As I was saying

The words "As I was saying" trigger in me a memory I described a few years ago, here

[<something>] reminded me of a story I heard in a half-remembered lecture, about Juan del Encina.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1971-1972">
In May 1972 I was ... not quite a world authority on sixteenth-century Spanish literature, but Professor E. M. Wilson, my lecturer for that year, was.  

Juan del Encina

Juan del Encina, author of some of the seminal works in Spanish Golden Age literature, was arrested by the Holy Inquisition in the middle of a lecture. He was away for some considerable time (years, I think, but I was never much of a note-taker; I'm sure the details are somewhere on the Internet, if you‘re that way inclined). 

When he returned, his opening words were Dicebamus hesterno  die [="{As} we were saying the other day"].

<digression>
It was partly because of Professor Wilson's specialism (he had just contributed the chapter on Calderón to the standard work on Golden Age Literature first published in 1971) that the Hispanic Society chose the play mentioned here.
</digression>

</autobiographical_note>

Back on terra firma (this post, phew)  this is in effect an update to one I wrote nearly five years ago, but it's a bit more than an afterthought. It hinges on some research notes I produced in the late 1970s – when my future had more in it than my past.

<autobiographical_note>
I found the notes during a massive clearout of things I had written. The earliest was a spy spoof I produced when I was still wearing shorts.

<disambiguation> 

(no reference here, for North American readers, to deshabille. These were the 'my mamma done told me' kind of dress: knee-pants, if you will). 

<disambiguation>

</autobiographical_note>

Just to recap the gist of my speculative idea:

The royal coat of arms of Great Britain bears the motto Dieu et mon droît (a reference to the divine right of kings). Google finds well over 200,000,000 hits for the rather feeble (not to say meaningless) translation 'God and my right'. 

Somewhere (when I had reading rights in the old BM reading room) I found a French bible with the words Le Seigneur est ma justesse, which appears in the AV (no refs. today, my battery's about to die, as is my brain) as 'The Lord is my righteousness'.

...

Cutting to the chase, let's imagine Dieu e[s]t mon droît was the translation in some French bible of the verse that appears in the AV* as 'The lord is my righteousness'. The French-speaking Plantagenets would have met it. What better motto for Henry (the first king of Great Britain to adopt the motto) to adopt as a statement of a newly defined right (Henry having picked it up from his forebear Richard I, who favoured it as a crusading battle cry [meaning, roughly, 'God's on my side'])? 

*[2019 correction] I was wrong about the AV, which has (Jeremiah 23:6) 'the Lord our righteousness' . The Revised Standard Version   has Jeremiah 23:6 translated as 'the Lord is our righteousness' (as do other versions)
. 

A French version of this battle cry might have been Dieu est notre droit, which in Old French could have had et for est; e before -st becomes acute, and all this correct spelling stuff wouldn't have bothered Richard I (or his advisers, or chaplain) when he adopted it as his motto at Gisors in 1198. And a few centuries later (as my original post said). it was in use at around the time that defining the divine right of kings became relevant.

<digression>

Getting One's Metaphors in a Twist

David Coleman is not the only source of Colemanballs. Sports commentaries generally offer a cornucopia of such infelicities. The need for a continuous stream of verbiage almost guarantees it.  In the half-time break of a recent Ireland/England rugby match an  example was produced and allowed to slip away unnoticed (apparently unnoticed in the studio, but linguistically aware observers were on the qui vive). 

England had dominated the first half, but in the last ten minutes Ireland were resurgent, and had a one point lead.  The person leading the panel of interested parties in the studio wanted to say Ireland's tails were up and Ireland's noses were in front. Given the positional sense of the two metaphors (tails up/noses in front) it's no surprise that what came out of the presenter's mouth was the posturally improbable mixture: 

Ireland have their tails in front.

</digression>

But those shelves won't clear themselves.

b

Turn hell hound, turn

I don't have a PhD, nor am I a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. But I know a self-important windbag when I see one. Richard Hanania brings all those attributes to the party in his article

It Isn’t Your Imagination: Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals 
Source

The gist of his beef (if that's not too sinewy a metaphor) is:

Until now, conservatives have had to rely on anecdotes to make their case. To see whether there is an empirical basis for such claims, I decided to look into the issue of Twitter bias by putting together a database of prominent, politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform.

He continues  with a description of the massive database he has used to put flesh on the whinging bones of neo-con "argument" :

My results make it difficult to take claims of political neutrality seriously. Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.

"My results", he says – pretty impressive. As I write, his piece has attracted more than 140 comments, mostly unreadable and full of references to a mixture of acronyms and slang that frankly isn't worth the bother of decrypting. But there is the occasional nugget, like

...And the statistical analysis? Unless we know the proportion of liberals versus conservatives versus apoliticals in the base population from which the 22 cases were drawn, the analysis is meaningless. Maybe conservatives are more likely to use Twitter? That could account for some or all of the bias. How would we even know what the political composition of the base population looks like?

Count 'em: 22; that's the sample size. The same (very long) comment concludes:

And even in the unlikely circumstance that the base population has exactly equal numbers of liberals and conservatives, using 5% as the significance level versus 1% requires further justification, as does the use of what is apparently a ‘one-tailed’ analysis [the author is vague on this point].

As I said at the outset, I have no statistical expertise. But I think I can detect here a statistician  who doesn't buy the "analysis".

But this comment provoked a huge backlash, which the author "Jack B. Nimble" (wish I'd thought of that) batted away with arguments  such as

Do Twitter users skew liberal? Your linked data are from 2012! I can suggest two reasons why old data are unreliable:

1. [HD: my numbering and formatting]  Trump effect: Trump’s use of Twitter may have drawn in hordes of his supporters to Twitter starting in 2015, so they can follow his tweets in real time.

and

2. Obama effect: Obama may have encouraged a generation of young adults to become liberals starting in 2009, and we all know that young people adopt new tech sooner than old people.

Are Twitter users in 2019 more likely to be liberal than the base population of average citizens? I don’t know and you don’t know.

 This is what paedocracy looks like

And in unrelated news, I was reminded recently of a post that I wrote a  few years ago, when the government were renewing their relentless attacks on the young (this was before they wasted 2½ years arguing the toss about Brexit and doing little else). Their latest wheeze at the time was to restrict Housing Benefit so that the little blighters could stay at home until they were 21.

This was the latest in a series of reforms (that's politician-speak for retrograde step) that started much earlier:

If I had my time again I'd be feeling extremely paranoid. The pressure starts being heaped on at primary school, where – as I mentioned last time – not only are the hoops you have to jump through getting smaller and higher, they are held by fools (or lions led by donkeys: look at the comments to that David Crystal blog I cited, and you'll see a good and conscientious teacher being forced into the goons' short-sighted bidding by an inflexible marking scheme). 

Then there's secondary school, where the hoops are not only smaller and higher, now they're ringed with flame. Where Victorian schools had notices saying Boys and Girls, they should now say

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate 

(commonly mis-translated as 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here'. It's 'all hope'.) 

And when the kids get through the hoops anyway, there's the ritual annual decrying of standards. 'More of them should be failing' snarl the hounds of hell (oh yes, I'm still working on the Dante theme).

I went on to talk about the woeful imposition (and raising "until the pips squeak") of tuition fees. Generally, my feelings about the way young people were being screwed over were not optimistic.

We're filling the streets with angry young men. And somehow I don't think it's just a revolution in theatre we're fomenting. Today's Jimmy [HD 2019: Jimmy Porter] is armed not just with an ironing board but with the power of the Internet.

But the streets are being filled by angry young men and women armed with nothing more threatening than disgust at the mess adults have made of the world, chanting 'This is what democracy Looks Like':

There's hope for the planet yet, if these good people have  anything to do with it. The comparison between these children's righteous anger and the feeding frenzy of bile accompanying Dr Hanania's whinging is heartening.

But prepare to repel time's wingéd chariot.

b

Aus der Alten Welt

Shortly after its first performance in Prague in 1880, Dvořák's Stabat Mater was performed several times in the UK, starting with a performance at the Royal Albert Hall in 1883.

Dvořák's Stabat Mater (1880) was performed and very well received at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 10 March 1883, conducted by Joseph Barnby.^[2] The success "sparked off a whole series of performances in England and the United States", a year ahead of appreciation in Germany and Austria.^[2] Dvořák was invited to visit Britain where he appeared to great acclaim in 1884.

More

On 12 September 1884...

<autobiographical note relevance_value="0">
 (135 years ago – a period neatly bisected by my own birth on 12 September 1951)

<inline_pps>  

Dvořák‘s tour was twice as long ago as the origin of Wokingham Choral Society. Precise records haven't survived – "Autumn 1951" is as close as it gets. 

</inline_pps>

</autobiographical note>

... it was performed at Worcester, and this title page of the score was signed by members of the orchestra and by Antonin Dvořák (signing himself "Ant."):

The dot above the n may be a reference to the last syllable of his full name,
or it may just be the end of one of the other signatures on this crowded page

As a fellow member of my choir said 'Where has this piece been hiding for the last 40 years?'

<confession>

I borrowed this observation, and added a few years to the claim - though in all honesty I should admit that although my experience of singing in an SATB choir started in the early 1970s it has not been continuous. 

</confession>

The piece really is extraordinarily tuneful. Don't miss it, or the (free, to ticket-holders) introductory talk.:-)

b





Update: 2019.02.07.09:40  – Added PS

PS
In an earlier post I wrote

I think I've already mentioned (somewhere in this blog) Vulgar Latin's preference for first and second declensions over the less regular third, fourth, and fifth; less to remember – and we are often dealing with Latin for speakers of  a Second or Other Language (LSOL?)

And that preference for regularity extended to  the choice of verbs made by those early speakers of LSOL – not only the choices, but the modifications they made (taking an irregular verb and changing the ending to make it behave like a regular one). This happened to the verb that means give: the irregular

do, dare, dedi, datum

became, in some parts of the Roman Empire, the regular

dono, donare, donavi, donatum

So give in current Spanish is dar, but in current French it is donner.

The last words of Stabat Mater,  a Christian Hymn that dates back to the 13th century,  are

Quando corpus moriétur,  fac, ut ánimæ donétur  paradísi glória. And the rather florid translation given by Wikipedia is While my body here decays, may my soul Thy goodness praise, Safe in Paradise with Thee.

Not only florid, but also fanciful, particularly in the third line. The soul (not necessarily mine) does not do anything; it doesn't praise anything. It is the recipient of something; and to mark it as a recipient it has the dative ...

<digression>
(a word that, incidentally, derives from the irregular sort of "give" verb)
</digression>

... ending -ae (in THIS case). The prayer is that the soul may be given the glory of paradise. And the word donaret derives from the regularized form of the word.

Update: 2019.02.17.18:40  – Added inline PPS (see above)

Update: 2019.03.01.11:40  – Added PPPS

PPPS
The double nn and -er ending of the French example I gave in the first update may give some readers pause. The history of French phonology and orthography are a mystery to me (for reasons I've explained before – basically a lazy choice of study options on my part)...

<rant flame intensity="the heat of a thousand Suns">
I can't use that expression without flashbacks of the horror I (not infrequently) feel when people use "on my behalf" as though it  meant the same.
</rant>

... but I'm happy to regard them as a given (which, after all, they are).

So perhaps another example would be more illuminating. The word donation is also probably derived* (ultimately; via the Old French donacion) from the regularized DONARE. I say "probably" because although there is no hint of an n in any part of do, dare, dedi, datum, there is an obvious direct line from DONATIONE(M) (I've explained this typographical convention before; a classical Latinist would be content to say donatio, -onis).

Update: 2019.03.17.10:40  – Added footnote.

*On further reflection it seems to me that this word is not le mot juste. My mistake was to think in terms of one word directly influencing a new word. But what really happens is a systemic pressure for change to words in a particular  field. Given DONATIONE(M) a new system of words was formed, centred on DONARE.