Aa, there's the Raab

<explanation subject="Dominic Raab">
People in the UK may know who Mr Raab is, and expect some satire here about monkeys and organ-grinders. Well, sorry about that. It was the just the /ɑ:/ sound that made me think of him. Generally I try to avoid thinking about that particular nonentity.

And people outside the UK are no doubt accustomed to my subject lines making no sense; so,  no change there.
</explanation>

It has often been pointed out that, at the time when English and French rubbed along together...

<aside>
 (with Norman-French being used by the nobs gifted all the plum positions by William the Bastard [who is now  better known as the Conquistador {or something}] and his cronies, while the horny-handed sons of toil used a less Latinate language)
</aside>

...the names of meat (for the table) had French-derived names like beef (boeuf), mutton (mouton), and pork (porc), but the animals themselves were cow, sheep, and pig (or in some parts) swine.

Earlier this month I visited a place that embodied a similar class distinction, but with pronunciation rather than vocabulary. Hardwick Hall has the /ɑ:/ sound adopted by the upper classes for certain words with an -er- spelling...

<digression>
English, in some parts of the world, still keeps this sound in words like clerk, derby, sherd, and serjeant...

<meta_digression source="WVGTbk2">
In the work-in-progress now in all good Kindle libraries as When Vowels Get Together with Sonorants I have written:

*ER* represents this sound in a dwindling number of words. For example, in the BBC Radio comedy series The Navy Lark recorded 1959-61, the rear end of a ship is called its /stɑ:n/, but I have only ever heard the /ɑ:/ pronunciation in that context. This sort of specialized argot – used in particular areas of work – may support the /ɑ:/ sound from time to time, but this pronunciation persists in only a small handful of words in British English (more so than in American English: BE /klɑ:k/ but AE /klɜrk/).

 </meta_digression>

...  although in, say, American English the first two still use /ɜ:/ while the /ɑ:/ sound of the last can be preserved by a revised spelling: sargent.
</digression>

... and to make sure the pronunciation didn't stray back to that /ɜ:/ the ruling classes changed the spelling.

But the sheep grazing in the fields surrounding the house were herdwicks (well, to be honest they may not have been that breed, but I'm not one to spoil a good story with mere facts – there are some of that breed on farms that need hardier livestock).

<unrelated_observation>
And I'll record here a totally unrelated observation, from the first part of a recently televised spy thriller. It was set in Berlin...

 <inline-p⁷s>
It was called Berlin Station; it just came up in conversation, and I thought I might as well record my findings – although if I'd known when I started that it would involve a record-breaking <inline P⁷S /> I probably wouldn't have bothered.
 </inline-p⁷s>

...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. 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"*,†. 

</unrelated_observation>

Is that the time? I must check the words/notes for tomorrow's concert (well worth a listen if you can make it):

b
PS: A couple of clues

• Rather draconian response to a failed marriage? (13)
• The deity's offspring, it's said, introducing energy to regulators. (11)

Update: 2018.11.11.19:30 – Typo fix, and added PPS

PPS And it was "well worth a listen".


Update: 2018.11.12.15:40 – Added PPPS

PPPS And here's a review...

Update: 2019.04.07.11:20 – Added footnote.

* 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." 

<inline_p⁶s> 

Without doing the necessary research (which would involve close textual analysis of a lyric that even I can't muster the energy for), I suspect that the song "Take on me" was written by an ESOL student who can't use a learner's dictionary properly (and so missed the fact that "take on"  – in the sense "assume a burden" – is separable. )

</inline_p⁶s>

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.

Update: 2019.04.25.10:10 – Supplied answers to those clues.

P⁴S EXTERMINATION, PEACEMAKERS

Update: 2019.09.23.11:05 – Added footnote

† P⁵S I've  just noticed another instance of the separability problem, in an error message:

The Bluetooth device is not 

turned on. Do you want to 

turn on it.

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

Update: 2021.11.11.17:20 – Added <inline_p⁶s />

Update: 2023.01.17.21:25 – Added<inline-p⁷s />

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

The lesser of the two weevils

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 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.

<silly_aside>
Perhaps those more sexist times should be evoked as "as hisetofore". He is certainly to the fore.
</silly_aside>

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>

But language  is pretty insidious stuff. George Orwell (pace David Crystal, as I've said before) was right on the money when he warned about the influence of language on political power; Big Brother and Donald Trump have a lot in common: if something you want to be true isn't, say it is and keep saying it. If the existence of someone in history doesn't suit your politics, make them an unperson; people will stop talking about them if their identity has been erased... If you want to change a social reality, changing language is a good place to start.

And one system that has been thriving for millennia is the undervaluing and belittling of women. Which brings us to another topic (which turns out to be part of the same story). Harvey Weinstein got away with his pitiful predatory behaviour for so long because the system facilitated it; a pretty significant part of that system (hmm, "significant"... What would de Saussure have to say about that?) is language. If you want to excuse or ignore something, hide it behind a jokey euphemism, like 'casting couch', say. Many a protégée turns out to have been a victime. Disrespecting women ...

<tangent>
Incidentally, I was surprised to learn from Etymonline that "disrespect (v)" pre-dates "disrespect (n)":

1610s (v.), 1630s (n.), from dis- + respect. Related: Disrespected; disrespecting.

Just because I met the noun first, just because I heard the verb as a bit of a newcomer, I assumed the noun had greater "validity" in some way (not a way that a linguist should take any pride in). Of course, 20 years one way or the other in a word that goes back about 400 years is neither here nor there. But still...
</tangent>

...is something that involves language, and the language of patriarchy (at best – a more appropriate word escapes me at the moment, that's the thing about something being unspeakable) underpins the male-dominated status quo, not only in La La Land but...well, just about everywhere.

And physical assault is just the tip of the iceberg – the visible loathsomeness that is supported by a raft of tiny acts of disrespect. The other night I saw a repeat on BBC 4 of a programme made nearly ten years ago – a fascinating account of where we come from (<spoiler alert>: out of Africa) . Dr Alice Roberts was treated to this amazing exchange (about 16 minutes in to The Incredible Human Journey):

REWOP from The Incredible Human Journey

Woman:
That's like a little spearhead.

Man:
Yes that's exactly what it is. We think it's actually the ... [looking for the right word, to avoid blowing her little mind with the AWESOMENESS of his findings]  ...TIP to a ...SPEAR.

Perhaps I'm being over-sensitive here; perhaps there was no slight. Almost certainly there was no slight intended. (They were two specialists, repeating something for the benefit of a less well-informed public.) But it just felt a bit patronizing to me.

It was 20-odd years ago that English-speaking female actors started to complain about the term actress. A Quora article, basing its conclusion on the Guardian's archives, said

In 1994, the word actress appears 1150 times in the Guardian, and actor appears 2418 times, so about 2:1.

In 2003 the word actress appears 1173 times in the Guardian, and actor appears 3948 times, so about 4:1. That dates the change to 10-20 years ago.

although AMPAS (as the Oscar-dispensing organization is called – not without irony ...impasse?)  has yet to catch up. But if actors in France want to be addressed as act⋅eur⋅rice⋅s what's the problem? OK, it looks a bit ugly; but there are worse things.

b

Update: 2017.10.17.15:50 – Added PS

PS – And here are a few clues:

• I‘m muscular (or perhaps something like it). (10)
• Editing...editing.., until smoke began to rise? (7)
• Trees that bear fir cones. (8)

Update: 2017.12.31.15:35 – PPS added.

PPS: The answers: SIMULACRUM, IGNITED, and CONIFERS – (which, last, may have taken as long as 5 μs to get).

My old man said Follow the lobster...

... and don't Dili-Dali on the way.

'You couldn't make it up' – said John Waite in this week's Pick of the Week, introducing  a BBC report on a self-styled Grammar Vigilante. This masked crusader roams the streets of Bristol righting the wrongs done to Milady the Blessed and Inviolate Language of Our Forefathers the Way Mrs Thistlebotham Taught It. [Mrs Thislebotham was a stickler for proper English who inhabited Dave Barry's Mr Language Person columns, one of which observed that an apostrophe just meant Here comes an S.], The Apostrophizer's special interest was the wayward apostrophe, and the arcane/arbitrary rules governing its "correct" application. I wrote a  few years ago (here) about this:

... my late twentieth-century sightings of apostropho-clasm are far from original. GBS wrote

I have written aint, dont, havent, shant, shouldnt, and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only when its omission would suggest another word: for example hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. [ed, 2017: the source I originally gave had papering for peppering, but this is obviously wrong: peppering is the perfect choice, whereas papering makes no sense at all; I suspect the finger of blame points at Optical Character Recognition]

(Isn't that bacilli marvellous? Bacilli were in the news at the time, because of discoveries in connection with these stick-like [Latin baculum – 'little staff'; there's that '-ulus/m' again, denoting a diminutive, as noted in a previous post]  microscopic objects. Shaw was a contemporary of Fleming [HD 2017: I have no idea why I mentioned Fleming. The reason is probably a circumstantial link now lost on the cutting-room floor.] – who was born before Shaw but outlived him. One can imagine Shaw reading a newspaper or scientific leaflet illustrated with a slide covered with these things looking like chocolate vermicelli - and there's another metaphor, 'little worms', but that would be a digression too far). You can read more about apostrophes here [ed, 2017: this source is no longer there. Here's an option], if you're that way inclined. I really can't get awfully excited about this sort of thing. [HD 2017: I'd like to include a contemporary picture {mid-late 19th cent.} but for the time being you'll have to make do with this:

A better one is TBS, but breath retention is not advised.]

The Pedant column in The Times, responding to the BBC's story, layed into the Apostrophizer in a column entitled ...

<digression>
See rant here (the bit in red) if you're interested in my feelings about this wronged word.
</digression>

...The Apostrophiser should Apologize. I'm not convinced the writer came up with that title; maybe a sub-editor was just attracted by the assonance

For a start, the grammar vigilante has misunderstood his own moniker. Grammar encompasses syntax ...morphology ... and phonology .... Mr Vigilante is concerned instead with orthography, the conventions for writing a language, which has nothing to do with grammar.

The distinction matters. [HD: Well yes. I thought as much when I first heard the BBC report but dismissed it as a bit of typical dumbing down; and eternal vigilance in this sort of thing strikes me as almost as anal as the malefactor.] Whenever you hear a complaint about “bad grammar” levelled at a native speaker it will almost invariably be untrue. We know how the rules of grammar go (real rules, I mean, like word order or inflection for tense) and don’t get them wrong. But the conventions of spelling and punctuation have to be learnt. Mr Vigilante believes it’s a “crime” to get these wrong. [HD: Well, again, yes. The self-styled Apostrophizer was making a rhetorical rebuff of the interviewer's question (about the legality of his efforts), without weighing his words more carefully, so ...] What nonsense [... it was indeed pretty silly. He needs a PR training course. But his use of "It's a crime" to refer to something not strictly criminal is fairly standard hyperbole and hardly merits this put-down. Sledgehammers and nuts spring to mind.].

Though agreeing with a lot of what Oliver [Pedant] Kamm writes, I fear this article was not his finest hour. He talks about the history of orthography, giving loads of detail. I sympathize with his objection to being corrected by an ignoramus who thinks English should be pickled in aspic.

Incidentally, Kamm obviously knows but has over-simplified the story:

The apostrophe didn’t enter the English language till the 16th century. It was adopted from French as a printers’ convenience to denote an elision or contracted form. From that usage, [HD: Here's the missing bit, expanded below.]  it was adopted to denote singular possession and then plural possession. But this was no logical stepwise progression. The conventions fluctuated and they didn’t settle down in their current form till around 1800, with mechanised printing.

The printers' convention was applied, in a case of a possessive usage, to a missing letter or  letters that had been part of the possessive inflexion. Chaucer's Pardoner inveighs against the casual use of oaths such as

"By Goddes precious herte," and "by his nayles"...

and the possessive ending is necessary for the metre. So those compositors weren't just inventing a convention for denoting possession, but using a trick used in other contexts (such as ñ for nn); it was just a convention for making the artisan's work easier. The apostrophe came to denote possession more-or-less by accident, by marking the elision of a possessive ending.

Anyway, I must start on the picnic bench in the gaps between rain showers and neighbours' bonfires.

b