Clash of the bakewell tarts

 You'll have to excuse that subject line; it occurred to me as a possible caption for the 'artist's impression' used by the BBC to illustrate...

<hmm>
(a flamboyantly inappropriate image, come to think of it, in the case of jousting black holes; on what is light being thrown ?)
</hmm>

... a cosmic event earlier today (the  newscast silly, not the cosmic event, which happened really quite a long time ago):

In a galaxy far far away, well two actually

Meanwhile down here in Harmless-Drudgery land, something cataclysmic (though not quite on the same scale) is afoot. In the early days of what I think of as 'the June Event' (a slight misnomer as it started in the dying days of May) I reported in updates to this post on a sudden resurgence in interest in the blog. As the end of June approaches I can say that those early comments didn't do justice to the enormOUSNESS (you 'eard; there is a special place in Hell reserved for abusers of enormi... (oops, is my closet prescriptivism showing? I blame my English teacher.)

June saw a blip in visits to HD that didn't just match the previous year's total, as shown here:

But since the blog's first days at the end of 2012, and even in comparison with the glory days of 2016-19 (when the blog deserved its name as I was doing wordy work), June seems to have been much busier (about twice as busy as the busiest, at the turn of 2016-17).

This is strange. 20-odd years of IT-related work has led me to suspect that something has changed in the way the data is collected and/or recorded (rather than any change in the quality or popularity of the writing). I'll keep an eye on it.

L'envoi

And while we're on the subject (of irrelevant and unrelated observations) I was recently reminded of my feeling (before I hung up my cycle clips) of quiet rage at this ubiquitous sign on the backs of lorries:
 

Grr. 😠😠😠
Subtext: 'If you get crippled,
you deserve it, thicko'

'Beware' doesn't work like that. You beware of a dangerous thing (a dog, say). There is danger when a cyclist overtakes on the inside of a left-turning vehicle, but the thing that does the damage is the vehicle. So the heart of the designer of this notice is in the right place; I wouldn't say the same for the hearts of the thousands of users who use it to assuage a guilty conscience: 'not my problem, mate'

But there's cricket to watch.

b

PS Listening to Chris Van Tulleken on last week's Infinite Monkey Cage on the subject of Ultra-Processed Food ...

<side-swipe>

(which is engineered not to be resistible, so although it seems to be  wholesome – and is more-ish – it intentionally overrides the body's satiety mechanism. Intentionally. In other words, there is an obesity crisis because the UPF-mongers want it that way)
</side-swipe>

... I was struck by the appropriateness (dictionaries recognize "appropriacy", and PGCE students can't avoid it [as I know to my cost], but there are limits) of the term "binge-watch". The streamers use the same ploy (of interfering with the sense of satiety).

/ends

Update: 2023.07.06.15:00 – Added PPS

PPS I've come across a very impressive website: steno.ai , which encourages me to quote Dr Chris verbatim, on the subject of obesity and will-power:

...[O]besity is nothing to do with willpower. Because all of the genes that affect our propensity to gain weight are all expressed in the brain. So they're all about eating behaviors. And people will be able to tell if they have any of these genetic risk factors because they will find themselves highly motivated by food. And we all know people who are somewhat indifferent to lunch and can skip dinner. Those of us with these risk factors are obsessed with food. We're prone to, you know, we'll plan dinner at breakfast time and we'll be foodies. And so that's how you can tell.... [T]he really interesting thing is that the way you inherit those genes, the way they're expressed, is entirely dependent on your family income. So obesity is heritable in low-income populations, and this was all sorted out with twin studies.

..[I]n high-income families, we don't see obesity being inherited. And that's because people who live in places with lots of money and have access to good food are much less likely to gain weight. So what the twin studies really tell us is that if we could get rid of inequality and get rid of poverty, we would deal with well over half of the problem of diet-related disease and obesity. 

Source

This is impressive, although the incidence of obesity in the USA shows that there's no slam-dunk here: a privileged background doesn't automatically guarantee a healthy diet (it just makes it possible to choose one). 

Update: 2023.08.08.15:45 – Added PPPS

The 'June Event', which I mentioned above (a sudden increase in reports of visits to the blog, starting towards the end of May and continuing into July) has died down:

I suspect that someone in Blogger-stats-land was playing with a new toy. Still, it was (mildly) exciting while it lasted.

Update: 2023.08.31.15:10 – Added P⁴S

P⁴S

I spoke too soon when I said it had 'died down'. HD Page Views in August are set to amount to wee over half as much again as those in July (although most of that increase is due to a sharp uptick in the last 10 days of the month):

Cashing in

When I arrived outside Corpus Christi College Cambridge in September 1971...

<cambridge-terms-parenthesis>

(Oh yes. I think I've mentioned before the belief in academic circles that the best time for Part I modern language orals to be held was before we had started the first term. In the days before the year abroad became [rightly] compulsory, this meant that the only proof that an examinee could talk a foreign language was gathered before the course started.)
</cambridge-terms-parenthesis>

...'my suitcase and guitar in hand'  à la Paul Simon ...

<inline-pps type="brickbat-dodging">

(and if  you would have preferred "au Paul Simon",  read more about à la

here)
</inline-pps>

...(except that he didn't have a third bit of baggage for his rugby kit) I was struck by the unevenness of the pavement outside the main gate:

But there were other things on my mind at the time (quite a few, come to think of it) and I put it out of my mind, until in due course it just became one of many Cantabrigian oddities.

Nearly fifty years later, all became clear. A 'Cantabrigian oddity' was indeed involved, but it was in the mind of the architect of Corpus's New Court, William Wilkins. The design and building of New Court (inter alia) is discussed in The Courts of Corpus Christi – not a must-read, I grant, but with a certain interest.

Wilkins graduated from Gonville and Caius College in 1800, with a strange interest in King's – particularly the chapel, which he measured and drew as an undergraduate (the drawing is in a libray in New York...

<need-to-know needfulness="0"> 

"A volume of engravings based on the survey is held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York." 

</need-to-know>

...).

This bee stayed  buzzing around in his bonnet for  years. To quote The Courts of Corpus Christi:

New Court’s Trumpington Street facade is aligned exactly with the southern of the Chapel’s two eastern towers .... Is this alignment a coincidence or intentional? No drawing survives of the setting-out of New Court and its relation to the street and neither has any written explanation by Wilkins of the building. However, the plinth along the street frontage may offer a clue. The edge of the plinth marks the boundary between the street and the College. The generous space between that edge and the façade suggests that the façade was moved back in order to ensure the alignment with King’s Chapel...– Wilkins’s private link between the site of his first architectural endeavour and, later, his favourite building and final resting place.

<inline-ps>
Wilkins is buried in Corpus Chapel. 
</inline-ps>

Corpus, on a line between
King's College Chapel ² and St Botolph's ³
(so not quite aligned with Trumpington Street)

<extra-credit>
St Benet's ¹ adds to the arcanity. If you want the full story, you know where to look: The Courts of Corpus Christi.
</extra-credit>

 L'Envoi

When I was first introduced to the Worldwide Web in the late 1980s or early 1990s the distant graphically rich site that everyone gave as an example of this brave new world of sharing and altruism was the Vatican Library.  Another such site that I have recently been drawn to is the Parker Library on the Web. But such sites are few and far between. The need to make money out of web-sites has called for a new word – well an extension of an old one. The word "monetize" has existed for centuries – ever since kings (or whoever) felt the need to turn stuff into cash.

The word was first recorded in the nineteenth century, and the Collins English Dictionary gives these definitions:

But the third of these definitions seems to have been waiting for Tim Berners-Lee to come along. The Collins page, if you scroll down far enough, shows this trend:

So the word spent its early years doing a workmanlike but not very interesting job, and then took on a new meaning in the early 1980s; if only the Collins data went beyond 2008 we could no doubt see the full 'hockey-stick' curve.

Enough for today.

b

Update 2023.06.20.15:15 – Not quite enough; added <inline-ps />

Update 2023.06.22.19:50 – Added <inline-pps />

'Sooner than' what?

 A small point, but one that bothers me rather more than somewhat (an  expression I first heard my mother using ...

<autobiographical-note>
(the context was 'that little madam gets up my nose rather more than somewhat' – referring to one of her daughters;  no names, no packdrill, besides, de mortuis... whoops, me and my big mouth), but she probably picked it up among the hip talk of the 1930s, or maybe she was quoting Damon Runyon)
</autobiographical-note>

...) is the meaninglessly abbreviated expression 'sooner than later'. It's not complicated: the word 'rather' contrasts two possibilities: doing something sooner or doing it later; the former is preferable. The word 'rather' is the  WHOLE POINT of the expression 'sooner rather than later', and dropping the 'rather' is cutting beyond the bone. I'm all for cutting out dead wood in over wordy expressions, but this is not dead; it's structural – load-bearing.

When I first heard this, I blamed the Americans (as is often the way, usually mistakenly), possibly because the first time I noticed it was in a Letter from America (which dates it: probably around the turn of the millennium...)

<pedantic-sideswipe>
(two ns, please, unless you've discovered a new heavy metal [with atomic number 1000])
</pedantic-sideswipe>

... as the last one was broadcast in February 2004.  My guess is that the relevant broadcast was in the mid-late '90s.

The balance in the British National Corpus is strongly in favour...

<you-know-thats-not-what-I-mean>

<tangent>
And the missing apostrophe's deliberate. I know the pseudo-code compiler doesn't exist, but if it did then ' would be (as they say) a 'reserved character'. (To test this, try to write a Twitter [or whatever your poison is] hashtag that includes '. The highlighting gets switched off at the '...

<inline-ps> 

– it's a 'reserved character'; that is, it slips out of your context, and starts talking to the computer. It's 'reserved' in the sense that it has a special function and shouldn't be used for anything else: Computer says NO.

<inline-ps>

...).
</tangent>

(not that a corpus can express a preference; it just records what happens [in this case, what has been written])
</you-know-thats-not-what-I-mean>

...of  'sooner rather than later' 65/6; that is, the shorter (that is,  content-free) version is a bit less than 1% as common.

Meanwhile in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (a much bigger corpus) the preponderance is 1031/424. The shortened version is less uncommon, but is still much less than half as common.

So can it be called an 'Americanism'? I think the answer is more nuanced than that; we need (though 'need' is a strong way of putting it) a more granular corpus. As Alistair Cooke was based (at the time when I heard him use the LAMENTABLE short form)  in New York, it seems to me worth considering that the preference for this ABERRATION (sorry, the small caps are like Dr Strangelove's right arm – they just spring up unbidden from time to time) is peculiar to New England. But the only granular corpus I've found is Corpus of Historical American English (the wrong sort of grains– though possibly informative):

So when Alistair Cooke first disturbed my linguistic platitude (that's a new meaning I've just invented, referring to an unruffled plate-like surface) he was toying with an essentially 21st-century neologism: of the 30 (I make it 29, but who's counting [apart from me, obv.]?) more than half were written since the turn of the millennium; so the offending Letter to America was written during the very early stirrings of an UNFORTUNATE development (OK, it had been attested since the late 19th century, but ⅔ of the total were recorded in the 21st).

Enough of this. There's biomass crying out for destruction in the back garden, not to mention words/notes to learn for Saturday week's concert:

b

Update 2023.06.27.12:05 – Added <inline-ps />