Nuts and Bolts: stripping.

 You didn't think that grammarians are interested in stripping, did you? But they are.

And there's a lot of it about.

The theory of stripping (when you're talking about language) can be complicated, but basically it's an extreme form of gapping, which is missing out a chunk of a sentence because you're already said that bit.

Mary smiles adoringly at babies, and Ann cats.

is saying that Mary smiles adoringly at babies and Ann smiles adoringly at cats. But all that's left of the last bit is a single word. That's stripping.

Would you like to eat, or dance?

Chloe can help Zoe put on her bridesmaid's dress, then Zoe Chloe. 

...which is a rather neat example of stripping while putting the clothes on.

Only grammarians could imagine something like that.

Word To Use Today: stripping. The word strip comes from the Old English bestriepan, which means to plunder.

Thing To Be Today: indefatigable.

 Today is a day to take everything in your stride. To climb that hill with perfect ease, to jump that stream, write all those letters, tidy that bedroom, weed the patch, patch the strides, stride the track, track the treasure, treasure the people, people the garden, garden the weeds, weed the patch...

But what I want to know is, what's doing all that stuff with indefatigable energy got to do with being fat?

Thing To Be Today: indefatigable. If being defatigable is to do with not being fat, then being indefatigable must be to do with being fat, yes?

Disappointingly, nope. The central fat but of the word indefatigable comes, sadly, from the same root as fatigue, which is from the Latin word fatīgāre, which means to tire. Dēfatīgāre means not tiring, and the in- bit just means extra, as in inflame.

Spot The Frippet: garage.

 Well, this should be easy, but I thought we'd better spot garages while we can, before they go obsolete.

The domestic kind of garages are being converted to other purposes at a tremendous rate, partly because mostly they're too small to get a car inside (and, if they are big enough, they're not big enough to let you get out of the car once it is. Unless you fit through the sun roof) and the buying-petrol sort of garage will soon not have any customers needing petrol, which is bound to put a bit of a dampener on the business model.

photo by Johan Jönsson

But let's look on the bright side, perhaps we'll all still be swinging into garages to plug in our vehicles for a quick charge. Or perhaps we'll be swinging into garages to slot in a new hydrogen cartridge.

Or perhaps we'll decide not to bother to go anywhere, and just to send a text message. Who knows?

Still, I suppose even electric cars will break down, so mending-cars garages should survive. The fleet of ancient fossil fuel cars that people will hold onto as long as possible will certainly need lots of servicing.

I've hardly ever never seen an architecturally magnificent garage - or even a very well-built one, come to that. The buildings seem nearly as transitory as the vehicles they supply.

Here's a magnificent exception:

photo by David Eliff

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stockwell_Bus_Garage_1,_London,_UK_-_Diliff.jpg

Still, today is a day to appreciate them while they're still there.

Spot the Frippet: garage. Extra points for spotting a domestic garage with a car in it. The word garage is French. You can pronounce this word GARRidge or GARahj, but it's best not to be too French about it (gaRRAHje) if you're speaking English because it'll make you look a snob and an idiot (but of course it's fine if you're speaking French). The word comes from the French garer, to dock a ship, the Old French meaning of which is to protect. Before that it came from the Old High German warōn. 

Garage music has been defined by Wikipedia thus: a genre of electronic dance music which originated in England in the early to mid-1990s. The genre was most clearly inspired by garage house, but also incorporates elements from R&B, jungle, and dance-pop. It is defined by percussive, shuffled rhythms with syncopated hi-hats, cymbals and snares, and may include either 4/4 house kick patterns or more irregular "2.step" rhythms. Garage tracks also commonly feature 'chopped up' and time-stretched or pitch-shifted vocal samples complementing the underlying rhythmic structure at a tempo usually around 130 BPM.

A garage sale is a cheap opportunity for a person's neighbours to despise his, her or their (other pronouns are available) taste.

Sunday Rest: methinks.

 In the great churning that is the English language, it is natural that most new words will be ugly. This doesn't matter much because a lot of new words are slang, and slang is largely a signifier of newness, and signs of newness, obviously, can't last long. The ugliness is soon swept away into cringing oblivion.

(This also means that old people will very often sound ridiculous using slang. Well, I must say that saves a lot of us a lot of bother.)

But there is the odd word which creeps into current language which doesn't even have the excuse of newness to recommend it. Such a one is methinks.

The purpose of using this word, I believe, is to signal intellectual profundity. All it actually signals is a blindness to the sensitivities of language so profound that the speaker can't even spot it in himself.

So, hey, I suppose even a word like methinks has its uses.

Sunday Rest: methinks. This word, Wikipedia tells me, is used at least a hundred and fifty times by Shakespeare. As two words - me thinks - its trail goes right back to Old English.

Saturday Rave: From My Diary, July 1914 by Wildred Owen.

The month of May has loads of poems, and so does June. August brings the poetic joys of holidays and harvest.

But July poems?

Not so many. It's a rather exhausting month, July: it's basically June with the freshness taken off it.

Anyway, here's an example of a July poem. Well, it's a bit of verse, really - and not terribly good verse, at that. It was written by the very great poet Wilfred Owen in the month before the start of World War I.

If you're at all familiar with Wilfred Owen's war poetry then it's really interesting. 

If you know that Wilfred Owen was gay then it's interesting, too.

From My Diary, July 1914

Leaves
Murmuring by miriads in the shimmering trees.
Lives
Wakening with wonder in the Pyrenees.
Birds
Cheerily chirping in the early day.
Bards
Singing of summer, scything thro' the hay.
Bees
Shaking the heavy dews from bloom and frond.

Boys
Bursting the surface of the ebony pond.
Flashes
Of swimmers carving thro' the sparkling cold.
Fleshes
Gleaming with wetness to the morning gold.
A mead
Bordered about with warbling water brooks.
A maid
Laughing the love-laugh with me; proud of looks.

The heat
Throbbing between the upland and the peak.
Her heart
Quivering with passion to my pressed cheek.
Braiding
Of floating flames across the mountain brow.
Brooding
Of stillness; and a sighing of the bough.
Stirs
Of leaflets in the gloom; soft petal-showers;
Stars
Expanding with the starr'd nocturnal flowers.

Word To Use Today: ebony. This word, which describes the very hard and black wood of a group of tropical trees, goes right back through Latin and Greek to an Egyptian word hbny. The trees grow further south than Egypt, though, in Africa, India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

 

Word To Use Today: mullock.

 Here's a word so vigorous and satisfying that many people over the centuries have seized upon it with glee.

The first dictionary entry for mullock defines the word as the waste material from a mine, and, hence, worthless material or rubbish. 

Then there are local uses of the word to mean a state of confusion, or a mess or a muddle. You've made a right mullock of that.

If you're in Australia or New Zealand - and, after all, many people are - then mullock is rock containing no gold, or rock that's had its gold extracted. Mullock can also mean worthless information, or nonsense, and to poke mullock at someone is to make fun of them.

Dictionaries, however, only reporting facts rather than making suggestions, overlook the word's potential for relieving the feelings.

So, next time you pick up a mug and the breakable coaster comes with it, I do believe that a useful response might be oh mullock!

It won't mend the coaster, but it'll be quite consoling, all the same.

Word To Use Today: mullock. The Old English word for dust was myl, and the Old Norse mylja means to crush.

A dressing-down: a rant.

 The work suit has had its day, apparently. Shahidha Bari, professor at the London School of Fashion, says this is a good thing.

“Think of the implicit force in the words buttons, braces, zips, cuffs and ties,' she says. 'Even in its verb forms – the ‘collaring’ and ‘buttonholing’, for instance, that mean to entrap or corner – the language of the suit suppresses and restrains.”

Right...

photo of some terrifyingly forceful people by Harry Walker

...I'm not sure that the word button has much implicit force. For instance, a button-nose isn't scary, and some people are even said to be as cute as a button. 

The buttonhole (that is, the buttonhole in the lapel. You know, the one where there's no corresponding button to go into it) belongs to the formal jacket, though not necessarily to the suit. And other buttonholes get everywhere: even jeans have buttonholes.

I don't know quite what Professor Bari would like men to wear to the office, but I'm afraid that whatever it is it is likely to have a zip and a collar. 

Braces are seldom worn nowadays, and suits don't have cuffs (I know they sometimes do in America, but we call them turn-ups here in England. Anyway, whatever you call them, they're out of date). 

The tie is so called, I would imagine, because it is...tied. I'll agree that ties are, and might sound, oppressive; but that's the opposite of forceful. 

There are several reasons why a man's formal work clothes are impractical, expensive, and uncomfortable, but I don't think the language of it's constituent parts has much to do with anything.

After all, a suit suits people, doesn't it.

The clue's in the name.

Word To Use Today: suit. This word comes from the Old French sieute, a set of things, from sivre, which means to follow.