Sumer came in several weeks ago

In my choir's forthcoming concert we will be singing 

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
and bloweþ med
and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu

Awe bleteþ after lomb
lhouþ after calue cu
Bulluc sterteþ
bucke uerteþ
murie sing cuccu

Cuccu cuccu
Wel singes þu cuccu
ne swik þu nauer nu

 

But this, the first recorded song to be sung in parts, is not – as is sometimes mistakenly thought – ...

<example>
On BBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme on 21 June 2022 this song was presented to mark the summer solstice.

In the days before I had sworn off Twitter (to give it the name that I still insist on using, for reasons given here – in short, the reference to birds makes the expression 'A little bird told me...' pleasingly appropriate) I tweeted thus:

I'm sure this wasn't a unique error, and that it has been, and will be, repeated as long as this delightful song is sung.
</example>

.. a paean to the coming of summer. I've written about this before, here:

<prescript> 

In  The Stories of English David Crystal says

Reading Abbey did not have a scriptorium, so the manuscript was probably copied at Oxford.

... But why Sumer? [And] 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

 </prescript>

So the song, the cuckoo, the wude springing nu, the lombs and their bleating mothers, the methane-related bullock action, and all the rest of it, refers ŧo the coming of spring not summer.

AOB

 <autobiographical-note>
The England Women's cricket series against Pakistan fired off a distant memory of a... not exactly playmate I had when I was 10 or 11; he was the youngest son of a tenant in the downstairs flat, with very little English (mostly 'I am', used to mean 'I <any-verb-in-any-tense>.  Heidar taught me the numbers from 1 to 10 in his mother tongue (possibly Farsi, as he was Iraqi).

In this cricket match, Akhtar was bowling, and the commentators always referred to her by her given name, 'Waheeda'. This, except for the final vowel, and allowing for the tricks of memory and L1 interference as we used to say in the language teaching  trade...

<parenthesis>
L1 interference is the influence a mother tongue has on the way a language learner processes information and examples in a second language; for example, an Anglophone speaker of English will hear the French oui as 'we', although both the onset (the rounding of the lips) and the final vowel are very different.
</parenthesis>

 ... was not unlike the word for 'one', as I remember it, in Heidar's language . And while 'One' is not a girl's name, 'Una' is. I wondered, hearing that commentator, whether 'Waheeda' was like that. or whether this was just a coincidence with no relevance in unrelated languages.
</autobiographical-note>

Speaking of coincidences, I stumbled on an extraordinary (but totally inconsequential) one the other day. It started with a crossword clue, whose answer was 'stannic'. Out of idle interest I looked up the etymology of the word, which told me that the first recorded use was in 1790. The dictionary then pointed me to a site that promised to list other words first used in 1790: this site deserves a nomination for this year's TEZZY (Time-wasting Site of the Year Award). Among the words whose first appearance in print was in 1790...

<tangent>
 (think of it: with the French Revolution in full swing,  the appearance in print of the word guillotine is hardly surprising, but what of aside from, laughing hyena, prearrange, scrunch...?) Anyway, the point is (if it can be deemed so consequential as to have a point) that...
</tangent>

... one of the newly printed words was horseweed – a word that had escaped my notice for the last 73¾ years until last week (when I asked PlantNet to identify a newcomer to what MrsK and I, with laughable optimism, refer to as 'the wild garden').

b

Update: 2024.05.28.12:50 – Added PS

At our 15 June concert we'll be singing John Rutter's collection. The Sprig of Thyme. One of the songs in this collection is  Afton Water ...

<tangent>
(which with supreme irrelevance reminded of the old Passing Clouds cigarette packet; I never did: see what justufucation [or even just reasom] there was for quoting the poem on that pink packet.)
</tangent>

... whose tune reminds me of Ye Banks and Braes, which we sang at St  Gregory's Primary School ...

<rant type="potential, nipped in the bud, but still...">
(in the days when primary schools dealt in education rather than the extrusion of an endless supply of potential wage slaves who know the 3Rs but little else)
</rant>

.... And at last, about 65 years after the question formed in my young mind, I realized just why Burns asked the aforementioned topological features How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?, and then went on to ask the birds How can ye chaunt? He's feeling a close relation of the Pathetic Fallacy (or maybe it just is the Pathetic Fallacy: it depends how you define it.)

<definiton>
An author who uses the Pathetic Fallacy makes nature reflect the feelings of the characters or the narrative: a distant clap of thunder portends a misfortune, when a couple make up after an argument the rain stops and the sun comes out, when the villain enters clouds gather.... Expressions like 'a sunny disposition' , or 'casting a clouid over...' are shorthand versions of the Pathetic Fallacy.
</definiton>

As a poet, Burns knows how to use the Pathetic Fallacy. But, more than that, he feels when it's the right time to use it. So, in Ye Banks and Braes the spurned lover expects nature to reflect his feelings: 'How can you be so lovely and fruitful when I'm so miserable [full o' care]? So this close relation of the Pathetic Fallacy is when the poet expects nature to reflect his mood and nature doesn't play bell – pretty subtle: no wonder I didn't get  it back at St Gregory's.

I spy

In the late '60s there was a late-night TV drama that I used to watch, starring Bob Culp playing a tennis pro and Bill Cosby as his coach. They travelled the world, a-spying. This struck me at the time as a pretty unlikely cover story, but the backchat between the two was quite amusing. My only memory of it involved the two trapped in some kind of storeroom and making an improvised bomb ...

<parenthesis reason="neologism not yet coined">
(this was long before the term "IED" had been coined)
</parenthesis>

...one of whose ingredients was the dry ice used to preserve fresh fish. One of the two was unimpressed by the prospect of this thing working, and poured scorn on his partner's 'cod-fish bomb'...

 <tangent importance-quotient="0">
I forget which, but in my mind's eye I can see Bill Cosby saying it; Bob Culp was the one full of wacky ideas and Bill Cosby was the world-weary sceptic.

<meta-tangent>
(Cosby played Gromit to Culp's Wallace)
</meta-tangent>

</tangent>
.

Not only was it, I thought, an unlikely cover story, but a pretty implausible story-line. 

But the other day I was invited to a talk given by Professor Chris Andrew, a meteorically rising young  (when I first knew him – ten years older than me) Fellow of Corpus and fellow (lower case this time) member of the Gravediggers (a Corpus play-reading society...

<esprit-descalier>

<tangent>
I know it should be d'éscalier, but as I've said before if a conceit is worth anything it's worth doing properly. This non-existent mark-up language...

<meta-tangent>
(incidentally this ["mark-up language"] accounts for all the other       -MLs you may have come across: HTML,  SGML,  XML... and so on [there are dozens]. Mark-up languagers use tags to control the way different bits of text are displayed in various sorts of document [for example, print in a range of formats, help text, other sorts of online text...] This makes it possible for one source document to produce several outputs.)
</meta-tangent>

...would surely have a compiler that would return an error and probably (in the best traditions of computing) fall down in a heap if it found punctuation or diacritics in a tag; that sort of character is often, in geek-speak, "reserved".
</tangent>

 Oh I get it. Corpus/corpse. It's only taken me 50 years...
</esprit-descalier>

... of which I was the Hon Sec. We met once a term, port and rich-tea biscuits), thst sort of thing. Very Cantabrigian.

<autobiographical-note>
One evening I remember a last-minute (pre email, of course) change of venue necessitated a notice in Old Court, decorated with a picture of this provender. A passing worthy added words designed to shame us lotus-eaters by referring to some current horror (probably the Wollo famine): '1 bottle of port would give an Ethiopian family... etc etc'. Not a whit abashed (I 've always wanted to write that) a fellow Gravedigger wrote 'Let them, drink Coke'. Happy days.
</autobiographical-note>

The latest in the good Professor's oeuvre (he is the pre-eminent historian in matters of British espionage) starts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I wonder if this is where John Le Carré got the idea for the expression 'the Circus'. The introduction goes on:

This strange story put in mind of I Spy.  But the idea of using a form of entertainment as a cover for espionage is not a twentieth-century thing. The intoduction later reads:

But if you want to know the rest of the story (and read all those footnotes, which don't lead anywhere in these screen grabs) you'll have to read the book. That's my lot for tonight.

b

 

Update: 2024.05.11.16:15– Added PS

        <autobiographical_note> 

In the late 1970s and well into the 1980s many IT professionals were working to standardize a markup language ultimately called SGML Some time in the mid-1980s, all the is and ts were respectively dotted and crossed, ducks were aligned, etc when somebody (one of the contributing partners, who – according to colleagues fabled to be in the know in matters relating to standards bodies – wanted to spike DEC's guns, knowing how nearly market-ready they were [the developers, that is, not the guns]), said "Woah! Wouldn't it be cool if we...?" At this point the bean-counters at DEC, who'd spent years signing away serious money on R&D (and standards work...

<tangent>
(which involved, among other things, international travel – in the days when 'man-bags' were unusual, it was well-known in the Reading engineering community that a sure-fire means of identifying a standards person was that they always had such a bag, so that they could high-tail it to Heathrow at the drop of a hat)
</tangent>

....) said "No; we go to market with what we've got". So VAX DOCUMENT was born, based on SDML; I used it for a good 15 years, topping and tailing this work with other (sometimes, more or less WYSIWYG...

<tangent>
(but starting with DEC Standard Runoff, which was far from it)
</tangent>

...) writing tools, but always returning to VAX DOCUMENT when there was real heavy-lifting to be done.

Later I was studying for an Open University diploma in software engineering, which introduced me to XML. This is a very flexible system that allows the user to define their own tags and their possible values, which are specified in a Document Type Definition (which explains the abbreviation "DTD" that users of HTML may recognize from the first line of an HTML file...

<tangent>
(that is, a 'well-formed' HTML file, as they insist on saying in the standards world. Many...

<inline-pps>
Correction: all browsers. HTML was conceived as an all-purpose display engine; but in its common use there is usually one DTD (general-puposed online text) which can therefore remain implicit. An explicit DTD is needed only for particular screen shapes and sizes (and, of course, for "well-formedness").

</inline-pps>

...browsers silently assume a suitable DTD even if an HTML file is not well-formed.
</tangent>

.... On one occasion, I was writing to my tutor and jokingly used a pair of these pseudo tags (something like

<apology type="lateness"; explanation="failure of backups">

I'm afraid my assignment will be late because....

</apology>

). I found the device useful and, once you've got it, it makes documents easier to scan – by clarifying the extent  of a long parenthesis and making embedded parentheses easier to make sense of. So ever since then (late 1999 or early 2000) I have taken to using it freely.

        </autobiographical_note>

Update: 2024.05.16.11:15 – Added <INLINE-PPS />