What's in a name?

The answer, of course, is Intellectual Property Rights ("IPR" to friends), though Shakespeare didn't know that when he was writing Romeo and Juliet; so naïve; well, they were in those days.

When I started this blog – which is coming up to its tenth birthday, having started in  October 2012 – it was a source of some (admittedly pointless) satisfaction that in a Google search of Harmless Drudgery it came first in the list of results. It still does.

But if you search for Harmless (tout sec [that's French for that, no just that, ONE word for Pete's sake, give me strength] the top of the list is  a blog with the same title by Kory Stamper, author of Word by Word. And when I first noticed this I suspected some fancy SEO jiggery-pokery. Search Engine Optimization is a dark art that let's you steal a march on other less savvy web sites. I thought momentarily ...

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(and I use that word in its relatively meaningful sense,  rather than  the execrable "in [not for] a moment" sense, which I fear will ultimately displace it; but over my dead body – a small delay which I imagine will be acceptable to the linguistic gods)
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... that some arriviste (French for "carpet-bagger) had employed an SEO wonk to deprive me of my rightful primacy, Google-wise.

But there's nothing new under the sun. Another writer wrote a blog with the same title in 2007 (Lexicoblog); it seems that "Harmless Drudgery" is low-hanging fruit when it comes to naming a blog about language. What would Dr Johnson have thought (not that he could have)? Besides, my blog isn't exclusively about language; it was originally named to refer to work I was doing at the time. A lot of it is about language, but I think other bloggers have as much right to the name as I do, if not more.

But the topic of intellectual property cropped up in a recent edition of Past Forward which took as its point de départ (French for fons et origo) a recording of one of Cecil Sharp's main contributors to Folk Songs From Somerset: Gathered And Edited With Pianoforte Accompaniment, singing a song that one contributor regarded as paving the way not only for Vaughan Williams and Elgar  (sorry – no time to find the exact quote) but also the folk revival; (she mentioned Joan Baez and Bob Dylan (many of whose sources were English – though in that context I'd have mentioned English singers, like Martin Carthy, Bert Lloyd and Ewan McColl).

Cecil Sharp collected folk songs that had almost died out since the Industrial Revolution, arranged them for piano and had them sung in schools (in the days when cultural enrichment was still allowed in schools, before the National Curriculum put paid to all that nonsense), I was at school during those folk-singing years. I mentioned this a while ago here (in the context of the carol Joys Seven, which uses the same tune as The Lincolnshire Poacher):

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That's something they don't seem  to do in  Primary Schools any more  – communal singing of  what were known as "Folk Songs" before the Revival of  the late '50s–early '60s.. I remember at St Gregory's RC Primary School singing with gusto

When me and my companions were
    setting of a snare
'Twas then we spied a gamekeeper
For him we did not care
For we can wrestle and fight,
    me boys,
And jump o'er anywhere...

A one-time colleague of mine, who already played the piano and the violin, during her teacher-training was required to learn the guitar so that she could maintain eye-contact with her pupils. As a consequence of this sort of thinking, today's schoolchildren can sing Kumbaya but not Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill.
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I always thought that Cecil Sharp was an unmitigated Good Thing. But that programme opened my eyes to the Dark Side of what he did: gentrification of working class music, doing nice little arrangements suitable for the parlours of the bourgeoisie, copyrighted it and monetized it. And did the contributors get a royalty? Of course not. But the singer of the song that started so much got a concertina and a copy of the book (with the unintentionally ironic inscription Exchange is no robbery).

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Who was  it who said 'There's nothing so easy as stealing a culture from people who don't  know they've got one'?
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 There's more to be said, but not now; I'm off to the frozen north.

b