A tale of two cities

My latest discovery is Radio3's Inside Music. In it a leading musician discusses an eclectic range of music, and their approach to it. Ten days ago I was listening to Aylish Tynan's edition, and she was talking about the importance of text. She sang a Fauré piece, which I heard as Les roses disparantes. In her introduction there was no mention of the author of the poem, so in my subsequent search for the poem I drew a blank.

So, without being able to check the text I assumed that disparantes in the context  meant dying or fading, or just no longer being in season. There was the remote possibility that the piece was referring to shades of pink (as the masculine rose is not a flower but a colour) in which case the disparants would refer in context to fading or disappearing. But, as the only other word I could make out was jasmin, I felt safe enough to assume the piece was talking about flowers and bunged off this flippant tweet

Over the next few days there was no response, and I began to fear I might have got the tone wrong.

<tangent>

On Word of Mouth this week I heard an extraordinary statistic about misunderstood texts; the figure was "50%", but I don't see how they could measure it in any meaningful way.

<autobiographical-note>
This reminded me of a misunderstood mail I sent in the early '90s, involving the words 

I could be wrong; there are recorded instances. 

(I often used this line, so it may be familiar to some of you.)

I might have known that this wouldn't have the intended cheeky-chappy effect in a trans-atlantic mail, and it made for difficult professional relations over the following few months. The recipient probably still thinks I'm an arrogant prig (if she remembers the incident at all; she seemed to me to be a more or-less inveterate taker of umbrage at perceived male slights, so I imagine her memories of this sort of thing must be quite crowded).
</autobiographical-note>

 </tangent>

But with relief I saw this response  The "thoughtful insights" might have been ironic, but anyway I deserved it 

In a further tweet she linked to this site. The poem in question starts:

Les roses d’Ispahan dans leur gaine de mousse,

Les jasmins de Mossoul, les fleurs de l’oranger

Ont un parfum moins frais, ont une odeur moins douce,

Ô blanche Leïlah! que ton souffle léger.

So my disparant was (not inappropriately) a fantasm. And to make matters worse, the poem I had misheard was one I had met...

<autobiographical-note>
(I wouldn't use the word "studied" – it was more a matter of scanning two or three poems by Leconte de Lisle (the author of Les roses d'Ispahan) and deciding that Baudelaire was more fun .)
</autobiographical-note>

... in my first year as a "gentleman in statu pupillari" (to use the local lingo).

So the first of my two cities is "Isfahan"...

<philological-observation>
(and the p of the French Ispahan  is a small mitigation of my invention of disparant. I suspect that the fricative in question is neither the French p (a bilabial plosive) nor the English f (a labio-dental fricative) but /ɸ/ – a bit of both, a bilabial fricative ("you just put your lips together and blow")

<inline-ps>
(Nearly all the "ph" spellings in English words – probably all, in words that are pronounced with an /f/ sound – represent the Greek ɸ.)
</inline-ps>

</philological-observation>

My second is mentioned in Leconte's poem: Mossoul,  known in English as "Mosul".  Mossoul is the source of the fabric name mousseline, known in English as "muslin". So Mosul joins Genoa ("jean"), Nîmes ("denim"), Kolkata ("calico"), and presumably more cities that gave their name to a kind of cloth.

That's all for now, though I'm thinking about an update about Leconte's muse, Leilah – which'll take a bit of research.

b

Update: 2021.09.03.11:30 – Added <inline-ps />; and I suspect Leilah was just Leconte's latest squeeze rather than a reference to any of the dozens listed here.

 

Update 2022.01.18.15:00 – Added PPS

Last year's Update was over-hasty....

<correction>
(in two ways:

• in intention (I meant this page – which lists 50-odd possibilities, actual and fictional, in a range of spellings)
• in fact (I got the link wrong)

)

</correction>

...and I now think the reference is fairly obvious:

Meaning & History

Means "night" in Arabic. Layla was the love interest of the poet Qays (called Majnun) in an old Arab tale, notably retold by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi in his poem Layla and Majnun. This story was a popular romance in medieval Arabia and Persia. The name became used in the English-speaking world after the 1970 release of the song Layla by Derek and the Dominos, the title of which was inspired by the medieval story.
Source

"Derek and the Dominos" is the well-known/thinly-veiled pseudonym of Eric Clapton, who was naturally inspired by a story of devotion to a married woman (in his case, Pattie Boyd):

The story of Qays and Layla or Layla and Majnun is based on the romantic poems of Qais Ibn Al-Mulawwah (Arabic: قيس بن الملوح) in 7th century Arabia, who was nicknamed Majnoon Layla (مجنون ليلى), Arabic for "madly in love with Layla", referring to his cousin Layla Al-Amiriah (ليلى العامرية).^[3] His poems are considered the paragon of unrequited chaste love. They later became a popular romance in medieval Iran,^[4] and use of the name spread accordingly.
Source

Whether, in the case of  Clapton and Boyd, the love was either "unrequited" or "chaste" – to use Wikipedias's words – is none of our business (though there is no doubt speculation in circles that concern themselves with that sort of thing).

<inline_ppps>
This isn't the only case of  Clapton taking inspiration from other art forms in this context. I mentioned here the similarity between Handel's Silent Worship and Wonderful Tonight. 

<parenthesis type="pppps">

While we're on (i.e. off) the subject, why not go even further? I was struck recently by the formal similarity between the first of Bartók's Roumanian Folk Dances and the early Beatles song All My Lovin' (though it would of course be fanciful to suggest that Bartók actually pinched it from Lennon and McCartney).

</parenthesis> 

</inline_ppps>

Returning to Les Roses d'Ispahan, presumably Leconte de Lisle was following the many other poets who took their inspiration from this medieval romance.

Update 2022.01.19.12:50 – Added <INLINE PPPS/>

Update 2022.01.19.17:00 – Added (nested) ppps.

Newspeak

Irony of ironies. A winner of the Orwell Prize has been defenestrated for her failure to use Newspeak (originally envisaged by Orwell...

<glossary>

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express..."

More on Newspeak here.
</glossary>

...). Last Saturday's Times had an article headed 

Authors must stand up against language police 

(itself possibly a nod to Orwell's Thought Police)..., which begins like this:

 Yet another of the faithful [sic – a hastily accepted spellcheck for fateful?]...

<autobiographical-note>
I'm paranoid about these: I recently wrote to the editors of CAM about what I thought was a brace of typos:

When, on page 20 of issue 93, I saw reference being made to "racialised [sic] minorities" I assumed that a hastily used spellchecker had been allowed to substitute "racialised" for "radicalised", but when on the next page I saw the reference to a "Pakistiani [sic] boy" it became clear that no spellchecker could have been involved - unless the putative spellchecker incident had already happened in the quoted work (in which case a "sic" would have been helpful). Or perhaps in some horrid hyper-woke world people do  actually use the term "racialised" to mean "taught by a racially isolated environment to discriminate on grounds of race"; I hope not, 

I was wrong though. The article had been written by an academic whose language was acutely conscious of the possibility of no-platforming. 

Note: The online text in that CAM link has been fixed, so you'll just have to take my word on the "Pakistiani".

</autobiographical-note>

...swirls in publishing's "purity spiral" before disappearing down the drain. Kate Clanchy has been censured for offences against ever-more-stringent modern orthodoxy in her memoir about teaching in British state schools, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, specifically for referring to "chocolate-coloured skin" and "almond-shaped eyes". The book won the Orwell Prize in long-ago 2020, back when our standards of sensitivity were criminally lax.

After a burst of consternation, the author apologised - in today's predatory cultural climate, a sign of weakness and always a mistake. "I am not a good person," she grovelled. "Not a pure person, not a patient person, no one's saviour." Picador, her publisher, also apologised for the "anguish" the book had caused, although the experience of shooting down a prize-winning author is likely to occasion an emotion closer to "glee". The publisher will soon release a new version of the memoir that is cleansed of sin.

"Authors must..."? To judge by her retraction, which smacks of an ISIS hostage video, I'll bet Clanchy fell on her sword (or should that be pen) at the craven instigation of Picador, who no doubt have her sewn up good and tight: "Retract or you're in breach of  contract and we want the advance repaid with interest." The author had to rely on irony to signal her lack of what, in our Catechism classes, we were taught was a condition of the sacrament of Penance: "a firm purpose of amendment".

Returning to the subject of that suspected spellcheck-o. My wild surmise of "some horrid hyper-woke world [where] people do actually use the term 'racialised'" turned out to be a nightmare in the real world rather then a flippant dream in the world of whimsy. 

The verb "racialise" is a recent coining, as this Collins trend graph suggests:  

The fact that their data runs out more than a decade ago is a shame, but the trend is clear. The word was scarcely heard of until the end of the twentieth century, but usage rose steeply after that. Assuming a growing steepening of the slope, it has now got a fairly firm foothold. But Collins is the only print dictionary found by Onelook ...

<OK-OK>
Of course, the link is to an online source, but it's backed up by the credibility of  "a proper dictionary". This is the way language progresses in a networked world. Online sources record new usages first, and they are confirmed in print after a decent interval.
</OK-OK>

...in a search for "racialise". and it is only secure enough in its understanding of the meaning to give it seven words (which don't  reflect the politically correct version):

The past participle has a slightly firmer foothold:

<ducking-&-covering>

An early instance of this self-editing is the suffix "-man". I first began to feel this in the early '70s. Because of its superficial similarity to the word "man" it began to fall out of use. Take "chairman"; it was replaced either by the mealy-mouthed "chairperson" or the laughable "chair". (Should a "spokesman" be a spokes or an "ombudsman" an ombuds?)

The borrowing ombudsman points to the flaw; in the related German there are two words: Mann and man, and only the first is marked for sex. In English, we only have sounds: a /mæn/  is male and a /mɘn/ is not.

I'd better stop digging; but I'm filled with admiration for any woman who calls herself a "chairman".

</ducking-&-covering>

Hmm. This doesn't hang together the way I thought it would. But for real randomness it's hard to beat  the unholy juxtaposition imposed by alphabetical order: I was listening recently, on my MP3 player, to the Buena Vista Social Club. After a pause, Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri ...

<tangent>

(Another potential spellcheck-o. The computer wants me to make that nostril).

</tangent>

...changed the mood rather abruptly

b

Senex, senior

The Feedback column in the Times last Saturday ...

<typographical-correctness-gone-mad>
(the kosher format would be "Last Saturday's The Times", but that way  madness lies)
</typographical-correctness-gone-mad>

...discussed the use of "senior" (as a free-standing noun denoting someone of maturer years (or "somewhat advanced in age" as I was taught to render Chaucer's somdel stape in age...

<digression>
(which I suppose has something to do  with our steep (as in "steep price")

<meta-digression>
This use of /eɪ/ (as in "stape") to render ...

<academic-point>
This puts the cart before the horse. Speech came first, obv.
</academic-point>

 ...  written "ee" and "ea" and "eigh" reminds me of a northern comedian I heard on the radio earlier this week in Act Your Age. The punchline (after a story about a man who wanted a gold statue of his dog) was

Jeweller: Eighteen carat?

Man: No, chewing a bone.

Not a real rib-tickler, but making a point. The joke wouldn't work with RBP.
</meta-digression>

...(I hope you're keeping up with all these  mental ricochets. As a scatter-brained school-friend once said to me: "It's all right for you. You've only got eight hours of this a day. I have to put up with it all the time.")

<digression>

Here's the beginning of that Times article:

Philip Burt says he objects to the word pensioner. "It's disparaging. We should be referred to as 'seniors'. Much more respectable."

It might be respectable but heaven forbid. My dictionary (Collins Online) confines the use of "senior" as a noun to professional golfers or tennis players who are too old for the main tournaments. It hasn't gained much traction elsewhere unless you're buying cheap cinema tickets.

'... hasn't gained much traction'? Sez who? The writer hadn't even properly read the one work she cited: Collins Online. Granted, the first couple of screensful support her airy dismissal ("heaven forbid" – which incidentally I agree with, while fearing that Mr Burt may feel he has got not only short shrift but also short change), but if you scroll down to where it says American English you will see this:

Definition 8 gives the requisite sense. This is confirmed by the American Heritage Dictionary entry:

Definition 1b:  is the relevant one; part of the first definition, that's what I call traction. And notice the Usage Note, particularly the second and third sentences. So Mr Burt is simply following the well-trodden path of British English following American English. This is what happened for example with "boyfriend" (which I must have mentioned at least once in this blog – probably more...

<confirmation> 
Yes, here and here.

<note-for-the-irony-impaired>
In the first of those my tongue was virtually impaling my cheek when I referred to "boyfriend as a "loathsome Americanism"; we couldn't do without it.
</note-for-the-irony-impaired>

</confirmation>  

...): British English needed a word for an informal relationship somewhere on the friend...fiançé scale, and American English provided the answer: boyfriend.

Returning to that article, Philip Burt's feelings at being so glibly dismissed may  be  mitigated by his satisfaction at having tricked the columnist into repeating his unique use of "respectable": what it means is anyone's guess: respectful? expressive of respect...?

But the otherwise curtly dismissive columnist repeats it, almost as if it meant something,

Enough of this, though. I shouldn't be such a snob [really, though...].

Time for my walk.

b 

Update: 2021.08.12.14:50 – Added PS

PS: Two things. First is my subject line. Traditionally, Latin adjectives are learnt in 3 forms: <adj> comparative, superlative (big bigger biggest...

<tangent>
which reminds me of an award winning teacher I saw on video, teaching English. He gave lots of examples of what he called "superlatives", with not an -est in sight. I forget the details. Perhaps the AQA  have redefined "superlative", but I  fear this super-teacher was just ignorant. People of his just pre-millennial vintage are sadly ignorant about the nuts and bolts of their own language.
</tangent>

...). Several Latin adjectives have irregular comparatives and superlatives, and English has adopted many of these (such as "major", "junior","senior" [comparatives] and "optimum", "maximum", "minimum" [superlatives]). Less commonly, rather than borrowing the whole word, English forms words by adding bits: "ameliorate" is a case in point,  derived from melior  (whence Fr meilleur, Sp mejor and so on...

<inline-pps>
A few more: It meglio Pg melhor, Cat millor...
</inline-pps>

<inline-ppps>
Another example of this word-building is "pejorative", for peior (comparative of malus...

<autobiographical-note subj="Quips&quiddities">
(which, irrelevantly, reminds me the Latin jingle I met at school: 

Malo malo malo malo

[glossed as

I would rather be/ Up a apple tree/Than a wicked man/In adversity

]
</autobiographical-note>

...[which means "bad"])
</inline-ppps>

...)  the comparative of "good/better/best" (Latin doesn't have a monopoly on irregularity):  bonus/melior/optimus.

<autobiographical-note>
(Which reminds me of one of my favourite Portuguese words. During a summer course in Coimbra I lived in a pensão with a  particularly optimistic {!} young man who, when asked about how he was, always said óptimo – with a beaming smile.) 

</autobiographical-note>

"Senior" is one of these words, being the comparative form of senex. 

But what about the superlative? Well, some would say senissimus, but this is a hotly discussed topic. Here's the nub of the argument:

In this specific instance the question is whether superlatives of senex are really senissim-. The answer from a classical point of view is "not really". The best way to check whether something was actually used is to consult a text corpus. They all have their limitations, but they do give good hints at least. There is only one hit for senissim- ... [HD – the hyphen is needed because there are about a dozen possible endings]

In such cases, when a form is not attested, some grammar books use the term caret  – "it is wanting/absent/missing..."

<serendipitous-potential-footnote subject= "carrot-based puns">
(which, eerily, provides another carrot-based pun to go with yesterday's "18 carat" joke, Shakespeare showed his background in schoolboy Latin puns (NB: no sexism in that "-boy"; in those days schoolgirls were an empty set – let alone ones that studied Latin) in  The Merry Wives of Windsor:  Dr Caius says "The root is caret".)
</serendipitous-potential-footnote.

<inline-ppps subj="caret">
A word not unknown to a few users of English (the ones with more ink-stained fingers) as the Sunday-best form of "omission mark")
</inline-ppps>

 ... So my subject stops short of the superlative.

The other thing I wanted to say was that I've reconsidered Philip Burt's "respectable". In mitigation I blame his channeling of his inner Mr Jingle, eschewing verbs. His "Much more respectable" means, in context, "The  use of the word 'senior' would give people so called an air of much greater respectability." 

<rant>
I recognize the literary credibility of verb-less "sentences"; but they don't always express the writer's sense. The fact that Dickens did it is too often an excuse for a lazy writer to say  

"Here's a bunch of words in the right sort of ball-park, but I'm too important to fritter away my time saying what they mean. You sort it out. Go ahead, punk, read my  mind."

</rant>

Update: 2021.08.13.12:50 – Added <inline-pps/> and <inline-ppps/>

The thief of time

Procrastination, of course. But that thief has had a wide range of accomplices over time, and the latest, in my experience, is BBCSounds ("Music, Radio, Podcasts", as they say, forgetting to add "time-sink"). I have hitherto used BBC radio as a time-keeper, but BBC Sounds has a feature that lets you rewind...

<tangent>
(There's an interesting metaphor, another example to add to the long list of figures of speech that refer to an obsolete technology, like flash in the pan (from the world of firearms) or give someone a ring (from the world of telephony) or in the last reel (cinema) or down to the wire (horse racing). We use rewind to refer to electromagnetic tape or film, although no such medium is involved in the recording of either sounds or images today (except in the practice of museums or Luddites or hobbyists); most recording now is digital...

<meta-tangent>
(Another interesting term... But if I stopped every time I saw a noteworthy word, I'd be here all day. I must really get back to the main issue – procrastination [nb: irony].
</meta-tangent>...

</tangent> 

... to the beginning of the programme you've tuned in to...

<tangent>
(And there's another,"tune in",  harking back to Bakelite knobs and crackly reception.)
</tangent>

This is a frequent temptation, I find. But it ruins the radio as a timekeeper. Programme  follows programme, with time signals and everything, leaving the listener in a land of make-believe.

And then there are podcasts...

<tangent>
(a once proprietary word, like Hoover or aspirin, that the BBC is reconciled to [understandably, there being no alternative]; but podcasts were once the spawn of the iPod.
</tangent>

One can get sucked in to a black hole of true crime and unsolved mysteries; there is a lot of dross out there. And there are vain attempts at sticking to a format that must have seemed worth sticking to at some stage: a prime example is British Scandal (not BBC so interlarded with toe-curling advertisements): the  creators seem to think that scandal means "any-old fairly noteworthy thing that caused a bit of a stir once and involved skulduggery of some kind".

My favourite is Newscast, but it is not without its faults. Worst of all is Chris Mason's illiterate and condescending outro:

Well ...

<small-mercies>
(At least it isn't "So")
</small-mercies>

...thank you for making it to the end of another Newscast. You clearly ooze stamina...

<see-what-he-did-there>  

Most of the same phonemes, but in  a different order. For the first few hearings I missed this, bridling at the misplaced unctuousness. Surely this merits a place in a school magazine somewhere. 

</see-what-he-did-there>

May I gently encourage you to subscribe to us on BBC Sounds and then, without doing anything else, our meandering chat will miraculously make its way to your phone.

<apologia-pro-transcriptione-sua>
This may not be verbatim. If I listen again to check, my ears may start to bleed. (Whenever it comes on, I feverishly jab at the Stop button.). But the gist is there.
</apologia-pro-transcriptione-sua>

He could usefully take a leaf out of Anthony Zurcher's book on Americast ; his outro is admirably sparse, and says twice as much in half the time, with none of the sophomoric wordplay.

But there are Olympics to watch and biomass to do battle with in the garden, so that's all for now.

b

 

/