Summery (sic)

The other morning (well last week, probably, given that I have a concert on Saturday) Radio 3 celebrated the summer solstice with lots of appropriate music. One of the pieces chosen though provoked these tweets:

This was an idea I had written about while my choir was meeting over Zoom two years ago and we sang this:

Manuscript from Reading Abbey, but probably produced in Oxford.
(see David Crystal, The Stories of English [2005], p. 108)

At the time I wrote:

But why Sumer? Isn't it the wrong bird? The cuckoo arrives in Britain in April. Crystal gives the answer:

There was no contradiction, because in Middle English sumer was the only word available to describe the period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The word spring to refer to the season is not recorded in English until the mid-sixteenth century.  

The Stories of English

In this case there was a delay of well over two centuries between the two similar-sounding words (the medieval Reading/Oxford sumer and the mid-sixteenth century [and later] 'summer'). But this clash of similar-sounding words put me in mind of another word that no longer means what it meant when first applied: red  as in 'red kite', 'red squirrel', 'red deer', 'redhead',  'robin redbreast' .... Like 'sumer', 'red' once had a wider meaning than we attach to it now....

<autobiographical_note>
My  middle sister (of three), a redhead, always hated my grandfather's nickname for her: 'Rusty'. In fact it was a source of great friction at the time, and I'm taking a bit of a risk reminding her.  It seemed to me at the time that rusty was a more accurate description of the colour than red.

<wimbledon-related-aside> 

The hawk used at Wimbledon to keep pigeons away is called Rufus. I imagine the 'Ru-', like the 'ru-' of Rusty, refers to the colour (although the hawk in question may not be so coloured – the name when coined would originally have been applied [I guess] to a redhead). 

<background-reading> 

For more on this 'ru-' thing, see this:

... from a PIE root *reudh- "red, ruddy," the only color for which a definite common PIE root word has been found. It also is the root of native ruddy, rust, and, via Latin, ruby, rubric, russet, etc.

 </background-reading> 

</wimbledon-related-aside>

</autobiographical_note>

...

And the gap between the two usages of 'red' was much less than the two or three hundred years that separated 'sumer' and 'summer'. Etymonline dates 'red' to the mid-thirteenth century, and (of course) compounds came later....

<example>

 

</example> 

So the European robin was dubbed 'redbreast', although his breast was not particularly red:

Erithacus rubecula

there was no word for the colour of its breast in English at the time, until the recently imported orange provided (in the early 16th century, says Etymonline) a colour word that meant  

"a reddish-yellow color like that of a ripe orange."

 

 So there was an explanation for the mischromaticization (don't bother looking that up ; it's hot off the presses) of the European  Robin. There's no such explanation for that of the American Robin, a totally different bird, named at a time when the word 'orange' had long been available:

Turdus migratorius
(a rather blue-collar fellow, 
it seems to me)

 

But American English is full of mystery for me. For example, the 'sycamore tree' in the song isn't a sycamore (acer pseudoplatanus); it's an American Plane (platanus occidentalis)...

Anyway, I'm missing the tennis. So that's it for today.

b

Old technology revisited

I often write about the way metaphors come into use because a new technology or scientific discovery makes a new figure of speech possible, but then persist long after the technology has been superseded. We spool back or or rewind or fast-forward or cut to the chase in a story because spools and tape and scalpels and sticky-tape were once involved in recording and editing. A bowler's delivery is ram-rod straight even though muzzle-loading rifles ...

<parenthesis>
(or should I say 'long-barreled firearms?', as the earliest muzzle-loaded guns had no rifling – the spiral grooves that increase range and accuracy; maybe they also keep the barrel cooler...? – what I don't know on this subject could hardly be more extensive)
<parenthesis>

...are a thing of the past. I've written before about a flash in the pan, a metaphor that's still going strong, although it refers to long-gone firearms:

Flash in the pan – in a flint-lock, the trigger sparked off an explosion in a pan which itself set off the main explosion. Sometimes there was a flash in the pan, but the main charge was unaffected.
Source

My attention, though, was caught this week by something else entirely, although it involves a word that – incidentally – does this metaphorical freeze-frame trick: the word is 'charabanc'. A char in French is some sort of wheeled vehicle – a hay-cart ...

<parenthesis>
('cart' and char are related, of course, as are Carolus and 'Charles', and many more c/ch pairs)
</parenthesis>

... or a carnival float, or even (in a military context) a tank. But when the cart was to be used for carrying large numbers of people, it was fitted with benches – a char à bancs.

For a few years after horse-drawn vehicles had given way to the combustion engine the word 'charabanc' was used to mean a motor-coach. But then it started to go out of use, and became to all intents and purposes extinct. This graph from Collins shows the decline:

But that 'to all intents and purposes' was (as so often... 

<autobiographical-note>

(I'm reminded of a lesson I used to give to my advanced ESOL students about 'dead wood' – essentially meaning-free phrases that bulk a text out but don't contribute to [and sometimes diminish] the structural soundness; what they do diminish is comprehensibility [so do big words like that].) 
</autobiographical-note>

...) ill-chosen. Words don't always ...

<hmm>

 (ever??? Discuss) 
</hmm>

...become extinct. If you're that way inclined, and don't share my pathological hatred of pay-walls, you might want to read Old words don’t die, they just wait to be rescued. And this is where 'charabanc' came to my notice. It was in a recent edition of Newscast (don't ask me which; probably June 13 or 14) and someone was talking about the damage Covid had done to the transport system – planes, buses, cars, trains...'the whole charabanc'. 

At first I thought I must have misheard; then, given the speaker's background, I supposed that 'charabanc' must be a word he had met, and he had made a slip of the tongue – with 'charabanc' slipping unnoticed into the slot "/ʃ/<something>/bæŋ/" – especially easy since 'shebang' (the more common occupant of the phrase 'the whole ~') is marked by dictionaries with a despairing Origin unknown. 

But that 'more common' doesn't mean 'right'. For me (your search parameters may vary) a Google search of 'the whole shebang' yields About 2,620,000 results. On the other hand, 'the whole charabanc' yields About 1,170,000 results. So the less common version isn't knocked into a cocked hat; it's certainly more than the slip of the tongue that I at first suspected. 

But I should be learning my notes in preparation for the Bach on Saturday week. Bye for now. 

b

Update 2022.07.21.17:10 – Added PS/footnote

^PS Another of these technological fossils, relating to analogue recording but living on in a digital age is footage. A journalist will say things 'Have you seen the footage?' although no linear recording medium (film) is involved.

Solastalgia

This week, after the World at One on Radio 4, there is a series about climatic tipping points (not climactic ones, which would be a bit extreme: The Climate Tipping Points). And at the end of the first episode it alerted me to a new word...

<parenthesis>
(new both to me that is, and to traditionally published dictionaries,  although Onelook does find three online ones. And if anyone bothers to publish hardcopy dictionaries in a few years' time it may find its way into one; I doubt it though. 

The etymology given by a site called Word Spy suggests that it has two roots: solacium and -algia: 

Word Spy's definition

But this simply repeats (and over-simplifies) the explanation by the man who coined the word in a 2005 paper. If the roots are just solacium and -algia, then where does the st come from? Professor Albrecht, in that paper, cited the influences of both nostalgia and desolation – which, come to think of it, has a pleasing (if linguistically irrelevant) suggestion of land being stripped of topsoil (solum being Latin for – inter alia – soil).

</parenthesis>

This extract from the paper gives an idea of the thinking behind the word:

That mini-series (and also podcast) on Radio 4 gives pause for thought. Tuesday's Newscast had an interview with "Climate Change Correspondent" (who  knew there was one?) Justin Rowlatt (who wrote, researched and presents that podcast) talking about, among other things, the future of coastal communities. And he quoted a US climatologist called Ben Strauss, CEO of Climaestionte Central, (a US research organization) characterizing our legacy to future generations as "a necklace of ruins around the coasts of the world". And to finish the interview Adam Fleming invited him (by way of an 'And finally...') to name a song or songs that would sum up the situation. The one that sprang immediately to my mind was Brenda Lee's I'm sorry....

Another podcast that I've been following is The Climate Question (originally a series on the World Service, The latest had the dispiriting (not to say ominous and threatening) title Is destroying the planet a vote winner?

But what is more important for my state of mind is the need for biomass reduction in the garden (specifically, mowing the lawn).

b 

PS the "Ten Green Bottles Principle" revisited:

On Breakfast this morning they played a Gaelic setting of Psalm 46, "God is our refuge and our strength", which sounded pretty unusual to my Western European sassenach ears. But the tune (if that's the word) was strangely reminiscent of the usual tune given to Amazing Grace, supplied by the American composer William Walker. I wonder whether there was any conscious borrowing, or if this is just another instance of the "Ten Green Bottles Principle", explained here:

...words spoken by an MD of my youthful acquaintance: 'There has only been one tune written in the history of the world - "Ten Green Bottles".' (This may not be original, but I had never heard it before).