "bee" and "bonnet"

The latest issue of Third Age Matters has the usual contribution by professional stick-in-the-mud Eric Midwinter, to which a sub-editor has contributed the ridiculous idea of theft (as if a meaning, whatever that may be, could be "stolen"):

For many years...

<digression>
(I was about to write "sixty-odd", but that would imply that when the word was coined in 1958, I [extraordinarily gifted child that I was] immediately adopted it into my seven-year-old's working vocabulary; improbable, I think)
</digression>

...I have used the word (ABused it, from the point of view of Mr Midwinter) in the way suggested by the New York Times interview quoted by Etymonline

It's a quite simple bit of word formation. As aristocracy is rule by the best (aristoi) and theocracy is rule by God (theos), meritocracy is rule by people judged on merit. But nous avons changé tout cela as le bourgeois gentilhomme was told, and as Mr Midwinter would have it; strictly, though, the Midwinter version would be "almost everyone has changed it, but they're wrong".

Michael Young, writing in an introduction to the 1994 edition of his work, wrote:

The case against meritocracy (the one and only true meaning of meritocracy, in the view of Midwinter and his ilk) is that people who get into a position of power on the basis of merit then protect their progeny regardless of merit. In other words, meritocracy works once, and thereafter arrogates power and influence to the privileged, regardless of merit. To insist that this flawed sort of one-time meritocracy-followed-necessarily-by-mediocracy-in-perpetuity is the only sort – the TRUE meaning of "meritocracy" – deprives the word of any useful meaning.

Over time, meanings change. Here I give lots of instances of  change, sometimes complete reversals, finally getting round to this explanation  of "backlog":

The words back and log were first fused together (to use an appropriately fiery metaphor) in the late seventeenth century. They referred to a log placed at the back of a fire. Such a log was desirable; it was a Good Thing. It protected the fire from going out. But about two hundred years later it was used metaphorically to mean a Good Thing in the commercial world: a stock of unfulfilled orders. 

Here's where the reversal in polarity happened, possibly influenced by another meaning of log. The metaphorical ledger ... could be the record of a Bad Thing – work that hasn't been done and gets more and more embarrassing as more is added to the mountain faster than it can be done.

But no sane observer scans the airwaves, searching obsessively for people using "backlog" to refer to a Bad Thing and complaining that they've stolen its meaning. Like Aung Sang Suu Kyi, flipping from fêted to fœtid overnight.

Mr Midwinter thinks "meritocracy" is another case of such a flip – but from Bad Thing to Good Thing, rather than vice versa. I think he's simply wrong; that "meritocracy" does what it says on the tin,  and the satirical background to the first use of the word doesn't affect that meaning – the notion that the word can only ever be used to refer to one side of a multi-faceted argument in the original work of fiction that gave it its first airing more than 60 years ago is frankly ridiculous.

(Not that this prevents Mr Midwinter from writing to any organ that will publish him, accusing various public figures of this "abuse":   with the search string Eric Midwinter meritocracy I get over 14,000 Google  hits –  never, in the history of human apiculture have so many bonnets attracted so many bees, vainly swatted at by so few).

On a more festive note, I'm reminded of words I sang in last Saturday's concert, in Ralph Vaughan Williams' charming Fantasia on Christmas Carols:

God bless our generation who live both far and near.

This was not Roger Daltrey's My G-G-G-Generation. I was not singing God bless all baby-boomers  but nobody else. Words change their meanings, and when someone's  meaning is clear  it's unproductive  – not to say patently absurd  – to insist that they are among the great majority who are all out of step.

b

Update: 2019.12.20.12:50  – Added PS

PS I have belatedly found a source for Midwinter's article online. Here's a taste:

It is just over 60 years since Michael Young, co-founder of our marvellous U3A movement, published his perceptive and prophetic text The Rise of the Meritocracy.
He had foreseen that social mobility worked fully only once, recruiting a new oligarchy of power, influence and wealth which, like all former ruling castes, then ensured the power, influence and wealth was bestowed on its children. 

Social mobility does not obey the law of gravity; very, very few go down the social ladder to be replaced by an urgent climber-up. It is not normal to find the children of the privileged among the homeless or the customers of food banks – and vice versa. 

I fear his word has been abused to the point of it sounding like a good thing, not least in the mouths of prime ministers, including a speech by Theresa May some months back in which she used the word “meritocracy” 20 times, with perhaps unconscious irony, as if it were something for which to aspire. 

This led me to write a correcting letter to the press and I quickly evade the charge of political bias by pointing out that Tony Blair was an even worse offender, to the point where a despairing Michael Young, a short time before his death, published an article pleading with the then prime minister to refrain from using the coinage “meritocracy” as the opposite of what it actually meant.

Found in translation

In an early post I looked at the mistranslation of a single word that jumped out at me while I was listening to a Book of the Week. The word was "Romanesque" – used in a context that had nothing to do with architecture. It referred to President Mitterand, whose predilection for seeing himself as a character in a roman provides a strangely appropriate parallel with a fictional  character who shared the first four letters of his name: Walter Mitty. (The source of the mistranslation was well hidden, and is arguable; if you're interested, feel free: here.)

But the reason for picking on that one word  is clear,  given my interest in the process of translation. More recently though I've found another case of mistranslation, that doesn't make the same kind of sense unless David Baddiel (the single-word-mistranslation-hunter in this case) has a similar background to mine (which I doubt). Wikipedia may cast some light, though I'm not minded to spend much time on it.

The case was documented in an article brought to my attention by an accident (I was toying with the phrase freak accident, but thought better of it. "Freakish" is an accolade that I think is too easily attached to accidents. Freakish is the accident that unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls, say, and this Baddiel cutting was unearthed less dramatically in a stash of documents that referred not to the early days of Christianity but to an era that could be described as BHD (that is, before this blog started in late 2012).

<digression subject="'-eak' words in clichés">
I'm sure it's just an accident ('-eak' attributes becoming meaningless), but the latest Radio Times claims to have a "sneak preview" of a new Doctor Who series. The "sneak" bit added something once (when there was an unofficial and/or unsanctioned foretaste of some media event) but in this case there was nothing sneaky about  it. The PR department wanted the preview to appear. What's unsanctioned about that?
<digression>

The one word (well two if you want to be pedantic) was Careers Officer. A Baddiel novel used this expression, and it was rendered in the German translation as 'Reintegration into the Working Process Responsible Person'. (the "original" German was Wiedereingliederung-in-den-Arbeits-Prozeß-Betruer  – as opposed to the more predictable [not to say less RSI-inducing] Karriereoffizier). Baddiel met the German translator at some publishing shindig and asked why she had done this. The answer was, in my translation,

'Because I felt like making up a word, regardless of your intentions. I thought it'd be cool.'

In an update to an old post about local colour, I mentioned a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and wondered whether the word Rolleiflex had survived in the translation. In a later update I added:

 The good news is that it [HD 2019: the translation] has kept the Rolleiflex. The bad news is that it has introduced an irrelevant bit of cleverness:

I took your picture with my trusty Rolleiflex
And now all I have developed is a complex

Why can't translators just
GET OUT OF THE FRIGGING WAY ?

Five years earlier, if I'd read that edition of The Times, I could have cited yet another instance of overweening  translatorrhoea.

That's enough for today. In a later post I mean to look at the rest of this stash  of early-21st-century cuttings – a number of pieces from the Ben Mcintyre Last Word column. Now though I must go and do a bit of note-bashing for our carol concert: 14 December, 6.00 pm, All Saints', Wokingham.

b

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

For the duration of the one-sided leaders debate ("one-sided" because both participants were more-or-less avowedly Eurosceptic...

<I-know-I-know>
(or in Corbyn's case "Euro-agnostic" according to the party line [which some people find hard to credit – first Cameron renegotiated UK's deal with the EU, then May negotiated a withdrawal agreement, then Johnson tinkered with that.]
</I-know-I-know>

...privileged, white men) the Conservative Press Office's Twitter profile enjoyed a name-change: "CCHQ Press" became "FactcheckUK".

James Cleverly tried to justify it by saying that the Twitter handle was not changed, so there was no attempt to deceive. This is disingenuous  at best, and at worst – to use Emily Maitlas's choice of words – dystopian.

<autobiographical-note>
"The Twitter handle" has become diminishingly significant. When I started using Twitter about 10 years ago, the Twitter handle was all you saw in the way of ID. People had witty/creative handles that said something about what they did and what their interests were. I followed, for example, @langwitch because all I knew about her was that she was an intelligent teacher of modern languages. I didn't know her name or want to know it; if I wanted to know, wouldn't that make me a stalker (or at the  very least plain nosey)?

Then Twitter screwed this up by letting people rename their accounts while keeping the same (scarcely visible, depending on the client or app you use) handle, by doubling the maximum word-count, and by a plethora of other little time-wasting tweaks that have made Twitter a virtual no-go area for me and for anyone who resents its attention-grabbing trickery.
</autobiographical-note>

This caused a predictable Twitter storm The Guardian had the unequivocal headline

Tories pretend to be factchecking service during leaders' debate

The public have increasingly turned to factchecking websites, such as the independent Full Fact, the BBC’s Reality Check, Channel 4 News’ FactCheck and the Guardian’s Factcheck, to verify claims made by politicians. 

During Tuesday night’s debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservative party renamed their main media account as “factcheckUK”, changed its logo to hide its political origins, and used it to push pro-Conservative material to the public. 

More here

Cleverly and his ilk would have chosen a different verb from that pretend, and in his Newsnight interview he made an unconvincing defence of the brainless wheeze dreamed up by some low-ranking minion, saying that he would continue to "call out the lies".  But that‘s not what the misbegotten rebranding of the CCHQ Press Twitter account did. Dressing up as policeman before trying to get your own way is simply a crime. The Cleverly defence is as jaw-droppingly inappropriate as a sign that says

POLITE NOTICE

NO PARKING

It doesn't fool anyone. When is a fact-checking service not a fact-checking service? When it's bare-faced Tory spin.

b

The Etymological Clock

Last year, in a belated update to this very early post, I recalled how a bit of wartime parlance happened to get adopted into the Knowles family lexicon.

<TO-BE-EXACT>
I say "Knowles family lexicon" as I haven't come across this usage anywhere else. But the word "salvage" may have a wider application in this sense.
</TO-BE-EXACT>

Recycling waste paper is not as trendy a thing as some of the greenwash we get from politicians might lead one to think. In my childhood, in the 1950s we distinguished between household waste (which went in the bin)  and clean waste paper (which went in 'The Salvage Box'). We had no idea, nor any need to know, what salvage meant; the linguistic 'clock' just happened to stop in WWII, when salvage mattered.

This is what I have called in that  post and elsewhere the etymological clock...

<weasel-words>
(I may not have used those precise words; but the post did use the Corpus Chronophage [look it up] as a metaphor for linguistic change)
 </weasel-words>

... – the engine that drives the coining of new words and expressions, and just stops at seemingly random moments, leaving us with  a reference to some arbitrarily fleeting expression like "nine days' wonder" or the semantically similar "flash in the pan", whose provenance most present-day English speakers don't know about and neither care nor need to know about.

<EXAMPLES which="Those two">

• Flash in the pan
  A reference to a long-gone firearms technology, which I've mentioned before – more than once. Here, for example:

[I]n 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.

• Nine days' wonder

In 1600, William Kemp, an Elizabethan clown actor, who is thought to have been the original Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing,1599, danced a morris dance between London and Norwich. He took up the challenge for a bet and covered the distance of a hundred miles or more in nine days (spread over a few weeks). Some doubted that he had achieved this and, to quell dissent, he wrote 'Kemps nine daies vvonder', published in 1600:

More

 But that's not the last word on that derivation (or rather it's not the first word) as further reading of that Phrase Finder excerpt explains. In short, the expression had been around for about 300 years when Kemp used it (dubiously). As so often, the etymological clock just happened to stop at a juicy (and quite old) publication date. 

<and-another-thing>
Another example, heard on the radio just now, is "Parts of the Australian outback are a tinderbox". Tinderboxes haven't been in regular use for over two hundred years, but the metaphor lives on.
</and-another-thing>

</EXAMPLES>

Where was I? .... Got it: a Radio 4 programme about Bonfire Night food led me to recall another instance of such wartime jargon (words such as salvage, that is) becoming domesticated. (The context – food – was irrelevant to the memory, so I‘m not bothering with a  link; it just triggered the memory of what I used to wear  on 5 November in the  mid ‘50s.)

The garment was in modern parlance a onesie  though Lexico dates this word to the 1980s,  "... from Onesies, a proprietary name for a garment of this type, based on one + -sy."  But this was a good 30 years before that word was coined. We called it a siren-suit...

<CULTURAL-APPROPRIATION defence="Moi?">
I say "we", though in this case the words  had a much wider application. For Wikipedia's take, click away.
</CULTURAL-APPROPRIATION>

.... Being the second youngest of six children,  I  have a brother who was alive during the war, and at the time was about the right size to bequeath me this hand-me-down. When the air-raid siren sounded at night, a siren-suit was a one-piece garment to wear over pyjamas.

Enough for now. This post was originally intended for a 5 November publication date. Events, doncherknow.

b

Fortnite out[r]age

Epic Games' wildly popular battle royale game, Fortnite, was unavailable to play for several days in preparation for its next iteration: Fortnite Chapter 2.

So said CNN Business earlier this week. This was quite an event. the outage map went mad (or, rather, presumably, it just went black).

<autobiographical_note>
When I started working for DEC in 1984, and first met the word outage a colleague and fellow arts graduate explained that this was a typo for outrage. My initial resistance to the neologism...

<digression>
(well, relative neologism. Etymonline dates it to 1903 [in a US context] but it didn't impinge on my consciousness until the early 1980s
</digression>

...has been worn down since then. I'm not "the first on whom the new is tried", but neither am I "the last to cast the old aside". I have become inured, or as the medics say (of some regrettable thing you just have to live with – tinnitus, say) habituated.; what once made your life a misery becomes just wallpaper.

</autobiographical_note>

In the words of a speaker on the Media Show:

The servers ... went down for a full weekend, and nobody was told it was going to happen. It... just ...a black hole appeared ...and people kind of lost their minds about it...Nobody was told about it. They had no access. It was essentially the equivalent of your mum taking your X-box off you, and you not having it [HD – for a weekend], but for millions of people.

Media Show, 16 Oct 2019, from 21'15"

The Earth did not stand still. As another guest on that programme explained, it was the equivalent of any commercial website with a big software update to implement announcing that its service will be unavailable for a few days...

<RANT subject= "Santander, who treat their customers like beta testers">
...or sometimes weeks. Any old rubbish bit of kit held together with chewing gum and baler twine, they just stick it up and wait for someone to complain, leaving it to their overworked (and largely impotent) help desk staff to fend off the predictable brickbats. But I  digress.
</RANT>

This is the sort of minor irritation that 21st century customers are used to. But in the case of Fortnite the customers weren't regular commercial users accustomed to the vagaries of software updates; and they weren't told what to expect. They were, for the most part, children, quick to detect the end of the world. The weekend is for many their chief (or only) relatively unfettered playing time.

And the owners of Fortnite were happy to trade on their users' naivety. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that they intentionally made it feel like the end of the world, to underline the fact that it was the end of the world as far as Fortnite, Chapter 1 was concerned.

Radix malorum, as  Chaucer's Pardoner was fond of quoting, est cupiditas.

<usual_disclaimer>
Pardoner's Tale quotes best before end May 1968.
</usual_disclaimer>

 In other words, Cherchez la canaille capitaliste.

Time for my constitutional.

b

Assassins and Dutch courage

The starting point for today's ramblings is the word assassin. Followers of The Old Man of the Mountains (shaik-al-jibal) were known for (in the words of Etymonline)  "murdering opposing leaders after intoxicating themselves by eating hashish." It goes on:

1530s (in Anglo-Latin from mid-13c.), via medieval French and Italian Assissini, Assassini, from Arabic hashīshīn "hashish-users," an Arabic nickname for the Nizari Ismaili sect in the Middle East during the Crusades, plural of hashishiyy, from the source of hashish (q.v.).

The Etymonline entry for hashish reads

hashish (n.) 

also hasheesh, 1590s, from Arabic hashīsh "powdered hemp, hemp," extended from sense "herbage, dry herb, rough grass, hay."

and quotes English Words of Arabic Ancestry:

Its earliest record as a nickname for cannabis drug is in 13th century Arabic. Its earliest in English is in a traveller's report from Egypt in 1598. It is rare in English until the 19th century. The word form in English today dates from the early 19th century. The word entered all the bigger Western European languages in the early to mid 19th century if you don't count occasional mentions in travellers' reports before then.  

That mention of cannabis invites the reflection that the English word canvas is related. Unstressed vowels between consonants (like the second a in cannabis) are, as students of language change over time say, unstable: they tend to disappear.

Here , relatively early in the life of this blog, I was writing about a spiral ring found in Pompeii,  with an inscription that included the word domnus (sic, no i).

... no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10-15 cm spiral ring, for one little I, or that this one-stroke character was too complex for an otherwise impeccable craftsman! No, people were dropping the unstressed I in speech; and this accounts for words like the Italian Donna and Spanish Doña when the  Latin was Domina . (I changed the sex of the lordly person, because in the masculine the attrition of an unstressed vowel has gone one step further in Spanish – Don [which dropped its unstressed vowel {HD 2019: that is, after dropping the unstressed i it dropped the unstressed u}].)

It would have been less contentious to cite the Portuguese donna, as in current Spanish the change has gone further, with the introduction of the ñ.

Anyway, the same happened to the unstressed a in cannabis (though in a different context, of course – not, as linguists are wont to say diachronic) to produce the word "canvas" – woven from that "herbage, dry herb, rough grass, hay.".

The -in of assassin is, incidentally,  a false  plural, like "a criteria", "a panini", "a cherubim".

<THE_USUAL_PROVISO prescriptivism="0">
(I hasten to add that that "false" is an indication of how the word was formed, not a value judgement. Some of these mistakes are becoming standardized.  I won't say "a panini" but at some stage that sort of finger-in-the-dikery will become misplaced  A mistake is at the root of many words. My favourite, and oft-cited, example is the French  word for bat – discussed at length here. [I recommend that piece, but if you don't have time the short version is this: a chauve-souris is not a bald-mouse but an owl-mouse.])
</THE_USUAL_PROVISO>

If the notion of a fighting force getting high before spilling blood seems odd, try your preferred search engine with the string US Army Vietnam drug-taking. I get nearly 22 million hits.

But Vietnam was by no means the first theatre of war that encouraged....

 <QUOD_SCRIPSI_SCRIPSI translation="Youi'd better believe it">
 "Substance abuse in the Vietnam War wasn’t just limited to the marijuana and heroin enlistees could buy on the black market. Military commanders also heavily prescribed pills to help improve soldiers' performance."

History.com
</QUOD_SCRIPSI_SCRIPSI>

 .... drug-taking. The Phrase Finder writes

'Dutch courage' derives from the English derision of the Dutch which came about during the Anglo-Dutch wars. 

Strictly, the Phrase Finder is at pains to point out that the use of alcohol to "stiffen the sinews" wasn't the chief aim of the original users of the expression. Rather, the Anglo-Dutch wars encouraged the use of 'Dutch as a pejorative:

• Dutch bargain - a contract made when one is drunk.
• Dutch concert - where several tunes are played at the same time.
• Dutch feast - where the host gets drunk before the guests.
• Dutch treat - a 'treat' at which one has to pay one's own share.
• Double Dutch - nonsense.

I'm not sure I buy the pejorative idea. After all, a "Dutch auction" isn't a substandard or risible auction, it's just a different sort of auction  So I am not so quick to dismiss the idea that Dutch fighters had a nip of the hard stuff before an engagement. They wouldn't have been the first to do it, and gin was cheap and plentiful

Time to return to real life.

b

Where have I heard that before?

Listening to BBC Radio 3 the other day I had an aha moment like the one I discussed here  – when I thought I had detected a link between Delius' On hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and an American folk song. I had initially thought Delius must have been influenced by the cowboy song  Goodbye old paint while he was in Florida, but in the end (having heard a Tales from the stave programme on the Delius piece) I realized there was another reason for the similarity:

The influence I mistakenly suspected was from an American folk song to Delius. Many years ago, when my ability to read music was even more hesitant than it is now, I found the score of Goodbye old paint in a collection  of American folk songs. It wasn't a melody I knew, but the book provided chord symbols and I eventually worked out A tune that fitted the harmonies. But my grasp of the actual notes petered out after the first phrase

When I later heard the Delius piece I thought  AHA. While Delius was living in Florida he must have been exposed to Goodbye Old Paint.

But the BBC has now disabused me of this. The Delius piece was not an original idea (although I've never been a stickler for originality – as I've said often enough in this blog,  here for example); he got it from Edvard Grieg who he was with in Leipzig in 1887...

Grieg's source was the Norwegian folk song In Ola valley, which he included in a collection of piano transcriptions in 1896. But as that radio programme made clear, the atmosphere of the piece was very different. The story behind In Ola Valley is rather Scandi Noir:

More here

The Scandi Noir bit  is  a lugubrious tale about a lost (and ultimately dead) boy. The falling third of Delius' cuckoo represents, in Grieg's piece, a bell tolling. So On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring turns out to be not the direct descendant of Goodbye Old Paint, but the first cousin once removed (the Delius piece via Grieg's transcription, the cowboy song being a direct descendant of the Norwegian folk song).

My more recent aha moment happened 55'35" into an Early Music Show Special: Al-Andalus!

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>
I'm not a card-carrying early music nerd, but in the early 1980s I was working in OUP‘s office in  London, formerly the General Division‘s home, but then the home of a few General Division stragglers working on the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (3rd edn – the one with the pretty green  cover [and you must not forget the quincentenary colophon on the spine, Best Beloved]). The main body of the General Division (an internal admin  thing that is probably irrelevant to the present structure of OUP and  is of no great import) had moved to Oxford. 

The Early Music Department, working on another quincentenary  book The Oxford Book of Madrigals, were also left in London, and I joined a group of singers who sang from it at the launch party. One of the madrigals we sang was The Silver Swan, which became a favourite of  mine and – as the bass line is so  melodious  as a solo  – my usual audition piece (in the days when I did that  sort of thing).
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE> 

I  haven't listened to the whole thing, so this little observation may not be news to everyone, but the fact  that the programme was called Al-Andalus is indicative of a quirk of Spanish/Portuguese borrowings from Arabic.

The Berbers who occupied various parts of the Iberian peninsula between 711 and 1492 had Arabic as a second language, and they automatically tacked on the definite article to nouns; this accounts for borrowings that start with al- (algebra etc) or a- {Sp. azucar/Pg açúcar...

<PER_CONTRA>
[meanwhile the Italian for sugar – as their borrowing came from mother-tongue Arabs – is zucchero. Similarly Sp alcotón/Pg. algodão  but It. cotone, the root (via France) of  our "cotton"]
</PER_CONTRA>

...) or sometimes just l- (the word lute is derived from words that mean the-oud, the oud being a stringed instrument.

<GUESS likelihood="minimal, but who cares?">
I suspect that Spanish láud may have been influenced by an imagined etymological association with the Latin laus (=praise) as in "praise Him with... stringed instruments", but don't quote me on that; it‘s just supposed folk-etymology. )
</GUESS>

In this case the Portuguese preserved the whole al- –  alaude.

Where was I?... Got it, 55'35". I didn't catch the title of that Hebrew song, 'Adonai <something>', but it's strongly reminiscent of the cor anglais tune at the beginning of the second movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez...

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>
I've been there (Aranjuez)... no. Irrelevant self-indulgence.
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>

... and some of the ornaments before the voice comes in are just like the later guitar reprise of the tune.

Time I was doing stuff  outside before it starts to rai.. Bugrit.

b

But what does "original" mean?

This term's concert...

<lest-you-forget>

</lest-you-forget>

... has made me return to the problems of verse translation (which, as I said here, in the very early days of this blog, is something I have actually done [and actually in the French/Spanish/Italian/etc sense of happening right now {as my entry for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, which I mentioned here, is in the hands of the judges right now}]).

In some cases I think there's a clear case for the original language. Of one of my favourite pieces I wrote this:

In my subject line, both here and on the occasion of my Cambridge rendition, I said Johannes-Passion. This isn't because of snobbery (though elitism does come into it – so bite me, as I believe they say in some parts of the world). It's because the German is part of the music 

There are, in the piece, two choruses with more-or-less identical settings. But what is matched is not just the notes. In one the mocking words are

Sei gegrüßet, lieber Jüden König!

In the other, the corresponding words are

Schreibe nicht der Jüden König!

The last two words are (trivially, of course) a perfect match, but consider the vowel sounds in the first three syllables: two are identical (Sei/schrei-, ge-/-be) and the third is similar: nicht has a front vowel and grüßet has a vowel that, though not strictly a front vowel, is fronted (the lips are forward); the same applies to König. All the stressed vowels are either front, or fronted,  or in the case of the first diphthong the tongue position is moving forwards (from [a] to [ɪ]. 

The first version, which I sang (in  English) with a previous choir about 30 years ago, had "Write thou not..." for Schreibe nicht... The first syllable is a close match  [2019: for the German]; not so the others. My present edition has both German and English and goes for a strangled and outlandish version: "Write Him not as our king"; how glad I am that we're not singing that... :-) 

There's more to be said, but tempus is fugendum (or whatever). My point is that the original language adds to the drama of the original, forcing facial antics in the singers to indicate mockery/anger/hatred... as appropriate. And the sounds are part of the musical picture.

But this is an unusually clear case. Bach thought and wrote in German, and the German sounds are an intrinsic part of the work. There are, naturally, difficulties for an amateur choir in England to do justice to the German...

<autobiographical_ note>
Some years ago I  sang this piece in a choir with a German-born bass (who I tried to sit next to as often as possible). Having studied German at school, and used it in the course  of my studies in Romance Philology (as discussed here), I was reasonably confident in my accent. But I often found that the  "German" sounds coming out of my mouth were noticeably different from sounds produced by a native speaker.
</autobiographical_ note>

... but in theory at least I think a German performance of a piece originally written in German. is best  (although a confident and accurate English performance is preferable to a "German" version  that sounds like  'Allo 'Allo's Herr Flick).

In some cases a German composer has written a piece originally with an English text. Mendelssohn's Elijah, for example, was written for the Birmingham Music Festival in 1846 and only later translated into German. There are cases where the text of the two versions do not tally...

<case_in_point>
The story of Elijah proceeds from a curse, which I described here:

The original curse, mentioned in the opening bars, is these years there shall not be dew nor rain but according to my word – that is, it was up to Jehova when the water supply was to be reconnected.

In an attempt to break the drought Elijah sings

As God the Lord of Sabaoth liveth, before whom I stand: three years this day fulfilled [HD: my emphasis], I will show myself unto Ahab; and the Lord will then send rain again upon the earth.

In other words this is precisely (to the day) the third anniversary of the beginning of the drought. In the German version the words Three years this day fulfilled have become  Heute im dritten Jahre – which isn't nearly so specific. (Perhaps the translator was nudging the text towards making sense; a drought is unlikely to last a precise number of years: assuming, for simplicity, an English climate,  say the drought starts on 31 May. It's not going to break on 1 June in some later year.) 

</case_in_point>

... but I don't feel the original English is in some sense "better".

There is another case (of German composers' oratorios), exemplified by the piece I mentioned in my opening words: Haydn wrote The Creation/Die Schöpfung with both languages simultaneously in mind. In the absence of a reliable English hand on the tiller (hmm, that could have done with a mixed metaphor alert) this makes for some pretty strangled syntax. But I'll keep my powder dry on that until I hear the pre-concert talk on 16 November.

Nearer at hand is another concert at Reading Great Hall,  Trinity Concert Band's Classical Spectacular which includes a piece with particular local significance: Jupiter,  from The Planets by  Holst. But I'll leave it to Paul Speed (the band's MD, who always gives very detailed notes) to say more about that link: the clue is in the photograph that Trinity have used to publicize this concert:

But I must make the most of this break in the weather. Things to do..

b

Update:  2019.09.30.10:15 – Added PS

PS We didn't get the expected local  background last night (which, BTW, was great fun), so here it is. That rather dapper Edwardian gentleman in the photo is (I suppose) Holst himself., and in the background you see the organ and wood panelling of the Great Hall. Wikipedia says:

At a concert in Reading in 1923, Holst slipped and fell, suffering concussion. He seemed to make a good recovery, and he felt up to accepting an invitation to the US... 

More here

<autobiographical_note>
When I was told of this accident when I was  singing with one of the university choirs my informant said that the fall didn't kill him outright but that he died later as a result. I'm inclined to think that this is nonsense, as Holst enjoyed a further 10 years and more of productive life after the fall.
</autobiographical_note>

He saw that it was good|bad|neither good nor bad

I didn't know – until I heard Simon Schama's excellent Schama on Blake on Radio 4 the other day – that Blake was a poet only in his spare time.

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE type="Introduction">
My introduction to William Blake, the poet, was a whole-class detention (back when teachers could do that sort of thing) during which we were required to learn The Tyger by heart. Ma Griffiths (the teacher, so dubbed because she insisted on being addressed as "Ma'am") can't have tested us very stringently, as only the first 4 lines  stuck – and even then I have to check whether the symmetry is fearless or fearful. And I have vague structural (gist) memories: the second stanza is a series of questions asking what...?;  the last revisits the first (though how accurately I don't know).

<inline_PS>
I underestimated the power of that rote learning. Although this memory was not strong enough to interfere with my singing in the 2019 Christmas concert, it's strong enough to make me expect the words of Rutter's Star Carol 'See the star, shining bright' to continue 'In the forests of the night'.
</inline_PS>

</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>

The programme was tied to an exhibition at Tate Britain

With over 300 original works, including his watercolours, paintings and prints, this is the largest show of Blake’s work for almost 20 years. It will rediscover him as a visual artist for the 21st century. 

More here

I'm not sure what "rediscover[ing] him as an artist for the 21st century" involves exactly, but I mean to find out.

One of Blake's most famous artistic works  is Europe, a prophecy, which Wikipedia uses to illustrate its entry  on Haydn's Creation (I'm not sure why...

<CHOICE_OF_ILLUSTRATION>

Newton by William Blake -
The William Blake Archive, Public Domain,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=198284

(in my view his work Newton would have been  more appropriate. Wikipedia, like Schama, describes the implement he is wielding as "compasses", but I'm not so sure. Compasses, as any schoolchild knows, are used in construction. But in this case I think what we can see are dividers (used to measure). A mighty creator would have used compasses.

Europe, a Prophecy - The William Blake Archive, Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27197029,

This  puny geometer, though, is just measuring. Blake‘s "Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death." suggests that he wasn't a fan of Newton and his  ilk.) 

I don't see what makes  Europe, a Prophecy relevant to The Creation. The dividers are still there, but the geometer is older.  Did Blake know something we don't?

</CHOICE_OF_ILLUSTRATION>

... though).

<COINCIDENCE> 

On 20 November 2010 at Wellington College Newsome Sports Hall Wokingham Choral Society last sang Haydn's Creation. Reading Chronicle's review called it "this most satisfying evening". The Wokingham Times reported possible misgivings about the venue, but in the end said

While it is true that there was a slight vibration in some of the louder sections, the performance was so well prepared and polished that this did not interfere with the power of the music.

Fortunately,  when the choir sings this marvellous piece again (just under 9 years later, on 16 November 2019) it will be at the University of Reading's Great Hall – with better acoustics and nearer to home. 

And the relevance of this – albeit tenuous and coincidental (hallmark of Harmless Drudgery, the "snapper up of unconsidered trifles") is that the tenor soloist at the concert will be "William Blake". 

<TEXTUAL_INFO type="plug"> 

For further  details on Haydn's  score for The Creation  (particularly the translation), if you're  feeling strong, you could  read this (a 68 page document, though only the first 55 are the  main text). You might prefer, though, to come to James Morley Potter's free introductory talk at 6.30 pm on the day of the performance.

</TEXTUAL_INFO>

</COINCIDENCE>

b

Update: 2019.11.12.15:30 – Added PS

PS

Correction: the tenor at our Creation concert next Saturday will not be "William Blake" (as originally announced). The tenor will be the young Dutch soloist Stefan Kennedy.

Update: 2020.01.02.15:00 – Added inline PPS.

The naked flesh forecast for inshore waters

Sanditon – Fair – Buttocks – Mostly firm –  

Male – Mid-to-late 20s with occasional 30s 

In March 1817 Jane Austen stopped working on her novel Sanditon (previously entitled...

<GLOSSARY PC-value="0">
I know, I know, the trendy thing to say is "titled", but I use British English, and the social environment that that language evolved in is not the same as that of late 20th-early-21st-century United States, home of American English (and consequently of the style guides that seem to govern  most current academic writing). I've discussed this before, in a note to this.

<rant>
And 'Spare us, O Lord' , from the gruesome 'titled'. ...  

...There is no question of ambiguity; if a person is entitled  it's a question of entitlement, but if a document is entitled it's a question of nomenclature. American English., with its egalitarian background, just doesn't feel it necessary to recognize 3 [designations of social rank]. Two words/two meanings => one word for each is the AE rule. Fine: just don't force it (and thus your cultural background) on me.
</rant> 

</GLOSSARY>

... The Brothers). She had completed only eleven chapters, and died later in that year. But those eleven chapters mostly set the scene (fairly exhaustively), which made the uncompleted work attract much attention from potential (diachronic) collaborators...

<DIGRESSION>
if you'll permit me to rescue the word from our tinpot dictator, Bozo the Clown, more prrecisely Alexander Boris de Pfeffel the Clown  To be fair, I should admit that he – with his expensive education – knows perfectly well what the word means. But – with his expensive (right wing) education – he knows perfectly well the word's value as a dog whistle.

In Anglo-French matters collaborator has a nasty secondary meaning. One of the earliest  instances I met of this word as a term of abuse was in Marcel Pagnol's La Gloire de mon père; one of the characters was referred to as  "le fils du collabo" – with the abbreviation adding to the implication of contempt. 

</DIGRESSION>

.. .that is, they worked with her on the same artefact ,  though centuries apart.

<JUSTIFICATION word-choice="artefact">
I say artefact; I considered enterprise, but I don't feel that's quite right; they didn't have the same aim. Jane Austen's aim was to write a work of literature or perhaps primarily to exercise her wit (as, in her day, women of her social standing weren't expected [or even allowed] to do  much else in the way of self-fulfilment). On the other hand, Andrew Davies' aim was less literary
</JUSTIFICATION>

Which is not to suggest any kind of disapproval on my part. Sexing stuff up is his schtick, and good luck to him. As James Jackson wrote in The Times recently.

So far at least [HD: after one episode] it can't really be faulted  for giving an unchallenging whirl through Austen's world of love and money, marriage and class. It is a truth universally acknowledged that, being Davies, there'll be a bit of sex too. Perhaps, by now, it's in the old goat's contract to provide some sauce for pre-publicity purposes

But (I wish people wouldn't try to suggest that the whole sexing-up thing had a higher purpose. In the Radio Times Kris Marshall (Tom Parker in this version) is quoted as saying:

"The simple fact was female nudity was a lot more hidden away in those days, and male nudity was kind of natural. So it's completely accurate [HD:  it's not clear whether this IT is the nude bathing scene or the whole series] and Andrew Davies isn't sexing Austen up at all."

No. This doesn't follow. Davies is (without question, predictably, unashamedly, and admittedly) sexing Austen up; he's just using historically accurate material to do it.

But  now the second episode has been and gone without ruffling the waters of the Knowles consciousness, I have better things to be doing.

b

Rules run amuck

I‘ve mentioned before the way that people learning a language (particularly people acquiring their mother tongue) tend to take a newly-learnt rule and test it to destruction:

It's fairly obvious to a  native speaker that the most common way [of forming a plural] is to add an s. In fact, this rule becomes apparent whenever a young language learner mistakenly adds an s to an irregular plural – sheep becomes sheepS rather than sheep, for example; and when an adult corrects mouseS to mice, the compulsion to keep faith in the add-an-s rule is so strong that the next attempt is quite often miceS.

More here

But a similar source of error is frequently met, particularly in a singer's life, with respect to the rules of foreign languages, and particularly (as in that add-an-s case) the rules of phonology.

The two that spring most readily to mind (I was going to call them "my favorites", but  favorite is not quite the word) occur in French and in German (both languages that I have studied). And although my O-level German knowledge,  as I have admitted before, is Best Before November 1969 [or whenever it was in that winter], I had to resurrect it in order to study Romance philology...

<EXAMPLES type="German scholars of Romance languages" need-to-know="0">

• Grimm (of Grimm's Fairy Tales fame); the brothers made a crucial observation, known as Grimm's Law.
• Meyer-Lübke, compiler of Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
  the bible of all students of this area – the one necessary reference
• Gerhard Rohlfs, editor of Sermo Vulgaris Latinus
  a collection of very early texts – including, for example, graffiti from Pompeii
• and many others

</EXAMPLES>

1 Thirteen waters

This error is so common that I have given it a name. The rule here is

When there's a written s at the end of a word, it isn't sounded 

unless the following word starts with a vowel.

There are provisos and exceptions, but that's the gist.

This is the rule that gets out of hand in the Thirteen Waters Error. One of the exceptions applies to a word that starts h+<vowel> (but not just any old h).  There is, in French, the hache aspiré, which the LawlessFrench site explains thus:

This error oftSuch a false liason often  occurs in the first line of the sublime Cantique de Jean Racine, composed by Gabriel Fauré ...

<PROGRAMME_NOTE>
when (as programme notes insist on saying he entered it for a "school prize". Sometimes they even say 'when he was only a schoolboy!!!' [if you'll pardon the screamer-orrhea]. But he was not a schoolboy in the Just William sense; he was nineteen, studying at the École Niedermeyer de Paris,)
</PROGRAMME_NOTE>

....which has the basses alone – as exposed as a choral singer can be. And this howler occurs between the fourth and fifth words:

Verbe égal aux très haut

I'm not sure about the transcription in that  LawlessFrench excerpt. (Note: that's my way of saying I am sure and am not impressed.) But it makes the point clearly enough :

 Some hs don't block elision
when they precede a vowel, so the s isn't sounded:
the h in haut is one such: so /trɛ.ɔ/ not /trɛzɔ/.

<DIGRESSION>
(and Les Halles, while we're at it: /le.al/)
</DIGRESSION>

There is no rule for remembering which hs are aspirés and which are muets.  Dictionaries* mark it in some way, but that's no help for regular speech. You can't carry a dictionary around everywhere you go.

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_EXCEPTION>
As a matter of fact, my brother did during an exchange visit, in his early teens. He was not a great linguist, but he was always very keen on communication.
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_EXCEPTION>

You just have to know which is which. Just over a hundred words start with  an hache aspiré, so it‘s not a huge undertaking  to just learn them – which is all very well for people who hate hammocks; personally, I prefer a more humane approach to language learning.

I complained about this to a native speaker of French once, but he was not sympathetic  – particularly as people learning English have to grapple with a not dissimilar rule, telling honest with initial /ɒ/ from honk with initial /hɒ/.

But, returning to the Cantique, "aux treize eaux" (which the rule over-appliers seem to be singing) makes it sound as though the Cantique is being addressed to someone with thirteen waters (with the aux analogous to the aux in La dame aux Caméllias), or perhaps to a  Native American called 'Thirteen Waters'.

2 Sturm und wrong

The errant rule here, in German now, is this:

In some cases an s that precedes
another consonant becomes /ʃ/

(or "sh" if you must, but for more on my feelings about sounds-like transcriptions, see here; regular readers will already be accustomed to this fad.)

An obvious case is a word like Sturm (as the st occurs at the  start of a word – habitual home of examples of this phonological rule); but the /ʃ/ remains even in mid-word, as in the derived word Regensturm

But often  this change is not applied . And in the musical world a common habitat for the misapplication of this rule is Liebestraum, Liebestod or Liebesliede (any word, I now realize, that starts with Liebes- – not to suggest that it doesn't happen after similar-possessives (it's just that all the examples that spring to mind use that word). In a week of not unusually dedicated monitoring of the airways, I've noticed two cases: the first was on Desert Island Discs (no names, no pack-drill; but it was the guest – young Lauren got it right after the excerpt from Liebestod).

In the second case there was no error – my life, like that of many another survivor of an RC education, is plagued by an eternal vigilance for what the Penny Catechism ...

<GLOSSARY further-info="autobiographical">
(the RC equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book. [If you're interested I can still reel off "The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost" or "The Twelve Fruits of the Holy Ghost"])
 </GLOSSARY>

... used to call "occasions of sin" (situations that invite misbehaviour). But the presenter of the same piece at the Proms (a supporting piece in the Mozart's Requiem concert) knew her stuff.

But this has gone on too long. There's an urgent bio-mass crisis in the front garden.

b


Update: 2019.08.23.10:20  – Typo fix

Update: 2019.08.26.20:20  – More typo fixes, and a couple of clarifications in blue.

Update: 2019.09.06.16:10  – Added footnote:

*A dictionary is of  limited (usually no) use with names.  Often (in  English-language news broadcasts) the French politician François Hollande was the unwilling recipient of trans-gender treatment (Françoise).  In such cases the best advice is to listen to a native speaker: if there‘s no liaison  before it, the h is aspiré.

Zero dark thingy

The Times last week published a crossword that – self-referentially – aroused cross words. The clue (a somewhat feeble one...

<WHOOPS>
I was misled by the angry correspondent's writing, or at least implying by its context, "the Times crossword". It must have been the Quick Crossword, which is a whole 'nother thing. So my "feeble" was undeserved, except to the extent that all such clues are feeble.
</WHOOPS>

....whichever side of The Great am/pm Debate you come down on)   was "12 a.m." and the answer was "midnight".  Aware of the  Great Debate,  their style guide says "Use noon/midnight".

But there is no need for the Debate; it depends on a simple misapprehension. 12 noon is not before or after anything; it is noon on the dot; it is just m.

And the m in "a.m./p.m." does not stand for meridian as many people seem to think...

<DESCRIPTIVIST_CAVEAT>
(except in the sense that all's fair in language use, so that "what people mistakenly think" becomes The Truth.)  But I  know what I know.
</DESCRIPTIVIST_CAVEAT>

... and as I was told at primary school. I lacked the theoretical meta-language to voice my objection (but meridian is an adjective, how can you have BEFORE or AFTER an adjective. Holy Category Error, Batman), but I knew enough to raise an eyebrow. One of the letters to The Times added to the corpus of the poisoned fruits of this widespread misapprehension:

"Surely 12 am follows 11 am, so is noon; any time after 12.00 is post meridian [sic], up to 12 pm."

I'm not sure why Rose Wild (writer of the article in The Times) calls this "logical". By simply swapping a few values, you arrive at the opposite conclusion: "Surely 12 am precedes 01 am, so is midnight".

<CASUISTICAL_EXCURSUS status="dead end">
I suppose it would be possible to argue that – like 'the Orthopedic'  meaning hospital, or 'Local' meaning pub (which itself is an adjective-made-noun, being an abbreviation of  'public house') – meridian is, in the contest of expressions of time, a noun (standing for 'meridian great circle'). The sun has passed that imaginary line. 

That's all very well, but the fact remains that the sun has not passed the line at noon. It is dead on it.
</CASUISTICAL_EXCURSUS>

That m stands for meridiem (the middle of the day). As it happens there is an adjective postmeridian. Most dictionaries carefully define it as of or about something that happens in the afternoon. Onelook will point you to a number of examples. One such (the AHD) is admirably specific:

On the other hand there are some whose obeisance to the God of Usage makes them excessively permissive (in my view, though they would presumably argue that that obeisance reflects the fact that they simply OBEY the trends). But I fear that the obeisance is more a matter of craven idolatry. One such is Collins:

(in which there is only a word space [between after and noon] and one little "in" to emphasize the adjectivity By not emphasizing the "of or relating to" bit, they are holding the door open to illiteracy.

It would be helpful – for those of us who crave such systemic balance – if there were  a Latin word *merinoctis to balance the scales; and although the 'word' does exist in some twilight/fictional/pseudo-gothic/'fanfic' sense (that I don't want to pollute my browsing history by researching any further) it is not mainstream enough to pass muster. If it were, we could have md for noon and mn for midnight., each followed respectively by pmd/pmn times. 

But this is getting rather silly; duty calls. We may as well stick with that style guide, and just say noon/midnight; or use the 24 hour clock. And accept, while we're at it, that crossword compilers cock a snook at style guides.

b

Magellan not gelling

The starting point for today's rambling is the quincentennial celebrations of the circumnavigation of the globe, in a voyage that took nearly three years – from 20 September 1519 to 6 September 1522.

The course of the Magellan/Elcano circumnavigation
as depicted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Magellan_Elcano_Circumnavigation-en.svg

The BusinessMirror reported recently on the circumnavigation ...

<REALLY status="query">
People say things like "Magellan circumnavigated the globe". Well, he only made it (alive) for the first half of  the circumnavigation. Maybe his stand-in Juan Sebastián Elcano  who took over captaincy of  the one ship that completed the journey, brought Magellan's corpse with him for the last bit (not unlike Nelson's body on the trip back from Trafalgar) crossing the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, just so he could get the record.
</REALLY>

...of the Earth:

THE arrival of Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan to our shores [the shores of the Philippines] in 1521 was a watershed in Philippine history because, although he was slain by Mactan chieftain Lapu-Lapu, the Spaniards came back decades later to Christianize and unify the country.

I feel there there may be a non sequitur of stupendous proportions here. The arrival wasn't the watershed; the discovery by the Western world of the islands was – or, rather, it represented one.

<OH_YEAH query="appropriateness of water-based metaphor">
Hmm. Interesting metaphor, watershed.  A watershed, for a map-maker, is where water chooses to go either one way or another; if there's a mountain range, and rivers go eastwards on one side and westwards on the other, that's a watershed. The water, in the Philippines' case, is economic development. After the "discovery" it certainly did flow westwards (eventually). (So fast did it flow, in fact, that global-warming threatens the very existence of the Philippines; a mixed blessing.)

Another watery metaphor is bailout. I see in the paper that our tinpot dictator, wished on us by a handful of ...[ no, I must count to ten and keep taking the tablets {as Jahweh said to Moses <boo-boom>}] The "Brexit war cabinet'  is planning a 'bailout fund' for key businesses brought low by a no-deal Brexit.  Two punning meanings of  bail out are involved here. One meaning of "bailing <someone> out" is "getting them released temporarily"; no water there. This meaning has a long history in print, discussed in the Phrase Finder. Shakespeare ( as so often) used it in Titus Andronicus ("Thou shalt not baile them, see thou follow me"). I imagine this idea of temporary financial assistance was in the mind  of the Brexiteers who planned the fund. 

But there are other possible meanings of "bail out". The first that comes to mind is what you do in a sinking ship, deriving from a word for a small bucket. To quote Etymonline:

Both sorts of "bail out" seem to have got mixed together in the parachutist's emergency move (later adopted by anyone in difficulty, from surfers to party-goers) – both a temporary fix for a little local difficulty (standing as guarantor to avoid imprisonment), and a last-ditch attempt to stave off disaster. In the Brexit case, I favour the latter interpretation.

</OH_YEAH>

But this is only the first eyebrow-raiser in an article [HD: keep up: I mean that BusinessMirror article] full of them. the last "sentence" is a masterful demonstration of how not to write:

If Spain and Portugal view these extraordinary feats as their country’s contribution to mankind, it is thereby hoped by mankind that these ‘Circumnavigation’ nations will be in the forefront to foster peace and address the challenges confronting mankind in the 21st century, such as threats to world security and environmental problems, to name a few.

Fifty-five words and only a couple of commas to lighten the cognitive load; oh, and quotation marks to highlight the meaninglessness of "'Circumnavigation' nations". It deserves a FOGGY, (first introduced here).

But, returning to Magellan (or, in the grandiloquent phraseology of  BusinessMirror  "THIS writer referenced Wikipedia"). Wikipedia, in its first line on Magellan, offers two possible pronunciations, citing two dictionaries: "(/məˈɡɛlən/^[1] or /məˈdʒɛlən/;^[2]. " Now, as regular readers will know, I'm not a fan of prescriptions about language use. But a chap's name is his name, and it seems to me that pronouncing it some other way is just plain wrong.

When it comes to foreign names, there's a problem. Often one language's phonemes just don't fit; and there are things like stress that interfere. Ask a French national who /'vɪktə 'hju:gəʊ/ was and they probably won't recognize Victor Hugo (/vik'tɔɹy'gɔ/). And I'm not suggesting that the English should have to grapple with the original pronunciation (I doubt if a modern native speaker  of Portuguese would know how the language sounded 500 years ago). But the Portuguese name Magalhães has (and always has had) a /g/ in it (I've stopped using the term 'hard' for that sort of g since trying to make sense of the requirements of a Musical Director who used it to mean the precise opposite). So my view is that the affricate (/ʤ/) pronunciation (as in "jello") is simply mistaken. Webster's is accurate in reporting its existence (this is one of the few flaws in the makeup of Sir David Attenborough, for example), but that doesn't make it right.

b