'All you within this place'

Now to the Lord sing praises all you within this place
And if 'this place' is No. 10  each other now embrace...

A cheap shot, I know, but really though; what a shower. Boris could take lessons in leadership from Fred Karno.

I'm going to address omicron. But before you tune out with forebodings  of more bad news let me assure you that mine will be not a virological point of view; rather a linguistic one. The word has been mangled in all sorts of ways: I've heard omicrom, omnicron...

<parenthesis>
I've heard this latter at least twice on Newscast. The first time. the speaker was a Brit award-winner, and I raised a supercilious eyebrow...

<etymological_note>
(Incidentally, that's what supercilious means.)
</etymological_note>

...But the second was Dr Angelique Coetzee, discoverer of Omicron ...

 <meta_parenthesis>  

(originally dubbed nu [ν]  – in fact the 26 November edition of Newscast was the called The 'nu' variant.  But then someone realized that calling the old variant nu, after sigma is discovered [at some point in 2022, before they run out of Greek letters and have to adopt  the Only Connect method of using Egyptian hieroglyphs – I wonder who'll be first to catch the "Eye of Horus variant"...], might be confusing; they've also decided that xi [ξ] would be bad for relations with President Xi. 

</meta_parenthesis>

and darling of many a Tory ostrich. The slip occurs at 26'25" in this episode.  But I digress...

</parenthesis>

<autobiographical_note>
(and my Greek master had a talent for metathesis [see here for more about this sort of phoneme-swapping], so that he called this little o omricon; another of  his more common slips was referring to Mesopotamia as 'between the Tigris and the Euphatres')
</autobiographical_note>

....But a knowledge of etymology, as so often (except in Mr Towey's case...

<orthographical_note>
Another example is ancillary vs auxiliary. People who don't know the background aren't sure how many ls and how many is there are.

But an ancilla was a maidservant; (maybe there was a masculine, but ancilla is the only version I've met, inscribed on a ring unearthed (unashed) at Pompeii, and discussed here:

Ring found at Pompeii;
it is to be hoped that the wife of the dominus didn't find out.

<parenthesis>
(I was going to copy&paste the picture from that old post, but it's too heavily annotated there. Don't let me stop you from doing some background reading though; I think it's rather fun.)
</parenthesis>

And auxilium is help. So, armed with this information, you need never write anciliary again.

</orthographical_note>

...) should prevent this.  Ancient Greek had two sorts of o: o-mega and o-micron – 'big o' and 'little o': simples.

The little o, like any other god-fearing o, was tucked in between n and p (ν and π); (strictly speaking, ξ was there too; but let's not cause a diplomatic incident). But big o, o-mega, was in pride of place, right at the end of the alphabet. 

<silliness_warning>

I suppose the beginning would have been even more prestigious; but then it would be the omegabet
.</silliness_warning>

And 'the Alpha and Omega' is the bee's knees. In this early Christian word square...                                      

... the words tell the confused, arbitrary and multilingual story of sower. But the words weren't chosen at random. As this account says

The square reads the same up or down as well as forward or backward. However, the words do not collectively seem to mean anything. Individually, sator means "the sower", tenet "holdeth", opera "the works", rotas "the wheels [accusative case]". Arepo is not a Latin word; it is perhaps related to a Celtic root meaning "plough", an interpretation known in XIV Century Byzantium

...(though how a medieval Byzantine word found it's way to 1st century Rome beats me: a miracle , perhaps.) 

The same account observes that the letters in the square can be organized like this

A                P                O

 A
T
E
R
P A T E R N O S T E R
O
S
T
E
    O                R                A    

with the left-overs put in the corners. (as I said before in a post whose graphics have gone the way of much seven-year old html)

(My use of the term left-overs shouldn't be read as implying anything dismissive: 'I am the Alpha and Omega' has biblical resonance. Those letters even find their way into the Christmas Carol Unto Us is Born a Son: 

'O and A and A and O' 

Cum cantibus in coro...

And during the preparations for Easter Midnight Mass [in the Roman Catholic rite, of course{!}] the celebrant prepares the Paschal Candle with chips of incense [I think – I never got that close] inserted into the wax in the form of those two letters [repeated in the 'quadrants' defined by a crucifix]. Those two letters, repeated round about a crucifix, are by no means random 'left-overs'.)

 Duty calls.

b

How much did the beloved worms cost you?

Silly me though: not le vermi but l'avermi. The words of a carol I'm singing on Saturday...

<plug>

</plug>

... are Quanto te costó l'avermi amato (=What did it cost you to love me?)

We'll also be singing, amongst other things, Ding dong merrily on high, which I pondered about here (on the occasion of our second-most-recent carol service, 3 years ago):

<pre_script>
The first thing that strikes me is its structure – which is pretty neat. The first verse is about something happening in Heaven. The second verse draws a conclusion (E'en so) about what should, as a result, happen down here: let steeple bells be swungen. And the third verse goes into specifics, specifying what should happen at Prime...

<brickbat_dodging>
I know, I know, this isn't a majority view. Still, it's what I think: Pray you Prime is a command about singing a particular office. An early editor, and ignoramus – a benighted heathen no doubt, who was not conversant with the format <utterance_word>+<office_name>, as in  for example "say Mass" – stuck a meaning-wrenching comma after you, making prime a ([n] improbable, it seems to me) verb. 

<inline_PPS> 

It just occurred to me that "chime Matins" fits the same pattern (although "chime" makes the format <utterance_word>+<office_name> a little over-specific [suggesting speech rather than just noise-making].)

</inline_PPS>

</brickbat_dodging>

... and at Matins; and then at the evetime song. In between. the praising etc. goes on, presumably.

But why sing io? There are people who sing /ɑɪ.əʊ/ (which led my correspondent [HD 2021: who had invited this speculation] to suspect a connection with Io). But the Oxford Book of Carols is insistent (to the extent of a footnote) that the pronunciation is "ee-oh"  (they don't trust readers with IPA symbols, but they must mean /i:.əʊ/).

Some years ago this question was raised in this forum,  As usual, comments should be weighed in the balance and some will be found wanting;  but they are fairly brief and not very numerous. There are many, often conflicting views:  

1. "i-o" is a corruption of the Latin "in excelsis Deo"
2. I-o is a contraction or corruption of "ideo," Latin for "therefore." The implied thought is "ideo... gloria in excelsis deo,".
3. "io" is a Latin interjection (usually an exclamation of joy)

I imagine the truth is a mixture of the last two. (The first sounds to me like the distinctive blend of fanatically Christian sanctimoniousness and inventive improbability so familiar to survivors of a God-fearing education.) But monks in a scriptorium fought off RSI by abbreviating anything they could; and the pre-existing Latin interjection gave them an off-the-shelf solution.
</pre_script>

We'll also be singing a new arrangement (by our MD) of  The Seven Joys of Mary, which I wrote about (5 years ago) here:

<pre_script>
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.
.
.

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:

</pre_script>

Words though (as I regularly say before a concert); they won't learn themselves. 

Do come!

 

b

Putin on the fritz

 

The recent gabfest at Glasgow has occasioned a number of "cop"-based puns (a cornuCOPia [bou-boum-tsh-I-thangyou]), but chief among them good cop (Paris) bad cop (Copenhagen). But for some reason I haven't heard the rather world-weary "not much cop". 

There has been a welter of podcasts, that I am slowly working through, and in one of the many (I've no idea which) there was an interview with a  poacher turned ga... actually, logger turned conservationist in Brazil. As is often the case with non-English-speaking interviews, there was a split second of foreign language answer before a translation cut in.

He (the reformed logger) was talking about a reform that was going to come "really quite soon" (that's my translation). What he said was logo-logo which struck me for two reasons:

• a silly pun, based on the very approximate equivalence of logo and "logger"
• the fact that the programme's translation made do with a simple "soon"

This is reminiscent of a case I mentioned a few years ago, here, with reference to the French finalement finalement:

<quote_and_thoughts> 

"The woman being interviewed was recounting a separation caused by war, but, thanks to some agency, 'Finalement, finalement' she was reunited with her family. The translator said 'Finally, finally', which just about did the job, but it sounded a bit off – not exactly a FAUX ami, but one whom your mother wouldn't invite for tea.

'Finalement finalement' reminded me of Jaques Brel's Chanson des Vieux Amants:

Finalement, finalement
Il nous fallut bien du talent
Pour être vieux sans être adultes

And the vieux amants had been together, off-and-on, for a good few years."

So the repeating of the adverb of time adds to the emotional impact of the event it modifies. I'm not suggesting that there's some kind of linguistic universal here; I just have the feeling that these two Romance languages (French and Portuguese) behave similarly in this respect – that when you repeat an adverb of time you mean more than just (e.g.) "finally" or "soon".

<quote_and_thoughts>

I wouldn't pretend to be an expert on Brazilian Portuguese, but I suspect that the translation of logo-logo as just "soon" leaves something to be desired.

But what's this got to do with Putin?

In 2003, commenting on Russia's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (obliging developed and developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels), Russian President Vladimir Putin jokingly remarked that global warming is not so bad for a northern country like Russia, since “We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would increase,” but a year later, he signed the law on ratification of the Kyoto Protocol .
Source [That's a Russian-language site, but there's an English button.]

So he did finally sign the Kyoto Protocol, and by 2009 the writing was well and truly on the wall (though it may have been a bit hard to read, given the state of the wall):

Detail from 2009 photo, Guardian 2016

Cracking and collapsing structures are a growing problem in cities like Norilsk – a nickel-producing centre of 177,000 people located 180 miles above the Arctic Circle – as climate change thaws the perennially frozen soil and increases precipitation. Valery Tereshkov, deputy head of the emergencies ministry in the Krasnoyarsk region, wrote in an article this year that almost 60% of all buildings in Norilsk have been deformed as a result of climate change shrinking the permafrost zone. Local engineers said more than 100 residential buildings, or one-tenth of the housing fund, have been vacated here due to damage from thawing permafrost.
Source

In the run-up to COP a Moscow Times article chronicled Putin's switchback ride:

Skepticism to Acceptance: How Putin's Views on Climate Change Evolved Over the Years

During his two decades in power, Putin has gone from joking about the climate crisis to gradually accepting responsibility for responding to climate change as its effects have become more pronounced in Russia, the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter which is warming faster than the rest of the planet. 

"Accepting responsibility" to a limited extent. He sent a delegation to Glasgow, but he didn't face the music in person. Poor Vladimir. The most powerful pychopath in the world has his work cut out. As someone once said Uneasy lies the head that wears the throne (or something like that).

b

Knight-Commander of the Honourable Institute for the National Good

 

In view of the recent Sunday Times report, which quoted an ex-party chairman saying

The truth is the entire political establishment knows this happens and they do nothing about it… The most telling line is, once you pay your £3m, you get your peerage."

and in the spirit of one Lord Fisher, commonly cited (wrongly  and/or trivially, I would argue)...

<prescript intro="And here's why">
...As I write I have the BBC‘s Julius Caesar in the background; and the line Who is it in the press that calls on me leapt out at me with its two anachronistic puns: press and call on. And this reminded me of a recurrent annoyance, apparently irrelevant but similarly depending on an anachronistic pun sadly repeated ever and anon (is that Shakespeare?) by people who should know better: the roots of OMG:

This one’s for all you amateur internet archaeologists out there: The first recorded use of the ubiquitous texting abbreviation OMG wasn’t uttered by a precocious tween in the 1990s, but by one Lord Fisher in a letter to none other than Winston Churchill.

          Time report

Well well; silly us! There‘s everyone thinking that abbreviation's a child of the late 20th Century. How wrong we were! Umm,  no. Lord Fisher‘s "OMG" was a joke based on the names of honours such as "OBE" and "CMG". Here's the context:

To cite it as the etymological basis of the SMS-based abbreviation "OMG" is to indulge in an anachronistic pun – the sort of textual "discovery" that is increasingly common in these days of easily accessed electronic text  databases. In the words of that prescient ophthalmologist Friar Lawrence [HD 2021: in Romeo and Juliet]

What a pair of spectacles is this?

Old post

<HD_2021_Addendum>
Lord Fisher's is not "The first recorded use of the ubiquitous texting abbreviation OMG"; it's the first recorded use of those initials in that order, with a not dissimilar approximate meaning, but in a totally different context and a totally different intention. You might just as well argue that Shakespeare was a hi-tech whizz-kid because he coined the word "unfriend".
<HD_2021_Addendum>

</prescript>

...as the "source" for the abbreviation OMG, I would like to suggest the introduction of a new honour, Knight-Commander of the Honourable Institute for the National Good,  specifically for Tory donors: that's a bit of a mouthful, so you may want to abbreviate it in some way.  KCHING, perhaps.

 

Noticed in passing 

In the first episode of the BBC TV drama Show Trial, the spoilt brat at the centre of the story wiles (sic)...

<and_heres_why>

See this (the footnote in the red note). "Whiles" isn't wrong, but my omission of the h is both deliberate (I've thought about it) and intentional (I mean it).
</and_heres_why>

... her time in custody by singing a French nursery rhyme (which is curiously appropriate in a macabre way – possibly intentionally or possibly accidentally (the actor having been told to sing something to herself, foreign if possible, to underline her insouciance and sophistication). We'll see.

What makes it macabre is that it relates the story of a little sailor-boy who on his maiden voyage (un petit navire qui n'avait ja- ja- jamais navigué) is ship-wrecked. He and his fellows take to the life-boat, and  here's where it gets really dark.  After s few weeks the victuals start to run out...

<autobiographical_note>
This line (Les vivres vin- vin- vinrent à manquer) was my first exposure to the passé historique (in a hideously irregular form  – which my teacher at the time was wise enough to gloss over); what stuck with me was the expression tirer à la courte paille (which the little sailor boy does, of course ("draws the short straw")
</autobiographical_note>

... and they decide to draw lots to see who would be the first one to be eaten.

There are four things that make this story appropriate (five, if you include the fact that it's a French nursery rhyme –  with all that that implies about the culture and education of the singer):

• Its watery background, echoing the place where (spoiler alert  –   whoops, too late) the body is found
• Its matter-of-factness, underlining the nonchalance of the suspect
• The fact that it deals with death, with a hint of greater or lesser illegality
• The fact that the death is of a young innocent

So well done, or Chapeau!, to either the writer or the actress.

<INLINE_PS/>

After seeing the final episode it's clear that it was intentional on the part of the writer: the song and the singing formed a crucial part of the back-story (no spoilers though :-) )
</INLINE_PS/>

But I must get on, preparing for my first live concert in nearly two years:

No tickets on the door, and only 160-odd to buy in advance (Covid restrictions). So get them while they're hot (I've got a spare –  first come, first served!)

<INLINE_PS/>

And here's a review:

</INLINE_PS/>

b

Update: 2021.11.29.17:00 – Added <INLINE_PS/>s

Arms and the man

At the weekend I attended my daughter's post-nuptial shindig (the nuptials themselves having taken place a year ago at Reading Town Hall, with a cast of 6 including the bride and groom) at a quirkily decorated pub. May she and her Unworthy Swain (a title I originally coined for my little sister's husband, but now pass down to my son-in-law – "something borrowed",   perhaps – have a long and fruitful life together.

And now, the coincidence. First, a bit of background: early in the twentieth century (if not earlier – Wikipedia  says ...

As London developed, the area became predominantly market gardens which required a greater proportion of workers as it was more labour-intensive. In the 1850s, with improved travel (the Great Western Railway and two branches of the Grand Union Canal), villages began to grow into towns and merged into unbroken residential areas. At this time Ealing began to be called the "Queen of the Suburbs".

...) the name Queen of the Suburbs  became current,  and Nikolaus Pevsner repeated this accolade in his 1951 Middlesex volume in his  "The buildings of England" series – coinciding with the year of my birth...

<inline_ps>
(and also, as it happens with the inauguration of my choir, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary in the current season)
</inline_ps>

....I can't pretend that this gave me a predilection for the sobriquet, as I only noticed this coincidence today, but I have long been known to use the expression when referring to my native...

<autobiographical_note>
(not quite native; we moved there in 1953, for  reasons explained here. My little sister was a native, and it was the family home for about twenty years.)
</autobiographical_note>

...town. In fact, at a college reunion party I was once greeted as "Knowles, King of the Queen of the Suburbs".

Ealing's 1902 coat of arms

And for much of its twentieth-century life Ealing had this coat of arms:

(Stay with me; there's a point to all this, honest.)

In the mid-sixties, however, the burghers of Ealing had to get rid of the Middlesex reference (the three swords), and (no doubt at some expense, silly burghers) they changed the motto as well – getting rid of that so-last-year Latin stuff ...

<parenthesis type="supposed design comments">
(Respice? ["Look back"] Where's that at?  Besides, doesn't it suggest "Load up again with turmeric"?)
<parenthesis>

...but kept the pro- of prospice ["Look forward"]: "Progress with Unity"; pretty inspiring, don't you think.

Home-lit (ie not lit) photo of the shield

At last, the point: 

On the wall of the main reception room there was this coat of arms (with the motto Respiciens Prospiciens – the same two verbs ("Look back" and "Look forward"), but in the present participle (or "ing- form" as I learnt to call it during my CELTA training) rather than the imperative. I wondered if there could be a link between Ealing and  the original owners of these arms, whoever they may have been

They were awarded to the poet Tennyson when he was ennobled. The Tennyson family home was Farringford House, which stayed in the family until 1945, when it was acquired by an hotel chain. They presumably kept the escutcheon as part of their hotel décor:  

Farringford is a Grade 1 Listed Building and was the main residence of the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson from 1853 until his death in 1892. It continued in the possession of the Tennyson family until 1945, when it was sold to British Holiday Estates Ltd, who converted the house into a hotel. 

Source

Here's where The Bell (est. 2011) comes in. That Farringford House history continues:

Farringford remained a hotel until 2010, when work began to restore the building to its original condition as a historic home.

It's a fairly safe bet that  the newly-refurbishing pub took advantage of the sale (including the shield, mentioned in the 2008 ARCHITECTURAL AUDIT (INTERNAL)):

In the west wall, there is a fireplace with ornate wooden surround [80]. A wide, built-up moulded mantle-piece is supported by five main corbels containing human and lion faces in relief above a moulded leaf. ... The cast iron fireplace has two tall, thin decorated side panels, while along the top are seven quatrefoils containing a rosette motif except for the centre one, which holds a shield with Tennyson’s embossed initials, ALT. 

The photo I took wasn't well enough lit for a really  meticulous/pathological? search for these initials, though in the interests of academic rigour it seems to me that such a search is worth doing (in an arguable sense of worth).

Enough standing and staring though; there are leaves to be swept up.

b

Update 201211104.11:20 – Added <inline_ps />

A Tale of Two Concerts

The first was at Cadogan Hall last Tuesday:

It featured three choral pieces, all of which I have sung both with my choir  and with others. The first two were short pieces, interspersed in the first half with two familiar orchestral pieces – Vaughan Williams's Toward the Unknown Region and his Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus ...

<parenthesis>
(and while we're on the subject, I do wish those people on Classic FM would stop using the inappropriate Romish pronunciation. In the speech of Vaughan Williams [who studied Latin before the vogue for Italianate pronunciation in choral works] the stressed vowel in Dives [as also in Benedicite] was the very English diphthong /ɑɪ/)
</parenthesis>

...as I like to think of it Variations on The Star of the County Down).

<note type="obituary">
Incidentally, RIP Paddy Moloney, who plays on that track.
</note>

The other orchestral piece was Ravel's Pavane pour une infante ...

<more_Classic_FM_snobbery>
NOTHING TO DO WITH CHILDREN FOR PETE'S SAKE. An Infante can be any age. The present Infanta Elena, for example, is in her late fifties; and the Infanta Eulalia died in her 95th year. Catherine Bott, the other week, said the music conjured up the image  of a "young princess". (Well they were all young once of course, but never princesses.)

Not that that matters. According to the program notes. Ravel had no image in mind, and just liked the sounds. (And I suspect the reason for that was the three distinct nasals [not just two, as it would be if the infante was just a child.)
</more_Classic_FM_snobbery>

...défunte.

The other  choral piece was Fauré's charming Cantique de Jean Racine, written...

<PROGRAMME_NOTE exception="not last Tuesday's though">
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,)  

More here 

</PROGRAMME_NOTE>

And here's an extract from something I wrote a few years ago (not essential reading but quite fun, I think  –  though I say it as shouldn't):

<2015_quote>
[In the Cantique] 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 dis-covery – 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.... 

More here 
</2015_quote>

But the main choral offering was Fauré's Requiem. The choir (the excellent City of London Choir, whose diction outdid the soloist in my favourite part of the Libera Me.

<parenthesis type="distance between heaven and earth">
Their double /t/ and rolled r in et terra was momentous (portentous?... one of those -entous words anyway); whereas the soloist was less percussive (while philologically more sympathetic – think of the Italian e [sometimes i], the Spanish y  [sometimes e], the french et (where the written t is just an orthographic convention, and doesn't resurface [as does the last consonant of est] even before a vowel...

<autobiographical_note >
I remember a sixties classmate making the unnecessary elision, so that the Claude Lelouch film acquired the surprising title "A man is a woman" (a fore-runner of The Danish Girl, perhaps).
<autobiographical_note>

...). 

The rest of this parenthesis is eminently skippable. The concert just brought it to mind.  

I wrote some time ago (here) about the musical difference between heaven and hell:

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of Libera me [part of his Requiem].

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judg-ment: Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.' 

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom. 

††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

</parenthesis>

Whether by accident (Covid-spacing) or design, the idea to put the Soprano in the gallery for the Pie Jesu was well-judged – a mixture of the angelic and the celestial – though I did wonder how they'd coordinate her curtain call: a system of wires up the staircase, carrying a silent message?  An SMS?

<note type="Health & Safety">
In the event, she came down onto the main stage; I trust she wasn't wearing heels, though she did have three numbers to negotiate all those stairs.
</note>

The concert was conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton, who I first heard of a few years ago (probably more like ten, in view how fast time flies for the septuagenarian) presenting the sadly short-lived Masterworks programme on Classic FM. It was axed (or at least not recommissioned) after one or two series...

<parenthesis subject="Masterworks">
This was an educational programme aired on Sunday afternoon, based on the GCSE music syllabus (in those halcyon pre-Gove days when more than a handful of children still studied music at school). 

<inline_ps> 

Since taking this fairly off-hand swipe at the Coalition Government's introduction of the eBacc in 2010, I have been feeling the need for some documentary backing. Well here it is. And here's a pretty telling graph from the article:

Moreover, the report adds 

A similar pattern was shown even more starkly in last week’s A Level results, when Music A-Level students were revealed to have halved in the last decade, falling from around 10,000 to around 5,000 a year.

(Of course, as this was in August 2020, there had been especial problems of access to music facilities/hands-on teaching.  Home schooling, anyone? Still...). 

<inline_ps>

<parenthesis>

... He was having a whale of a time, waving his arms like Mick Jagger. It was clear that he had sorely missed music-making and was making up for lost time.

The second of my two concerts – Kevin Loh at King's Place  – is in doubt. We may not go.

<rant>
And I'm sick of this Trump-like insistence on politicizing the wearing of masks. latest example of this was in Giles Coren's piece in The Times last Saturday "Done The Times, now I need to do the crimes" – all the more insidious because of its puerile resentful acquiescence (more befitting William Brown than a grown-up like Mr Coren): "I wear a mask on the tube because Sadiq Khan says I must" (or words to that affect).

I quote from the TfL conditions of carriage, section 2.4:

Given the coronavirus pandemic, all passengers over the age of 11 years must wear a face covering when travelling on our services, until further notice.

You must wear a face covering when in our bus and rail stations, on our platforms, Emirates Air Line terminals and river piers and on our bus, tram, train, Emirates Air Line, Dial-a-Ride and Woolwich ferry services.

Your face covering must cover from the top of your nose to the bottom of your chin, and attach behind your ears or tie behind your head, unless you are exempt from this requirement.

If you are not exempt and you fail to comply with this requirement or directions given by an authorised officer, you may not be allowed entry or may be asked to leave our premises.

Nothing to do with Sadiq Khan, although being a responsible adult, rather than a smart-arse  overgrown public schoolboy,  he approves. This is not the overweening nanny state, it's a simple capitalist contract: you ride our network, you wear a mask: that's the deal. And the mealy-mouthed TfL announcement that says "some people may  have difficulty wearing masks" is plain risible. Some people can't wear masks; nobody "has difficulty" wearing them; a little inconvenience maybe.

<hindsight>
I can't help thinking of male surgeons spreading puerperal fever  by not washing their hands when leaving autopsies to go to a maternity ward; today we can't believe anyone would be so stupid, but then there was huge resistance (especially among privileged men) to what we see today as simple hygiene. Similarly in a few years, with hindsight, it will be impossible to fathom how stupid it was not to wear masks.
</hindsight>

It's not politics; it's hygiene.  I wish entertainment venues followed TfL's lead  and made mask-wearing a contractual obligation

</rant>

But I must "tread upon the ground" (as Old Daddy Fox used to say (or maybe I'm thinking of a similar song  – anyway time for my rehearsal).

Update 2021.10.23.14:05 – Added <inline_PS />

 

How can I help?

Veterans of early versions of Microsoft Word will recall the animated paper-clip, which stuck its nose in every now and then, saying things like "You seem to be writing a letter, would you like to use a template?"

<IT_urban_legend>
Word has it [not that sort of Word. duh] that the original prototype for this busybody was designed by Melinda Gates, and was called "Bob".

<IT_naming_apocrypha>
it was also said that in an early version of the worldwide web, the prefix WWW...

<meta_tangent>
(an interesting abbreviation in that it has three times as many syllables  [/dʌbəlju: dʌbəlju: dʌbəlju:/] as the words it stands for – an indication, perhaps, of the way the early web was concerned only with text and not with sound)
</meta_tangent>

...was TIM (standing for Tim's Information Machine). This smacks to me of CERNo-mythopoeia. 

<meta_tangent>
The making of myths. Interesting word-bit (alias morpheme), poei-; turns up where you least expect it: from poet to erythropoietin (EPO – for the drug-cheats in the audience) – anything that involves the making of something.
<meta_tangent> 

/IT_naming_apocrypha>

</IT_urban_legend>

I've recently been haunted by a high-tech analogue of this: the Google Assistant. At seemingly random intervals – usually when I could do without the redirection of my, at the best of times, butterfly-like focus – it cuts in and says "Hi (painfully informal, and over-familiar, I feel) How can I help?"

My first instinct was to say "You can help by keeping the heck out of my face", but I'm sure this would get us nowhere, possibly prompting more specific irrelevant question like "Would you like to know the lead in Shrek" (they set a lot of store by vowel sounds, these speech recognition doofers). Then I thought (a more mature response): There must be a setting; switch it off.

But the people at Google seem to have thought I might do this, and have implemented some byzantine system of nested dependencies, with the effect that whenever I switch it off some other setting automagically switches it back on.

<rant type="cyber-paranoid">
Besides, call me old-fashioned but I've already signed over much of my personal data to the tech giants, and I'm blowed if I'll add bio-metrics to the damage. For this reason I'm not letting them get their hands on my voice-print; and for the same reason I haven't accepted the siren requests that I should "Make my life so much easier" by using a face-scan or a fingerprint to open my phone...

<tangent>
And while we're on the subject, whenever I see a TV cop opening a phone by thrusting it in the face of a resistant perp, I think "Surely you can stymie the facial recognition software by girning."
</tangent>

...My face-scan isn't going to fly off into the cloud somewhere... (Unless... oh gawd, Don't tell me... It's there already, isn't it?) Well anyway I'm not going to knowingly hold the door open for the identity thieves by saying "This is my face and Google can do what it likes with it".
</rant>

L'Envoi 

And I'll close with a not entirely irrelevant speculation about a name that features in a G&S operetta based on confused identities. In HMS Pinafore the nurse sings

I'm called Little Buttercup
Dear Little Buttercup
Though I could never tell why

The last line struck me when I first heard it as a rather pointless non sequitur, whose only justification was to provide a rhyme for "Little Buttercup I" (itself a bare-faced  makeweight). But I saw it in a  painfully chaste convent school production, which certainly wouldn't have added the inviting (and probable – given Gilbert's obsession with all things mammary...

<parenthesis>
(Another case: In Iolanthe Strephon sings 

In babyhood upon her lap I lay
With infant food she moistened my clay
Had she withheld the succour she supplied...

And the chorus have a nudge-nudge-wink-wink moment, hearing "sucker".
</parenthesis>

...) bit of stage-business, hitching up her ample bosom: Buttercup the cow, milk, wet-nurse – geddit?

Tha'sall. Time I prepared for tonight's rehearsal.

b

 

 –

The lure of the one-word-fits-all "dictionary"

 A few years ago I was writing, as I sometimes do, about Gutenberg, and quoted Wikipedia's

His surname [my emphasis] was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors ...

Wallau's [HD2021: the writer who Wikipedia was citing] word was cognomen. Johannes was as much Johannes Gutenberg as Leonard Woolf was Leonard Hogarth  (whose business just took its name from Hogarth House). I imagine the wikipedioscribe saw cognomen, wondered what it meant and looked in some benighted dictionary that went for tight-lipped and simplistic one-word "equivalences" such as Dictionary.com's

 

... without bothering to read the rest of the definition. 

Old blog post

I was reminded of this the other day while watching Pointless when the round involved the meanings of French words for parts of a house. The contestants had had their go, and the host (Alexander Armstrong) was providing answers to the remaining questions. They came finally to grenier, and he said (uncertainly, I thought as I was watching live, though on a second look I see I was wrong, "barn") and his sidekick (the ubiquitous Richard Osman) "corrected" him to "attic". My first thought was that Armstrong didn't speak French and was guessing on the basis of a similarity to our "granary" (a good guess, as Wiktionary confirms:

From Middle French grenier, from Old French grenier, gernier, guernier, from Latin grānārium. Equivalent to grain +‎ -ier.

). And you can add to the related words not only "granary" but also "garner"...

<philological_point>
(in which case, spot the metathesis; and if you're not sure what that is start here)
</philological_point>

....

But I was wrong about Armstrong's  francophony . His second offering, drowned out by the "right" answer, was "attic" (which, admittedly, is more of a 'part of a house').  And, turning to the oracle, I find that Larousse confirms Armstrong's order of possibilities:

Larousse

And note also that 3rd usage. In French grenier fulfils the same metaphorical role as our "bread-basket"; (this is one of the many advantages of monolingual dictionaries - the way they cast fascinating new light into the language by means of serendipitous revelations; I've only just met this usage, but it's one I don't think I'll forget).

For the faint-hearted ...

<mini_rant>
, or those who went to school after that obscurantist vandal Michael Gove made the learning of foreign languages optional (at any serious level), giving the privately educated yet another unfair advantage over the cattle-class of public eduation,
</mini_rant>

...here's a French-English version:

Collins

So Armstrong's first answer was not far off the mark (the translation was OK though the context was wrong - and his only mistake was not realizing that the context was not a text but a quiz question.).

<autobiographical_note>

And at the mention of grenier the vision came to me of my French master (referred to in various posts in this blog), when Le Grand Meaulnes arpentait la salle in the attic overhead, miming arpenter - although Meaules didn't do it in a threadbare and tattered master's gown.

</autobiographical_note>

Tha'sall she wrote. 

b

Update 2021.10.03.18:30 – Various tweaks and typo fixes.

Mr Biden and the serviette

Last week I was listening to a repeat of an episode from A History of the World in a Hundred Objects...

<autobiographical_note>
(which, when it first appeared, gave me the idea for A History of English in a Hundred Words – an idea that I planned and actually started on, before David Crystal published 

 The Story of English in 100 Words 

to my  disgruntlement, especially as in his Introduction to the earlier 

The Stories of English

he had written:

(which I felt at the time –  somewhat petulantly  I now admit –  disqualified him from writing the story]; though I think he made a better job of it than I would have).
</autobiographical_note>

.... and this particular episode (about a map drawn on buckskin, recording a nefarious deal done between The Wabash Company and  the Native Americans they were trying to exploit. The exchange showed up (and indeed in a sense depicted) the clash of cultures between the fly-by-night, exploitative westerners and the people who just didn't have the notion that land was something that could be traded.

<inline_ps>

To quote from  the BBC's blurb:

Today he[Neil MacGregor]  tells the story of a map, roughly drawn on deerskin that was used as the colonists negotiated for land in the area between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. It was probably drawn up by a Native American around 1774. Neil looks at how the French and the British were in conflict in the region, and examines the different attitudes to land and living between Europeans and Native Americans.

</inline_ps>

 That short programme is well worth a listen.

Later that week I was getting up to date with Lyse Doucet's  excellent and thought-provoking  A Wish for Afghanistan . This (last week's) episode features an interview with Hamid Karzai (former president of that long-suffering and deeply-wronged country). Hamid Karzai recalls a meeting he had over dinner with then Vice President Biden in 2008; Biden  was complaining about corruption in the Afghan administration. The President's answer was that yes there was petty corruption in the Afghan administration but to an extent dwarfed by that done by the US Army and their contractors; what was unconscionable was the hundreds of civilian casualties. Afghanistan would be better off without their interference.

 

I can believe that – not that I necessarily do believe it.

<autobiographical-note>

But as my big sister (who lived much of her adult life in Northern Ireland) used to say "Give people in uniforms weapons and control over a civilian population and you will get misbehaviour, you know?"

</autobiographical-note>

At this point Mr Biden lost his rag (the rag in question being his table napkin – or in the non-U Karzai report his serviette) : "He got up and he got angry and threw his serviette and left". The child is father of the man, or rather the 66 year-old is father of the 79 year-old. That is what now-President Biden has just done; he has thrown down his serviette and stormed out, calling over his shoulder "I've had it with you people". Here again was a bit of fabric exemplifying, as did the buckskin map, the gulf between two cultures and the reason for bloodshed between Western progress and any non-white resistance to it.

Anyway, the latest Wish for Afghanistan has just appeared (or dropped as  they say in the trade) so I must go and get my fix. 

b

Update: 2021.09.24.10:55 – Added <inline_ps />