Thing To Do Today: show your mettle.

 The fashion nowadays is to cave in at the slightest difficulty and then moan piteously - or perhaps aggressively - that the world is against you and IT'S NOT FAIR!

This trend does have its advantages. I mean, how easy life is if everything is someone else's fault.

Oh, but I do feel nostalgic for the challenge; for the fight against the odds; the do-or-die; the can-do spirit; the forlorn hope.

The opportunity to show one's mettle.

What mettle actually is, though, I've never had much of a clue. Surely it can't be anything to do with, well, metal, can it? That would be silly.

Wouldn't it?

Thing To Do Today: show your mettle. It turns out that mettle is exactly the same word as metal. The two spellings only diverged in the 1700s. 

I suppose the idea is that metal is shining, strong and flexible, and jolly useful in a crisis.

(Though that does rather depend on what the crisis is. I can't help thinking that this expression was invented by a man.) 

Anyway, the word metal comes from the Latin word metallum, which means mine, or product of a mine, from the Greek word metallon.

Spot the Frippet: bank.

 There are three banks - three different words all sounding the same, that is. One's basically Italian, one's Scandinavian, and one's French.

One's a slope, one's a place to keep money, and one's a load of stuff arranged so you can see it easily.

Two are closely related.

Which do you think those are?

Answer later. 

Anyway, while these kind of bank:

High Street bank: HSBC, London, photo by Stanley Howe

are getting rarer as we all are obliged to move online; and these, too:

1965 Shelby Dash. Photo by Joe Mabel

 have been replaced with smart hard-to-read digital displays (again, there's progress for you), these:

Sloping verge of the A377, UK. Photo by David Brinicombe

are still everywhere, and are very good for sitting on and watching the world go by.

And according to Shakespeare, they're visited by fairies.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in

Whether that is an inducement to linger must be an individual decision.

Take care!

Spot the Frippet: bank. The money word comes, probably, from the Italian banca, which means bench or money-exchanger's table. The arrangement word comes from the Old French banc, which also means bench (both these words have similar Germanic origins). The word meaning a slope is Scandinavian. The Old Icelandic word bakki means hill.

Sunday Rest: shigella. Word Not To Use Today.

 I don't know how internationally famous Nigella Lawson is, but, for those who don't know, she's a British-Italian TV cook, and a spectacularly voluptuous and beautiful one, too:

photo by Brian Minkoff- London Pixels

As it happens, her dad is Nigel Lawson (now Baron Lawson of Blaby), who used to be Britain's top finance chief (or Chancellor of the Exchequer, to give him his proper job title). Nigella is named after him. 

Now, Nigella is a very unusual name indeed, and I don't know of anyone else who's had it (apart from the genus of plants which includes Love-in-the-Mist, of course). Nigella is an odd word, too, to an English-speaker, and so when one comes across the other odd word shigella, it's Nigella which tends to spring immediately to mind.

This is a bit unfortunate, really, as shigella is a bacterium which causes dystentary.

Ah well.

Sunday Rest: shigella. word Not To Use Today. This bacterium was named after K Shiga, 1870-1957, who discovered it.

Saturday Rave: May and the Poets by James Henry Leigh Hunt

 I apologise to all of you who live in the Southern hemisphere. For you, dearest readers, the month of May must be a dreary time: Winter is approaching, and there's not even any sign of Christmas.

But still, I'm trying to keep our spirits up in difficult times, and the world is full of poets who have had a cheery crack at carolling the delights of May.

So here's James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), who made that observation long before I did.

 

There is May in books forever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May's in Milton, May's in Prior,
May's in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer;
May's in all the Italian books:--
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves,
And will rise and dress your rooms
With a drapery thick with blooms.

Come, ye rains, then if ye will,
May's at home, and with me still;
But come rather, thou, good weather,
And find us in the fields together.

 

Word To Use Today: May. This word comes from French, and before that probably from the Roman goddess Maia, who's basically the same person as the Greek god Maia who was the eldest of the group of nymphs called the Pleiades. 

Here she is with her son Hermes:

Word To Use Today: scuttle.

 What's the connection between a scuttle as in a place to keep coal:

photo by Hustvedt

 the action of an alarmed crab:

photo by incidencematrix

 and the deliberate sinking of a ship?

Um...

...well, they just sound the same, really.

Still, it's a lovely crisp word, isn't it.

Word To Use Today: scuttle. The coal-container word (in some part of Britain you can carry plants in a scuttle, though personally I'd call that kind of shallow basket a trug) comes from the Old English scutel, a carving plate, from the Latin scutella, a little bowl. The running-away word probably comes from the word scud, with a bit of the word shuttle put in there as well to make it sound more, well, scuttle-like. The ship-sinking word comes from the Spanish escotilla, a small opening, from escote, an opening in a piece of cloth, from escotar, to cut out.

Discrimination: a rant.

 You know, I can remember a time when discrimination was a good thing.

Word To Use Today: discrimination. This word comes from the Latin discrīmināre, to divide, from discrīmen, a separation, from discernere, to discern.

photo by Monica Georgescu

Nuts and Bolts: apodosis and protasis

 No, no, come back! Apodosis and protasis do look like difficult words, but that's only because grammarians like sticking posh labels on stuff. You've been using apodosis and protasis all your life.

Well, nearly all your life.

If I give you an example you'll be able to understand apodosis and protasis without any trouble at all...

...and, guess what, I just did - though you almost certainly wouldn't have realised it. 

That sentence:

 If I give you an example you'll be able to understand apodosis and protasis without any trouble at all.

is made up of two basic chunks. The first chunk:

If I give you an example

tells you what needs to happen for the second chunk:

you'll be able to understand apodosis and protasis wihtout any trouble at all.

to come into effect.

The chunk-that-tells-you-what-has-to-happen is called the protasis and the chunk that tells you what-will-happen-then is the apodosis.

See? Simple.

Sometimes the protasis and apodosis come the other way round in a sentence, as in:

I'd give you a beer if the dog hadn't buried the bottle-opener.

but basically it's just the same thing.

Grammatical Structures To Preen Yourself On Being Able To Use Today: apodosis and protasis. Protasis is Greek for a proposal, from pro- before, and teinein to extend. Apodosis is Greek too, and means a returning or giving back. It comes from apodidonai, to give back.