It ain't necessarily so

In this post I wrote some time ago about my initial attitude to Ira Gershwin's "home in/abdomen" rhyme.

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...[A]nother song we're singing in our forthcoming concert is It ain't necessarily so – which includes the words "He made his home in that fish's abdomen". The underlay forces stress on the second syllable [HD 2023: of  'abdomen'], which – on a first hearing many years ago – I put down to American English. But many dictionaries give both (though always, in my experience, with abdomen having pride of place). I had previously assumed that the British English stress was the one given unequivocally in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary:

No option given there,  whichever side of the Pond you're on.
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In an update, having surmised that speakers with mother tongues other than British English used – when speaking English – the stress-pattern used for the cognate word in their own mother tongue, I added:.

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Come to think  of it, you can bet your life that Moishe and Rose Gershovitz's native language had stress on the -do-, so naturally their son Ira pronounced it that way.
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This week's Pick of the Week (@ 32'36" for about 5 minutes ) reminded me of this. I knew that the words of the song were somewhere on the irreverent/blasphemous spectrum,  but it was news to me that the tune itself was equally (if not more) shocking to a believer – particularly a Jewish  believer. Guy Garvey, on his Radio 6 show, discussed the background of this song, and ended with a Jewish scholar describing the ritual reading of the Torah, using the same melody as that used in the first two lines of Ira Gershwin's song.

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The words were vaguely familiar to me, from snatches of The Chichester Psalms, set by another immensely talented American Jew: "Baruch", "Adonai", "Elohim"...
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The whole thing (only 5 minutes' worth) is well worth a listen. I particularly enjoyed an  unpublished (unsung?) verse:

Way back in 5,000 BC
Old Adam and Eve had to flee
Sure they did that deed in the Garden of Eden
But why chasterize you and me?

This hasn't made it into the canon. Perhaps the unusual word 'chasterize' is the problem: 'chastize' with a metrical contribution from 'castigate'?

Another thing that ain't necessarily so – the great sensus con

I have nothing to say about the rights and wrongs of the doings of Señores Rubiales and Brand, except to note that they were both very quick to reach for that much-misused word consensual. Think about it: cum + sensus. When an activity is consensual, both parties share a feeling about it. and an understanding of its role in their relationship. It seems to me that when there is a significant difference in power between the parties, consensuality is by definition impossible.

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But I'm in danger of committing the Etymological Fallacy here – the belief that words can only ever mean what they originally meant (usually in another language). "Consensual" has now become the knee-jerk roué's defence.  I'm not entirely at ease with that – to use the Portuguese, which seems to me particularly appropriate – relaxação. 

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(≅ relaxation [of standards]; it was a word often used by a central character in Eça de Queiroz's novel A Relíquia. 

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If Señor Rubiales would look at the celebrations at the World Championships in Budapest recently after the success of the Netherlands women's 4x400m team, when the men's team came to congratulate them (about 15  minutes in), he will see how men excitedly but appropriately congratulate women after a sporting success: hint – osculation is not involved.

b

Update 2023.09.21.14:40  – Added <inline-ps />