Halloween Horror: a rant.

You know something? All those witches and ghouls etc were bonkers to choose October 31st to have their picnic and general celebrations.

Apart from the nasty weather, the very next day is booked by the God Lot for their own festivities, so the forces of evil have to knock off their shenanigans at midnight.

At least the God Lot have their nice long robes and warm (solar-powered?) haloes:



The witches tend to be quite inadequately dressed for the season:


drawing of a witch by Guercino 1591 - 1666

Perhaps the witches etc a hardy lot, but whether they're as impervious to cold as polar bears wearing thermal underwear and ear muffs, they should have had the sense to schedule the day away from the God Lot's beano.

I mean, Hallowe'en. The clue's in the name, isn't it!

Word To Use Today: Hallowe'en. The e'en bit is short for evening, and to hallow something means to set it apart because it's sacred. The word comes from the Old English hālig, which means holy.

Nuts and Bolts: hackables.

Britain's anti-spy organisation, GCHQ, has a special anti-cyber-crimes unit called NCSC.

A recent survey conducted on behalf of NCSC has managed to put a figure on something I've always been curious to know, namely: how many really stupid people are there in the world?

The answer seems to be about 23.2 million, because this is the number of people worldwide who have been identified as using 123456 as a computer password.*

NCSC has made some recommendations abut forming a more secure password, but sadly their suggestion of using three random words isn't often workable. There's usually only space for about eight characters, and two of those often have to be non-letters. (Don't these NCSC people live in the real world? I suppose you could have Tea4two!, but options are severely limited...

...Two4tea! works as well...)

Anyway, can we identify other stupid people by their easily-hackable passwords?

The commonest names used in passwords are Ashley, Michael, Daniel and Jessica - but perhaps that's just because people with these names are particularly adorable.

Similarly, the common use of football team names Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manutd probably only reflects the huge number of fans these fine teams have: they aren't all going to be geniuses, after all.

There's another group of music-themed passwords: Blink182, 50cent, Eminem and Slipknot (I am only slightly surprised that JSBach doesn't get in there) and then there is a group of the deluded, which begins with Superman and takes in Tigger and Batman. That isn't surprising at all.

The big problem, as you will already have realised, is that as passwords are secret they are actually of no use at all for identifying stupid people.

I can only suggest asking what's your password? 

If they tell you then it will be clear enough.

Word To Use Today: a good secure password. I suggest one based on the initials of a memorable phrase. 3Bm3bm stands for three blind mice, three blind mice, for example.

None of my own passwords are in this form.

*I know that this only gives us a minimum figure for the number of really stupid people in the world, but I'm taking the most optimistic possible view. 

Someone has to.

Thing Not To Do Today: trudge.

Trudge is a lovely word: you can almost hear the effort of every step as the mud reluctantly releases its hold on your boots, the heaviness of your tired legs, and the resentment of your mind as you make your unwilling slow progress.

Trudge trudge trudge...

Still, as a comfort, when the word trudge was first used in English, it looks as if trudging was even more difficult.

So cheer up, do.

Thing Not To Do Today: trudge. The origin of the word trudge is obscure, but in the mid 1500s it meant to walk in snowshoes. 


Man trudging along in the Coup de Matelot Valley in Canada. Photo by 0x010C

There's a Swedish dialect word trudja which means showshoe, which looks very much as if it must be connected to our own word trudge.

Spot the Frippet: something terebrate.

Animals are terebrate, but only some of them.

These are terebrate:


wasp Polistes dominula. Photo by Alvesgaspar

and these:


whip scorpion. Photo by Glenn Bartolotti

and these:

















Photo of an assassin beetle by Simon Egan - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31838625. 

(That long thing sticking out of its head is used for sucking the juice out of other insects. Yum!)

Now, you may be recoiling a bit because none of these animals look cuddly - and most of them look dangerous - and you'd be right to be cautious, because something terebrate has a piercing or boring organ, such as a sting.

Still, that's just the sort of thing you want to spot isn't it.

Especially if it's on the seat of your chair.

Spot the Frippet: something terebrate. Collins says the word was made up in the 1900s, but other sources quote Sir Thomas Browne using it (and he died in 1682). In either case the word will have  come from the Latin word terebra, which means borer.

Sunday Rest: ravioli. Word Not To Use Today.

There's nothing actually wrong with the word ravioli, and the little pillows of stuffed pasta are themselves nearly always delicious.

However, I've never felt quite the same about them since I learned the derivation of the word. 

So I shouldn't read the next bit if I were you.

Word Not To Use Today: ravioli. This word comes from the Italian dialect rava, turnip, and means little turnips.

photo by Tiia Monto

Saturday Rave: Beyond the Sun by Andrei Bely

The Russian writer and intellectual Andrei Bely was born in Moscow in 1880. He carried on being Russian (though he didn't always live there, Russia not being at all times a healthy place for those of independent mind) and he certainly carried on being a writer and an intellectual.

He wrote a very much admired book, Petersburg, and he also devoted a lot of thought to the use of stress in poetry, devising a system of joining up stresses and half-stresses on the page and discovering that many of them formed squares and rectangles.

This wonderful portrait is by Léon Bakst 

I don't know what shape the original stresses of Andrei Bely's poem Beyond the Sun make, but here it is in translation so you can work it out in English if you like. It seems a very Russian poem, to me, but luckily not too dismayingly intellectual.

The world-gold sunset is ablaze with fire,
Having pierced through with radiant airiness,
above the peaceful cornfield it set fire to crosses
and distant outlines of cupolas.

Airy veils, waving, whispering with a gust of freedom
in the azure expanses
wind around us with cold satin kisses,
flying from east to west.

The hot sun - a golden ring -
Your contour, piercing the cloud, burned out
The hot sun - a golden ring -
departed from us into the Unknown.
We shall fly to the horizon: there
eternal day without sunset shines through a red curtain.
Speed to the horizon! There a red curtain
is woven from daydreams and flame. 

**

Nowadays when I see a sunset, I tend not to want to fly towards it but to hurry home and have a cup of tea. So I'm grateful to this poem for reminding me what it's like to be young.

Word To Use Today: horizon. This word comes from the Greek phrase horizōn kuklos, limiting circle, from horos, limit.

Word To Use Today: galoshes.

What's the connection between an evil emperor and some waterproof footwear?


Galoshes: ink drawing by David Ring


This:

Word To Use Today: galoshes. This word hasn't changed much in two thousand years, but then as a word it is practically perfect, so that's no surprise. The Old French form of the word, meaning clog, was galoche, and the Latin form was gallicula, Gallic (which means French, more or less) shoe.


Galoshes made in 1910 by the Converse Rubber Company, Massachusetts. Photo by Daderot (How about that: Converse!)

Gaius, the little son of the popular Roman general Germanicus and the Emperor Augustus's granddaughter Agrippina, was given the nickname Caligula, small soldier's boot, during a campaign in Germania.

Caligula grew up to be a Roman Emperor. The historians of the period are not particularly to be trusted, but I'm afraid that his name echoes down the centuries as a hideous example of cruelty, luxury, and madness.

But just think how bad-tempered he'd have been if he hadn't been given some little galoshes.

March of the Giraffes: a rant.

Many human beings in Britain are keen that we should have another referendum about Brexit.

I know the famous definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result (can anyone really think another referendum would soothe the nation?) but what bugs me is that the campaign in favour of this are calling it a People's Vote.

I mean, who do they think voted last time?

Giraffes?

Word Not To Use Carelessly Today: people. This word comes from the Norman French people...arrgghhh! No it doesn't! Oh dear, Blogger won't let me type that word as it should be. The word people comes from the Norman French word which looks like people, but has the o before the first e. Previously, the word comes from the Latin word populus, which does indeed mean, well, populace.

Nuts and Bolts: metalanguage.

Metalanguage is what happens when language starts navel-gazing.

For instance, once you start talking about the form of a language - let's call it English - and you begin using words like, well, word and noun, for instance, then you're commenting on English, and so logically you must be speaking a slightly different language from English itself.

It then follows, of course (if you accept that's true), that it's possible to comment upon your comment, and comment upon your comment upon your comment, and comment upon...but you get the idea. Then, you lucky thing, you have nested metalanguages. 

It's all a bit hair-splitting, but there is a straightforward example of nested metalanguages. This is the way species are described scientifically.

If you take the example of a wolf:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivore
Family: Canis
Species: lupus

You see? Each layer of identification is a comment on (in a way) the one before.

Yes, it is a bit of a stretch, but hey...

Does any of this metalanguage stuff actually matter?

Only as an illustration of the minds of academics.

But then people are always fascinating, aren't they.

Word Probably To Decide Not To Use Today: metalanguage. The Greek word meta means with, after, between, among...more or less anything, really.The word language comes from the Latin lingua, tongue.

Thing To Do Today: herd something.

The world, the physicists say, is getting ever more chaotic, and in the end (actually, if I understand it aright (which I probably don't) quite a long time before the end) everything will be an infinite soup of...

...well, soup.

They call this entropy. I call it boring. Who wants conformity?

But on the other hand there are times when it does seem as if there's enough chaos in the world. We humans do seem to have an urge to impose order. We collect things and put them in cupboards specially made for the purpose; we decide on one particular side of the road to drive on and (mostly) keep to it; we follow recipes to the nearest pinch of salt.

This must be, I think, a sign of a deep and ancient herding instinct. Most of us no longer have animals about the place, so we herd papers into folders instead of sheep into folds.


So why not try to herd something today. But not people, probably.

Herding people is almost as bad as herding cats.


photo of Aoshima island by 暇・カキコ

Thing To Do Today: herd something. This word comes from the Old English hirde.

Spot the Frippet: carnivore.

Let's start with the basics.

A carnivore eats meat...

...well, except for the ones which don't (which is most of them).

A member of the order of mammals called Carnivora is an example of a proper meat-eating carnivore...

...except that this order of mammals includes the giant panda, which lives on bamboo.

So what's going on? 

A carnivore is more widely defined as an animal which eats other animals. So that includes hedgehogs, for example, which eat slugs and snails and beetles:


photo by Hrald



and pike, which eat mostly other fish:


illustration by Sherman Foote Denton

and robins, which eat insects:


Eurasian robin photo by Charles J Sharp

as does the carnivorous Venus fly-trap:


photo by AleksanderSandi

There are even carnivorous fungi (but don't worry, they don't eat anything bigger than springtails).

So could you call man - some men - carnivores?

Almost certainly not. There are, obviously, degrees of meat-eating, from the obligate carnivore like a lion, which eats pretty-much nothing but meat, to the facultative carnivore, like a dog, which can eat vegetable food, there isn't a rule which says at which point the facultative carnivore becomes an omnivore. There are, however, categories which cast a glance towards the answer. A hypercarnivore eats more than 70% animal; a mesocarnivore 30-70% animal; and a hypocarnivore less than 30% animal.

Being a carnivore seems quite cool, until you consider that an obligate carnivore has to rely on other animals to get his food into a state in which it can eat it. Then it seems a bit weedy.

If you could, would you be an obligate carnivore?

You'd probably have a good svelte figure (unless you were a polar bear) but it would mean giving up cake, pancakes and chocolate.

Personally, I want to eat everything.

Spot the Frippet: a carnivore. This word comes from two Latin words: caro, meat and vorare, to devour.

Sunday Rest: crusty/crustie. Word Not To Use Today.

Extinction Rebellion protesters are causing a bit of trouble in some of the big cities of the world at the moment.

The protesters are keen that the world and its inhabitants flourish, and they believe that climate change is a terminal threat to this happy outcome.

Now, whether the Extinction Rebellion protests are the right way to persuade those in authority to act, and whether a drive to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025 is the most effective way to stop climate change, I do not know. I'll just say that it would probably make any necessary progress easier if those on both sides would listen more generously to what the other side is saying.

Anyway, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, recently called the protesters "uncooperative crusties". Boris is fond of an obscure word, and this one has become obscure very quickly as, in this meaning, it dates from only the 1980s.

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of crusty involves the words homeless, vagrant, young, begging, rough, matted, dreadlocked and unkempt, but this leaves out an important facet of crusty life style, which was that it was often driven by animal rights and environmental concerns.

So what's wrong with the word?

Well, as one of the Extinction Rebellion crowd pointed out, some of the protestors were librarians, doctors and teachers.

And if one of those is crusty it means something else entirely.

Word Not To Use Today: crusty/crustie. This word is probably derived from Crust Punk. The crust is the line of grime caused by not having access to baths. As Mr Johnson will know, the word crust comes from the Latin word crūsta, which means hard surface, rind or shell (and is therefore related to the word crustacean).

Saturday Rave: Sir Thomas Browne's friends.

Thomas Browne was a doctor who lived in Norwich. He was also a man of the widest possible curiosity, full of interest in science and nature, and in every possible means of learning more about both.

Because he was born in 1606 and died in 1682 these interests included various subjects no longer respectable, such as alchemy, astronomy, and witchcraft. The fact that his most famous work is called Religio Medici, Religion of a Doctor, gives some idea of his free-ranging mind.

Browne wrote widely about...well, about what interested him, which was more or less everything. But he was perhaps above all fascinated by the act of being interested.

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion [he said], or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.

(He also said Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good, but where that leaves us I do not know.)

Browne's stuff isn't easy to read. The OED attributes to him 775 new words (among them electricity, prairie, coma, locomotion, carnivorous and cryptography) and 1596 new meanings for already established ones. He assumes a wide knowledge of the classics and the Bible.

And then there's that other quotation, death is the cure for all diseases. So he's not much of a one for happy endings.

But still there's that mind, unafraid and undaunted and getting into everything.

Not easy, no. Not predictable.

But certainly one hell of a ride.

Word To Use Today: one of Sir Thomas Browne's new ones. How about coma, which comes from the Greek word kōma, which means heavy sleep.

Word To Use Today: furlong.

A furlong is the distance an ox team can pull a plough before it needs to have a rest.

That distance is equivalent to 220 yards, or about 201.168 metres - though in practice the conversion to metres doesn't work that accurately as surveyors in various parts of the world use slightly different conversion tables. 

Furlongs aren't used very much nowadays. About the only time you'll hear the word used is describing distances in horse races (and even there, Australia has gone metric); but grid system towns in North America were quite often laid out using furlong measurements, and on the London Underground railway and along British canals furlongs are still sometimes used.

Myanmar roads have signs in miles and furlongs, too.

I feel rather nostalgic for furlongs, and I think I might use them to  measure my walks. A furlong must be about 260 steps. I wonder if there's a pedometer that would do the sums for me?

Word To Use Today: furlong. This word comes from the two Old English words furh, furrow, and lang, long. A furlong is an eighth of a mile and about a fifth of a kilometre. A furlong used to be 600 feet, but then the size of the foot measurement was changed and now it's 660 feet; but the furlong is still the same actual length because this wasn't done until the 1200s, long after field and property boundaries had been laid down in Britain.

Model people: a rant.

Lately - and this is a good thing - a trend has started for clothing companies to give some idea in their catalogues of the size of their models.

Millicent is 5'8" tall and a size 8, it will say.

This still leaves us with the problem that we don't know if this is a British size 8 or an American size 8 (a British size 8 is an American size 4); and also with the other problem that anyone anywhere else in the world will probably not know that 5'8" means five feet and eight inches (which is the same as 1 metre 73 centimetres in most other places, a foot being twelve inches (or thirty and a half centimetres) and an inch being about two and a half centimetres).

Still, on the whole it's helpful.

But you have to be careful. My husband was sent an advertisement for this jumper the other day. It looks jolly warm and cosy - and it probably is - until you read the small print:

Smart enough to add polish to your casual separates and relaxed enough for at-ease, weekend wear, this fantastic all-rounder is a smart, versatile buy. For effortless style, why not try adding it to your favourite jeans-and-trainers, weekend-ready combination?

Features

100% Pure Wool

Crew neck

Aran style pattern on front and back

Long Sleeves

Regular Fit - True to Size

Machine Washable

Our model wears a size Medium and is 6" tall

**

6" tall..?

Six inches?

Good grief. That's only just over 15cm. That's only about half the size of Action Man! 

Well, I know they call them models, but I didn't know they took it that literally.

Still, I suppose if you know a chilly garden gnome...

Word To Use Today: size. This word comes from the Old French sise shortened, from assise, session (as in a court session leading to a judgement) from asseoir, to sit. It's not unrelated to the word assess.

Nuts and Bolts: Indonesian.

We've had a couple of comments sent to The Word Den recently - well not comments, exactly, more advertisements for gambling sites, but hey - which have popped up on some rather old posts. 

They were written in the Indonesian language.

Well, I didn't even know there was an Indonesian language (many thanks to Google translate for enlightening me). So from where has this Indonesian language come?

Well, yeah, yeah, it comes from Indonesia, obviously. But Indonesia is a large country (fourth largest in population in the world, getting on for a quarter of a billion people) and has many languages (perhaps three hundred), so which of these languages counts as Indonesian?

Indonesian is, basically, the Austronesian language previously known as called Malay, and the history of how it got to be called Indonesian is interesting and unexpected.

The colonial language of Indonesia, Dutch, would normally have become well-established in the Indonesian islands, but it was never spoken by very many of the inhabitants and disappeared very swiftly after independence.

This was partly because Indonesia was keen to forge an identity among its nation of 17,500 islands, but it was quite as much because of the way the Dutch had administered the country. The Dutch did not attempt to use their language as a lingua franca, but instead had a policy of discouraging native Indonesian people from learning the language, even though many official forms had to be completed in Dutch. The idea was to maintain a distinction between the social status of the Dutch and that of the ruled. This policy continued until the 1930s.

During the 1930s there was some agitation for the adoption of an official native language to be called Indonesian, but before anything was done about it Indonesia was invaded by the Japanese, which led to the complete banning of the Dutch language. Three years later, when the Japanese had left, Indonesian was announced as an official language of all the 17,500 islands.

Indonesian, as I've said, is basically Malay. Malay wasn't the most spoken language in the islands (that was Javan, and after that Sundanese: three times more people spoke Sundanese as Malay) but Malay was the most widely spoken language, and the language of trade and travel. Javan, on the other hand, was the language of politics and literature and religion - and if you're trying to unite a large and disparate new country then the last thing anyone wanted to do was to remind people about politics and religion. In any case, Malay had been used all over the place for a thousand years and most people knew it a bit.

Nowadays almost everyone in Indonesia speaks at least two languages, a local language and Indonesian, which is now the language of education and government. Indonesian is still the second language of most Indonesian people, but it's perhaps the most important thing which makes them feel Indonesian. 

And so (I hope very much) they will all live happily together for the rest of their lives.

Word To Use Today: Indonesian. This word comes from the Greek place name Indos and the Greek word nesos, island, so Indonesia means the Indian islands. The name was coined in the 1700s, not by Indonesians. Still, after independence the name Indonesia was preferred to Maleische Archipel, Malay Archipelago, or Netherlandsch Oost Indie, which had been used by the Dutch.

Thing Not To Do Today: coggle.

Coggle is another Scots word - thank you, Scotland! - and it means to wobble or rock, or to be unsteady.

Something which coggles usually has a rounded base. If coggles too violently then it can be coggled over, or overturned.

Things which don't stand too firmly on their bases can even be coggly.

The word coggle is, plainly, completely charming, and it has been drafted in for other uses. A coggle is a wheel used for making small dents or grooves along the edge of plates before they are fired (though why anyone should wish to do this I have no idea at all). 

A coggle can also be another word for the sort of cobble that's used to make a path or road; or a coggle can be a small boat (which coggles along if the sea is rough); or it can even be a way of drawing word-trees on a computer.

In fact, you know something? It makes standing up straight seem really rather overrated.

Thing Not To Do Today: coggle. The origin of this word isn't known, but could be something to do with the type of coggle/cobble which tends to tip you off-balance when you tread on it. On the other hand it might be a diminutive of cob, a small boat. Or the word may have come about just because it sounds such fun, as did the word joggle.

Spot the Frippet: flap.

Letter go into flaps, and in Britain the vast majority of thses flaps will be set into a front door:


photo by Timo Newton-Syms https://www.flickr.com/people/19935963@N00

but do mathematicians ever go into flaps? 

See the puzzle, below, and see of you can work it out calmly!

In the meantime, tents have flaps:


photo by Paritosh chaudhary

and so do envelopes, pockets, and aeroplane wings:


photo by David Monniaux

And then there are flapjacks*. In the USA Canada and New Zealand (my Collins dictionary tells me) a flapjack is a pancake, and in this case the flap in flapjack is understandable because you have to flap the pan to turn the flapjack over. In Britain, however, a flapjack is a chewy dense cake made with porridge oats and golden syrup, and, far from flapping it about, you press it firmly into the pan to make sure it sticks together while it's being baked:


photo by sk8geek https://www.flickr.com/photos/sk8geek/

So where the flap has come from in that case is a puzzle: though not the only one (see below). 

Spot the Frippet: flap. This word is first recorded in the 1300s and is probably an imitation of the action of flapping.

The mathematical flapjack puzzle. My flapjack recipe (and this is true) calls for an eight inch square baking tray, but instructs the baker to mark out the soft newly-baked cake mixture into twelve squares.

Can you work out how this can be done?

It is possible - though I don't think the result is what the writer of the recipe had in mind.

*The jack is basically a word meaning man, or thingie-that-does-something, and comes from the shortened form of the name John.

Sunday Rest: shacket. Word Not To Use Today.

I'm not against new words.

I'm not even against portmanteau words where two words have been cobbled together without even a passing glance in the direction of history or aesthetics. 

There are limits, though, and this word cavorts through them with all the grace of a hornet-stung mule. 

A shacket is an item of clothing. No, it's nothing to do with shackles, thank heavens. It's a shirt worn as a jacket.

Still, whatever you call it, it's still a shirt. Just a very expensive one.

Still, a fool and his money...

Word Not To Use Today: shacket. This word is a badly sewn-together mixture of the words shirt and jacket. The word jacket comes from the French word jacque, which means peasant, from Jacques, the given name. The word shirt comes from the Old English scyrte, which is related to sceort, which means short.

An Autumn Rain-Scene by Thomas Hardy.

Well, that's summer gone. It's dull and grey and cold and still.

Keats' writes of sumptuous autumn days of mellow fruitfulness, but they don't really exist. With autumn comes a hint of unease, of threat, of better-take-a-coat, of have-you-seen-my-woolly-hat-I-left-around-somewhere-in-the-spring? That sense of warmth (if any) being fleeting.

All this will tell you that I am basically a county person, by which I mean someone whom the weather affects in practical ways and who is enraged by the very idea of boots made of sheepskin (how are they going to fare in the mud!).

Thomas Hardy was a country person, too. 

You can tell.

There trudges one to a merry-making
With a sturdy swing
On whom the rain comes down.

To fetch the saving medicament
Is another bent,
On whom the rain comes down.

One slowly drives his herd to the stall
Ere ill befall,
On whom the rain comes down.

This bears the missives of life and death
With quickening breath
On whom the rain comes down.

One watches for signals of wreck or war
From hill afar
On whom the rain comes down.

No care if he gains a shelter or none,
Unhired moves on,
On whom the rain comes down.

And another knows nought of its chilling fall
Upon him at all,
On whom the rain comes down.


October 1904

Word To Use Today: chill. This word comes from the Old English ciele, and goes right back to the Latin gelidus, icy.