A recent Start The Week had Marwa Al-Sabouni, Jo da Silva and Jessie Childs discussing rebuilding shattered cities, with Helen Lewis. All three guests had very different backgrounds involving (but not exclusively, particularly in the case of Jo da Silva, Director of International Development at Arup Group) sieges.
Marwa Al-Sabouni, an architect, was a survivor of the siege of Homs,
... a military confrontation between the Syrian military and the Syrian opposition in the city of Homs, a major rebel stronghold during the Syrian Civil War. The siege lasted three years from May 2011 to May 2014, and resulted in an opposition withdrawal from the city.[4]
For Dame Jo da Silva, siege is only one of the sorts of disaster she deals with; tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and so on vie for her attention along with the more man-made disasters seen at Aleppo, Stalingrad, Dubrovnik, Homs, Mariupol... the list is depressingly endless.
Jessie Childs provided a historical flavour to the discussion. She is the author of the forthcoming (if you're reading this before 19 May 2022) The Siege of Loyalty House: A new history of the English Civil War, which, despite its all-encompassing sub-title, centres on The Siege of Basing House
<parenthesis>
(a few miles from Knowles Towers as the cr... [no, make that] red kite flies)
<autobiographical-note>.
(making for an irrelevant coincidence, as the presenter of that program grew up only a few miles from the starting point of Jessie Childs' story, Fort Royal)
</autobiographical-note>.
</parenthesis>. In her treatment of the siege at Basing House, Jessie Childs says
...the Parliamentary forces literally [HD – sic, an admirably accurate usage] sat down in front of it: that's where the word "siege" comes from – sedere,"to sit down" ...
...which won't be news to readers of my 2016 post:
<pre-script>
Now though I can hear the word Aleppo without that irrelevant memory popping its irreverent head over the PC parapet.
<post-script>
I've left this in because of the coincidental mention of Aleppo. If you want to know about the 'irrelevant memory', you know what to do.
<post-script>
Now it's the word siege. that distracts me momentarily from the horror.
I discussed chairs a while back, here, but said nothing about siege at the time. In Mallory's Morte d'Arthur the vacant seat at the Round Table was the siege perilous, and this was the earliest meaning: a chair. Etymonline says
Only then does the entry go on:
...The military sense is attested from c. 1300; the notion is of an army "sitting down" before a fortress.That is to say, siege had been around for about a century with the meaning chair before it acquired its military sense. Sadly (considering the fate of the besieged) the military sense became the predominant one
But that "Vulgar Latin *sedicum" (and its more reputable Latin relatives) left many other traces, from courts in session to recording studios (with session musicians); in a less formal musical environment, a guest musician may sit in (and of course they don't just sit). In Portuguese, where Spanish has catedral (which Portuguese [Continental Portuguese, that is; to call my grasp of Brazilian Portuguese rudimentary would be a gross overestimate] can also use, having many such pairs*...
<repositioned-footnote>
*Eça de Queiroz is notable for using such pairs: a bottle, for example, is sometimes uma botelha and sometimes uma garrafa.for example.</repositioned-footnote>
...), the word is sé (in Coimbra, in the summer of 1973 I used to catch the eléctrico at a stop called Sé Velha). The Holy See is a Santa Sé.
</pre-script>
<tangent type="dead-end, I don't know why he bothers">
Thinking about sieges, it occurred to me that the almost homophonous Catalan coastal town of Sitges...<autobiographical-parenthesis>
(where I enjoyed lunch as the guest of a diamond geezer called Reg, when I was down and out in Barcelona in the spring of 1971, before an ignominious, and fairly disturbing, arrest detailed here [in the 2nd paragraph of that post]); and in the mouth of Reg (a cockney) 'Sitges' was a precise homophone of 'sieges.'
</autobiographical-parenthesis>...had any military associations. But no. It turns out that
The meaning of the name Sitges (“sitja” in Catalan), comes from silos, deep pits in the ground used for grain storage and suggests this could have been an area where these underground silos were frequent.Read more here.
</tangent>
Time for tea.
b
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