Time off in Looe

Today's title is brought to you by courtesy of TiredPunsᴚus (Inc.)

Milles zexcuses, as they used to say in the FRENCH notes file ...

<glossary>
(Notes files were a collaborative tool used in the world-wide DECnet network [of, in its heyday, more than 100,000 users], and one of my favourites was FRENCH – which gave me access to thousands of Francophones [not unlike Twitter in some  respects, only 25 years earlier and with no limit on character count]. For further information on Notes files, a feature of my work life in the '80s and '90s [when recreational notes files were stamped out by the bean counters], see here. )
</glossary>

...for the recent radio silence. Deadlines have been crowding together. Yesterday I  submitted my entry for the Stephen Spender Prize ("for Poetry in Translation" to give its old, useful name, now suppressed for unknown [and probably unfathomable] reasons). And this morning I had mail from the organisers of the John Dryden Translation Competition, announcing the latest in a series of Covid-related judging delays. So my cup will run over in September, when both sets of results are due, although the submissions were five months apart. (The also-rans  get to hear later but  a fellow can dream).

A word that has come into its own recently (Covid-assisted via the NHS app), and which I've been thinking about for some time, is PING.

<autobiographical_note>
In the late '80s I came across UNIX (an operating system) – or more specifically ULTRIX (the flavour of UNIX designed to run on DEC systems). I was not a heavy user of UNIX, but its online help was delivered by way of something called a MANPAGE(I imagine this was just an abbreviation for "manual pages" as they were really simple text files), and I had to understand UNIX enough to produce MANPAGEs and get them to display appropriately. So I found myself fairly close to the coining of a backronym that has now been in use in the computing world for nearly forty years; and I suspect it may have influenced the spread of a non-digital ...

<glossary>
(by which I mean "having nothing to do with computers"; but computers and IT people and their jargon are never far from modern business – and if one  IT person says to another "I'll ping you" [meaning "I'll test the network between our machines using the PING protocol"] it's not impossible that a computer virgin might have overheard it and assumed it was just a cool synonym for "make contact with"...

<tangent>
To take  another example of  technical jargon leaking into business-speak I remember my first sighting of "Can we take this offline?" – meaning "Let's discuss this later" – delivered by a besuited man [whose main use of IT was to use a batch-job...

<meta-tangent>
In the VMS world, a batch-job was a way of automating a repetitive  process
 </meta-tangent>

... {written by a tame engineer} to read his mail and print it all out every half hour]. Of course, he seldom got round to reading it, and the print room was consequently full of his arrangements to "do lunch". And this was in the days of fan-fold paper and line-printers, so we are talking serious pollution.
<tangent>

...) 

</glossary>

... homonym in the business world

PING was named,according to its writer, after  an analogy to his student work on sonar systems: 

From my point of view PING is not an acronym standing for Packet InterNet Grouper, it's a sonar analogy. 

Horse's mouth

 But a backronym was soon formed; according to  that source (who ought to know, having invented it). It was Packet InterNet Grouper. In Wikipedia's account, even the original word Grouper [sic] didn't survive: it is the Packet InterNet Groper. I have no idea what "Grouper" means in  this context; it might even be a typo for "Groper". But Groper strikes me as irrelevant, and pretty lame even for an IT-related backronym (a rich field, headed by SPAM).
<autobiographical_note>

 But having spent the afternoon dodging the showers...

<tangent>
(which reminds me of some Knowles juvenilia, probably dating from the time when I thought Cyril Fletcher  (of Odd Odes fame) was the Rat's Pyjamas:

Showers
Be they ne'er so scattered met
Are yet
As wet

</tangent>

...while deploying a lawn mower (or rotary cat-sh1t distributor) I must go and get on with Stuff.

b

The PS that "jes' grew"

PS 

Another of the reasons for my absence of late has been my entry to the John Dryden Translation Competition 2020 - 2021 , which is nearly done. I'd give you  a taste here, but rules is rules and

Entries must be the original work of the translator and must not, as a whole or in part, have been previously published or accepted for publication, including web or self-publication...

So I'll content myself with recounting a near miss...

<tangent>
Surely the expression should be "near hit". A miss is as good as a mile, but what I nearly did was hit. Still, ours not to reason why. If I followed every such quandary to its logical conclusion I'd he here all d... Is that the time?
</tangent>

...Pride goeth before a ... <something or other, not "fall", I'll have to look it up >.

In the piece I'm translating, the leading character's maiden aunt (God-fearing, pious, devout, living in  a house that's more like a chapel than a home) is praying a terço, whatever that is. Dictionaries were no help. Collins, unhelpfully, said :

This was only very slightly better than Google Translate's third (I say "slightly better" because Collins at least rules out the ordinal third.)

I turned to what I should have tried  first – a monolingual dictionary. And among the unhelpful third-related definitions it gave one religious meaning, tierce (one of the offices). Aha, I thought, that's what she was doing – saying tierce.

Smugly I looked in a published translation, to see what they'd made of it: "rosary". Huh, I thought, one up to me.

But a little voice in my head kept saying "But  tierce is a morning office" and morning didn't fit the context (a visit paid after a character had been to work). I hung, Ptolemaically, onto my wrong idea: the character visiting after work was so work-shy (this fitted the background) that he knocked off in mid-morning.

But luckily my "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic" church background rang a warning bell. Why had the published translator plucked "rosary" out of the air? The answer comes from the way a rosary works.. Apart from the few introductory beads, the circle is made up of five groups of ten beads.  Each bead represents a prayer.

But the sayer of the rosary isn't just mouthing (or minding) the words. They are meditating on one of three groups of five Mysteries: the Joyful Mysteries, like "The Finding in the Temple"...

<background>
The occasion when Jesus was being bar-mitzvah'd (or whatever they did in those days  –  anyway he was only 12, according to Luke), his parents left Jerusalem where they'd been celebrating the Passover, Jesus hung about talking High-minded stuff with the elders (as is the wont of 12-year-olds [the getting lost bit, not the high-minded discussion}) and when he was found he came out with a put-down that seemed to me, when I first heard the story, incredibly priggish:

Did you not know that I must be about my father's business?    

(That's the Douay version  – the one that springs most readily to the mind of the cradle-Catholic.)

If I'd given my mother that lip when I was 12 I would have expected short shrift (or at least a Hard Stare).  In his defence, the verb (in Jerome's Latin) was in the plural (nesciebatis), so he was being lippy but not necessarily misogynistic; he was replying to Mary though, in the manner typical of stepsons throughout the ages: 'That schmuck isn't my real father.' 

<reflection>

Still, it's not fair to hold it against him; the words were probably dreamed up by some unnamed patriarch.  That's the thing about the Bible, it's full of incredible misogyny, racism, manifest bias, and what-have-you, but there's always a justification in the small print. 
</reflection> 

</background>

 ... the Sorrowful Mysteries (like 'The Crucifixion') , and The Glorious Mysteries (like 'The Resurrection'). There are 5 of each, one for each of the groups of ten beads (which I used to be able to list,  but nearly got egg on my fave by conflating 'The Presentation in the Temple' with 'The Finding in the Temple'...

<parenthesis>

(separated by twelve years,  both  Joyful Mysteries though. 'The Presentation in the Temple' is notable for being the context of the Nunc Dimittis text. Simeon, who the baby was presented to, had a deal with Yer Man, not to die until he'd held the Messiah in his arms. 'Lord, now lettest thou  thy  servant  depart in peace according to they word' was a kosher way of saying 'OK, you've kept your word, I'm for the bone-yard.'
</parenthesis>

...; and there are three laps in a full rosary.. So that's what a terço is: ⅓ of a full rosary.

AOB

And it's destruction that Pride goes before:

Pride [goeth] before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. 

That's all for now; competition admin to do.

b

Update 2021.01.25.12:55 – Added PPS

PPS

The translation has been submitted now. Onwards [and I do mean onwards, Microsoft] and upwards. No rest for the ... <not that bad, really; we're none of us human>. Per ardua ad nauseam.

Up the Gunners

Writing here back in 2013, initially about "magazine", I moved on to 

Another perfectly innocent storage word from Arabic has been... bellicosified (don't bother looking that up; it means 'given a martial meaning' ). The word in question derives from what looks to me like a phrase in Arabic: dār as-şinā‘ah (maybe Arabic can create composite nouns by joining smaller words together –  as indeed English does: Etymonline tells me dār means 'house' and as-şinā‘ah means 'art/craft/skill' –  a rather up-market sort of 'workshop'; come to think of it, English has borrowed from French le mot juste, an 'atelier').  

This spawned various words in Italian and its many dialects. In standard Italian the word is darsena – 'wet dock'. Moving north, the Venetian equivalent was arsenal, which was applied to a complex of naval dockyards and armouries, the Arsenale di Venezia. Various other languages got their foot in the door and borrowed that word, but shorn of its peaceable storage-and-work-related meaning. It wasn't until some workers from the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich formed a football team ('The Gunners') that  swords were beaten into ploughshares and the word was rehabilitated.

So  the Venetian dialect has given us the word "arsenal". which referred originally to a particular complex of buildings devoted to war at sea but has come to be used to refer to any store of weaponry.

Venetian also gives us (and many other languages) the word "quarantine", mentioned in passing (I was talking about dozen at the time) here:

In French -aine is a suffix that can make any number approximate; in English, though, dozen is the only ...

<digression>
I was hoping that, in recognition of the fact that flowers are sold in 10s and 5s, the word dizen would evolve (French dixaine). Sadly. it hasn't happened.
<digression>

...such word we have; quarantine is related, but came via Italian quarantina giorni – the period that ships from plague-ridden countries had to wait in the offing [never thought I'd use that one, except in the song "Blow the Wind Southerly"] before putting in at 17TH-century Venice.

That reference to Venice agrees with the received etymological wisdom (Susie Dent mentioned it in a recent Radio Times). But more recently (here) I mentioned Dubrovnik as a possible locus for the coining – though the Venetian dialect would have been influential there at one time, as Dubrovnik was under Venetian rule at the time.

Another Venetian word that, like "arsenal" gave English a word with a general application based on a particular usage in Venice is that place where Shakespeare housed Shylock – in the ghetto:

The term was originally used for the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, as early as 1516, to describe the part of the city where Jews were restricted to live and thus segregated from other people.
Source

But when Elvis used those words "in the ghetto" referred to 'a cold and grey ...

<parenthesis>
(Come to think of it, it was probably gray)
</parenthesis>

... Chicago morn'. In fact, many cities now have ghettos.

Another legacy of Venetian will have to wait for an update. It's time for tea.

b 

Update – 2020.07.06.13:55: Added  PS and fixed date in first line. 

PS

And here it is:

Another word that has come to us from Venice is "gazette". Here's what Etymonline has to say:

gazette (n.)

"newspaper," c. 1600, from French gazette (16c.), from Italian gazzetta, Venetian dialectal gazeta "newspaper," also the name of a small copper coin, literally "little magpie," from gazza; applied to the monthly newspaper (gazeta de la novità) published in Venice by the government, either from its price or its association with the bird (typical of false chatter), or both. First used in English 1665 for the paper issued at Oxford, whither the court had fled from the plague.

The coin may have been so called for its marking; ...The general story of the origin of the word is broadly accepted, but there are many variations:...

That page goes on to give details, which are many and varied, but the common threads are the bird (although one of them adds the rather sniffy "but it does not appear on any of the oldest Venetian specimens preserved at Florence") and the idea of idle chatter (Twitter comes to mind, a little anachronistically)...

<tangent subj="translation">
Speaking of anachronism, I am still fuming at the award-winning World's Classics translation of Os Lusíadas which sidesteps a rather tricky translation point by ignoring the original and inventing a 'heavy anchor chain' on a sixteenth century caravel, when the anchor chain was not invented until the nineteenth century – when ships started getting too heavy for hemp hawsers. And even then, a ship as light as a caravel wouldn't...

<inline-PPS>
This made sense when I wrote it, but probably needs a bit of explanation. I'm entering for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, as mentioned in a recent post. Part of my preparation involved looking at another translation, which

• Won an international prize 
• Is rubbish

</inline-PPS> 

But I must let it go.
</tangent>

...England had just such a coin , the farthing (a quarter of an old penny, so a 960th of a pound, about 00.01 oops, correction: .1 new pence, but the bird was not a gazza (thieving or otherwise). It was a wren:

Update – 2020.07.07.09:55:  Added inline PPS.

Found in translation

In an early post I looked at the mistranslation of a single word that jumped out at me while I was listening to a Book of the Week. The word was "Romanesque" – used in a context that had nothing to do with architecture. It referred to President Mitterand, whose predilection for seeing himself as a character in a roman provides a strangely appropriate parallel with a fictional  character who shared the first four letters of his name: Walter Mitty. (The source of the mistranslation was well hidden, and is arguable; if you're interested, feel free: here.)

But the reason for picking on that one word  is clear,  given my interest in the process of translation. More recently though I've found another case of mistranslation, that doesn't make the same kind of sense unless David Baddiel (the single-word-mistranslation-hunter in this case) has a similar background to mine (which I doubt). Wikipedia may cast some light, though I'm not minded to spend much time on it.

The case was documented in an article brought to my attention by an accident (I was toying with the phrase freak accident, but thought better of it. "Freakish" is an accolade that I think is too easily attached to accidents. Freakish is the accident that unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls, say, and this Baddiel cutting was unearthed less dramatically in a stash of documents that referred not to the early days of Christianity but to an era that could be described as BHD (that is, before this blog started in late 2012).

<digression subject="'-eak' words in clichés">
I'm sure it's just an accident ('-eak' attributes becoming meaningless), but the latest Radio Times claims to have a "sneak preview" of a new Doctor Who series. The "sneak" bit added something once (when there was an unofficial and/or unsanctioned foretaste of some media event) but in this case there was nothing sneaky about  it. The PR department wanted the preview to appear. What's unsanctioned about that?
<digression>

The one word (well two if you want to be pedantic) was Careers Officer. A Baddiel novel used this expression, and it was rendered in the German translation as 'Reintegration into the Working Process Responsible Person'. (the "original" German was Wiedereingliederung-in-den-Arbeits-Prozeß-Betruer  – as opposed to the more predictable [not to say less RSI-inducing] Karriereoffizier). Baddiel met the German translator at some publishing shindig and asked why she had done this. The answer was, in my translation,

'Because I felt like making up a word, regardless of your intentions. I thought it'd be cool.'

In an update to an old post about local colour, I mentioned a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and wondered whether the word Rolleiflex had survived in the translation. In a later update I added:

 The good news is that it [HD 2019: the translation] has kept the Rolleiflex. The bad news is that it has introduced an irrelevant bit of cleverness:

I took your picture with my trusty Rolleiflex
And now all I have developed is a complex

Why can't translators just
GET OUT OF THE FRIGGING WAY ?

Five years earlier, if I'd read that edition of The Times, I could have cited yet another instance of overweening  translatorrhoea.

That's enough for today. In a later post I mean to look at the rest of this stash  of early-21st-century cuttings – a number of pieces from the Ben Mcintyre Last Word column. Now though I must go and do a bit of note-bashing for our carol concert: 14 December, 6.00 pm, All Saints', Wokingham.

b

He saw that it was good|bad|neither good nor bad

I didn't know – until I heard Simon Schama's excellent Schama on Blake on Radio 4 the other day – that Blake was a poet only in his spare time.

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE type="Introduction">
My introduction to William Blake, the poet, was a whole-class detention (back when teachers could do that sort of thing) during which we were required to learn The Tyger by heart. Ma Griffiths (the teacher, so dubbed because she insisted on being addressed as "Ma'am") can't have tested us very stringently, as only the first 4 lines  stuck – and even then I have to check whether the symmetry is fearless or fearful. And I have vague structural (gist) memories: the second stanza is a series of questions asking what...?;  the last revisits the first (though how accurately I don't know).

<inline_PS>
I underestimated the power of that rote learning. Although this memory was not strong enough to interfere with my singing in the 2019 Christmas concert, it's strong enough to make me expect the words of Rutter's Star Carol 'See the star, shining bright' to continue 'In the forests of the night'.
</inline_PS>

</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>

The programme was tied to an exhibition at Tate Britain

With over 300 original works, including his watercolours, paintings and prints, this is the largest show of Blake’s work for almost 20 years. It will rediscover him as a visual artist for the 21st century. 

More here

I'm not sure what "rediscover[ing] him as an artist for the 21st century" involves exactly, but I mean to find out.

One of Blake's most famous artistic works  is Europe, a prophecy, which Wikipedia uses to illustrate its entry  on Haydn's Creation (I'm not sure why...

<CHOICE_OF_ILLUSTRATION>

Newton by William Blake -
The William Blake Archive, Public Domain,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=198284

(in my view his work Newton would have been  more appropriate. Wikipedia, like Schama, describes the implement he is wielding as "compasses", but I'm not so sure. Compasses, as any schoolchild knows, are used in construction. But in this case I think what we can see are dividers (used to measure). A mighty creator would have used compasses.

Europe, a Prophecy - The William Blake Archive, Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27197029,

This  puny geometer, though, is just measuring. Blake‘s "Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death." suggests that he wasn't a fan of Newton and his  ilk.) 

I don't see what makes  Europe, a Prophecy relevant to The Creation. The dividers are still there, but the geometer is older.  Did Blake know something we don't?

</CHOICE_OF_ILLUSTRATION>

... though).

<COINCIDENCE> 

On 20 November 2010 at Wellington College Newsome Sports Hall Wokingham Choral Society last sang Haydn's Creation. Reading Chronicle's review called it "this most satisfying evening". The Wokingham Times reported possible misgivings about the venue, but in the end said

While it is true that there was a slight vibration in some of the louder sections, the performance was so well prepared and polished that this did not interfere with the power of the music.

Fortunately,  when the choir sings this marvellous piece again (just under 9 years later, on 16 November 2019) it will be at the University of Reading's Great Hall – with better acoustics and nearer to home. 

And the relevance of this – albeit tenuous and coincidental (hallmark of Harmless Drudgery, the "snapper up of unconsidered trifles") is that the tenor soloist at the concert will be "William Blake". 

<TEXTUAL_INFO type="plug"> 

For further  details on Haydn's  score for The Creation  (particularly the translation), if you're  feeling strong, you could  read this (a 68 page document, though only the first 55 are the  main text). You might prefer, though, to come to James Morley Potter's free introductory talk at 6.30 pm on the day of the performance.

</TEXTUAL_INFO>

</COINCIDENCE>

b

Update: 2019.11.12.15:30 – Added PS

PS

Correction: the tenor at our Creation concert next Saturday will not be "William Blake" (as originally announced). The tenor will be the young Dutch soloist Stefan Kennedy.

Update: 2020.01.02.15:00 – Added inline PPS.

It ain't over...

 ... till the fa... (Come to think of it, why did the coiner of that adage assume that prima donnas (whose big song tended to end the show) had to be fat; Brünnhilde maybe, but not Tosca...) ...till the fat lady sings

My inbox caught a whiff of musical history  last week:

Liszt began work on an Italian opera in 1845. He started composing in 1850 but abandoned the project after completing the first act. The score — written largely in shorthand — was known to only a small number of Liszt scholars who concluded that it could never be performed because the material was incomplete and largely indecipherable. [HD as Shaw (??*) said, it was not so much weighed in the balance and found wanting as found difficult and not tried at all.]

David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at Cambridge University, saw it differently, and spent three years deciphering the forgotten 115-page manuscript, decoding Liszt’s notes and supplying a 20-bar finale. The result is the complete first act of Sardanapalo, Liszt’s only mature opera, based on Lord Byron’s Assyrian tragedy of 1821, Sardanapalus.
Source

I'm not sure why this became newsworthy on 19 March 2019, as the same article goes on to say

Between April 2017 – July 2018 Dr Trippett orchestrated the opera according to Liszt’s cues...

<digression>
HD: I DO hate this pleonastic use of "between" and  "–" , but don't let my bugbears interfere with your understanding of something that, admittedly, is perfectly clear. And while we're here, should that be sic – for clues?
</digression>

...based on the scores on Liszt’s desk during the 1850s. 
Source

In a post on The Conversation on 11 February 2019 Dr Trippett wrote

I am a musicologist and so my interest is primarily in musical sketches. These can pose challenges of presentation that scraps of poetry or incomplete drawings do not. However beguiling incomplete art may be, what are we to do with unfinished music?

And his answer to that question is implied by the title of the piece:

Editing unfinished music by a great composer is controversial – but sometimes it needs to be done

And as Colonel Pickering might have said "He did it".

Notes from a New Enterprise

When this was posted, 29 March was due to be a date that would live in infamy, but that's changed; though HMG's attitude to the revocation of Article 50 is implied by their choice of a date for a petition-inspired debate: April Fools' Day. And if you can't make sense of this paragraph you've had the good fortune to avoid the three years of unseemly wrangling that will perhaps come to be known as Cameron's Folly.

Anyway, that gives me 3 and a bit months to put my money where my mouth is. It's about 40 years since I did any serious translating, and we've all passed a lot of water since then.

So far I've made a start – chosen my author (Camões, in a nod to former glories ...

<autobiographical_note>
[last translation I did won the Camões Award, back in the days when arts funding was less pitiful than it is now; the award has been discontinued]. 

<inline_PS>
Not to be confused with the Camões Prize, first awarded in 1989 and awarded annually thereafter by the Portuguese Direcção-Geral do Livro e das Bibliotecas and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. The Camões Award was made by the Luso-Brazilian Society, Canning House, and I submitted my entry in 1974.
<-inline_PS>

</autobiographical_note>

...) and chosen my extract (the Rules say "translate a poem" but Os Lusíadas runs to nearly 300 pages in the original Portuguese; that's not the original original, which was first published in 1572). More anon, when the weather is less inviting...

b

Update: 2019.04.01.10:45 – Added footnote,  added to <inline_PS>, and added PPS.

*
Regardless of the date of this update, I really got it wrong; well, right era, wrong opinionated ideologue. It was Chesterton who wrote "The Christian ideal... [HD And if I'd remembered this bit of context I'd have had a better chance of placing the source.  Added to this, the Colonel Pickering thought brought Shaw to mind] ...has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."

PPS
Stop Press. My entry for the Stephen Spender Prize has met choppy  waters (quite appropriately,  given  the poem's subject matter: voyages of discovery). The Conditions of entry call for "a commentary of not more than 300 words", and – given that  Os Lusíadas was published when Shakespeare was still  a schoolboy – there are single phrases in it that would be quite meaningless to a 21st century English  reader without more than 300 words of explanation.

Update: 2019.07.01.13:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS
All is – if not well, exactly – at least settled. I chose another passage, less footnote-iferous, and submitted that. But the more interesting passage (discussed a few posts later than this one, with title Heaven, I'm in Heaven) wouldn't accept its suppression; so eventually I made a second submission (with a second entry fee – but hey, you're only old once).

Frites or crêpes? Who cares?

A few days ago the usually unruffled calm of French grammar was rudely disturbed by a pair of teachers in Belgium, who wanted a change:

Currently, the rule is that the past participle of a verb does not agree with the direct object of a sentence if it comes after it, but it does when the object comes before the participle.

So for instance, in the sentence j'ai mangé des frites (I ate chips), mangé remains the same. But in the sentence les frites que j'ai mangées (the chips that I have eaten), the participle agrees with the word chips, which is feminine and plural.

...The rule was imported from Italy by pedants in the 16th Century and is being dropped in everyday use, the pair argue.

BBC source

There are three things about the original Libération article  that struck me:

• Those Italian pedants in the 16th Century had a name, and it started with only one:
  

  Au XVI^e siècle, Clément Marot, constatant le même phénomène en italien, en fait la promotion à l’aide d’un joli poème, ce qui fera dire à Voltaire : «Il a ramené deux choses d’Italie : la vérole [HD: smallpox] et l’accord du participe passé. Je pense que c’est le deuxième qui a fait le plus de ravages [HD: I think the latter did the most damage]».

  This is reminiscent of the history of English, which is littered with pedantic attempts at "tidying up" by introducing rules that cause more trouble than they solve.
   
• The "80 hours of teaching time" claim looks very odd, not to say iffy. I suspect some strange extrapolation of Wallonia's version of OFSTED accounting methods. Before anyone believes this, or worse still acts on it, I recommend a closer inspection of this figure. (On a related topic, I wonder what proof there is of the "being dropped in everyday usage" claim. It seems credible, and should be easy enough to prove, but I'd be happier not relying on what a couple of Belgian teachers ARGUE [I wonder what universe the BBC plucked that verb out of]).
  
  
• The example has changed. This is not a serious counter argument; indeed, it's just not a counter-argument – simply an object of passing interest. The writer of the BBC article seems to have decided that frites was a more telling example than crêpes:
  

  «Employé avec l’auxiliaire avoir, le participe passé s’accorde en genre et en nombre avec le complément d’objet direct quand celui-ci le précède (les crêpes que j’ai mangées). Mais si le complément suit le participe, il reste invariable (j’ai mangé les crêpes).» [HD: my underline, just to make navigation a bit easier.]
  

This sparked off an irrelevant memory:

<autobiographical_note date="1968">
After my O-levels [HD: fore-runner of GCSEs] I went hitch-hiking around Europe with a friend. When we arrived outside Paris (at the Auberge de Jeunesse in the unpromisingly-named Châtenay-Malabry [surely bon abri would have been a more attractive-sounding name]), we ate from a stall that sold crêpes. The crêperie was set up a bit like a fish-and chip stall. But this apparent similarity was  a faux-ami. The bottle on the counter, tipped with a pouring spout, was not for free use of the customer.

<meta_digression\>
While I'm on the subect of "false friends", an ongoing cycle repair has alerted me to fact that rubber solution is not solution de caoutchouc but dissolution de caoutchouc; not exactly a false friend, but something that's just not friendly at all.
</meta_digression\>

I ordered and paid for a crêpe and reached for a bottle of Grand Marnier, standing on the counter like a vinegar bottle in a fish and chip stall. The stall-holder was not amused, and gave me an earful. She no doubt agreed with de Gaulle, who for some years had remained obdurate about keeping la perfide Albion out of the EEC.
</autobiographical_note>

I'm glad that the English have avoided this sort of wrangling by the simple expedient of not having a supreme arbiter of correctness. If the rule is being used in practice less and less, that will be it. The Académie (or some more relevant body, as the Académie doesn't really do syntax) can keep its finger in the dyke if it likes, but it won't have much bearing on the linguistic facts.  We are left with a twale twold by a twidiot:

The BBC article translates this: "why not also drop the offside rule in football? That way ... schoolchildren will be able to spell phonetically and football players will be able to play with their hands.

I'm not sure about the "that way", but la règle du hors-jeu will make a useful new entry in my Vocab. Book.

b

Taking the cake

A proverb that bothered my younger mind has come to unwonted prominence, in the fertile soil provided by the context of Brexit. And recently a Prospect blog written by Professor Simon Horobin cast some light on this:

The well-worn proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it” is enjoying something of a revival in the heated exchanges over Brexit. Ever since Boris Johnson characterised his policy on cake as “pro having it and pro eating it too,” Brussels has sought to alert the British negotiators to the impossibility of adopting such an attitude.

In October 2016, European Council president Donald Tusk, taking a rather literal approach to the aphorism, called upon proponents of the ‘cake philosophy’ to carry out a scientific experiment: “Buy a cake, eat it, and see if it is still there on the plate.”

A month later a Tory MP caused a certain amount of embarrassment when, emerging from a Downing Street briefing, his handwritten notes were photographed in the barefaced admission “What’s the model? Have your cake and eat it.” 

<advanced_riposte>
And NO, the "?" doesn't absolve the miscreant. The question  is “What’s the model?...". The answer is "...Have your cake and eat it.”
</advanced_riposte>

My impression is that this slip gave rise to the neologism cakeism, used strictly in the context of Brexit.

Horobin's blog explains the source of the confusion mentioned in my first sentence:

The reason for the confusion is that the original form of the phrase has been reversed in its modern incarnation. Here it is in a 16th-century book of proverbs: “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?” The idea, then, is that once you have eaten your cake, you can no longer continue to possess it; that is, sometimes you are forced to choose between two irreconcilable options.

In France, the approximately equivalent idiom is vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre which I have seen translated as “to want the butter and the money from the butter”  – confusingly. What does "from the butter" mean? (I suspect the intervention of an abused dictionary, as 'du' can (sometimes) mean 'from [the]'). But this is the translation that Professor Horobin uses, although I imagine he's not the original dictionary-abuser – rather that he knows French and overlooked the inadequacy of the translation.

What English does for this sort of "de" is that it simply prepends the beneficiary/recipient: e.g. "dinner money", "fag packet" ... L'argent du beurre is "the butter money" or, if you like, "the money reserved/designated/intended... to pay for the butter", or, more briefly (but rather clumsily), "the money for the butter".  For, at  a push, but not From ". The money from the butter" could be used if somebody were selling the butter.

Which brings us to the afterthought sometimes added to intensify Vouloir le beurre et l'argent du beurre ...: et le sourire de la crémière. The crémière does perhaps collect "the money from the butter". This intensifier was presumably the source  of  the Luxembourg Prime Minister's: “They want to have their cake, eat, and get a smile from the baker.”

<hat_tip>
This is a pretty impressive bit of linguistic pyrotechnics  – not so much L1-interference  as L1-interpretation or just L1-riffing; he even adds "get" where the French model has no verb, and then changes the supplier appropriately. And all in a second (or even possibly third) language.
</hat_tip>

Another culinary metaphor to receive a new lease of life from Brexit is cherry-picking. This can be understood in one of two ways: either picking dessert cherries from a mixed fruit-bowl (not a way I've ever seen cherries served),  or – greedily and selfishly – picking a glacé cherry from the top of a bun/cake,  and thus unknowingly but carelessly marking the residual carbs as tainted. Or maybe, now I think of  it, the image evokes someone viewing a bowl of cherries and picking the ripest.

I'm not sure I buy everything Professor Horobin says. For example, I don't think even he believes it when he says 'The belief that the mouth was designed principally for its consumption is suggested by the slang term “cake-hole.”'. "Designed principally"...? Does he know what principally means?   But his blog is worth a read. And when he points to "with a cherry on top" as a possible intensifier to "the icing on the cake" I'm reminded of that crémière (whose smile is used to intensify the beurre metaphor).

b

PS: A couple of clues:

• Championship is moreish in a sense. (8)
• Orchestral manœuvres after withdrawal of leftist extremists before Part Three finale, Nijinsky, for example. (9)

A participle is not a particle

Play. That‘s what it means:  

Press this to make the thing play. 

Similarly, Pause:

Press this to make the thing pause.

That's the way  it's been since the dawn of ti... technology (the 20th-century sort, that is: specifically, audio equipment). But globalization has undermined these comfortable certainties.

I have an MP3 player, characterized by the typical uselessness of its user "manual" (which is at least stapled together in the form of a book, better than the many self-styled "manuals" I've had to grapple with – often just a single sheet of A4). Like many bits of technical wizardry, it seems to have been generated by engineers who felt that their brainchild needed no written support.

<autobiographical_note>
Many an engineer thinks this, mutatis mutandis. I remember a conversation I had  with a Software Engineer more than 30 years ago, shortly after I started work with the Digital Equipment Corporation as a Technical Editor. He was trying to work out just what Technical Writers did (at the time I was at one remove from that, but if he could only get to grips with what Writers did he could then see what I did).  I  said things about making information clear and consistent and with repetition only when appropriate, and he raised an eyebrow and said "What, like the comments we put in our code?"

Self-documenting software has long been the Holy Grail of Software  Engineers, but the final and most insuperable obstacle is the ego of the creator: 

My stuff is self-evidently Good.

</autobiographical_note>

But this MP3 player had more than the lack of documentation to overcome; and  it wasn't just the infelicity of  the  "translation". Its problem is incorporated into the GUI ...

<buzzword>
That's Graphic User Interface. Most of us see them  regularly on the screens of PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The engineer who designed it may well not have known he (she? – I wonder whether female engineers are as rare in China [that's where it's from] as they are in the West) was using one at all. But the device has functions, and controlling those functions involves manipulating icons. So there's a GUI.
</buzzword>

...itself.

Which brings us to those particles (mentioned in my subject-line). Chinese has a funny way with verbs. It doesn't inflect  them. But it achieves a fully nuanced set of what I can only metaphorically describe as "verb forms" (more accurately, syntactical constructs that give context to verbal ideas). And one of the syntactical devices Chinese languages use is particles. So whereas most Western languages have participles, Chinese doesn't. Particle is a near-miss, orthographically, but unrelated.

So there's no one-word translation of Playing or of Paused – which, confusingly, are what those "universal" music-playing symbols mean on my MP3 player: the little right-pointing triangle means Playing (that is, the precise opposite* of Play), and the middle-less "H" means Paused (again, the precise opposite* of what it seems to promise). And it's specifically (usually, impossibly) a one-word translation that a user of a second language wants.

"One-word translation" – so often a mythical beast, but still believed in by so many.

b

PS: A couple more clues:

• Vegan embracing angry (upset) one of less extreme practise (10)
  
• The end of a tournament to waste away (7)
  

Update: 2018.02.13.16:10 – Added footnote.

*This phrase is open to misinterpretation. Playing is not  the opposite of Play in the same  way that black is the opposite of white, or true is the opposite of false. In this context I just mean Making it start as the opposite of  Making it pause.

Update: 2018.08.15.16:00 – Added PPS

The answers to those clues: VEGETARIAN ,  ATROPHY

Update: 2019.01.40.08:55 – Added PPPS

Just when you thought this post was finished, I've noticed another misconstruing, in this player's GUI, of a participle. It has a function that lets you lock the dial; after you've done it (that is, when it's locked) the display shows a little locked padlock. Fair enough.  But the text tells a different story: LOCK, it says. Similarly, when you have unlocked it there's a picture of an opened padlock. Again, fair enough. But the caption says UNLOCK.

Make Hay while the author signs

In Spring an old man's fancy turns to books.

According to Heinrich Wallau, writing in The Catholic Encyclopedia:

Gutenberg was the son of Friele (Friedrich) Gänsfleisch and Else Wyrich. His cognomen was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors "zu Laden, zu Gutenberg". The house of Gänsfleisch was one of the patrician families of the town, tracing its lineage back to the thirteenth century."

<autobiographical_note theme="Wikipedia strikes again">
Ever since 2009, when I saw a Stephen Fry documentary about Gutenberg (that link is to iPlayer's TOUGH BANANAS page – the programme is no longer available) I have wondered about the status of Gänsfleisch. Was his name Gutenberg or was it Gänsfleisch? And I wondered why, when Fry touched a Gutenberg Bible and said he had gooseflesh, he didn't exploit the pun (Gänsfleisch means gooseflesh).

A partial answer (the surname thing, not Fry's self-denial [perhaps explained by the lamentable brevity of the mini-series – I wonder what other gems were swept up from the cutting-room floor]) comes from an examination of Wikipedia's source

His surname [my emphasis] was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors ...

Wallau's word was cognomen. Johannes was as much Johannes Gutenberg as Leonard Woolf was Leonard Hogarth  (whose business just took its name from Hogarth House). I imagine the wikipedioscribe saw cognomen, wondered what it meant and looked in some benighted dictionary that went for tight-lipped and simplistic one-word "equivalences" such as Dictionary.com's

 

... without bothering to read the rest of the definition.
</autobiographical_note>

I have a note that "Gutenberg pre-sold  in Mainz"; I have no source for that snippet, but he was at least born in Mainz – so-called not because of its nearness to the Main river, but still the coincidence is pleasing). Today the hub of the universe, in the matter of pre-sales of books, is the Book Fair at Frankfurt am Main the Frankfurter Buchmesse).

<digression>
Maybe this week's Book of the Week was sold there (that is non-German book rights). It bears all the hallmarks of a tolerable but not quite good enough translation, with near-miss malapropisms (like consistent for constant [on Monday]; today's was "war-horses need to be attuned [sic] to gunfire" – not habituated/accustomed/inured...?)

And another sign of translation rights having been pre-sold is this sort of illustration...

...or quotes such as this:

...Massey-Ferguson?

Sometimes translation is not really possible; some texts need to be localized as well. And international book fairs such as "Frankfurt" (to use the jargon of the publishing business) do their best to ignore this. It's in the interests of the Foreign Rights Seller to say that everything will be hunky-dory, and leave it to the poor translator to make a fist of it.
</digression>

Ah well. I have more to say but DIY to do. Stay tuned.

b

PS And here's a clue:

• Sounds like it calls for retreads all round? Too late for that. (10)
  

Update: 2017.06.02.16:45 – Added afterthought.^PPS

A recent televising of a Maigret story reminded me of the name Quai des Orfêvres – the legendary (not to say inaccurate [but cp "Scotland Yard"]) address of the Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris . When I first  read Simenon, I just let the address wash over me: Orfêvres was a name, tout sec.

But it slowly seeped into my understanding of the word that it was built from or (of course) and fèvre; to quote the French Wikipedia page 'ancien terme désignant un ouvrier travaillant le fer...'. In other words, Orfêvres means GOLDSMITHS. 

<linguistic_note> 
But why not  Fêvres d'Or? I don't know, having cunningly avoided the History of French paper for reasons possibly explained elsewhere in this blog, but boiling down to sloth on my part...

<rant>
(and I do wish more speakers of English would observe the distinction between on the part of  and on behalf of – even the BBC does it [with notable, not to say noble, exceptions]. It's got so that I am starting to doubt myself. Collins suckered me into a sense of self-righteousness with this:

But then they hit me with the sucker punch:

Oh well: yet another  solecism that I shall forever avoid but increasingly hear.
</rant>

... but I expect it's something to do with the Strassbourg oaths, discussed elsewhere (with an important proviso here) which divided France between languages that put the defining word first (Neuchâtel) and that put it second (Châteauneuf).
</linguistic_note> 

The original users of that wharf, at one time home to La Police Judiciaire, were Goldsmiths.

Finally. another snippet from Lingo, which ends each chapter with a word that has no direct "equivalent" in English. The chapter on Icelandic ends with this: Jólabókaflóð. Erm...

I'm sensing a whiff of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. I concede that English has no one-word equivalent, but in what sense is this "one word" (except in the trivial orthographic sense that it has what Primary school teachers used to call a fingerspace at each end [with obvious exceptions for punctuation marks])? If I were to say "Yule book flood", that would be  a phonological word. So what's the big deal? The multifaceted Victorian literato/diplomat Eça de Queiroz noticed this flood (tanto livro!) in the (as yet) untranslated Cartas de Inglaterra (a sort of Letter[s] from America, but written by a Portuguese observer, writing for a Portuguese newspaper, and based in England.).

Update: 2017.06.02.21:45 – Added PPS

PPS What has this to do with the price of fish? you may well ask. Well earlier this week I heard an interview with Jane Goodall, whose observation of chimps "fishing" for termites with a stripped rod showed that tool-making was not a specifically human activity. The pre-existing belief  was epitomized (that‘s one for the etymologists) in the book Homo faber , and it was the Latin faber (the root of fèvre) that brought the Maigret memory to mind. Though this seems madness yet there is method in‘t.

Update: 2017.06.26.20:55 – Added PPPS

PPPS That crossword clue answer: RETIREMENT. And here‘s another:

• If opened, cynical deal with DUP‘s a way of guaranteeing this. (10,3,6)

Update: 2017.12.20.21:05 – The answer: CONFIDENCE AND SUPPLY

Snowflakes and avalanches

In my days of thinly-disguised fascism I used to defend Latin in schools (which I still believe would be a good idea, by the way) by saying 'If what you think is a thought can't be expressed in Latin, it's not a thought.' I admit that this was a bit priggish, and it implied that logicality was a particular characteristic of Latin – a pretty silly implication. It's a not uncommon one, though – it rears its insidious head with respect to various languages; I've heard it said not only of Latin, but of French, of German... even of English.

But it hides a general truth about translation – that in order to translate meaningfully you have to grasp a text's meaning...

<autobiographical_note>
One of my few forays into  the realm of professional  translation (by which I mean I got paid for it, as opposed to having any professional training or standards or ethics or any of that good stuff) involved an article about aneurysms and arterio-venous fistulae, and I spent more time in a medical library than in a more general library with a technical Portuguese dictionary in front of me (this was in the mid-'70s, and the association of libraries with computers was yet to be made).
</autobiographical_note>

....(in a language possibly uniquely adapted to one area of interest), which makes it harder to translate into a language that is not similarly endowed. So it can be tempting to overlook or even ignore bits of sense

The translatability of Donald Trump's ravings has been in the news of late, in a way that I find unsurprising at best, and at worst  a non-issue flagged up by self-regarding elitists. Of course he's hard to translate; so was – to cite a more UK-based politician – John (now Lord) Prescott, of whom Simon Hoggart famously wrote

'Every time Prescott opens his mouth, it's like someone has flipped open his head and stuck in an egg whisk.'

Come to that, many politicians and off-the-cuff public speakers speak nonsense. Speaking nonsense is something that happens more and more in an increasingly unreflective world dominated by rolling news and its inevitable bastard offspring fake news (alias LIES).

On the subject of the Trump campaign, the word snowflake, used as an insult to the liberal intelligentsia (and anyone else with two brain-cells to rub together), easily disturbed and slipping 'in a moment out of life' has recently become popular. It is analogous to the rather more traditional 'hot-house plant'.

But the thing about snowflakes is that when they mount up and reach a tipping-point (or, more relevantly, a sliding-point) they start an avalanche. And that point is, we are told by 38 degrees – though I'm not sure it's as simple as that – the name of what Wikipedia calls

a British not-for-profit political-activism organisation. It describes itself as "progressive" and claims to "campaign for fairness, defend rights, promote peace, preserve the planet and deepen democracy in the UK".^[2] In October 2013, it was reported to claim 1.9 million UK members.^{[3][needs update]}

It goes on

38 Degrees takes its name from the critical angle at which the incidence of a human-triggered avalanche is greatest [THAT sounds more like it, though they give as a reference the same simplistic wording as the 38 degrees website gives –

the angle at which snowflakes come together to form an avalanche – together we're unstoppable

] Ah well, their hearts are  in the right place. I'm keeping my head down for the next four years – the Trump era (British English /i:rǝ/, and in American English – not without irony – /ɛrǝ/). See you on the other side, Gaia volente.



PS And here's a clue:

• Invalid given wrong sort of IUD is like a cup-cake (10) 

Update: 2017.06.21. 16:40 – The answer: INDIVIDUAL

Of crooks and crosiers

If you visited Iceland and asked someone what they called the smelling organ in the middle of their face, they'd tell you, nev. In Japan, it's hana. To Sar speakers in southern Chad it's kon, and among the Zuni tribe of the southwestern United States. it's noli. In fact, you could go to more than 1,400 places around the world, question speakers of more than 1,400 different languages, and hear 1,400 words that contain the sound "n." But all of them mean the same thing: nose.

So said the Washington Post last September.

Well   G O S H ... Given that N is the nasal consonant par excellence (if it's possible to achieve excellence in nasality. There are others, but N is the granddaddy of them all)...

<further_explanation type="egg-sucking for grannies">
Put the tip of your tongue behind your teeth and jam the body of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, then make a speech-sound. It'll come out of your nose and be something like [n]. That's what a nasal consonant is – not necessarily [n], that is, but a consonant formed by releasing air down the nose.
</further_explanation> 

... it seems to me that the question should be Out of 7,000 languages in the world, why do only 20% of them include a nasal? Surely it's just contrary NOT to include one? (Natural languages aren't invented; they evolve. And whatever mixture of sounds and gestures is involved in referring unambiguously to a nose, a nasal consonant is the first thing one would expect.)

Morten Christiansen, author of the paper that occasioned that article was on Inside Science last week, and he gave another body-part example: in languages that have a word for breast, many have the sound [m] in its name. I found this as surprising as the nose example: that is, nugatorily. Take a tube (a length of plastic drainpipe would be ideal) and make the  noise you make when the doctor tells you to 'Say "Ah"' – a continuous noise – down it. Then shut-and-open the free end of the tube, imitating a brass player with a mute. That's the noise a baby makes: ma. It would be surprising if words for mammary in natural languages FAILED to include the sound [m].

But as the Professor says at the end of that interview, there's something going on but we don't know what (that's not verbatim, but it gives the gist: the interview occupies the last 5 minutes of the end of that programme). The examples I've given are cherry-picked for literary effect (alias "cheap laughs"). There's more to this than meets the...er...ear, and while some of it can be explained with reference to articulatory physics there is much that can't be. By chance, I have been thinking about the not unrelated phonesthesia (first discussed here), which is due for a revisit.

Tai Chi, as so often, started the hare. My teacher often refers to what I hear as "the croix" (which she often explains by referring to the inguinal crease*). I make my francophone assumption by analogy with other linguistic relics of France's imperial presence in the far east, such as the name for a Chinese (ritually important) pony-tail  – the queue. But maybe, I've since thought, it's a native Chinese word that happens to share the crucial sound..

<autobiographical_note>
This sparked off a not entirely irrelevant memory of a conversation I had about 5 years ago with a fellow chorister  – a German national, but with impeccable English; impeccable, but not up to the term "cruciate ligament". She pointed to her knee and used the word she knew – Kreuzband. Although my German was immeasurably inferior to her English, I could translate (or at least make a pretty secure educated guess) on the basis of the /kr/ sound.

<meta_digression>
The title of this post cheats a bit. The words crook and crosier do share a reference to what Etymonline calls

perhaps related to a widespread group of Germanic kr- words meaning "bent, hooked". 

Presumably crochet, crouchback, and hundreds of other /kr/ words share this provenance; even, by a more indirect root, words like crotchet (that's an American quarter-note), half of which in French is une croche (the French care more about the image – a quaver looks much more hook-y than a crotchet). This recalls.... no, no time.

Anyway, cheating. The crosier is shaped like a crook not because of phonological relatedness but because it's symbolic of the role of the carrier as a pastor – it's interesting how much Christian imagery refers to sheep and shepherds: pastor (related to pasture), "Worthy is the lamb that was slain", "I am the Good Shepherd", "feed my lambs"... even the word congregation is derived ultimately from the Latin for flock: grex, -gis.
</meta_digression>

</autobiographical_note>

Anyway, that's enough for now. I have some serious word-bashing to do.

b


PS: A couple of clues:

• Tangled thread leads to scarcity (6)
• International security force tucked in to make a digression (11)

Update: 2016.11.23.22:00 – Added footnote and PPS.

* Investigation of inguinal crease will lead you into the sort of web-site that appeals to young men. who hanker after a six-pack, rather than to an old man with a Party Four.

PPS: And another clue – 

• Show about the Spanish  – bit rude. (10)

Update 2017.01.20.11:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS: The answers: DEARTH. INTERPOLATE. and ... no, can't do it! [got it: INDELICATE].

Update 2017.01.22.13:45 – Corrected PPPS.

Update 2018.06.14.09:45 – A few typo-fixes..

Long time no screed

See what I did there?

I was thinking last week about Maundy Money, and of course its derivation – the derivation not just of the word Maundy but of the ceremony itself (the distribution of largesse [well, not that LARGE]). What was given  out at the ur-ceremony was not so much largesse as a service.

The One True Church commemorates this in The Washing of the Feet.

<autobiographical_note theme="Been there, done that">
At the service on Maundy Thurday

<digression>
THINKS: must look up the other day names: I can do Easter Sunday, Holy Saturday, Good Friday, Maundy Thursday OK, and I think it's Spy Wednesday (ridiculous, really, as if Judas was a Fifth Columnist rather than a flawed bloke – as was Peter in the same story); but I have a feeling there are epithets for Monday and Tuesday too.
<digression>

The celebrant (priest numero uno, in my case Father Abbot) re-enacts Christ‘s emblematic washing of the apostles' feet – except that they were really dirty after a typical dusty Palestinian...

<digression>
Always with the dust,  already. In Saturday‘s concert we sing, in Laudate Pueri, about the Lord de stercore erigens pauperem, "translated" as "raising up the poor from the dust". But dust was the least of your worries in ancient Palestine; stercus means something a lot more organic than dust: dung, says Etymonline under scatology. (And if you think you've detected metathesis there – see Letters playing leapfrog [and elsewhere] – you're learning)
</digression>

... day in sandals, rather than still smarting from Auntie Katy‘s attentions with nail brush and pumice stone (as the part of the apostles was played by a dozen altar boys).<autobiographical_note> 

Mandatum novum do vobis, ("I give you a new commandment...") said Christ (according to the Vulgate).

French made this order mandé, and that nasalized a became in English aun.* At least, that was the story we were given at the time. In later years I have to admit that I suspected a trace of pious folk etymology – as with the Doomsday Book (which I long believed came from Domus Dei, an inventory of newly Christianized Britain (not that Christianity hadn't been around for several centuries – it's just that William was a True Believer): the House of God. Plausible, but rubbish).

So I did a bit of checking, and found that Maundy is related to  mandé:

          Maundy Thursday 

Thursday before Easter, mid-15c., from Middle English maunde "the Last Supper," also "ceremony of washing the feet," from Old French mandé, from Latin mandatum "commandment" (see mandate)...

(Courtesy of Etymonline as usual, with no apology for recourse to the usual source; I can't afford an OED subscription. But in case you want another reference, they're easy enough to find. Here's one, for example or  here, or ...)

And while we're on the subject of the etymology of Easter words, try this. Fancy simnel cake being related to semolina (spot the phonological change process: hint – look at the consonants in simnel/semolina).

But I must go and prepare for the Big Day. –

b

PS: a couple more clues:

• Nothing but going over the same ground again and again – dull as ditch-water,
  for example. (12)
• Onset of season after climate change makes a climber. (8)

Update 2016.04.04.17:35 – Added link to review.

PPS – And here's a review of last Saturday's concert.

Update 2016.04.19.11:00 – Added footnote:

* Looking for something else (as ever) I just saw this confirmation of the "French -an => English -aun" spelling on David Crystal's blog:

 ...France is usually spelled France in the First Folio, but it is spelled Fraunce when the French are speaking (suggesting a pronunciation of 'frawnce'). Henry is also given this spelling when he is trying to speak French to Kate - and he has it just once when he is speaking English. 

Update 2016.05.16.10:25 – Crossword answers: ALLITERATION and CLEMATIS