Thing To Do Today: bogey.

To bogey or bogy a hole at golf means taking one more stroke to get the ball into the hole than the number of strokes called par, which is the number of strokes the most expert players are expected to need to sink the ball.* 

Just one more stroke than a great expert. Well, that must make bogeying a hole beyond the dreams of a beginner - and in any case I have not the faintest intention making a public spectacle of myself cluelessly waving golf clubs about.

Luckily, there is another way of bogeying. It might involve a bogey hole but (thank heavens) it's nothing to do with picking the nose, for in Australia a bogey (or bogie) hole is a natural pool, and to bogey means to bathe or swim.


Back yard swimming pool in Queensland. Photo by Kgbo

Now, a bath, a nice long hot bath with bubbles. That I'm prepared to undertake.

Thing To Do Today: bogey. The golf word is probably something to do with the mischievous sprite sort of a bogey and might come from the Scots bogill, or the Middle Welsh bwg, which means ghost, or the Cornish buccaboo, the devil. The swimming word comes from the Australian native language Dharuk. Bū means bathe, and the gi bit is a past tense marker.

*Though, to confuse things, bogey once meant what is now called par.

Spot the Frippet: diapente.

The Greek dia means through, and pente means five.

So, diapente: five what?

Well, five nothing, as it happens. This is because musicians are rubbish at counting. 

For example: if you start at your thumb (and assuming your name isn't Frodo) how many steps, finger to finger, does it take to get to your pinkie?

Full marks if you said four - but musicians will say five because they count the beginning of a series as one.

A diapente is a distance of musical jump. If you jump up from doh a diapente jump takes you up to so, which, if we count them (starting on doh, right?) goes ray me fa so, or a jump of four notes. 

(Not wishing to complicate things, but if you count all the notes on a piano from the sound doh to the sound so, including the black ones, then it's a jump of seven notes.) 

Anyway, diapentes can be found near the beginning of Baa Baa Black Sheep or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: the jump from the second Baa to Black, or the first kle to the second Twin are both diapentes. It's the beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra, too.

You can also hear the two notes of a diapente by playing two next-door violin strings.

(In a diapente, the notes can be sounded at the same time, or one after the other.)

For the hitherto unmusical, stretch an elastic band round a book, then wedge a couple of pencils under the elastic band, one at either end of one face of the book. Now twang the band between the pencils. No, twang it more softly, so you get a note. Okay? Now wedge another pencil under the band exactly a third of the way from one of the end pencils to the other. Now press a finger down hard on this middle pencil and twang the longer bit of the elastic band: hey presto, the difference between the first note and the second is a diapente!

Neat, huh? So: can you play the beginning of Twinkle Twinkle?

Happy twanging!

Spot the Frippet: diapente. This word comes from the Greek phrase dia pente khordōn sumphōnia, which means concord through five notes.

Sunday Rest: deterge. Word Not To Use Today

US Army training exercise in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan (yes, there are swamps in Afghanistan.)

Deterge may sound like the act of diving into sewage, but as a matter of fact it means the opposite: deterge is to do with detergent, and means to wipe away or cleanse.

The trouble is that once we know that, poor deterge looks annoying as well as ugly: a particularly heavy-handed attempt to form a verb from a noun.

And if you're perfectly relaxed about those, well, then, comment me!*

Sunday Rest: deterge. This word has been around since the 1600s (as has the word detergent), and which came first is uncertain. They both come from the Latin tergēre, to wipe.

*Sorry.

Saturday Rave: New York Weather by F Scott Fitzgerald.

This passage is from a rather mad short story by F Scott Fitzgerald called O Russet Witch!.

It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows - it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of the sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven, and felt that now surely the farce was to close, and presently all the buildings would collapse like card houses and pile up in a dusty, sardonic heap upon all the millions who presumed to wind in and out of them.

It's almost enough to make you fall in love with bad weather, isn't it.

Fabulous.


New York, 1931, U.S. National Archives

Word To Use Today: desolate. This exquisite word comes from the Latin dēsōlāre, to leave alone, from sōlāre, to make lonely or lay waste, from sōlus, alone.

Word To Use Today: Zugenruhe.

Everyone at The Word Den is surely a magpie when it comes to words, and Zugenruhe is a particularly bright and charming find, though admittedly more relevant to migratory martins than magpies.

Zugunruhe is a German noun, which means that technically you have to spell it with a capital letter. You say it TSOOgnROOa (with the g hard, as in magpie).

Zugenruhe is the feeling of restlessness experienced before and during a migration period, and it's particularly applied to birds. When their time for migration approaches birds will get very excited (especially around dusk), their sleep pattern will change, and they'll eat everything they can lay their beaks on.

How long Zugenruhe lasts depends on how long the birds' normal migration journey lasts - but even birds that don't migrate seem to feel some sense of Zugenruhe.

Humans feel it, too, of course, when the summer comes - or even at the first signs or even hope of spring.

Hang on, where's that holiday brochure...


photo by Ken Billington of house martins in Austria.

Word To Use Today: Zugenruhe. This word is German. Zug means movement (and also tug, and train), ruhe means calm, and unruhe means restless.

Tell me about it: a rant.

You know that thing where people say tell me about it when they actually mean don't tell me about it - and then go on about it themselves for half an hour?

That.

Word To Use Today: tell. This word has been pretty much the same for a thousand years. The Old English form was tellan. It's related (third cousin once removed) to the Old High German zellen, which means to tell or count.

Nuts and Bolts: shh!

photo by Norbert Kenntner

The basic idea with English is that the spelling of a word tells you how to say it. It would more or less work, too, if the language hadn't accumulated a lot of baggage along the way.

Some problems have been caused by letters for which printers don't have type, or which just look a bit odd (the z in Dalziel and the g in night aren't really supposed to be z or g, you know).

Then there are the problems caused by extra letters scholars have bunged in just to show how good their Latin was, like the b in debt.

But still, there are some bits of English you can rely on. Like sh being pronounced, well, sh. Like an s, but with a bit more breath to it.

Sheep, shuttle, bush, mash, perishing, bushy.

See? Simple, or what?

Mishap, goshawk, mishear, dishearten, dishabille, dishonest, mishandle, mishit...

...oh.

Ah well. 

Looking at that list, even this isn't necessarily always a bad thing, is it?

Word To Use Today: one where a sh isn't pronounced sh. Most of these are words with bits shoved on the front to make them mean more or less the opposite (as in honest and dishonest) but goshawk comes from the Old English gōshafoc, goose hawk.