Spot the Frippet: something arenaceous.

Arenas can be arenaceous - but they aren't very often, even though the words are closely connected.

Arenaceous means made of sandstone.

It can be a cliff:


photo by portengaround

or a work of art:


Qtub: photo by ampersandyslexia  https://www.flickr.com/photos/88916555@N00

or a building:


this is Sandstone School in Sandstone, Minnesota, USA. I assume this is made of sandstone.

Arenaceous can also describe a plant which grows most happily in sandy soil, so this this might be the easiest spot for you if you have sand dunes, a desert, or an old building site near you - or, indeed, if you know someone who has a cactus as a houseplant:



And what's all that got to do with arenas?

This:

Spot the Frippet: something arenaceous. This word comes from the Latin word harēnāceus, sandy, from harēna, sand. The first arenas had sand sprinkled on the floor before combats.

Sunday Rest: kritarchy.

WARNING: if you use the word kritarchy most people start wondering if this means government by critters.

Then they will start wondering what might be the best sort of critter to put in charge of the country.

This will result in them not listening to another word you say.

Word Not To Use Today: kritarchy. This word means rule by judges, and was first described in the biblical Book of Judges. The word comes from the Greek words krites, judge, and arkhein, to rule.

...bonobos?


photo by  Wcalvin

PS I wrote this post before last Monday, when Britain's Supreme Court went bananas and made Britain into a kritarchy. As far as I know, though no one has actually used the word (I have seen Supreme Court-archy) and so generally this post is still true - except that the thing about the bonobos seems rather less bonkers.

Saturday Rave: Confucius he say.

Confucius really did say:

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous

which is fair enough (though the meaning of study in the second part of that saying is perhaps rather different from that in the first).

There are a lot of things, however which Confucius didn't say, despite all claims to the contary. Like these:

Man who run in front of car get tired. Man who run behind car get exhausted.

War not determine who is right. War determine who is left.

He who think only of number one forgets this number next to nothing.

**

Whether Confucius would have agreed with these pearls of wisdom we shall, sadly, never know.

But, in any case, I hope he'd have laughed.

Word To Use Today: wisdom. This word has been pretty much the same in English for over a thousand years.

Word To Use Today: smeddum.

I love the Scots form of the English language, and so here's a Scots word with a beautifully eccentric history.

It starts off as pig food and ends up as the finest quality of man. 

How?

Like this.

In the 1600s smeddum described the most annoyingly floaty particles of flour which, after grinding, evaded the sacks and ended up on the floor to be swept up for pig food. 

As time went on smeddum came to refer to any very fine powder (the word is still sometimes used to describe powdered malt) including a particularly nasty mercury-based powder used as an insecticide*.  This insecticide was such powerfully noxious stuff that the word smeddum soon came to mean the strength, or the essential character of a substance. 

Not long after that smeddum began, as it does now, to be used in Scotland to mean vigour, courage, energy, common sense and resourcefulness. 

It's something to which any of us might aspire. 

And it all comes from the dirty sweepings of the mill floor.

Word To Use Today: smeddum. This word comes from the Anglo-Saxon word smeodoma which means fine flour.

*Quite possibly dimethylmercury, H3C-Hg-CH3, which is such nasty stuff that it's been known to kill someone from a single exposure through latex gloves.

Best Foot Forward: a rant.

So, when people say best foot forward, just what is it they expect us to do?

Hop?

(And, in any case, while I'm here, it should actually be better.)

Word To Use Today: better. This word comes from the Old English betera.

Nuts and Bolts: The Language of the Internet

Who uses the internet?

A report from the University of New South Wales tells us that 28% of internet users speak English; 23% speak Chinese; and 8% speak Spanish.

(For comparison, the number of people speaking English as a first language is 360 million; Chinese 1,200 million; and Spanish 437 million. (Though 1,500 million speak English altogether.))

Those figures don't seem too wildly unexpected, then; until you look further.

So: how much content is available on the internet in various languages?

English 56%
German 6%
Russian 6%
Japanese 5%
Spanish 5%
Chinese 3%

(About 95 million people speak German as a first language; 150 million Russian; and 130 million Japanese.)

Suddenly being a Chinese internet user doesn't seem to be such a horizon-widening experience, does it.

Still, I tend to look on the bright side.

Well, most of my income comes from teaching-English books sold in China. 

Word To Use Today: content. This word comes from the Latin contentus, which means contained. It's basically the same word as content meaning mildly happy, the idea being that to be contented involves having limited desires.

Thing Not To Do Today: demonise someone.

People are spending a lot of time arguing, aren't they? It's probably a good thing, in principle, except for the bitterness and the tumultuous lack of balance and reason.

It would take several thousand words to work out exactly what is going wrong - and then it wouldn't make any difference - so here are just three small points which the Big People might, perhaps, bear in mind before giving us the benefit of their wisdom (if any).

First of all, even the worst people (that is, people who don't agree with a particular point of view) will still have some opinions which are correct.

Second, there's only one person who understands the reasons that a person holds a belief or has made a decision (and, quite often, not even one.)

Third: if a person doesn't have a forked tail or eagle feet then he or she isn't a demon:


From Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster



Got it? People are complicated.

And most of them are quite as well-meaning and clever as you.

Thing Not To Do Today: demonise someone. The Latin word daemōn means evil spirit. The Greek word daimōn means spirit, deity or fate.

Spot the Frippet: repeat.

Well, this must be the easiest Spot the Frippet ever. It's actually harder nowadays to find something on TV that's original.

Still, for those of us (and us in this case doesn't include me) too refined and/or sensitive to watch TV, all kinds of music includes repeats.

It might be interesting to note how every repetition is different, even if all the notes are the same and are played in exactly the same manner and order.

I can only think it works rather in the same mysterious way that makes your wine tastes horrible after your pudding.

Spot the Frippet: repeat. This word comes from the Old French repeter, from the Latin repetere, from petere to seek.

Phrase Not To Use Today: big girl's blouse.

The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is known for his colourful turn of phrase, and recently (and ungratefully, considering that the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition had just voted in Parliament to reject a General Election, thus forcing the Prime Minister to continue in being in charge of the country*) he called the Leader of the Opposition a big girl's blouse.

This is an expression that's always puzzled me. Is it the blouse of a big girl? Or merely a blouse that's too big?

I know the expression implies cowardice, but what's that got to do with women's clothing?

Well, probably, this:

Sunday Rest: Phrase Not To Use Today: big girl's blouse. This phrase seems to come from Lancashire in North West England, and its earliest recorded use was in the TV sitcom Nearest and Dearest. The origin of the phrase is not completely clear, but it's strongly associated with sport, and the best guess seems to be the idea that a weak or over-sensitive (there's an old-fashioned idea for you) man might literally as well as metaphorically get in a flap if, as a rugby or soccer player, he wore a big girl's blouse instead of his team strip. 

The word blouse comes from 1800s France, but no one knows any  more than that.

So this means the phrase probably refers to neither a big blouse nor a big girl, but a big man. 

*The word bonkers has been used to describe Britain's current political shenanigans.

Saturday Rave: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest poetry we have.

It's not the oldest poem ever, of course - that would have been when some individual of an early Homo species asked someone to sit down beside her on the sabre-toothed tiger - but The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first poem we have that's written down.

It was first written as five Sumerian poems in about 2100 BC, which became the basis of a long poem in Akkadian. Our first versions of this translation dates back to perhaps 1900 BC.

It's absolutely terrific.

It begins like this:

Gilgamesh King in Uruk

I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.

When the gods created Gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body. Shamash the glorious sun endowed him with beauty, Adad the god of the storm endowed him with courage, the great gods made his beauty perfect, surpassing all others, terrifying like a great wild bull. Two thirds they made him god and one third man. 

In Uruk he built walls, a great rampart, and a temple of blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu and for Ishtar the goddess of love. Look at it still today: the outer wall where the cornice runs, shines with the brilliance of copper, and the inner wall, it has no equal. Touch the threshold, it is ancient. Approach Eanna the dwelling of Ishtar, our lady of love, the like of which no latter-day king, no man alive, can equal. Climb upon the wall of Uruk, walk along it, I say; regard the foundation terrace and examine the masonry: is it not burnt brick and good? The seven sages laid the foundations. 

***

So that's the very beginning of known poetry. 

And obviously, remarkably, it's still a pattern for many fantasy writers today. 

Well, I suppose if it ain't broke...

Word To Use Today: Gilgamesh. This name might mean the ancestor is a hero, from the Sumerian bilga, ancestor, and mes, hero or young man. But that's a bit of a guess, really.

The translation above is by N K Sanders, and the full text can be found HERE.

Tern: Word To Use Today.

The terns are leaving England...


Arctic tern. Photo by OddurBen

That sounds very mournful and poetic, but it isn't, really, because they'll be back again in the spring. Every year, once the weather starts getting cold, they rise and float on the winds far, far away to the south until they find summer again.


Common tern, photo by Badjoby

Among human populations it's only generally the old people who follow them and go to warmer climes for the winter, but if someone younger and fitter wants to travel south then there's a chance they might do it in the sort of tern which is one of these:


The Annie R Lewis by William P Stubbs

This type of tern is also known as a three-masted schooner.

And if by any lucky chance three three-masted schooners sailed off together then you'd have a tern of terns, because a group of three is a tern, as well.

So what's the connection between the word for the bird, and the word for the boat, which are both so beautiful, and both live on the sea, and ride the wind in order to move over it?

If you can believe the dictionary, none whatsoever.

Word To Use Today: tern. The word for the bird comes from the Old Norse therna. The word for the ship and the group comes from the Latin terni, which means three each, from trēs, three.

Tons of fun: a rant.

The Saddlers Company was fined ten tuns of wine for their part in the great London brawl of 1327. 

And you know how much a tun is, don't you.

No?

Well, a US ton (which is pronounced tun, naturally) is 2,000 lbs (lb is short for pound (yes, I know, but it just is, all right?! Blame the Romans!*) which is about half a kilogram), though a British ton is 2,240lbs. A metric ton (which is a term used in the US and many other parts of the world but not Britain, where it's called a tonne (pronounced, obviously, tun)) is, amusingly, 2,204lbs.

The size of a freight ton depends upon the stuff being shifted, but it can be a unit of either volume or weight. It can be 40 cubic feet (a cubic foot is 0,028 of a cubic metre) or one metric tonne.

But what about a tun?

That's definitely a unit of volume, and is either 252, 256, 240 or 208 wine gallons. A wine gallon is the area of a cylinder of 42 inches height and diameter. An inch is...

...sorry. I seem to lost the will to live.

Ten tuns of wine? 

Ten big barrels.

That'll do.

Word To Use Today: ton or tun. Ton and tun both come from the Old English word tunne.

*lb is short for libra.

Nuts and Bolts: penillion.

This word sounds like a number with a very large number of noughts, but it's not. It's something much more interesting.

Penillion is the Welsh art of singing poetry to the accompaniment of a Welsh traditional melody, usually played on the harp. The singer's (often improvised) tune may be in triple time while the harpist plays in duple time, and the harpist will often ;play variations on the traditional tune. 

Here's a beautiful example:

Penillion often, as in that clip, forms part of the Welsh Arts competitions called Eisteddfodau.

Word To Enjoy Today: pennillion. This word is Welsh and means verses, from penill, verse. It's also called certhh dant, which means string music.

Thing Not To Tell Someone They Are Today: puisne.

You say puisne the same as you do puny (PYOOnee) and it's basically the same word.

The difference is that whereas puny usually means physically weak, puisne means not so powerful.

It's used for people who have too much authority and dignity to have sand kicked over them when sunbathing. Particularly judges.

There are times when calling someone in great authority puisne can be extremely refreshing.

Best not say it out loud, though.

Thing Not To Tell Someone They Are Today: puisne. This word comes from the Old French puisné, born later, from puis, at a later date, and né, born, from the Latin nascī.

Spot the Frippet: sundial.

There are quite a lot of sundials in England. Yes, it is quite bizarre, because we don't always have very much sun. Ah well!

You can find horizontal:

















photo by SEWilco

and vertical sundials:


this one's in Paris. Photo by Ken Eckert

This one from New South Wales is a whopper (though it doesn't seem to be doing much good at the time of the photograph):


Singleton sundial. Photo by Bandworthy


My very favourite sundial is the topiary one at Ascott House in Buckinghamshire, England (follow the link to see a photograph). Around the clipped box numbers is the motto, also in clipped box hedging, Light and Shade But Love Always.

If you don't know where to find a sundial then if you have any sort of stick to cast a shadow you can make your own very easily. It'll only tell the correct time at that particular place at that particular time on that particular day of the year, but, hey, that's better than a clock which loses a second a day. 

Or, of course, its battery.

Spot the Frippet: sundial. The Old English for sun was sunne. Dial comes from the Latin diālis, daily, from diēs, which means day.

Sunday Rest: eutaxia. Word Not To Use Today.

A Greek scholar might guess that eutaxia is the state of enjoying things arranged neatly - and the rest of us the word might suggest the natural disgust felt at having to give money to the government. 

But we would all be wrong, because eutaxia is actually an engineering term which describes something that can be easily melted.

Still, if you can find a work of literature which includes the sentence The butter existed in its usual state of eutaxia then you will at least have some idea what it's going on about, won't you.

Sunday Rest: eutaxia. Eu- is to do with the Greek word eus, which means good; -taxia, I should imagine, comes for the Greek word taxis, which means order. 

What this has got to do with things melting I have no idea at all.

 By the way, eutaxis is the state of having a fifth secondary flight feather. 

This is, however, only likely if you are a bird.

Saturday Rave: the book.

Not The Book, as in the Bible (though I can't deny it has some jolly good stuff in it) but the book - the multiplicity of paperback, hardback, cloth book, pop-up, illustrated, versified, mapped, indexed story of romance, betrayal, lust, greed, sacrifice, prejudice, war, romp, anguish, triumph, tragedy and all.

Michael Deacon has recently summed up the lure - well, one lure - of the book most economically and beautifully.

On the 24th August 2019 in the Telegraph newspaper he wrote:

That's what a book is, at heart: a refuge for introverts. It's a way to learn about life without having to take part in it. To learn about people, without having to touch them.

And he's right. Because there's nowhere safer, really, than a book.

Word To Use Today: book. This word comes from the Old English bōk. It's basically the same word as beech (as in the tree) because people used to write on its bark.

Word To Use Today: ostracon.

I love a really obscure word, and so I here give you the word ostracon.

(As a bonus, there's a word ostracod, too, but that's something completely different.*)

An ostracon is a potsherd (no, not someone who herds pots, but a broken piece of a pot used for writing on. It's an early example of recycling).



This one says Kimon Miltiades woz here, more or less.


 In Ancient Greece ostraca were used in voting, and if the vote went the wrong way some unlucky person would end up ostracised. That's the meaning of the word ostracon which non-archaeologists are known to use.

But only very very occasionally.


Word To Use Today: ostracon. This word comes from the Greek ostrakon, and is basically the same word as ostracise.

*Ostracod is any of the minute freshwater crustacea in the order Ostracoda, from the Greek ostrakon, meaning, in this case, shell.

Kisses nah: a rant.

A dear friend wrote to me about her son-in-law's fiftieth birthday celebrations.

We're having a kisses nah, she said, and all the family will be there.

Well, this friend is a very cultured and intellectually curious person, and I did wonder what a kisses nah might be. But then my friend is also rather fond of using family slang and playful abbreviations, and so, as I'd got the gist of what she was saying, I thought I'd wait until the actual day of the celebration and hope that all would become clear.

Except that it didn't. We had a brilliant kisses nah, my friend told me, happily. So I went off to consult Google; which, I'm afraid, proved to be exactly as ignorant as me.

I then did the sensible thing and asked my friend what a kisses nah was; and it turned out that kisses nah was an example of the Cupertino Effect - a predictive text error.

And what for?

Well, you now have all the clues, so see if you can work it out .(Answer below).

Word To Use Today: kiss. It strikes me that kissing is rather odd behaviour, but we have been kissing in England for a long time. The Old English form of the word was cyssan.

And the answer?

Kisses nah is what the predictive text system on an iPhone made of an accurate attempt to type birthday lunch. 

And I don't think that even Alan Turing could have worked out that one.

Nuts and Bolts: diaeresis.

The most important thing to know about diaeresis is that an ability to spell the word is a sign of a wasted life.*

(I had to look it up.)

Knowing that the plural is diaereses probably means you have also no friends.

A diaeresis is the double dot you occasionally get above a letter, giving the instruction that the letter in question, and the one before it, should be pronounced separately, as in, for example, Noël, 
Chloë and naïve. 


There are also a few instances where a diaeresis tells you to pronounce the letter separately even though it isn't attached to another vowel, as in the name Brontë.

Diaereses used to be commoner in English - we used to write coöperate and poem, for example - but now if a word is likely to cause a problem with pronunciation then we tend to use a hyphen instead, as in, for example, the word re-ignite.

In fact, pronouncing adjacent vowels separately is still called a diaeresis, even without the double dots or hyphen - though only, as I've already said, by people who have wasted quite a substantial proportion of their lives.

Word Probably Not To Use Today: diaeresis. (Don't mix this word up with diuresis, which is to do with passing urine.) This word is Latin and comes from the Greek diairesis, which mean division. The Greek word diairein means to divide.

Diaeresis can also describe the place in a line of poetry when the end of a regular repeated rhythm coincides with the end of a word.

*Though some people spell it without the e, the rebels.

Thing To Be Today: an ignoramus.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Thus said Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism - and not thus say a whole heap of ignoramuses, who misquote him confidently. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, they say; which is also true, but sadly we all of us only have a little knowledge.

Mind you, we all of us only have a little learning, too. 

Still, to help a little, how about this Pierian spring thing Pope was going on about?

The Pierian Spring was in Macedonia, close to Mount Olympus where the gods lived. The Muses, who were the spirits of music, poetry, etc, frolicked there (what a nice word is frolic!). The spring was said to be the source of all knowledge of Art and Science.

One day the daughters of King Pierus challenged the Muses to a contest - which was idiotic of them - and, predictably, the princesses lost. Then the silly girls, instead of accepting their defeat gracefully, began to squawk protests at the decision, and were briskly turned into magpies.

Knowing about the Pierian Spring is admittedly only a small drop of knowledge to thicken the ocean of our ignorance. 

But it all helps.

Thing To Be Today: an ignoramus. The first Ignoramus was a character in a play by C Ruggle, a dramatist in the 1600s.

Spot the Frippet: loot.

In informal speech loot is anything particularly desirable that someone has brought home, even if it happens to have been paid for honestly. This loot may come from a clothes shop or a supermarket (but not if it's grey knickers or sliced bread or bleach or anything dull like that).

Loot must in some sense sparkle.

Most loot, however, is ill-gained. He's got plenty of loot only technically means that he's got lots of money, because there's a tasty tang of dishonesty about the expression which makes a salve for the feelings of the hard-up and the envious.

If you would like to see something more definitely dodgy then countries have always had a habit of looting stuff whenever they can; a lot of loot is a product of empire, war, trade, or an assumption of superiority.

There's probably something viewable in a museum near you.

Spot the Frippet: loot. Strangely, although the Saxons, Vikings, and Cromwells were notable for their looting and pillaging of England, the word loot itself is much more recent. It comes from the Hindu word lūt. 

Sunday Rest: bradigan. Word Not To Use Today.

On 29 August, the fashion journalist Caroline Leaper asked rather nervously if it would be acceptable to call Katie Holmes' latest outfit of a knitted cardigan worn over a matching knitted bra either a bra-digan or a bradigan.

I would say the answer to that question is no.

Sunday Rest: bradigan. The word bra is short for brassière, and in the 1600s in France this meant bodice. Before that, braciere was Old French for a cover for the arm, from braz, arm. The -digan part of bradigan comes from Cardigan, a town in Wales, which gave the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who liked a nice warm button-up woolly, his title.

Saturday Rave: A Ballad of Freedom by C J Dennis.

The Australian poet C J Dennis was born in 1876. He was remarkable for having a fairly gloomy and difficult childhood (not only sent away to be raised by great-aunts, and then by the notoriously violent Christian Brothers, but being called Clarrie (which was short for Clarence, but even so...)) and yet he grew up to be not only a poet who could see the comic side of more or less anything, but a poet who made proper money.

The Ballad of Freedom speaks penetratingly of serious matters, but that doesn't stop it being a joyful read.

It begins like this:

Now Mr. Jeremiah Bane
He owned a warehouse in The Lane,
An edifice of goodly size,
Where, with keen private enterprise,
  He sold imported napery
  And drapery - and drapery.
His singlets and his socks were sent
Out over half the continent;
  In clothing for the nursery
  And mercery - and mercery
He plied a most extensive trade,
And quite enormous profits made,
And barracked, with much fervency,
For foreign-trade - described as "Free."
        He said,
            Indeed,
        It was
            His creed.
The trade described as Free.

*

And then we get a whole story about this dreadful, cunning man, which I thoroughly recommend.

A Ballad of Freedom poem reminds me rather of The Canterbury Tales. It has the same winking humour and sharp eye for hypocrisy, and the same slightly sardonic realism and delight in the arrangement of language.

How could anyone afford to miss something like that?

The whole poem - do read it - can be found HERE.

Word To Use Today: mercery. Mercery is fine fabrics (mercery are fine fabrics? Oh dear, that's a place that English won't go, isn't it) such as velvet and silk. The word comes from the Latin mers, which means goods or wares.

Word To Use Today: loriner/lorimer.

Loriner is a lovely word. I discovered it on a visit to Capel Manor College and Gardens, which is just inside the northernmost stretch of the M25 motorway which circles London.

There is a plaque in the entrance there to commemorate the 750th anniversary of the Worshipful Company of Loriners. 750th! And yet I didn't even know what a loriner was.

It turns out that a loriner is someone who makes the metal bits of a horse's tackle: that is, basically, the metal parts of its saddle and bridle.

The Loriner Company first came together officially in 1261, and part of the idea of the company was to lay down rules for conditions of work, and to stipulate the taxes to be paid to the City of London, and also to charity.

Now, the Saddlers had a company, too, and the Saddlers' Company hated the Loriners. They hated the Painters and the Fusters (or joiners), too, and on Ascension Day in 1327 there was a huge bust-up in the streets of London between all these companies in which several people were killed.

Everyone was duly summoned to appear before the Mayor and Sheriffs (in fact, so many men turned up on the first day that they had to abandon the sitting) but although the Saddlers protested that all the other trades had agreed to go on strike if any one of them had a dispute with the Saddlers (a wheeze which continued to be legal for nearly all of the last 750 years), in the end the judges decreed that the Saddlers must promise to conspire no more against the other trades - and must pay ten tuns of wine to the Commonalty of London.

It's a lovely story, but how to use the beautiful word loriner today I do not know. I can only suggest you tell someone the story of the court case and discuss how much wine might atone for some other sins. 

Such as failing to return a library book on time, perhaps.

Word To Use Today: loriner/lorimer. The Old French word lorain means harness strap, and comes from the Latin lōrum, strap. The form of the word lorimer seems to be basically a very long-standing mistake.