Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 4

Blowsy flowers, blowsy women and Beryl Cook. But what does blowsy mean?

Here’s a thing. I like to preen myself (Pretty Polly! Pretty Polly!) on having an extensive vocabulary, active and passive.

But there’s a word my partner has used quite often – blowzy or blowsy or ?blousy – that is clean outside my idiolect.

It’s clear from what they apply it to that they use it to mean ‘gaudily showy; showy in an overblown and slightly tasteless way’. The object most recently so classified was these admittedly rather showy orange-and-yellow ‘Franz Hals’ day lilies (Hemerocallis). And it’s clear that my partner links the word to blouse, the item of clothing.

The day lilies may be a bit of a Marmite taste, but we grew to rather like them, in the end, and they went on flowering for a couple of months, so they were great value … but I digress.

When asked for an example, my partner cited Beryl Cook’s generous-busted lipsticky women, which is interesting in view of the word’s historical meaning. [1]

Intrigued, I decided to do a little survey on Twitter to ask what the word meant for people.

The questions and answers were these:

What does blowzy/blowsy mean in your vocabulary?

Unkempt, slatternly6.5%Vulgar & colourful, showy58.7%Both the above17.4%Nothing17.4%

So, for a good proportion, blowzy/blowsy/?blousy means nothing at all (Phew! I wasn’t alone), but for the largest proportion, it seems to mean something that the dictionaries don’t recognise, while the historical meaning gets a mere quarter of votes (combining rows 1 and 3).

How do people use it?

People don’t use it that much, so there isn’t that much data. The screenshot below from the Corpus of Contemporary American shows 28 of the 59 examples therein. (To give you an idea of how infrequent blowsy is, it appears in a mere 58 texts out of the 485,202 the corpus contains and is the fifty-five-thousand-six-hundred-and-nineteenth most frequent word.)

As reading the examples will quickly show, most refer to women, but four examples refer to flowers or flower heads, and six more refer to plants or gardens, three of which are shown: blowsy British charm, blowsy clump of feather reed grass, blowsy double anemones.  

What exactly is the historical meaning?

That historical ‘meaning’ turns out, as the OED defines it in an entry as yet unrevised for the third edition, to be three meanings:

having a bloated face; red and coarse-complexioned; flushed-lookingOf hair, dress: Dishevelled, frowzy, slatternly.Coarse; rustic.

Sadly, it is one of those countless disparaging and sexist words that belittle female appearance.

One of the examples for OED meaning 1 is from 1778, at a time when for a woman to have a pale complexion was a mark of gentility and bleeding, presumably, was thought to take away any ruddiness.

Thinking herself too ruddy & blowsy, it was her Custom to bleed herself … 3 or 4 times against the Rugby Races.

(against here means ‘in preparation for the time of’ or ‘ahead of’ as journos phrase and overuse it.)

As for ‘dishevelled’, which seems to be the earliest meaning, c.1770, there’s a nice Thackeray citation from 1854:

Smiled at him from under her blousy curl-papers.

(Those ‘curl papers’ are the forerunners of curlers.)

However, the 1770 meaning applies to a man, whereas most citations for blowzy 1 & 2 are clearly gendered.

Finally, meaning 3 (‘coarse, rustic’) has this single OED example from 1851.

 I cannot fancy the blowsy wisdom of the country.

Other dictionaries such as the Collins Unabridged, the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) and Merriam-Webster (M-W) tend to conflate the meanings.

Collins conflates those three to two:

1. (esp of a woman) untidy in appearance; slovenly or sluttish

2. (of a woman) ruddy in complexion; red-faced.

M-W reverses the order but keeps the same two meanings:

1: having a sloppy or unkempt appearance or aspect: FROWSY

2: being coarse and ruddy of complexion

And gives this colourful example:

a large, blowsy woman in frumpy clothes runs the diner.

(Jackpot! if you know what frowsy means.)

ODE kills those three OED birds with one stone and has ‘Coarse, untidy, and red-faced (typically used of a woman)’ and gives first a sort of Beryl Cook-ian example and then one about roses, labelled ‘figurative’:

the cheap perfume worn by the blowsy woman

blowsy, old-fashioned roses

Interestingly, the Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), which is aimed at non-mother tongue speakers, defines it as below and labels it not only British and informal but also ‘disapproving’:

an offensive way to describe a woman who you think looks large, fat and untidy.

Macmillan follows a similar train but is cunningly gender-neutral

a blowzy person looks untidy and is often rather fat

whereas Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) reinstates the sexist angle:

a blowsy woman is fat and looks untidy

And finally, Cambridge adds a final indignity, badly fitting clothes:

A blowsy woman is rather fat and looks untidy, often with badly fitting clothes.

How should I spell it?

The dictionaries are divided. Most give blowsy as the principal form and cross-refer blowzy to it (thus LDOCE, OALD, Collins, ODE, M-W, Cambridge) and a couple do the opposite (Macmillan, American Heritage). None admit ?blousy, which is how I suspect more than a few people would automatically spell it.

For what it’s worth, a trawl in one corpus showed blowsy to be by far the preferred spelling (141), followed, ahem, by ?blousy (70) then blowzy (12). The fact that blousy occurs so often suggests that people do indeed link the meaning to blouse.

What does the word mean nowadays?

Well, if my poll on Twitter is anything to go by – and the people who replied are very likely to have been clued up linguistically – it means something not quite covered by yet extending current dictionaries: ‘vulgar, showy; tastelessly ostentatious; garish’ and can be applied to objects as well as to people. Only ODE has an example illustrating that meaning – blowsy, old-fashioned roses – but doesn’t cover that meaning at all in its definition. The examples in the screenshot shown earlier support that interpretation.

And does it have anything to do with blouses etymologically?

Nope. Nix. Though a connection with blouses would give plenty of scope for fantastical folk-etymologising, the root of the word lies elsewhere. In the sixteenth century, a blowze might be, as the OED defines it, ’A beggar’s trull, a beggar wench; a wench.’ (trull = ‘prostitute’ or disparagingly, ‘girl’.)

Then two eighteenth-century lexicographers introduced, or rather, recorded, the plumpness and the ruddiness – in short, the whole Beryl Cookery:

‘A fat, red-faced, bloted wench, or one whose head is dressed like a slattern’ (Bailey, An Universal Etymological Dictionary, 1731); ‘a ruddy fat-faced wench’ (Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755).

[1] It’s worth taking a look at the picture in the link. The title is ‘Ladies who lunch’, but these are not upper-middle class, moneyed sophisticates. They drink from the bottle with one hand while fagging with the other, and the lunch looks suspiciously like fish fingers, or, if not them, something breadcrumbed.

Autumn traditions and their lexicon – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

My Collins post about Autumn words.

 

We discuss autumn, as the colourful fallen or falling leaves and the shortening days remind us that it is well and truly here.

Source: Autumn traditions and their lexicon – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

European Day of Languages – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Happy European Day of Language! Here’s my post on the theme.

Monday 26 September marks The European Day of Languages with aims to encourage language learning, multilingualism and cultural diversity.

Source: European Day of Languages – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

You say catafalque, I say catafalco – or grave or tomb

Oh, what a mongrel language is ours!

TV coverage of Her Late Majesty’s funeral cortège and the Accession of the new King has focused attention on funereal language in general. And in particular, a word we rarely get to hear or read, catafalque, has intrigued people. I was on Radio Leeds this morning talking about this very subject, so I thought I would update this post, originally written at the time of the death of Her Majesty’s husband, Prince Philip, in 2001.

That set me thinking about where other language of funerals comes from. It’s perhaps surprising how many of the words listed and discussed below are loanwords. Of catafalque, bier, hearse, coffin, funeral, grieve, mourn, bury, widow(er), grave and tomb, only bier, mourn, bury, widow(er) and grave are Germanic, i.e. inherited from Old English.

Interestingly, both coffin and hearse are included in the first and second English ‘hard words’ dictionaries, which suggests they were novel and strange to most people at that time (the early seventeenth century),

catafalque: Webster’s defines it as ‘a wooden framework, usually draped, on which the body in a coffin lies in state during an elaborate funeral’.

The important point is ‘during an elaborate funeral’. You (no disrespect intended!) and I are unlikely to lie on one in death. Except that, so I am told by a friend who is a vicar, in crematoriums the platform on which the coffin sits and which then disappears through the curtains is a catafalque. And in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, there is a catafalque which descends into the vault below. On it, I presume, Her Majesty’s coffin will rest.

Catafalque is a word English purloined from French catafalque in the mid-seventeenth century. Following a not uncommon itinerary for ‘English’ words, French catafalque had in turn been borrowed from Italian catafalco, the origins of which are obscure though some link the cata– part to Greek kata. I understand some have been pronouncing the –falque like the first part of falcon. It is pronounced with the a of cat (ˈkætəˌfælk) and strong stress on the first syllable.

The word’s variants in French produced modern French échafaud, which is the origin of English scaffold. Catafalques might be more than mere platforms to rest the coffin on, but rather funerary monuments. After all, Prince Philip’s catafalque was raised a few feet above floor level and draped in purple.

John Evelyn’s three references to it in his diaries all mention it in relation to royalty or the nobility, which suggests an imposing construction of some kind, not a simple surface. He uses the French spelling twice and the Italian catafalco when in Rome, where he calls the catafalco for the Queen of Spain ‘most stately’. He must have known his catafalques when he saw one, for he saw three – in Brussels, Beauvais and Rome.

bier – Added because that is what you and I would call the movable platform on which a coffin might rest, wouldn’t we? The Collins Dictionary defines it as ‘a platform or stand on which a corpse or a coffin containing a corpse rests before burial’.

That last bit is crucial. A corpse, not a coffin, might be carried on a bier, for instance in a Hindu funeral when the body is taken to be cremated.

This word is from the Germanic bedrock of English vocabulary, or, in the standard wording of the OED for such cases, after the rubric ‘origin’, ‘a word inherited from Germanic’. In Old English it was bǽr, and the –ie– spelling seems to have been influenced by French. It is related to the verb to bear, which makes sense.

hearse – the Duke’s was a specially adapted Land Rover. Humbler folk will make do with whatever the undertaker provides – as long as it’s black, presumably. Unlike bier, though, hearse has an almost exotic origin and a torturous development to reach its current meaning of the vehicle which transports the coffin.

First, where it comes from. According to the OED, it was originally spelled herse, from Anglo-Norman French herce ‘harrow, frame’, from Latin hirpex, hirpicis, ‘a kind of large rake’, from Oscan hirpus ‘wolf’ (with reference to the teeth).

Oscan? An extinct Italic language related to Latin. Apparently, some of the street signs in Pompeii are in Oscan.

This image from the Luttrell Psalter shows what a medieval harrow might have looked like and hence how the design might have carried over into the hearse as defined below.

British Library, Luttrell Psalter, c.1325–1340 Shelfmark Add MS 42130 – The text seems to be Psalm 94.

As regards how its meaning developed according to the OED, read on. The bracketed dates refer to the earliest written citations in the OED.

a) First it was ‘an elaborate framework designed to carry a large number of tapers and other decorations placed over the coffin of a notable person as it lay in the church’.

Known in Latin in this sense since the thirteenth century [1291], it is recorded by Marvell in the seventeenth:

And starrs, like tapers, burn’d upon his herse.

a1678   A. Marvell Wks. III. 510 

In two of his three references to catafalques mentioned earlier, Evelyn has ‘hearse, or catafalque’ and ‘catafalque, or hearse’, which suggests they were synonyms for him.

b) Then [1552] hearse became a permanent framework of iron ‘or other metal, fixed over a tomb to support rich coverings or palls, often adapted to carry lighted tapers’.

c) Next [c.1575] hearse could refer to ‘A temple-shaped structure of wood used in royal and noble funerals, after the earlier kind [a above] went out of use. It was decorated with banners, heraldic devices, and lighted candles; and it was customary for friends to pin short poems or epitaphs upon it’.

These next lines refer to a ‘marble’ hearse, but I wonder if it conceivably could have been wood painted to look like marble, a trick sometimes used in the interiors of grander houses.

Vnder this Marble Hearse Lyes the subiect of all Verse.

1623   W. Browne Epit. C’tess Pembroke in W. Camden Remaines 340 

The OED citations for that meaning include this, which reflects the definition’s statement about pinning verses being pinned to the hearse:

Shall I to pin upon thy Herse, devise Eternal Praises; or weep Elegies?

1659   T. Pecke Parnassi Puerperium 119  

d) Hearse could also mean a light framework of wood over the body to support the pall at funerals [1566]; the funeral pall itself [1530]; and even a bier or coffin, as in Julius Caesar, when a ‘plebeian’ tells others to stand back from Caesar’s body:

Stand from the Hearse, stand from the Body.

a1616   W. Shakespeare Julius Caesar (1623) iii. ii. 163  

e) Finally, by 1650 it is first recorded in the OED being used for the vehicle transporting the coffin.

Given all those different meanings the OED records, it looks as if its meaning was hazy for quite some time.

Evelyn uses it as synonymous with catafalque;in his French primer of 1530, Palsgrave gives it two meanings; andBullokar includes it in his dictionary of hard words of 1616, the English Expositor, so he clearly felt it was in need of explanation for some people:

Hearse, a buriall coffin couered with blacke.

coffin – This is another word English owes to French, but its ancestry is Greek. It came from Old French cofin, coffin, ‘little basket, case’, which comes from Latin cophinus (later cofinus), which in turn comes from Greek κόϕινος ‘basket’. (Coffer also comes from this source.)

In Middle English it was spelled cofine, coffyne and many variants, including some with ph, cophyn.

a) When first recorded in English, in Wycliffite sermons (1380) and the Bible (1382), it translated the Latin cofinus of the Vulgate:

et occiderunt septuaginta viros et posuerunt capita eorum in cofinis

Thei…slewen the seventy men, and putten the hevedis of hem in cofynes

2 Kings x. 7

In this meaning it could even refer to the receptacle Moses lay in in the bulrushes, as in one of the first Latin-English dictionaries:

Tibin a baskette or coffyn made of wickers or bulle rushes, or barke of a tree: suche one was Moyses put into.

1538 T. Elyot The Dictionary of syr Thomas Elyot

b) Coffin could also mean ‘a chest, case, casket or box’ (from 1330 onwards)

Here’s one of ivory:
A Cophyn of Evore.
c1425   Wyntoun Cron. viii. viii. 19  

c) Only in 1525 is coffin first recorded (by the OED) in its current meaning. Cawdrey included it in his Table Alphabeticall of 1604:

Cophin, basket, or chest for a dead body to be put in.

People must have buried their dead in containers before they called them coffins. In Old English the word was cist, cest, cyst and variants, which itself is from Greek and is the ancestor of our ‘chest’. It appears in Chaucer with that meaning:

He is now deed, and nayled in his chest.
c1386   G. Chaucer Clerk’s Prol. 29  

funeral – This is another ultimately Latin word borrowed via French. Or, to be precise, as the OED shows it, from both French and Latin. For the noun referring to the ceremony, the origin is Middle French funerales (Modern French funérailles) AND post-classical Latin funeralia, the neuter plural of the adjective funeralis, derived from Latin fūnus, fūneris.

In early use in English it was often in the plural, imitating the Latin, and its earliest citation refers to funeral expenses rather than the ceremony itself, as in this extract from a will:

After that my funerales and dethe be paied.
1496   Will of George Celey (P.R.O.: PROB. 11/11) f. 68v  

to grieve – A primordial emotion and another loanword. Again from French and through it from Latin.

In Middle English in the sense ‘to harm, oppress’ as greve and variants: from Old French grever ‘burden, encumber’, based on popular Latin *grevāre from gravāre, ‘to load, weigh down, oppress’ from gravis ‘heavy, grave’.

Of its fourteen OED sense categories, a full eight are marked as obsolete, including its first cited use to mean, as per French and Latin, ‘to press heavily upon, to burden’:

Nimeþ ye hede þet youre herten ne by ygreued ne y-charged of glotounie ne of dronkehede.
1340   Ayenbite (1866) 260  

[Take heed that your hearts be not oppressed nor burdened with gluttony or drunkenness.]

The sense of ‘causing great distress to someone’ goes back to the early thirteenth century.

It’s one of the not too numerous verbs in English that can be used with an impersonal dummy ‘it’, as in ‘it grieves me to have to tell you…’ and the like, used in that construction since the first half of the thirteenth century.

In its modern sense of ‘feel intense sorrow’ it is first recorded about 1380.

to mourn – Derives from Old English murnan, which is cognate with forms in other Germanic branches and possibly related to the Indo-European base of memory. It has been used intransitively and transitively since Old English.

to bury – Also from Old English byrg(e)an, byrigan, and in use since Old English with its modern meaning ‘to deposit a corpse in the ground’.

widow(er) – An unusual word in that the masculine ending is added to the feminine rather than the other way round. Quite often I’ve seen men calling themselves widows. I have no idea whether this is a) ignorance of the existence of widower b) an unwilled participation in a trend that is effacing the difference or c) a conscious decision to be non-sexist.

Widow comes from old English widewe. It has cognates not only in West Germanic languages (e.g. German Witwe, Dutch weduwe) but in other Indo-European languages such as Avestan viδauuā, Old Prussian widdewū and Welsh gweddw. According to the OED it corresponds to an adjective reflected in Latin viduus ‘bereft of a spouse’.

That adjective has Romance descendants whose descent from it is more or less easy to spot: Spanish viuda, Italian vedova, French veuve, Romanian văduvă.

grave – From Old English græf, related to German das Grab. Grave the noun comes from the same ultimate root as the OE verb grafan, to grave, meaning

 ‘to dig’ – paralleled in German by the verb graben;

‘to engrave’;

‘to form by digging’ – Stronge diches are grauen on euery syde off it.
1535   Bible (Coverdale) Ezek. iv. 2  

and

‘to bury’ (obsolete) – They told you that I was dead too and graved in yonder kirk.
1876   J. Grant One of Six Hundred ix. 80.

Unlike the other words, grave has associated idioms: you can carry a secret/mystery etc. and certain emotions to the grave:

Harriet, a 23-st Galapagos tortoise, has died in a Queensland wildlife park at the age of 176, carrying to her grave the mystery of her origins.

They carried to their graves the horror of the mud, blood, and guts of serving on the Western Front.

a place can be as silent/quite as the grave:

The morning commute on the London Underground is silent as the grave…

Or, so I discovered yesterday thanks to a discussion on Twitter, people can be as silent as the grave, which was a novel usage to me:

Josephine County Attorney Mulkins has been as silent as the grave on this issue.

And then there is to dig your own grave and to turn in your grave.

tomb – Unlike a grave, which can just be a hold in the ground, a tomb suggests a monument of some kind. As Oxford Online defines it: ‘A monument to the memory of a dead person, erected over their burial place’.

It can also be:

‘A large vault, typically an underground one, for burying the dead’.

Tomb comes from Anglo-Norman toumbe and is paralleled in Modern French by tombe, Spanish & Portuguese tumba and Italian tomba. All derive from the post-Classical Latin tumba, which in turn derives from Greek τύμβος. Beyond that, nobody seems to be sure.

In Spanish, you can say ‘soy una tumba’ [literally ‘I am a tomb’] in the same way you can say ‘my lips are sealed’ or ‘I shan’t breathe a word.’ The same applies to Italian ‘sono una tomba.’ German uses something similar: ‘Ich schweige wie ein Grab’ or ‘Ich bin verschwiegen wie ein’ Grab’.

In line with historical verbing, to coffin, to tomb and to widow have all been created at different times.

Shakespeare used to widow in a gruesome combination with another verb:

In this City hee Hath widdowed and vnchilded many a one.

a1616   W. Shakespeare Coriolanus (1623) v. vi. 152  

To tomb (‘to place a body in a tomb’) has being going since the late thirteenth century. The OED notes its current use as ‘chiefly archaic or poetic’, suggesting also that it might be a shortening of the more normal to entomb. I am not sure whether this next quotation is striving for effect, but anyway, here is a modern citation:

A genuine nobility pulses through the ancient cathedral where the great of England are tombed, from poets to kings.

2011, National Post (Canada) (Nexis) 30 Apr. rw4  

References:
“bier, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/18783. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“bury, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/25160. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“catafalque, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/28690. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“coffin, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/35802. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“funeral, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/75519. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“grave, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/80989. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“grieve, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/81401. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“hearse, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/85060. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“mourn, v.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/122939. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“tomb, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/203084. Accessed 21 April 2021. “widow, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/228912. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“widow, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/228912. Accessed 21 April 2021.

The Queen’s death: Royal and ritual language and procedures since

Long to reign over us…

This post describes and examines some of the language and ritual associated with the accession of the new King.

On Thursday evening, 8 September, the unexpected death of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral Castle was announced to a stunned world. The sovereign who had seemed immortal, and only two days before had invited Liz Truss to form a government, had left us. As a friend recently phrased it, before that it had been possible to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head: that the Queen was very old and that she would live forever.

Though the timing of the Queen’s death took many by surprise, subsequent events unfolded with what to outsiders like me looks like exemplary, if not miraculous, smoothness. This was due to plans which had, naturally, been drawn up long ago – some even as far back as the 1960s – organising Her funeral and the accession of a new monarch. The master plan was ‘Operation London Bridge’, with ‘Operation Unicorn’ due to come into operation if she were to die in Scotland. It has been said that the Queen wished to die in Scotland, and it is hard to resist the thought that she must have known when she went up to Balmoral in July that she would not leave.

The Prime Minister (PM) was informed by the Queen’s private secretary using the code ‘London Bridge is down.’

The Queen was for me, as for so many people, a key part of our national identity and therefore of our and my individual identity. I still cannot quite connect the picture of the diminutive Granny of the Nation peering smilingly over her glasses at Liz Truss on Tuesday 6 September with her death a mere two days later. The extent of the affection, regard and respect for her shown by the public since her death amounts to that oxymoron, a secular canonisation. I am not ashamed to say I have shed a tear or two – I can, at the drop of a hat— but, contrariwise, I am now beginning to feel a bit royalled out.

The Demise of the Crown

The death of the monarch is known in law as ‘Demise of the Crown’, referring to the transfer of authority from one sovereign to another. In keeping with the arcane nature of some of the associated ritual, Demise here has its own special pronunciation, ‘dimeeze’ (/dɪˈmi:z/), instead of the normal /dɪˈmʌɪz/, which rhymes with despise.

There is no gap in the continuity of the monarchy, no hiatus, no interregnum. No sooner has the King or Queen died than their heir appointed in statute becomes King or Queen. As a noted eighteenth-century jurist observed: ‘The law ascribes to him [the King], in his political capacity, an absolute immortality. The king never dies … and … his heir … is eo instanti [instantly] king to all intents and purposes.’

Nevertheless, certain procedures must be followed. And there was huge media intrigue because those procedures had last been put into effect 70 years ago and were therefore outside most people’s memory span. A House of Commons Library paper set everything out down to the minutest minutiae, though some wordings had to be changed to reflect the Queen and King now involved and other political changes of the last 70 years.

Though the King’s reign had in effect already begun with the death of his mother, his accession had to be ratified and proclaimed. 

The Accession Council

The steps to do that can be summarized as follows:

The Cabinet meets;The Privy Council summonses privy councillors and other to attend an Accession Council to proclaim a new monarch;An Accession Proclamation is read and signed by those present at St James’s Palace;The new sovereign joins the Council to make a non-statutory Declaration and take an oath to defend the Church of Scotland;The Proclamation is then read aloud in various cities and towns.

The idea of proclamation belongs to an age before any of our modern forms of communication, when word of a new king had literally to be shouted out at important places throughout the land. What was entirely novel was that the Accession Council had never before been filmed, though the BBC managed to unearth some flickering footage of earlier Proclamations.

Thus it was that at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, 10 September, the Accession Council convened at St James’s Palace, a largely Tudor brick building in Westminster constructed by order of King Henry VIII.1 Those leading the proceedings are styled the ‘Platform Party’, whose head is The Lord President of the Council (Penny Mordaunt). Around 200 Privy Councillors attended, among them six former prime ministers.

The whole process can be watched here, and where necessary I give timings for a particular phrase or event.

After the Lord President announced the Queen’s death (30:20), she invited the Clerk to the Council to read the Proclamation – Step 3 above (31:30 The full text of that proclamation can be read here, in my earlier post about it. It is a remarkable document, well worth reading).

The Proclamation begins with the solemn words ‘Whereas it has pleased Almighty God to call to His Mercy our Late Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth the Second’, and then refers to ‘the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this Realm … proclaiming and publishing’ that the new King is King.

Those ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal’ included the aforementioned Privy Councillors and those in the Platform Party not already mentioned, namely the PM, the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Lord Privy Seal and the Earl Marshal, and the two members of the Royal Family who are Privy Councillors, Prince William and the Queen Consort.

The idea of a small group of royal advisers such as the Privy Council goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, and until Cabinet government became the norm the Privy Council played an important role in advising the monarch of the day. Indeed, the Accession Council can ultimately be traced back to the councils in which Saxon Kings were chosen from out of the ranks of eligible royal males.

The Privy Council’s members are mostly senior parliamentarians, a small, select number of whom generally meet monthly with the ruler of the day. The King or Queen remains standing at such meetings, which means those attending cannot sit, thereby keeping the meetings short. (If only that meeting convention applied everywhere!)

Pursuivants, heralds and Garter Kings-of-Arms

Until well into the fourteenth century, an English dialect of French known as Anglo-French or Anglo-Norman was the official language of the English royal court.

It is therefore understandable that the names of the officials and institutions mentioned above, who are connected with the court, are mainly of French origin: Privy, Council, Chancellor,2 Chamberlain, and Marshal as also are the words Majesty3 and liege (pronounced ‘leedge’) used in the Proclamation, heir, and herald.

Among the Platform Party, the only person dressed in special attire was the Earl Marshal, the eighteenth Duke of Norfolk, whose family have held the hereditary title of Earl Marshal since 1672.

Earl Marshal is an interesting compound noun which is in a sense a microcosm of the Norman Conquest, for it unites the Old English/Anglo-Saxon eorl with the Norman French marshal. Marshal has echoes in French maréchal and Italian maresciallo. Though it came into English via Norman French, its origins are in Germanic, Old High German marahscalc ‘groom’, from marah, horse, + scalc, servant, that marah being from the same base as mare. Chamberlain is also ultimately of Germanic origin, based on Latin camera, ‘room’ and a suffix related to –ling.

Formerly, an Earl Marshal would have been in charge of the King’s stables and horses and have had military duties. Now his role is largely ceremonial. He is, however, responsible for organising events such as coronations and state funerals. In addition, he oversees the College of Arms, the body responsible on behalf of the Crown for all matters relating to heraldry, that is, coats of arms and related matters, and genealogy.

Stage 5, reading the Proclamation aloud, takes place on the gallery overlooking the courtyard of St James’s. This is the most medieval-seeming part of the process as the Garter King-of-Arms, the Earl Marshal, Serjeants at Arms, Heralds and Pursuivants assembled. That spelling serjeant, by the way, is not a typo but an archaic, alternative form. It is worth taking a look at about 1:25 in to see the trumpeters and then other officials in their brilliantly colourful archaic garb emerge onto the gallery.

Pursuivants are officers of arms below the rank of Herald. At 37:00, after the Proclamation had been read in the Picture Gallery, the Lord President directed ‘the King’s Heralds and Pursuivants of Arms to attend at the Court of St James’s to proclaim’ Charles King.

And the pronunciation of pursuivant caused the Lord President of the Council to stumble, understandably, given its rarity.

Collins suggests it is pronounced purse-ee-vuhnt (ˈpɜːsɪvənt), but it can also be purse-swee-vuhnt (ˈpɜːrswɪvənt). The Lord President pronounced it something like pur-syoo-vee-uhnt (pəˈsjuːvɪənt). The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary recommends purse-ee-vuhnt (ˈpɜːsɪvənt). The word comes from Old French poursivre, ‘to follow, attend upon’ from which comes English pursue.

Kings, monarchs, sovereigns

English is famously rich in synonyms. Such synonyms often reflect the different strands that have been stitched together to create its multicoloured tapestry. And lending their colours to that great tapestry in particular are, as regular readers of these posts will know, Latin, French, and Greek on the one hand and the Germanic basis of English on the other. Thus for the adjective relating to kings and queens, we have royal (French), regal (Latin) and kingly (formed by derivation from king).

Thus, king and queen come from the Germanic bedrock of English, and king finds obvious echo in German König and Danish kong. In contrast, monarch comes via Late Latin monarcha via Byzantine Greek from Classical Greek monarkhos (μόναρχος), originally meaning in English ‘sole ruler’ but then broadening to its current sense. The original Greek word consists of the mono– element, meaning ‘sole, alone’ as found in so many words, e.g. monorail, monounsaturated, and the Greek arkhein (ἄρχειν) as embodied in the political anarchy which has prevailed in Britain in the past when there has been no clear line of succession.

The Accession Proclamation contains the phrase ‘by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory’. Sovereign is of French origin, coming from Old French soverain in the thirteenth century as a noun referring to a supreme ruler, and in the fourteenth as an adjective meaning ‘supreme, paramount’, as in the modern phrase ‘sovereign lord’.

It was also once a gold coin with a value of roughly a pound, just as another word associated with royalty, the crown, was also once legal tender, as in the well-known coin before decimalisation of a half-crown, or 2s. 6d, or as in the modern currencies that use the word for ‘crown’ in the relevant language, such as the Swedish krona or the Czech koruna.

Incidentally, the word crown ticks all three boxes of linguistic provenance, coming as it does from French corone, from Latin corōna ‘wreath, crown’, ‘from Greek korōnē (κορώνη), ‘crown’.

A pair of other royal words mentioned so far have Latin sources. Interregnum is straightforward Latin, literally ‘between reign’, inter + rēgnum, and rēgnum has, via Old French reigne, given English the verb and noun reign. Consort as in the Queen Consort, Camilla, comes via Old French from the Latin consors, consortem, ‘partner’, in Latin literally one who shares – con – possessions with you. Accession is borrowed partly from Latin and partly from French, as is proclamation.

And finally, talking of Latin, as a TV commentator has suggested, we have left the Elizabethan era and entered the Carolean one, Carolean being based on the Latin for Charles, Carolus.

1. It gives its name to The Court of St James’s, to which all ambassadors and high commissioners are accredited. Ironically, there is inside a fireplace on which are carved the initials of the King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, whom he caused to have beheaded.

2. The equivalent of chancellor in German, Kanzler, has been used for the Head of State since 1867, and Angela Merkel was die Kanzlerin.

3. On a completely orthogonal note, the Spanish for ‘the royal we’ is based on the Latin for ‘Majesty’ maiestas, -ātis and has always tickled me: el plural mayestático.

The Accession Proclamation: the full text. God Save the King!

What follows is the full text of the Accession Proclamation, as so masterfully read by the Clerk of the Privy Council (Richard Tilbrook, CVO) at St James’s Palace on Saturday morning, 10 September 2022. By the time you read this, the selfsame Proclamation will have been read throughout the UK, in Edinburgh, Cardiff, at Hillsborough Castle, and in various cities and towns.

It is such an extraordinary, solemn, moving and historic(al) text in so many ways.

If you are wondering how the pageantry of the Accession on Saturday proceeded so smoothly and magnificently so soon after Her Majesty’s death, the whole process is laid out step by step down to the last detail in a paper (The Death of a Monarch) in the Commons Library here. I have to thank Michael Hocken on Twitter for pointing me to this document, which, inter alia, contains the text of the 1952 Proclamation for King George on p.20. and makes for fascinating historical reading.

Not only does the paper lay out the procedure to be followed, it also has historical information about earlier deaths and accessions, and in particular what happened upon the death of King George VI and the late Queen’s accession.

I had already transcribed the current Proclamation in full when I was alerted to the aforementioned paper. That Proclamation is similar, but not identical, to the one read on Saturday. For instance, the 1952 phrasing refers to ‘the High and Mighty Princess Elizabeth’, a form of words dropped for obvious reasons from the latest Proclamation.

What particularly struck me was the metonymy of ‘do now hereby, with one voice and Consent of Tongue and Heart…’ in the second paragraph, meaning ‘and as our speech and our sentiments will show’ and carried over from the earlier Proclamation. Also, the old-fashioned use of is with become, rather than has.

On another linguistic note, in this royal context the word demise, meaning ‘death’, is not pronounced /dɪˈmʌɪz/ to rhyme with rise but as dimeeze /dɪˈmi:z/

The 1952 Proclamation is laid out simply as two paragraphs, whereas I had broken up the text for legibility. I have kept my paragraphing but copied the capitalisation of the 1952 Proclamation or imitated it.

At the end of the reading of the Proclamation, after the Clerk intones ‘God Save the King’, the assembled company solemnly and joyfully repeated those words.

The Proclamation starts at about 31:25 in this link, if it works.

Whereas it has pleased Almighty God to call to His Mercy our Late Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth the Second, of Blessed and Glorious memory, by whose Decease the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is solely and rightfully come to the Prince Charles Philip Arthur George,

We, therefore, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this Realm, and members of the House of Commons, together with other Members of Her Late Majesty’s Privy Council, and Representatives of the Realms and Territories, Aldermen and Citizens of London and others, do now hereby, with one voice and Consent of Tongue and Heart publish and proclaim

that the Prince Charles Philip Arthur George is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become our only lawful and rightful liege lord, Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith,

to whom we do acknowledge all Faith and Obedience with humble Affection, beseeching God by whom Kings and Queens do reign, to bless His Majesty with long and happy Years to reign over us.

God save the King!

National Radio Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

I forgot to post this at the time, but it’s timeless, ;-).

 

With 20 August marking National Radio Day, we talk about all things radio, from its invention to common terminology in use today.

Source: National Radio Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Is it “one and the same” or “one in the same”?

Lesedauer: 4 min

Photo by Sharon Santema on Unsplash

Microsecond summary

“One in the same” will generally be considered wrong. No dictionary recognizes it. You should avoid it and use the standard form of “one and the same.”

Apart from shoring up my prejudices (a function it performs I suspect for so many people), Twitter occasionally lobs a new (to me) eggcorn my way.

One it flung at me a while back is “one in the same”.

It should be “one and the same”.

What does “one and the same” mean?

As the Collins Cobuild dictionary helpfully defines it, “When two or more people or things are thought to be separate and you say that they are one and the same, you mean that they are in fact one single person or thing.”

You use it mostly, but not exclusively, as the complement of to be, in the latter’s various forms, as these examples suggest.

Luckily, Nancy’s father and her attorney were one and the same person.

I’m willing to work for the party because its interests and my interests are one and the same.

I grew up equating sex with love, believing them to be one and the same.

As you can see, the phrase can either be used on its own or with a following noun (person, 1st e.g. above.)

The nouns people most often use with it, other than person, are time and thing, but, as the last two examples below show, you can use it with any noun appropriate to your meaning.

They [sc. beaver dams] are at one and the same time parts of beaver societies and parts of beaver nature.

…that is to say, that sexuality and gender are not one and the same thing, and their complex interaction not only varies from one society to the next but also within a given culture.

It is possible that different paradigms introduce different ways of classifying one and the same set of objects.

The imagination must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being.

Hazlitt, Essay on the Principle of Human Action, i, 1–2.

Who uses it? Why do people get it wrong?

It crops up most frequently in formal or technical prose in the areas of the Arts and Humanities and Religion and Law. That means it is not common in general writing or speech, which helps explain why people convert it to “one in the same”.

And the speech mechanism of that conversion is not far to seek: in speaking, the phrase will be pronounced “one ’n’ the same”, and people who have never come across it in writing will interpret that ‘n’ as ‘in’.

Does “one in the same” make any sense?

Merriam-Webster online suggests that it doesn’t and argues that it would have to refer to a Russian doll-type arrangement.

I’m not so sure.

At the back of my mind, for that use of “in” I hear an echo of religious, specifically Christian, specifically Trinitarian, usage, i.e. God the three in one, but perhaps that’s just me.

(Can someone hear things at the back of their mind? Only asking. Ed.)

On a more mundane level, it must, surely, be influenced by advertising phrases highlighting the benefits of a product, such as being a “2-in-1 laptop and tablet”.

Other than that, I can’t fathom what it means to people who use it. I’d have to ask them.

It has been argued that it makes sense if you think of one thing being inside a clone of itself. In the case of people, though, that explanation could suggest (auto)cannibalism. Eeek!

Surprisingly, though, it is used in the same sort of circles that use the correct form, judging by the examples in the eggcorn database, e.g. Any time you visit our service desks, you will have the agreeable impression that helping the library and staying young are one in the same.

(UC Berkeley, Annual Report of the Libraries, Fall 2001).

The Merriam-Webster usage note also cites examples from publications which one can’t help feeling ought to have editors who know better, e.g.

a politician whose public and private persona seem to be one in the same.
— Newsweek, 8 Sept. 2017

Where does “one and the same” come from?

It is a calque, or translation of the Latin unus et idem, meaning, erm, “one and the same”, recorded as being used by Cicero and Horace.1 Piquantly, its first citation in the OED is from a translation from Latin, possibly by Cranmer, of Edward Fox and others’ treatise about the legitimacy of Henry VIII’s marriage to his brother’s wife (Catherine of Aragon) titled The determinations of the moste famous and mooste excellent vniuersities of Italy and Fraunce, that it is so vnlefull [sic] for a man to marie his brothers wyfe, that the pope hath no power to dispence therewith.

One and the same selfe man may be bothe a preest and a maryed man.

The phrase occurs 451 times in the OED, which gives some indication of its embeddedness in English.

How often do people muck it up?

That depends on where you look. In a corpus of academic journals (as one might hope but not necessarily expect these days) the dunderhead version is vanishingly small, 7 vs. 1994 (i.e. less than 0.5 per cent). In a general corpus (OEC, 2014) the proportions change to 192 vs. 3,183 (i.e. 6 per cent). And in a more recent corpus, 750ish vs. 4,283 (i.e. 17.5 per cent).

A few people are even using it slightly differently in comparisons to mean “exactly the same as”:

Fructose is the sugar that’s prevalent in fruits, and it’s one in the same as cane sugar, which is simply much more concentrated.

And then there’s the song by Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato (whoever they are; I only found it by googling). They spell it correctly, but then others misspell it.

As M-W poignantly pleads “Please try to avoid misinterpreting this venerable phrase.”

1 From Horace’s Epistles we have …ego, utrum Nave ferar magna an parva, ferar unus et idem.

I, whether I be carried in a large or a small boat, shall be carried as one and the same man.

Which, as the motto of the Royal Navy’s training establishment HMS Collingwood is sexed up and, at one and the same time, dumbed down to ferar unus et idem, “I shall carry on regardless”. A noble and uplifting sentiment, somewhat undermined by the existence of the film Carry On Regardless.

This is an updated version of an earlier post on the same topic motivated by one and the same/in the same being one of the most consulted phrases on my site.

Verbing. A marmite phenomenon? I love it.

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

Verbing. What a wonderful thing!  So useful, so economical, so inventive.

Well, I think so, anyway.

Two examples I came across recently – to slime and to black-box – made me want to blog about them and it.

To slime

On the BBC Radio Four programme Gardener’s Question Time yesterday (17 July 2022), one of their polymathic presenters was talking about pest control and graphically described checking slugs, ‘which direction they’re slimeing* out from’ (09:25ish). That verb graphically turns the revolting sliminess of slugs into a living action which is even more sinister and disgusting than the destructive little molluscs themselves.

(*I’ve kept the –e of the noun to make it easier to read it as it sounds, but according to the rules it shouldn’t really be there.)

Before I checked, I assumed to slime was a creative one-off, but no, the OED has two entries. The first goes back to the seventeenth century and is similar to Frisian and German terms. The examples for uses similar to the one I enjoyed are both nineteenth-century:

a. To make (one’s way) in a slimy fashion.

Stealthily, serpently, he slimed his way Unto the pay-master.
 

1842   Tait’s Edinb. Mag.  9  374  

 b. intransitive. To crawl slimily; to become slimy.

The happy insouciance of a snail ‘sliming’ up the side of the Parthenon.
1851   G. H. Kingsley in Fraser’s Mag. Aug. 146/2  

The OED also lists a second verb to slime, apparently Harrovian (that is, relating to Harrow, the famous public school) slang:

 intransitive. To move in a gliding, stealthy, or sneaking manner.

His ‘house~beak’ ‘slimed’ (went round quietly) and ‘twug’ him.

1898   E. W. Howson & G. T. Warner Harrow School 282  

When he does come over on our side of the House, he slimes about in carpet slippers.
1905   H. A. Vachell Hill i  

(I suspect being ‘twugged’ as in the first example is something one would do anything to avoid.)

The OED labels this public-school to slime as ‘of unknown origin’, but couldn’t it be just a specific application of the other to slime?

To black-box

The other example of verbing which tickled my palate was from an interview between Professors Jim Al-Khalili and Adam Hart on the BBC’s The Life Scientific programme. The discussion was about bees and whether and to what extent they might be thought to possess any kind of consciousness.

At about 20:12 into the programme:

‘You can start to blackbox it out, as to what a honeybee’s brain must be capable of, and it starts to become really quite complex and some of the things are really very finely tuned, so, yeah, there’s a lot going inside a group of neurons not much bigger than a pinhead.’

Although we are most likely to associate black boxes with air crashes, to ‘black-box it out’ here derives from the following meaning of black box as defined by the OED:

‘A device which performs intricate functions but whose internal mechanism may not readily be inspected or understood; (hence) any component of a system specified only in terms of the relationship between inputs and outputs.’

What is verbing?

As per my two examples – and if you haven’t come across the term before – it is a noun that denotes the action of taking a word that wasn’t a verb before and converting it into one.

A now ubiquitous example of this phenomenon is to access. It had been used as a noun since about 1300, but it took until 1953 for it to be used as a verb in the meanings now familiar to us of being able to get hold of information, log on to a site and various related senses.

As an aside, it is worth noting that the verbal noun verbing is an example of the phenomenon it describes and is therefore one of a small group of words that are autological.

When was that name of verbing coined?

The verbal noun verbing is first cited a surprisingly long time ago, in 1766

As to the Nouning and Verbing, which he so heavily charged you with, I told him..that you never confounded Grammar.

R. Griffith & E. Griffith Lett. Henry & Frances IV. 60  

But, as the OED notes, it was ‘rare before [the] late 20th cent[ury].

And there’s the rub.

Some people detest this phenomenon. There is no particular reason why they should, except that once a feature of language is visibly or vocally shunned, fatwas against it take on a life of their own.

Hostility to it then becomes part of the body of language features that annoy those who wish to be annoyed.

Various usage guides have taken exception to it, the earliest noted by the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage being the 1972 edition of Strunk and White. Rather than wholesale condemnation, specific verbs are usually targeted.

Indeed, three examples in the OED suggest hostility to it. The first two are not far removed in time from Strunk and White, are from publications about language and implicitly criticise a specific example.

Under to access:

A friend reports that he has recently heard access frequently used as a verb. For instance,..You can access the information if you dial 626, or, It is now possible for you to access details of recent sales by calling Mr. Jones.
1977   T. M. Bernstein Dos, Donts & Maybes of Eng. Usage 78  

The University of California at Berkeley..announces the hours during which its business office ‘may be accessed’.
1978   Verbatim Feb. 1/2  

Under the entry for verbing, examples of the process are given:

I think it’s worth wondering about role models. Or about role modeling if you belong to the ‘interfacing’, ‘accessing’, ‘networking’ school of verbing.
1985   Washington Post 27 May a19/3  

I have no date for the probably apocryphal anecdote about the American student who arrived in Oxford and wished to contact their prospective tutor to let them know. The arch-Oxonian and arch Oxonian rejoinder was:

‘I am delighted that you have arrived in Oxford. The verb “to contact” has not.’

Other names for verbing

In usage guides, you may find the phenomenon dealt with under the heading ‘Nouns as Verbs’. Garner’s Legal Usage has several arguably useful examples under that heading, such as to be air-expressed and to be out-box-officed, but Garner ponderously warns:

‘Though writers refer to fast-tracking budgets, tasking committees, and mainstreaming children, English is generally inhospitable to this sort of jargonistic innovation. Legal writers should be wary of adopting usages of this kind.’

The metaphor of a language being ‘inhospitable’ fulfils the long-established conceptual metaphor of a language being a living thing. However, it cannot disguise the fact that it is certain speakers of the language, not the language itself, that shun verbing.

Does it only affect nouns?

No. Verbing is one example of a larger process whereby the you can change the word class of any word according to need. The technical linguistic name for this process is conversion (1928) or, less commonly, zero-derivation (1960).

Although noun to verb conversion is probably the most common application of the process, adjectives can become verbs, e.g. to dirty, verbs can become nouns, e.g. a must, and even conjunctions can become nouns and verbs as in but me no buts (1629). Shakespeare was certainly no stranger to verbing.

Almost finally, whatever opinion one may have about individual instances of this highly productive feature of English, we couldn’t really get by without it. What follows are a few examples from different editions of Fowler to highlight (noun 1658; verb 1881, but 1963 to mean with a marker) the phenomenon and prove the point:

Fowler himself didn’t refer to the phenomenon in the 1926 edition. What he did do, however, was to provide a long list of well-established-in-his-day words which are both noun and verb and where the stress changes from one to the other, normally on the first syllable for the noun and the second for the verb, e.g:

accent,
commune,
compound,
compress
and so forth.

Gowers left it at that, but Burchfield added an entry on conversion in which he listed some common noun-verb pairs to illustrate how long the historical process might take, with the noun shown first, e.g:

chair – before 1297/1552elbow – Old English/Shakespeare, 1608inconvenience – c.1400/before 1656

I’ve updated his dates in line with OED 3.

Almost finally again, of the forty-seven verbs created since 2000 that my OED search retrieves (there must be others, surely?) nineteen are formed directly from nouns or from verbal nouns, e.g. to bling, to crowdfund, to Skype, to hashtag, to virtue signal, etc.

And finally finally, the last OED example under the entry verbing reinforces the point most elegantly:

Verbing is an honoured literary tradition… See Plutarch’s Lives Englished by Sir Thomas North in 1579.
2010   Times 2 Mar. 23/5   

Global Beatles Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

This Saturday 25 June is Global Beatles Day where The Beatles have a day in the year devoted to them and their legacy.

Source: Global Beatles Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog