I must not

Last Saturday's copy of The Times had a piece about a recent find in Egypt, which showed that the practise of giving recalcitrant children a repetitive writing task was more than 2,000 years old.

<doubt gravity="slight">

The Bart Simpson reference is to an earlier illustration

(at least, that's what the writer thought; I feel the example shown could have just as easily been interpreted as the repetitive efforts of someone learning to write... 

<autobiographical_note> 

I remember, in one of the three or four times when I was learning to write [for reasons best known to a series of English teachers, who all failed to get me to write legibly], filling pages with a single letter [or part of a letter] 

</autobiographical_note>  

Possibly, though, other examples, not shown, offer more persuasive evidence – the hieratic equivalent, perhaps, of "I must not waste papyrus.". 

</doubt>

Writing on potsherds seems to me an inappropriately fiddly operation; still, that seems to be what they did. The potsherds were called ostrakoi, which on first reading I thought ...

<autobiographical_note>
(because of yet another piece of misinformation force-fed to me by my Greek master, who said that the word "ostracize" came from the Athenian practise of writing the name of a miscreant on an oyster shell and casting it outside the city walls)

<tangent>
Paul Simon got it right: 

When I think back on all the cr@p I learned in highschool

It's a wonder I can think at all.

</tangent>

I can only apologize for my passing on this misapprehension in this post (and to the dozens of ESOL students I've told – with any luck, they weren't listening.)  

</autobiographical_note>

...must be a metaphorical reference to oyster shells. But the metaphor had already been coined (in Egypt, if not before) when the Athenians used it.

L'envoi

I was going to resurrect the old TEZZY awards ('Time-wasting site of the year') when I saw this tweet:

But after a bit of digging I found that it doesn't qualify, as there's no website – just this document. So my dream of poking about among hundreds of pointless comparison charts was just a dream. Still, it deserves recognition with a special award: The not-a-website-really THING of the year?

<inline_PPPS>

STOP PRESS: That TEZZY is kosher. There is a website – the test that formed the basis for the paper. This throws up many more questions about the charts. The sample size is entirely self-selecting (you need a networked computer to participate, for a start). I suspected, as the spelling is American ...

<example> 

I must live in the ignominy of not having recognized "fetor"; I'd've had a chance with 'foetor'. Oh well that's just a cross I'll have to bear.
</example>

... that it came from the US somewhere, or maybe Canada; but it is in fact the work of the University of Ghent (where, of course, they speak American English). It would be interesting to know where respondents came from. (they probably say somewhere: For Further Study). 

My first throw of the dice (you can take the test as many times as you like, and be tested on a different selection of words (and "nonwords") yielded a score of 84%; 84%, in a test based on a total of  61,858 words; gosh, what an intellect! But hang on: estimates of the size of the English lexicon differ widely, but I remember David Crystal, in a talk sponsored by the British Council a few years ago, suggesting that well over a million words was not an over-estimate. So a test based on a lexicon orders of magnitude smaller doesn't cut much ice. It's fun though.
</inline_PPPS>

The "Mars versus Venus" chart is interesting (if predictable – in a "Sugar and spice and all things nice" world, is it surprising that little girls grow up knowing words like tulle, chignon, chenille, ruche, damask, taffeta, sateen. voile...?):

Indeed, it would be surprising if the word prevalences failed to reflect social biases (the paper probably says as much – and I'd pick out a quotation, if I didn't have a guitar lesson to prepare for).

b

PS One of the pink words is "kohl" which reminds me: I must do an update on the word "alcohol". Stay tuned...

Update: 2022.02.15.16:40 – Added PPS

PPS 

When I wrote that I remembered filling whole pages with a single character, I didn't mean to imply that I never did the other sort of repetitive writing; I am a veteran of lines-writing, having started my career before I could do joined-up writing.

<autobiographical_note>
I rtemember the fact of not doing joined writing, because there were four children involved – my older brother being away in Aldershot (National Service), and my little sister being too young to be

 

a destructive hooligan who wrecks the house and paintwork

The number of lines we had to write depended on age; I had to do only ten.
</autobiographical_note>

Update: 2022.02.16.16:05 – Added <inline_PPPS />

Update: 2022.02.22.12:50 [I decided not to style it out, and wait  22:22 to post] – Added P⁴S

That planned update turned into a new post.