Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 3

The Coronation: God Save King Charles! – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

My second blog post about you know what, where I get carried away – not literally – by the Gold State Coach.

Today is the Coronation of King Charles III – we look at some of the regalia involved in the ceremony and the procession.

Source: The Coronation: God Save King Charles! – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Dogs bark but the caravan moves on

This possibly obscure-to-Anglophones proverb became momentarily newsworthy in May 2015 when José Mourinho, the football manager who was then managing Chelsea, uttered it – and left many scratching their head over what he meant. His team had just won its fourth Premier League title, but their style of play was still getting flak, so he tried to rebut the criticism.

As the Mail Online put it: ‘But the Chelsea boss hit back with a cryptic adage from his homeland: “Dogs bark, but the caravan keeps on.”

Translated, the adage simply means: pay no attention to what people say about you.’

It’s true, as the Mail says, that one meaning of this ‘cryptic adage’ is similar to ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. Another aspect of its meaning, however, is something like ‘History or progress will move on regardless of the criticism it may attract (from lesser mortals),’ or, as the OED succinctly puts it ‘someone or something is impervious to protest or criticism.’ In that first sense it has a parallel in the Erasmian apophthegm The eagle does not catch flies.

But is it uniquely Portuguese? Certainly, a Portuguese version exists – os cães ladram, mas a caravana passa –, but then there are versions in various languages, such as French (les chiens aboient, la caravane passe), Spanish (los perros ladran, la caravan pasa and variants), German (die Hunde bellen, die Karawane zieht writer), Polish (Psy szczekaja, karawana idzie dalej), and so forth. Descriptions of the proverb in those languages sometimes claim it is Arabic – hardly surprising, given the reference to a caravan. And caravan here of course means ‘a group of people and animals who travel together’, not a mobile home.

At the time of writing, the first citation in English for it offered by the OED comes from a book of 1860 by I. Dass Domestic Manners & Customs of the Hindoos of North India and comes complete with an explanation of its meaning.

Dogs bark but the traveller quietly goes on his way, without minding them. They say so, when a person seeks occasion to quarrel with some one, but does not succeed.

xvi. 219   

However — Breaking News! — a citation has just been found from the previous year. Walter K. Kelly’s Proverbs of All Nations of 1859, among a list of doggy proverbs, states, ‘The Turks say “The dog barks, but the caravan passes,” which sounds like the origin of the Portuguese and any version with a version of ‘pass’ in it.

The next OED citation is from the Indianist John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father, thus confirming that the ‘adage’ came into English from the subcontinent:

Though the dog may bark the caravan … moves on.

Beast & Man in India ix. 252 (1891)

The OED explains that the 1860 quotation is ‘after Hindi musāfir calā jātā hai, kuṭṭe bhuṅkte rahte haĩ, literally “the traveller has moved on, the dogs remain barking”, probably itself after a Persian or Arabic model. In later use after Persian sag lāyad va kāravān guẕarad (and variants), literally “the dog barks and (or but) the caravan passes by” and its Arabic model tanbaḥ al-kilāb wa-tasīr al-qāfila (الكلاب تنبح والقافله تسير and variants), literally ‘the dogs bark and the caravan moves on’.

Turkish, so the indefatigable Wiktionary tells me, expresses the thought in four words and a rhyme: it ürür, kervan yürür.

The mystery of the proverb’s origins is more or less resolved. But if you intend to use it, will people find it as mysteriously cryptic as the Mail correspondent did?

Image courtesy of Vera Davidova on Unsplash.

Hoorah! It’s the spring or vernal equinox

Today marks the vernal equinox. The event that ought to herald spring, despite the less than springlike weather Britain has been enjoying recently. While the meteorologists have already kicked ‘spring’ off to a start at the beginning of the month, today is when ‘astronomical spring’ begins.

So what is an equinox, and why is this one vernal?

Vernal equinox sounds like double dutch. Actually, it’s double—or even triple—Latin.

An equinox, as Webster’s New College Dictionary, 4th edn defines it, is:

the time when the sun in its apparent annual movement along the ecliptic crosses the celestial equator, making night and day of equal length in all parts of the earth.

In theory, day and night should therefore be twelve hours each, but because of the earth’s atmosphere refracting the sun’s rays, the day will last about ten minutes longer than that in Britain.

The -nox part of equinox comes from the Latin for ‘night’. If you go back far enough in the mists of time, night is related to nox and also Classical Greek νυκτ-, νύξ, and Sanskrit nak, all of which derive from a hypothesised common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European, *nókʷts.

From nox, or more strictly, its stem, noct-, we get several English words, but the only ones you’re likely to encounter are nocturnal, musical or pictorial nocturnes, and, just possibly, noctambulism, aka sleepwalking.

The equi- part is from the same Latin word æquus ‘equal’ which has given us equidistant, equitable, and equity.

What about the vernal bit?

Think of Botticelli’s world-famous image: La Primavera.

Primavera means, literally, ‘first spring’. The -vera part comes from the Latin word for spring, ver.

From that Latin also derives English vernal, meaning ‘of or relating to the spring’. But it’s not a word you’ll come across often outside literature.

As thick as bees o’er vernal blossoms fly.

Alexander Pope

or

It was a beautiful morning, of that soft vernal temperature, that seems to thaw all the frost out of one’s blood.

1822   Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall xix

How do some other languages denote the equinox?

The Romance languages, as you might expect, have Latinate forms: French équinoxe, Spanish equinoccio, Italian equinozio, Romanian echinocţiu. In the Romanian form, the -ch- is pronounced /k/ and the letter t with a cedilla stands for the sound /t͡s/. 

Instead of bamboozling their speakers with ‘furrin‘ words, Some other languages just sort of do ‘what it says on the tin’ and call it something like ‘equal day and night’. Thus, German has die Tagundnachtgleiche (‘dayandnightequalness) and Russian has равноденствие, ‘same-day-ness’, derived from From ра́вный (rávnyj; ‘equal’) +‎ -о- (-o-) +‎ день (denʹ; ‘day’) +‎ –ство (-stvo; noun-forming suffix) +‎ –ие (-ije; neuter noun ending). Danish follows a similar pattern with its jævndøgn, literally, ‘evenness of the (24-hour) day’. 

Image: Courtesy of Stefan Schauberger on Unsplash.

And if you feel like celebrating wiht a classic risotto primavera, there’s a recipe here. The image is the best I could find, royalty-free, for risottos, but may not be a primavera.

This is an updated version of a post from 2013.

St David’s Day/Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus – Happy St David’s Day!

Collins Dictionary celebrates St David’s Day on the 1st March. Find out more about St David and enjoy some of our Welsh words of the day.

Source: St David’s Day/Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

International Mother Language Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Better late than never…Here’s the link to my piece about International Mother Language Day, which fell on Monday this week.

International Mother Language Day aims to encourage multilingual education based on someone’s language spoken at home and in their community.

Source: International Mother Language Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

National Backwards Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Below is the link to my post. !fun Have

Today, 31st January, is National Backwards Day, where People are encouraged to do all sorts of zany things front to back!

Source: National Backwards Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Nuts, nostalgia and ‘as sweet as a nut’.

Image courtesy of Francesco Cavallini on UnsplashNuts as Christmas treats

Christmas can be a time of great nostalgia for me – as for many of you, I’m sure.

My parents died too soon decades ago, so my living memory of them, sadly, grows dimmer by the year. But certain scenes never fade.

One such is my father on Boxing Day cracking shells from a bowl chocka with assorted nuts. You’ll know what I mean if you’re older – the nuts you could then only ever find at Christmastide (I choose the archaic word deliberately), not the neatly packaged health foods you can nowadays buy come rain come shine. Walnuts, with their knobbly locket shape and fragile shell that yields so easily to the nutcracker, and then their neat brain-like fruit inside; Brazil nuts, with their elephant-hide shell; almonds, with their intriguingly pitted husks; and the glossy almost-wood of hazelnut shells.

I can still picture in my mind’s eye the simple silvery metal nutcracker that almost floated atop the inviting cornucopia of nuttiness when I was a child and how my father loved to splinter the shells open.

And I can still picture the earnest way in which he splintered them. (I always knew when he was concentrating hard because his lower jaw dropped away so his teeth did not meet. It’s a trait I’ve inherited.) Cracking nuts was a hallowed ritual, as was savouring the Stilton you only ever ate at that season, or the tangerines or clementines, mysteriously unavailable otherwise.

As sweet as a nut

This year I had a walnut epiphany – forgive my pretension, but there’s no other way to describe it. Fresh ones, straight out of the shell, have a taste all their own, buttery and smooth and sweet, completely different from the packaged ones.

Which made me think of the phrase my partner occasionally uses: as sweet as a nut.

What does it mean? They use it to mean what it says: a simile for something deliciously sweet. And that’s how it appears in the first OED citation. That citation apparently refers to palm hearts, then known as ‘palm cabbages’:

The Cabbage itself when it is taken out of the Leaves..is as white as Milk, and as sweet as a Nut if eaten raw.

William Dampier A New Voyage around the World vii. 166, 1697

Image courtesy of Congerdesign on Pixabay

Apart from being a rapacious buccaneer, Dampier was also an acute and well-informed naturalist. He is the first person to describe banana, plantain and breadfruit in English, and his A New Yoyage was a literary success.

But as sweet as a nut has a long pedigree as a colloquial underworld phrase, which the OED doesn’t record but Jonathon Green’s magisterial Dictionary of Slang does, meaning ‘simple, easy, delightful, especially of a robbery.

The first citation given rhymes and is decades earlier than the Dampier one.

He puts / His hands, to feele for Lockwoods guts, / Which came not foorth so sweet as Nuts.

R. Speed The Counter–Scuffle, 1628

Nuts

Nuts feature in two types of metaphor The first is a euphemism for, ahem, testicles. Clearly perceived similarity of shape is the root or the ‘grounds’ of the metaphor.

The popular Australian brand of edible nuts ‘Nobby’s Nuts’ exploits potential double-entendres to the full, particularly in an ad it used a while back: ‘Nibble Nobby’s Nuts.’

(I’d always assumed ‘Nobby’ was an invented name to provide alliteration with ‘nuts’. I was wrong. So Wikipedia informs me, it was the nickname of the company’s founder, Anthony ‘Nobby’ Noblet [1913–1995]).

English uses the nut metaphor, but Spanish prefers eggs (among other possibilities) – huevos – as do Russian and German, with яйца and Eier.

Portuguese and Italian are more prosaic with their ‘balls’, palle and bolas. In this connection, avocados are a hidden testicle metaphor: the word derives ultimately from Nahuatl aguacatl, which in the sixteenth century could denote both the fruit and by metaphorical extension, the body part. The word seems not to be used in that sense nowadays, but the Mexican word for ‘avocado’ aguacate, which clearly derives from aguacatl, denotes the fruit and the appendage.

The second metaphor is for the head, again, of course, the grounds being the shape. First recorded in 1841, according to the OED, but before 1790 according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Nuts is first recorded in Grose’s slang dictionary A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785, meaning, as the OED puts it, ‘to be infatuated with someone; to hold something in high esteem’. From there it was only a short semantic hop, skip and jump to its meaning, originally U.S., of ‘mad, deranged, eccentric’ from 1908 according to the OED, but 1840, according to Green.  

Image courtesy of T.L. Strot on Unsplash

We […] found them waiting on the beach, and a little afraid about going off, as the surf was running very high. This was nuts to us.

R.H. Dana Two Years before the Mast (1840: 1992) 219

What struck him? He must be nuts.

1908   H. C. Fisher in San Francisco Examiner 8 Jan. 9 (comic strip)   

Finally, talk of testicles reminds me of that adage my father taught me to remember how to make the sign of the cross on one’s body. Irreverent though it is, it can be helpful for a man: spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch, i.e. up, down, left, right, left being where the wallet would be in one’s breast pocket and right where a fob watch might once have been found.

Should you ever be in need of an adjective to describe botanical nuts, there is the combining form prefix nuci– from the Latin for ‘nut’, nux, nucis f., which gives e.g. nuciferous (nut-bearing) and nucivorous (nut-eating), not to mention its Romance offspring noix, noce, nuez, etc.

Belated ‘Merry Twixmas!’ But what is Twixmas?

4-minute read

What is Twixmas?

A few years ago, rather than going away for Christmas, we went away to a hotel for the period between Christmas and the New Year, advertised as a ‘Twixmas’ break.

I have to say I’d rather forgotten about this potentially useful portmanteau until 28 December this year (2022). The presenter on a radio programme I was on, pontificating about words of the year, commented that shopping in Tesco in the Twixmas period was frantic.

I hadn’t come across Twixmas until, I think, 2016. The delightful hotel where we used to hole up for three or four days over Christmas later stopped doing Christmas packages due to lack of demand. (We had been the youngest couple there, which was gratifying from a narcissistic point of view; sadly, we think some of the auld yins might have moved on to a better place, hence the lack of demand.)

Anyway, the last time we were there enjoying our Christmas ‘tucker’, the hotel also offered a ‘Twixmas’ break.

Now, in context, sandwiched as it was between Xmas and New Year packages, it was blindingly obvious that Twixmas referred to the period between Crimbles and New Year.

But with less context is it so clear?

This Beeb vid from 2017 suggests that at that time it wasn’t, though I suspect it will now be rather more familiar.

The presenter says it refers to 27 to 29 December, which made me ask: ‘What about 30 December? Why wouldn’t that be part of it?’

(Context is always everything in language. It is clear from what the presenter says at the beginning and people’s responses that they were asked ‘Have you heard of Twixmas?’ In other words, there was no genuine linguistic context.)

It is still not yet defined in any of the major dictionaries, as far as I can see.

English has a rather restricted repertoire of ways to make new words. One often-used way is to splice existing words together in the way an unscrupulous car dealer might weld two cars together in a ‘cut and shut’. Such combinations of two (or more) words are extremely common.

With cars, the join is intended to be invisible. With words, however, speakers need to sense where that join lies so they can deduce the meaning. Let’s take Brexit (sorry to mention it, you must be as sick to death of hearing about it as everyone else), which is a combination of British/Britain and Exit. The name for such hybrids is ‘portmanteau’1 or ‘blend’.

Alice and portmanteaus

The portmanteau we’re talking about now is Twixmas. It is presumably a blend of betwixt with Christmas (whereas it could, say, have been Tweenmas, from between, but then it wouldn’t rhyme, and would be even more opaque.)

It has its pros and cons.

On the con side:

Twix is a kind of sweet widely known in Britain. As the video (December 2017) shows, some people thought Twixmas might be a confection (figuratively, and almost literally).Only one person in that video knew what it meant.The suffix –mas is not widely known or highly productive these (post-Christian) days.

(While historically it appears in a handful of religious feast days, as the OED shows [e.g. Candlemas, Lammas, Martinmas], the one that more people might have heard of is Michaelmas, as it is used to refer to the autumn term at some schools and universities. Not to mention Michaelmas daisies.)

It is a made-up word, invented by the advertising and marketing industry to make us part with our money. (Or, as the top definition in Urban Dictionary rather bitterly puts it, ‘capitalist pigs [sic] idea to squeeze more profit from christianity [sic] and abusing the poor minimum wagers to slave away there [sic] holiday season.’)

On the plus side:

It expresses in one word what otherwise would take at least seven, thereby embodying the principle of economy, which is often a driver of language change.It rhymes with Christmas, which makes it – or should make it – easy to remember.Other ‘invented’ words have stood the test of time, such as blurb.It is arguably ingenious, taking the twix– element from betwixt, a word which possibly conjures up the set phrase betwixt and between. (Note in the video how the two older ladies get this immediately.)Will it last?

Only time will tell. But it seems to have at least survived since I first posted this in 2018.

But whatever you have been doing for Twixmas, I hope you have had fun.

And here’s wishing you a successful and prosperous 2023!

NB: According to the video, it’s only 27-29 December. I suppose 30 December is subsumed under New Year celebrations.

I don’t know about you, but the final ‘Merry Twixmas’ really doesn’t work.

1Portmanteau is not an ‘invented’ word itself, but its linguistic meaning was ‘invented’ by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.

To understand the appropriateness of the word, it is necessary to realise the kind of luggage it denotes in its literal meaning. As the OED defines it (emboldening mine): A case or bag for carrying clothing and other belongings when travelling; (originally) one of a form suitable for carrying on horseback; (now esp.) one in the form of a stiff leather case hinged at the back to open into two equal parts.

Humpty Dumpty is explaining the meaning of some of the words in the ‘Jabberwocky’ poem, the first couplet of which runs ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves | did gyre and gimble in the wabe’.

‘That’s enough to begin with,’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted : ‘there are plenty of hard words there. “Brillig” means four o’clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.’

‘That’ll do very well,’ said Alice : ‘and “slithy”?’

‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”. “Lithe” is the same as “active”. You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

‘I see it now,’ Alice remarked thoughtfully : ‘and what are “toves”?’

‘Well, “toves” are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.’

‘They must be very curious creatures.’

‘They are that,’ said Humpty Dumpty : ‘also they make their nests under sun-dials—also they live on cheese.’

(The space before the colons above is deliberate, echoing the original printing convention, which is still followed in French.)

NB: This is an updated version of a post originally published in 2018.

Antarctica Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Antarctica Day on 1st December celebrates the signing in 1959 of the Antarctic Treaty, but where did the word ‘Antarctica’ originate from?

Source: Antarctica Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Pop Goes the Weasel: the magical language of nursery rhymes – Collins Dictionary Language BlogIn honour of Nursery Rhymes Week, which ended last Friday.

Nursery rhymes are deceptively simple but they teach us all about rhyme, word order, and vocabulary whether real or nonsense!

Source: Pop Goes the Weasel: the magical language of nursery rhymes – Collins Dictionary Language Blog