A sorry tale

 I have just discovered Americast and am slowly working through back-numbers...

<tangent type="suppressed">
(There's a crossword clue there, something about  epidurals [GEDDIT?] – no time now though.)
</tangent>

... (which are notable for the outrageous flirting that goes on between Emily Maitlis...

<tangent type ="spellchecker">
Sure you don't mean mantillas?
 </tangent>

and Jon Sopel [who is old enough to know better]). I've just reached one that starts off with an apology. Reflecting on this, Emily Maitlis uses the phrase "Dominic Cummings's mantra 'Never apologize, never explain'".

De mortuis ...

<tangent type="no such luck">
(but let us rejoice that the Poundland Rasputin has been turned out of the corridors of power )
</tangent>

...nil nisi bonum (and I've never been a fan of that use of mantra, so my knee-jerk reaction [How very dare she suggest he was the first to say it?] was possibly a little intemperate: she probably didn't mean to imply that anyway).

But it took me back to the  first time I heard it...

<autobiographical_note FX="harp music to mark reminiscence">
In 1980, one of my first jobs at OUP was to read the page-proofs of Patrick Devlin‘s The Judge (long out of print, or  ‘exhausted‘ as  they say  in Spain, as is the author  [RIP]). My boss (if that‘s the word) was a great cultivator of authors, mentioned (here).

... A recent edition of Great Lives started with Matthew Parris asking 'Why hadn't I heard of him before?' Well I had, by chance. During my brief stay at OUP in and around 1980, my friend and mentor Richard Brain (sadly no longer with us) edited a book about the extraordinary Muir of Huntershill, and as his assistant I had some dealings with it (not as many as I should have, as Richard – for all his many talents – was not terribly good at delegating, but the author was a personal friend).

So I didn‘t see much of Patrick Devlin (who Richard would have preferred to credit as Lord but the great man would have no such thing). The last time I saw him was  just after publication. when I admitted to having let slip a very obvious error. The typesetters had lost a whole line. missing out the end of one of one long and abstract sentence and the beginning of the next, leaving a string of words that was unusually long even for the noble Lord but without any of the  satisfaction of a peak well-scaled on reaching the bourn of a full-stop. I admitted it not by way of apology, although one was due (it was a case not so much of Homer nodding as of Homer nodding OFF). With unfounded optimism I was thinking in terms of an erratum slip in a reprint, or even a corrected paperback edition.

What he said was "Never apologize, never explain, never make the same mistake twice", which seemed to me to have the resonance of a Quotable Quote, possibly from somewhere like Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son. But I haven't been able to find it quoted anywhere; the nearest I get is that old stick GBS saying "I never explain" – which can hardly be regarded as the seed for Lord Devlin's tripartite advice. Perhaps Lord Devlin, after a lifetime of rhetoric, knew the rule of three and rounded off the rather banal "Never apologize, never explain" with his own rhetorical flourish.
 

And I've just realized he was talking to me, rather than saying what he would do if anyone noticed. DOH.  :-) (I'd make this an emoji, but Blogger seems to insist that the first image in a post must become the icon [in, for example, social media].)
</autobiographical_note>

Emily Maitlis reported (in the most recent edition I've heard, which dates back to the days when – would you believe it? – Trump  was still  crying Foul) that she had been told that the latest casualty from the Mad Hatter's Te er... Trump Cabinet had been sacked because he drafted a concession speech – or some such  adult admission of reality. What seems to be happening is that a depressingly large majority of Republicans have hold of a tiger by the tail and daren't let go for fear of the teeth at the other end. The sorry spectacle is a 21st-century version of The Emperor's New Clothes – The President's Second Term.

L'Envoi 

And my almost-unnoticed Word of the Year  is "rollout" and its associated phrasal verb "roll out". Etymonline dates it to 1957, which makes it fairly old but coined in my lifetime: when I was knee-high to a grown-up. I met it in what must have been one of its first outings, at the rollout of the Vulcan at the Farnborough AirShow (though in my experience of English engineers they have an extreme ...

 <INLINE_PS>

(some would say pathological)

<INLINE_PS>

...sensitivity to perceived Americanisms, so it probably didn't appear ... 

 <INLINE_PS>

(so much for that memory)

<INLINE_PS>

...in the sales bumf at the time). And it transferred by a gentle extension from the aeronautical usage to motor shows, when a car that wasn't fully developed (maybe it had no engine) was rolled out onto the showroom floor.

Then marketeers  got their greedy little neologizing teeth into it, and any product was fair game for a "rollout". In nearly twenty years of writing for a US-based multinational I became inured to the idea of more-or-less anything  being rolled out.

But it really came into its own in 2020. PPE is rolled out, Test and Trace is rolled out, vaccination is rolled out.... It didn't make the OED's Words of the Year, but it must have come fairly close.

 

 

b

Update 2020.12.20.13:35 – Added <INLINE_PS>s

No sex please, we're French

On the last Saturday in November (that's  how long I've been worrying at this bit of linguistic gristle) an article in The Times mentioned a reader who had been working away at an anagram for over 3 years. My mail to the Feedback column fell on stony ground, but here it is:

Leigh Carter‘s three-and-a-half year computer-assisted anagram search may have used tools that incorporated the "rule" my French master taught me more than 60 years ago: that cookery words that are based on a name are preceded by an implicit  "à la mode" and are therefore feminine - bourguignonne, mayonnaise... and dauphinoise.

However, I have often reflected, as a student of philology, that rules like this are usually the sign of a linguistic change in progress; I discuss a fascinating case here (about an early Roman Latin master's list of rules proscribing common errors). My most recent dictionary (Concise OED, 2013) lists dauphinois as a headword and relegates dauphinoise to a parenthetical "(also ...)". But Onelook (a web-based finder of dictionary entries) finds only one entry - Oxford's. (In contrast, it finds four - including Oxford's) for dauphinoise.)

 Following the Onelook link I found that, although the headword is dauphinois, most of the examples, have daphinoise. In fact, in the first screenful of examples, there are only two cases of dauphinois to nine of dauphinoise, and all the cases of dauphinoise refer to a manner or mode (both feminine nouns in French) of cooking. So what explains the two cases of dauphinois?

..ois or ...oise?

The answer is suggested by the second example and confirmed by  all four cases of dauphinois in the next screenful  (with dauphinoise still in the majority, but less so: 7 out of 11). Wherever dauphinois occurs it can (mistakenly) be parsed as an adjective qualifying gratin. There are no dates on the examples, but I suspect that these "adjective qualifying gratin" examples predate the first case in my first screenful: dauphinois as an adjective qualifying gratin becomes a justification for dauphinois understood as a free-standing noun.

The second screenful

But this does not apply only to dauphinois, for which Onelook finds only one entry. In the case of bourguignon (which I vainly, and – let's face – it mistakenly) whinged about here:

... (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette, Bourgignon/Bourguignonne... 

<mini-rant status="stillborn">
No, I won't but... If people would just pronounce the /n/ when they say Bœuf Bourguignonne.  PLEASE.
</mini-rant> 

... etc.)

The fight in defence of the rectitude of bourguignonne (according to the "B-G rule" [B-G being the French master who taught me it]) has been well and truly lost. Google finds 

About 9,010,000 results for boeuf bourguignon 

but only 

About 311,000 results for boeuf bourguignonne.

And the ...gnon version really has the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Teachers laying down rules are a sure sign that language is on the move.

b

I read the news today

An OTP (One-Time Passcode) I was sent this morning (partial of course, and I'm not saying what for – you never know what Nigerian princes are lurking out there) started 158... and it took me back to the top deck of a 158 bus in late May 1967. I know it was a 158 (although I could  catch either a 158 or a 114 for the first leg of my journey home from school at the time) because a friend was there ...

<parenthesis>

I've mentioned John before, here back in the days when this blog paid more attention to its byline ["a snapper up of unconsidered trifles"] and recounted chance observations)

</parenthesis>

...and he lived in Ruislip (which wasn't on the 114 route).

John was reading from the sleeve of an album...

<tangent>

Now there's an interesting word – yet another example of a metaphor continuing to refer to an old technology long after the technology has moved on (mentioned  in this blog, too often to mention, like hanging-up a phone or [trivially] giving someone a ring, when most mobiles don't ring anyway). 

Latin album  means "white [thing, in this case]", and collectors of various things (stamps, press-cuttings, photos...) used to keep them in a book with blank pages. Meanwhile, back at the gramophone, the old 78 rpm records used to last  only about 3 minutes.  (The length of early popular songs in the recorded music era reflects this...

<autobiographical_note>

And novelty recordings like Danny Kaye's story of The Little Fiddle had to be turned over halfway through. At least, that's what we did until the elder of my two brothers broke it, and had to mend it by sticking thick card to one side. Thereafter, we had to make do with just the second half of the story.

</autobiographical_note>

 )...Any longer, and you had to have a number of discs;  for a symphony, say,  there would be a dozen or more). These were sold in ledger-like volumes, containing separate sleeves. This was an "album" as the sleeves were blank. I've always wondered whether the designer of the Beatles White Album knew this. (But maybe it's a well-known item of pop trivia: "let your fingers do the walking" [to use another metaphorical anachronism] if you're interested enough to check.)

</tangent>

... which included full lyrics on it. To quote Wikipedia: 

The album's lyrics were printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP.

This was important, some say, because it was a "concept" album (though what the alleged concept was isn't clear to me. OK, so there was a band. And then....? [as they say in that telling French question Et alors?]). What's that got to do with the other songs?

Still, it was exciting, and John read the lyrics aloud on that 158 (top deck, of course).

One last observation re "the news today": RIP Dave Prowse. His two chief roles were Darth Vader and The Green Cross man; but I  first remember him as the figurehead of the Bullworker^TM advertising.

<autobiographical_note>

My two brothers and I clubbed together to buy one at the Ideal Home exhibition "special" price of 32s 6d. The older one, who had a job in the Selfridges crockery department (which indirectly caused the Little Fiddle Affair, as he was demonstrating how you could drop a plate without breaking it), paid £1/0/0. The two younger brothers, reflecting our relative amounts of pocket money, contributed 10s. and 2s. 6d.

 

</autobiographical_note>

That's all for this week. I'm missing the cricket.

b

 

Soul of discretion

Some years  ago I wrote (here):

Songs in my forthcoming concert have made me think about gender. My first ..issue, thinking point.....? comes in Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (written  'when Fauré was still at school', as programme notes tend to say, although he was a fairly mature 19-year-old at the time). The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great discovery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well....

This was a bit defeatist (Defeatist? Moi?); there could still be a musicological point worth making. There are, as I wrote before looking at the score, two possible interpretations of the sounds:  

1. qui la conduit is an admission of (present) human weakness
   Here, la conduit means "[it] leads"  [the soul is being led by human frailty]
2. qui l'a conduit is a confession of (past) misdeeds (l'oubli de tes lois)
   Here, l'a conduit means "[it] has led" [sleep – human fecklessness – has led to l'oubli de tes lois]

   <autobiographical_note>
   I can almost hear Fr Gregory saying 'I hadn't time'. 

   <inline_PPS>
   The context was a soul in Purgatory aspiring to get into Heaven, speaking to the celestial bouncer in justification of their sins of omission.
   <inline_PPS> 

   </autobiographical_note>

There is a pun here, based on the two meanings of conduit and Fauré knew that. It's not inconceivable that he wanted the basses to sound Sam-the-Eagle-like. After all, the phrase is  marked by a very prominent bass entry. Perhaps the 19-year-old was having a sly dig at his schoolmaster father, who sent him away  from the family home in the South of France twice: he lived at home for only 14 five of his first 19 years –  with a foster mother until he was four, and then after only  five happy years...

<parenthesis>
(of the chapel near his home he wrote:

I grew up, a rather quiet well-behaved child, in an area of great beauty. ... But the only thing I remember really clearly is the harmonium in that little chapel. Every time I could get away I ran there – and I regaled myself. ... I played atrociously ... no method at all, quite without technique, but I do remember that I was happy; and if that is what it means to have a vocation, then it is a very pleasant thing.

quoted in Wikipedia

)
</parenthesis>

... he was sent to Paris to study at the Ėcole Niedermeyer.

L'Envoi

Meanwhile, a pedant's life doesn't get any easier: in My soul doth magnify the problem I wrote (of a concert that include the Magnificat)

...The words of the Magnificat reminded me of a confusion that keeps cropping up in the life of a choral singer. In the text that that link points to you'll see in the third line of the Latin exultavit, translated in the English as "hath rejoiced". But later on the word exaltavit appears, translated in the English as "hath exalted".

Italianate pronunciation of Latin now gets involved. Listen to this YouTube clip; the relevant word starts occurring from about 30 seconds in, and is repeated as often as Vivaldi chooses. When this vowel (not unlike the English /ʌ/ phoneme – the one that occurs in, for example, "exulted", although it is closer to [ɑ]) is heard by a strictly Anglophone ear, confusion arises..

And this a/u problem hasn't gone away. In the ENO's recent rendition of Mozart's Requiem one of the alternations between in aeternum and requiem eternam was a fleeting blemish (at 51'14") on a very welcome live concert. I'm sure I'd be happier if I didn't notice this sort of thing, but there we go. The choir of ENO usually sing in English, so maybe I should cut them some slack; shame though.

b

PS My choir was rehearsing (via Zoom) last night, and it reminded me of a previous concert, of which I had written:

...My favourite moment during rehearsals involved a private joke – private, that is, to people who have a bit of Latin. 

We were singing an arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo that involved only half the choir singing the second verse and the other half joining in at the words Trahe me post te. As often happens when more people sing, there was a tendency to slow down. Our conductor said 'I feel as if I'm having to drag‡ you along after me.' This was my moment of private hilarity [little things...], as the words mean 'Drag me after you' (think of tractor on the one [Latin] hand and draught [animals] on the other [English].) 

More here

Update: 2020.11.2311:45 – Added <inline_PPS /> and fixed dodgy maths re Fauré's time spent  at home.

Joys Seven

In a Zoom rehearsal last night we were introduced to a new setting by our MD of the carol Joys Seven.

In less pestilential times, before singing a more traditional (or less fiendishly difficult, perhaps) version of this carol I wrote:

We will be singing several pieces new to the choir, among them Joys Seven – which is, in jazz terms, a paraphrase of The Lincolnshire poacher.

<digression>
That's something they don't seem  to do in  Primary Schools any more  – communal singing of  what were known as "Folk Songs" before the Revival of  the late '50s–early '60s. I remember at St Gregory's RC Primary School singing with gusto

When me and my companions Were setting of a snare
'Twas then we spied a
    gamekeeper
For him we did not care
For we can wrestle and fight,
    me boys,
And jump o'er anywhere...

A one-time colleague of mine, who already played the piano and the violin, during her teacher-training was required to learn the guitar so that she could maintain eye-contact with her pupils. As a consequence of this sort of thinking, today's schoolchildren can sing Kumbaya but not Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill.
</digression>

The interjection "me boys" in that extract are significant in a mistake I am always tempted to make in Joys Seven, because the two-word interjection at the equivalent place is "good man" – and I find it hard to avoid the less devout version.

Words, though; they won't learn themselves.

And, in a update to the same post I added this oft-picked nit:

And while we're on the subject of the words to Joys Seven, the sixth verse (which needs a rhyme for six) evokes in me another conditioned reflex from my old  St Gregory's days, provoked by the words "To see her own son Jesus Christ upon the crucifix".

A cross is a cross; an image of someone on one (there have been thousands of people tortured to death that way, if not  millions, but Christ is usually the one depicted) is a crucifix. I thought I'd better confirm this bit of pedantry, and it seems that dictionaries tend to agree:

Cambridge

Macmillan

Cobuild

Still, they needed a rhyme for six, and there aren't too many. Besides, the Collins English Dictonary is more forgiving:

On re-reading this I didn't see at first what justified my word "forgiving"; but there is a reading of this (which would be clarified by a comma after the second word) that makes the last phrase apply exclusively to "image of a cross". (And I wouldn't put such low standards of punctuation past the editors. :-) )

But time's wingėd chariot is doing its usual thing; Phoebus's jolly old cart...

b

Shibboleth schmibboleth

OK, it's a fair cop. Pedantry is not a stranger to  me.  I've dealt, often in this blog, with linguistic pedantry; one of my more visited posts is this one, the first of two trottings out of one of my most cherished bons mots, about "pedants of the world having nothing to lose but their chains" (make that three trottings out).

<background>
New readers start here: it's an etymological joke (i.e. absolutely hilarious), about the root of the word "pedant": Greek pedai (which means "chains").
</background>

I'm not a fan of this sort of pedantry; not that that spares me from being prey to it from time to time. It's hard not to be , the way people throw words around quite disirregardless of their proper meaning,

<irony_warning>
And, as they say in the UNIX world, send complaints about that use of "proper" to /dev/null/.
</irony_warning>

A bridge between linguistic pedantry and the sort of pedantry I want to address now is somewhere in this (which I have no time to trawl through just now for the sake of a spot reference, and besides, "no names, no pack drill") someone who had put together a virtual choir said that the effort involved increased exponentially with the number of recordings and he or she...

<parenthesis>
(well, I know which, but to specify which would spill the beans as – apart from the ring-mistress – there was only one wo..[oops])
</parenthesis>

... said "and I don't need to explain about exponential growth" (or words to that effect). And it's clear that the speaker wouldn't have been able to explain it. My savings, with varying interest rates (averaging not much more than than 1.5%), grow exponentially, but the exponent in question is about 1.0015. With an exponent of significantly more than one, exponential growth is indeed very fast and getting faster and faster (roughly what people mean when they use the word), but if the exponent is one-and-a-smidgen the growth rate is nugatory, and when the exponent is less than one....

<home_study_recommendation>
Somewhere on the net you'll find a story about someone doing a service for a Chinese emperor (aren't they always?) who says – do they never learn? – "Ask of me anything you want". And the doer of the service spots a chessboard (there's usually one lying around) and asks the emperor to give him one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth etc. doubling all the way to 64, and aggregating all the contents of the previous squares. The total is (as I remember) astronomical (really) – anyway, it's huge (not that all those kilos of rice would fit on the squares, if I'm being honest). There the exponent is 2, and the growth really is great.
</home_study_recommendation>

...But she knew what she meant. and everybody else did . So I should give her a break.

Anyway, this is the sort of pedantry I want to address: arithmetical pedantry – usually influenced by a teacher or teachers. At my primary school, when we started adding and taking away ...

<autobiographical_note type="Oh, the naivety">
At secondary school "taking away" was scorned in favour of "subtracting". I still have a vision of Doc Lewis's withering scorn...

<tangent>
Excuse the cliché: is there any other sort? <blush />
</tangent>

 ...when people on Countdown say "times it by..."; "The word is multiply, boy."
</autobiographical_note> 

 ... we were told to label the columns "H/T/U". A "1" in the H column stood for "100". In fact, although we hadn't yet thought about the wonders of this new-fangled zero thing (the Romans managed without it), that's what the zeros in 100 are doing – making sure the "1" stays in the H column and doesn't migrate to somewhere else where it would mean something different.

/More next week

AOB

I must get on.... But my mind has been occupied of late with this carol competition. I've been following this on Radio 3 Breakfast for a few years now, but it's always seemed beyond me. People submitted complex 4-part settings of modern poems.

But  numbers must have been falling off...

<rant>
 (one could ask a woeful succession of Education Ministers why, I suspect; but is there any wonder that people in this benighted country couldn't tell a melisma from a melanoma? )
</rant>

..., and now they've moved the goalposts; the competition people simply want a melody, which I  can just about do ("Has ability but is disinclined to use it musically" wrote my music master, in the days when teachers were allowed to put what they liked in school reports.)

The rules require a melody for one verse, suitable for all the others.  How can you do any word-painting when you don't control the arrangement?

Still, it's done now:

Well, I'm not holding my breath, although for other reasons I'm counting down the days to 18 November...

Bye for now

b

Update: 2020.11.07.16:20  – Added PS

PS: Another prejudice...

<parenthesis>
(by which I don't mean to deprecate the belief; thinking about it I find it innumerate, lazy, and misleading. I'm simply saying I feel this antipathy without thinking about it.)
</parenthesis>

 ...ingrained in me by Doc Lewis  is the habit of many commentators (particularly sports commentators) to keep the HTU words even after the decimal point: "reducing the world record to nine point twenty-four seconds". No. no, no. in the expression "9.24 seconds" the 24 isn't twenty-four; twenty is represented by a 2 in the Tens column; in 9.24 the .24 stands for two tenths and four hundredths. Calling that sort of 2 "twenty" is making the same mistake as calling 31 "twenty eleven", because when you get 11 in the Units column you put down a one and carry a one – every fule no that.

Of course, there is a language that – while not saying "twenty eleven" – does say "sixty eleven": soixante onze: a Guardian Notes & Queries page explores the tip of the septante huitante nonante issue,  which is partly (as far as quatre vingts is concerned) due to the fact that the Celtic language spoken in Gallia Transalpina before the Romans came and taught them how to speak proper used a vigesimal (base 20) counting system. In fact, that vigesimal counting system affects English dialects as well. A friend of mine with a holiday home in Swaffham once heard a farmer talking about "half a score of pigs".  (The word score itself suggests a vigesimal counting system, but the phrase "half a score" seems to me more persuasive, as it deliberately avoids the word "ten".)

Still more numerical navel-gazing to come, but I must show my face in the Real World.

 

b

On the one hand...

Last week I met a new word – well, new to me. BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week was a version of The Good Germans, which began:

<minor_bugbear response="I know, I know, I should lighten up"> 

My hackles rose at that first sentence (on the radio), as the reader omitted the commas, and I tried to imagine what a "Gymnasium grammar school" was.

</minor_bugbear>

It had to be taken down. The caretaker claimed not to be able to find the key to the tower, but the day was saved by the one-armed French master, a mutilé de guerre, who climbed up unibrachially (as is the wont of the one-armed... and don't bother looking that word up) and took it down. The narrative goes on:

<autobiographical_note>

(which reminds me of my history master, who larded his lessons with contemporary quotations: "Roll up that map of Europe", "Blood and iron", "Contemptible little army"... that sort of thing. The watchword for The Battle of Verdun was Ils ne passeront pas. Such quotations were the key to writing good history essays, he said.

In the mid-late '70s, I was visiting a friend in Paris. On one occasion, on the Metro,  I was standing, unhelpfully, in the middle of the carriage's doorway as it drew into a station.  And, as the bottleneck tightened, I was slow to get out of the way of the massed Parisians...

<regret>
(I thought my hostess, who had introduced me to the pun 'One man's Mede is another man's Persian' [which turns out to be less original than I initially thought] would appreciate the joke, but she was sufficiently acclimatised [though a  native of New Jersey] to be rather quick to join in with the general hostility to the boorish behaviour of this particular rozbif.
</regret>

...as I mused on how appropriate the station's name (Verdun) was: Ils ne passeront pas du tout.  Mr Crosby would have been proud. 

</autobiographical_note>

A few weeks ago I made the mistake of watching For a Few Dollars More again. The music was fun, but the action was  – as I should have remembered – tedious; lots of our hero riding backwards and forwards watching other horsemen riding pointlessly in the distance. My boredom was assuaged by the vagaries of the subtitles.

The protagonist did everything but shoot with his left hand, and I got an inkling of who was about to figure in the plot when a bounty-hunter's name was revealed as Manco...

 <suspension_of_objection>
Yes I KNOW. If you know what's coming and object, stick with me. This is the story of my enlightenment.
 </suspension_of_objection>

...Spanish for "one-armed man". Manco was an appropriate nick-name for a gunfighter with this trait.

But the subtitle said Monco. I thought I had noticed an issue that is heightened when British ears meet American pronunciation of what in British English is /ɒ/ (the stressed vowel in "biology").

<???What's_he_on reason="Why not got or something?">
Trawling through *AL* words  for When Vowels Get Together vol. 2 –  Sonorants...

<inline_PPS>
I'm not sure what this link will do for you. You may need to instal the free Cloud ePub Reader (but the link could automagically enlist the aid of the Reader installed on my system).
<inline_PPS>

...found that areas of study, from astrology to zoology, were all -ologies, with one exception, genealogy. But some American English pronunciations of words that in British English have an /ɒ/ have a vowel not unlike the /æ/ used in British English to (sometimes) represent a written o.*

<inline_ps>
Here is the note I wrote in that book.

Perhaps because of the popularity of genealogy on the Internet, the American English pronunciation (which Cambridge Dictionary of American English gives as having either /æl/ or /ɑl/) is often misheard, misreported, and then mistakenly learnt as /ɒ/ and misspelt as geneology. As this is the only -alogy in English, it is possible that the erosion will continue, and that in 22nd-century English the a spelling will seem as old-fashioned as – for example – shew or 'bus does today.

</inline_ps>

The craze for genealogy is something I associate with the USA – possibly because of the Mormons' records in Utah. Anyway when an American speaker says genealogy it's easy for a British English speaker to assume it's spelt geneology – which has become a fairly common mistake (Google, after you've convinced it that you don't really want "genealogy" reports more than 1.5 million instances) My guess is that over the next hundred or so years (Global Warming Permitting) it will become increasingly common (and ultimately accepted as right).

That's why I gave biology as an example.
</???What's_he_on>

So when I saw Monco I assumed that the person writing the subtitles had simply misheard.

But the truth is much less interesting. The many script-writers (credited and uncredited, including Sergio Leone twice) were Italian, and Italian for one-handed is Monco. Of course, the idea of a bounty-hunter in an originally Spanish-speaking part of the world adopting an Italian nick-name is ridiculous; and if the thing had really happened he would have been called Manco.  But the mistake wasn't the subtitle-writer's; it was the script-writers'.

That's all for now. Time for guitar practice  –  a much simplified version of Albéniz's Leyenda (which I think, eerily, means "subtitle" [in some secondary meaning in a misremembered language that I don't have time to research])

b

Update: 2020,10.19.13.50 – Added footnote

* Early readers may have noticed a typo here – I initially put "a". Sorry, I find that not using the  IPA symbols gets very confusing.

Update: 2020,10.19.16.45 – Added <inline_ps />

Update: 2020,10.19.17.15 – Added <inline_pps />

Update: 2020,10.21.12.45 – Added confirmation of leyenda meaning.

Here, courtesy of Google Translate:

Knew I didn't dream it :-)

 

Where have I heard that before? (Take 2)

Today's excursion (taking a thought for a walk, whereas Klee took a line) is an idea I've looked at before (here, and probably other places – I often notice these things [and as often can't place the tunes]

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 [HD – On hearing the first cuckoo in Spring] 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

(You may want to follow that link,  but here's a plot-spoiler: the falling third represents not a cuckoo but a bell tolling for a lost boy.)

My most recent AHA moment came in a guitar lesson ...

<background>
Between the late '60s and the mid '70s I was a folk-rock hero manqué. One of my most cherished memories of this time is of an American audience member at the folk club in the crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields saying to me "You're subdood, but hit it"; I was never sure what this meant, but it felt encouraging.

My last public performance with a guitar was in an OUP Christmas Revue in 1979. (I appeared in the 1980 one as well, but sans guitar... 

<inline_ppps> 

(Captain Hook, the character I was playing, would've had trouble with the fingering.)

</inline_ppps> 

  Now, after 40 years, I've decided to learn properly.
</background>

... as I was stumbling through a Russian folk tune about a Little Tree in a Meadow (life's too short to track down the Cyrillic) I thought I recognized it.

<yawn reason="Everyone knows that">
Well I don't. I know that a favourite habit of some composers is to quote from folk songs, and if I had a decent musical education I could reel off umpteen examples. But no, apart from the Hovis advert (which everyone does know) I keep tripping over this stuff and it's always a surprise.

And it's not just folk songs. Watching The First Night of the Proms earlier this year I was struck by the similarity between Copland's Quiet City (at 24'45" in that programme) and Frank Loesser's My Time of Day . Maybe it's just the plaintive lone trumpet and the general atmosphere of deserted city streets (and they're both set in New York), but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was some other theoretical clue in the music.  Loesser might well have heard the Copland piece (or vice versa – they both premiered in 1940. Come to think of it, they might both have borrowed it from somewhere else).

I discuss another example (but the Devil's music this time [Clapton's Wonderful Tonight and Handel's Silent Worship] here). And that song brings to mind another musical quotation which brings us back to folk; in one of Cream's songs [I'll have to look it up] Jack Bruce's bass line is The Cutty Wren.
</yawn>

After a false alarm when I thought I'd placed it in the 1812 (at 8'10")...

<inline_PS>
(in my defence, the two songs are both in the Dorian mode.

<mnemonicsʁus>
On the piano's white notes, the Dorian mode starts with D.
</mnemonicsʁus>

</inline_PS> >

... I found it in the same composer's  Fourth Symphony (it first appears at 0'15" into the 4th movement, but is restated several times).

That's all for now. I may revisit this next week (Sunday's a day of rest) with an update about my time with "the fastest balalaika player in the West".

b

Update: 2020.10.13.14:10 – added < inline_PS /> and PPS

PPS: That folk song mentions a balalaika; I know only a handful of Russian words,  but balalaika leaps out of the jumble of foreign sounds – that is, most of it does (the last syllable seems a bit /u/-ish to me, but I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason for that). 

Anyway, listening to it reminded me of my time as Boris the Accompanist, supporting Bibs Ekkel, the fastest balalaika player in the West. If you saw a film or TV drama that called for a balalaika-playing extra, if it was made in the 1970s or '80s it was probably Bibbs. (IMDB cites more recent films, so maybe he was younger than he looked). It was Bibbs who introduced me to the idea of practice rewards  – Stolichnaya in his case.

When we first met, he asked  exciting questions like Had I got a passport? and How soon could I fly to Israel? (he had worked on cruise ships; I think the Israel  gig was a figment of his imagination. But the furthest afield we ever got was a restaurant in South Kensington, where he was constantly asked to play Lara's Theme, which he despised (to the extent of not telling me the chords, so we couldn't rehearse – and this was in the pre-Youtube days, when research like that was a less trivial matter).

Update: 2020.10.28.16:20 – added < inline_PPPS />

Well said, that man

In this week's Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, Rowan Williams was talking about his new book The Way of St Benedict., which led me to think about the many appearances of Benedict in my life.

The first was as near home as you can get. When looking for a house to buy, my father had three priorities: nearness to church, RC school, and Ealing studios (in that order). He got the first two spot on: the church and the school were within walking distance. The journey to Ealing Studios (where he worked at the time)  would have taken a little longer – maybe 15-20 minutes in the Standard Vanguard (known, for reasons I  never questioned, as "the Green Lizard"):

The church and school were named for St Benedict, as was indirectly... 

<parenthesis>

Very indirectly. Father Ben (sic  – younger and trendier than most of his peers) named the youth club he started after the bird that figured on the school's emblem: "the Corbie":

 

<subparenthesis>  

And there are twa. I wonder.... Probably not though. I suspect the corbies were just a heraldic pun referring to the great Benedictine foundation in Picardy: Corbie Abbey. (Although perhaps the designer of those arms knew the song.) 

</subparenthesis>

</parenthesis>

... the folk club that was the scene of my first guitar-related efforts.

Benoît ....

<you-at-the-back command="Wake up">
Do I really need to point out that this is one of several French names cognate with "Benedict"?
</you-at-the-back>

... was "my" member of the Regnault family, who lived in Motteville.

<background-info>
Throughout the 1960s my family took part in a number of exchange visits with a family made up of conveniently spaced children. Jo exchanged with Odile, Mick with Denis, Angela with Vincent, I with Benoît, and Yag [don't ask] with Nicolas (note the names; we were matched in religion, an important consideration at the time,  as well as age).
</background-info>

Which brings me to Bene't – presumably the anglicized version of Benoît.  My college at Cambridge was built next to St Benet's Church – and at one time was known colloquially as "Bene't College". The church stands in Bene't Street, scene of a bit of unconsummated ésprit d'éscalier recounted here: 

A few years ago I was in Cambridge, and missed a trick. I was at the front of the crowdlet in front of the Chronophage [HD: See here], and a tourist behind  me wondered aloud what the inscription meant: 

Mundus transit, et concupiscentia ejus 

It took me a while to work it out, as two of the less obvious words (everything except transit, et and ejus) had glyphs that hid the letters un and en behind the conventional stone mason's tilde, giving ũ and ẽ. But what it says could be rendered as The world passes, as does its concupiscence. (I think the comma justifies my as does).

The trick I missed was the opportunity to give the tourists the impression that round every corner (the Chronopage is on the corner of Bene't St) in Cambridge there lurks a Vulgar Latinist. (And if you want to know more about concupiscence, read that post.)

There are other Benedicts in my life; a nephew, the celebrant of my little sister's wedding, the patron saint of Europe (who seems to have taken his eye off the ball spectacularly in the last few years), my choir's multi-talented accompanist ...

But what of my subject line, particularly the expression well said?  Well, according to Wikipedia, ...

Etymologically it [HD: Benedict] is derived from the Latin words bene ('good') and dicte ('speak'), i.e. "well spoken" [HD:my emphasis] 

...which strikes me as broadly true (though I wonder what 'dicte "speak"' is supposed to  mean...

<tangent>
Why the inflexion -e on dicte? Why cite a root in the ablative? I suspect the writer had only a passing acquaintance (if that) with Latin, and maybe once had a penpal called Bénédicte.
</tangent>

...) but crucially irrelevant. A person who in Latin is benedictus is not "well-spoken" but is BLESSÉD*. In the words of the Sanctus "he who comes in the way name of the Lord" is blesséd:

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini

<tangent>
"He who comes in the way name of the Lord is well-spoken?" Just as well, really. We don't want any of those ill-spoken yobs coming in the name of the Lord.  What would people think?
</tangent>

The speaker of the good things is Himself – and it would be either anathema or pointless or meaningless (depending on your beliefs) to pass judgment on His elocution.

That's all for now

b

Update: 2020.10.02.10:05 – Added PS

PS

When listing Benedicts in my life, I missed an obvious one, which I might have remembered if I'd read the WCS rehearsal schedule for last night before I hit Publish. We were due to sing the Benedictus  from Beethoven's Mass in C (although in the rehearsal we overran on the Credo and didn't get round to it).

<parenthesis>
And when I said "in the words of the Sanctus " I meant it. Most composers treat the Sanctus and the Benedictus as separate movements (though often there is an actual or implied attaca linking the two, and each is followed by a Hosanna with broadly the same notes). But the Benedictus is part of the same prayer – at least it was in my altar-boy days.
</parenthesis>

Update: 2020.10.09.10.15 – Fixed misquote. Mea maxima culpa.

Update: 2020.10.24.14.15 – Added footnote

* I've just become aware of a case of contrasted benedicts versus Bad Lots that will be well-known to singers of various Requiems. The Ur-Requiem in my mind is Mozart's: in the Confutatis maledictis an ominous figure in the lower voices is interrupted by an angelic Voca me cum benedictis in the upper voices ("Call me [to be/to stand/to stay] with the blesséd [as opposed to the maledictis]. The music forces an interpretation that isn't strictly there in the prayer. The infernal tune and lower voices mark the maledicti. The angelic tune and upper voices stand for the benedicti ...

<inline-p⁴s>
(strictly, I suppose, benedictae)
</inline-p⁴s>

.... But in the prayer there is only one voice – that of a soul awaiting judgment: "When the wrong-doers have been condemned to Hell [confutatis maledictis] ...

<inline-pps>
(Some of the more attentive readers, if not deprived of the schooling in Latin that is everyone's birthright,  may have recognized the ablative absolute here –  "Caesar having thrown a bridge across the river" sort of thing.)
</inline-pps>

 ...call me ...". It's a bit like when a teacher is choosing the worthiest in the class: "Ooh me, pick me".

Update: 2021.03.31.15:00 – Added <inline-pps />

Update: 2021.12.22.11:35 – Added PPPS

PPPS

I've only just learnt, from an alumni magazine [incidentally, I wonder when "old boys/girls" became "alumn-i/-ae"] of another instance of "Benedict" turning up in my back-story: this fore-runner of that termly publication:

The Benedict was first published in 1898, and continued under that name (with a break in 1914-18) until 1928.

Update: 2022.12.31.15:00 – Added <inline-p⁴s>

Nascent, adolescent, dehiscent, and crepuscular

Nearly eight years ago here in the first months of this blog (when this blog was nascent [before  its adolescence and – some would say – senescence]) I first visited the idea of inchoative infixes. Etymonline skates over them, rather missing the point, I would suggest, by calling -escent a suffix...

<weasel-words>
(in case anyone actually bothers to follow that link, I'd better admit that Etymonline doesn't actually use the word "suffix"; but it does call -escent a "word-forming element", showing a cavalier disregard for Occam's razor and ignoring all the -asc, -isc, and -usc- cases hinted at in my subject line.

<FFS> 

<order-order scurrility-quotient="0"> 

And no, the  S doesn't  stand for "sake". FFS means "For Further Study". 

</order-order> 

There may well be an -osc- word to complete the picture, but I can't think of it off-hand. Maybe "osculate" is all about puckering up before you O someone. Or "proboscis"...? But what's starting or growing about a proboscis, except in a special case such as Pinocchio? (That's not a serious suggestion, although some research into whatever preceded Latin might be interesting.... Probably not though.)
</FFS>

...What Latin did with an inchoative infix was take a verb like florere (="to flower") and add an  -esc-   before the ending to make it mean "start flowering"/"burst into flower": florescere. 

<road-not-followed> 

(Which, incidentally, is where our verb "flourish" comes from [ultimately].) 

</road-not-followed> 

And while I'm in the realms of full disclosure, I should admit that experts say infixation only happened with -esc- and -isc-; I'm not so sure, although those two infixes are by far the most common.
</weasel-words>

But this coining of new inchoative words by using an infix was not what linguists call "a productive mechanism" in the forming of Romance languages; they simply took the verb form and did what suited their needs. As I wrote in  that old post

In fact Elcock, in The Romance Languages says 'of all the innovations in the active verb of Vulgar Latin, perhaps the most noteworthy is the extension of the -ESC/ISC infix'...[which was] more influential as a basis for the formation of Romance language verbs [Fr.  finissons/finissez/finissent/etc from  finir, etc] – where there is no sense of 'inchoateness', and the infix just introduces this 'regular irregularity' to French -ir verbs;... 

<INLINE_PS> 

This one took me a while to work out after eight years. I suppose readers at the time just dismissed it as further evidence of a confused mind. What I meant by "regular irregularity" was just that "-ss-" suddenly appears from nowhere in the new verb paradigm. 

<INLINE_PS>

...in Spanish and Portuguese they didn't use it as an infix at all, and used -ESCERE as a rather long suffix. to create verbs such a aparecer – 'appear' – presumably distantly related to Latin aperire   'to open' (as in French, careful readers will notice that it happens only to –IRE verbs). 

And this all started with a harmless reflection on the word "opalescent".  Like "fluorescent" and "iridescent"  the idea of inchoateness (="beginning/becoming", roughly) is here only in the sense that the image is always becoming something else. It is, to use a word coined by the wearer of the opal in question many years ago, sprickly. 

b

 

 

PS A chance observation. There exists in English the word flatty. Its primary meaning (among several) is a sort of shoe:

But it's not that common a word. Collins gives this usage graph:

It was quite popular (with some meaning) in the eighteenth century, went downhill in the nineteenth, and has been next to moribund since then (but not so moribund as to escape my attention: I first met it when such footwear was prescribed for my oldest sister when she played a pirate in HMS Pinafore).

Now good old M&S  has resurrected it, and not without effrontery they have even slapped a trademark on it. Flatties^TM  are escalopes of chicken tenderized/marinaded in various ways. They are quite pleasant to eat; I'm not sure what makes them trademarkable though.

 

And this is not the first time a shoe name has been used to refer to a foodstuff. In 1982 "a baker in Adria, province of Rovigo, Veneto, Italy [created them]  in response to the popularity of French baguettes", says Wikipedia. Whereas the French called their sort of bread "drumsticks" (which takes us in a coincidental circle back to chickens) he called his new loaf a ciabatta (which means slipper). And don't talk to me about choux buns [Bou-boum]

 

But there is an ongoing biomass crisis in the garden that I must attend to. 

 

b

To his coy mistress

The idea for this  post has been bubbling away on the back-burner for some time, but something  struck me today – or more probably the day before yesterday by the time I hit Publish – that has brought it to the fore.  And "Something" is an appropriate choice of words, as it relates to the song Something's Coming at the beginning of West Side Story; specifically the introductory words, when Tony's still stacking bottles of pop ...

Could be,

Who knows?

... before deciding to sing.  Each ...

<inline_pps>

Correction: only the second – I misremembered.

</inline_pps>

of these lines includes a tritone (mentioned before here with this note:

<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) 

<footnote repositioning-rationale="for 2020 post"> 

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

<clarification>  

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

</clarification>

...nor Pythagoras.) 

</footnote> 

</autobiographical_note>

...).

In the later song Maria (and Maria transpires to be that something)  the same tritone is there, but spelt differently (it's a rising diminished fifth this time, rather than a falling  augmented fourth). Bernstein is telling the audience something, and it's only taken me sixty-odd years ...

<autobiographical_note>
The film (which the older of my brothers saw in the West End) premiered in 1961, but I heard the original Broadway cast recording in the late '50s.
</autobiographical_note>

...to notice it. I wrote "later song Maria", though Something‘s Coming was an afterthought (as explained here), so Bernstein knew de antemano as they say in Spanish...,

<tangent>
And there's another thing that I've no time to pursue: calques, or "loan translations". Which came first, de antemano or beforehand? ante = before, and mano = hand (where those "=" signs have a fairly loose sense of equivalence).
</tangent>

...what the "Something" was, and what it would lead to – the song Cool (after the rumble) opens with a tritone. I'm sure there are many more, underlining the story; I just haven't noticed them yet.

All of which, belatedly, brings me to the order of the day – theme tunes that hold hidden musical messages. I notice these from time to time. The four that have stuck in my mind are:

• Mr Bean                               
  This is not a hidden message in the music, so much as words hiding in plain sight, cloaked by the music accompanying them. Howard Goodall has used a musical setting reminiscent of the many other settings of (Christ's) Ecce homo. It's plaintive and reflective. But listen to the words:  
  
  Ecce homo qui est faba 
  ("Behold the man who is Bean")
  

  <tangent>
  If you have time to kill, dip into the comments on that YouTube clip and another hymn beloved of Richard Curtis will spring to mind: "Forgive our foolish ways".
  </tangent>

• Mission Impossible             
  This theme music has a more clear message, using Morse code. The rhythm spells out dash dash dot dot ...
  

  <autobiographical_note>
  Like most English speakers I don't know much Morse code apart from S and O (Because of "SOS"), H (because it's so unwieldy: dot dot dot dot)), and RK (which appealed to me because of their symmetry – dot-dash-dot, dash-dot-dash [which I noticed only because they're my initials])
  </autobiographical_note>

  ..."IM". The idea of hiding Morse in music goes one step further in the theme music to the TV series Morse, which spells out not only the title character's name but also (in incidental music) clues to the action.
   
• Charlie Wilson's War           
  In this film, based on a true story (of a US politician lobbying [and more] to equip the Mujahideen in their struggle against the Russians [or was it Soviets? – one forgets so much...].), the retaliation of the Mujahideen purifying their country...
  

  <inline_ps>
  (casting out the Infidel)
  </inline_ps>

  was accompanied by some strangely familiar music. After a while I recognized it: it was an up-tempo version of Handel's And He Shall Purify.
  
  
• Sherlock Holmes                
  When the steam launch is passing the Palace of Westminster ...
  

  <inline_ppps>
  (in the 2009 Robert Downey Junior film)
  </inline_ppps>

  ...the music has a bass line that chimes out the Westminster jingle (the one that everyone knows and most people – including me – can't reproduce).

No time for more. I'm sure there's much more to notice,

Had I but world enough and time

(but this particular coy mistress [music] is one that I've sadly not pursued [with any vigour]).

Ho hum.

b

Update: 2021.10.15.11.35 – Added  <inline_ps />.

Update: 2021.10.18.15.5 – Added  <inline_pps /> and <inline_ppps />.

 

 

Who's who in that setting?

Among the many things that a composer needs to think about when setting a text is the internal clues about who's singing what. If they get it wrong it may involve the audience and/or performers in some unnecessary mental gymnastics.

One example is That Lovely Weekend, which once  was a regular part of the repertoire for BYC's male-voice sub-choir. It starts "I haven't said Thanks for that lovely weekend" and the song recounts the two young lovers' doings on the weekend in question, followed by a tearful parting: "I'm sorry I cried, I just felt that way".

This was a song made popular by Vera Lynn in 1942 . It was a wartime song. The lovely weekend in question was – to use the British English – leave (short for 'leave of absence'); the American English equivalent would be furlough...

<parenthesis>

(a word that has a less recreational sense in British English in 2020...

<amuse-cervelle>

What English word is spelt with these consonants in this  order: CRNVRS and includes these vowels (in another order): OOAIU, but has nothing to do with respiratory infection?

</amuse-cervelle>

...If the usage trends graph provided by Collins extended beyond 2008 it might show an upturn starting in March 2020 rather than this faintly embarrassing ... 

<IknowIknow> 

(not that any document can ever be up to date – I just feel that with data at least 12 years out of date [and counting], they ought to 'fess up)

</IknowIknow> 

...slow dwindling:

) 

</parenthesis>

.... But in the setting that used to be in the repertoire of the Berkshire Youth Choir in the early noughties it featured a baritone and only male voices. Of course, the tearful man might have been a conscientious objector being visited by a Wren whose "kit to be packed" (lyrics courtesy of genius.com) included an evening dress, but – expecting (at the sound of galloping hooves) horses rather than zebras – I found it rather odd.

Similarly, but with the full forces of an SATB choir, I felt the version of "Goodnight Sweetheart" performed two or three times by Wokingham Choral Society under our one-time MD Alex Chaplin (and more often by the WCS Chamber Choir...

<plug>

(available at reasonable rates for weddings and bar mitzvahs)

</plug>

...) was inappropriately set. The socio-historic (rather than musical) setting was an American Graffiti sort of thing: an adolescent couple in a borrowed car outside the young lady's home at the end of a date:

sings the young ma... but no; it's the sopranos. I always felt confused at this stage (not that anyone in the audience would have shared my feeling.

That's all for today; things to do (even if it rains at Southampton :-)).

b

 

Update: 2020.08.26.12:25 – A few typo-fixes and other corrections