Desktop iconoclasm

<rant>
I blame the desktop publishing  software ("DTP"). When I was at OUP, many moons ago, all was right (recto) with the world. A recto was, as the name suggests, a right-hand page; and on its back, as the name suggests, was a verso. Page numbering started at 1 (or i in prelims, if you were old enough to be fussy about that stuff) on a recto. Except that,  as it was the title page, or the first page of text – in either case a display page – it had no page number (or folio, if you're toeing the Hart's Rules line). A satisfying mixture of Latin, arbitrary rules, and even more arbitrary exceptions, made publishing workers feel special, acolytes in an arcane priesthood.

Then along came DTP, and any Thomasina, Ricarda, or Harriet had the keys to the tabernacle of editorial arcana; they started spraying page numbers around willy-nilly as if there were no rul... Well, I suppose there aren't any more...

<meta-rant>
(and that's another thing; "any more" as one word)
</meta-rant>

...rules, that is.

<meta-rant>
(and that's another  'nother thing; automatic hyphenation. The-/rapist, ency-/clopedia, leg-/end, te-/aching; who writes these misbegotten algorithms? Why not spend some time doing it manually... thoughtfully before dreaming up a bit of software that's guaranteed to go on getting it wrong until Hell freezes over?)
</meta-rant>

</rant>

But what it is is "enabling  technology" – a Good Thing, I suppose. Gutenberg...

<parenthesis>
(or Gänsfleisch, to give him his proper name:

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."

 So, as I said here.

Johannes was as much Johannes Gutenberg as Leonard Woolf was Leonard Hogarth  (whose business just took its name from Hogarth House) 

)
</parenthesis>

...revolutionized the means of disseminating information in the fifteenth century. This put the power to spread the word in the hands of anyone who had access to a printing press (whereas previously – in the West, at least – that  power had been in the hands of  the Church, so that there were strict limitations on what that Word could be). The Church was understandably annoyed  at this encroachment on their monopoly, and argued strongly that such empowerment was a Bad Thing. (Rightly; there do have to be standards; there do have to be rules to prevent perversions of justice. But the Pope doesn't have to  brandish his imprimatur ...

<etymological-note>
and trust Holy Mother Chorch. as Father Steven used to say in my history classes, to hide the agent of a ruling behind the passive voice and in an obscure language: "it may be printed". 

</etymological-note>

... like a spoilt teenager, just because).

So, going back to my opening  rant, you may have noticed that I used the metaphor priesthood. So where does that put me in the case of the Church and Gutenberg? I have to admit, through clenched teeth, that DTP was a Good Thing. (That doesn't mean. though, that I find its giving power to the people comfortable.

<inline-PS>
My feelings on seeing an odd page number on a left-hand page, when someone's cutNpasted from a published source and then re-paginated ...

<rant rejoinder= "Eppur si muove">
(without having the common courtesy to add blank pages to keep the spreads right)
</rant> 

... need have no repercussions in the real world, however violent they may be.
</inline-PS>

 )

Enough for now.

b

Update: 2020.06.2912:05 – Added inline PS.

It depends what you mean by "bee" and "bonnet"

The latest issue of Third Age Matters has the usual contribution by professional stick-in-the-mud Eric Midwinter, to which a sub-editor has contributed the ridiculous idea of theft (as if a meaning, whatever that may be, could be "stolen"):

For many years...

<digression>
(I was about to write "sixty-odd", but that would imply that when the word was coined in 1958, I [extraordinarily gifted child that I was] immediately adopted it into my seven-year-old's working vocabulary; improbable, I think)
</digression>

...I have used the word (ABused it, from the point of view of Mr Midwinter) in the way suggested by the New York Times interview quoted by Etymonline

It's a quite simple bit of word formation. As aristocracy is rule by the best (aristoi) and theocracy is rule by God (theos), meritocracy is rule by people judged on merit. But nous avons changé tout cela as le bourgeois gentilhomme was told, and as Mr Midwinter would have it; strictly, though, the Midwinter version would be "almost everyone has changed it, but they're wrong".

Michael Young, writing in an introduction to the 1994 edition of his work, wrote:

The case against meritocracy (the one and only true meaning of meritocracy, in the view of Midwinter and his ilk) is that people who get into a position of power on the basis of merit then protect their progeny regardless of merit. In other words, meritocracy works once, and thereafter arrogates power and influence to the privileged, regardless of merit. To insist that this flawed sort of one-time meritocracy-followed-necessarily-by-mediocracy-in-perpetuity is the only sort – the TRUE meaning of "meritocracy" – deprives the word of any useful meaning.

Over time, meanings change. Here I give lots of instances of  change, sometimes complete reversals, finally getting round to this explanation  of "backlog":

The words back and log were first fused together (to use an appropriately fiery metaphor) in the late seventeenth century. They referred to a log placed at the back of a fire. Such a log was desirable; it was a Good Thing. It protected the fire from going out. But about two hundred years later it was used metaphorically to mean a Good Thing in the commercial world: a stock of unfulfilled orders. 

Here's where the reversal in polarity happened, possibly influenced by another meaning of log. The metaphorical ledger ... could be the record of a Bad Thing – work that hasn't been done and gets more and more embarrassing as more is added to the mountain faster than it can be done.

But no sane observer scans the airwaves, searching obsessively for people using "backlog" to refer to a Bad Thing and complaining that they've stolen its meaning. Like Aung Sang Suu Kyi, flipping from fêted to fœtid overnight.

Mr Midwinter thinks "meritocracy" is another case of such a flip – but from Bad Thing to Good Thing, rather than vice versa. I think he's simply wrong; that "meritocracy" does what it says on the tin,  and the satirical background to the first use of the word doesn't affect that meaning – the notion that the word can only ever be used to refer to one side of a multi-faceted argument in the original work of fiction that gave it its first airing more than 60 years ago is frankly ridiculous.

(Not that this prevents Mr Midwinter from writing to any organ that will publish him, accusing various public figures of this "abuse":   with the search string Eric Midwinter meritocracy I get over 14,000 Google  hits –  never, in the history of human apiculture have so many bonnets attracted so many bees, vainly swatted at by so few).

On a more festive note, I'm reminded of words I sang in last Saturday's concert, in Ralph Vaughan Williams' charming Fantasia on Christmas Carols:

God bless our generation who live both far and near.

This was not Roger Daltrey's My G-G-G-Generation. I was not singing God bless all baby-boomers  but nobody else. Words change their meanings, and when someone's  meaning is clear  it's unproductive  – not to say patently absurd  – to insist that they are among the great majority who are all out of step.

b

Update: 2019.12.20.12:50  – Added PS

PS I have belatedly found a source for Midwinter's article online. Here's a taste:

It is just over 60 years since Michael Young, co-founder of our marvellous U3A movement, published his perceptive and prophetic text The Rise of the Meritocracy.
He had foreseen that social mobility worked fully only once, recruiting a new oligarchy of power, influence and wealth which, like all former ruling castes, then ensured the power, influence and wealth was bestowed on its children. 

Social mobility does not obey the law of gravity; very, very few go down the social ladder to be replaced by an urgent climber-up. It is not normal to find the children of the privileged among the homeless or the customers of food banks – and vice versa. 

I fear his word has been abused to the point of it sounding like a good thing, not least in the mouths of prime ministers, including a speech by Theresa May some months back in which she used the word “meritocracy” 20 times, with perhaps unconscious irony, as if it were something for which to aspire. 

This led me to write a correcting letter to the press and I quickly evade the charge of political bias by pointing out that Tony Blair was an even worse offender, to the point where a despairing Michael Young, a short time before his death, published an article pleading with the then prime minister to refrain from using the coinage “meritocracy” as the opposite of what it actually meant.

Fortnite out[r]age

Epic Games' wildly popular battle royale game, Fortnite, was unavailable to play for several days in preparation for its next iteration: Fortnite Chapter 2.

So said CNN Business earlier this week. This was quite an event. the outage map went mad (or, rather, presumably, it just went black).

<autobiographical_note>
When I started working for DEC in 1984, and first met the word outage a colleague and fellow arts graduate explained that this was a typo for outrage. My initial resistance to the neologism...

<digression>
(well, relative neologism. Etymonline dates it to 1903 [in a US context] but it didn't impinge on my consciousness until the early 1980s
</digression>

...has been worn down since then. I'm not "the first on whom the new is tried", but neither am I "the last to cast the old aside". I have become inured, or as the medics say (of some regrettable thing you just have to live with – tinnitus, say) habituated.; what once made your life a misery becomes just wallpaper.

</autobiographical_note>

In the words of a speaker on the Media Show:

The servers ... went down for a full weekend, and nobody was told it was going to happen. It... just ...a black hole appeared ...and people kind of lost their minds about it...Nobody was told about it. They had no access. It was essentially the equivalent of your mum taking your X-box off you, and you not having it [HD – for a weekend], but for millions of people.

Media Show, 16 Oct 2019, from 21'15"

The Earth did not stand still. As another guest on that programme explained, it was the equivalent of any commercial website with a big software update to implement announcing that its service will be unavailable for a few days...

<RANT subject= "Santander, who treat their customers like beta testers">
...or sometimes weeks. Any old rubbish bit of kit held together with chewing gum and baler twine, they just stick it up and wait for someone to complain, leaving it to their overworked (and largely impotent) help desk staff to fend off the predictable brickbats. But I  digress.
</RANT>

This is the sort of minor irritation that 21st century customers are used to. But in the case of Fortnite the customers weren't regular commercial users accustomed to the vagaries of software updates; and they weren't told what to expect. They were, for the most part, children, quick to detect the end of the world. The weekend is for many their chief (or only) relatively unfettered playing time.

And the owners of Fortnite were happy to trade on their users' naivety. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that they intentionally made it feel like the end of the world, to underline the fact that it was the end of the world as far as Fortnite, Chapter 1 was concerned.

Radix malorum, as  Chaucer's Pardoner was fond of quoting, est cupiditas.

<usual_disclaimer>
Pardoner's Tale quotes best before end May 1968.
</usual_disclaimer>

 In other words, Cherchez la canaille capitaliste.

Time for my constitutional.

b

Knowing when to fold

I just heard Terry Wogan on Desert Island Discs Revisited using the expression (when talking about ending his career) "I'll fold up my tent".

I wrote about metaphors for arriving and leaving over 3 years ago (here) but I think it's due for a new outing. As so often in this context, I quote The Man:

Elcock explains: 

While VENĪRE remained everywhere the usual verb for 'to come', two new terms conveying a more visual image were  borrowed from maritime language. The older of these, which prevailed in Spain, was PLĬCARE, first used with reference to the folding of sails (cf Port. chegar, Sicilian chicari). In Rumanian a pleca means inversely 'to go, to depart'; this is because the metaphor there was military, and referred to the folding up of tents  (cf. Eng. 'to decamp').  AD-RIPARE, 'to  come to shore', was a somewhat later creation which found favour in Gaul (cf Prov. arribá [HD: Elcock does not mention plegar here, but he has already mentioned it in another context]. From Provence it spread to Catalonia, and during the Middle Ages was carried thence to Sardinia, as arribare.   

The Romance Language (I've given this source more than once, but make no apology for that: it's very good.)

So, whereas I had hitherto relied on the decamp example as a metaphor for leaving in English, I can now add to my body of examples (in that Terry Wogan quote) the explicit metaphor of folding a tent.

<temporal_paradox>
As it happens, as that edition of Desert Island Discs dates from before the beginning of the Harmless Drudgery blog, in fact the example was already there, waiting for me to hear the repeat. But anyway...
</temporal_paradox>

But, I was thinking of the spoken language. As I said in that earlier post

<digression>
Catalan often straddles the French/Spanish camps, so I expected a pair like the Provençal ones. But Cat. plegar has a different metaphorical use: stop work, knock off  – reminiscent of primary school teachers' instructions: When you've finished, FOLD your arms on the desk in front of you.
</digression>

And the arm-folding image as a sign of work done is unequivocal ...

<digression>
(not the most apt of words in this context, considering the last two syllables...

<word_formation_speculation>
Hmm. There's something to be said on each side of that argument. If all the arguments were on the same side, it'd be univocal. 

<univocal_thought>
[The metaphor that evokes univocality is "singing from the same hymn-sheet" {unless harmony's involved, of course, but this is getting silly {Getting?}}]
<univocal_thought>

</word_formation_speculation> 

... but you know what I mean – clearly meaningful)
</digression>

...  in an English context (and I imagine in many others).

<rant>
And apropos of nothing (I just happened to see it in a fruitless quest for information just now)...

The dates of these restrictions 

may be subject to change.

No, no  no.  They ARE subject to change. What they MAY be is changed, in which case they would be subjected to change.

I do wish people wouldn't toss the subjunctive around willy-nilly with some vague it's-not-my-fault-guv "meaning".  But I must take a deep breath and ignore it. There are worse things, I know...
</rant>

Anyway, I think it's time I folded my arms.

b

English tests as part of the 'hostile environment'

A Guardian article last week quoted Stephen Timms, the Labour MP for East Ham:

“Panorama established that a few dozen people cheated, but the way the government has responded has blighted the lives of thousands and thousands who did not cheat. All the people I’ve met feel mortified that anyone would think they would cheat."
Source

My attention was drawn to the article by this tweet:

And the writer also wrote a blog post; "rather angry" she said:

Not very angry – bit of a shame really for a fan of (written) blood sports; I'm partial to a literary hatchet job.  But there's a lot to be angry about:

I knew there had been problems with some of the centres running tests of English, but it now turns out overseas applicants and some who are already studying in the UK for whom there is no evidence of cheating are having their visas cancelled, denied or - in extreme cases - being forcibly removed from the UK.  Many have asked to sit tests again to prove their proficiency and therefore eligibility to study in the UK. This has fallen on deaf ears. 

Source

A few days later the Guardian upped the ante:

The Guardian has learned that a special team overseen by the Home Office was established in January 2017 to deal with the growing backlog of legal actions related to a Home Office decision in 2014 to revoke or curtail the visas of around 34,000 students whom they accused of cheating in a government-approved English language test. 

Guardian

The Indy came late to the party

The Home Office is to be investigated over its decision to cancel the visas of tens of thousands of foreign students and remove more than 1,000 people from the country as a result of cheating allegations in English language tests... 

On Friday, Mr Timms, MP for East Ham, said the treatment of the students had been “a disgrace”, telling the BBC: “They trusted Britain to provide them with a decent education. Instead, they've been falsely accused of cheating and been given no chance to appeal. They've been left in limbo for years.” 

Independent

In truth though that came "late to the party" needs qualifying.  As the same Indy article said:

The Independent revealed in February that some students were still being detained and were living in “terror” despite not being involved in the scandal.

This is a disgrace  – in the fullest sense of the word (was the creation of the "hostile environment" gracious?) Amid all this Brexit nonsense, the last thing we need to  do is alienate well--intentioned visitors (visitors, incidentally, who pay good money to contribute to the educational experience of domestic students). There is a  path to be navigated  between "a hostile environment" and the wielding of soft power; and this shabby episode represents an ugly deviation away from the side of the angels.

b

Stating the obv... hang on though ...

See the original here.

This comes with the cachet (or should that be caché?) of the saundz.com stable, so presumably one should pay it some heed. I have to say, though, that whenever – in the past – I have looked at their site for purposes of preparing a lesson I found that it was (intentionally, I suppose) heavily, if not entirely biased in favour of American English. OK, that makes sense. There are many more native speakers of American English than of British English, and students of ESOL usually want to learn American English in preference to British English; or else they don't care either way.

<mini_rant force="Just saying">
But my reaction to sites that say just "English" when they mean "American English", or for that matter "Portuguese" when they mean "Brazilian Portuguese", or sports commentators who say "World Champion" when they mean "US-wide Champion" get my goat.
<mini_rant>

A few counter-examples from the rule as stated there – one for each word:

1. BELIEVE
   I believe I am being taken for a sucker.
2. UNDERSTAND
   I understand you have seen the figures...?
3. KNOW
   I know you were there.
4. DOUBT
   I doubt  if we‘ll ever know the truth.
5. LOVE
   I love what you did with the lentils.
6. WANT
   I want to be going first thing tomorrow.
7. ADMIT
   I admit I am being blackmailed.

Of course I'm ignoring (or at  least overlooking) context – not the context surrounding the situations in the examples, but the context of the lesson itself; the rule is given to students who just haven't met any other tense than the present, so that it is implicitly preceded by the words WHEN ANY OF  THESE WORDS IS FOLLOWED BY A VERB IN THE PRESENT...

But even so,  there must be a typo in the opening sentence (unless this is a bit of American English syntax that I haven't met). State verbs are usually used 

with [THE – does the writer have difficulty with articles?] Present Simple instead [OF, surely...?] with [THE ...?] Present Continuous

And the lack of articles can't be blamed on "typographical  licence" – the  last two lines in that four-line extract (the exhibit I started with) are plenty loose enough to accommodate a few extra characters.

Besides, only a few days' exposure to the Western world is going to expose students to the infamous I'm lovin' it (which vies with 10 items or less for the

Most egregious tweaker of Grammar Nazis' chains 

award). This really does break not only the spirit but also the letter of the law (Present Continuous rather than Present Simple). But students will quickly realize that rules are not so much made to be broken, in the words of that tired cliché...

<digression>
Isn't TIRED CLICHÉ itself one of those ... erm, THREADBARE commonplaces?
</digression>

... as defined by actual usage. The repeated failures of practice to match up with theory have to be accommodated by weasel words like that USUALLY.

b
PS As I write I have the BBC‘s Julius Caesar in the background; and the line Who is it in the press that calls on me leapt out at me with its two anachronistic puns: press and call on. And this reminded me of a recurrent annoyance, apparently irrelevant but similarly depending on an anachronistic pun sadly repeated ever and anon (is that Shakespeare?) by people who should know better: the roots of OMG:

This one’s for all you amateur internet archaeologists out there: The first recorded use of the ubiquitous texting abbreviation OMG wasn’t uttered by a precocious tween in the 1990s, but by one Lord Fisher in a letter to none other than Winston Churchill.

          Time report

Well well; silly us! There‘s everyone thinking that abbreviation's a child of the late 20th Century. How wrong we were! Umm,  no. Lord Fisher‘s "OMG" was a joke based on the names of honours such as "OBE" and "CMG". Here's the context:

To cite it as the etymological basis of the SMS-based abbreviation "OMG" is to indulge in an anachronistic pun – the sort of textual "discovery" that is increasingly common in these days of easily accessed electronic text  databases. In the words of that prescient ophthalmologist Friar Lawrence

What a pair of spectacles is this?

PPS And here‘s a clue:

Measurement of time absorbing one new virtue (7)

Update 2016.05.03.22:35  – A couple of typo  fixes (including a deletion), + this clue:

Cutting short brusque indisposition. (11)

Update 2017.09.25.14:15  – PPPS
 PPPS Second answer first, as I'm sure of it: CURTAILING. The first one could be HONOUR, but if so I counted wrong (and it's a pretty dodgy clue anyway).

Making whey (with whetstones?)

Almost a year ago I wrote here about words making way for other words in dictionaries. My use of the evanescent word burgher ...

<digression>
whose evanescence...

<meta_digression>
longtime readers may remember that I wrote here about the inchoative infix -ISC- {with its legacy of  English words that contain the letters 'sc' and have something to do with a  beginning or gradual process}
</meta_digression>

...has been dragged out over more than a century
</digression>

... led me to think, not about words replacing others but words dying out while others become more popular – even though they're completely  unrelated.

<digression>
This happened in the case of let (meaning obstacle), because of a pun caused by the Great Vowel Shift (which led to the words for obstacle – as in without let or hindrance or a let in tennis...

<rantette>
... and gawd 'elp me I'll swing for that tennis commentator who insists on saying "let-cord" (which is, for the record, hyper-correct)...
</rantette>

... and (not because of the vowel this time, but because of RBP's careless conflation of the sounds [w] and [ʍ]* into a single /w/ phoneme) in the case of whet (meaning sharpen).  

* [ʍ] is the "whispered" /w/, sometimes represented  in print as hw – still apparent in the spelling "wh" (making the word whispered strangely appropriate). 

AND I'VE COLOURED IN THIS STACK OF DIGRESSIONS 

TO MAKE IT SLIGHTLY EASIER TO MAKE SENSE OF. 

</digression>

In that blog I wrote of  "the burghers of Ealing"  – which itself seemed rather strange.

<digression>
Incidentally, burghers collocates with the and of about 10 times more frequently than burgher, as this BNC search shows; and for some reason the burghers of Ealing seems much less resonant than the burghers of Hamelin.
</digression>

But while I was looking up the spelling here I glanced down out of interest at the Usage Trends – which made me wonder what occasioned the change. Was the relative neologism burger involved?

The word burger was shortened from hamburger in 1939 – that is, 1939 was the earliest attested usage; it was no doubt gathering a head of steam throughout the inter-war years.

Here is what Etymonline says (about hamburger, as burger just has a terse cross-reference):

hamburger (n.) 

1610s, Hamburger "native of Hamburg." Also used of ships from Hamburg. From 1838 as a type of excellent black grape indigenous to Tyrolia; 1857 as a variety of hen; the meat product so called from 1880 (as hamburg steak), named for the German city, though no certain connection has ever been put forth, and there may not be one unless it be that Hamburg was a major port of departure for German immigrants to United States. Meaning "a sandwich consisting of a bun and a patty of grilled hamburger meat" attested by 1909, short for hamburger sandwich (1902).

So in 1902 hamburger sandwich was attested in American English; and a few years later the unrelated [w e l l... the burg- part of it was, via the placename, but the concepts burger and burgher are unrelated] burgher started to dwindle in  popularity.

Started to dwindle? How do we know? Collins helpfully lets you specify different extents for a word's changing fortunes, and taking the word frequency back another two hundred years we see something of a roller-coaster. The general trend was up throughout those first two centuries, though with many ups and downs; and there was a marked peak at about the turn of the century. But the story has been one of fairly consistent decline throughout the twentieth century and beyond – which I think justifies my use of the word started.

Of course, many other things have changed – politics, various kinds of context... Besides, I am the last (excuse the hyperbole, maybe ante-pre-penultimate) to make the rookie mistake of confusing correlation with causality. And anyway, the slide in frequency was well under way before the abbreviation was coined.. Still, it all strikes me as rather THINGish.

b

The point of a myth...

...or why 'myth-busters' often [ahem] myth the point.

Last week on Computing Britain,  a long-held belief of mine was called into question – but by stealth. In the 10th minute the presenter of that short broadcast says

...the American military think-tank the Rand Corporation ..among other things [NB pre-emptive strike against accusations of  'quoting out of context' {for heaven's sake, what is a quotation if not words taken away from the surrounding words (AKA 'context')}], aimed to design a computer network that would survive a nuclear attack.

'I knew that', I thought. I mentioned it here. Next. When's she going to mention X.25 or JANET?' [she didn't, but I'm sure Wikipedia will fill you in if you're that interested.]

But a few minutes later, about 11'58", the wheels start to come off. 'But there is one thing we must get clear' says the presenter and then cuts to an ARPA-net engineer:

There is a myth that has been going around for 30-odd years that the ARPA-net was constructed in order to protect the United States against a nuclear attack. False. Totally false. [BK: And the presenter continues:]  No. ARPA-net... was built for sharing of computer resources, not for surviving a nuclear attack. It just so happened that the design had also emerged from thinking in that area.

Hmm. Do I detect some doubleplusgood duckspeaking, to borrow Orwell's term? The ‘myth', to whose dissemination I may have contributed in a document I wrote in the early '90s (was I an early carrier of the "myth" [an iconopoet {like an iconoclast, but making rather than breaking}]? – I don't know without wasting time trawling through stuff I wrote 35 years ago). If I didn't write it down, I was certainly told it by my main research source; and I've certainly repeated it since.

But things don't happen in a vacuum, especially not in the field of technology. One idea sparks off another and there follows a chain-reaction of ideas sparking off new ideas. The ability to withstand a nuclear strike (not to 'protect the US against a nuclear strike' – Geez, what planet is this guy on?) was one of the design criteria that underlay a predecessor of the ARPA-net.

<rant>
And why does he have to call it a MYTH? As I've said before here (and probably elsewhere) this is a sore point with me. Generally – from the point of view of the culture they belong to – myths are a Good Thing.

<digression type="autobiographical note"> 

I remember a Latin-American Studies seminar in the mid-'70s that featured an interesting expansion of  myth-related terminology.  The leader of the seminar said she wanted to ‘explode the myth of... [something]', and my hackles started to rise. 

But they needn't have. She said she wanted to explode a myth in the sense of explode used in the phrase exploded diagram. In other words, she was going to take it apart and show how it all fitted together – an illuminating, interesting, and creative use of the expression. 

</digression>

Besides, even overlooking the abuse of the word myth, I am sick and tired (yes, both) of people who parade their greater knowledge by dismissing out of hand the beliefs of us lesser mortals when those beliefs, while not 100% correct, contain a grain of truth that is worth examining.
</rant>

That's all folks.

b
Update 2015.09.21.17:10 – Corrected typo in bold. It was LONG ago.

Update 2015.09.22.10:10 – Esprit de l'escalier, in green.

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each e cvowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Sounds like my sort of thing

An article in last Saturday's Times (yes, I know, The Times [sigh]) was a less than glowing review of Richard Dawkins's new book. Not having read (nor intending to read)  it (the book, that is), I don't mean to add to the review, but one assertion quoted leapt to my attention as dubious:

Really? I was saying /'mɑ:li:bəʊn/ (in the brief few turns it took to buy me out of a game of Monopoly™  in those days) several decades before Transport for London was even dreamt of. I wish the reviewer had been more punctilious with his punctuation, as on the basis of this it's nigh-on impossible to determine which bits of the assertion are those of Dawkins. But I imagine the Marylebone instance is his, as is the faintly ridiculous 'classic [BK: Really? Has he any idea of what 'classic' means?] struggle between two memes'. But this isn't a review, so I'll lay off.

Excuse my use of IPA symbols...

<rant flame="simmer">
 I have ranted about this before, somewhere  in the UsingEnglish forums, but I can't find  where. So some readers may get a sense of déjà-lu  – but probably not. (And I did mean -lu.)  Anyway, here I go again. 

When you know your audience (and that word is crucial  –  when people can hear you) it's OK to say things like 'lear sounds like leer'. 'Sounds like' is meaningful only if there's a known sound to compare. But when you're writing – say, in an online forum – it's not so easy. What  if one of your readers has just learnt bear, pear, tear (NOT the lachrymal sort) or wear, so that the /eǝ/ sound is uppermost in their short-term memory of English sounds? You've told them that leer is pronounced  /leǝ/. 

Or suppose one of your readers mispronounces law as /lǝʊ/  –  a common enough mistake in an ESOL classroom   –  and you write that a word  'sounds like law'. Again, you've misinformed them. And I don't think that's too strong a word, at  least not in a language-teaching context.  If the teacher wants to communicate something, it's part of the job to make sure it's understood correctly. 

People complain about 'having to learn a whole new alphabet'. That's nonsense, particularly in the case of English  – which can be adequately transcribed using the letters of the alphabet (most with 'their own' sound – b ⇨ /b/, k ⇨ /k/, s ⇨ /s/, and so on) with a dozen or so new symbols). The system can be taught in a few lessons, makes dictionaries infinitely more informative, absorbing and rewarding, makes modelling and correcting sounds easier and clearer, supports increased learner autonomy.... And yet many learners (and even quite a few teachers, to my utter bewilderment – as I can't conceive of learning a new language [except by total immersion] without using the IPA) resist the idea of learning/teaching IPA symbols. 

</rant>

... but old habits die hard (and dye deep).

<digression>
There are various stories about etymology of that word. [Marylebone, remember?] This site says

...In the thirteenth century when the language of the aristocracy was French, St-Mary-by-the-Tyburn would have been St-Mary-a-le-Bourne (‘bourne’ being the French for a small stream) and from this we arrive at the word ‘Marylebone’ as we know it today.  

Based on this etymology and a progression of phonetics, the correct way of pronouncing ‘Marylebone’ is widely considered to be ‘Marry-leh-bon’ – although in reality this is rarely heard.

As to the meaning of "a progression of phonetics" your guess is as good as mine – though I imagine it may mean something like 'a number of both phonetic and phonological changes' ; after all, those 13th-century origins pre-dated the Great Vowel Shift. 

I once gleaned, from a source that I regarded at the time as authoritative (although as this was in the late '60s I no doubt set the bar pretty low), that ‘-le-bone' just meant 'the good', as le was feminine at the time,  and the convention of doubling a word-final consonant before adding an e for the feminine (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette, Bourgignon/Bourgignonne... 

<mini-rant status="stillborn">
No, I won't but... If people would just pronounce the /n/ when they say Bœuf Bourgignonne.  PLEASE.
</mini-rant> 

... etc.) had not yet been adopted by the Académie – which had surely ... (nope, not until the mid-17th) not yet been set up.  Still, -a-le-bourne is plausible enough, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it either way. On the one hand, beware folk etymologies, especially on special-interest web sites; on the other hand, what's the point  of saying 'St Mary the Good' at all, unless there were a... aha, maybe Mary Magdalene was 'Mary the Bad' (not so 'bad', though, as to stop her being canonized in the end [for all that, by all accounts, she was no better than she SHOULD be, if you catch my drift, and note the colour of this parenthesis. St-Mary-the-Not-So-Bad-Really-(just-not-the-one-in-the-blue-frock), perhaps]).
</digression>

And by the way, while we're on the subject of what was said and when., in that (i.e. Saturday; do keep up) night's televised version of An Inspector Calls, some of the dialogue was surely in Priestley's original. Just before the Great War, it makes sense for both Sheila and the Inspector to say during the 31st minute, 'Why had this to happen?' (where an 21st-century speaker would say 'Why did this have to happen?' – or would they? Maybe it's the sort of Northern English syntax that's still current... I can imagine Sir Geoffrey saying it.)

On the other hand, bits of the dialogue stick out like... something very sticky-outy [I'm avoiding clichés like the pl... um, like something jolly bargepole-y]. Would Gerald really have said 'It's a question of the bottom line'? (the context is a bit uncertain, as I can't find the reference, but he certainly used the expression the bottom line, which Etymonline says is  attested from 1967.)

Well, must be off.


b

PS A couple of clues:

Dildo's met an awful aria. (5,6)
Dumb-show of involuntary movement – that's imitative. (7)

Update: 2015.09.16.08:55 – Whoops... fixed in maroon.
Update: 2015.09.21.15:45 – Added long-overdue clarification in red.
Update: 2016.01.29.15:10 –  Supplied answers to clues, and deleted footer (as I will do in other posts when I get 'a round tuit'. The latest info. is on my other blog.)

PPS The answers: it's been so long that it took me a while to work them out – DIDO'S LAMENT and MIMETIC

Latte of this parish

<gratuitous_pun theme="subject line"> 

Not that I was ever a habitué of the local church, but when, over five years ago, this started being discussed, I admit to having had  a house of prayer/den of thieves [Matthew 21:12]  moment. But since then, despite the toe-curling tweeness of the name, I've come round to the idea. More recently, I felt not a twinge of such hypocritical pietism at the opening of a small (and now thriving) village shop in the next-closest church.  Besides, it makes for a rather pleasing (if gratuitous) pun (at the possible expense of its being mistaken for an Android-inspired typo). 

</gratuitous_pun>

I've been thinking of late about the TV series Witnesses – specifically who witnessed what?  What does it have to do with the series? I suspect that a reason will be revealed in due course.

But already, regardless of the denouement, Témoins (the original title) is relevant, because exhumed corpses appear in show homes, and a show home is a maison-témoin. This sort of untranslatable linguistic clue to the theme of a work of fiction is also apparent in the name of a key (not quite central) character's name: Maisonneuve.

Death and the compass, one of the Fictions, misses a similar trick (an unwinnable one, in a translation)

<plot_spoiler avoidance_advice="Skip this bit"> 

The piece translated as Death and the Compass (most recently published as one of the Ficciones) appeared originally as  La Muerte y la Brújula in 1944 (Artificios). The denouement expected by the central detective is not where or when he expects it. He guesses the position of a murder by looking at a street-plan and plotting an equilateral triangle based on two murder sites. He assumes that this is the end of the series. 

It turns out that he was on the right track with the idea of an equal-sided 2-dimensional figure, but it is not an equilateral triangle; it is a rhombus, with the fourth corner being the site of the final murder. 

<meta_plot_spoiler>
Look, I‘ve warned you ONCE... But no, I'm  not saying who the victim is.
</meta_plot_spoiler> 

But you don't need a compass to read a street-plan. What you do need, to describe an equilateral triangle (and then – if you've read the story – a rhombus) starting from two points on a street-plan, is a pair of compasses – un compás. 

Borges, whose command of English was impeccable, knew what he was doing. So he knew that he was giving his translator an impossible task. 

</plot_spoiler>

<rant flame="5">
On the subject of Borges, a reworking of his El Aleph has been in the news. I first got wind of it on A Good Read of  16 August, as part of. Carlos Gomero's Postcard from Buenos Aires. The relevant excerpt is at 14'44"– 15'27": that three-quarters of a minute will save you  reading this Guardian piece.

He refers to the book as The fattened Aleph, although  Amazon doesn't know of a translation. In fact – as Pablo Katchadjian only published 200 copies – Amazon doesn't know anything about it at all. The English-speaking world doesn't seem to know much about it; that Guardian article is the only one I've found in the English press.

Anyway, as that article says

In the short story Pierre Menard: Author of Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges writes of an author’s quest to reproduce Cervantes’ masterpiece, word by word, comma after comma. “Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough – he wanted to compose the Quixote,” Borges writes. 

More likely than not to be aware of this Borgesian playfulness, Argentine author Pablo Katchadjian decided in 2009 to remix one of Borges’s most renowned short stories The Aleph, keeping the original text but adding a considerable amount of his own writing. The result was the short experimental book called El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph), published by a small underground press in a short run of 300 copies [BK sic; I'm not sure this is right; but the figure, whatever it is, is tiny] . An unfortunate consequence of Katchadjian’s literary experiments is an ongoing lawsuit initiated in 2011 by Maria Kodama, Borges’s widow and fervent guardian of his literary estate...

More here

The reason the issue has come to the fore again, as the judge in 2011 saw sense and dismissed the widow's talk of  'plagiarism' as the pitiful nonsense it so obviously is, is that Ms Kodama has appealed again and again and finally got a criminal court to take her allegation of  FRAUD seriously.

If found guilty, Katchadjian faces up to six years in gaol. 

OK, Katchadjian is guilty – of impoliteness. Having read Borges, he must have known that Borges would have approved [and approved of, which is a whole 'nother thing] the literary experiment; but Katchadjian should have run the idea past the literary executors as a simple matter of courtesy. In spite of this lapse, though, should the nut of a slight literary faux pas be cracked with the sledge-hammer of six years inside? I think not.

Also, had he addressed the executors back in 2009  (the 'publication' date – a print-run of 200 was hardly going to fund Katchadjian's retirement; no  wonder it took the executors two years to so much as notice it), there would have been one of two outcomes:

• his idea would have either been given its deserved imprimatur 
• he would at least have known that the executors were totally out of sympathy with the playful inventiveness that lies behind the body of work that they were supposed to be protecting

In the second case, he would have known what a legal minefield he was dealing with and he could have chosen to engordar something that was out of copyright – though, come to think of it, perhaps a Borges work was essential to underline the Borgesian nature of the enterprise.

Anyway, I recommend this summary and petition to all and sundry.
</rant>

b

PS And remind me, if ever I appoint literary executors, to make sure to avoid penny-pinching and pusillanimous NINCOMPOOPS

PPS

<crossword_clue> 

Spooner might point the finger at child minders; topping! (5,7) 

</crossword_clue>

Update 2015.11.13.10:45 – Added PS
OK, time's up: the answer to that clue is CRÈME FRAÎCHE.

Update 2018.05.12.14:45 –  Repaired broken links.

Strassbourg Revisited

<autobiographical_preamble theme="DIY, Velux"> 

The Velux refurbishment is in hand [after a few ruffled feathers – for details of the Storm-in-a-YouTube see here].  As usually happens when I, with my retired technical writer's hat on, broach a DIY job,

...I am pained by standards of technical writing. My experience was mostly in the field of software, and mostly for System Managers rather than end users  – real-life punters, that is – but many of the issues are the same.

         More here (from one among several such rants)  

This time the villains are Velux. To quote their website, which surely qualifies for a FOGGY,

All VELUX products come with easy to read, step by step illustrated installation instructions.   

<rantette flame="medium">
The dreaded words The products [sic, not that the missing apostrophe bothers me that much] PDF instructions  are available for download, which follow  those irony-laden words, remind me of this ubiquitous road sign: 

The underlying message is 

STOP DOING WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO DO AND START DOING WHAT WE ALLOW YOU TO DO,  PLEB 

'Take a chill pill'  I hear the cry. "What's wrong with PDF?" Here's what's wrong with it: it restricts information to readers with the right setup (as opposed to HTML, which will happily respond to any browser in the world that understands HTTP).
</rantette>

Well, the 'easy to read, step by step instructions' [hollow laugh] are here. (Those aren't the actual printed ones, which have the added complexity of numbered insets that might or might not refer back to the other numbers^{†See update}, but they share this crucial feature: Velux have solved the problem of international applicability by the simple expedient of NOT HAVING ANY TEXT). I'm not sure how a document that includes no text can be EASY-TO-READ (with or without the hyphens that make the word itself slightly easier to read.)
</autobiographical_preamble>

Where was I...? Oh yes, Strassbourg. I wrote some time ago (here) about

Les Serments de Strassbourg –  or 'The Strassbourg Oaths' as we called them in my Romance Philology days.

In that post I quoted the Wikipedia article on these

...mutual pledges of allegiance [in 842] between Louis the German (876), ruler of East Francia, and his half-brother Charles the Bald (877), ruler of West Francia.  

This much is true. But the next sentence in that article is not (although I ignored it because my memory of what I had learnt was faulty).

They are written in three different languages: Medieval Latin, Old French and Old High German. 

No. They were written in only two languages  – the vernaculars of the two testifiers. To quote W D Elcock, in The Romance Languages, who cited  Professor Ewert's The French Language:

Professor Ewert's approach... merits further attention. It my be assumed, he observes, that both versions are translated from an original draft in Latin, Latin being ... the  common language of all notarial documents. He then attempts a hypothetical reconstruction, employing the phraseology of like documents....

This reconstruction makes sense, accounting for my misremembering and for Wikipedia's lapse (which I mean to correct, when I get a round tuit): the 'three languages' version makes a pleasing parallel with the  Rosetta_Stone,  (as a way of getting to grips with obscure languages).

We can be grateful that the notaries involved in the drafting did not take the Velux way out and dispense with words entirely.  

b
PS
And here's a clue:

Qualifiers for the Dunmow Flitch must avoid this sort of thing. (10)

Update 2015.07.24.20:35 – Added footnote:
† Here's what I mean:

Excerpt from the soi-disant 'manual', (REWOP, so sue me)

Having lived with this for a while, and watched that much more helpful YouTube post, I think I've worked it out: "1, 2, 3", and "4" are in fact 3₁, 3₂, 3₃ and 3₄. It would have been helpful if the double-size 3 (1,2,4,5, 6, and the unnumbered last one, which one must suppose to be 7, all take up one 'page' of the 'manual') had had a frame to show this hierarchy^‡.

Update 2015.07.25.12:15 – Added afterthoughts in green.

^‡I've just noticed a very faint background wash, confirming my supposition.

Update 2015.09.21.11:45 – Added PPS

PPS And here‘s the answer to that clue: CROSSWORDS

(Quite neat, I thought, though I say it as shouldn't. It'd be fairer though – and easier to solve – if it were set in the context of a crossword puzzle (where the double entendre would be more apposite – that is to  say, AT ALL apposite.  )

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.