Questing voles and pinnipeds

I've just come across the word "pinniped" – not for the first time, as I'm a hoarder of obscure words, but it's only now that I have thought about their etymology.

When I first met the related word "pinnate', I thought it referred strictly to compound leaves like this one, but I have recently discovered that botanists use the term pinnate venation to describe basic leaves like the one further down, with a feathery system of veins.

This explains another appearance of the "word-bit" (or morpheme if you're in a linguistics exam) penna- (Latin: =a feather): the English word "pennon".

Another, slightly more obvious derivative, taking the pointiness to extremes, is "pinnacle".

But why stop at Latin? The English "pen" (mightier than the sword, but not because of its pointiness)   is derived ultimately from a Proto Indo European   (PIE) word, as Etymonline says:

late 13c., penne, "writing implement made from the hard, hollow stem at the base of a feather," from Old French pene "quill pen; feather" (12c.) ... in Late Latin, "a pen for writing," from Old Latin petna, pesna, from PIE *pet-na-, suffixed form of root *pet- "to rush; to fly."

In the late 13 century, of course, a pen was a feather . Scholars ...

<digression type="Further reading","optional">
If you'd like some extra philological speculation,  there's some here about how the stress in the Greek ένκαυστον (ink) shifted forwards to give the Late Latin encaustum, and where the r came from in most Romance words for ink. (Hint: The scholars were writing [the Italian ones at least] in chiostro. [="cloister"])
</digression>

... used a pen-knife (geddit?)...

<anachronism-alert>                                    
OK, they probably didn't have the modern sort of pen-knife in medieval monasteries, but that's where those implements – at some later stage – got their name. Gimme a break, dammit: it's a literary device.
</anachronism-alert>  

... to do their scrivening (if that's a word, and it is now). 

 Meanwhile in German a pen is not derived from that PIE root: it is a Füller, which says Duden , while its primary meaning is fountain pen, can also mean feather; (except that maybe it is derived from that root; "feather"/Feder is [by way of that same Grimm's law that makes English "father" and Latin pater cognate]).

But let's go back to pinnipeds: sea-lions, walruses, and so on – mammals that use pointy limbs in place of feet; and what's the vole doing in my subject line? Well Evelyn Waugh knew a thing or two, and I like to think that – although a vole isn't a pinniped – the idea of a word that combined feather and foot owes something to Waugh's classical education:

Feather-footed through  the plashy fen passes the questing vole
Scoop

 But while the sun's out there's some greenery that needs attacking.

b

The pun that never was

I went out to dinner last night, just for the halibut [BOU-BOUM - TSH {Ithangyou}].  (except that by the time I publish, it won't be 'last night'. and I didn't have the halibut anyway [it was an outlier at the top of the price list: the chance to resurrect the 'just for the halibut' gag wasn't worth the extra £6.50]). It, last night, that is, was the first night for some months (since the misguided 'Eat out to help out' initiative) when it was possible to eat out inside (which was just as well, in view of the biblical deluge we ran through from the car-park).

Which has led me to think of firsts and lasts. The subject of this morning's Life Scientific was Nira Chamberlain, a mathematician with many firsts to his name, all of them taking the form "the first black mathematician to be <accolade-or-position>". Towards the end of the program he's talking about being the first black mathematician to figure in Who's Who. At which point he mentioned another black academic saying something strongly reminiscent of the famous Kamala Harris quote...

<parenthesis subj="oh-yeah? Sez who?>

Well, maybe not that famous, but well enough known to feature in an oft-repeated podcast ident – Newscast or Americast, I think; and well enough known for Google to throw up millions of red-herrings...

<meta-parenthesis>
And who knew that the red herring (which was a Thing exported to the slave plantations, I've just learnt, as a bottom-of-the-market foodstuff: see here but here's an excerpt, in case you're not interested in the whole sorry tale

From its outset, the role of the Fishery Board was to maintain standards and to intervene in disputes between fishermen.... [F]ishery officers were obliged to inspect the curing of the fish and only correctly cured fish could be sold within Europe. Implicit in this approach was the intention that fish which did not meet the standard could be shipped to the West Indies to feed the slaves. As in the case of cod ‘the West Indies presented growing market for the rejects, for anything that was cheap’. By feeding the slaves, rather than have them growing their own crops, slave-owners could keep them working longer. This trade only flourished until the abolition of slavery ‘since the blacks, in connection with emancipation, acquired the privilege of choosing their own food.’

...) So 19th-century casual racism ('not up to snuff for Europeans, give it to the blacks') has made a crucial contribution to modern-day Caribbean cuisine.
</meta-parenthesis>

... when I was chasing down Monday morning's (Oh yes, it's already Wednesday) anecdote. based on the Vice President^then-elect's "Although I may be the first black* woman..." line, which has finally made sense to me. When I first heard it, it struck me as a non-sequitur; OK, so what's that got to do with the price of fish? But when I heard Nira Chamberlain's story it made sense. Now read on...

</parenthesis>

He said, at 22'40" in that programme that when he told her of his record she said...

<parenthesis subj="Who? The cat's mother?">

The first black South African woman to obtain a PhD in mathematics education and the first black female Executive Dean of the College of Science, Engineering and Technology at the University of South Africa is now the first black woman to preside over the Convocation of Wits University.
Witwatersrand Convocation Report

</parenthesis>

..."Being the first is nothing to be proud of, but it's a call [HD This word isn't clear but it's a monosyllable, and the gist is unaffected] to ensure that one is not the last."

So the first/last  trope made famous by Kamala Harris is (I guess) something that parents of girls (especially in racial minorities) say to encourage assertiveness and sisterhood; (and that's not a sexist use of sisterhood, we all need to be sisters).

The other first I was going to mention was live rehearsals of my choir, which were due to restart tomorrow. But the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport changed its guidance for amateur choirs last night...

<inline-ps type="esprit d'escalier">
So rather than viva voce it's going to have to be muta voce (on Zoom)
</inline-ps>

...having presumably discovered a new variant that can tell the difference between aerosols coming from a professional singer's mouth and those produced by an amateur's:

However, non-professional singing indoors should only take place in a single group of up to 6 people.

So I'm hitting the Publish button and getting on with my entry for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation.

b

Update 2021.05.20.16:15 – Added <inline-ps />

Update 2021.05.22.16:55 – Added footnote

*She didn't say this bit.

Denouement or tying up loose ends?

Neither, I think (not that they're the same thing – it's just amusing that they're such a near miss)...

<parenthesis>
A denouement is an unknotting; most English speakers, especially gardeners...

 <meta-parenthesis>

Other people conversant with the word "node" include doctors, and people working in the area of networks and/or databases. My exposure to database software is  getting on for 20 years out of date, but one of the earlier systems was called quipu (and there's an account of the early days of LDAP development [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, if you must know] here). This directory-related name was taken from a messaging and/or recording device made of knotted string. A quipu, as Wikipedia explains...

...usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization...The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords....The configuration of the quipus has been "compared to string mops. Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps sturdier, base to which the color-coded cords would be attached. A relatively small number have survived.

 The idea of knotting is a fruitful source of idle mental wanderings.
</meta-parenthesis>

...will know what a node is, even without the aid of the French noeud. The author has got loads of concurrent and intermixed story-lines, and in the denouement they are disentangled. Tying up loose ends is a rather different process; unfinished story lines have been left dangling, and the author tidies up. Hmm.
</parenthesis>

... And I'm talking about Line of Duty, of course; I was thinking of The end of the line? but Radio Times got there first. And I doubt if they're the only ones; as puns go, it's pretty low-hanging fruit. 

But I started to have my doubts during the penultimate episode. Why did Kate run off after the shooting? In the interests of devil's advocacy, I tried to defend it when MrsK objected.

<parenthesis subj="The case for the defence">
'There was no hard proof against Pilkington, so Kate feared she'd be framed for his murder'.
 </parenthesis>

But my heart wasn't in it. He was carrying and threatening to use an illegal gun, so it was obviously a righteous shoot, as they say. The motivation at this stage was further muddied by an article in Saturday's Times, which hinted at a Lesbian/Bonnie and Clyde angle, but as devil's advocacy goes, this was really scraping the barrel.

REWOP (reprinted w/o permission)

And when, during the Bonnie and Clyde bit (after reading that Times article it's hard to see that scene without imagining Foggy Mountain Breakdown as background music), a police pursuit vehicle appeared after Jo had been giving directions, why didn't Kate suspect that Jo had led her into a trap (again – Kate had precious little reason to trust her at that stage).

Then the action moved to Spain, and the wheels really came off. The subtitles (the Spanish ones) were a bit dodgy. For example, when the captain was telling his men to go in, the subtitle read 'Entrar, entrar', making him sound like an official instruction rather than the informal command (which I imagine it was): Entrad! Entrad! But the sound wasn't that clear, and this is not a serious error anyway; it just added to the undermining of my willing suspension of disbelief.

What really did it for me though (OK,  I'm a pron-Nazi) was the pronunciation of 'Thurwell'. I imagine the actor was a native speaker of Spanish who lived in England and had met the distinctly English /ɜ:/ (though even when exposed to the sound, in my experience, Spanish-speakers rarely get it). But this, in the world of fiction, was a Guardia who had

• never (or never knowingly – that is, he might have been exposed to it, but didn't recognize it as linguistically meaningful) heard our /ɜ:/
• only ever seen the name 'Thurwell' in reports

So he should have said [ur]. He flapped the /r/ OK, but he used the highly improbable (if not impossible) /ɜ:/.

<usual_apologies reason="IPA symbols">
Regular visitors to this blog will be used to my insistence on not using "sounds-like" soi-disant 'equivalences', which never work and sometimes mislead in an ESOL class. But here I should perhaps supply a 'misericord' (as defined here) by saying that the word word is transcribed /wɜ:d/. 

For the full pro-IPA rant, see here.

<more-recent-example>     

I recently wrote to The Times on this subject, after they had published a profile of  Kamala Harris around the time of the US presidential election in November 2020:

As a retired teacher of English as a foreign language I was disappointed to read Dana Goodyear's misleading and unhelpful pronunciation advice ('it's Comma-la'). 'Sounds-like' pronunciation aids, as I was always telling my fellow teachers, are no better than the memory of  a speech event. This speech event involved two people who were both speakers of American English. So 'comma-la' tells us about the stress but nothing about the vowels. A speaker of British English will be misled by this memory aid:

• there is no /ɒ/ in the first syllable; 
• the schwa at the end of 'comma' is more-or-less the same in British English and in American English
• even a speaker of American English would have no idea about the last syllable (/ɑ/, /ɑ:/, or /ə/)

...

When I first read the Goodyear article I wronged the writer, assuming she was British and had  misled her readers by slavishly regurgitating her notes of what Harris had said. But what she wrote turns out to have been true for her speech community, and just misleading for speakers of British English (as I presume most of your readers are). 

<more-recent-example> 

</usual_apologies>

Returning to that series (containing only seven episodes, as if originally written for a commercial service, allowing for ad-breaks in an 8-episode series), there were many other disappointments. It was a bit of a damp squib (or 'DS').

But if the rain holds off, the hedge (the one bit that survived the depredations of Li'l Miss Lebensraum next door) needs attention.

b

Update: 2021.05.05.21:30 – Added <meta-parenthesis />