steepholm

Here's another niggling phrase - this time not mine but Sir Thomas Browne's. Towards the end of The Garden of Cyrus Browne decides it's time to go to bed, and writes: "The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia."

Marvellous stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. In fact, "The huntsmen are up in America" is a phrase I like so much that I sometimes catch myself saying it round about midnight. It's less infantile than "Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire," after all. But more often than not I bite the words back - because, as a moment's thought will reveal, Browne (being sleepy) got the Earth's direction of spin wrong. By the time the huntsmen were actually up in America he would have been tucking into his elevenses and the Persians would have been taking afternoon sherbet.

I've considered adapting the phrase to reflect geographical reality. There are several suitable candidates that would preserve the dactylic charm of the original. "The huntsmen are up in Mongolia," for example. However, it's just not the same.

The only other expedient I can see is to move to a part of the world where Browne's phrase would actually make sense. If I lived in Honolulu, for example, saying "The huntsmen are up in America" at midnight would work perfectly, at least for the huntsmen of the east coast (whom Browne no doubt had in mind), while in Iran it would be the small hours of the morning - not ideal, but adequate. [ETA Actually the small hours of the afternoon, of course. Not so good.]

In fact, the more I think about it the more inevitable it seems that some future graduate student will use this phrase as the basis of an article arguing that Sir Thomas Browne was actually a native of Hawaii. I, for one, wish that person well.

"Unter den Linden? How sublime!"

For years I've nursed that multilingual pun, looking for an opportunity to slip it naturally into conversation. "I wonder what Longinus would have made of the Brandenburg Gate?" I might say, a propos of nothing - only to see the other people in the bus queue shuffle warily away. Would anyone feed me a line that would allow me to unsheathe my devastating witticism? Would they heck. It became an albatross round my neck. An albatross called Moby Dick.

Today, in a fit of abandon, I put it up as my Facebook status - but it didn't get so much as a single Like. After that I was forced to face the fact that a) not many people would get the joke, and b) even those that did probably wouldn't find it funny.

Perhaps, in fact, it isn't very funny. There - I've said it.

I admit defeat. Take it. Do with it as you will. Publish it as your own, and make millions - I care not.

God, I feel so much better for that.

Step forward, all you collectors of nineteenth-century erotica - Oxford hath need of thee!

For years, I've been carrying around in my head, as one of those nuggety truths that are so pleasant to take out and burnish of a winter's evening, the fact that the word "masterpiece" may refer not only to the crowning achievement of someone's career, but also to the work that proves they have learned their craft, allowing them to slough off the name of apprentice. For a scholar, it's the PhD thesis; for a Shaolin monk (from my memory of 1970s TV) it's snatching the pebbles from his master's hand; for a joiner, a really nice cabinet. These are the pieces that prove their mastery and earn their membership of the guild - hence masterpiece.

Is this sense of "masterpiece" well known? Can I use it in a piece for undergraduates without having to stop and explain it?

In another part of the forest... it's well known that J. K. Rowling uses various creatures from folklore and myth, etc. Mostly, she uses them fairly "straight" - a werewolf in the Potterverse is much like a werewolf in most other places one encounters them, and is subject to the same rules. So why does she play such silly buggers with the good old boggart? This mischievous household spirit of the genus Poltergeist is hardly the most obscure - but when a boggart makes an appearance in The Prisoner of Azkaban it's quite different from its traditional manifestation, being described as "a shape-shifter [that...] can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most". No one knows what Rowling's boggart looks like when it is unobserved, making it some kind of cross between Schrödinger's cat and Room 101 - in fact, nothing like a boggart at all except in its desire to mischief humans. Yet now, to my students (and no doubt to their contemporaries the world over) that is what a boggart is. I find that regrettable - but also out of character for Rowling, who tends to play things fairly straight.

Despite getting a flu jab before Christmas (just £10 at Tesco!), I appear over the last couple of days to have caught flu. It's not been totally incapacitating, and I'm already feeling a bit better (though still with a slight fever), so I'm hoping that the jab may at least have done some good in mitigating its effects. Still, it's annoying. Anyway, I apologise for any residual delirium in what follows.

Lying in bed this morning, staring at the ceiling, I got to thinking about the rise of "down". In particular, there are three usages, which seem to me related:

1. put down to = attribute to, as in "I put the mildness of my illness down to having got a flu jab."

It struck me that this might have arisen as an accounting metaphor, where things are put down in different columns of credit and loss. And, having checked the OED just now, I see that the earliest cited uses do indeed make some mention of accounts, albeit more in a divvying up the bill sort of way: "His Death was not Legally Due for and from himself, but might be put down to the Account of others" (1723). At the very least, I think it would be reasonable to say that "put down to" derives from an act of recording, sharing out, dividing up, etc.

What I'm wondering, though, is whether there's any connection between that prepositional verb and the following two usages. Here's the first, which I'm fairly sure is of more recent date:

2. down to = attributable to, as in "The mildness of my illness is down to my having got a flu jab."

It looks very similar and it's doing a similar semantic job - but the "put" has disappeared! And then there's this:

3. down to = up to, as in "Whether you get a flu jab is down to you."

My sense is that this is more recent still. It looks slightly different from the first two, but it preserves the basic idea of attributing responsibility for an action or event, albeit in this case a future event.

What I find interesting, if I'm right in thinking that the latter two phrases are related to the first (and each other) is that this is an instance of a prepositional verb where the prepositional part has become independent of the verb part. "Down to" has broken free of the semantic giant that is "put", like a growler breaking from an iceberg.

Is this a reasonable reading? And, if so, can we think of any other prepositional verbs where something similar has happened - i.e. the prepositions have come to do the job without the verb?

Well, that's interesting. I was just thinking about the phrase "sleep with", as in "have sex with", and wondering when it came into common use. It seemed to me that it would feel odd to find the phrase in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, who/which both tend to use "lie with" where today we might say "sleep with". For example: "But if a man find a betrothed damosel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her, shall die"; "And so I lie with her, and she with me."

Perhaps because of this, "sleep with" has always felt like a euphemism to me, and one that until today I'd probably have dated (off the top of my head) to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when embarrassment about sexual matters became more common in polite society.

However, when I looked up "sleep with" in the OED, I found to my surprise that it goes deep into Old and Middle English:

a900 Laws Ælfred (Liebermann) Introd. §29 Gif hwa fæmnan beswice unbeweddode, and hire mid slæpe.
c1000 Ælfric Genesis xxxix. 7 His hlæfdige lufode hine and cwæð to him: Slap mid me!
a1325 (1250) Gen. & Exod. (1968) l. 967 Forð siðen ghe bi abram slep, Of hire leuedi nam ghe no kep.
c1386 Chaucer Sir Thopas 78 An elf queene shal my lemman be, And slepe vnder my goore.
a1400 Trevisa's Higden (Rolls) VII. 143 A clerk of þe court hadde i-sleped wiþ hire.

At that point, though, the list of citations stops, and takes a four-century gap before popping up again with Shelley:

1819 Shelley Cenci i. iii. 15 Whilst she he loved was sleeping with his rival.
1898 Sessions Paper of Central Criminal Court Feb. 266 He has been sleeping with my wife. How would you like it?
1928 A. Huxley Point Counter Point xxvii. 445 ‘Sleeping around’—that was how he had heard a young American girl describe the amorous side of the ideal life, as lived in Hollywood.

Did the phrase "sleep with" really drop out of common use for all those centuries? Pushed out, perhaps, by "lie with"? A glance at the OED's citations for the latter phrase suggest that this is indeed possible. They range from 1300 to 1750, which plugs the gap pretty neatly.

Of course, the OED isn't exhaustive, but it is indicative. And I have to get used to the idea that "sleep with" isn't a niminy-piminy expression after all, but pure Anglo-Saxon. (And the Anglo-Saxons, like ourselves but unlike the Jacobeans, could both sleep and have sex standing up [see Knee trembler].)

The ability to turn almost any part of speech into a verb is one of the glories of English, but it can be quite distracting. Take my desultory skimming of the internet this morning. Yes, they've discovered a Beowulf-style feasting hall under a village green in Kent, but I'm fixated on the phrase, "the ability to own and upkeep a horse". Yes, Mitt Romney has told porkies about Chrysler moving Jeep production to China, but I'm hung up on the image of "the Toledo plant shuttered and its more than 3,500 workers idled".

Each country's euphemism for redundancy says something about its culture. In the USA, it appears, workers are "idled" - a loaded term recalling the country's Puritan roots and the kinds of hands that the Devil makes work for. Here in the UK, people are "let go" - which sounds suitably passive aggressive, almost (and especially if done to the backing of Engelbert Humperdinck) as if it were done at the employees' instigation. And in France, of course, they use a culinary metaphor: firms are dégraissé. Bon appetit.

Okay, it's a lighter-than-air theory. That's why I float it.

I was pleased to hear of the conviction of the Winterbourne View "care workers" today, and (for my own hobby-horsical reasons) pleased too to hear the BBC Radio 4 news consistently and correctly describe the home as being "in South Gloucestershire" - even though the BBC website still refers to it simply as being "near Bristol." [ETA: Huh: PM now seems to have led a radio relapse.]

It's always interesting to hear how events are described, of course. After last year's attack by the police on Stokes Croft, and the way that the reporting of the student protests prior to that failed to match the first-hand accounts of the people I knew who were there, I've become more sensitive to the reporting of public order policing in particular. Perhaps because of this, I'm now aware of a problem increasingly faced by security forces around the world - that of being forced to fire rubber bullets into crowds of protesters. Now, don't get me wrong - it's not that they want to do it. It's not that they'd do it if there were any alternative. No, the protesters actively compel them to shoot them - or so the news agencies of the world seem to agree.

Just how can protesters force security personnel to shoot them, you ask? There are numerous methods, all equally irresistible in their effect. Sometimes it's by throwing stones:

"Bandh supporters pelted stones at security forces at Mahadev Tilla and Harangajao. Policemen on duty were forced to fire rubber bullets to disperse the mob."

Sometimes by breaking things:

“Police had to use rubber bullets to disperse the rowdy crowd which started to be violent and destroyed property.”

Sometimes by trying to go somewhere the security forces don't want them to go:

"The traders claimed they were attacked without provocation, while the metro police said they had been forced to fire rubber bullets to contain traders trying to force their way into the market."

Sometimes being upset and angry is enough to oblige the helpless security forces to pull the trigger. After all, there's nothing like being hit by a rubber bullet to calm you down...

"Mass demonstrations in Madrid turned to violence earlier this week, as police were forced to fire rubber bullets to calm the fury of the public."

"South African police were forced to fire rubber bullets and stun grenades to break up a protest by hundreds of stadium staff unhappy at their wages."

It's clearly a widespread problem. What can be done about it?

Bloated public sector [adj.]: a term justifying the dismissal of nurses, teachers, policemen, soldiers, careworkers, etc., while implying that only high-paid civil servants are in danger.

Clobber [verb]: the effect of proposed taxes on the extremely wealthy. Usage note: This verb is not applicable to lower income groups. When they have their wages cut or their benefits removed, they are merely being stripped of an unfair advantage.

Disproportionate force [noun phrase]: See proportionate force.

Proportionate force [noun phrase]: See disproportionate force.

Rebalance the economy [verb phrase]: a) to achieve a better balance of payments; b) to reduce the dominance of the financial services sector and increase manufacturing; c) to cut wages and make public sector workers redundant. Usage note: In practice this phrase is now generally used to mean c), but it retains the virtuous associations of a) and b).

The Editors are always grateful for new definitions..

I am a very shallow person. I feel terrible for the family of young April Jones, especially now it's emerged that she has cerebral palsy and needs medication. I feel terrible for April Jones herself. I'm awed by the way the local community has worked together to try and find her.

But I still can't help correcting the radio every time a BBC reporter fails to pronounce "Machynlleth" properly. What have I become?

"Shall I be like the young men who sit upon the gates of the city, eating of their own shit and drinking of their own piss?"

My father used to say that sometimes, after a particularly bruising encounter with a class of CSE pupils. That was the gist, anyway, but I may have got any or all of the individual words wrong. But what a useful line it is! It tends to pop into my head unbidden whenever I see a group of juvenile delinquents - at least until I remind myself that they aren't actually doing anything more disgraceful than standing talking to each other, as is almost always the case.

Anyway, I assumed it was a quotation from the Old Testament - Proverbs, maybe, or one of the prophets - but doing a quick search just now I'm coming up empty. The nearest I can get is the bit in 2 Kings 18, when Rabshakeh is sent with his friends Rabsaris and Tartan (yes, Tartan!) by King Sennacharib to parley with the besieged inhabitants of Jerusalem, some of whom are indeed sitting on the city wall. He tells them, in effect, that if they don't cooperate they'll soon be reduced to eating dung and drinking piss.

Can that be what my father was quoting? Because, if so, he took the dung right out of context. Or maybe I've misremembered what he said, as the years have passed. Or maybe there's another text I've not found yet?

I've been away in the Midlands, primarily to attend my aunt Naomi's funeral - which went well. It took place at Stafford Crematorium, which turns out to be just three miles from Great Haywood (better known to Tolkien aficionados as Tavrobel), where I was obliged to ask directions, for it is a puzzling piece of country in which meandering roads wind aimlessly over dead straight waterways (via awfully narrow bridges), thus reversing the proper order of nature.

The night before the funeral I stayed with friends at nearby Alrewas. There, I was shown this book, from which my friend had learned to read - though not spell - in the 1960s.

I posted before on the abortive Shavian attempt at English spelling reform. The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a less ambitious scheme, which flourished in Britain (and elsewhere) for about 10 years from the mid-'60s, and was intended to get children reading before they made the move to standard English texts and spelling; but it looks much the same, inasmuch as it's a largely phonemic script. (It's also all in lower case.) I'd heard of it before, but never actually seen it being used to bring great literature to life.

It's hard to believe anyone thought this would be a good idea. Did any of my LJ friends learn to read this way? How was it for you?

I also passed very near to Abbots Bromley. This September I must make an effort finally to see the Horn Dance.

Someone on the Sidney-Spenser list threw out a challenge the other day, which no one so far has taken up. Maybe there's a bold younker here, ready to don the bright helm of grammatical truth?

The question is: is there any word in the English language, other than "quoth", which always appears before its subject? You always say "Quoth Aristotle" not "Aristotle quoth". Is this unique? I feel it can't be, but have been racking my brains to find another instance.

Incidentally, it turns out that "quoth" is not, as I always thought, related in some way to "quote", even though these days it invariably introduces a quotation. It's an unimpeachably Germanic word, echt deutsch. The verb from which it derives (only the first and third person singular survive) is "queath", which we still hear echoes of in the verb "bequeath" - suggesting that wills were originally spoken, as of course in pre-literate societies they must have been.

This is another query flung tangentially from our History Project like a spark from a Catherine wheel. It's common wisdom, both on the web and in print, as dozens of hits on Google Books attest, that Victorian women advised their daughters - usually before their wedding nights - to lie back (or perhaps close their eyes) and think of England (or possibly the Empire). Indeed, this is frequently cited as evidence of the resistance at the time to the idea of female sexual pleasure.

But is there any evidence that this phrase was ever used during Victoria's reign? Apocryphally it's sometimes attributed to Victoria herself, although this tendency has abated as Victoria's enthusiastic enjoyment of sex has become better known. Other than that, the earliest citation appears to be from the 1912 journal of Alice, Lady Hillngdon, in which she expresses her relief that these days she is obliged to "lie down on [her] bed, close [her] eyes, open [her] legs and think of England" only twice a week. But that quotation first appeared in print in the 1970s, and the journal itself (as Brewer notes) has never been produced, so it must be treated with suspicion at best. Something similar is said to have been given as advice to her daughter by the wife of Stanley Baldwin, but again, no evidence.

It's tricky, of course, the subject matter being such that people who might have conceivably have used the phrase would have shied from putting it down in print; but surely there would have been many women from the early to the middle part of the twentieth century who would have attested to its use in earlier times? Did the Suffragettes make no mention of it? Marie Stopes? Virginia Woolf? Gwen Raverat? Marie Lloyd? Anyone at all?

By this point I'm pretty much convinced that the phrase is a twentieth-century invention, foisted on the Victorians as a way of poking fun at them (c.f. Victoria refusing to outlaw lesbianism) - but I'd still like to know who first came up with it.

Two language queries came up today, and I'm sure this flist has the answer to them both.

a) Whenever I hear US pundits talking about the costs of America's various military endeavours, one of them usually refers at some point to the amount of "treasure" it's all cost. I don't hear that term used in the UK (although we have a Treasury, so perhaps it used to be), nor do I recall hearing the phrase applied to US domestic spending on, say, Medicare. I quite enjoy the vision of pirates chests it inevitably evokes, but I'm curious as to how widely used the word is in the States. Am I correct in my impression that it's a military thing?

b) Why isn't it "Octember"? And why didn't it occur to me to wonder until today?

c) Oh yes, you need a third item for a post. In that case, here are some of the classic children's literature texts I'm teaching this year. This isn't a query, but those who enjoy anagrams are welcome to give them a go:

Chastened Regret
Win Well with Hedonist
White Witch Bothered Another Land
Try Hero Part!
Wanna Nice Riddle? Lo!
Evil Cow's There
Grim, Not Bleak

All of those are quite appropriate to the books in question, but there's a bonus for "Dishearten Wheelwright".

I gather this one is surging on Twitter (or whatever the phrase is), but I can't resist posting it here. Did Cameron know what he was saying? Was it a Freudian slip? A sly joke by his speech writers? Either way, it is a matter of record that he began a speech on the mass looting with the following sentence:

"It is time for our country to take stock."

Bliss.

... enough of my avo's sango runs through my veins that I sometimes wish I could take the English language and shake it out like a sheet, or at least straighten its tie when it's on its way to an important meeting. For example...

When we talk about people who "have difficulty" with women, we might say that they are sexist, or we might say that they are misogynist. The two things are connected, and are often found together, but the distinction between them is a useful one. Sexism is public, structural, and may be institutional. Misogyny is personal, psychological, perhaps pathological. Misogyny may underlie institutional sexism, but I at least would hesitate to call an institution misogynistic per se. Similarly, it's possible to say that somebody is being sexist without necessarily accusing them of misogyny as well.

In the area of race, it all gets a bit blurrier. "Racist" does double service, both as a description of what people and institutions say and do, and also of their motivation. Nevertheless, there is a word (if a rather specialized one) that does some of the same semantic work as misogyny - namely "xenophobia". Like "misogyny", "xenophobia" is a diagnosis of motivation rather than a description of action. (There's also the problem that "xenophobia" refers to nationality or culture, rather than to race as such - although to racists this distinction may be less apparent.)

Then there's "homophobia" (and indeed "transphobia", which was coined by analogy). Again you've got that pathology-suggesting suffix, and it's easy to see "homophobia" as doing the same kind of job as "misogyny" and "xenophobia". But where is the equivalent of "sexism" and "racism"? What is the word to use when you want to point out that somebody has just said or done something oppressive or othering or heteronormative or otherwise shitty, but you don't necessarily want to accuse them of being motivated by fear or hatred of homosexuals? How, in short, do you avoid this kind of derailing comment:

Dictionary.com defines homophobia as an “intense hatred or fear of homosexuals or homosexuality.” This to me is probably the biggest and most offensive stereotype in your essay. [...] I can give you my word that I do not hate a single person on this earth, and I am certainly not afraid of homosexuals. In fact, I have a cousin who is a lesbian, and I give her a big hug every time I see her and love her just as much as I love any of my cousins. Just because I believe that her actions are immoral definitely does not mean that I love her any differently. [For the context of this comment, see here].

I've read on several blogs about racism that one of the things people tend to do when told that they have said something racist is to take offence, or be over-apologetic, or in some other way make it all about them, rather than understanding it as a simple correction from which they can learn and move on. However rare the latter reaction may in fact be it is at least possible, because in saying that an expression is racist you're not necessarily saying that the speaker is a xenophobe through and through and motivated by pathological fear and hatred. But "homophobic" has that accusation built in - especially for those of an etymological cast of mind.

What to do? Do we invent a new word that will have the same relation to homophobia that racism does to xenophobia, and sexism does to misogyny? You can invent till you're blue in the gums, but who will use or even learn it? Or do we continue to let "homophobia" be stretched thinly over a large semantic territory, and trust that usage will sort things out? But how do we avoid the kind of derailing mentioned above while we're waiting?

Where is Ludwig Zamenhof when you need him?

I haven't read any of the 1295 (at the last count) comments on this BBC article about Americanisms and how annoying they are. The list itself is an eclectic one, with people's objections ranging from the aesthetic ("burglarize") to the logical ("I could care less") to a simple dislike of phrases because they are American and we have our own thank you very much (Z pronounced zee).

Quite a few of the items listed don't seem to me to be Americanisms at all, though, and I suspect the US has become a convenient whipping boy for all kinds of pet hates. A person called Gordon Brown (no relation, I assume) objects that "a million and a half" really means 1,000,000.5. Is that an Americanism, or just a piece of pedantry? And what about "Turn that off already" - surely a Jewish idiom on both sides of the Atlantic? "That'll learn you" has always existed here, and "gotten" ("It makes me shudder," says Julie Marrs of Warrington) was merely on holiday from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. While Julie Marrs is shuddering at "gotten", John in London finds that "oftentimes" makes him "shiver with annoyance" - though that is hardly an American coinage either. Such physicality in their reactions!

Ah, but "Is physicality a real word?" asks one bemused correspondent, resident in the US. Why yes, yes it is, both there and here. The fact that you first come across a word in the States, doesn't make it an Americanism.

Just a heads up, going forward.

It's sometimes said that cricket is an Indian game that happened to be invented in England. I suppose that makes chicken tikka masala cricket's gastronomic equivalent, although I doubt Hambledon CC will thank me for saying it.

What I hadn't realized until today was that vindaloo was originally a Portugese wine and garlic sauce (vin d'alho), before being spiced up by the inhabitants of Goa. At least, I suppose that's the case since the OED tells me so, but Indian food origins seem quite prone to mythologizing. Chicken tikka masala itself is not without its controversies, and then there's the case of jalfrezi, which I've blithely told people for years derives from the name of an officer of the Raj called Colonel Frazer - because that's what it says on the labels of Geeta's Spice and Stir. However, the same label claims that "jhal frezi" means "dry fry". Can both be true? It was apparently popular as a cooking method (rather than as a dish) in Anglo-Indian households, so maybe there really was a Colonel Frazer who took a particular liking to it - and maybe he or his friends saw the opportunity for a bilingual pun?

Or maybe Geeta Samtani is having a joke.

If indeed she really exists.

I hardly dare mention that I've always understood chutney to have been the miraculous offspring of British preserving techniques and Indian ingredients - and that if one needed an excuse for the Empire one need look no further than my cousin Dave's recipe, or failing that Mrs Ball's more widely available South African version. But I dare say that will turn out not to be true either, and that the whole imperial adventure was built on sand.

"The huntsmen are up in America"

Purging a Pun

Venus and the Lexicographers

Pseudodoxia Etymologica - Masterpieces and Schrödinger's Boggart

Thoughts on Emergent Occasions - or, Feeling a Bit Up and Down

"Slap mid me!"

Transitory Transitives

Don't Make Me Hurt You

The Devil's Dictionary: Birmingham Edition

Inappropriate Tics

Inappropriate Tics

A Game of Hebrew Whispers

From Alrewas to Tavrobel; from the most able to him that can but spell

Quoth Who?

Sexual Intercourse Began in 1863

There's Treasure Everywhere!

Why I Love the English Language

I'm not an Esperantist, but...

The Price of Good Usage is 24/7 Vigilance

Chicken Tikka Masala and Other Chimeras

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