Charivari

 A quickie, before a 'planned outage' while I get an all-over rust in Dartmoor.

I was talking last night about the derivation of charivari. It doesn't look French, although it has been used in the name of an orchestra in a context that suggests Frenchness: Charivari Agréable. I have seen it only rarely, notably in the full name of the satirical (and defunct) 

Punch, or the London Charivari

which led me to suspect (wrongly, as so often) it was a nonsense word referring to a mixture – a gallimaufry...

<tangent>
(and where does that come from? The first two syllables suggest something to do with France. No time though)
</tangent>

...or pot pourri (France again). 

But it was indeed French albeit Late French...

<autobiographical-note>
(and I'd be in a better position to say what that was if I'd bitten the bullet in 1972 and studied The History of French paper, with a notoriously soporific lecturer who'd written the one essential text. I took the coward's way out and learnt Portuguese instead)
</autobiographical-note>

.... [ed. Four dots, because it's the end of a sentence.]

Thr OF form was, as Etymonline reports

chalivali "discordant noise made by pots and pans" (14c.), from Late Latin caribaria "a severe headache," from Greek karebaria "headache," from karē- "head" (from PIE root *ker- (1) "horn; head") + barys "heavy" (from PIE root *gwere- (1)

And if you follow that *gwere- link, you'll find that another meaning of that PIE (Proto Indo-European) root (meaning 'favour' – which makes sense when you think about it: the favour being the thumb on the scales). So that that orchestra's name  (Charivari Agréable) goes back to the same PIE root twice. I wonder whether they knew....

But my interlocutor (the bloke I was talking to) probably wouldn't care.

<autobiographical-signoff>
I've been enjoying the latest Charles Paris mystery, which is set in Edinburgh. The lead character is a down-at-heel actor, played by Bill Nighy. The last time he appeared on the Edinburgh Fringe was in 1976. Strange, I didn't see him, but I was there, appearing in the Oxford Theatre Group's No, we have some bananas –  Rowan Atkinson's one-man show (with a cast of nine).
</autobiographical-signoff>

Bye, b 

Clash of the bakewell tarts

 You'll have to excuse that subject line; it occurred to me as a possible caption for the 'artist's impression' used by the BBC to illustrate...

<hmm>
(a flamboyantly inappropriate image, come to think of it, in the case of jousting black holes; on what is light being thrown ?)
</hmm>

... a cosmic event earlier today (the  newscast silly, not the cosmic event, which happened really quite a long time ago):

In a galaxy far far away, well two actually

Meanwhile down here in Harmless-Drudgery land, something cataclysmic (though not quite on the same scale) is afoot. In the early days of what I think of as 'the June Event' (a slight misnomer as it started in the dying days of May) I reported in updates to this post on a sudden resurgence in interest in the blog. As the end of June approaches I can say that those early comments didn't do justice to the enormOUSNESS (you 'eard; there is a special place in Hell reserved for abusers of enormi... (oops, is my closet prescriptivism showing? I blame my English teacher.)

June saw a blip in visits to HD that didn't just match the previous year's total, as shown here:

But since the blog's first days at the end of 2012, and even in comparison with the glory days of 2016-19 (when the blog deserved its name as I was doing wordy work), June seems to have been much busier (about twice as busy as the busiest, at the turn of 2016-17).

This is strange. 20-odd years of IT-related work has led me to suspect that something has changed in the way the data is collected and/or recorded (rather than any change in the quality or popularity of the writing). I'll keep an eye on it.

L'envoi

And while we're on the subject (of irrelevant and unrelated observations) I was recently reminded of my feeling (before I hung up my cycle clips) of quiet rage at this ubiquitous sign on the backs of lorries:
 

Grr. 😠😠😠
Subtext: 'If you get crippled,
you deserve it, thicko'

'Beware' doesn't work like that. You beware of a dangerous thing (a dog, say). There is danger when a cyclist overtakes on the inside of a left-turning vehicle, but the thing that does the damage is the vehicle. So the heart of the designer of this notice is in the right place; I wouldn't say the same for the hearts of the thousands of users who use it to assuage a guilty conscience: 'not my problem, mate'

But there's cricket to watch.

b

PS Listening to Chris Van Tulleken on last week's Infinite Monkey Cage on the subject of Ultra-Processed Food ...

<side-swipe>

(which is engineered not to be resistible, so although it seems to be  wholesome – and is more-ish – it intentionally overrides the body's satiety mechanism. Intentionally. In other words, there is an obesity crisis because the UPF-mongers want it that way)
</side-swipe>

... I was struck by the appropriateness (dictionaries recognize "appropriacy", and PGCE students can't avoid it [as I know to my cost], but there are limits) of the term "binge-watch". The streamers use the same ploy (of interfering with the sense of satiety).

/ends

Update: 2023.07.06.15:00 – Added PPS

PPS I've come across a very impressive website: steno.ai , which encourages me to quote Dr Chris verbatim, on the subject of obesity and will-power:

...[O]besity is nothing to do with willpower. Because all of the genes that affect our propensity to gain weight are all expressed in the brain. So they're all about eating behaviors. And people will be able to tell if they have any of these genetic risk factors because they will find themselves highly motivated by food. And we all know people who are somewhat indifferent to lunch and can skip dinner. Those of us with these risk factors are obsessed with food. We're prone to, you know, we'll plan dinner at breakfast time and we'll be foodies. And so that's how you can tell.... [T]he really interesting thing is that the way you inherit those genes, the way they're expressed, is entirely dependent on your family income. So obesity is heritable in low-income populations, and this was all sorted out with twin studies.

..[I]n high-income families, we don't see obesity being inherited. And that's because people who live in places with lots of money and have access to good food are much less likely to gain weight. So what the twin studies really tell us is that if we could get rid of inequality and get rid of poverty, we would deal with well over half of the problem of diet-related disease and obesity. 

Source

This is impressive, although the incidence of obesity in the USA shows that there's no slam-dunk here: a privileged background doesn't automatically guarantee a healthy diet (it just makes it possible to choose one). 

Update: 2023.08.08.15:45 – Added PPPS

The 'June Event', which I mentioned above (a sudden increase in reports of visits to the blog, starting towards the end of May and continuing into July) has died down:

I suspect that someone in Blogger-stats-land was playing with a new toy. Still, it was (mildly) exciting while it lasted.

Update: 2023.08.31.15:10 – Added P⁴S

P⁴S

I spoke too soon when I said it had 'died down'. HD Page Views in August are set to amount to well over half as much again as those in July (although most of that increase is due to a sharp uptick in the last 10 days of the month):

Cashing in

When I arrived outside Corpus Christi College Cambridge in September 1971...

<cambridge-terms-parenthesis>

(Oh yes. I think I've mentioned before the belief in academic circles that the best time for Part I modern language orals to be held was before we had started the first term. In the days before the year abroad became [rightly] compulsory, this meant that the only proof that an examinee could talk a foreign language was gathered before the course started.)
</cambridge-terms-parenthesis>

...'my suitcase and guitar in hand'  à la Paul Simon ...

<inline-pps type="brickbat-dodging">

(and if  you would have preferred "au Paul Simon",  read more about à la here)

</inline-pps>

...(except that he didn't have a third bit of baggage for his rugby kit) I was struck by the unevenness of the pavement outside the main gate:

But there were other things on my mind at the time (quite a few, come to think of it) and I put it out of my mind, until in due course it just became one of many Cantabrigian oddities.

Nearly fifty years later, all became clear. A 'Cantabrigian oddity' was indeed involved, but it was in the mind of the architect of Corpus's New Court, William Wilkins. The design and building of New Court (inter alia) is discussed in The Courts of Corpus Christi – not a must-read, I grant, but with a certain interest.

Wilkins graduated from Gonville and Caius College in 1800, with a strange interest in King's – particularly the chapel, which he measured and drew as an undergraduate (the drawing is in a libray in New York...

<need-to-know needfulness="0"> 

"A volume of engravings based on the survey is held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York." 

</need-to-know>

...).

This bee stayed  buzzing around in his bonnet for  years. To quote The Courts of Corpus Christi:

New Court’s Trumpington Street facade is aligned exactly with the southern of the Chapel’s two eastern towers .... Is this alignment a coincidence or intentional? No drawing survives of the setting-out of New Court and its relation to the street and neither has any written explanation by Wilkins of the building. However, the plinth along the street frontage may offer a clue. The edge of the plinth marks the boundary between the street and the College. The generous space between that edge and the façade suggests that the façade was moved back in order to ensure the alignment with King’s Chapel...– Wilkins’s private link between the site of his first architectural endeavour and, later, his favourite building and final resting place.

<inline-ps>
Wilkins is buried in Corpus Chapel. 
</inline-ps>

Corpus, on a line between
King's College Chapel ² and St Botolph's ³
(so not quite aligned with Trumpington Street)

<extra-credit>
St Benet's ¹ adds to the arcanity. If you want the full story, you know where to look: The Courts of Corpus Christi.
</extra-credit>

 L'Envoi

When I was first introduced to the Worldwide Web in the late 1980s or early 1990s the distant graphically rich site that everyone gave as an example of this brave new world of sharing and altruism was the Vatican Library.  Another such site that I have recently been drawn to is the Parker Library on the Web. But such sites are few and far between. The need to make money out of web-sites has called for a new word – well an extension of an old one. The word "monetize" has existed for centuries – ever since kings (or whoever) felt the need to turn stuff into cash.

The word was first recorded in the nineteenth century, and the Collins English Dictionary gives these definitions:

But the third of these definitions seems to have been waiting for Tim Berners-Lee to come along. The Collins page, if you scroll down far enough, shows this trend:

So the word spent its early years doing a workmanlike but not very interesting job, and then took on a new meaning in the early 1980s; if only the Collins data went beyond 2008 we could no doubt see the full 'hockey-stick' curve.

Enough for today.

b

Update 2023.06.20.15:15 – Not quite enough; added <inline-ps />

Update 2023.06.22.19:50 – Added <inline-pps />

'Sooner than' what?

 A small point, but one that bothers me rather more than somewhat (an  expression I first heard my mother using ...

<autobiographical-note>
(the context was 'that little madam gets up my nose rather more than somewhat' – referring to one of her daughters;  no names, no packdrill, besides, de mortuis... whoops, me and my big mouth), but she probably picked it up among the hip talk of the 1930s, or maybe she was quoting Damon Runyon)
</autobiographical-note>

...) is the meaninglessly abbreviated expression 'sooner than later'. It's not complicated: the word 'rather' contrasts two possibilities: doing something sooner or doing it later; the former is preferable. The word 'rather' is the  WHOLE POINT of the expression 'sooner rather than later', and dropping the 'rather' is cutting beyond the bone. I'm all for cutting out dead wood in over wordy expressions, but this is not dead; it's structural – load-bearing.

When I first heard this, I blamed the Americans (as is often the way, usually mistakenly), possibly because the first time I noticed it was in a Letter from America (which dates it: probably around the turn of the millennium...)

<pedantic-sideswipe>
(two ns, please, unless you've discovered a new heavy metal [with atomic number 1000])
</pedantic-sideswipe>

... as the last one was broadcast in February 2004.  My guess is that the relevant broadcast was in the mid-late '90s.

The balance in the British National Corpus is strongly in favour...

<you-know-thats-not-what-I-mean>

<tangent>
And the missing apostrophe's deliberate. I know the pseudo-code compiler doesn't exist, but if it did then ' would be (as they say) a 'reserved character'. (To test this, try to write a Twitter [or whatever your poison is] hashtag that includes '. The highlighting gets switched off at the '...

<inline-ps> 

– it's a 'reserved character'; that is, it slips out of your context, and starts talking to the computer. It's 'reserved' in the sense that it has a special function and shouldn't be used for anything else: Computer says NO.

<inline-ps>

...).
</tangent>

(not that a corpus can express a preference; it just records what happens [in this case, what has been written])
</you-know-thats-not-what-I-mean>

...of  'sooner rather than later' 65/6; that is, the shorter (that is,  content-free) version is a bit less than 1% as common.

Meanwhile in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (a much bigger corpus) the preponderance is 1031/424. The shortened version is less uncommon, but is still much less than half as common.

So can it be called an 'Americanism'? I think the answer is more nuanced than that; we need (though 'need' is a strong way of putting it) a more granular corpus. As Alistair Cooke was based (at the time when I heard him use the LAMENTABLE short form)  in New York, it seems to me worth considering that the preference for this ABERRATION (sorry, the small caps are like Dr Strangelove's right arm – they just spring up unbidden from time to time) is peculiar to New England. But the only granular corpus I've found is Corpus of Historical American English (the wrong sort of grains– though possibly informative):

So when Alistair Cooke first disturbed my linguistic platitude (that's a new meaning I've just invented, referring to an unruffled plate-like surface) he was toying with an essentially 21st-century neologism: of the 30 (I make it 29, but who's counting [apart from me, obv.]?) more than half were written since the turn of the millennium; so the offending Letter to America was written during the very early stirrings of an UNFORTUNATE development (OK, it had been attested since the late 19th century, but ⅔ of the total were recorded in the 21st).

Enough of this. There's biomass crying out for destruction in the back garden, not to mention words/notes to learn for Saturday week's concert:

b

Update 2023.06.27.12:05 – Added <inline-ps />

The grandma of climate science

Last week's Inside Science dealt with the digitization programme that after nearly ten years has yielded a website that makes available online all the journals and many other associated documents from the archives of the Royal Society, dating back to its earliest activities over 350 years ago

Established in 2014, 'Science in the making' is an ambitious digitisation programme that aims to make archival material related to the publication of the Society’s scientific journals available online to all. On this website you can discover the complex material that lies behind the published articles: peer reviews, correspondence, photographs, illustrations and early drafts.

Source

This clearly deserves a Tezzy nomination (regular readers will recognize this as a virtual [that is, non-existent, except in my fevered brain] award for a time-wasting website [numerosissimi...

<rantette> 

Incidentally, why can't people stress these Italianate superlatives as nature intended, that is (ahem) proparoxytonically (on the third from last syllable). There was, until the pandemic put them out of business, a short-lived beauty parlour in Spencers Wood with the (odious, incidentally) name "Blissimi".

<autobiographical-note> 

I remember when they were recruiting before the launch. They asked for full cv, references, AND A PHOTOGRAPH. They might just as well have said

Ugly people need not apply. 

</autobiographical-note>

They clearly didn't exclude the ugly in spirit, who said they worked at "Blissimi".
</rantette>

 ...]).But it was not until 1945 that the Royal Society admitted women as full members (there had previously been some sort of Associate Fellowship). I suppose it took the 2nd World War to convince the members that women were capable of more than housework and child-rearing

Nearly a month ago I missed an edition of the BBC's excellent The Climate Question. As it says in the blurb:

In 1856, an American woman called Eunice Newton Foote discovered that higher levels of carbon dioxide would warm the planet. But credit for discovering climate change was given to someone else who made the same discovery three years later.

We celebrate Foote's role in early climate science by recreating her little-known experiment and asking if there are some voices that continue to be overlooked in climate science today - and how we overcome these climate blind spots.

Three years later, John Tyndall (who had the advantage of a Y chromosome rather than a second X, as well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society) did a similar experiment, and was subsequently dubbed 'The father of climate science.'

The first contributor to this podcast, Alice Bell, describes Eunice's experiment in her book Our Biggest Experiment:

Her experiment was reasonably simple. She placed two glass cylinders by a window and planted a thermometer in each of them. Using a pump to remove some of the air from one of the cylinders, she found it didn't catch the heat as well as the other. From this, she figured out the density of the air had an impact on the power of the Sun's rays. This made sense - after all, everyone knew it was colder at the top of high mountains. After comparing a cylinder of moist air with one that had been dried, she found the Sun's rays were more powerful in damper conditions. This wasn't surprising either, as she commented in her notes:

'Who has not experienced the burning heat of the Sun that precedes a summer's shower?' Thirdly, and crucially for our story, she tried filling one cylinder with carbon dioxide. This had the biggest impact: the cylinder became noticeably much hotter and took a lot longer to cool down after the experiment had ended. She concluded, almost in passing: 'An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature.'

'WOULD give.'  167 years ago. But the Monstrous Regiment of XY-ers careered on in their self-perpetuating death spiral. As Byron put it 'And if I laugh 'tis that I may not weep' (Don Juan quotes Best Before May 1970).

Perhaps Eunice should be dubbed 'the grandma of climate science'. 

That's all for now.

b

PS

I would have preferred to illustrate this post with a photo of Eunice Newton Foote. Tellingly, though, there isn't one. The only photographs of American women in the 19th century were of the "Get back in the wagon, woman" sort, with their husband's hand on their right shoulder and their left hand on the right shoulder of the oldest of a befuddling string of children. I'll have to content myself with not using a photo of Tyndall.

Update: 2023.06.09.14:15 – Added PPS

PPS Come to think of it, the snub is a bit more snubby if I use this picture:

Alice Bell

I Was Glad, take 3

When Hubert Parry set verses from Psalm 122 (Laetatus Sum) for  the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 the text of the middle section read

Vivat Rex Eduardus

...

Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!

It was revised for George VI, for Elizabeth II, and for Charles III (as listeners/spectators last Saturday will have heard).

In Latin, 'May he live" is Vivat, traditionally pronounced – in this context – in what Wikipedia calls 'a variant known as Anglicised Latin' though I'm not convinced about the 'Anglicised' bit. It's the traditional seventeenth to early twentieth century English pronunciation: /vaɪvæt/. This section is officially known as "The Acclamation", less formally known in choral circles as "The Vivats".

But more often than not, in concerts, the Vivats are not included, and some listeners (though not singers) are surprised by Parry's abrupt change of mood

In I Was Glad, take 2, I mentioned

 ...an ad for a concert I had missed, at Truro Cathedral, the venue

Church at Lostwithiel

for the final performance in my choir's tour of the West Country in the summer of 2013. From a base at Plymouth, we sang at various places, one being here at the pretty church at Lostwithiel. If more about the tour interests you, I covered it in this post nearer the time (a  bit parochial, but with some linguistic  interest on the subject of expressions of home and opinion [bei and chez]).

As I said, our last recital was at Truro Cathedral. By chance, only hours before we sang, the birth of Prince George was announced. In our  repertoire for the tour we had various largely devotional  pieces, and two party pieces from which our MD chose one, varying from concert to concert.

I thought that a  natural piece to sing to welcome the young prince was "I Was Glad".  But – rather tactlessly, I felt 😏 – for the Truro recital our MD chose "Zadok the priest" recalling the prince's grandfather's ill-starred wedding (where it had been played). (Perhaps, though, I was the only one to notice this rather lugubrious echo; besides, my view was probably coloured by the marvellous bass-line of the Parry (especially the last few bars).

But when we sang it at Truro we omitted the Vivats (as many choirs do, depending on the context). 

On 30 April Westminster Abbey announced the New Vivats:

    

One of many

On 4 May at about 08.50 Radio 3 played a rendition performed at Ely Cathedral, with what Petroc Trelawney said were 'the new vivats'; but the words weren't the ones announced by Westmister Abbey 4 days earlier:

The words which will be sung at this Coronation are:   

Vivat Regina Camilla! Vivat Regina Camilla! 

Vivat! Vivat! Vivat! 

 

Vivat Rex Carolus! Vivat Rex Carolus! 

Vivat! Vivat! Vivat! 

(Or ‘Long live Queen Camilla! Long live King Charles!')

These were indeed the words used during the service  I couldn't make out the words of the Ely version, but the queen was not Camilla and the king was not Carolus; not Eduardus or Georgius either – it sounded like ... 

<speculation>
Latin had a little-used case ...

<doubt type="not in the exam?">
(or perhaps we just didn't learn about it)
</doubt>

....case ending for use when addressing someone. As it was often the same as the nominative I never gave it much thought.

<autobiographical_note>
On the subject of vocatives, I'm reminded of a charming feature of Portuguese (if not current now it was still current in 1972) whereby the name of a person whose attention was sought was preceded by "O". I enjoyed people addressing me as "O Bob". That's /ɔ bɔb/, not /u bɔb/ . This is not the definite article – which would indeed be used before a name when referring to another person. That's /u/. This 'vocative'  is a full-blown open /ɔ/; 

<beware-a-little-learning> 

My big brother – not that big, actually; but senior – had a 78 called 'The bandit of Brazil", mostly in English but with the odd 'o cangaceiro' thrown in for local colour, That 'o' is just a definite article, pronounced /u/; but the singers gave it an  /ɔ/, Perhaps this is Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, and the US singers got it right.  I doubt it though. 

</beware-a-little-learning>

</autobiographical_note>

I wonder if the  word for 'name' (nomen) has the vocative nomini, so that Vivat nomini means '"may <insert name here> live ("long", if you must, but get real)" Perhaps using the right words before the Big Day would have been Bad Luck.

</speculation>

Personally I wasn't that fussed, but whatever floats your royal barge. Good luck to him.

b

PS Save the date:

b

Timber

The opening paragraph of The Power of Trees by Peter Wohlleben sums the book up rather wel

And the subtitle adds quite a sad reproach: 

How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them

<speculation subject="reproachfulness quotient?">
I wonder how carefully Wohlleben's translator Jane Billinghurst (a long-time collaborator) reflected this reproach: does it really mean How Ancient forest can save us if only we'd let them? The last paragraph of Wohlleben's introductory note suggests this sort of doubt:

</speculation>

The author was one of the guests on this week's Start the Week. The other guests are introduced by the BBC Sounds blurb thus:

Jill Butler is an ancient tree specialist and a trustee of the Tree Register of the British Isle which records the nation’s ‘champion trees’ – the tallest and biggest trees of their species. But she’s also keen on getting the public involved in helping to find and care for some of the country’s oldest trees with the citizen science project, Ancient Tree Inventory, run by the Woodland Trust. 

 The healing powers of ancient trees is celebrated in stories throughout history, including the great Icelandic sagas. In The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think Carolyne Larrington, Professor of medieval European Literature explores the renewal that comes from the roots of Yggdrasill, the World Tree.

While listening I thought back to three podcasts. The first was this (about the "nuclear milestone" reached on 5 December 2022...

<parenthesis>

(though the work was done at the US National Ignition Facility, so perhaps we can date this milestone to the Feast of St Nicholas – providing a possible explanation for the energy source used by Santa's sleigh; (well, I did say 'perhaps'))

</parenthesis>

...) by getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than they'd put in (a tiny amount, but its a start.

What they do is in effect use lasers to contain a tiny star (the American speaker says 'the size of a BB', but the English woman says 'the size of a peppercorn' – draw from that whatever cultural conclusioins you like).

When they waxed lyrical...

<cliché-watch>

What else can one wax (apart from cars, obv.)?

</cliché-watch>

... about "a practically limitless supply of fusion energy", I thought 'Hang on a minute. Haven't we already got that – the Sun?

Aha, comes the objection; but only in the daytime, and when it's sunny enough. Well I've thought of that: those other two podcasts:

• A huge solar farm in the Sahara: The Inquiry
• An even bigger one in space, assembled by robots: The Climate Question

But the highest tech solution, apart from depending on as-yet uninvented kit, would involve the burning of huge amounts of rocket fuel. And anyway it all seems a lot of bother, when the the Sun and the trees are doing the job anyway.

Time for my walk.

b