Thing Not To Be Today: nonplussed.

 Here in Britain, I was completely nonplussed to discover the  widely-understood American meaning of the word nonplussed.

I'd make some suggestion about how we can resolve this ridiculous situation.

But I'm completely nonplussed.

Thing Not To Be Today: nonplussed. In Britain to be nonplussed is to be so taken aback (that is, surprised and confounded) by a situation that one can't act, or even speak.

The word comes from the Latin nōn plūs, which means no further, the idea being that nothing more can be said or done.

In the USA I understand that nonplussed is often used to mean completely unmoved, or poised in the face of a difficult situation. 

Merriam Webster still marks this meaning as mistaken, but we seem to have got to the stage where the poor word is more or less unusable.

Spot the Frippet: jack.

 Well, there are jacks all over the place, so this should be easy.

A jack-tar is a sailor, a jack-the-lad is an enterprising (though dodgy) person; every man jack is absolutely everybody. You can lift a car with a jack, or roast meat on one.

Jacks are in packs of cards and harpsichords:

illustration by Nojhan, English captions by Jeff Dahl

 and games of, well, jacks, as well as games of bowls. You find them in electrical circuits (they're the female half of a connection that acts as a kind of circuit-breaker).

They fly from the bows of ships:

photo by Gary Mihalko

and another kind of jack forms part of a sailing ship's rigging.

They're to be found in tropical seas:

Crevalle jack. Photo by Kevin Lawver

And in the USA jack is money, which gets everywhere.

In fact, now I come t think about it, we really won't be able to avoid Spotting this Frippet.

Nice easy day for us all, then.

Spot the Frippet: jack. This word is short for Jenkin, which is a pet form of the name John. This Hebrew name means blessed by God.

Sunday Rest: Potus. Word Not To Use Today.

 I mean to cast no aspersions on any holder, past or present, of the high office of President Of The United States [of America], but the acronym Potus, with its echoes of both potation, and doofus, does no favours to any of them.

Mind you, until 1964 Britain's Minister of Defence bore the title First Lord of the Admiralty; and FLOTA conjures up things that are even worse.

Sunday Rest: doofus. This word appeared in the 1960s. It might be an alteration of goofus, which is to do with the word goof, or it might be from the Scots word doof, which means dolt. 

Sadly, no one knows from where the word goof came.

My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is by Sir Edward Dyer or somebody

 My mind to me a kingdom is was published in 1588, so we know it was written before that, even if people are still arguing about who wrote it. 

Until fairly recently it was thought to be the work of Sir Edward Dyer, but now there are those who claim it for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (in which case it must have been dashed off in a spare moment snatched from writing the complete works of Shakespeare, sucking up to Queen Elizabeth I, and earling Oxford).

Still, whoever wrote it seems to have been a happy man - there was even a ballad version published of the poem, so if you'd wanted you could have sung your joy to the world. 

My mind to me a kingdom is;

Such perfect joy therein I find

That it excels all other bliss

Which God or nature hath assign'd.

Though much I want that most would have,

Yet still my mind forbids to crave.

No princely port, nor wealthy store,

No force to win a victory,

No wily wit to salve a sore,

No shape to win a loving eye;

To none of these I yield as thrall,

For why? my mind despise them all.

I see that plenty surfeit oft,

And hasty climbers soonest fall;

I see that such as are aloft

 Mishap doth threaten most of all.

These get with toil and keep with fear;

Such cares my mind can never bear.

I press to bear no haughty sway,

I wish no more than may suffice,

I do no more than well I may,

Look, what I want my mind supplies.

Lo ! thus I triumph like a king,

My mind content with anything.

I laugh not at another's loss,

Nor grudge not at another's gain;

No worldly waves my mind can toss;

 I brook that is another's bane.

I fear no foe, nor fawn on friend,

I loathe not life, nor dread mine end.

My wealth is health and perfect ease,

And conscience clear my chief defence;

I never seek by bribes to please,

Nor by desert to give offence.

Thus do I live, thus will I die,--

Would all did so as well as I!

 

Mind you, full of good sense as it is, the poet doesn't entirely escape the suspicion of being a bit of a smug git, does he.

 

Or perhaps even that is part of the fun.

 

Word To Use Today: surfeit. A surfeit is too much of something. It's said that King John died of a surfeit of lampreys and peaches.  The French surfaire means to overdo . The sur- bit means over, and the Latin facere means to do.

Word To Use Today: vulcanology.

 The blood group of Mr Spock, that most famous inhabitant of the planet Vulcan, is T negative. Sadly, this is nothing to do with vulcanology, which is the study of volcanoes.

(By the way, Mr Spock was originally supposed to come from the planet Mars, not the planet Vulcan, but there was a fear that mankind might get to Mars before Star Trek finished being broadcast - which is still possible. Mr Spock's Vulcan wasn't the planet Vulcan which was thought by the French mathematician Urban le Verrier to exist between Mercury and the sun:

illustration by E Jones and G W Newman

but another, equally non-existent one, which has been said to exist in the triple star system 40 Eridani.)

Anyway, vulcanology. It's usually spelled volcanology...

...but that post wouldn't have been nearly so much fun to write.

Word To Use Today: vulcanology. Vulcan was the Roman god of fire and metal-working and his activities were said to cause earthquakes and volcanic activities. The Latin word for lighting was fulmen, which might be something to do with the name Vulcan, but on the other hand there were loads of similarly-named gods all over the place in the ancient world, and the name could really have come from anywhere.

Vote For...um.... A rant.

 There are to be some elections in Britain next month. One of them is to elect the members of a new Scottish Parliament. (The Scottish Parliament has responsibility for things like Health and Education, but not UK-wide things like Defence.) 

Now, the SNP is the Scottish National Party, but are the Scottish Tories the SNP's friends and coalition partners, or their enemies? 

Can you tell from this headline in the Telegraph newspaper.?

Stop SNP 'wrecking' Covid recovery by voting for Scottish Tories, says Douglas Ross

To discover the answer to this question you really have to know that Douglas Ross is leader of the Scottish Tory (or Conservative) Party.

Yep, though you can't tell from that headline, te SNP and the Tories are deadly enemies. It's like watching a production of Macbeth at times. 

Though, admittedly, with fewer people tramping about carrying trees.

Word To Use Today: vote. The Latin word vōtum means a solemn promise, from vovēre, to vow.

Nuts and Bolts: the Swedish alphabet.

 Swedish has twenty-nine letters in its alphabet - that's the English twenty-six plus three more vowels, å ä and ö.

The three extras are placed at the end of the alphabet, after the z, and are regarded as completely separate letters from a and o.

This basically Roman alphabet came to Sweden with Christianity, but the old Swedish runes continued to be used into the 1700s, especially in the countryside. More or less everyone could read runes, but it took a long time for everyone to get round to learning to read the Roman script, so literacy actually got worse after the new alphabet was introduced.

In 1889 someone noticed that the letter Q wasn't a lot of use, and from 1900 it was replaced by the letter K in all contexts except proper names like Husqvarna and borrowed words like queer.

W and V were treated as the same letter, and V was generally preferred (except for some ancient families who were proud of their old W-spelled names). But then the World Wide Web came along, which made things trickier, and so from 2006 dictionaries have split up V word and W words into two sections. Before that they were all jumbled up together.

Z is rare, most old uses having been rather sensibly replaced with the letter S.

There's a sound in Swedish called the sj sound. It sounds (to me) a bit like hfwar, and it is said to be spelled in fifty different ways.

I shall not moan about English until at least tomorrow.

Word To Use Today: one of Swedish origin. Perhaps gauntlet, tungsten, or ombudsman. 

Allow yourself an extra biscuit if you can use them all in the same conversation.