English wonders

 

The English language is a truly wondrous thing. Its highways and byways catch you sometimes with surprise and oftentimes with pleasure.

Take collectives, for example. We all know about a pride of lions and a herd of elephants. But how about a “murder” of crows or a “parliament” of owls. I looked up some more for your delectation: an eyrie of eagles, an ambush of tigers, a confusion (or argument) of architects, an army of herrings, a bale of turtles, a battery of barracuda, a bellowing of bullfinches, a bevy of swans, a bloat (or crash) of hippopotami, a boil of hawks, a bubble of divers, a celebration of polar bears, a clowder (?) of cats, a coalition of cheetahs, a commonwealth of bees, a conflagration of arsonists and a converting of preachers – and all of this without going past the letter c.

There are also plenty of odd words describing one specific thing. “Dottle” is a good example. Dottle is the remaining plug of unburnt tobacco and ashes left in the bottom of a tobacco pipe when it has been smoked (precise definition from Wikipedia). Not something you need in everyday conversation but delightfully precise.

Take a word like “hull”. It means the husk or shell of a seed or fruit but in its verb form it means to remove a hull. So, for example, digging out the green leafy stem of leaves on a strawberry is called hulling the strawberry. I’m curious about the strawberries and cream which apparently are a feature of watching Wimbledon live. Do they have an army of minions (or indeed Minions) hulling thousands of strawberries every day of the tournament? What an extraordinary thing to put on your CV; “I hull strawberries at Wimbledon”.

Then there are words which have multiple meanings, some of which are odd. For example, if you are dressmaking, you “set” a sleeve into a bodice, vastly different from “setting” something down or “setting” something up. Which reminds me of the school age mantra: Flu breaks out, a thief breaks in, school breaks up and a car breaks down.

How about the odd use of simple words. Take “neck” for example. It is used perfectly sensibly for the bit of your body which attaches your noggin to your torso. But we also say “which neck of the woods do you come from”. And there’s “nick”.
It’s often used for a small cut. But we also say “in the nick of time” or “I’ll just nick out to the shops”.

You are supposed to eat “a peck” of dirt before you die, and you sing to your grandchild: “I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” Both peck and bushel are old imperial measurements up there with guinea (one pound one shilling) and a “baker’s dozen” (13). The Britannica tells us that there are a few theories as to why a baker’s dozen became 13, but the most widely accepted one has to do with avoiding a beating. In medieval England there were laws that related the price of bread to the price of the wheat used to make it. Bakers who were found to be “cheating” their customers by overpricing undersized loaves were subject to strict punishment, including fines or flogging.

Even with careful planning it is difficult to ensure that all your baked goods come out the same size; there may be fluctuations in rising and baking and air content, and many of these bakers didn’t even have scales to weigh their dough. For fear of accidentally coming up short, they would throw in a bit extra to ensure that they wouldn’t end up with a surprise flogging later. In fact, sometimes a baker’s dozen was 14—just to be extra sure.

The word “hawk” is another example of weirdly different meanings for same word. Of course it’s the name of a bird of prey and, not too distantly, describes a person with bellicose views. It also describes carrying goods around for sale and it’s the word for expectorating or clearing one’s throat and bringing up phlegm.

If you’ve got any favourite examples of English at its best and most peculiar do let me know; you can share it with everyone.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

Donald McGill, British comic postcard artist: “Do you like Kipling? “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled.”

Antimacassars and other strange customs 

I was going to write to you about antimacassars, a strange word which had fallen into disuse. Except it hasn’t. When I went into Google to check its spelling, I find that it’s still used to describe a piece of cloth draped as protection across the arms and/or back of an armchair. In the Victorian era, antimacassars were usually of lace or possibly embroidered cloth; now it seems they’re of any fabric and appear to be much more sturdy than their older relations.

At least we don’t have to live with other Victorian ideas like draping fabric around a piano’s legs because seeing legs, even on an inanimate object like a piano, was regarded as provocative. Seeing a lady’s ankle was a sexy as it got. Which is odd as in slightly earlier times as we saw in Pride and Prejudice and a myriad of other television series and movies, women wore extremely tight bodices with a great deal of bosom pushed up and out and men wore extremely tight “inexpressibles” of knitted material which one imagines were even more revealing than budgie smugglers.

O tempora, o mores – Oh the times, oh the manners!

It’s interesting how fashion – in clothing, manners, activities and more – has changed from my youth to now.

Take “Ban the Bomb”, the slogan of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a strong peace movement in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. It advocated the abolition of methods of mass destruction but is no longer active although its logo, a kind of revamped Mercedes symbol, is still co-opted sometimes by other anti-establishment movements.

And then there were beach inspectors. Even in the ‘60s, they patrolled Bondi Beach (and maybe elsewhere) looking for young women wearing scanty bikinis which were against either the law or the statutes of Waverley Council. I was humiliated by being complimented by one of these loathed public servants because my two-piece was supremely modest, the bottom half coming all the way to my waist.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, men escorting women down the street would reliably position themselves on the kerb side of the sidewalk, a custom ingrained from when streets were muddy and passing traffic would fling mud or dust upwards. I doubt there is anyone alive under 70 who would do this for that reason. It’s a bit like women wearing gloves to go to town – totally foregone.

Kids today have their LOL (laughing out loud), BRB (be right back), BTW (by the way), FISH (first in, still here) and POS (parents over shoulder). But we had our own acronyms; as young teenagers we wrote SWALK on the back of envelopes (sealed with a loving kiss) and giggled at the supposed meaning of POSH (allegedly written on the suitcases of the sahibs and memsahibs sailing to and from India and standing for Port Out Starboard Home, instructions on which side of the ship to have one’s cabin) and the supposed meaning of the word Snafu, coined by the military and meaning Situation Normal All F**d Up.

We also had Pig Latin, an invented language where each word lost its first letter which was pushed to the end of the word with the sound “ay” afterwards. So, Pig Latin for Pig Latin was “igpay atinlay”. Astonishingly, it didn’t really catch on.

Ladies were not supposed to eat in the street in the Olden Days; if I ever find myself slurping an ice-cream as I wander along, I send up a silent “sorry” to my late mother.

Young ladies also didn’t get their ears pierced. That, apparently, was only for foreign people. So strong was this admonition that I didn’t get my ears pierced until I was a dashing 72.

We did a lot of singing the National Anthem in the Olden Days, including at the cinema where we had to stand and sing before the film (or fillum or pitcha). In those days it was, of course, God Save the Queen. It took me years to learn Advance Australia Fair when it was introduced as our National Anthem, and I’m still wobbly on the second verse.

By the way, the young Queen visited Australia in 1954, less than a year after her Coronation, which was celebrated by the publishing of glossy black and white picture books which we young girls sighed over. On her 1954 visit, my mother, along with an estimated 1.8 million others, took my little brother and I to wave flags as her motorcade flashed by. I recall wondering when I was older how she coped with the disgusting stench of the tanneries which lined the then best route from the airport to the city. Perhaps she had her bottle of sal volatile (smelling salts) without which, I understand, no lady would travel.

And another quaint custom of the Olden Days … When we young ladies finally met and married Mr Right we completely lost our identity, subsumed into that of our husbands; Betty Williams became Mrs John Brown or Helen White, Mrs Bob Jones.

 

 

Quote of the Week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

US poet Robert Lowell: “If we see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the light of the oncoming train.”

 

 Things I know

 

I know the motto of NSW. In case you ever feel you need to know this it’s Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites which means “Newly risen, how brightly you shine”. There you are – instant geek!

I know how to sing La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. I presumably picked this up in French lessons at school but I’m mystified by why I still recall it. When one’s brain capacity is shrinking it seems odd that this is one of the memories it retains.

I know the date of the French Revolution – 1789; also learned in modern history at school. As a sign of those times, we learned about the French, Russian and Japanese revolutions instead of learning the name of Australia’s first Prime Minister – or indeed any Prime Minister. And further to this French theme, I have some remnants of French language from five years of study.

I know how to clean silver cutlery and other smallish silver objects, at least a practical thing to remember. You line a large bowl with silver foil, put the cutlery in, shake in lot of bicarb soda and cover it all with boiling water. Instant clean!

As I’ve noted before, I know a LOT of poetry. It’s interesting that I remember poetry and lots of history but, as I’ve written before, absolutely nothing from my years of learning maths at school. There’s not a jot of Algebra, Calculus or Trigonometry in my noggin, but there’s masses of bits and bobs of literature including Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 which is supposed to be the most perfect sonnet in the English language. OK, if you really want to know …

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,    

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

 

I know how to use a Thesaurus.

I know when to use “shall” and when to use “will” (it’s I shall, you will, he/she it will).

I know that media and data are plurals so they should be followed by “are” not “is”.

I have a profound understanding of where and when to put an apostrophe. An example: it’s “such and such was popular in the 1970s”, but “the clothes were 1970s’ fashion” where the first is a plural and the second a possessive. (I know I’m a punctuation bore.)

I know the two most famous dates in British history: 55 BCE and 1066 CE. The first is Caesar’s invasion of Britain and the second, the Norman invasion. This information became fixed in my mind when years ago I read the wonderful spoof on British history called 1066 and All That. And of course in those days we used BC (Before Christ and AD (Anno Domini – in the Year of our Lord), now replaced by BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era) because not all of us count with reference to Jesus.

I know the other thing which happened in 1492. Not only did Columbus “sail the ocean blue” but all the Jews were kicked out of Spain in the same year. Well, most of them, because there were pogroms and expulsions well into the next century.

I know how to give a good speech. I write them, then perform them. My mother was very supportive of my inability to speak extempore and told me I was in good company because Winston Churchill also wrote his speeches.

I know, thankfully, how to make good friends and I’m really chuffed that I’ve made new friends on the Northern Beaches.

I once knew how to use a theodolite and even a slide rule although I suppose this doesn’t count because I’ve forgotten how to do either. I just thought you might be impressed with the one-time breadth of my knowledge.

I know that Britain only has 36 actors who wander from program to program.

Because I am hopelessly boring, I know where to put apostrophes around quotes at the end of a sentence and I know that most publishers get it wrong. (If the quote is only a part of the sentence, the inverted commas go inside the full point, not after it. Boring, I know!)

I know what DNA stands for – Deoxyribonucleic Acid – but not what it means.

I know how to iron shirts really well.

To quote Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof I can do a “little bit of this, a little bit of that”.

I once saved the life of a newborn chick, but to be fair I didn’t have a clue how to do this until I’d spoken to a vet. The chick was suffering separation anxiety from having been taken from its mum and sold to my offspring at the school fete. When I discovered they had purchased this chick we were already home. Within minutes of coming inside, the chick keeled over. I rang a vet from the yellow pages (remember those) and he told me to put the chick on a warm hot-water bottle, cover it with a soft jumper (cashmere preferred) and feed it warm water through an eye dropper. I conscientiously did all these things and was richly rewarded when the chick returned to the vertical.

These chicks (there were actually two of them, but one was decidedly more robust than the one who’s life I saved) lived initially in the children’s bath-tub as their principle activity was pooping. Later they graduated to the courtyard as the weather warmed up but grew decidedly uglier as they aged. Eventually they were gifted to a friend with acreage in Queensland, via another friend who was flying up to see her; my spouse presented this second friend with a carrier bag to take with her on the plane which secretly contained the two chickens. Somehow or another, she managed the trip without knowing what she was carrying and the chickens lived a reasonably peaceful life until they were eaten by a fox.

 

Quote of the week from Chamber’s Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

American humourist (and mathematician) Tom Lehrer: “It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.”

And from one of his hilarious songs:

“I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky. In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics. Plagiarize!

Plagiarize!

Let no one else's work evade your eyes;

Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, 

So don't shade your eyes, 

But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize … 

Only be sure always to call it please "research".

 

 

 

 

Poetic ageing

Reading a history of the Middle Ages, as you do on the Northern Beaches in the middle of summer, I came across a delicious extract from the 12^th Century De Miseria Humanae Conditionis of Pope Innocent III which translates as Concerning the Wretchedness of the Human Condition.

“If, however, one does reach old age, his heart weakens straight away and his head shakes, his spirit fails and his breath stinks, his face wrinkles and his back bends, his eyes dim and his joints falter, his nose runs and his hair falls out, his touch trembles and his competence fails, his teeth rot and his ears become dirty. But neither should the old man glory against the young person nor the young be insolent to the old person, for we are what he was, someday will be what he is.”

I’m not entirely sure about the dirty ears, but the rest sounds pretty familiar.

There’s a lot of poetry and literary prose which deals with the issue of ageing.

Of course, Shakespeare has a go in his famous speech about the seven ages of man:

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” (As You Like It)

And then there’s the very depressing Sonnet 30

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,

And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.”

 

Andrew Marvell’s delightful poem about seduction and ageing, titled To His Coy Mistress is a delight.

 

“Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust;

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

 And I have just come across this marvellous 1961 poem called Warning by British poet Jenny Joseph.

"When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

 

 

QQuote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations

BBritish writer Hugh Kingsmill: “Friends are God’s apology for relations.”