The third envelope

 The newly-appointed CEO found that her...

<not-making-THAT-rookie-mistake>
Didn't expect me to assume the default CEO was male, did you?
</not-making-THAT-rookie-mistake>

... predecessor had left three numbered envelopes, marked

Mentally editing the instruction...

<criticisms>

To be opened: Why not just 'Open'?

In order: What else would you do with numbered envelopes?

In case of emergency: Errm.... isn't that just an emergency?
</criticisms>

... she gave them to her PA to file.

After the usual honeymoon period, the company got into difficulties. She epoened the first envelope. A note inside read

BLAME YOUR PREDECESSOR 

She did, and eventually the share price recovered. 

In the fullness of time the the company  fell on hard times again, and she opened the second envelope. A note inside read:

BLAME ADVERSE MARKET CONDITIONS

As you might expect...

<Storytelling-101>
I didn't just fall out of the coconut tree; what else was going to happen?
</Storytelling-101>

... eventually the company got into trouble a third time. Not knowing what else to do...

<Storytelling-101>
(but knowing how these things work)
</Storytelling-101>

....she opened the third envelope. The note inside read:

PREPARE THREE ENVELOPES

Call me Æsop.

b

N or M

Last Saturday's The Times mentioned...

<tangent>
(or perhaps homed in on [Self-referential, moi? ])
</tangent>

a point that I wrote about here) – the variation between 'home in on' and 'hone in on'. Rose Wild observed in the Feedback column  that the N-version was more common in American English than in British English, agreeing with the observation I made in that post, starting with a visit to the British National Corpus:

<pre-script>

'That's right' I thought; 'Only one instance. A solitary ignoramus got it wrong.'

<parenthesis>
Oh dear. Me and Cnut...

<HD24>
As usual with stuff I've written, I couldn't make sense of this at first . What I meant was that there was a tide in the usage, and my feelings about it didn't signify.
</HD24>

</parenthesis>

On the other hand there were many of the M-version ('hoMe in on') :

 

...[HD 2024: whereas in American English]

'Home in on' is the commoner of the two, but only by a whisker.

Finally, I used my favourite newly discovered language-related software tool to compare the two.

The expression 'home in on' took off about the same time as computers and related technologies used in guided weaponry, and for twenty years it had the field to itself. Then 'hone in on' appeared, but until the mid-'80s it never represented more than a quarter of its soundalike. Then, from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s something strange happened: 'home in on' marked time, and 'hone in on' took advantage. It is as if a significant number of M-users tried the N-version as an experiment, and stuck with it; and this infected...

<parenthesis>
(is my prejudice showing?)
</parenthesis>

... the people who had not yet adopted either expression, with the result that for the next two decades the N-version rose in popularity more steeply than the original. Since then, shares have remained roughly stable, with the MEANINGFUL version outnumbering the NONSENSICAL one, but not by much.

</pre-script>

She wrote...

<parenthesis>
(in fact she attributed it to a correspondent, but she was sparing with quotation marks, so it's hard to tell who supplied the bit about  'making sense', which rather stuck in my craw.)
</parenthesis>

... that the substitution of 'hone in on' for home in on' was "an eggcorn – a phrase based on a mishearing that sounds like the original and catches on because it makes sense (sic: my emphasis)" . A hearer can make sense of it; I'm not convinced that is the same as making sense. Or perhaps it is. Discuss.

Interestingly (for me at least thinking, about unjustified Ns cropping up in popular usage) the previous week's Feedback column had referred to the tendency  in American English for 'careened' to occur when right-thinking people would have expected 'careered'.

<autobiographical-note>
(I first noticed this while listening to the Mud Slime Slim album, and assumed that James Taylor was the prime culprit.)
</autobiographical-note>

  But N seems to be a repeat offender here.

<brickbat-dodging>
And 'offender' is the wrong word of course.'He only does it to annoy/Because he knows it teases'
</brickbat-dodging>

In another case,...

<covering-his-back>
(not the same case – this is not a matter of N replacing another letter in the course of ongoing language use, but rather a matter of N spontaneously occurring in the course of language development – but still, it is a case of an N appearing where it's not expected)
</covering-his-back>

...'message'  has spawned 'messeNger', 'passage'=>'passeNger'... There must be others...

But I have promises to keep, etc.

b

A pigeon come home to roost

I was smugly glad to be proved right last week when a BBC newreader ascribed to the  Vice President an undeserved punctuation mark for a name. In May 2021 The Times published  a profile of Kamala Harris, originally published in a US journal. An American English speaker said something like 'It's pronounced  'Comma-la'. I wrote about this at the time.

Long-time readers of this blog will be accustomed to my banging on about how misleading 'sounds-like' pronunciation guides can be, especially in a teaching context. For the full pro-IPA rant see here,  but my point is simple: 'sounds-like' pronunciaton guides are useful only when they refer – and are understood to refer – to a particular speech event. In the case of that article, the speech event was between users of American English. For a user of British English Kamala is NOT pronounced 'Comma-la'. Here's the letter I wrote to The Times back in 2021:

<prescript> 
As a retired teacher of English as a foreign language I was disappointed to read Dana Goodyear's misleading and unhelpful pronunciation advice ('it's Comma-la'). 'Sounds-like' pronunciation aids, as I was always telling my fellow teachers, are no better than the memory of  a speech event. This speech event involved two people who were both speakers of American English. So 'comma-la' tells us about the stress but nothing about the vowels. A speaker of British English will be misled by this memory aid:

• there is no /ɒ/ in the first syllable
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  /ɒ/ is the vowel sound in 'bot', 'cot', 'dot' etc. I realize I am hoist by my own petard here but I've got to allow for the lack of IPA-fluency in my readers
  </HD24>

• the schwa at the end of  'comma' is more-or-less the same in British English and in American English
• even a speaker of American English would have no idea about the last syllable (/ɑ/, /ɑ:/, or /ə/)
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  It doesn't much matter what these represent, as I now realize there are many more possibilities. 

  </HD24> 

When I first read the Goodyear article I wronged the writer, assuming she was British and had  misled her readers by slavishly regurgitating her notes of what Harris had said. But what she wrote turns out to have been true for her speech community, and just misleading for speakers of British English (as I presume most of your readers are).

</prescript>

The 'Sounds like "Comma-la"' guide works only for stress, not vowel sounds. But some BBC Newsreaders (not all), presumably having read that article, insist on the /ɒ/.

<tangent subject="word-stress">
And while I'm on the subject of word-stress, Wimbledon is a regular source of linguistic entertainment: foreign names that Radio Five Live commentators have been blithely mispronouncing for the rest of the year suddently get the Radio Four treatment. Their newsreaders turn to the Pronunciation Unit on, for example, Medvedev:

In the case of Medvedev, we have had to compromise: we cannot expect non-Russians to pronounce this name in a perfectly Russian way because this would require broadcasters to have detailed knowledge of Russian pronunciation, which is not feasible.

Having carried out detailed research and consulted with Russian speakers, including a Russian phonetician, we concluded that correct stress placement and reflection of the soft (palatalised) 'v' in the stressed syllable were the most important aspects to highlight in our anglicised pronunciation.

The surname Medvedev stems from the Russian word for 'bear' medved' (with stress on the second syllable), so that it is important to retain this stress in the surname, hence our recommendation muhd-VYED-uhff.

Source 

For years tennis commentators have been using this name. For all I know, Medvedev himself may have abandoned all hope of getting Anglophone commentators to stress the second syllable. But when Wimbledon comes around the Pronunciation Unit comes to the fore; and BBC radio reports on different programmes often have headlines that seem to refer to two different people.
</tangent>

Returning to Kamala. Trump, of course, gets it wrong. This may be intentional, as a Harris campaign video deals expressly with the name's pronunciiation; or it may just be the old political trick of deliberately mispronouncing an opponents name, as Churchill did with the Nazis and Thatcher did with Gal-ti-e-ri.

<tangent>
(which ...

<whatExactly>
[the sound /eə/]
</whatExactly>

... reminds me of the 'Spanish' speaker in a recent radio play I heard, who in the course of his espeech used the uniquely English /eə/ sound when saying the third syllable of 'Buenos Aires'; it's a diphthong all right, but the spelling is a clue to which one. I wish soi-disant foreigners in plays put a bit of effort into getting it right. Perhaps they could ask the Pronunciation Unit...
</tangent>

'Nuff said.

b

PS

My translations have gone off. Now I just have to wait by the phone for a few months

 

 

Ne plus(-size) ultra

 

On 8 July Medsape published a piece on Ultra-Processed Food

What Is Ultraprocessed Food, and What Are Its Effects? 

with this intriguing note:

This story was translated from the Medscape Portuguese edition using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.

Seldom  missing an opportunity to be intrigued, especially where Portuguese is concerned, I followed the link to the original, published  nearly a week earlier:

Alimentos ultraprocessados: Uma ameaça tão evidente quanto a crise climática?

The story is not 'AI-mediated mistranslation misrepresents important research'. As far as I can tell without the sort of fine-tooth-combery which I don't feel like doing at the moment, the two articles are broadly similar. But there is a fairly signficant editorial difference, at least in tone (particularly as far as the headline is concerned). It doesn't take a Portuguese expert to see that 'uma ameaça' (the English cognate is 'menace') is more value-laden than the gentle 'what are its effects? And the comparison in tone is even more stark when the 'menace' is characterized as being 'as evident (obvious? unarguable? urgent? 'real and present"?) as the climate crisis'. 

Another difference is socio-political. Where the English version has the subhead Proof of concept the Portuguese version (Brasilian I imagine, as the 2010 conference was held in São Paolo) has the defensive 

Avaliando a contradição: o canadense que testou a NOVA 

(how can a mere norteamericano put a Brasilian concept to the test? The effrontery!)

<inline_ps>
You may need a little help guessing what this means. Avaliando ≅ 'assessing/the value of/weighing up'; contradição ≅ 'contradiction' {obv}; canadense ≅ 'Canadian' (but I get a hint of the passive-agressive – nationality [identity] is more important than academic qualification); testou  ≅ 'tested' {obv}; NOVA ≅ the Brasilian report that. introduced the concept of UPF

</inline_ps>

But I'm inclined to think that the comparison with the climate crisis may be apposite:

Monteiro ... highlighted a study showing that people with assessing diets rich in ultraprocessed food consume many more calories, often exceeding 5000 per day, thus resulting in weight gain. The post hoc analysis of this study suggests that the hyperpalatability and high caloric density of these foods are the main factors contributing to this excessive consumption. Another point raised was the deterioration of the nutritional quality of foods due to ultraprocessing, which reduces the content of beneficial phytochemicals, such as flavonoids. According to Monteiro, these characteristics are "a recipe for diseases." Processing also "creates chemical contaminants, such as acrylamide and bisphenol, which have proven harmful effects on health," he added. He also addressed the problem of dependence on ultraprocessed food. About 14% of adults and 12% of children in the United States show signs of addiction to these foods, he said. Addiction may be amplified by aggressive marketing.

The issue is summed up in Dr Chris van Tulleken's award-winning book:

Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

 

And the question at the end of the title is not rhetorical: we can't stop because UPF is designed to be addictive.

<paranoia-alert status="query">

This isn't just another right-on hippy conspiracy theory. There aren't evil boffins rubbing their hands like the animated germs in the '50s toothpaste ad, saying 

We'll hurt her teeth and drive her crazy 

It's her fault for being lazy' 

There's no evil conspiracy. It's just good old Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'. UPF sells more, so the behaviour that leads to it is reinforced, putting a gastronomical spin on Gresham's Law: 

Ultraprocessed drives out wholesome

</paranoia-alert>

He goes on:

Worth waiting for. Nuff said (more than enough).

b

Update: 2025.01.11.16:05 – Added <inline_ps /> 

 

 

 

A porte manteau too far

 Oops – deleted in error. This may reappear if I feel it's worth the effort. Sorry (that'll teach you to read these words of wusdom hot off the presses.

b

Sumer came in several weeks ago

In my choir's forthcoming concert we will be singing 

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
and bloweþ med
and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu

Awe bleteþ after lomb
lhouþ after calue cu
Bulluc sterteþ
bucke uerteþ
murie sing cuccu

Cuccu cuccu
Wel singes þu cuccu
ne swik þu nauer nu

 

But this, the first recorded song to be sung in parts, is not – as is sometimes mistakenly thought – ...

<example>
On BBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme on 21 June 2022 this song was presented to mark the summer solstice.

In the days before I had sworn off Twitter (to give it the name that I still insist on using, for reasons given here – in short, the reference to birds makes the expression 'A little bird told me...' pleasingly appropriate) I tweeted thus:

I'm sure this wasn't a unique error, and that it has been, and will be, repeated as long as this delightful song is sung.
</example>

.. a paean to the coming of summer. I've written about this before, here:

<prescript> 

In  The Stories of English David Crystal says

Reading Abbey did not have a scriptorium, so the manuscript was probably copied at Oxford.

... But why Sumer? [And] isn't it the wrong bird? The cuckoo arrives in Britain in April. Crystal gives the answer:

There was no contradiction, because in Middle English sumer was the only word available to describe the period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The word spring to refer to the season is not recorded in English until the mid-sixteenth century.  

The Stories of English

 </prescript>

So the song, the cuckoo, the wude springing nu, the lombs and their bleating mothers, the methane-related bullock action, and all the rest of it, refers ŧo the coming of spring not summer.

AOB

 <autobiographical-note>
The England Women's cricket series against Pakistan fired off a distant memory of a... not exactly playmate I had when I was 10 or 11; he was the youngest son of a tenant in the downstairs flat, with very little English (mostly 'I am', used to mean 'I <any-verb-in-any-tense>.  Heidar taught me the numbers from 1 to 10 in his mother tongue (possibly Farsi, as he was Iraqi).

In this cricket match, Akhtar was bowling, and the commentators always referred to her by her given name, 'Waheeda'. This, except for the final vowel, and allowing for the tricks of memory and L1 interference as we used to say in the language teaching  trade...

<parenthesis>
L1 interference is the influence a mother tongue has on the way a language learner processes information and examples in a second language; for example, an Anglophone speaker of English will hear the French oui as 'we', although both the onset (the rounding of the lips) and the final vowel are very different.
</parenthesis>

 ... was not unlike the word for 'one', as I remember it, in Heidar's language . And while 'One' is not a girl's name, 'Una' is. I wondered, hearing that commentator, whether 'Waheeda' was like that. or whether this was just a coincidence with no relevance in unrelated languages.
</autobiographical-note>

Speaking of coincidences, I stumbled on an extraordinary (but totally inconsequential) one the other day. It started with a crossword clue, whose answer was 'stannic'. Out of idle interest I looked up the etymology of the word, which told me that the first recorded use was in 1790. The dictionary then pointed me to a site that promised to list other words first used in 1790: this site deserves a nomination for this year's TEZZY (Time-wasting Site of the Year Award). Among the words whose first appearance in print was in 1790...

<tangent>
 (think of it: with the French Revolution in full swing,  the appearance in print of the word guillotine is hardly surprising, but what of aside from, laughing hyena, prearrange, scrunch...?) Anyway, the point is (if it can be deemed so consequential as to have a point) that...
</tangent>

... one of the newly printed words was horseweed – a word that had escaped my notice for the last 73¾ years until last week (when I asked PlantNet to identify a newcomer to what MrsK and I, with laughable optimism, refer to as 'the wild garden').

b

Update: 2024.05.28.12:50 – Added PS

At our 15 June concert we'll be singing John Rutter's collection. The Sprig of Thyme. One of the songs in this collection is  Afton Water ...

<tangent>
(which with supreme irrelevance reminded of the old Passing Clouds cigarette packet; I never did: see what justufucation [or even just reasom] there was for quoting the poem on that pink packet.)
</tangent>

... whose tune reminds me of Ye Banks and Braes, which we sang at St  Gregory's Primary School ...

<rant type="potential, nipped in the bud, but still...">
(in the days when primary schools dealt in education rather than the extrusion of an endless supply of potential wage slaves who know the 3Rs but little else)
</rant>

.... And at last, about 65 years after the question formed in my young mind, I realized just why Burns asked the aforementioned topological features How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?, and then went on to ask the birds How can ye chaunt? He's feeling a close relation of the Pathetic Fallacy (or maybe it just is the Pathetic Fallacy: it depends how you define it.)

<definiton>
An author who uses the Pathetic Fallacy makes nature reflect the feelings of the characters or the narrative: a distant clap of thunder portends a misfortune, when a couple make up after an argument the rain stops and the sun comes out, when the villain enters clouds gather.... Expressions like 'a sunny disposition' , or 'casting a clouid over...' are shorthand versions of the Pathetic Fallacy.
</definiton>

As a poet, Burns knows how to use the Pathetic Fallacy. But, more than that, he feels when it's the right time to use it. So, in Ye Banks and Braes the spurned lover expects nature to reflect his feelings: 'How can you be so lovely and fruitful when I'm so miserable [full o' care]? So this close relation of the Pathetic Fallacy is when the poet expects nature to reflect his mood and nature doesn't play bell – pretty subtle: no wonder I didn't get  it back at St Gregory's.

I spy

In the late '60s there was a late-night TV drama that I used to watch, starring Bob Culp playing a tennis pro and Bill Cosby as his coach. They travelled the world, a-spying. This struck me at the time as a pretty unlikely cover story, but the backchat between the two was quite amusing. My only memory of it involved the two trapped in some kind of storeroom and making an improvised bomb ...

<parenthesis reason="neologism not yet coined">
(this was long before the term "IED" had been coined...

<inline-ps>
Or perhaps it had been coined, and used by insiders, but even if it had it hadn't entered common parlance.
</inline-ps>

...) 

</parenthesis>

...one of whose ingredients was the dry ice used to preserve fresh fish. One of the two was unimpressed by the prospect of this thing working, and poured scorn on his partner's 'cod-fish bomb'...

 <tangent importance-quotient="0">
I forget which, but in my mind's eye I can see Bill Cosby saying it; Bob Culp was the one full of wacky ideas and Bill Cosby was the world-weary sceptic.

<meta-tangent>
(Cosby played Gromit to Culp's Wallace)
</meta-tangent>

</tangent>
.

Not only was it, I thought, an unlikely cover story, but a pretty implausible story-line. 

But the other day I was invited to a talk given by Professor Chris Andrew, a meteorically rising young  (when I first knew him – ten years older than me) Fellow of Corpus and fellow (lower case this time) member of the Gravediggers (a Corpus play-reading society...

<esprit-descalier>

<tangent>
I know it should be d'éscalier, but as I've said before if a conceit is worth anything it's worth doing properly. This non-existent mark-up language...

<meta-tangent>
(incidentally this ["mark-up language"] accounts for all the other       -MLs you may have come across: HTML,  SGML,  XML... and so on [there are dozens]. Mark-up languagers use tags to control the way different bits of text are displayed in various sorts of document [for example, print in a range of formats, help text, other sorts of online text...] This makes it possible for one source document to produce several outputs.)
</meta-tangent>

...would surely have a compiler that would return an error and probably (in the best traditions of computing) fall down in a heap if it found punctuation or diacritics in a tag; that sort of character is often, in geek-speak, "reserved".
</tangent>

 Oh I get it. Corpus/corpse. It's only taken me 50 years...
</esprit-descalier>

... of which I was the Hon Sec. We met once a term, port and rich-tea biscuits), thst sort of thing. Very Cantabrigian.

<autobiographical-note>
One evening I remember a last-minute (pre email, of course) change of venue necessitated a notice in Old Court, decorated with a picture of this provender. A passing worthy added words designed to shame us lotus-eaters by referring to some current horror (probably the Wollo famine): '1 bottle of port would give an Ethiopian family... etc etc'. Not a whit abashed (I 've always wanted to write that) a fellow Gravedigger wrote 'Let them, drink Coke'. Happy days.
</autobiographical-note>

The latest in the good Professor's oeuvre (he is the pre-eminent historian in matters of British espionage) starts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I wonder if this is where John Le Carré got the idea for the expression 'the Circus'. The introduction goes on:

This strange story put in mind of I Spy.  But the idea of using a form of entertainment as a cover for espionage is not a twentieth-century thing. The intoduction later reads:

But if you want to know the rest of the story (and read all those footnotes, which don't lead anywhere in these screen grabs) you'll have to read the book. That's my lot for tonight.

b

 

Update: 2024.05.11.16:15– Added PS

        <autobiographical_note> 

In the late 1970s and well into the 1980s many IT professionals were working to standardize a markup language ultimately called SGML Some time in the mid-1980s, all the is and ts were respectively dotted and crossed, ducks were aligned, etc when somebody (one of the contributing partners, who – according to colleagues fabled to be in the know in matters relating to standards bodies – wanted to spike DEC's guns, knowing how nearly market-ready they were [the developers, that is, not the guns]), said "Woah! Wouldn't it be cool if we...?" At this point the bean-counters at DEC, who'd spent years signing away serious money on R&D (and standards work...

<tangent>
(which involved, among other things, international travel – in the days when 'man-bags' were unusual, it was well-known in the Reading engineering community that a sure-fire means of identifying a standards person was that they always had such a bag, so that they could high-tail it to Heathrow at the drop of a hat)
</tangent>

....) said "No; we go to market with what we've got". So VAX DOCUMENT was born, based on SDML; I used it for a good 15 years, topping and tailing this work with other (sometimes, more or less WYSIWYG...

<tangent>
(but starting with DEC Standard Runoff, which was far from it)
</tangent>

...) writing tools, but always returning to VAX DOCUMENT when there was real heavy-lifting to be done.

Later I was studying for an Open University diploma in software engineering, which introduced me to XML. This is a very flexible system that allows the user to define their own tags and their possible values, which are specified in a Document Type Definition (which explains the abbreviation "DTD" that users of HTML may recognize from the first line of an HTML file...

<tangent>
(that is, a 'well-formed' HTML file', as they insist on saying in the standards world. Many...

<inline-pps>
Correction: all browsers. HTML was conceived as an all-purpose display engine; but in its common use there is usually one DTD (general-puposed online text) which can therefore remain implicit. An explicit DTD is needed only for particular screen shapes and sizes (and, of course, for "well-formedness").

</inline-pps>

...browsers silently assume a suitable DTD even if an HTML file is not well-formed.
</tangent>

.... On one occasion, I was writing to my tutor and jokingly used a pair of these pseudo tags (something like

<apology type="lateness"; explanation="failure of backups">

I'm afraid my assignment will be late because....

</apology>

). I found the device useful and, once you've got it, it makes documents easier to scan – by clarifying the extent  of a long parenthesis and making embedded parentheses easier to make sense of. So ever since then (late 1999 or early 2000) I have taken to using it freely.

        </autobiographical_note>

Update: 2024.05.16.11:15 – Added <INLINE-PPS /> Update: 2025.05.07.12:40 – Added <INLINE-PPPS />