Progress with Unity (or was it Nancy?)

Wordwatch

I can date with some precision my first exposure to the horrid "going forward" (in the meaning from now on (which saves a few characters, saves one syllable, doubles the opportunities for sensible line-breaks – go-ing? for-ward? – and has the added advantage of NOT MAKING YOU SOUND LIKE A TOTAL WALLY).  I was reminded of this quite unexpectedly when I happened to see a flurry of tweets such as these:

Not being a close follower of a Presidential Election that's not going to take place for another nine months – we haven't reached Peak Bull$h*t  yet, not even close – it was news to me that she was even in the running for nomination (until she wasn't).

In September 2001 Ms Fiorina, in only her second year as CEO of HP (or "H-P" to use the rather quaint style favoured by the Wall Street Journal) made her play for Compaq (the shrimp that had engulfed the Bostonian lobster that I had started to work for in 1984, acquired by Compaq in 1998). A short time after her arrival in my world (probably in late 2001, or possibly early in 2002 – I have a feeling that she may have wished us well for the Holiday period, but I wouldn't swear to that memory) she spoke to her worldwide empire in a huge video conference. I was one of the few hundred employees crammed into the canteen at DEC Park – or the employee cafeteria at Worton Grange as we were corporately adjured to call it. But we were one little outpost; questions were phoned in from all over the world.

Revenons à nos moutons  – "going forward". In that video conference (a description that grossly overstates its interactivity – it was really a TV broadcast with a few carefully sanitized phoned questions tacked on at the end) Ms Fiorina outlined her view of HP's future (which didn't include the bit about her being kicked out in 2005), and during this rose-tinted vision she used the phrase going forward several times. The first time she used it –  although it was not difficult to interpret, because of English's (and most [if not all?] other natural languages') use of the space → time metaphor – it took a moment to sink in; had she really said that? Well, she had, and went on to do so several times more. Maybe it was current then in the American business world. But it is now, even in the UK.

I referred in my last paragraph to 'the space → time metaphor' . I think I've provided examples of this somewhere in my earlier posts. I'm sure I've come across it in works by David Crystal and Steven Pinker (not in collaboration [!]) But links to these will have to wait for an update 'for I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles...' (you get the idea).

b

Update 2016.02.16.15:55 – Added PS:

PS. Here are some of the links I promised.

The Pinker one is from The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (edition-specific reference; other editions are available) p. 191 et passim:

The similarity between space and time is limpid enough  that we routinely use space to represent time in calendars, hourglasses, and other time-keeping devices. And the cognitive similarity  also shows up in everyday metaphors, where spatial terms are borrowed to refer to time.

My post was about transport rather than space, though speed (space/time) is central to that idea. Here's a taste:

He [Ed: Brian Foster, in The Changing English Language] writes:

'Cavalcade', etymologically a procession  of horsemen, has given rise in American English to a series of words in which the -cade element denotes the idea of 'spectacular display', e.g. aquacade, musicade and motorcade. Of these only 'motorcade' has penetrated into British use.... It remains to be seen how productive this ending will be in Britain....

Well, he was writing in 1968 (or before), so I think we can stop holding our breath;  -cade's hopes of becoming a productive suffix in British English, can wave forlornly to that slow-moving motorcade, or cortège, that follows many a linguistic speculation like this.

But elsewhere automobile-based metaphors pervade the language. A person who is not at their best can be said to be 'not firing on all four [cylinders]'. Rather than rush you can 'put the brakes on' (or, with a nod to former times, you can 'hold your horses'). If you're in a hurry you either 'put the pedal to the metal' (which must come from American English, as the wordplay is better with an American accent) or 'step on it' or 'burn rubber'. The point where, for the walker 'the shoe pinches' is where 'the rubber meets the road'. And while we're on the subject of tyres, assessing the suitability of something in a desultory way, with no clear intention of buying it (either literally or figuratively) is 'kicking the tyres'. People who need to get moving should 'get their a$$ in gear' and someone who's making progress is 'going through the gears'.

I must have dreamt the Crystal quote, or – more probably – just can't find it. Anyway, the metaphor is clear and suggestive, or to use Pinker's word limpid, which I'll trump, if I may be so bold, with a word I've just come across: NITID. This word, defined by Collins as (poetic) bright; glistening deserves, I think, a new lease of life. The Collins Usage Trends graph shows this sad decline (meteoric, in the falling-rapidly sense). In the 18th century the word must have been on everyone's lips:

Where was I? Commonness. The future is in front of us; the past is behind us – everyone knows that. And I'll bet that no language teacher could ever have taught the past tense without pointing back over their shoulder. En seguida ['following'], sur-le-champs ['on the field' – hmm, not sure how that one works; perhaps it's the field of battle, where you have to make split-second decisions...], langsam ['lengthily', to mean 'slowly']... there must be hundreds (thousands?) more.

Update 2016.02.17.12:55 – Added PPS:

1965 coat of arms

PPS. I've just realized that my subject line (Progress with Unity...) makes little sense to anyone not having knowledge of my early drafts. The word progress suggested itself to me as a possible meaning for going forward – "as we  progress". Progress with Unity is the motto of the Borough of Ealing – "QUEEN OF THE SUBURBS" as  it was once known.

1902 coat of arms

In the '60s, with Ealing, Acton, and Southall conglomerated, the burghers of Ealing realized that they needed a new coat of arms; the old one, granted in 1902, was reworked. "The boring old elitist Latin obviously had to go – but hang on, what did it mean anyway?"

Coincidentally, it exemplifies that space/time metaphor this blog was looking  at earlier: "Look back [and] Look forward". "Well," said that burgher (talking in the Swinging Sixties) "Look back? Where's THAT at? But Look forward – that works."

So, ironically, the new motto does "Look back", in that it keeps the idea of looking forward from the 1902 version.

b

How low can you go?

A guest on a recent Midweek was Willard Wigan, the maker of very small sculptures. As his website says

Willard’s micro-sculptures are now so minute that they are only visible through a microscope. Each piece commonly sits within the eye of a needle, or on a pin head. The personal sacrifices involved in creating such wondrous, yet scarcely believable pieces are inconceivable to most. Willard enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat is slowed, allowing him to reduce hand tremors and sculpt between pulse beats. Even the reverberation caused by outside traffic can affect Willard’s work. Consequently, he often works through the night when there is minimal disruption.    

Willard’s artwork has been described by many as “the eighth wonder of the world”.... 

Willard Wigan‘s website

I'm not so sure about the Eighth Wonder thing. My tip for octavio-mirabilitude (I've no idea how English has managed for so long without a word for the quality/fact of being the eighth wonder) is the sculptures that are much smaller than "only visible through a microscope". I'm not sure of the numbers in relation to Willard Wigan's sculptures, but the technique of DNA Origami surely beats them into a cocked hat. In this video the narrator says that her nano models, in comparison with an origami model of about the size of a bag of sugar, had the relative size of a grain of sand to Mt Everest. They are much smaller than simply microscopic. More of this anon, but here's a taster (borrowed from  CAVmag 13 [after a little tweaking]):

And while I'm on the subject of scale,  my latest award of a Tezzy (first mentioned here,  but awarded irregularly several times since to a super-cool(ed?) site – best avoided if you've got a deadline to meet) goes to this. It's similar to an earlier version produced (also by NASA) that  I saw in the closing years of the 20th century (but not, I don't think, as another NASA page says

the most famous short science film of its generation ... Powers of Ten, originally created in the 1960s

).  But it's much cooler, and interactive, and takes only a few seconds to load – well worth the wait.

Wordwatch

This is a new one on me, but maybe it's been part of the jargon of Sales since time immoral.

What's the one thing sales teams generally suck at? Onboarding new sales reps.It isn't anyone's fault, though. It's difficult to nail down an effective onboarding program. According to research firm, TOPO: 72.5% of high growth companies hire sales reps with 0-1 year of experience. 

But most teams don't have an onboarding process. This sets reps up for failure. The sad part is they have the potential to become top performers, but only if they receive proper onboarding...

It seems to mean roughly the same as inducting, but with less strait-laced overtones. The spam that told me about this amazing opportunity linked to this page, which interested parties might want to upfollow.

b

Update 2016.03.09.16:00  – Added this PS:

In the early 1930s Pyotr Kapitsa persuaded his colleague Ernest Rutherford to spend £15,000 of a government grant to build a new laboratory in Cambridge. As the CU Department of Physics website says:

The Laboratory was built in 1933 by the Royal Society for Kapitza to continue his work into intense magnetic fields. During the building work, those passing the lab were surprised to see a figure in a brown monk's habit busily chipping away at the brickwork behind a tarpaulin screen. This was Eric Gill who had been commissioned by Kapitza to carve both a plaque of Rutherford and this Crocodile...

The reason for this, on the face of it, odd choice of subject is a cause for some debate. Everyone agrees that Crocodile was his nickname for Rutherford, but there are various versions of the reason behind it:

..."The Crocodile" [was] Kapitza's pet name for Rutherford, either because of his fear of having his head bitten off by him, or because his voice could be relied upon to precede his visits, just like the crocodile's alarm clock in "Peter Pan".

The first of these is pretty unimaginative; the more literary Peter Pan-based one strikes me as more interesting; and given science students' predilection for cult/fantasy fiction (which Peter Pan may have been at the time), it's the reason I favour.

Anyway, the crocodile sculpture is quite well hidden. In three years living within a quarter of a mile of it (and in two of those years less than half that)   I didn't see it until last Sunday, when I went back to Cambridge to sing Messiah.

The picture of the three crocodiles I borrowed from CAVmag is a little misleading – though not to a serious extent. I could, by estimating the brick size, have calculated the applicability of the caption Bricks 10⁰m. When I saw it in the flesh (or, I suppose, brickdust) I saw that this was a bit of an underestimate. The vertical extent of the bas-relief is indeed a little over 10⁰m (which to us non-mathematicians means, I think, 1m). But, even with its curled tail, it forms the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle with base ca. 0.8m; so its length is more like  √1.6 m. With its tail uncurled (like the middle one of the 3 crocodiles) it would exceed 1.5 m. This makes the size of the DNA origami crocodile even more impressive.

I had hoped to use my visit to Cambridge to see DNA origami in action, but the opportunity didn't arise. As this post has been visited more often than all but 4 of my posts – all of which have been around for 3 or 4 years, as opposed to this post's 3 or 4 weeks – I was looking forward to updating it with something  a little more substantial (rather than this somewhat trivial reflection on what is – I must admit – a pretty unimpressive Eric Gill pot-boiler

b


PPS

Here are two clues:

Such animal magnetism is a charm - sort of.  (8)

And a thematic  one:

Fancy folding, reversing, I'm a PO cheque. (7)

(Hint: the last two words make this nigh-on impossible for people with no experience of/in the UK. If you can't  bear the ignorance, look at the HTML source [where there's a comment].)

Update:2016.05.16.09:55 –  Answers: CHARISMA and ORIGAMI

Keeping it simple

Guy Deutscher, in The Unfolding of Language constructs an allegory (typically – read it, it's fun) about people who tried to save the effort of communicating by simplifying their language use. Everyone does it, and – paradoxically – it can lead to new complexities (Guardians of The Queen's English like to refer to the "lazy" pronunciation of dialects such as Cockney but (no reference I'm afraid...

<autobiographical_note>
This observation comes from a lecture given by John Trim, in the days when Cambridge's Department of Linguistics was run from a converted cricket pavilion on the Sidgwick Site
<autobiographical_note>

...) the phonological  system of Cockney is much more complex than that of RBP.

Deutscher refers to one area of complexity in Latin that quite often

<digression type="editorial"> 

I almost said regularly but that would be etymologically inappropriate, since a regula is a 'rule' [or 'little stick']; in fact it wouldn't surprise me if there was a link [by some obscure pathway no doubt including Proto-Indo-European] to 'rigid'... [oops – close, but no cigar: Etymonline says the PIE roots are *reg- and *reig- respectively] 

</digression>

Where was I? Oh yes. ... that quite often third declension Latin nouns have a seemingly irregular nominative ending in -s, with all the other case endings differing; in these the word-final s becomes a medial r (yes, I'm afraid students of linguistics do have to say medial rather than 'in the middle of a word' – which brings me neatly back to the theme of simplicity: the 6-words of the Wordsworthian version (that old sexist was very keen on the language of a man speaking to me) becomes a 6-letter jargon word.

But Deutscher shows that this irregularity  resulted from a new regularity that ran amok (though he doesn't use quite those words):

...[E]arly on in the history of Latin, some time between the fourth and sixth centuries BC, a sound change took place, in which every (undoubled) s between two vowels turned into an r. In itself this was an entirely regular change, and happened systematically in all eligible candidates. But as a result an irregularity wormed its way into words like flos [HD: = "flower"; the section head is Irregular flowers; shame flos doesn't mean "apple" really – a better candidate for being "wormed into"]. The s in flosem, flosis and so on turned into an r...  whereas the s in flos remained an s...

He cites an article by Christian Touratier, Rhotacisme Synchronise du latin classique et Rhotacisme Diachronique . Although the article itself is in French, the journal it's in is published in German, so I quote from the Abstract (and if you should chance to plug this text into Google Translate and think Aha, caught him out, he's just used their translation, you're on the right lines; I did start with Google Translate, but then edited their not entirely flawless version and told them mine was better):

Der historische Lautwandel, den man üblicherweise 'Rhotazismus' nennt, hat im phonologischen System des klassischen Lateins lebendige Spuren hinterlassen: Das Phonem /s/ realisiert sich zwischen Vokalen und in Berührung mit einer Morphemgrenze als Variante [r]. 

The historical sound change usually called 'rhotacism' has left clear traces in the phonological system of classical Latin: the phoneme /s/ is realized,  between vowels and in contact with a morpheme,  as the variant [r].

Deutscher  uses the word flos/floris but there are many (MANY) examples in the third declension (as Dorothy L. Sayers observed in The Greatest Single Defect of My Own Latin Education:

With the Third Declension, the high and austere order of Imperial Rome seemed to lose grip a little.  Irregularities set in...

...). This leaves us with pairs like justice/jurisprudence  (with the s and the r alternating according to the root jus/ juris).

The fortunes of the word ain't provide a good example of the way language learners take the line of least resistance. Put yourself in the position of a European immigrant to America in the 18th or 19th century. The paradigm of the indicative of the verb be is not at all straightforward, especially in the negative:

• I am not, I'm not, [and not so long ago I amn't]
• You are not, You're not, You aren't
• He/she/it is not* (etc etc..., you get the idea)

How much easier than all these variants (with attendant phonological complications – for example, the vowel does not  change between 'I'm not' and 'I am not', but it does change between 'You are not' and 'You're not' [but it's unchanged again in 'You aren't']) is the word ain't:

• I ain't
• You [sing.] ain't
• He/she/it ain't
• We ain't
• You [pl.] ain't
• They ain't

Language Nazis may deprecate this usage, but it certainly makes the language learner's life much simpler.

Must get on.

b

PS And here‘s a clue:

Surfeit of promissory notes – hateful.  (6)


Update 2016.02.0810:55 – Fixed a few typos, and added PPS:

PPS And another:

Place for fixing damage to paintwork of classic motorcycle? – (8,6)

Update 2016.02.1016:05 – Added this footnote:

* I make it twelve variants (3 x 3 for the singulars, and 1 x 3 for the mercifully unchanging plurals, but with the added complexity of a plethora of more-or-less perfect [i,e. some more than others] homophones we're/were/where/wear, you're/your, they're/their/there [not to mention, for improbably advanced learners,  yaw and yore – but hang on, this is getting rather silly]. Anyway, the one-form-fits-all-verb-forms ain't is a great simplifier.



Update 2016.03.09.22:10 – Added PPPS

PPPS Time‘s up: ODIOUS and CHIPPING NORTON

Anything for the weekend?

Harry S. N. Greene, pathologist, cancer researcher, and Yale professor, when testifying in 1957 to a Congressional committee, disputing an interpretation of a statistical study,  famously said

It was noted long ago that the front row of burlesque houses was occupied predominantly by bald-headed men. In fact, such a row became known as the bald-headed row. It might be assumed from this on statistical evidence that the continued close observation of chorus girls in tights caused loss of hair from the top of the head. 

See more

I think of this wherever a politician mentions the 'Weekend Effect'  (painfully often of late).

Whereas people in ivory towers (no – considering the state of academic funding I should make that stucco-clad breezeblock towers) may talk about "The Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy", I think of bald men and naughty ladies.

A BMJ study wisely says (my emphasis)

The weekend effect is real, concludes Helen Crump in her review of the evidence (doi:10.1136/bmj.h4473). Paul Aylin confirms this in his Editorial but explains that we are left with a range of possible explanations (doi: 10.1136/bmj.h4652). These need to be scrutinised before assumptions and suggestions harden into policy. 

Here are a few obvious yeah-buts that have occurred to me without the benefit of any training in statistical analysis (beyond O-level maths).

• People don't practise many extreme sports during the working week; they save their death-defying stunts up for the weekend. Even practices as gentle as rambling (risking exposure, hypothermia...) can lead to weekend emergency hospital admissions.
• People who start feeling dicky during the week don't go straight to hospital. Come 5 o'clock Friday though, and nobody's picking up the tab for their misfortune, they high-tail it to A&E (in the absence of a weekend GP service)
• Elective surgery is done during the working week. Emergency surgery is done from Monday through to Sunday (sorry – can't bring myself to say "Twenty-f..."; see – just no can do) . As a result, the average surgery patient is automatically nearer death at the weekend.
• etc etc ...

Last Wednesday, Inside Health went into this in much more (and more persuasive) detail. Gov.uk published a round-up of some research last year, but the list of 8 papers was compiled in October 2015, and the earliest 2 date from 2010. And only the most recent 2 date from 2015.

All of  which reminds me of the lady mentioned on Midweek (?) last Wednesday who always packed a hand grenade when flying, to reduce the possibility of anyone else having one. Or the driver who, on learning that most road-traffic accidents happen near junctions, automatically put his foot down whenever he saw one. As the title of an early BMJ article warned at the time of the first paroxysm of Jeremy Hunt's madness:

Seven day working: why the health secretary’s proposal is not as simple as it sounds

And as archy said, in archy and mehitabel (rough quote),

whenever a politician 

does get an idea 

he usually gets it wrong

Well, must go. Time for More or Less.

b

PS – A crossword clue:

Model worker? Hardly, arriving at THIS time. –  (8)

Update 2016.03.11.10:40 – Added PPS

Time's up: TEMPLATE (with apologies to people whose brand of English doesn't include the word temp.

Shameless plug

A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.

The first is Vivaldi's Gloria, which I've sung twice before, once with Reading Haydn Choir about 20 years ago, and once when I was driving my son to a concert arranged by a fellow barbershop singer (who was choir master at his local church). As I knew the piece, I became a singing chauffeur.

The other two pieces involve a setting of Psalm 110, once entirely (Handel's Dixit Dominus) and once as one of several texts in Mozart's Vesperae Solennes de Confessore. When I first sang the Handel, at the first rehearsal, somebody asked me what the opening words of Dixit Dominus meant. One word in the opening sentence was new to me, so I could only say 'The lord said to my lord "Sit on my right, until I do something jolly unpleasant to your enemies."'

The unknown word  was scabellum* – a footstool. The something jolly unpleasant was turning them into footstools (although I imagine there was an element of metaphor here  – I don't think trans-substantiation was involved).

The word 'until' seems a bit odd. Does the first lord – the speaker – mean that  the second lord can only occupy the favoured position until the enemies turn up and suffer enscabellation – thereafter to sit somewhere else (on the enemies, perhaps)? But donec, when followed by a subjunctive, usually does mean until. The bible translations listed here all use until or till, with a small handful of exceptions. Only two translate it as while, in which case donec would usually be followed by an indicative (not ponam but pono). Food for thought. But not today – I'm neglecting the cricket.

Suffice it ...

<digression> 

I refer readers to an old discussion,, in the UsingEnglish forum, where I explained: 

The fossilized phrase 'Suffice it to say' means 'let it be sufficient to say'; a more modern idiom is 'Enough said' - but, unlike 'suffice it to say', this follows the thing said: 'I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry. Enough said'.

You'll have noticed that I keep saying 'Suffice it to say'. This uses the subjunctive, which is hardly used in informal British English. And as both 'it' and 'to' are unstressed in that phrase, they are easily heard as a single /t/ followed by a schwa - particularly by habitual non-users of the subjunctive. This form [HD clarification: the ITless form] is widely used, and has become almost as common as the fuller form: BNC has 53 instances of 'suffice to say' and 88 of 'suffice it to say'.

In COCA, on the other hand, which is based on N. American usage, has [HD correction: 'there are' (I may have meant háy)] 376 (377 if you include 'sufficeit to say', of which there is a single instance which I found by accident ), and only 97 of  'suffice to say'. And that balance makes sense, considering the relative strength of the subjunctive in American English. 

Anyway, I'm an IT-man. 

</digression>

... to say that you should put Saturday 2nd April, 2016 at 7.30pm in your diary. (More details of the concert here.)

Tales from the word-face

My android system's latest exploit in the matter of spelling corrections involve a Character Entity expressed in the Named Entity Syntax (and if you really want to know what all that means, pick the bones out of this).  My HTML code makes occasional use of &nbsp; – a non-breaking space (for use when you want to keep a space between two words but keep them on the same line).

If I used it often enough I'd tell the spell-checker to add it to my dictionary. But for now, whenever it sees "nbsp" it asks me if I'd prefer to use "tbsp", which sounds like the sort of Character Entity that'd come in useful for writers of recipe books.

b

PS Another clue:
Landlubbers' haven in heavy swell (in case of bowel-movement) (5)

Update 2016.01.27.12:15 – Added PPS

PPS
I've been thinking about the until/while problem mentioned in the fifth para. To recap: the Latin text has Donec ponam  (="until I put"), not Donec pono (="while I put"). "Until I put" involves the first 'Lord' (the speaker) in some rather strange reasoning, making the sitting at the right hand only a temporary (pre-enscabellatory) position – which I suppose I should gloss as meaning lasting only until the end of the turning-into-a-footstool [sorry about these unfeeling neologisms, but scabellum is too good a word not to have any derivatives in English]). So why is ponam not pono – unless, of course, St Jerome (or one of his predecessors) got it wrong (when translating from David's [or someone's – Wikipedia has a rather ominous  "although his authorship is not accepted by modern Bible scholars"] Hebrew)?

It would take a Hebrew scholar to take this further (and I'm working on that), but I suspect that Hebrew has a way of expressing temporal and/or conditional relations in a way that does not fit in with the Latin way – so that neither "until" nor "while" really does the job. Hmmm...

Update 2016.01.27.15:05 – esprit d'escalier in blue.

Update 2016.02.05.10:15 – Added PPPS


PPPS

When, in last night's rehearsal, we broached (and on occasion breached) the Magnificat, I was reminded of last summer's post, My soul doth magnify the problem – particularly this bit:

...the words of the Magnificat reminded me of a confusion that keeps cropping up in the life of a choral singer. In the text that that link points to you'll see in the third line of the Latin exultavit, translated in the English as "hath rejoiced". But later on the word exaltavit appears, translated in the English as "hath exalted". 

Italianate pronunciation of Latin now gets involved. Listen to this YouTube clip; the relevant word starts occurring from about 30 seconds in, and is repeated as often as Vivaldi chooses. When this vowel (not unlike the English /ʌ/ phoneme – the one that occurs in, for example, "exulted", although it is closer to [ɑ] {Update note: this is an IPA transcription})  – is heard by a strictly Anglophone ear, confusion arises.... 

 Last summer's post   

Update 2016.02.06.16:40 – Added P⁴S
P⁴S Another clue:

Surfeit of promissory notes – hateful (6)

Update 2016.02.10.09:15 – Added concert poster.

Update 2016.03.24.14:40 – Added footnote, and crossword solutions.

* By chance, flicking through a dictionary looking for something else (the kind of serendipitous Aha-provoking discovery that doesn't happen with an online dictionary – excepting artificial things like Word-of-the-day), I found that Spanish (and indeed Catalan, Provençal, Italian, French etc, I've since determined [courtesy of the wonderful Meyer-Lübcke – which I've mentioned before] all have similar words) has the word escabelo. Spanish also has a quite charming metaphorical use for escabelo (which is, on weekdays, "a little stool"); in its Sunday best, figurative, use it is a "stepping stone". Life really is just one digression after another.

Solutions: BELOW and ODIOUS.

Winners and losers: icon and dozen etc

A little over a year ago I wrote here about words coming and going to and from dictionaries, which – with a few exceptions –  record the current state of [lexical] play. But what makes words come and go out of fashion? I've been thinking of late about two (clusters of) words, with diametrically opposite fortunes in my lifetime. Well, not exactly (symmetrically) opposite. Their rates of change don‘t match. But one goes up and the other goes down.

Up: icon

Things have gone well for icon. Time was when an icon was something you'd associate with Cyrillic script; it was a religious picture:

Its use in that context spawned several related word: iconoclasts (literally the smashers of holy pictures), iconoclasm ...

Then two things happened; one cultural and one technological. The growth of celebrity culture exposed the need for a word for something unique, striking, and representative of its class  – classic, if you'll permit me to use the word IN ITS PROPER SENSE (excuse that little outburst – I know I shouldn't).

The word icon was readily to hand. But a technological breakthrough in the late '60s added its weight to the impetus. Douglas Englebart's Mother Of All Demos, at Menlo Park in 1968 unveiled a system based on the notion of a new sort of computer interface that used windows, a mouse, and a pointer (some sources make the P stand for pop-up menus) – a WIMP interface. And that was windows not the capitalized sort: Apple was first to make a commercial go of this, and young Mr Gates came late to the party. Now, the command-line interface is unknown to many computer users (a majority? – this is neither conclusive nor representative, but more than two-thirds of visitors to this blog use Windows ).

Collins Online's "Usage trends" graphs show the affects of these two changes. Starting in the early '70s, usage rocketed:

Frequency graph

(Scroll down to the bottom of the  page, 

and wait for it to load)

Down: dozen

Over more or less the same period, the word dozen was suffering  a similar change – but in the other direction. The reasons  for this were mainly cultural (decimalization and metrication – in the UK, that is), though these were no doubt reinforced (and to an arguable extent prompted)  by a technological imperative: the calculating infrastructure (computers, electronic calculators, adding machine, cash registers and so on) favoured base-10 calculations

Our dozen derives, unsurprisingly, from the French douzaine – "about twelve". 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.

But this analysis oversimplifies. The high-point of that 50-year picture for dozen wasn't appreciably higher than in the 18TH century (see left).

And although the rise of icon reaches record heights – well above the 18TH-century peaks – it did enjoy some popularity before its 19TH-century doldrums (right).

There's more to be said about derivatives, but that's enough for today. If this sort of thing floats your boat, stay tuned for an update.

b

Update 2016.01.16.17:20 – Added afterthought in blue, and fixed a few typos.

Update 2016.01.19.13:0 – Added PS on derivatives:

PS So much for icon. But the adjective derived from it was not subject to the technological influence I mentioned earlier; if you click on the right part of a window on a computer screen, it doesn't become iconic. Moreover, a little painting of a saint in the Orthodox church isn't iconic either – at least, not any more: this Etymonline excerpt shows that that, indeed, is what it once meant (what else, in 1650?):

iconic (adj.) 

1650s, "of or pertaining to a portrait," from Late Latin iconicus, from Greek eikonikos "pertaining to an image," from eikon "likeness, image, portrait" (seeicon)... 

But now, the word iconic is reserved exclusively for the more recent cultural sort of icon; so, as one might have expected, its nigh-on vertiginous (do I mean that, or just vertical?) rise in usage over the last 60-odd years:

But if a window turned into an icon on a computer screen isn't iconic, what is it? In the early days of WIMP interfaces, various neologisms were toyed with, among them iconize and iconify. Once you had a verb, a past participle could describe the thing on the screen. In this Wild West of maverick nomenclature, Microsoft felt the need to lay down the law. Their Manual of Style for Technical Publications (my copy is from 1995) felt strongly enough about iconize that they devoted to it a separate headword:

iconize
Do not use; instead use shrink to an icon or minimize.

– a forlorn hope: in nearly 20 years of exposure to technical publication, I saw many more instances of iconize than of minimize in this context: Sic semper tyrannis – diktats about language use don't usually work, though their existence is often a useful indicator for students and observers of language change (as this blog has shown on several occasions).

b
PPS: A couple of clues:

Proceed with unspecified questionable practice? Get away! – (4,2)
Such a philistine most unlikely to visit place dedicated to literati– (5,6)
  
Update 2016.10.11.10:50  – Added PPPS

PPPS

An answer to the second clue: POETS' CORNER. Can't do the first one right now.

Keeping things personal

A reader recently asked where the to-infinitive came from – or rather, since he went to a school that shared my pre-CELTA nomenclature, he said just infinitive. In a post some years ago (the fact that I hadn't yet mastered the en-dash – there are three accusatory hyphens where there should be dashes ...

<digression> 

I haven't marked them sic, though, in the name of readability [although I would find it more readable if it was typographically pure, I know there are some people {quite possibly a not inconsiderable majority} who don't share my neuroses and anyway I'd better get on with the sentence before the adverbial phrase that began it 'slips in a moment out of life', as Wordsworth put it}]  

</digression>

...  –  is  an indication of its vintage) I wrote of someone who had written (among much other evidence of such bone-headed stupidity)  'Ms. O'Conner and Mr. Kellerman [authors of the article I discussed here] are simply wrong [my emphasis] when they say that "to" isn't part of the infinitive in English ':

I've been studying foreign languages, off and on, for about 50 years. In French, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian (that's the approximate order of the onset of study) the infinitive was one word; and to translate manger we learnt that we had to use two words - even to the extent of having a teacher correcting us: 'No, it's not just "eat", it's "to eat"!' That was the culture I had known as a student of foreign languages. 

In my CELTA class, though, my trainer used 'infinitive' differently. The infinitive (the form of the verb with no tense marking - whence the name, incidentally†) took two forms: the 'to-infinitive' and the 'bare infinitive', and the default sort of infinitive tout sec was the bare infinitive. So as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language one learns to say things like 'To form the -ing- form of "eat" you add "-ing" to the infinitive'.'Simply wrong'?What is simple is that the view is born of a culture clash - the culture of people who study languages and the culture of people learning and teaching English as a Foreign Language. In the words of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 'Nous avons changé tout ça!' 

† The infinitive is non-finite. In Portuguese it is even called o infinito. [2016 addition: it was this point that prompted my title. Portuguese has a form called, paradoxically, 'the personal infinitive': o infinito pessoal.]

Where was I...? got it, to in the to-infinitive and whether it had a former life as some more meaning-bearing word (lexical item, as we say in the trade).

<digression type="potential, better get on before I lose my thread again"> 

 We, paleface?...
[old joke about Tonto.... You had to be there.] 

</digression> 

The story is not simple. The change happened a very long time ago (before the earliest Old English texts), and there is great (and unsettle-able) debate about exactly what happened and when. My investigations have exposed me to indescribable monstrosities such as desententialization ( which seems, from context, to refer to "the process of a phrase's becoming not-a-sentence").  Here are three examples:

• Perspectives on Prepositions

See below for reference.

And

Connectives in the History of English (secondary source, also, of my second quote)

This last starts out quite promisingly ("to-PP" being broadly [shorthand for I don't know any better but I bet it's not as simple as that] a prepositional phrase such as "to eat worms" – the sort of purposive PP that could follow "going down the garden"),  but goes rapidly downhill after that. Besides, it doesn't answer the question. It jumps in in medias res, long after to became a linguistic nut or bolt (rather than a lexical item). I had hoped, when I started to look into this, that I'd seen the answer in Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding Of Language  but I haven't found it.

Not that it isn't there: it may be. Remember when publishers actually spent money on indexes...?  Maybe the bit I remember dealt with a similar word: work in  progress...

b
PS And here are a couple of clues:

Insist on confounded redraft. (6)
Expression of such self-assurance after Cabinet reshuffle. (3,1,3)

Update 2016.05.15.22:25 – And here are the answers: DEMAND and BET I CAN