WHAT sort of boeuf?

The present state of the kitchen (with two saucepans fresh from the oven) reminds me of this piece, which I wrote two years ago – almost to the day:

<pre-script> 

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

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

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

</pre-script> 

There my main area of concern (linguistic concern, that is  – I wouldn't like anyone to think I  get properly upset about stuff like this; what kind of nutter do you take me for?) was the ending of dauphinois/e. But that old post went on:  

<pre-script> 

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

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

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

... etc.)

The fight in defence of the rectitude of bourguignonne (according to the "B-G rule" [B-G being the French master who taught me it]) ...

<2022-afterthought>
(and rather neatly it repeats the initials not only of M. Baring-Gould but also of the first two syllables of the word in question)
</2022-afterthought>

...has been well and truly lost. Google finds 

About 9,010,000 results for boeuf bourguignon 

but only 

About 311,000 results for boeuf bourguignonne.

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

</pre-script> 

That last sentence is worth underlining. In  the second paragraph of that unpublished letter, where I refer to a Latin teacher (or tourist guide, or whoever it was that compiled a list of common mistakes and the "correct" version) I touch on one of the main sources of information of use to students of the history of languages: contemporary advice about "correct" ways of talking. In What's BALD about a bat? I discuss the warning not to say CALVA SORICEM but rather VESPERTILIONEM (the source of our pipistrelle...

A pipistrelle bat (far from bald)

...) But the mistake (which seems to be based on a pre-existing underlying local word (the fancy word is "substrate") that meant owl; so that CALVA SORICEM, meaning 'owl-mouse' (making much more sense than 'bald-mouse', which it's manifestly not), is the source of the standard French chauve souris.

That's all for now.

b

 

OCR schmOCR

A letter to this month's CAM started:

I’d like to nominate CAM 96 for an ‘understatement of the year’ award. On page 26, Professor Suchitra Sebastian is quoted as saying a milligram of these materials contains 10^²³ electrons

After a certain amount of egg-sucking advice (presumably aimed at grandmothers who don't know what  10²³ means) the writer went on to point out that the editor had made a mistake:

The editor apparently read it as 1,023 and put “more than a thousand”, but a hundred sextillion is indeed more than a thousand – in fact it is a hundred quintillion times as much.

<autobiographical-note>
To save time I keep these magazines (and others, to MrsK's dismay) until the following number comes. Then I read the letters in the latest one, to find out which articles in the old one are worth reading.
</autobiographical-note>

The letter confused me: the quoted text said 10²³, and the editor had presumably seen that; so where was the mistake? When I looked at last month's CAM it became clear. Someone had pulled out a bit of text, summarized it, and set it in a larger font – a pull-out quote. I would expect a sub-editor to do that; hence my confusion. Though in a small office who knows what depths an editor must stoop to?

The text was this:

We understand how a single electron behaves, but a milligram of these materials contains 10²³ electrons and every one of them is interacting with every other one. It is similar to the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of swallows, where collectively they shape-shift and a new form emerges. That potential for completely unimagined forms of physics to emerge is what makes it so exciting.

The pull-out quote was this: 

We understand how a single electron behaves, but a milligram of these materials contains more than a thousand every one interacting with every other one...

But the editor (or whoever) was only partly to blame, as I found when I took a photo of the article, and got Google Lens to copy the text. Because of the limitations of the (otherwise amazingly accurate) OCR transcription, the superscript ²³ was read as 23 making the figure 1023. When working against the clock it would be easy not to stop and think 'Hey, that doesn't make sense; they're jolly small...'. It doesn't take an innumerate arts graduate (the sort of ignoramus who needs to be told that 10²³  "is read as ‘ten to the twenty three’ ", as the letter-writer helpfully explains) to make that sort of slip.

But there is a nit to be picked, one I almost missed, as the image is so descriptive:

...similar to the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of swallows

A beautiful and persuasive image; except that the swallows should have been starlings, the only birds that behave like this, according to this website:

Starlings

Starling murmuration is a fascinating natural phenomenon that is a wonder to behold. The beautiful sight of them flocking and flying in perfect formation is something you don’t forget in a hurry once you’ve seen it, but arguably, the most interesting fact about murmuration is that starlings are the only species of birds who do it. 

How's that for nit-picking? 

In passing

Radio 3's 'Composer of the Week' last week  was César Franck. I was listening ...

<tangent>
Among the many things I dislike about BBC Sounds is that it incontinently splurges out whole series at one swell foop, cluttering up the view of that week's listening, with the result that I oftem find myself listening to live radio and have to change channels when something comes up on the broadcast schedule that I've already heard asynchronously. (The number of Christmas Specials I've already heard is ridiculous.)

The answer, of courese, is to use another app with a more manageable interface – but that involves the converse problem: topical shows become available a month after broadcast.
</tangent>

...on Friday, and learnt that Franck was hurt in a traffic accident involving "a horse-drawn bus". For a moment I was surprised that the presenter resisted the temptation to point out that this sort of carriage with benches was called a char-à-bancs, the source of the English "charabanc" (with the French banc becoming "bang"  – a different [more English] sort of nasal a)...

<tangent>

On the subject of banks, a guest on a recent episode of Tim Harford's Understand the Econmy pointed out that banks (the financial sort) took their name from an obvious (now I think of it) physical object. Those money-lenders  in Lombardy (or wherever) used to offer their services in the open air, on benches.

</tangent>

...Then I realized that the presenter probably didn't know, if he read the report in translation.

Tha's all for today.

b

How not talk to a racist

Nearly five years ago, here, I wrote about the (new to me at the time) concept of pedigree collapse.

...the closer the consanguinity, the fewer the  maternal great grandparents. This pedigree shows how 1st cousins marrying share only three maternal great grandparents. 

When 1st Cousins M and F Marry

There is a corollary to this, which is hard to credit and seems counter-intuitive, but which Adam Rutherford explained in last Sunday's Private Passions: because of pedigree collapse, if you go back far enough, the family trees criss-cross so much that everyone living now is descended from everyone living then. For people of broadly European heritage, this point is about 1000 AD. So everyone in that population is descended from Charlemagne. (But don't get too cocky; we're also descended from Ivan the Terrrible.)

So the answer to William Wilberforce's question (for those of the XY persuasion, at least) is "Yes. I am a man and a brother."

Dr Rutherford went on to recount the story of a taxi driver who had asked him where he was from; he said he was born in Ipswich but now lived in Dulwich. This didn't satisfy the driver, who asked 'But where are you really from?'

<background>

In his book How to Argue with a Racist, Adam Rutherford writes:

I am mixed race, or dual heritage, or biracial. Half-caste is a term which has fallen out of favour, but for much of my life that is how many have described me, some out of habit, occasionally in a dismissive way. I am often asked where I am from, and I adjust my answer by second guessing what they are really asking. Britain, England, Suffolk, Ipswich or London, where I have lived for twenty-five years. All are true, but often, what they are really asking is why do you look the way you do? 

So I wonder why he doesn't answer that question. In the same book he writes

My father was born in Yorkshire, with both his parents being White and British. My mother is British and Indian, though she has never set foot in India. She was born in Guyana in South America. Her grandparents were shipped there from India in the nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations under the auspices of a colonial edict known as Indenture - a form of semi-forced migration and labour that is a shadow of slavery. She emigrated to England in the 1960s, in the wake of the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought 802 Caribbean women and men to begin new lives in Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like them, she was a British citizen invited to the homeland of the colonies as the imperial age waned 

This does the job, although the version Sarfraz Manzoor gave on The World Tonight last Wednesday, mutatis mutandis (that's Latin for 'making the obvious changes, duh'), "I come from X ^UK but my people came from Y ^{HERE BE DRAGONS} "

</background>

As I said, I have to wonder why he doesn't answer that question. I know he is a firm believer in the accuracy of his research, but this makes him insist on coat-traiing when there is anyone who hasn't learned the Gospel According to A. Rutherford, giving him the chance to Make a Point.

<autobiographical-note>

This is a position that I know only too well. Many's the time that I have rocked the social or professional boat because of my insistence on sticking to an academic truth. On one memorable (well, I remember it) occasion I upset my toddlet (at the time) son, and his mother asked 'Did daddy shout at you?' He answered 'No, but he used his shouty voice.'

<parenthesis>

I'm reminded (with almost negligible relevance, but you're used to that, aren't you?) of a scene in the West Wing when CJ is being prepped for a court hearing. The lawyer asks 'Do you have the time?' and, looking at her watch, she says 'A quarter of two' (or whatever). Whereon he says 'I wish you'd stop doing that.' She asks what, and he says 'Giving more information than the questioner asks for. In your case, the answer was "Yes".' (I saw this several years ago, so it's not verbatim; but you get the gist.) 

My point is that sane people operating in society do more than just answer questions mechanically, but guess what the questioner really wants. This tolerance is the grease that makes society work.

</parenthesis>

</autobiographical-note>

This came up in that The World Tonight program, when a huge kerfuffle ...

<tangent>

(cause célèbre would be a bit of an exaggeration, though when Twitter gets its teeth into an issue like this it quickly becomes one) 

</tangent>

...kicked off about an old woman's insensivity, which  led to an event variously described as hostile, hurtful, unwelcoming, violent...

Of course, I am a WASP (or more accurately WAS RC_lapsed), so I'm in no position to say how non-WASP people feel about this sort of questioning. But it seems to me that there is room for more tolerance and understanding in this area, and blighting the few remaining years of an elderly woman is itself at best intemperate and at worst (ironically) insensitive, not to say plain stupid (though perhaps I mean childish?)    

b

The uneven playing field

A lot of ink has recently been spilled on a story that makes extravagant claims such as this:
There’s Never Been a Crash Test Dummy Modeled After a Woman—Until Now
As Boot might have said in  Scoop, "Up to a point".

What is true is that until now, crash-test dummmies designed to simulate women have been based on the original male ones, and besides there was no requirement for them to be taken into account. A less breathless and more measured account of the creation of the new dummy is given in Popular Science,  

It had been a long time coming. As the WI's Female Crash Test Dummies says

Female crash test dummies do exist but they are not mandated to be used in most tests. A pregnant crash-test dummy was created in 1996 but testing with it is still not government mandated either in the US or in the EU.

Women will not be surprised at this framing of the rules without reference to them (to put it at its least selfish; some people have suggested that it's a conspiracy by men to tilt the rules against anyone who isn't a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.) 

Another area where standards favour (or at least fail to consider) women is office temperature. A 2021 article in Nature found that

[O]ffice temperatures are less comfortable for women largely due to overcooling. Survey responses show that uncomfortable temperatures are more likely to be cold than hot regardless of season. Crowdsourced data suggests that overcooling is a common problem in warm weather in offices across the US. The associated impacts of this pervasive overcooling on well-being and performance are borne predominantly by women. The problem is likely to increase in the future due to growing demand for cooling in increasingly extreme climates. There is a need to rethink the approach to air-conditioning office buildings in light of this gender inequity caused by overcooling.

And this is ironic in the light...

<tangent subject ="stick-in-the-mud, moi?">

And, unlike whoever wrote that Nature article, I still care about which light I'm talking about.
<tangent>

... of a study which found that 

Women's brains work better in warmer offices

.

But male designers of the world aren't content with just ignoring the needs of just over half of the world's population. They also arrange some things to favour women, who are, on average, not as tall as men. Those things are, of course, the things that men don't want to do. Building regulations, or at least standard design (I don't intend to search the actual "Regs") dictate a height for kitchen worktops that suits the shorter worker.

<autobiographical-note>
In the summer of 1970 I did a holiday job on a recently completed Northwick Park Hospital. Sub-contractors had increased costs they were charging, the client had baulked at the new payments and had asked the subcontractors to economize. So there was one lot of estimates and a new set of accounts. This provided opportunities for fraud, and it was thought that a bunch of school kids would be less likely than forensic accountants (less likely, and cheaper) to have the wool pulled over their eyes. One of the economies was that a low-maintenance  [but costly] floor-covering was replaced by a cheaper alternative.

In the summer of 1971, for only a day or two, I did a job at the same hospital, now open. That cheaper floor-covering had to be polished every day with big Columbus Dixon machines, which seemed (to me) to have a will of their own. Which way they moved (right or left; forwards was down to the operator) was controlled by the angle of the handle. And the sweet spot (where left became right) was well below my waist. The foreman, a good foot less tall than me, couldn't understand my problem. He kept demonstrating how easy it was. But I jacked it in. Curvature of the spine.
</autobiographical-note>

But last week, alerted by Pick of the Week, I discovered a conversation with Holly Smale about her autism. It spent years undiagnosed and misdiagnosed partly because of the belief that "The typical autistic person is a boy". No. The typical autistic person DIAGNOSED IN CHILDHOOD is a boy. A girl with autism behaves just as obsessively, but nobody notices because girls should be seen and not heard. Listen to her; I recommend it. I particularly like the duck/frog bit at the end, where she talks about spending her first 39 years being told she's "a shit duck" only to find out that actually she's a frog.

Word watch

I've just spotted a new meaning of the verb "drop". Since embracing the world of podcasts I have come to recognize the intransitive use, when applied to a podcast, meaning become available/be listed by podcast providers You can't listen to a podcast until it drops...

<sideswipe>
By the way, it isn't then "downloaded to your phone", pace Chris Mason's lamentable Newscast outro. The app on your  phone just gets to know about it, so that you can download it if you're interested. This isn't  by any means the worst thing about that outro. (For the full rant see here.)  Just saying...
 </sideswipe>

...But earlier this week, on Newscast, as it happens, I was surprised (and momentarily misled) by a related, but transitive, use. Adam Fleming said "Netflix has dropped The Crown." Initially  I interpreted  this as analogous to "The BBC has dropped Bake Off". But I soon realized that it meant something quite different: If you have a Netflix subscription, The Crown has become available to stream – and that's another word that of late has been behaving differently.

And finally

There is an ongoing discussion in Rose Wild's Feedback column in last Saturday's The Times about using a preposition to end a sentence with. The latest  contribution is a letter from someone who decries 

...teachers and pupils who couldn't be bothered to learn or teach the finer points of English use correctly (sic).

 Rose Wild signs off (justly) unrepentantly saying 

...my point stands. There is nothing incorrect about a preposition at the end of a sentence.

OK.  But methinks Ms Wild doth not protest enough.  The correspondent is a pompous windbag, who no doubt blighted the English lessons of generations of young sufferers. Not everyone who believes in  this shibboleth is a pompous windbag; some of them, presumably, suffered this sort of teacher. But they are all wrong, and they are all misinformed

Time I did something useful; oh no, it's lunchtime.

b

Hot and cold and head and chief

Having just updated a fairly recent post about about paths of least resistamce, and specifically what make English "cold" and Italian caldo share an initial (if you want to know why, and what it has to do with paths of least resistance, read that post), I've been thinking more about words that have these two initials.

A few years ago I was writing about other words in Romance languages that share the initial c (as it happens, I was thinking about words that mean "head" and listed only capo, cabo, cabeza, cabeça. But I had the sense to follow the list with an ellipsis – there must be dozens more, including chef ...

<exception>
French took a different path to arrive at a word for "head" – for that read on – but a head in the metaphorical sense still has an initial c, as does the English "chief" 

<inline-ps> 

I should have said yesterday that in France the Vulgar Latin C became ch before certain vowels, so, for example, Carolus became Charles. (More than    "before certain vowels" I wouldn't like to say, as I studiously [interesting use of "studiously"] avoided the minefield that is French phonology.)

</inline-ps> 

</exception>

...). The Latin root for all these was caput, which derived, largely unchanged, from a supposed PIE root, *kaput.

Meanwhile, in Germanic languages the preferred initial for such words is h: here's what Etymonline has for "head":

The reason for this (Germanic h initials but Romance c) is the same as (or similar to) the hot vs caldo issue I was writing about here.

But 'What about tête?', I hear from the cheap seats. I said I was coming to that. It is based on a metaphor, dating from the pre-veni, vidi, vici days in Gaul. Back in 2013 I was recounting (here) a visit to a museum in Plymouth; 

<pre-script>
... Plymouth was noted for being a Roundhead stronghold during the English Civil War – and that name for the Puritans' soldiers, was coined with reference to their headgear (I prefer the soldiers' helmet theory to the pudding-basin haircut theory expounded – very briefly – here).

The Roundhead soldiers were by no means the first fighting force to be given a nickname based on what their heads looked like. When Roman soldiers occupied Gaul the locals thought that their helmets looked like cooking pots (Vulgar Latin TESTA(M)). Among all the Romance-language names for head (capo, cabo, cabeza, cabeça ...) where does the French tête come from? Well, here's a hint; the circumflex in French is often a vestige of an s.
<pre-script>

Back then, with a fairly recent history as a language teacher, I left the rest as an Exercise; but now I'll spell it out: tête is derived from that TESTA(M).

But nothing in language development is ever simple: English has both "head and "chief"; German has both haupt and kopf...

<parenthesis>
(it's not that easy, as kopf is not derived from the PIE *kaput; see here if you want the whole story, which rather spoils the neat h/k point.)
</parenthesis>

Most languages have more than one word for one idea, and each of the words has its own etymological path. Moreover, sometimes those paths cross.

Which brings me to "kaput", an international word meaning dead/hors de combat/finished... (a word that springs to mind because my Tai Chi teacher, a Czech (speaking English, although there have been some polyglot Zoom classes, with students from Czechia), used it last week (and I use it, written on the  container I use for one of my two laptop batteries: when it is flat, it goes in the bag marked KAPUT)

My first thought involved assassination; I thought that if you wanted to kill someone you would choose a head-shot. A person was kaput if they had been the victim of a head-shot. But the truth was much more interesting (and much less violent). Etymonline again:

kaput (adj.)

"finished, worn out, dead," 1895 as a German word in English, from German kaputt "destroyed, ruined, lost" (1640s), which in this sense probably is a misunderstanding of an expression from card-playing, capot machen, a partial translation into German of French faire capot, a phrase which meant "to win all the tricks (from the other player) in piquet," an obsolete card game.

The French phrase means "to make a bonnet," and perhaps the notion is throwing a hood over the other player, but faire capot also meant in French marine jargon "to overset in a squall when under sail."...

                                                                                               

<tangents>

1. 'throwing a hood over the other player' is not unlike 'pulling the wool over their eyes'. Hmm, wonder where that comes from... 
2. So kaput shares with "in the lurch" the distinction of being derived from a metaphor based on an obscure card game: kaput from faire capot, and "in the lurch" from en lourche.

<meta-tangent>
Thr Internet seems to be convinced that en lourche means "comprehensively beaten", and that the game it comes from is "obscure". but in an update to this post I questioned this: "The game is not so much not known about as not documented  – at least, not in English. Historians of French board games know perfectly well  how to put someone en lourche." And it doesn't necessarily imply a comprehensive defeat, although it often leads to one.
<meta-tangent>

</tangents>

Hmm. That's enough navel-gazing for now. Interesting though. And in an update I'll have to write about Grimm's Law (which underlies the h/k thing). 

b

Update: 2022.11.02.15:05 – Added <inline-ps />

And only man is vile, take 2

Last week's Science in Action had a short piece about a plastic-eating caterpillar (following another piece about plastic pollution of the sea – which explains the wording at the beginning of the Science in Action blurb):

It seems to me that this is BIG NEWS. As Silver Bullets go, this is pretty silvern (which, incidentally, isn't a typo, though heaven knows you might be forgiven for expecting one given my past performance: think of Golden: it's an adjective). But why has nobody made more of this?

The Science in Action website, which purportedly brings you all the week's science news  claims that a researcher at the University of Cantabria "has identified enzymes responsible for munching [sic – I don't think the enzymes do that; but still, that's not the point...] through resilient polymers..." This suggests a new discovery has been made.

But more than five years ago I reported  (here) on a not dissimilar piece of research:

<pre-script>

...a piece in the University of Cambridge's Research review.

This very hungry caterpillar produces "something that breaks the chemical bond, perhaps in its salivary glands or a symbiotic bacteria in its gut", says Paulo Bombelli, a Cambridge researcher and co-author of the article.

...the degradation rate is extremely fast compared to other recent discoveries, such as bacteria reported last year to biodegrade some plastics at a rate of just 0.13mg a day. Polyethylene takes between 100 and 400 years to degrade in landfill sites.  "If a single enzyme is responsible for this chemical process, its reproduction on a large scale using biotechnological methods should be achievable," said Cambridge's Paolo Bombelli...

...As the molecular details of the process become known, the researchers say it could be used to devise a biotechnological solution on an industrial scale for managing polyethylene waste.

<2022-afterthought>
Oh I get it. The 2017 discovery was the basis for the discovery of the enzyme, which was previously only suspected: "something that breaks the chemical bond... If a single enzyme is responsible...". Don't mind me. Carry on please. (I'm used to forensic findings becoming available in a matter of days [if not hours if the cop has a back-story involving the researcher]. But real science progresses at a more leisurely pace.) 

<after-afterthought> 

Hang on though, the researcher interviewed in that Science in Action programme told of a discovery she had just happened to make by chance. Maybe this is a different critter after all. 

</after-afterthought> 

</2022-afterthought>

Then, in update, I added a PPPS

PPPS – Three months after this original post, Scientific American has caught up, with quotes from Spain's Institute of Biomedicine & Biotechnology of Cantabria (a happy echo of Universitas Cantabrigiensis) and the University of Tennessee.

</pre-script>

I wonder what the relationship (if any) between "the University of Cantabria" (cited in that Science in Action programme) and "Spain's Institute of Biomedicine & Biotechnology of Cantabria", which knew about this process more than five years ago. Perhaps the programme should be called Science Inaction (a title that might, unfairly in most cases, be thought to apply to all the years wasted since global warming was first detected towards the end of last century, as documented in Big Oil v. the World a mini-series which, unaccountably, I missed earlier this year).

<further-reading>
Radio 4 are reading extracts from The Climate Book this week at 09.45. I just mention it; it's not as though it mattered (NB: Irony [when you say something you don't m... Hold on, don't most people know that?]).
</further-reading>

Musical trouvailles 

I've mentioned before some of the musical associations I make. My latest is a sort of conditional ear-worm. Three examples spring to mind:

• Whenever I hear the closing bars of Mozart's clarinet concerto I think of this: 
  Here We Go Looby Loo.
• Whenever the news mentions Keir Starmer I think of this chorus from The Mikado.
• My metronome app has the down beat distinguished by a pitch a minor third higher than other beats. So I can't set it to 4:4 without thinking of the Siamese cats in The Lady and the Tramp.

The other trivium I have to report is that my electric shaver can be made to play the accompaniment to the Dr Who theme. I may post a recording (if I can get it up to performance standard).

Bye for now.

b

Bear-baiting and de-nazification

In  George Kennan's Op-Ed article in the New York Times shortly after Bill Clinton's second inauguration (25 years ago), he wrote (prophetically) that

...expanding NATO would be 'most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era;' ...[and] that such  would inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion and have adverse effect on development of Russian democracy 

I first mentioned this article on 27 February, in this post, writing:

<pre-script>
His opening paragraph argues:

Later in the same article he writes:

Such a decision [expanding NATO] may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry

Nobody in their right mind... [HD October 2022: I've omitted a predictable sideswipe at the once and future King of Trumpery] ...could defend the fiendish excesses of Putin, but one couldn't say NATO  hasn't been coat-trailing for the last 30-odd years. Well, now the wounded and caged bear has lashed out, just as Kennan predicted. And the West looks on in horror mixed with shocked fascination, just as the crowds did in former times at many another bear-baiting. (In that case the smart money was on the dogs, but this time I'm not so sure....) 
</pre-script>

Two days later, according to this timeline (though other sources put it a few days earlier [to say nothing of Crimea, which brings it forward a few years]) Putin started his Special Military Operation...

<tangent>
Incidentally, Google reports for me (your mileage may vary) 

About 117,000,000 results (0.44 seconds) 

           for special military operation and peace.

You heard it here for the 17 million and oneth time, folks.

</tangent>

...which has stirred two memories in what passes in my case for a mind: 

• A BBC TV programme now available (for those who in the lottery of life have the Golden Ticket, otherwise known as a Blue UK Passport [..."without let, hindrance, or paywall"?]) on iPlayer, called The Rise of the Nazis
• A discussion on the radio (maybe on Start the Week; it'd be good to give chapter and verse) that mentioned the interesting (and disturbing) fact that political predisposition affects what you see. (Come to think of it, last week's Americast is a more likely source.)

The TV programme (a less-than-brilliant three-parter, that I'm not sure I'll stick with) showed Hitler in his bunker with less and less grasp on reality and increasingly hell-bent on vandalism for vandalism's sake, and the Nazi faithful encouraging and facilitating his excesses. This is what real Naziism looks like, and Putin seems to be in its thrall.

But why? That radio (or podcast) discussion gives a clue. It cited a peaceful demonstration (documented and filmed as peaceful), and the holders of the opposing view, shown the same footage, reported seeing broken windows and burning cars. Perhaps Putin believes his psychopathic misconceptions.

Amuse souris

I saw this recently. 

The source claimed it came from a 1920s ad. I'd prefer an actual publication date, but Tweet-consumers can't be choosers I do like "linguistry" though.

By the '50s, language learning had come on apache (excuse my spellchecker). My oldest brother, in the '50s, prepared for a trip to Spain with the help of records (perhaps an early LP, perhaps 78s in a real album) featuring an American voice that kept saying "Do not be embarrassed if you make errors." (I wonder how the user was supposed to know they had.)

Recording was the answer, and 20 years later, in a language lab on  the Sidgwick Site.... [HD: stay tuned]

That's all for today. Time for choir.

b

Update: 2022.10.16.17:30 – Added PS

PS: My "Recording was the answer" was somewhere bertween naive and over-optimistic. I've written elsewhere (not sure where) that acquiring a mother tongue involves suppressing the ability to distinguish between speech sounds that don't make a difference in that language. So the amount a learner of a second language can glean from a recording of their own voice is limited.

And that memory of the language lab at the Sidgwick site is not worth recalling (or recording).

I thought this was settled

The interminably tiresome issue of how to make "referendum" plural has reared its ugly head again, although  of late it had seemd fairly settled. Here's my 2016 view:

<pre-script source="here">
Addenda agenda corrigenda memoranda propaganda pudenda...

<inline-ps type="HD 2022"> 

All the examples might be thought  to justify an -enda ending for this plural, but they are all derived from a gerundive (an adjective – which can be pluralized) rather than from a gerund (a noun – which [vide infra] can't.)

<inline-pps> 

The nouns qualified by those adjectives are all "things/stuff/matters..." ["to be done/corrected/ remembered/propagated/ashamed of"].

</inline-pps>

<inline-ps>  

  

The time has come, unfortunately, for the pointless, annoying, never-ending discussion about the plural of THE R WORD.

Let's take as our starting point  The Speech of Cicero for Aulus Cluentius Habitus:

..[2022 précis:.in para 137 he's considering an issue on which the Senate is uncertain],
and uses the phrase "referendum ad populum"]

This referendum ad populum ["the putting of a question to the people"] was soon abridged to plain referendum; but the phrase shows that the word was, in Latin, a gerund. Now I'm not going to argue that English has to follow the rules of Latin. That ridiculous notion has long plagued studies of English. But to quote one distance learning site:

Forming the gerund: The gerund is formed much the same way... . All gerunds are considered neuter nouns and there is NO nominative case and NO plural form.

OK, there is no plural of referendum  in Latin; so how do we form it in English? There is little doubt about how plurals are formed in English. In most cases (and I wonder how to quantify that most – hmmm...

<further-musings>
This "hmm", as hmm's sometimes do, led to this post.
</further-musings> 

...) the rule is simple: add an s. Phonologically it's not quite that simple: dependent on what's being pluralized, you add either /s/ or /z/ or /i:z/ or /ɪz/. But there are quite a few exceptions: sheep/sheep, man/men, ox/oxen, basis/bases...

<pre-script>

The need to refer to referendum in the plural (the referendums-endum?)  has come to the fore of late because of Putin's shenanigans in eastern Ukraine – although in such cases the word should be something more like ForegoneConclusion-dum. And presumably the BBC's pronunciation unit (if such a thing still exists) has laid down the law: all BBC journalists (I thought until this Wednesday), and most of the people interviewed by the mainstream media (apart from a few ignorami...

<note type="for the irony-impaired">
Thie is a JOKE. It's not quite original, as I'm recycling my one contribution to the Today programme, about twenty years ago – something about "ignorami with hidden agendae".
</note>

But Razia Iqbal  (who presented The World Tonight on Wednesday) obviously didn't get the memo. So she confirmed the painful discovery I made back in 2016:

Argh indeed. Why does hypercorrectness have to  be considered "formal"? It's not formal, it's just WRONG.

Before I go, a bit of TV criticism. I've been watching the Beeb's Crossfire, but was singing during the last episode (so recorded it). I'm not sure I'll bother with it though. I mean it's quite suspenseful, and Keeley Hawes is good, but there's not much plot developmen to sustain a 3-hour mini-series. There's a love-triangle, but one corner of it died in the first hour and another corner died in  the second, leaving just our heroine running around a hotel dodging terrorists' bullets. Besides, there's no element of ctrossfire in it; there are just goodies and baddies.

Well, that's all she wrote.

b

Update: 2022.10.02.18:00 – Added <inline-ps />
Update: 2022.10.03.11:20 – Added <inline-pps />
Update: 2022.10.05.12:20 – Added PPS

PPS In my more manic moments I have floated an idea that neither would nor should fly. But it's interesting:

<reductio-ad-absurdum>
There are in principle four cases, each of which could have its own word:

• referendum (one of these things)
• referendums (two or more of these things)
• referenda (on the analogy of "agenda", a list of questions to be put to the people: to be clear, the usage would be "a referenda")
• referendas (two or more such lists)

Fortunately we don't live in a world where this could ever work.👺
</reductio-ad-absurdum>

Plus ça change...

 ...c'est la même shows.

I've said before

<pre-script post="this">
A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.
</pre-script>

This time, though, they were all sung by Wokingham Choral Society.  This poster gives the details:

We sang Ein Deutsches Requiem (we sang in German at the time, and we will be singing again in German, so I'm not sure why the poster gives the English) in 2011.

<tangent type="Elitist? So bite me.">
The choir had sung it previously (in English) three times, starting in 1970, and at roughly ten year intervals; so it's due for a reprise. I wonder if they sang the Novello translation, with its 'How lovely are all thy dwellings, Lord'. To me that ALL sticks out as strangely bathetic – the sort of thing you might say to an estate agent?

I know it's needed for a strict syllable-count (the original for 'are all your' is sind deine), but  what would be wrong with 'a-are'?

Fortunately (for me, at least) this time we'll be singing Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnüngen.
</tangent>

We haven't sung Brahms' Schicksalslied  in a concert, but it figures in the Past Concerts section of our website because it was programmed for a concert that was cancelled because of COVID (so we did rehearse it, on Zoom – not the whole choir, but as many as could tolerate Zoom's shortcomings).

As for the Purcell, we sang it in 2017 in an all-Purcell concert. But I had sung it before with my chapel choir in my first undergraduate year.

<autobiographical-note>
My college was, at the time (they've since seen the light) all male – the only concession to equality of the sexes was that ladies could dine at formal  hall (but only at high table, and I was present at the first occasion for that in September 1971...

<oh-yeah>
(And if any Oxbridge-savvy heckler protests that an undergraduate wouldn't have been there so early [Full Term doesn't usually start until early October], an  exception was made for people offering Modern and Medieval  Languages {don't ask😉} for Part I {I said don't ask😉}, as it was assumed that our oral proficiency would be better  after a year abroad rather than a year of lectures: so that the oral exams should happen before Full Term started.)
</oh-yeah>

...).
</autobiographical-note>

L'Envoi

Incidentally, I share Jon Sopel's bewilderment, expressed in this tweet:

I'm no republican, and in fact approve of pomp and ceremony. But in the last few days there has been a distinct lack of proportion in the public reaction to the death of a remarkable and wholly admirable lady – to whom our strangely appropriate concert will be dedicated.

b

Blowing hot and cold

 In  The Unfolding of Language.  Guy Deutscher asks "Have you ever wondered, for example, why in Italian caldo means not 'cold' but hot?" As it happens, yes. In this PP post (that's pre-pandemic – a usage I've borrowed from a recent suggestion to Newscast) I was writing about my time as an observer of language, and justified the early start in this note:

<autobiographical_note>
Really starting so young? Well yes. Before my tenth birthday, during a trip to Italy, I remember marvelling at the gratuitous mischievousness  of a language that marked a hot tap with a C.
</autobiographical_note>

Deutscher goes on to explain:

As it happens it is not the Italians who are to blame for this mismatch, but rather the English, who tum out to be of good Idlefordian stock [HD – the mythical town in Deutcher's fable is called 'Idleford']. Italian caldo and English hot both go back to similar roots that started with k- in the prehistoric ancestor language. Caldo ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European *kel 'warm', and English hot goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kai "burn'. But whereas the forebears of the Italians didn't alter the shape of their *kel too much, the ancestors of the English happily followed good effort-saving principles. As can be seen in the diagram below, the k of *kai was weakened to ch, and then further to h.  And since in many varieties of English, the h of hot has been dropped, so that only 'ot remains, it's clear that the Idlefordian principle has been followed to completion:

Changes due to economy of effort: k -> ch -> h -> <null>

 

<commentary justification="Don't blame Deutscher">
As Google Lens (the piece of magic that lets me read text) threw its hands up at the diagram, I've had to copy it. As I understand it, the ( ) in the Proto-Germanic line show a via stage in the process (with each change marking the progress k -> ch -> h - <null> (mirroring the changes spelt out in the fable, with characters saying improbable things like:

 'Life has much improved since we started raising the tongue only half-way [HD: to produce a ch instead of a k],.... But just think about it like this: wouldn't it be even easier if we didn't bother with the tongue at all? For if instead of raising it half-way up to produce a ch, we only slightly constrained the air in what is known in my profession [HD: the speaker is a doctor] as the "glottis", just a little further down the vocal tract, we would get the sound h instead. This sound is not so very different from ch, but takes so much less energy to produce, since we don't have to go to all the effort of moving that big and heavy tongue.'  

<voice_crying_in_the_wilderness complaint="Publishers, hmphh"> 

I'm sorry about this 'ch sound' business: what's to stop the reader thinking of chat or chemise or chiropractor, or .... It's /χ/, OK? I imagine the publishers told Deutscher he couldn't use a decent transcription method, and as it was his first book he had to go along with them. And by the time he wrote his second, the pass was already sold: ironically, the principle of economy of effort took over. 

</voice_crying_in_the_wilderness>

...). The asterisk is a philological convention; it marks an unattested form. And the bold letters are simply a way of highlighting the change being discussed

</commentary> 

 

Unstressed vowels

(new header, to reset the margins, so that phone-users don't get illegible indents}

In another PP post about assassins I wrote:

<prescript>
Here , relatively early in the life of this blog, I was writing about a spiral ring found in Pompeii,  with an inscription that included the word domnus (sic, no i).

... no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10...[HD: I over-estimated: the dedicatee, a maidservant, can't have had fingers as pudgy as I allowed for in my initial '10-15'] cm spiral ring, for one little I, or that this one-stroke character was too complex for an otherwise impeccable craftsman! No, people were dropping the unstressed I in speech; and this accounts for words like the Italian Donna and Spanish Doña when the  Latin was Domina . (I changed the sex of the lordly person, because in the masculine the attrition of an unstressed vowel has gone one step further in Spanish – Don [which dropped its unstressed vowel {HD 2019: that is, after dropping the unstressed i it dropped the unstressed u}].)

It would have been less contentious to cite the Portuguese donna, as in current Spanish the change has gone further, with the introduction of the ñ.

Anyway, the same happened to the unstressed a in cannabis (though in a different context, of course ...to produce the word "canvas" ....
</prescript>

Well, we've been netless for a few days, and I couldn't post this till now, so you're spared further thoughts for today.

b

Update: 2022.09.05.10:45 – Fixed several typos (some introduced by the aforementioned Google Lens [optical character recognition]); not so magical.

Paths of least resistance

Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass,  mentioned in several posts before, explores an extended metaphor about language development and the path of least resistance in language acquisition;  I hope to  cite it in an update, but for now you'll just have to take my word for it.

<inline_ps>
Readers of the past 500 posts on this blog may have come to the conclusion that this sort of faith is sometimes misplaced. I've had a good look, and think it must have been a different author – Steven Pinker maybe; but I've done a Prospero  on the relevant book (except that in his case Sue Ryder wasn't involved). So the source of this extended metaphor must remain a mystery.
</inline_ps> 

 <inline__pps>
Whoops – right author, wrong book (a better one, if I remember right): The Unfolding of Language. 

But I'm not sure that 'extended metaphor' does the passage justice. It is more of a fable, which seems to describe an unlikely tale called The Elders of Idleford: not so unlikely, as it turns out, since the very mechanism for language change that it describes, actually happened in English's treatment of 'hot'.  A future post will say more.
</inline_pps> 

In an early post  (nearly five years ago – a few months before the Brexit referendum, if you remember those halcyon days, when we had so much to look forward to) I discussed the way 'ain't' is so useful to learners of English as a Second Language (and to anyone acquiring the language):

<prescript> 

The fortunes of the word ain't provide a good example of the way language learners take the line of least resistance. Put yourself in the position of a European immigrant to America in the 18th or 19th century. The paradigm of the indicative of the verb be is not at all straightforward, especially in the negative:

• I am not, I'm not, [and not so long ago I amn't]
• You are not, You're not, You aren't
• He/she/it is not* (etc etc..., you get the idea)

How much easier than all these variants (with attendant phonological complications – for example, the vowel ['22 clarification: in the subject pronoun] does not  change between 'I'm not' and 'I am not', but it does change between 'You are not' and 'You're not' [but it's unchanged again in 'You aren't']) is the word ain't:

• I ain't
• You [sing.] ain't
• He/she/it ain't
• We ain't
• You [pl.] ain't
• They ain't

Language Nazis may deprecate this usage, but it certainly makes the language learner's life much simpler. 

</prescript> 

A similar (the mechanism is not the same – the motive is though) change happened with the phrase 'for aught I now'. This usage graph from the Collins online dictionary shows the decline of 'aught':

'Aught' has had mixed fortunes; it was big in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dwindled during the twentieth, and virtually disappeared in the twenty-first – living on, I suspect, among the few grey-hairs who insist on saying 'for aught I know' in preference to 'for all I know'.

<parenthesis subject="invitation to corpus gurus">
This conjecture could be tested, but I don't have the corpus nous to do it.  If you  know how, be my guest.
</parenthesis>

That phrase itself ('for aught I know' , rather than the version with 'all') is far from common: 11 is just over .01% of 817:

<apologia-pro-corpus-suo>

 

I've used COCA because the Collins online dictionary doesn't mention it in its 'British English' entries
but does under 'American English'

</apologia-pro-corpus-suo>

But that isn't the whole story. Though rarely outnumbering the 'all' version (only in the first half of the nineteenth century) , the 'aught' version was once a fairly significant competitor, as this historical query  shows:

But by the end of the century the 'all' version had a clear lead, and hasn't looked back since. Why?

There may be several reasons, but I suspect the path of least resistance in language acquisition...

<linguistese>
Excuse the $10 word. I've  inherited the linguists' opposition to the term learning for what is, outside the schoolroom, a simple process of picking up the system/rules (that's rules in the descriptive rather than prescriptive sense – the observable pattern of what's actually done, rather than a hodge-podge of prescriptions that some self-styled 'authority' lays down as a law).

</linguistese>

... had something to do with it. 

The Department of  Security's Yearbook of Immigration Statistic 2012  shows this pattern of immigration since 1820 (when 'for all I know' was unheard of): 

It's not difficult to imagine what was going on in the mind of the ESOL speaker: they hear a first-language  English speaker saying 'for aught I know'. The second syllable is a word they don't know (or think they may have misheard) starting with the vowel /ɔ:/, so when they reproduce the phrase they use the 'all' version. Contrast the upward trend in this graph with the downward trend in the usage graph for 'aught' over the same period (in a US cop show they'd superimpose them at the click of a mouse, but I shall just have rely on good old imagination).

Right; enough wild surmise for one day.

b

Update: 2022.08.23,14:20 – Added <inline_ps /> after first para.

Update: 2022.08.24,12:05 – Added <inline_pps /> after that.

Update: 2022.08.30,17:20 – Added link to that.

Update: 2022.10.29,17:00 – Added PPPS

PPPS

I've just spotted another example of this principle. On the news a few nights ago there was an interview with an Iranian woman who referred to a /'slægɔn/; from the context she obviously meant slogan, and I dismissed it at first as a one-off slip of the tongue. But she went on to use the same slip half a dozen times (if not more).

And I think I know why. There are not many English two-syllable words that use the form "-agon". I can think off the top of my head of only three - dragon, flagon (which an ESOL learner is unlikely to have met), and wagon. But they outnumber two-syllable words that use the form "-ogan"; I can think of only one, slogan - apart from  names like Hogan, Logan, and Wogan. One could cast the net wider and admit polysyllables such as agony, but that would open the door to counter-examples such as mahogany.

<tangent>
In The Masochism Tango Tom Lehrer rhymed those two words.

Your heart is hard as stone or mahogany,
That's why I'm in such exquisite agony 

Now where was I?
</tangent>

The reason for slogan's uniqueness is that it is, of course, a borrowing; and borrowings don't follow the phonological rules of more common words. Here's what Etymonline says:

slogan (n.)

1670s, earlier slogorne (1510s), "battle cry," from Gaelic sluagh-ghairm "battle cry used by Scottish Highland or Irish clans," from sluagh "army, host, slew," from Celtic and Balto-Slavic *slough- "help, service." Second element is gairm "a cry" (see garrulous). Metaphoric sense of "distinctive word or phrase used by a political or other group" is first attested 1704.

A language-learner looks for patterns; and maybe there was an area in this Iranian speaker's brain that housed the group dragon, slagon, and wagon.

Afterthought: it's an interesting coincidence (to me, at least) that the formation of the porte-manteau word "slogan" took place on the field of battle. To most Westerners...

<inline-p⁴s> 

(that is, speakers of British English, American English, and second-language English speakers who know the word)            

</inline-p⁴s>

... I imagine, the word has more associations with advertising; its use in the Iran riots is truer to its origins.

Update: 2022.10.30.12:30 – Added <inline-p⁴s />