Sunday Rest: plantocracy. Word Not To Use Today.

Plantocracy? Is that when someone doesn't dare go on holiday in case their tomatoes get thirsty?

Or when someone feels absolutely compelled to go out every night with a bucket to collect the slugs homing in on the ever-so-precious dahlias?

Or does it describe the dreaded Japanese Knotweed that is said to destroy houses more or less overnight with its powerful creeping roots?

Or is it...

...er...

...triffids?

Well, actually, no. A plantocracy is a place where the political system is run by planters.

This is rather disappointing, because although I don't have actual proof that a potato would do a better job at ruling a country than most of the present heads of the world's governments, I can think of a few where it might well be worth a try.

Word Not To Use Today: plantocracy. The -cracy bit comes from the Greek kratos, which means power.

Saturday Rave: Young Lambs by John Clare

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring, and yet at the same time April is the cruellest month... 

We're nowhere near April yet, but to wait for Spring in all its glory is rather to miss the point. Spring is for searching hopefully: Spring will always remain an untameable, tentative thing.

Here's John Clares' poem Young Lambs. It's not about glory, but hope and perhaps also the fragility of innocence.

The spring is coming by a many signs;
The trays are up, the hedges broken down,
That fenced the haystack, and the remnant shines
Like some old antique fragment weathered brown.
And where suns peep, in every sheltered place,
The little early buttercups unfold
A glittering star or two - till many trace
The edges of the blackthorn clumps in gold
And then a little lamb bolts up behind
The hill and wags his tail to meet the yoe,
And then another, sheltered from the wind,
Lies all his length as dead - and lets me go
Close bye and never stirs but baking lies,
With legs stretched out as though he could not rise.

Word To Use Today: yoe. This must be a local word for ewe (Clare was brought up near Peterborough, England). There's a Scots word yowe, which is presumably related, and all these words probably go right back through Latin and Greek to the Sanskrit avi, which means sheep.

Word To Use Today: cataplasm.

I came across the word cataplasm in Christmas at Thompson Hall, a thoroughly cherishable short story by Anthony Trollope.

The plot of CaTH is rather Wodehousian, involving as it does both rather a lot of creeping about large buildings in the middle of the night, and the infinite gradations of social embarrassment.*

A cataplasm is a mustard plaster. As mustard plasters have, perfectly reasonably, fallen out of fashion (they're both messy and useless) I should perhaps add that a mustard plaster consists of a dollop of nice slimy mustard wrapped in a piece of cloth and applied to the skin. They're supposed to be good for sore throats.

Luckily for us, the word cataplasm can be used (usually ironically) to describe anything slightly unpleasant that's designed to soothe an affliction. 

Such as a lawyer, perhaps. 



The Battle of the Cataplasm, an illustration for Tristram Shandy by J Bretherton.

Low-calorie bread can be pretty cataplasmic, too.

Word To Use Today: cataplasm. This word comes from the Greek, from kataplassein to cover with a plaster, from plassein, to shape.

*I'm not aware of PG Wodehouse ever writing about a cataplasm, but then perhaps he felt that after Christmas at Thompson Hall there wasn't a great deal of point.

A moral ending: a rant.

How would we know how to behave if we'd never heard a story?

Well, my guess is that it would be partly down to the tyranny of biology, and partly down to observing others.

A paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology (it's worth reading) by Mark O Riedl and Brent Harrison has argued that the way to stop robots from indulging in 'psychotic-appearing' behaviour is to tell them stories. Their idea is that as there's no manual for behaving like a good human being, then the best way to communicate the necessary vast nuances of human culture is to tell the robots tales of human life.

Now, you'd have to be jolly careful which story the robots read, of course. The authors of the study suggest the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. 

But look, even as a child that story struck me as alarmingly dodgy. I mean, what's the moral? That lying and wanton destruction doesn't stop you being an admired human being? That confessing makes everything all right?

'While not all humans act morally all the time,' say Riedl and Harrison 'humans seem to adhere to social and cultural norms more often than not without receiving an explicitly written down set of moral codes.'

More often than not? Good grief, I'm not prepared to use a car that acts in the right way more often than not, let alone a robot. More often than not doesn't come close to hacking it.

'Stories encode many types of sociocultural knowledge: commonly shared knowledge, social protocols, examples of proper and improper behavior, and strategies for coping with adversity.'

Look, gentlemen, a story isn't a list of instructions. It isn't a list of descriptions. A story is an exploration. It relies on its audience knowing lots of human protocols already.

So when, in my old age (should I be lucky enough to get there) you send a robot to care for me, I'd far rather have one imprinted with a list of instructions rather than an acquaintance with Hamlet. 

Good grief, by the time the thing had decided what to put in the sandwiches I'd probably have starved to death.

Word To Use Today Especially If You're A Robot: obey. This word comes from the Latin oboedīre, from ob- towards, and audīre, to hear.

Nuts and Bolts: the I of the storm.

The fact that Antje began with an A was entirely coincidental. 

The storm that ripped off the Antje's mast soon became known as Antje's storm, and once the storm had a name the message about its dangers seemed to spread around much more effectively. 

And so the practice of storm-naming spread.

By the mid 1900s storms in America were being given girls' names to identify them, and by 1973 storms were (more fairly, I think) being named alternately with male and female names. There are six Atlantic Lists of names that are used in rotation, though any particularly deadly storm has its name retired and replaced, so we will never see another Katrina or Mitch or Tracy. 

This also means we can hope one day for a Hurricane Algernon or a Gladys.

The storms are named in alphabetical order, but missing out the letters QUXYZ (which shows, I think, a shameful lack of imagination). In the Eastern North Pacific their storm lists leave out Q and U, and they have, effectively, only two lists for XYZ: Xavier/Xina, Yorke/Yolanda, Zelda/Zeke. This works perfectly well because they start every year afresh with an A and so they don't often get down as far as X.

Australia has been particularly clever, including P/Q, U/V and W/X/Y/Z slots in their alphabetical lists.

Central North Pacific names are based. as far as I can see, on the Hawaiian alphabet, with names beginning AEHIKLMNOPUW.

But what about an area with no alphabet at all? Well, the order of Tokyo's list has Cimaron followed by Jebi, and no new start when a new year dawns.

The South West Indian Ocean list is very clever: not only were the names chosen by the various countries round the area, but it consists of several lists of the complete alphabet. Hurray for Urilia, Vuntu, Wezi, Quotto, Yekela and Zaina!

Britain has only just joined the name-the-storm club. It has decided to make do with a sadly restricted alphabet, but I must give it points for its first storm-name: Abigail.

Geddit?

Word To Use Today: hurricane. This word comes from the Taino hurakán, from hura, wind.

Thing To Do Today: go cancrizans.

You can learn so much from the derivation of words. 

Mind you, quite a lot of what you learn will be wrong.

Take the word cancrizans. It's mostly used, if it's used at all, in the phrase canon cancrizans, of which more below, but of course any mildly educated person will spot that cancrizans is very likely to come from the Latin word cancer, which means crab. They will also know that a canon is an official of the church, so a canon cancrizans must therefore be a...um...a crabby bad-tempered priest? Or one who resists progressive theology by sidling sideways whenever he can?

As a matter of fact the canon in canon cancrizans is nothing to do with churches: it's the sort of canon where the same tune is played twice in an overlapping sort of a way. One part of a canon may be played upside down (the written-down notes are upside down, I mean, not necessarily the player) or a bit higher or lower, or slower or faster than the original tune. Or cancrizans, which is...no, not sideways, but backwards.

Oi! You will say, but a crab doesn't walk backwards!

Ah, yes: but the Mediaeval Latinists who made up the word cancrizans didn't know that, and so to this day to go cancrizans means to move backwards.

Do watch your step, won't you.

Thing To Do With Care Today: go cancrizans. The Latin cancrizāre means to move crabwise. The word goes right back to the Sanskrit karkata, which means crab.

Spot the Frippet: a leap.

(Photo of a Green and Black Poison Frog by Keven Law)

This year, being longer than last, is obviously going to require a bit of extra effort: but take heart, this Spot The Frippet requires no effort at all. 

A leap? Today is a leap day, and we're living in a leap year.

Hurray!

If this seems a bit of a cheat, then here's another kind of a leap:

It comes right at the beginning of the song - a whole octave leap from some to where.

Or, of course, if you want to see a moving-from-place-to-place leap then you can always look out for a hare, a flea, or a cat.

Now, I don't recommend this at all (the idea, I mean: I'm sure the place is charming) but here's Lover's Leap Point in Jamaica:

Or how about, rather less riskily, a game of leapfrog down the middle of the office? 

Put it down as team-building.

Spot the Frippet: leap. This word comes from the Old English hlēapan.