The Cuckoo, John Duarte, and sympathetic magic

I recently enjoyed a guitar recital given by my guitar teacher...

<parenthesis>
(now in the past, but you can still contribute to the DEC fund for Ukraine at his JustGiving page, and keep an eye out for future concerts...

<forthcoming proviso="at time of going to press">

• Wednesday 8 June, 2pm  Windsor u3a* : Spanish Guitar lecture recital
• Tuesday 5 July, 2pm Woodstock u3a* : Spanish Guitar lecture recital
  
• Saturday 1 October, 7:30pm,  English Guitar Orchestra. Witney, Oxford

*Editorial note: This style isn't the same as at Gary's diary page, but one of the more exciting and controversial changes in the u3a recently is the change from "U3A".

</forthcoming>

...)
</parenthesis>

 And the programme included John Duarte's English Suite, part of which is based on the folk song The Cuckoo, which

sucketh white flowers for to keep her voice clear

As the words went through my head, I wondered (for the first time in my thitherto unquestioning life) "Why white flowers?"

But the answer came to me almost as soon as the question formed: sympathetic magic. Like the mandrake root, shaped – if you screw your eyes up...

<du-côte-de-chez-Wikipedia>
Because mandrakes contain deliriant hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids and the shape of their roots often resembles human figures, they have been associated with magic rituals throughout history...

Source
</du-côte-de-chez-Wikipedia>

...– a bit like a homunculus, and so endowed with magical powers (and I think the little hallucinogens know something about it, as the narrator of Bill and Ben might have said), there is a sympathetic resonance between the whiteness of the flowers and the clarity of the voice – not that the cuckoo's call is particularly clear (although I suppose there's something to be said for the clarity of that falling minor third, repeated ad nauseam).

<bugbear>
That's nauseAM please. The phrase ad infinitum isn't a licence to mangle case endings. If I had a hot dinner for every time I've  heard ad nauseum I'd be a rich man.
</bugbear>

So much for cuckoos. Where was I? Answers, please, on a postcard.

 

L'Envoi

While we're on the subject of guitars, my Metaphor of the Month is cejilla. You may have come across the more common "capo" (short, I think, for "capo d'astro"...

<speculation>
Did guitarists borrow the term from piano-makers, for whom it is

Part of the cast-iron frame, the bar that presses down on the treble strings and defines the speaking length of the strings on the tuning pin side. 

Source

I wonder?
</speculation>

...) The capo is the little doofer that is clamped in some way to the neck of the guitar with the effect of shortening the string and so raising the pitch; and I said it was "more common" because Google finds nearly 2 billion instances of it ("About 1,940,000,000 results" for me): whereas cejilla yields a paltry million ("About 1,080,000 results ").

What qualifies it for Metaphor of the Month though is that the Spanish ceja means "eyebrow", so a cejilla is a little eyebrow – a charming image.

That's all she wrote.

b