From spine-tingling to nerve-jangling

The starting point for today's jaunt...

<note_to_self>
Must check on the etymology of jaunt. Looks a bit Indian to me. like jamboree and jodhpurs and juggernaut.

<cut_to_chase>
Couldn't help myself. 'Unknown origin' says Etymonline. But the trip to that source wasn't entirely wasted, as it's added to my stock of words that have done a somersault and reversed their meaning (as, for example, has backlog, discussed here (and elsewhere, from time to time: you know the drill).

There's not a lot on Etymonline to justify this switch in polarity; well. nothing really:

1670s in modern sense of "short pleasure trip," earlier "tiresome journey" (1590s), from jaunt (v.)

</cut_to_chase>

  <note_to_self>

 ...is a virtual choir recording in which I have a paternal interest. I'm not a fan of most web content (as they say) – most of it a mixture over-sentimentalized verbiage and meretricious clickbait – but this really does live up to its billing as both "spine-tingling" (though the headline wasn't that concerned about hyphenation) and "spellbinding" (a word that recalls to me that Bennet madrigal discussed in an update to this: "music the time beguileth").

In 2016 this Tallis piece displaced Spem in Alium – (House Song of the Van Helsings [no, that's Allium, 'Hope in Garlic'] {This is getting very silly}) – as my favourite (by that composer), as my choir prepared for the tour mentioned, tangentially (you know the drill), here.

On our first night in Newcastle a bunch of us ate at a restaurant on Grey Street, where I noticed this plaque (not a blue plaque, I noticed, perhaps for some reason: Black for foreigners that nobody's heard of? Or maybe it's more subtle than that: grey to match the street.

Well I had (heard of him), and read a good deal of his oeuvre (or obra as we say in the trade).

<autobiographical-note>
and earlier this year (2020, keep up) I entered  a translation of some of his work for 

THE JOHN DRYDEN

TRANSLATION COMPETITION 

(Excuse the shouty typeface; I cut/pasted it from the entry form.). As well as being a novelist and a diplomat he was also a journalist, and a posthumous publication in 1905 assembled much of his work as Cartas de Inglaterra. He was a sort of fore-runner of Alistair Cooke, writing "Letters from England". 

I was first introduced to his work at a summer school at the Universidade de Coimbra, where they had a proprietorial interest in him as an old boy more than a century earlier.

<aside>
The lecturer had a quaint way with pronunciation, joining together two vowels with a... No.  TMI. Vivid memory though.
</aside>

</autobiographical-note> 

Returning to Tallis, I also sang the piece as a visiting Old Member at my Cambridge College in May 2018.

<autobiographical-note>
We visitors were each flanked by members of the present Corpus Christi Chapel Choir, who had mostly been raised as trebles in cathedral schools. So they had a trained reflex to raise a hand when they (rarely)  made a mistake. If I had done the same I would have given myself RSI.
</autobiographical-note>

And more recently we sang it at the WCS choral workshop back when the only place in Corona lockdown was Wuhan; and the (sadly few) basses made such a mess of our E'en the spirit of truth entries that it was not so much "spine-tingling" as nerve-jangling.

But I have secateurs to wield

And sheds to fix before I shield...

<apropos enemy="covid19", first-casualty="language" >

Which reminds me: I'm finding it hard to say 'I'm shielding' (which is the magic word for people especially at risk).  The health chappies (Witty et al.) are obviously not conversant with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – which sprang partly from Benjamin Whorf's experience working with insurance claims. He recognized that the way people described situations often contributed to misfortunes; for example, the phrase "empty petrol cans" encouraged people to underestimate their flammability, as "empty" can mean null or void or having no effect – as in "empty threat" "empty promise" and so on. 

Similarly (at last, the point) the verb shield implies strength. A (hero) shields B (vulnerable person) from C (danger). So saying 'I'm shielding' invites the belief that I'm strong. So when I was recently ordering some pills online I asked for them to be delivered to my home address rather than asking MrsK  to queue outside the pharmacy (which I gather we're saying now instead of chemist – I'm tempted to do the full Shakespeare and say apothecary). But I didn't want to say "I'm shielding" in case someone who spoke English misinterpreted it. (On the international stage I reckon this might be more of a problem. People exposed daily to Wittygrams know all about this (ab)usage; but not Johnny Foreigner.)

Just saying. People planning resistance campaigns of all kinds need to think about the language they're using.

</apropos>

...And sheds to fix before I shield. 

That's all for now

b

Update:2021.01.1610.55 – Added PS

PS

You see? Thin end of the wedge. The syntax of the verb 'to shield' was threatened by covid, and now the door's open for further abuse. Emily Maitlis, on yesterday's Americast, used the expression "He was shielding" to mean "He was sheltering" – with no hint of a virological meaning.

PPS

Come to think of it, the verb 'shelter' has precisely the kind of transitive/intransitive flexibility that 'shield' is beginning to have. 

And then two come along at once

My mind had spent 68 years untroubled by thoughts of Steller's sea cow. But for Christmas 2019 I was given a copy of Ross Barnett's The Missing Lynx, which introduced me to this loyal and gargantuan extinct manatee. It was rendered extinct, wrote Barnett, because it was so easy to hunt (which is where the loyalty came in – the silly things went back to help fellows who'd been harpooned).

Steller's sea cows were large herbivores that had a seal-like appearance with a tail which resembled that of a whale. The Steller's sea cow was named after George Steller who discovered the animal and who described it: "The animal never comes out on shore, but always lives in the water. Its skin is black and thick, like the bark of an old oak, its head in proportion to the body is small, it has no teeth, but only two flat white bones one above, the other below". 

Source

But then I heard Rob Newman, on The Extinction Tapes. He made it clear that (on this rare occasion) it wasn't only man that was vile. Well, vile, but not because of a direct effect on the sea cow population. The vileness was due to the popularity of sea otter fur, as explained in this article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. It's not a simple story, but in a nutshell the hunting of sea otters for their fur, left sea urchins unchecked – and the sea urchins deprived the sea cows of their main (perhaps sole) source of food, kelp. It was not that  they ate an enormous amount, but they cast the plants adrift by gnawing through their moorings. As the National Ocean Service website says:

Sea urchins will often completely remove kelp plants by eating through their holdfasts. Other invertebrates found in kelp forests are sea stars, anemones, crabs, and jellyfish... 

A wide range of marine mammals inhabit kelp forests for protection and food. Sea lions and seals feed on the fish that live in kelp forests. Grey whales have also been observed in kelp forests, most likely using the forest as a safe haven from the predatory killer whale. The grey whale will eat the abundant invertebrates and crustaceans in kelp forests. One of the most important mammals in a kelp forest is the sea otter, who takes refuge from sharks and storms in these forests. The sea otter eats the red sea urchin that can destroy a kelp forest if left to multiply freely. 

Source

This graph from the PNAS article, where the scale on the left shows population density (of sea otters) as a proportion of the maximum, shows what happened and when. 

 

Of course post hoc doesn't have to mean propter hoc. And the hoc in question is so remote in time and space that it's impossible to know what caused what. But the author of the PNAS article is pretty convinced and convincing:

Although the exact timing and even the existence of a kelp forest collapse in the Commander Islands can only be surmised, the phase shift probably occurred soon after the onset of the fur trade in 1743. Sea otters in the Commander Islands had been hunted to virtual extinction by 1753. Although the precise timing of the associated kelp forest to urchin barrens phase shift depends on the exact trajectory of decline in sea otter density, those details are of little consequence to our argument. Sea otters were ecologically extinct by 1753, and the kelp forest collapse therefore preceded that date if our data from the western Aleutians are a reasonable proxy for what happened 250 y earlier in the Commander Islands. If the time course of the sea otter decline in the Commander islands was roughly exponential, then the kelp forest collapse probably occurred around 1750, just 7 y after the onset of the fur trade and 16 y before the last record of a living sea cow

b

PS And my the latest nomination for a Tezzy ...

<GLOSSARY item="TEZZY>
Time-wasting Site of the Year.
</GLOSSARY>

...goes to this, where the 14th century meets the 21st. In the 20th, in the year of my birth, the Equatorie was  misattributed to Chaucer; but recent research has placed the writer as a 14th century monk:

The ... possibility that the Equatorie was Chaucer’s own composition is an issue that has occupied the attention of many scholars; however, this has now been resolved. The writer has been identified as John Westwyk, a Benedictine monk of Tynemouth Priory and St Albans Abbey, whose life was one of dramatic contrasts.

The interactive model equatorium based on the Equatorie offers many hours of play. Don't say you weren't warned; this Tezzy looks as though it might be richly deserved. I haven't put it through its paces though, because of...

Self-isolation Chronicles

My tai chi classes are continuing via Zoom. But yesterday normal service was interrupted because my laptop had a nasty turn.

The backup plan was to continue on the desktop. But this has two big drawbacks.

1. It does not do video, and fixing up a camera for it wouldn't be plain sailing, as it's running Windows 7 (I know...).
2. It is in the study, where there's not enough room to swing a ca...gerbil.

<stop_press>
The day has been saved by a near-obsolete iPad.
</stop_press>

Meanwhile, my local U3A has gone into hibernation. Ironically, the mail announcing that everything was suspended until further notice claimed to be Guaranteed virus-free

/e 'luʧəvæn le 'stele/

These are indeed trying times, and made none the less trying by the mispronunciation called out in my subject. I don't know either why this is so painful or why people do it. Puccini has spelled it out in the first four words of the aria....

<aside type="boogy-woogy">
I mean, it's not like, say, Squeeze's Up the junction, where the name of the song is not mentioned until the last line. (Not sure why that occurred to me.)
</aside>

... with stress obviously, clearly, musically on the second syllable of lucevan. And the orchestration is as sparing as can be; the tenor is as clear as... [ed. can you do something with "bell/bel canto" here?] [You'll be lucky sunshine.]...a very clear thing.

The words are there, spelled out, what possible excuse is there for mangling the Italian? But the DJ on Classic FM (it would be invidious [indeed pointless] to name him, but he's an educated chap) says 'Here it is from Tosca, E loochevan le stele'.  Strange that he doesn't pick up the obvious clues; it doesn't take a great linguistic gift to hear something so simple.

Another frequent trial [while we're on the subject of bees in bonnets] comes for the Classic FM listener (or, more regularly except in these days of isolation, for a choral singer) whenever an r closes a Latin syllable. In English (in RP, that is) an r in this position does something strange to a preceding vowel (a bewildering array of strange things ...

<plug>
In due course ...

<really_though>
[hollow laugh; breath retention is not advised]
</really_though>

... WVGT2bk will list these. But its tortoise like progress has already covered most r words; only UR to go. AR, for example, can represent /ɑ:/ (in par), /eə/ (in pare), /ær/ (in parry), /ᴐ:/ (in war),  /ər/ (in parietal),  /ɒr/ (in quarry)... to list only the obvious cases. The whole grisly story (grisly, that is, for students of ESOL) is covered for AR, ER, IR, and OR words in WVGTbk2 , which will be free to download over the Easter weekend.</plug>

) Anyway, that frequent trial. The life of a choral singer is beset by fellow singers who – when singing Mozart's sublime Ave Verum Corpus, for example – insist on pronouncing the last word as if it were some kind of regimental mascot ("corps puss", geddit? [bou-boum tsh].)

That's all for now; the great outdoors is calling...

b

Update 2020.04.10.17:40 – Added PS

PS A similar mistake  happens with  Che gelida manina. The words are the first thing you hear after an unfussy introduction, and all clearly enunciated on one note. In Lucevan le stelle, the one note statement comes after the clarinet's I left my love in Avalon tune. In Che gelida manina, though, the mangling of the stress is subtly different. Whereas Lucevan is stressed (correctly) on the second syllable, gelida is stressed on the first.

<mnemonic type="approximately homophonic, irreverent">
Think of "jellied eels" – long-short-short.
</mnemonic>

So I ask myself again why the mis-stressed version (gelida) is so common. There's no excuse; the right stress is there, spelled out in the music.