My take on 'take on'

Five years ago I was writing (here) about separable verbs, and bravely undertook not to pursue an error in a pop song. I should have known better; this sort of nit won't be ignored

<pre-script>
... I'll record here a totally unrelated observation, from the first part of a recently televised spy thriller. It was set in Berlin...and most of the key characters had the decency to speak English. But  there were bits of German dialogue that had English subtitles – one of which reminded me of an exercise we did in my CELTA course, to raise awareness of the problems caused for ELT students by English's predilection for phrasal verbs.

<autobiographical_note date="2006" subject="Phrasal verb exercise">
The students sat in a circle, and each in turn constructed a sentence using the phrasal verb pick up with a meaning that differed from all the previous examples.

I expected that with a class-size of 14 it would become increasingly difficult after the first half dozen, and impossible before the end. But the lecturer had done his homework and knew that the Collins Cobuild Dcitionary (a favourite at the time) lists 15 separate meanings (some of which can easily be sub-divided: for example it gives one meaning for what "a microphone or radio" does, and it seems to me that processing an audio signal that is clearly part of the soundscape  [as in "We're picking up the traffic noise in the background"] is quite distinct from being able to detect at all a radio signal that just doesn't get there [as in "We can't pick up channel X when we're <somewhere>"). So in other dictionaries I imagine the total is more than 15.
</autobiographical_note>

And to add to the difficulty, some phrasal verbs are separable (the verb and the particle can straddle the object), or not, or either... 

<2023-aside> 

This Saturday's The Times gives an example of this. There's an M&S advert that says                                                                                                                            

It's time 

to switch on 

Christmas 

If the designer had had to set 

It's time 

to switch 

Christmas on 

the line lengths wouldn't have been so amenable. Fortunately for them, there was a choice; so – whatever the text means (if 'means' is the mot juste) – the flexibility of this phrasal verb made the text designer's life easier. 

</2023-aside>  

...And in one of the local-colour subtitles the translator had got it wrong. At a service desk of some sort a German-speaker said "I want to pick up something" (sorry – no time to check the original German). What the subtitle should have said was "I want to pick something up"*,†. 

</pre-script>

And in later updates I added two footnotes, * and †.

<pre-script> 

<footnote index="*">
Last night I witnessed another instance of that separability problem. In a subtitle to the Danish thriller Follow the money, towards the end of the first episode, one character said "We need you to take on this one."  What he meant, of course, was  "We need you to take this one on." ... But I had known the translator was less than perfect ever since, earlier on, he had used the expression "big fry" instead of "big fish".  Fry are small; that's the point.

This is not unlike a piece of family language we still use, ever since my son – then knee-high to something quite small [HD: Do grasshoppers even have knees? Granted there's a bendy bit between the upper and lower leg, but is that enough for knee-ness? This is getting silly...] – asked "Are we having a dark lunch today?". A dark lunch (obv.) is the opposite of a light lunch.
</footnote>

<footnote index="†">
I've  just noticed another instance of the separability problem, in an error message:

I've been getting this annoying little error for some time now – so often that I've only just noticed it; and noticed how apt it was, in view of my feelings about the device in question.

</footnote> 

<pre-script> 

At last, here's my take on ...

<tangent>
(! – thank heavens I don't have to learn this stuff as a second language)
</tangent>

...the Aha song Take on me.

The sense of 'take on me' is 'undertake a relationship with me [even though it may be risky and/or burdensome]'. The writers of this song were presumably...

<parenthesis>
Attribution is unclear, though I admit I haven't given it my usual laser-like focus. My attitude is not unlike Rick's to the Peter Laurie character in Casablanca: 'You despise me don't you Rick?'/'I guess I would if I gave it much thought.'
<parenthesis>

...the singers in Aha (a Norwegian band), and – to their credit (?) – they hedge their bets, as the words are 'Take on me/take me on' (as though they're not sure whether the phrasal verb is separable or not (or either); like many an uncertain second-language user, they do something that, while parading their uncertainty, they know will at least be partially right).

And so the language moves on. Aha knew there was something tricky, but native speaker covers (by, for example, Take That) cement the optionality of this phrasal verb (either separable or not, as the speaker wishes). Purists will huff and puff, but the tide of spoken usage will eventually wash over them.

Basta. 

b

Meaningful versus Nonsensical

My latest podcast discoveries include these two:

• The Infinite Monkey's Guide To...
• Add To Playlist – also broadcast on Saturday evenings

The first of these is a compendium of the best bits of long-lived (since November 2009) series The Infinite Monkey Cage, grouped on thematic lines...

<autobiographical-note>

It is, in principle, similar to a (stalled) project that I was worklng on until various software tools I was using were changed and/or canned. Words and Music is a compendium of my favorite bits of this blog. In an ideal world it will be completed, but breath retention is not recommended.
<autobiographical-note>

...And in an early one of these Robin Ince asks 'Why do we say "human being"? We don't say "daffodil being"...

<tangent>
That quote is approximate. I wanted to trace it and transcribe it properly, but BBC Sounds have done their usual trick of APPALING curation.  I've whinged before about the annoying tendency of the BBC to crow about the richness of its back-catalogue while failing miserably to make that catalogue accessible in any intelligent way. The Infinite Monkey's Guide To... exemplifies this in spades. Even the list of "Other Episodes" is opaque: the important bit after the word "To..." is truncated. And when you do find the episode you want, there's no guide to where clips came from. 

<inline-ps>

I wronged them - you can trace the clips if you know where to look. Some hyperlinks would have been useful though,  rather than a series/episode reference; we do have computers nowadays, and you'd think a podcast like this would take advantage of such new-fangled stuff.

</inline-ps>

</tangent>

...The answer was provided by my grandfather: '"Human" is an adjective' he would say (in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary). 'It needs "being" to make it into a noun phrase.' 

<autobiographical-note>
(I could hear Archie's voice as soon as Robin Ince spoke.)
</autobiographical-note>

Add To Playlist is a relative newcomer, and it is a joy; not an unalloyed joy – read on. The idea of the programme is simple: two regulars and two musician guests make a daisy-chain of tracks, commenting on structure/melody/rhythm/instrumentation ... etc, and making links between one track and the next. Often one of the recorded artists joins them down the line.

Now we come to the 'not unalloyed' bit. I do wish Cerys Matthews (who is an amazing source of interesting musical insight) wasn't so fond of the expression 'hoNe in on'. When I first heard it, I thought 'Surely not?' And I checked in the British National Corpus:

'That's right' I thought; 'Only one instance. A solitary ignoramus got it wrong.'

<parenthesis>
Oh dear. Me and Cnut...
</parenthesis>

On the other hand there were many of the M-version ('hoMe in on') :

But Ms Matthews has led her co-presenter astray, and now he's doing it too.

The BNC, though, is not very large or very up-to-date. The Corpus of Contemporary American English offers a less parochial view. And there the different commonness of the two forms is much more balanced:

'Home in on' is the commoner of the two, but only by a whisker.

Finally, I used my favourite newly discovered language-related software tool to compare the two.

The expression 'home in on' took off about the same time as computers and related technologies used in guided weaponry, and for twenty years it had the field to itself. Then 'hone in on' appeared, but until the mid-'80s it never represented more than a quarter of its soundalike. Then, from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s something strange happened: 'home in on' marked time, and 'hone in on' took advantage. It is as if a significant number of M-users tried the N-version as an experiment, and stuck with it; and this infected...

<parenthesis>
(is my prejudice showing?)
</parenthesis>

... the people who had not yet adopted either expression, with the result that for the next two decades the N-version rose in popularity more steeply than the original. Since then, shares have remained roughly stable, with the MEANINGFUL version outnumbering the NONSENSICAL one, but not by much.

That's all for now. There's work to do in the garden, and notes to bash in preparation for this (which I have sung before, but more than 30 years ago – so that although passages are familiar, I don't know it as well as I think):

b

Update: 2023.10.25.14:30 - Added <inline-ps />

Gender (again)

My latest discovery in the podcast world...

<parenthesis>
(so many podcasts, so little time😉)
</parenthesis>

... is The Allusionist, which the BBC has recently  (apparently belatedly) adopted.

<confession subject="podcast neophyte, guilty  yer 'Onner">
I'm afraid I still  have a very BBC-centric view of the podiverse. I'm aware that there's a lot more Out There, but podcasts are enough of a time-sink just seen through the BBC's very smoky spectacles, so I rarely let go of Auntie's hand. But the latest I have heard –  No Title –is number 121 on The Allusionist website, while it's only the 4th of the ones  that have the BBC's imprimatur...

<tangent>
(or should that be audiatur? Nobody prints (imprimit)  a podcast. They listen to it.)
</tangent>

...Perhaps the BBC didn't wake up to The Allusionist until Susie Dent got involved (The Allusionist all-time issue number 182, but BBC number 18). 

Most of the whois record for the allusionist.org is redacted, but the first few lines show that it's been around for nearly ten years – not quite as long as some blogs I could mention; but the selection available on BBC Sounds dates from only a few months ago. 

</confession>

Anyway, where was I? –  No Title. She says many illuminating and interesting things abou titles, pronouns, gender... and loads more. Here's a taste:

I've been trying to see if there any particular patterns in the ways that gendered language is ...

<sic-but-AIs-pretty-good> I imagine this should be "languages", with "gender" in the next line being a verb meaning 'assign gender to'. </sic-but-AIs-pretty-good>

...gender things. So at the moment, I've got a spreadsheet and - yes, don't get jealous, you can all have one - I've got columns along the top for different languages: so far, I've got Spanish, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Italian, and Greek. And then in the rows, I've got nouns in different categories. And I've just been trying to see if I can deduce anything from the ways that they gender different words. And so far I have learned that dog is male in all of them. bears are always male except female in Greek, lions are also male except neuter in Greek, and whales are always female except male in German - but in German a baby is neuter. But a spoon is masculine, a fork is feminine, a knife is neuter - which is not how I would have gendered the cutlery, if forced to do so.

But this is a tiny sample of the natural languages still spoken in the world, and all Indo-European – spoken where the founding fathers...

<tangent>
(the founding mothers don't get a look-in, of course)
</tangent>

... had mother-tongues ...

<tangent>
(oh there they are)
</tangent>

...that confused sex (a biological fact) with gender ( a grammatical construct). The early grammarians who first described the Indo-European languages co-opted (dragooned?) the word "gender" so setting in stone their own prejudices. But some languages apply grammatical rules of a gender-like nature without the remotest whiff of sex; the word  "gender" is just a confusing shorthand version of <arbitrary-classification-device>. I wrote here about one such case mentioned in a Guy Deutscher book:

<prescript>

<tangentially-relevant-preamble>
English students of foreign languages that have gender markings have to get used to the fact that the English possessives are marked for the sex of the possessor; many other languages are marked for the gender of the thing possessed. This gender versus sex distinction was one pointed out to me by Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim [that's Latin for 'So often that I can't be bothered to check a reference']). "Concrete things have sex; words have gender." In English, we put a further restriction on the first part of that rule – "Concrete things have sex only if they're animate"; and we don't have the second part (about gender, with a few arguable  exceptions, like ships and old cars; the few words that look as if they are gendered – mostly pronouns and possessives – in fact denote sex... 

<2023-addition> 

A neat example has just come to me. Son stylo and sa plume don't change with the sex of the owner in the way "his/her ballpoint" and "his/her fountain pen" do.

</2023-addition>

...) Isn‘t "only if they're animate" an improbably arbitrary restriction? Hardly. 
</tangentially-relevant-preamble>

In The Unfolding of Language  Guy Deutscher writes of  an Aboriginal language that assigns the gender "edible vegetable" to an aeroplane. He sums up his point:

In linguistic jargon...'gender' has nothing to do with sex  and can refer to any kind of classification that a language imposes on nouns. While sex-based gender is an extremely common type of classification, some languages have special genders not only for 'male' and 'female' but also for classes of nouns such as 'long objects', 'dangerous things', or 'edible parts of plants'.

When there‘s a correspondence between sex and gender (une fille, for example, is both feminine and female, but ein Mädchen is neuter) a phonological rule can interfere; you don't say ma amie because of the initial vowel in amie.

<tangentially-relevant-postlude> 

<harebrained_notion>
Did Bizet make use of this rule in Carmen's claim to be going chez mon ami(e?) Lillas Pastia? Does she toy with Don José's jealousy with doubts about the sex of Lillas Pastia? Lilas is a girl's name; certainly, when I first heard the Seguidilla I assumed Carmen was referring to a woman; I couldn't hear the -ll- that Bizet gave it. Does this make it male, I wonder.... Bizet's only clue (well, I haven‘t read the libretto in detail)  is to write that Lillas is an aubergiste – and I think Mistress Quickly was one of those.
</harebrained_notion> 

</tangentially-relevant-postlude> 

</prescript>

I wouldn't be surprised if I find in due course that this calls for an update (but don't hold your breath) . That's enough for today though.

b

Update: 2023.10.19.14:10 – Added PS

PS

No Title gives some examples of problems thrown up by gendered languages,

[I]n Germany they have Frau and Fräulein - well, they had them. Fräulein was the equivalent to Miss, literally translates to ‘little woman’, but it has been banned from official use since 1972. And in France, their version of Miss - or young woman flirt word - ‘mademoiselle’, has been banned from official documents since 2012, and a female person of any age will be Madame. And this might not sound like much, but in France, the whole language is binary gendered: every noun, every adjective, every pronoun. So if like me you want to get away from a binary-gendered system of everything, France is not going to let you forget it. And also, the language is controlled by the Académie Française, an official body which gets to decide what new grammar is allowed, what new words are allowed in, and when people have campaigned for gender neutral options, the Académie Française has just been like, “Non.”

So this Mademoiselle thing was at least some progress, with that backdrop. But the problem wasn’t so much why do the female titles change whereas the male ones don’t because they just use Monsieur - the male equivalent, Mondamoiseau, fell out of use - it’s so hard to say, that’s probably why. My mouth was exhausted after just one go-through. The problem was actually the etymology of Mademoiselle: it is kind of a diminutive form of ‘Madame’, which breaks down to ‘my lady’, but the problem in particular was this suffix, ‘oiselle’, which means ‘virgin’ or ‘simpleton’.

So this flirt word means ‘my lady virgin simpleton’.

There seems to me to be a whiff of confimation bias here: "The Académie is in charge, so everything sucks". But people in France have  done something about this.

<prescript>
The Académie Française takes a dim view of écriture inclusive – the proposed script reform that attempts to make French gender-neutral in spite of itself. The Times last week [HD 2023: I wrote this almost exactly six years ago: if you want to trace the article, it was published on the Saturday before 17 Oct 2017] referred to a "mid punctuation  point", a glyph that French keyboards are soon to include. And they gave as an example cher⋅e⋅s ami⋅e⋅s [HD: their impoverished fonts presumably don't go as far as an è]. You can sidestep the Infernal Firewall by looking at this Indie article.

Their one English academician, Sir Michael Edwards, calls the result "gibberish"  – missing the point rather  (écriture – the clue's in the name); I don't think the words with the mid punctuation point are supposed to be read aloud – any more than the solidus is supposed to be read aloud in our "his/her". It just lets the reader's mind skip over the gender variation without missing a beat. So when the university of Nancy addressed imminent graduates as Futur⋅e⋅s diplômé⋅e⋅s it was simply doing them the courtesy of accepting that they might be of either gender, rather than, as heretofore, even in a class of 99 diplômées and a single diplômé, addressing them all as men....

One sententious self-important windbag, the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, speaking on Europe 1 Radio, denounced it as "an attack on syntax by egalitarianism". 

<observation>
Generally, I've noticed that people who complain about "an attack on <abstract_noun>" tend to be blowhards.
</observation>

</prescript>

Plank's inconstant

This week's In Our Time was all about plankton, which – like most things when you study them deeply enough – turn out to be crucial to human survival (half the breaths we breathe are down to these little critters, to say nothing of all the food-chains they support).   The programme started with a mention of where they get  their name:

Etymonline

Meanwhile, in the early days of astronomy, seers noticed that whereas some heavenly bodies seemed relatively constant (stars – which we now know move about quite a bit), others seemed to wander about the sky (planets). And these took their name from that characteristic:

Etymonline

I detect a certain shakiness – maybe just a typo – between 'plazesthai' with a definite PIE root and 'planasthai' "of uncertain etymology", but whatever the ins and outs it's clear that the two are related, making a pleasing link between the very small and the fairly big.

Matters arising from my last post

Last week's offering mentioned Gaslight (the 1940 film), which led to a mention on Facebook of the new verb – meaning, roughly, to lead someone (often in an abusive relationship, as in the film) to question their own sanity). @Jim Worm said she didn't remember it being used like that in her youth.

As a more-or-less exact contemporary of that youth I agreed, but thought it'd be interesting to find out more, so I looked at Google Ngrams, which confirmed that this usage really took off in the 21st century:

The ing-form, as I was taught to call it in my CELTA days ...

<parenthesis>
(though I have to admit to a predilection for the old 'gerund/gerundive/present participle' terminology... 

<per-contra>
[but "ing-form" is easier for students, and few if any need to understand the minutiae however much fun it is for nerds like me to appreciate {"knowing the pretium (Latin for 'price', the root of 'appreciate') of everything and the value of nothing?"} the differences]
</per-contra>

...) 

</parenthesis>

 ...is the clincher, as it can only be a verbal usage, But as the two curves are so similar since the turn of the century, and as in the 21st century almost the only use of the noun is in describing the plot of the film it's a safe bet that they both represent the new verb

But that isn't the whole story. Long before the film, the word 'gaslight' meant something (the noun, unless there was a verb "to gaslight" in the sense of installing gaslight – I don't know, but it seems possible – and the steep up-tick in recent years is dwarfed by the earlier technological breakthrough:

The ghost in the washing line

Perhaps, though, this curve has a foretaste of the ghostlier sense. If you turn it through 90 degrees. it looks uncannily like someone running into a sheet:

b

PS

Translation news

I've  repeated last year's limited success in the John Dryden Translation Competition (that link doesn't work yet, but it will in the fullness of time): longlisted, but no further. Oh well: back to the ironing board.

What's a girl to think?

I'm often amused/interested/persuaded (if only temporarily) by Dr Michael Moseley's Just One Thing programme/podcast, although features of the formula often grate – especially the introductory words, repeated ever and anon: 'We're  bombarded by often conflicting advice':  too right we are – by the good doctor himself.

<excuse>
The series has been going on for several years, and medical advice changes from time to time. So it's only to be expected that exhortations to do 'Just One Thing',  separated by years, will contain elements of contradiction.

<but-hang-on>
Sometimes, though, contradictions aren't separated by years. In May 2022, there was an edition that dealt with naps that concluded "[I]f you can find time in your day for a nap, it really is worth trying."

Just 5 months later, in a mini-series on sleep  ...

<parenthesis>
This mini-series was a five-parter, which avoided some of the more annoying elements of the standard Just-One-Thing format, particularly the vox-pop bit with the tame guinea pig prepared to 'give it a try'. Per contra, it did involve a flamboyant abuse of the word 'elixir', repeated five times (with each repetition becoming more painful of course).
</parenthesis>

... he was saying "Try to avoid napping".
</but-hang-on>

</excuse>

 And at the end of the recent programme on the benefits of tea, the guinea-pig was so satisfied with her 'challenge' that she had decided to replace her regular coffee with tea. Whereon Moseley recommended the programme on coffee. OK, different strokes for different folks; there's no one recipe for the right balance.

And finally

<autobiographical-note> 

In the film business there is... 

<parenthesis> 

(or at least was; although. the gifts may have become less tangible – after his work on The Prisoner in the mid-sixties [it was broadcast from 1967-8, but probably made earlier] Patrick McGoohan gave my big brother a bottle of whisky. Maybe there's a sliding scale, and a clapperboy [or 'Director of Synchronization', as they used to say – geddit?] didn't qualify for the good stuff.) 

</parenthesis>

...a tradition of leading lights, at the end of a shoot, giving mementoes to the camera crew.

When my father ('Daddy', because the last time I saw him I was nine) was working with Anthony Asquith his end-of-job gift was a pair of gold cufflinks...

<tangent>

incidentally, one of my favourite metaphors in Spanish is the word for twins – gemelos (cufflinks); but I digress (so what's  new?)

</tangent>

... inscribed with CK on one end and AA on the other. A door-to-door spiv conned my recently widowed mother out of them for what I imagined at the time was a pittance. But I realize now that selling them made sense.

This came to mind this afternoon, as I was queuing to sell another such end-of-job gift, presented to him by Diana Winyard: 

       

<well-I-never> 

I've only just realized that as Asquith directed Freedom Radio, maybe the cigarette lighter and the cufflinks are related. Talk about provenance (oops – too late; they're sold – twice)

</well-I-never> 

</autobiographical-note>

b 

Update: 2023.10.11.14.15 – Added PS

In the process of looking out that lighter, I found a double acrostic that I wrote for the wedding of a house-mate in Cambridge (whence "CB" in the first line). This is a copy:

With apologies to Christina
and renewed thanks
to Penny Thexton (?),
calligrapher extraordinaire