The uneven playing field

A lot of ink has recently been spilled on a story that makes extravagant claims such as this:
There’s Never Been a Crash Test Dummy Modeled After a Woman—Until Now
As Boot might have said in  Scoop, "Up to a point".

What is true is that until now, crash-test dummmies designed to simulate women have been based on the original male ones, and besides there was no requirement for them to be taken into account. A less breathless and more measured account of the creation of the new dummy is given in Popular Science,  

It had been a long time coming. As the WI's Female Crash Test Dummies says

Female crash test dummies do exist but they are not mandated to be used in most tests. A pregnant crash-test dummy was created in 1996 but testing with it is still not government mandated either in the US or in the EU.

Women will not be surprised at this framing of the rules without reference to them (to put it at its least selfish; some people have suggested that it's a conspiracy by men to tilt the rules against anyone who isn't a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.) 

Another area where standards favour (or at least fail to consider) women is office temperature. A 2021 article in Nature found that

[O]ffice temperatures are less comfortable for women largely due to overcooling. Survey responses show that uncomfortable temperatures are more likely to be cold than hot regardless of season. Crowdsourced data suggests that overcooling is a common problem in warm weather in offices across the US. The associated impacts of this pervasive overcooling on well-being and performance are borne predominantly by women. The problem is likely to increase in the future due to growing demand for cooling in increasingly extreme climates. There is a need to rethink the approach to air-conditioning office buildings in light of this gender inequity caused by overcooling.

And this is ironic in the light...

<tangent subject ="stick-in-the-mud, moi?">

And, unlike whoever wrote that Nature article, I still care about which light I'm talking about.
<tangent>

... of a study which found that 

Women's brains work better in warmer offices

.

But male designers of the world aren't content with just ignoring the needs of just over half of the world's population. They also arrange some things to favour women, who are, on average, not as tall as men. Those things are, of course, the things that men don't want to do. Building regulations, or at least standard design (I don't intend to search the actual "Regs") dictate a height for kitchen worktops that suits the shorter worker.

<autobiographical-note>
In the summer of 1970 I did a holiday job on a recently completed Northwick Park Hospital. Sub-contractors had increased costs they were charging, the client had baulked at the new payments and had asked the subcontractors to economize. So there was one lot of estimates and a new set of accounts. This provided opportunities for fraud, and it was thought that a bunch of school kids would be less likely than forensic accountants (less likely, and cheaper) to have the wool pulled over their eyes. One of the economies was that a low-maintenance  [but costly] floor-covering was replaced by a cheaper alternative.

In the summer of 1971, for only a day or two, I did a job at the same hospital, now open. That cheaper floor-covering had to be polished every day with big Columbus Dixon machines, which seemed (to me) to have a will of their own. Which way they moved (right or left; forwards was down to the operator) was controlled by the angle of the handle. And the sweet spot (where left became right) was well below my waist. The foreman, a good foot less tall than me, couldn't understand my problem. He kept demonstrating how easy it was. But I jacked it in. Curvature of the spine.
</autobiographical-note>

But last week, alerted by Pick of the Week, I discovered a conversation with Holly Smale about her autism. It spent years undiagnosed and misdiagnosed partly because of the belief that "The typical autistic person is a boy". No. The typical autistic person DIAGNOSED IN CHILDHOOD is a boy. A girl with autism behaves just as obsessively, but nobody notices because girls should be seen and not heard. Listen to her; I recommend it. I particularly like the duck/frog bit at the end, where she talks about spending her first 39 years being told she's "a shit duck" only to find out that actually she's a frog.

Word watch

I've just spotted a new meaning of the verb "drop". Since embracing the world of podcasts I have come to recognize the intransitive use, when applied to a podcast, meaning become available/be listed by podcast providers You can't listen to a podcast until it drops...

<sideswipe>
By the way, it isn't then "downloaded to your phone", pace Chris Mason's lamentable Newscast outro. The app on your  phone just gets to know about it, so that you can download it if you're interested. This isn't  by any means the worst thing about that outro. (For the full rant see here.)  Just saying...
 </sideswipe>

...But earlier this week, on Newscast, as it happens, I was surprised (and momentarily misled) by a related, but transitive, use. Adam Fleming said "Netflix has dropped The Crown." Initially  I interpreted  this as analogous to "The BBC has dropped Bake Off". But I soon realized that it meant something quite different: If you have a Netflix subscription, The Crown has become available to stream – and that's another word that of late has been behaving differently.

And finally

There is an ongoing discussion in Rose Wild's Feedback column in last Saturday's The Times about using a preposition to end a sentence with. The latest  contribution is a letter from someone who decries 

...teachers and pupils who couldn't be bothered to learn or teach the finer points of English use correctly (sic).

 Rose Wild signs off (justly) unrepentantly saying 

...my point stands. There is nothing incorrect about a preposition at the end of a sentence.

OK.  But methinks Ms Wild doth not protest enough.  The correspondent is a pompous windbag, who no doubt blighted the English lessons of generations of young sufferers. Not everyone who believes in  this shibboleth is a pompous windbag; some of them, presumably, suffered this sort of teacher. But they are all wrong, and they are all misinformed

Time I did something useful; oh no, it's lunchtime.

b

Hot and cold and head and chief

Having just updated a fairly recent post about about paths of least resistamce, and specifically what make English "cold" and Italian caldo share an initial (if you want to know why, and what it has to do with paths of least resistance, read that post), I've been thinking more about words that have these two initials.

A few years ago I was writing about other words in Romance languages that share the initial c (as it happens, I was thinking about words that mean "head" and listed only capo, cabo, cabeza, cabeça. But I had the sense to follow the list with an ellipsis – there must be dozens more, including chef ...

<exception>
French took a different path to arrive at a word for "head" – for that read on – but a head in the metaphorical sense still has an initial c, as does the English "chief" 

<inline-ps> 

I should have said yesterday that in France the Vulgar Latin C became ch before certain vowels, so, for example, Carolus became Charles. (More than    "before certain vowels" I wouldn't like to say, as I studiously [interesting use of "studiously"] avoided the minefield that is French phonology.)

</inline-ps> 

</exception>

...). The Latin root for all these was caput, which derived, largely unchanged, from a supposed PIE root, *kaput.

Meanwhile, in Germanic languages the preferred initial for such words is h: here's what Etymonline has for "head":

The reason for this (Germanic h initials but Romance c) is the same as (or similar to) the hot vs caldo issue I was writing about here.

But 'What about tête?', I hear from the cheap seats. I said I was coming to that. It is based on a metaphor, dating from the pre-veni, vidi, vici days in Gaul. Back in 2013 I was recounting (here) a visit to a museum in Plymouth; 

<pre-script>
... Plymouth was noted for being a Roundhead stronghold during the English Civil War – and that name for the Puritans' soldiers, was coined with reference to their headgear (I prefer the soldiers' helmet theory to the pudding-basin haircut theory expounded – very briefly – here).

The Roundhead soldiers were by no means the first fighting force to be given a nickname based on what their heads looked like. When Roman soldiers occupied Gaul the locals thought that their helmets looked like cooking pots (Vulgar Latin TESTA(M)). Among all the Romance-language names for head (capo, cabo, cabeza, cabeça ...) where does the French tête come from? Well, here's a hint; the circumflex in French is often a vestige of an s.
<pre-script>

Back then, with a fairly recent history as a language teacher, I left the rest as an Exercise; but now I'll spell it out: tête is derived from that TESTA(M).

But nothing in language development is ever simple: English has both "head and "chief"; German has both haupt and kopf...

<parenthesis>
(it's not that easy, as kopf is not derived from the PIE *kaput; see here if you want the whole story, which rather spoils the neat h/k point.)
</parenthesis>

Most languages have more than one word for one idea, and each of the words has its own etymological path. Moreover, sometimes those paths cross.

Which brings me to "kaput", an international word meaning dead/hors de combat/finished... (a word that springs to mind because my Tai Chi teacher, a Czech (speaking English, although there have been some polyglot Zoom classes, with students from Czechia), used it last week (and I use it, written on the  container I use for one of my two laptop batteries: when it is flat, it goes in the bag marked KAPUT)

My first thought involved assassination; I thought that if you wanted to kill someone you would choose a head-shot. A person was kaput if they had been the victim of a head-shot. But the truth was much more interesting (and much less violent). Etymonline again:

kaput (adj.)

"finished, worn out, dead," 1895 as a German word in English, from German kaputt "destroyed, ruined, lost" (1640s), which in this sense probably is a misunderstanding of an expression from card-playing, capot machen, a partial translation into German of French faire capot, a phrase which meant "to win all the tricks (from the other player) in piquet," an obsolete card game.

The French phrase means "to make a bonnet," and perhaps the notion is throwing a hood over the other player, but faire capot also meant in French marine jargon "to overset in a squall when under sail."...

                                                                                               

<tangents>

1. 'throwing a hood over the other player' is not unlike 'pulling the wool over their eyes'. Hmm, wonder where that comes from... 
2. So kaput shares with "in the lurch" the distinction of being derived from a metaphor based on an obscure card game: kaput from faire capot, and "in the lurch" from en lourche.

<meta-tangent>
Thr Internet seems to be convinced that en lourche means "comprehensively beaten", and that the game it comes from is "obscure". but in an update to this post I questioned this: "The game is not so much not known about as not documented  – at least, not in English. Historians of French board games know perfectly well  how to put someone en lourche." And it doesn't necessarily imply a comprehensive defeat, although it often leads to one.
<meta-tangent>

</tangents>

Hmm. That's enough navel-gazing for now. Interesting though. And in an update I'll have to write about Grimm's Law (which underlies the h/k thing). 

b

Update: 2022.11.02.15:05 – Added <inline-ps />