Sunday Rest: divulge. Word Not To Use Today.

What do you divulge? 

Secrets, of course - but that's only if you're pompous and self-important and old and don't mind sounding as if you're suffering from a nasty attack of indigestion.

The amazing thing is that some people don't.

Word Not To Use Today: divulge. The truly horrid word comes from di- (the through meaning, not the two one) and the Latin vulgus, which means common people.

Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love. A rave.

Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, written between the 1370s and the 1420s, is the first book we know of written by a woman in the English language.

That's reason enough to celebrate by itself.

We know very little indeed about Julian herself. We don't know if she was ever married, or whether she was a lay person or a nun. We don't even know if her name was Julian (though it wasn't an unusual name for women around that time) or whether she actually came from Norwich (though she probably did come from somewhere close).

We do know, however, a little about the beginnings of Revelations of Divine Love. When Julian was thirty she had a very serious illness, and during this illness she had what she believed to be a series of visions of Christ.

When she was recovered she wrote down these visions (this is The Short Text), of which only one fairly early copy remains.

Over the next forty five years or so Julian thought deeply about these visions, and eventually, over the course of many years, she wrote The Long Text (of which, again, only one early copy survives), which consists of a series of meditations upon her experience.




What does Julian have to say? Well, she lived in a time of plague, revolt, and famine, and yet she believed that God was both mother and father of us all; that sin is a way of guiding people to do the right thing; and that, in her most famous saying, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

And whether or not you believe any of it, that must be a shining example of faith, hope and charity.

Word To Use Today: divine. This word comes from the Latin dīvus, a god.

Word To Use Today: selachian.

You say this word si-LAKE-ee'n, so this is a word that can be thrown about as casually as a silk scarf.

Selachian describes the members of the Selachii, which sound as if they should be Ancient Greek star-nymphs but which are actually fish which have to make do with cartilage instead of bones: that is, sharks, skates, dogfish and rays.

I was going to make a joke about them living in seas, not lakes (selachian, geddit?) but I discover to my horror that there are fresh water sharks:


bull shark, photo by Terry Goss


Speartooth shark, photo by Bill Harrison 

which means that I'm going to be counting my toes if I ever have to paddle across a river, I can tell you.

One last word on the subject of sharks: people killed by sharks every year, on average, fewer than ten; sharks killed by people every year, about a hundred million.

So there's an example of hideous ferocity, isn't it?

Word To Use Today: selachian. This word is Greek and comes from selakhē, a shark, and is related, rather wonderfully, to selas, brightness.

A blanket ban: a rant

According to a piece in The Telegraph online of 1st May 2017, the German parliament has voted to ban public officials wearing burkas while on duty.



































photo, North Afghanistan, by Steve Evans

The article goes on:

There have been widespread calls for a more general ban on wearing the burka in public, but legal experts say a blanket prohibition would be unconstitutional and would be struck down by the courts.

Well, it's not my place to criticise foreign governments, but I must say I'm surprised at that. 

I mean, if you were wearing a blanket you wouldn't be able to see anything.

Word To Use Today: blanket. This word comes from the French blancquette, from blanc, white, a word which originally came from some Germanic language or other. The Old English blanca, for instance, meant white horse.

Nuts and Bolts: couplets or distiches.

A couplet consists of two lines of verse. Traditionally, the two lines make sense all by themselves, and, also traditionally, they rhyme.

If they don't rhyme, then a couplet will have a blank line before and after it. Otherwise, obviously, you won't be able to tell the thing's a couplet.

A distich is basically the same thing as a couplet, but while rap, for instance, quite often uses couplets, describing a rap verse form as consisting of distiches will just make you look...odd.

There have been various fashions for using couplets. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales featured them:

This carpenter hadde newe a wyf
Which that he lovede moore than his lyf

(that's from The Miller's Tale) and Shakespeare liked to use them, especially as a sort of summing up, both in his sonnets:

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

and scenes from his plays:

The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!

(those are from Sonnet III and Hamlet)

Then there came Dryden and Pope, who were perfectly happy to write whole books full of the things. In Pope's case they are works of the sharpest possible wit:

'Yet Chloe sure was formed without a spot'-
Nature in her then erred not, but forgot.
With every pleasing, every prudent part,
Say, what can Chloe want?'- She wants a heart.

Ouch!

After that fashion started branching out a bit, but the couplet has never died altogether. Browning ends Apparent Failure:

That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.

Which is interesting but wrong; and a couplet ends Dylan Thomas's Do not go gentle into that good night:

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In fact couplets are still all over the shop:

You'll wonder where the yellow went
When you brush your teeth with Steradent.

Oh dear, I've just realised that there's only one way to end this post, and that's with a couplet:

The poet soars, he tramps through bogs
But on and on the couplet jogs.

Well, you can't say I don't show willing, can you.

Word To Use Today: couplet. The word couplet comes from couple, which comes from the Old French word meaning a pair. Before that it comes from the Latin cōpula, which means bond.

Thing Probably Not To Do Today: bamboozle someone.

A fine upright person like you wouldn't want to cheat, mislead or confuse someone, but how about bamboozling them?

It sounds much more justifiable and lovable, doesn't it, even though it means the same thing.

I don't know if this is because the word bamboozle itself sounds so silly, or because bamboozle seems to be a mixture of cartoon violence - bam! - and what sounds like a harmlessly small drink (fancy a boozle, vicar?) or because no one makes a career out of bamboozling people. Your master criminal will cheat, con and lie, yes, (and your small-time crook will do the same, only less effectively) but a bamboozler is, basically, sniggering.

The problem is, how do we make sure we're not being more clever than good-natured? How can we be sure to bamboozle with grace? It's all a bit, well, bamboozling.

I think today I'll be bamboozled instead.

That's no effort at all.

Thing Probably Not To Do Today: bamboozle someone. This word appeared in the 1700s, no one is sure from where, but at the time there was a bit of a fashion for making up silly words, for example fustiluggs (clumsy fat person), shabberoon (tramp) and whippersnapper (child).

Spot the Frippet: emperor.

They were never very thick on the ground, were emperors, and nowadays the only human emperor officially still in place is Emperor Akihito of Japan.

Good health and long life to him!

But, even so, I went hunting for emperors the other day. I took with me a small piece of rubber tubing tied up in a bit of netting. 

(It was all right, no one saw me.)

Sadly, I failed to attract an emperor, even though (according to the seller) the tube contained the perfume of a female emperor, a scent to send a male emperor moth:


By Lavaltrois - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7446489

crazy with desire.

Ah well, there are other emperors. If you're in Antartica (though you almost certainly aren't) there's the emperor penguin:


photo by Christopher Michel

There are many different types of emperor butterflies:


photo by Entomology, CSIRO

and there is an emperor angelfish:


photo by Brian Gratwicke

an emperor bream:

 
photo of yellow striped emperor by Richard Ling 

and (brrr!) and emperor scorpion:



photo by Rosa Pineda

If all these are difficult, or impossible (as they are for me) then there's an emperor piano concerto by Beethoven (it isn't dedicated to an emperor or anything, the title was a marketing ploy devised by his publisher) an emperor string quartet by Haydn (one bit of which is based on the tune Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, or God Save Emperor Franz:

 and there's also an Emperor Norwegian black metal band.

Which would you like to spot most?

Spot the Frippet: emperor. This word comes from the Latin imperātor, commander-in-chief, from imperāre, to command, from parāre, to make ready.