The North-EAST passage

Covid lockdowns did nothing for Putin's paranoia, or rather contributed greatly to it. A recent The Rest Is Politics (no link, because translation work has taken my eye off the ball for the last few weeks, so I can't point specifically to a particular edition – though I imagine it was influenced by articles such as this one in the New York Times [with the helpfully explicit title 

U.S. intelligence weighs Putin’s two years of extreme pandemic isolation as a factor in his wartime mind-set.

]...

<NYT-article>

...Throughout the pandemic, Mr. Putin has retreated into an intricate cocoon of social distancing — though he allowed life in Russia to essentially return to normal. The Federal Protective Service, Russia’s answer to the Secret Service, built a virus-free bubble around Mr. Putin that far outstrips the protective measures taken by many of his foreign counterparts.

Mr. Putin has been holding most of his meetings with government officials by video conference, often appearing in a spartan room in his Moscow estate, Novo-Ogaryovo. Even when foreign dignitaries arrived, they sometimes didn’t get to see Mr. Putin in person; the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, had to make do with a video meeting when he visited Moscow last year....

Putin and his national security advisers,   in a meeting days before the invasion

... 

</NYT-article> 

...)

Poor Vlad – 'alone and palely loitering';  but he was in thrall not to la belle dame sans merci but to Mother Russia. He spent two years in timorous isolation, dreaming of going down in history as Vladimir the Great, leader of the Make Яussia Great Again movement.

<election-aside>
A recent BBC news reporter, looking forward to Putin's predicted and predictable landslide in the forthcoming 'election' said all Putin's opponents were either in exile or in prison; I think one group of possible opponents were missing from this analysis: the dead.
<election-aside>

Anyway, paranoia: to add to the geo-political realities, he found that Gaia herself was conspiring against him. This week's The Climate Question discussed the effects of global warming on Russia's coastline. Whereas hitherto that coastline has been protected from all but the most well-equipped of research vessels it is now, for 4-5 months of the year, open to all-comers. And Russia's response has been to miltarize much of a coastline that formerly had been protected by natural conditions; at,  presumably, great expense.

<parenthesis>
According to Rory Stewart, in that same podcast,   Russia's miltary spending is '40% of its budget'. I'm not sure what this means, and he didn't do his usual thing of quoting chapter and verse. But he was sure of the number: 'Four zero' (lest we should think it was a paltry 14%,  a mere 6 or 7 times the UK's).
</parenthesis>

Meanwhile, out at sea, Russia enjoys the paradoxical benefits of increased hydrocarbon exports  – made possible by the global warming caused by hydrocarbon exports already made along more expensive sea lanes: the North East Passage.

At the end of that edition of The Climate Question, another global warming paradox is introduced: the melting of the Arctic ice-sheet (and the Arctic is just ice – there isn't a continent underneath it, as in Antarctica) – has changed the Earth's gravitational field, with a counter-intuitive result: in the southern hemisphere global warming raises sea-levels. But in the north, with less ice exerting less of a pull on the water, the sea-level is falling. There's more to it than that, which was beyond my O-Level Physics with Chemistry (which I described elsewhere as the 'hasty...

<2024-afterthought>
I think 'perfunctory' would have been a better choice
</2024-afterthought>

... genuflection at the altar of Mammon that ... we Lotus Eaters were allowed to make on the way to a Greek class'); I recommend the last few minutes of  The Climate Question (in  this regard, I mean  – it's all worth a listen.)

That's all she wrote.

b

The War Against Error, Take 2

Not too much of note happened in the last week of November 2015. Infoplease defines it with its two termini : the downing of the Russian aircraft in Turkey on the 24^th  and the beginning of the Climate Talks on the 30^th (both of which may come to generate much of import in the future (the latter for good and the former for ill) – but in between  the world news cupboard was bare. So the Independent published a strange filler:

The 58 most commonly misused words and phrases

(58; not a solecism more, not a solecism FEWER, as Jeffrey Archer might have observed.)

The piece starts out promising to be a review of  Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style:

The book is like a modern version of Strunk and White's classic "The Elements of Style," but one based on linguistics and updated for the 21st century.

Hmm. I'm not convinced by this use of linguistics as if it were some kind of magic added ingredient – Now with added Linguistics, they say, much as the makers of Pedigree Chum used to say Enriched with nourishing marrow-bone jelly in the '60s (not sure why that illustration swam up from the mental depths). Writing a style guide using insights provided by a study of modern linguistics (not "based on linguistics" whatever that means) is a good idea. I don‘t think "like ...Strunk and White..., but ... based on linguistics" quite does justice to the idea.

But the last six words of this sentence (a paragraph later) let the cat out of the bag (revealing it to be a pig in a poke...? a mixed metaphor too far, perhaps):

We've highlighted the most common mistakes according to Pinker using examples directly from his book along with some of our own.

As a result, it's impossible to identify the source of some of the slips (many of which I suspect aren't Pinker's, although I detect in some of his preferences that linguistic conservatism common in countries with a history of British colonialism: Canada, USA, Australia, India...).

You might be shocked by how many words you've been very slightly misusing.

it warns in the sub-headline. Well, no and no. I first discussed such nostrums here. More recently I wrote this. But this topic seemed worth yet another visit.

There is, in this list, a clutch of the Usual Suspects disinterested/uninterested, hung/hanged...

<autobiographical_note>
which I can never read without hearing, in my mind's ear,  Rex Harrison's

By rights he should be taken out and hung

For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue

in the soundtrack recording of My Fair Lady. Oh how we larfed.
</autobiographical_note>

... depreciate/deprecate, flaunt/flout, irregardless, practical/practicable, proscribe/prescribe, protagonist/proponent, unexceptional/unexceptionable, effect/affect (which I looked at a couple of years ago in a post entitled "Enother old favourite"}, lie/lay...   AHA

<eureka certainty="iffy">
Perhaps alphabetization/lack thereof in  the Independent's list is a clue to the provenance of different items: Pinker's are alphabetical and the Indy threw in a few at the end to make it up to a round ... hmm, not so much...58.
</eureka>

But there are odd omissions and strange choices, identifying a problem area but citing an uncommon  symptom – credulous, for example, rather than credible whereas the chief solecism I've met is incredulous/incredible (which aren't mentioned). BNC finds 35 cases of credulous and 428 of credible but 171 of incredulous and 1174 of incredible. OK, a total of 1345 instances of incredulous/incredible don't imply that many instances of confusion, but they far outweigh those for credulous/credible (3:1) – that's three times more occasions of sin (as my RE teacher would have said).

The fatal inter/intern confusion

And has anyone ever used urban myth to refer to someone like Al Capone,  confused meretricious with meritorious, or used New Age to mean futuristic? Does anyone confuse averse/adverse, inter/intern...? Maybe they do in Canada.

Also, there are assertions of "mistakes" that aren't mistaken, as for example:

Cliché  is a noun and is not an adjective

OK, some people believe that; British English dictionaries assert it. But Merriam-Websters, for example, accepts it as either a noun or an adjective. I suspect the Indy's simple (and simplistic...

<linguistic_mechanism>
Incidentally, this is how these once-decried (first deprecated, then depreciated, and ultimately accepted as standard) confusions commonly bear fruit. Cases arise where either is acceptable; and the process grinds on. And not just with words; also with grammatical forms. Guy Deutscher, recounts in The Unfolding of Language how the 'going to' future arose from usages that referred to both travel and futurity:  'they are going to see him'. More of this in an update...
</linguistic_mechanism>

 ...) "A not B" does not reflect Pinker's careful academic aloofness. I suspect that the careful avoidance of etyma (who could define "meretricious" without referring to ladies of the night?) derives from Pinker's studious avoidance of the Etymological Fallacy – discussed in several Harmless Drudgery posts. This "A not B" approach reflects that of the Reichenau Glossary, discussed here: VESPERTILIONES was right; CALVAS SORICES wrong. But, irregardless, a French bat is a chauve-souris. 

So I must read Pinker's book; surely the Indy's howler-ridden piece can't do justice to it?  Who knows what Santa may bring?

b

PS And here are a couple of clues:

Profoundly disappointing: baby's male – begone! (7)
Parental – sort of care before parturition. (8)

Update 2015.12.21.11.10  – Added afterthought in blue.

Update 2015.12.22.11.50  – Added picture; really must get an artist 

Update 2016.04.06.17.25  – Added answer to 2nd clue (still working on the first...anyone?) and removed footer.

PS PRENATAL

Update 2016.07.30.12.15  – A couple of typo fixes. I STILL can't get that first clue. 

Great Tits and American Chemists

This week's Nature Bang on Radio 4 caught my attention, particularly because the point de départ was a study involvimg Great Tits,  my single  conquest in the birdsong  recognition stakes...

<parenthesis>
(apart, of course from the easy and common Magpie and Jackdaw)
</parenthesis>

.... The Great Tit's monotonous...  

<afterthought>
(Strictly, more often than not duotonous, although sometimes it replaces the second tone with a hoarse gasp...)
</afterthought>

...call is not uncommon hereabouts; and it's easily recognizable.

As is the bird

The study involved culture, and the influence of immigrants. It involved a puzzle (of course) and a number of micropopulations, each consisting of six birds. There was also a 'tutor bird', which had been trained to solve the puzzle the wrong way.

Left to themselves, the tits soon learnt the right way, and it entered their culture (incomers and new-borns picked it up). But when the tutor bird was introduced, the culture adopted the wrong way to solve the puzzle (there was still a solution, but not the most efficient one).

Then a couple of immigrants were introduced to the group, and the puzzle was solved more efficiently...

<observation summary="immigration 1, Farage 0">
(Conclusions about the costs/benefits of immigration are clear. I am reminded of Ruth Davidson's observation in this week's Today Podcast: she found it extraordinary that no political party, given the demographic facts of the UK's aging population and economic failure to thrive, was making the positive case for immigration. Nature Bang simply flagged this issue up as 'political'; flag-wise though, my colours are nailed to the mast: it's a no-brainer – the benefits of immigration vastly outweigh the costs.)

</observation>

... but the obvious conclusion ('immigrants introduce innovations') was found to be an over-simplification. It was not the incoming birds that introduced the innovation. The more experienced home-grown birds did that. But the wise old-timers, having found the right way, soon reverted to what they'd been trained to do. What the incomers did was recognize the improvement and – not feeling the weight of the dead hand of the misguided culture – adopt it as best practice. It then entered the culture, and was passed on to young birds

So it was with Great Tits. What about us? Nature Bang went on to consider  Jewish emigrés' influence on US organic chemistry.

<background>

• Chemistry, because innovation is documented at the Patent Office. Not all innovations are patented, but in the world of Big Pharma  (for obvious financial reasons – innovations are either patented or not researched [so they don't happen in the first place]) they are. 

• Organic, because in the 1930s US inorganic chemistry was world-leading, but not organic (the warm/wet/messy stuff that involves life).

 </background>

Jewish organic chemists fleeing the Nazis (having been stripped of their livelihoods, though not yet their lives) brought new techniques and insights into the USA. And patents in organic chemistry boomed. But the new patents were not registered by the immigrants themselves. Young American scientists developed the immigrants' ideas.

 There was lots more in that edition of Nature Bang. Give it a go.

b

Translation News

Work on my next translation (an entry for the John Dryden Translation Competition) has been accompanied by the Royal Mail delivery from Hell. It seemed promising enough on Monday: 'next day delivery before 1.00pm'. But 'next day', starting on Monday, should be Tuesday, and Royal Mail's final date gives the game away:

So what happened on Tuesday (apart from stalwart manning of the front door, obvs)?

The package was in 'Swindon MC' (whatever that is) and it stayed there long after the promised delivery time. Nearly 16 hours after arriving at 'Swindon MC' it was passed, just before midnight, to 'Swindon MC'. So Wednesday dawned. And on Wednesday many things happened at 'Reading DO' (which I imagine is a Distribution Office, though to judge by the TEN entries in the tracking log it might as well stand for Dithering and Obfuscation. Perhaps it was a software glitch (oh no, that's the Post Office).

But the package did arrive in the end. Lucky it wasn't urgent.

AOB

Before Christmas I wrote – rather hurriedly...

<path-not-trodden> 

(I originally planned to vary the refrain, but with looming deadlines – both The Times's and homelier ones – I just cutNpasted the 'honest mistake' bit) 

</path-not-trodden>

... – this: 

God rest ye merry, gentlemen of the HMRC 
Who calculate the way to raise the costs of decency       

So we can hold our heads up in the world community        

Oh that's what it takes to be a Mensch

(Pardon my French)

Oh that's what it takes to be a Mensch .

But then Nadhim Zahawi got to be the taxman's boss

And found his business interests were set to make a loss

Unless he cooked the books a bit (whoever'd give a toss?)

 'It was only an ho-onest mistake

Honest mistake

It was only an ho-onest mistake.'

Then Rishi's post-Truss cabinet began to give him grief

Nadhim became a Minister without a working brief

No clash of int'rest possible, now that was a relief 

'It was only an ho-onest mistake

Honest mistake.

It was only an ho-onest mistake.'

In January Rishi made a show of being fair

And so Nadhim Zahawi was bumped down to party chair

He really couldn't  mess with things, no clash of int'rest -  there 

'It was only an ho-onest mistake

Honest mistake.'

Some may think that he was really on the take.

It would have taken up about a fifth of the space available in The Times Diary, so I'm not surprised it didn't lead to fame/fortune/national acclaim. But I'm my own gatekeeper...

<buzzword_du_jour>
(reference to a not-very-satisfying piece on the radio today, with a particularly lame ending)
<buzzword_du_jour>

... so you've got it – like it or not.,

Happy New Year.

b

Update 2024.01.29.15:00 – Added PS

PS

It's done and submitted. As usual, the entry form (specifically the requirements for the naming of files) left something to be despaired. 

<rantette>

(and no, that's not a typo). As someone who used to be paid to write instructions (and did Courses to prove it, with certificates and everything [which I forbore to stick on my wall] I find the attempts of the well-meaning academical committee charged with writing and rewriting the rules an annual trial).

After failing to make head or tail of some instructions, which led me to damage a newly-bought tool, I wrote (here)

They might as well ship these things  pre-broken  – it'd save a lot of bother.

Nothing broken this time though, if you don't count a few brain cells.
</rantette>

Red-faced hunter

Crowd Science's end-of-year round-up led me to this 2017 article in The Conversation, which - among other things, recounts this astronomical symbolism from the aboriginal lore of Australia:

A Kokatha oral tradition from the Great Victoria Desert tells of Nyeeruna, a vain hunter who comprises the same stars, in the same orientation, as the Greek Orion.

He is in love with the Yugarilya sisters of the Pleiades, but they are timid and shy away from his advances. Their eldest sister, Kambugudha (the Hyades star cluster), protects her younger sisters.

Nyreeuna creates fire-magic in his right hand (Betelgeuse) to overpower Kambugudha, so he can reach the sisters. She counters this with her own fire magic in her left foot (Aldebaran), which she uses to kick dust into Nyreeuna’s face. This humiliates Nyreeuna and his fire-magic dissipates.

<idle-musing>
I wonder why both the Aborigines and the Greeks a few thousand years later decided that this constellation represented a hunter. No time for further research though.
</idle-musing>

The title of this paper rather gives the game away. 

Yes, Aboriginal Australians Can and Did Discover the Variability of Betelgeuse

<comment>
No prizes for the sequence of tenses, but it is only a preprint – not that that makes much difference...

<editorial-note>
In my experience as a technical writer (what I did didn't undergo  'peer-review' – in name, at least – but it was reviewed by my peers), peer review doesn't improve the writing; quite the reverse – it invites the influence of numerous mutually-exclusive grammatical bugbears. It may improve academic rigour, but it doesn't improve readability. 

</editorial-note>

... Come to think of it, hasn't it been peer-reviewed yet? 
</comment>

Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and Antares. This result has excited the usual healthy skepticism, with questions about whether any untrained peoples can discover the variability and whether such a discovery is likely to be placed into lore and transmitted for long periods of time. Here, I am offering an independent evaluation, based on broad experience with naked-eye sky viewing and astro-history. I find that it is easy for inexperienced observers to detect the variability of Betelgeuse over its range in brightness from V = 0.0 to V = 1.3, for example in noticing from season-to-season that the star varies from significantly brighter than Procyon to being greatly fainter than Procyon. Further, indigenous peoples in the Southern Hemisphere inevitably kept watch on the prominent red star, so it is inevitable that the variability of Betelgeuse was discovered many times over during the last 65 millennia. The processes of placing this discovery into a cultural context (in this case, put into morality stories) and the faithful transmission for many millennia is confidently known for the Aboriginal Australians in particular. So this shows that the whole claim for a changing Betelgeuse in the Aboriginal Australian lore is both plausible and likely. Given that the discovery and transmission is easily possible, the real proof is that the Aboriginal lore gives an unambiguous statement that these stars do indeed vary in brightness, as collected by many ethnographers over a century ago from many Aboriginal groups. So I strongly conclude that the Aboriginal Australians could and did discover the variability of Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and Antares.

L'Envoi

Interesting pattern in the waxing and waning (see what he did there?) of interest in Harmless Drudgery, not boding well for January 2024😗:

Signing off for 2023.

b

Update: 2024.02.22.10.00 – Typo /format fixes.

A tradition resurrected

Angelus ad virginem subintrans in conclave

Virginis formidinem demulcens inquit 'Ave' ...    

...as we sang last Saturday at All Saints Wokingham (at a concert that I did mention last time (so if you missed it you've only yourself to blame [and the 200+ people who came had a marvellous time]).

Resurrecting a practice observed several times in the early days of this blog....

<rip>

The earliest instance is here. I was reminded of it by the passing of a friend and erstwhile colleague {and long-valued commenter on this blog}, who would surely have ticked the No publicity box, so I shan't name her.

</rip>

... when I marked the festive season by taking a carol to bits, I am today looking at Angelus ad virginem; but just the first two lines as there's plenty to detain me there; and I'll begin in medias res, or more accurately in medias primae lineae: subintrans. Like the first word of that sentence ("resurrecting") it's a way of referring to an event without saying '<x> happened'. It's a present participle, or – to use the CELTA-approved abomination – "the -ing form". And it kicks off with two prepositions. the second one belonging to the verb intrare, which means, as you may have guessed, "to enter". But before that it says sub-, referring to the direction adopted by any angel worth his salt: downwards. He (it was a feller – you can tell that from the -us) came down into the conclave.

<anachronism-warning>
I am anything but an expert on domestic door furniture in nought-th-century Palestine, but I suspect Mary's room was not lockable. Readers of a musical bent will know from klavier and clef and clavichord that the -clave bit of conclave is a key. The clavicle is so-called because of its shape (not a Yale of course; more the sort of thing you might see on a medieval jailor's keyring.) And followers of papal doings will recognize the word 'conclave'; when the cardinals are electing a new Pope there's a lock-in to concentrate their minds.

<equivalent-anachronism>

The  one that everyone quotes is Shakespeare's clock  chiming the hour in Julius Caesar. And the one in this Annunciation  scene involves a similar timespan: from the year dot (when the angel comes down) to a medieval technology (when they have doors with locks).  Caesar's Rome did have an audible marking of time, just monthly rather than hourly, and not mechanical: the ritual calling out of the new month, which gives us the word calendar, as noted by Etymonline:

</equivalent-anachronism> 

</anachronism-warning>

 Whereupon the girl had ants in her pants....

<autobiographical-note>
(at least, I suppose that's where formidinis gets its meaning – from formis [=ant]). By using this colloquialism I would no doubt incur the wrath of Mrs Batty, a primary school teacher who thought that my daughter's "Mary was gobsmacked" (in a retelling of the Annunciation) was inappropriately irreverent. In my view it was a brilliant use of the vernacular, showing extraordinarily rich vocabulary in a 6-year-old (though maybe I'm biased).
</autobiographical-note>

... and the angel showed remarkable obtuseness in assuming that a simple "Ave" would demulcere anyone... 

<gloss>
The -mul- part of demulcens is presumably related to our "mollify".
</gloss>

...They'd win no prizes for self-awareness, these angels. 

That's enough for now. I'm half-expecting a review of the concert, but if it happens it'll have to go in an update.

b

The 'Oh yes it IS' Bill

 In last Sunday's The Week in Westminster they were discussing the rights and wrongs of the Rwanda 'policy'...

<oh-yeah>
(less of a policy, it seems to me, than a gamble on the possible outcome of a tiny symbolic gesture)
</oh-yeah>

.... Sir Robert Buckland ...

<autobiographical-note>
(any relation, I wonder, of Graham Buckland, with whom I used to sing in Corpus Chapel Choir?)
</autobiographical-note>

... repeated the view reported in the Evening Standard last week:

“The ECHR [HD: European Court of Human Rights] underpins the very fabric of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement,” he told the BBC Sunday Politics programme.

He added: “To ignore that reality in the context of a debate about migration would be to threaten and endanger the Good Friday/Belfast process and once again undermine the position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom.

“I think it would be a foolish or rash move… the wrong step and a very un-Conservative step for colleagues to take bearing in mind it was Conservative lawyers and politicians who helped draft the convention in those years after the war.

The 'Oh yes it IS' Bill responds to the Supreme Court's ruling that the policy would be illegal because Rwanda was not safe, by hastily throwing some more money at Rwanda...

<weasel-words>
(Of course the official line is that they're not spending any more. But there are new procedures and restrictions that will inevitably mean more money is spent – not to mention the ongoing legal costs (millions) foreseen by Geoffrey Robertson KC in a recent World at One.)
</weasel-words>

 ...and decreeing that oh yes it is, so that's all right

But this one will run and run; it's a moving target. Latest news is that the Immigration Minister...

<parenthesis>
(whose name I can't dissociate from the smell of pilchards, because of a near-pun: 

 

</parenthesis>

... having introduced the Bill, has disavowed it as insufficiently inhumane and done a runner to the back benches to plot with Attila the Hen.

It's hard not to agree with Alastair Campbell in last week's The Rest Is Politics that the Tories have given up on governing and are spending their inevitable last few months laying political traps for an incoming Labour administration.

<image authorship="mine not Campbell's>
(Not unlike the Wagner group pulling out of Ukraine but leaving behind a devil's brew of booby traps and landmines)
</image> 

But I've got better things to do than chart the hissy-fits of HMG, notably, preparation for this:

It's already selling well, and should be a blast. Hokum all ye faithful.

b