Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 6

Jane Austen, moving parts of speech and Spanish

How much will you bet me that that’s a triad you will never see again?

(5-minute read)

Image by Annie Spratt, courtesy of Pixabay. Forde Abbey, Somerset, UK.

Now, to explain. In re-reading and deeply savouring Mansfield Park, I keep coming across things that a lexicographer cannot just let pass.

(Incidentally, I think the only way to appreciate the subtlety and irony of Austen’s lengthy, semi-coloned periods is to read them aloud. However, that becomes exhausting in long doses. At which point an audiobook seems like a suitable option. But will it contain the whole text?)

First of all, this, as the opening sentence of Chapter 2:

The little girl [Fanny Price] performed her long journey in safety; and at Northampton was met by Mrs. Norris, who thus regaled in the credit of being foremost to welcome her, and in the importance of leading her in to the others, and recommending her to their kindness.

‘Ello, what’s this’, thought I, ‘regale as a transitive verb?’ Generally, you regale someone with something.

It turns out that according to the OED this intransitive verb use of regale is ‘rare’ yet ‘obsolete’. I don’t know if that is code for ‘only found once, in Jane Austen’.

Even more exciting was to discover that to regale is a loanword…from Spanish. At least, it is according to the third edition OED, which presents convincing evidence in support. Other dictionaries give a French origin.

In modern Spanish, the verb regalar is to give someone a gift and it’s ditransitive – it has an indirect and direct object, e.g me regalaron un reloj de oro, ‘they gave me a gold watch’.

Not only is ‘to regale’ a loanword; it was first used in early seventeenth-century translations of Spanish into English in which it was not actually translated. (As an aside, it’s easy to forget quite how much knowledge of European languages, and in particular Spanish, there was in England in Jacobethan times.)

I began to Regalar him, and to serue him; presenting him still with one thing or other, inlarging my hand like a Prince.

1622   J. Mabbe tr. M. Alemán Rogue ii. 170  

This is from a translation of Mateo Alemán’s picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache.

At the time, the Spanish could mean ‘to pamper’ and that is presumably how it is being used here.

It was only in 1642, again in a translation from Spanish, that the verb to regale was used in one of the meanings it still has today, which is, as the OED puts it: ‘To please or delight (a person, the mind, soul, etc.) with some agreeable activity or event; to entertain or amuse, now esp. with a story, speech, song, etc.)

This time the author being translated is St Teresa of Avila as she addresses God:

O how good a friend, dost thou make thy self, to thy friend, O my Lord; and how dost thou goe enduring him, and regaling [Sp. regalando] him?

T. Matthew tr. St. Teresa of Avila Flaming Hart viii. 90  

To regale has had other meanings over time, which the OED labels obsolete. The only other two that survive today in any strength are, first, ‘to furnish lavishly with food and drink’. This is first recorded in an early English monolingual dictionary, Blount’s Glossographia of 1656. Evelyn Waugh used it in this rather elegant phrase – about wine, presumably:

We were regaled with bottles, some of dignified age, some in turbulent youth.

1965   E. Waugh Ess. Articles & Rev. (1986) 634  

The other meaning that survives is the reflexive, ‘to treat oneself to something’. First recorded by Aphra Behn:

In this hot part o’th year, he goes to Regale himself with his She Slaves.

1682   A. BEHN False Count III. i. 28  

a more recent quotation refers to Dickens ‘regaling himself’ with what seems to modern tastes extremely corseted self-indulgence:

Occasionally he regaled himself with a culinary treat, like coffee and bread and butter in a coffee room.

1988   F. Kaplan Dickens ii. 42  

At the top I mentioned parts of speech, so here’s the next Austenian surprise. Out of context, it is hard to appreciate how much of a further character assassination of the loathsome, hypocritical, ridiculous Mrs Norris the following is. Suffice it to say, she is cheated of her histrionics:

The earliest intelligence of the travellers’ safe arrival at Antigua, after a favourable voyage, was received; though not before Mrs. Norris had been indulging in very dreadful fears, and trying to make Edmund participate them whenever she could get him alone; and as she depended on being the first person made acquainted with any fatal catastrophe, she had already arranged the manner of breaking it to all the others, when Sir Thomas’s assurances of their both being alive and well made it necessary to lay by her agitation and affectionate preparatory speeches for a while.

To make Edmund ‘participate them’? Participate as a transitive verb? Yessir. That sense the OED labels obsolete and defines as ‘To take or have a part or share of or in; to share in; to possess or enjoy in common with another or others.’

And it appears in the very same year and work in which the intransitive first appeared, Sir Thomas Elyot’s Renaissance masterpiece The boke of the Governour, in a phrase that encapsulates an essence of contemporary belief:

The one [sc. the soul] we participate with goddes, the other [sc. the body] with bestes.

1531   T. Elyot Gouernour iii. xxiii. sig. gvv  

And the moral of this story is: nothing in language is fixed. As de Saussure wrote:

Le temps change tout; il n’y a aucune raison pour que la langue échappe à cette loi universelle.

Time changes all; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.

Christmas or Yule: the lexicon of the holiday season – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Collins Dictionary looks at Christmas/Advent and Yule words, the origin of both seasonal traditions and their lexicon.

Source: Christmas or Yule: the lexicon of the holiday season – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Fortuitous. What exactly does it ‘really’ mean?

In a recent BBC Radio Food and Drink programme, the following was heard, in a description of an award-winning project – the Good Life Project – to monitor the emotional well-being of livestock.

Image by Jonas Koel, courtesy of Unsplash. Header image by RhondaK Native Florida Folk Artist, also courtesy Unsplash.

I reproduce an extensive quote to provide sufficient context:

All the supply chains had a raft of data going back years and years and years…But what we were desperately looking for was something that would allow us to consider the emotional well-being of those animals…and I heard about Françoise and her work with QBA (Qualitative Behaviour Assessment) and it was a eureka moment…now we were also very fortuitous because at that time Françoise was developing an app for use on mobile phones which we’re now rolling out over all 1,800 Waitrose livestock farmers…

(Spoken by Andrew Booth, one of the dairy farmers involved with the project.)

Now, apart from the fact fortuitous is being applied to a person, which surprised me, what does it mean here? Does it just mean ‘fortunate, lucky’ or does it mean ‘by a lucky chance or coincidence’? Or just ‘by chance’? It clearly can’t mean the last, applied as it is to someone; by the same token, I somehow doubt if it means ‘by a lucky chance or coincidence’.

Only Mr Booth could tell us what he meant – and even then, he might not be so very sure.

Does it mean ‘fortunate’ in general parlance?

In the minds and on the tongues of many speakers, it appears to mean nothing more and nothing less than ‘fortunate’, as in this example:

The opening of his firm had come at an extremely fortuitous time.

But that’s wrong, isn’t it? Surely there has to be some element of chance involved and invoked.

Well, that is how a traditionalist would view the word, particularly if they have any Classical knowledge.

The word is a borrowing of the Latin adjective fortuitus, meaning ‘happening by chance’. That word in turn derives from fors, ‘chance’.

Tangentially, Tacitus has a wonderful phrase in his description of how Nero intended to have his mother, Agrippina, murdered by drowning at sea: nihil tam capax fortuitorum quam mare (‘Nothing so susceptible to accidents as the sea’, where the neuter plural fortuita is being used as a noun for ‘things that happen by chance, accidents’).

In the first edition of Fowler (1926), Henry Fowler noted and condemned the use of fortuitous to mean ‘fortunate’, ‘perhaps’. as he put it, ‘through mere sound’.

He cross-referred that use to his entry for malaprops (malapropisms) and from there to his list of pairs and snares, that is, pairs of words that are easily confused.

But that was getting on for a century ago and meanings, like fashion, have moved on – though Dot Wordsworth, that doyenne and guardian of linguistic propriety, seems to regret as much in the case of fortuitous. Most dictionaries now recognise a meaning associated with good fortune, but they do so in subtly different ways.

For a moment, let’s suppose that meanings can be given a hard border, using that Johnsonian (Samuel, not Boris) analogy (academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders;…)

On that assumption, there are three meanings: 1) occurring by chance, accidental; 2) occurring by fortunate or lucky chance, or occurring in such a way as to produce a favourable or beneficial outcome; 3) fortunate (applying to events and people).

Merriam-Webster online plumps for all three, in the order 1, 3, 2, and lumps 3 and 2 together as subsenses.

Oxford online again puts 1 first, and then blends 2 and 3 into a single dual definition ‘happening by a lucky chance; fortunate’.

In a usage note, it adds that some people will consider our 2 and 3 incorrect.

The Collins Cobuild dictionary takes a similar tack in its chatty definitional style: ‘You can describe something as fortuitous if it happens, by chance, to be very successful or pleasant.’

Collins Unabridged (scroll down to after the Cobuild entry) covers all three meanings but does so, economically, in one tripartite definition: ‘happening by chance, esp by a lucky chance; unplanned; accidental’

In practice, it’s easy to see that people will often want to ascribe a satisfactory outcome to chance, with the idea of Fortune being in their favour. In which case, meanings 2 and 3 above become practically identical. Take out that ‘by chance’ in the Cobuild definition above and you are left with a synonym of ‘fortunate’.

Image by Carson Arias, courtesy of Unsplash.

That said, I was still taken aback by the quotation at the start of this post. I was quite used to fortuitous as ‘fortunate’ referring to events, but to refer it to people was new to me. However, it could possibly prove how much that meaning is now, for many people, its main meaning: simply a best bib-and-tucker version of ‘fortunate’, or fortunate on stilts. Alternatively, of course, it could be just another demonstration of how ambiguous the word now is.

What would I do if I wanted to make my meaning clear? Instead of huffing and puffing that, well really, people ought to know what words mean and indulging in the etymological fallacy, I might choose a paraphrase, such as ‘by a happy coincidence’, ‘as it turned out’ or something similar.

Over to you.

National Tree Week: time to love your nearest tree

It’s National Tree Week in Britain again, time to celebrate one of the most ancient and majestic living things on Earth. From 27 November to 5 December, the Tree Council, the begetter of Tree Week, encourages us to plant, plant, plant for a better future.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

I love how the silhouettes of winter trees give the skyline a jaggier rhythm, unlike the smooth legato of summer lushness. As I look out from my second-floor study, I feel airborne, level as I am with the middle branches of the beech trees in the grounds behind our house. Mercifully, they are protected by TPOs (Tree Protection Orders).

Heart of oak are our ships, Jolly tars are our men

However, it’s not beech but oak that is the tree most redolent of Englishness. In fact, Quercus robur, the common oak typically found on these islands, is known also as the English oak. Druids performed their rituals in oak groves. It was in an oak that the future Charles II hid when on the run after the battle of Worcester; in commemoration, the Royal Oak is one of the most widespread English pub names. Oak timber was crucial for naval shipbuilding until the mid-nineteenth century, and the march ‘Heart of Oak’ is still the Royal Navy’s official march.

Oaks appear in English language as well as culture – in disguise. When politicos, as is their wont, or pundits have a robust discussion, they are unwittingly paying homage to the oak and to a deeply buried metaphor For robust comes from the Latin rōbustus, ‘steady, firm, strong’ which in turn comes from the Latin for ‘oak’, a word which we found in the botanical name above for English oak, rōbur. Oak being such a dense, solid wood became a metaphor in Latin for ‘firmness, steadiness’.

Almost as typical of the British countryside is the ash, now sorely afflicted by ‘ash dieback’ caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, originally from Asia, which will kill an estimated 80 per cent of British ash trees over the next several years and is a problem in the U.S. too. In Old English the name of the tree was æsc, pronounced very much like its modern version. That æ symbol, consisting of an a with an e strapped to its back, was a letter in Old English, the transliteration of the earlier runic character ᚫ, standing for… an ash tree.

Technically, æ is known as a ligature or digraph and was once used to print words like aesthetic or alumnae. Its main modern use is the IPA phonetic symbol for the a sound of cat as it might have been pronounced by the Queen or a BBC presenter 60 years ago. (On the chart it’s the near-open front unrounded sound, bottom left.) And that phonetic symbol is known as an ‘ash’.

As a child visiting my grandparents in Wales, I was fascinated by the name of a nearby town, Mountain Ash. It sounded so wild, so untamed, so romantick. Sadly, it really isn’t. Only later did I discover that mountain ash is one name for the rowan – which can be pronounced in two different ways – Sorbus aucuparia. Its glowing red or orange berries delight bird’s bellies and human eyes.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

The word tree is Germanic in origin and cognate with words in several Indo-European languages such as Greek, Russian and Welsh. In Old English tree could denote both the plant and the wood derived from it, a duality its Danish relative træ retains. Sinisterly, when hanging was a thing, tree could be used to refer to the gallows.

While writing this I wondered how German Baum related to English. And then – d’oh! – the penny dropped: beam. In Old English it denoted a ‘tree’ and then by a process of semantic narrowing came to refer only to a piece of cut and shaped wood. However, the original meaning lives on in the names of trees such as hornbeam and whitebeam.

Trees thrive in English in a range of metaphors that fulfil two overarching conceptual metaphors or ‘root analogies’, namely, human is plant and abstract complex systems are plants. In the first category fall such metaphors as wooden (acting, performance), to shoot up (= to grow quickly), our trunk (= body, a metaphor that goes back to Latin), to wither (= ‘to grow feeble’), to put down roots (= to settle in one place), and many more.

Under the second conceptual metaphor sit expressions such as a branch (of a bank, organisation, etc.), deadwood (= non-performing staff), root and branch (=completely), to be thin on the ground (= to be scarce), logjam (= delay, obstruction) and so forth.

Nothing remains for me to say other than to finish with a poem – well, two actually.

I’ve balanced Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, of which there’s a rather nice analysis here, with A.E. Housman’s wistful ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ to give us something to look forward to in the spring. I realised after I read the Frost that at the back of my mind I had seen and heard the scene. What more can one ask of a poem?

(Well, actually, quite a lot, but that’s another story.)

Whose woods these are I think I know.  
His house is in the village though;  
He will not see me stopping here  
To watch his woods fill up with snow.  My little horse must think it queer  
To stop without a farmhouse near  
Between the woods and frozen lake  
The darkest evening of the year.  He gives his harness bells a shake  
To ask if there is some mistake.  
The only other sound’s the sweep  
Of easy wind and downy flake.  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  
But I have promises to keep,  
And miles to go before I sleep,  
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Housman

Shrinkflation: what is it? The incredible shrinking Cadbury’s Christmas selection. Now there’s skimpflation, too.

Shrinkflation and inflation are in the news again. We’ve all heard of inflation before, but ‘shrinkflation‘? In the BBC’s Broadcasting House on Sunday 28 November, in the section on newspaper headlines, John Timpson, the owner of the high-street ‘cobbling’ chain, mentioned that Cadbury’s Christmas selection box will contain 24 grams of chocolate less than three years ago. And apparently – shock! horror! – according to the Mail on Sunday, this is the third year such shrinkflation has happened.

And there’s a new –flation in the -flation brood: skimpflation.  

What is shrinkflation?

Self-evidently, it’s a combination of shrink + (in)flation. What it refers to is a kind of closet inflation or inflation by stealth: manufacturers don’t put the price of a good up, which would constitute real price inflation, but instead reduce the size of the good.

In simple terms, you get less stuff for the same amount of dosh, less bang for your buck. 

Have you noticed it with anything you regularly buy? I bet you have. We notice it regularly, from biscuits to crisps to mince pies – which makes our diet sound terribly unhealthy, but, I rush to re-assure you, it isn’t. 

Some might think shrinkflation cons the consumer. Presumably, the logic driving it is that most people would be put off by a clear price rise but won’t necessarily notice the reduction in size. 

Skimpflation

This has been suggested as a word to describe changes to services which save the providers money. For instance, at Disneyland, Disney no longer provides a free tram service from car parks to the venue entrances. Other forms might be reduced breakfast options in hotels, or slower service, or longer waiting times when calling call centres. I’ve certainly noticed that last one.

When the pandemic was at its height, you could accept that there were difficulties finding enough fit staff, but now such slowness seems built into the system. Presumably, companies are either deliberately employing fewer people or having problems finding staff. Another example I’d give is the glossy magazine I used to get twice a year from the makers of my car. Now it’s all online, thereby saving hugely in production and distribution costs. 

Other -flations

Shrinkflation is only the latest of inflation’s spawns. Best known is probably stagflation (1965) which is, according to the OED, ‘A state of the economy in which stagnant demand is accompanied by severe inflation’.

The first citation it gives is by the Conservative politician, Shadow Chancellor and very briefly Chancellor Iain Macleod, who is indeed credited with having coined the term:

‘We now have the worst of both worlds — not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other, but both of them together. We have a sort of “stagflation” situation. And history, in modern terms, is indeed being made.’

slumpflation

Less familiar, at least to me, is slumpflation: ‘A state of economic depression in which decreasing output and employment in industry are accompanied by increasing inflation’.

The first OED citation is by the journalist and quondam1 editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg (yes, the pater of our very own Jacob Rees-Mogg) from his 1974 book The Reigning Error: The Crisis of World Inflation. Whether that means he coined the word, I do not know.

deflation

The opposite of inflation is deflation, which in economic terms means, so the OED tells me, ‘The action or process of deflating currency; an economic situation characterized by a rise in the value of money and a fall in prices, wages, and credit, usually accompanied by a rise in unemployment’.

Wikipedia explains it further as follows, which helps me, an economic illiterate, understand it a bit better:
‘In economics, deflation is a decrease in the general price level of goods and services. Deflation occurs when the inflation rate falls below 0% (a negative inflation rate). Inflation reduces the value of currency over time, but deflation increases it. This allows one to buy more goods and services than before with the same amount of currency. Deflation is distinct from disinflation, a slow-down in the inflation rate, i.e. when inflation declines to a lower rate but is still positive.’

The Great Depression of the 1930s was preceded by a period of deflation, and the more recent economic crisis (2008) also featured a certain amount of it.

What is the -flation of inflation, stagflation, etc?

The –ation part is the normal Latinate way of deriving nouns from verbs in English. As it happens, inflation directly mirrors Latin inflātiō-nem in form if not in meaning.2 Inflate comes from Latin inflāre ‘to blow into’. Now, often English takes one part of a word to create others, e.g. telethon from marathon, and the part used has no etymological validity as a meaningful part of the original word – and it doesn’t matter that it hasn’t. The Latin parent of inflate consists of in + flāre, to ‘blow into’, and while the verb flāre exists there is no related noun flātiō-nem in Latin. Had it existed, it would have meant ‘a blowing’, I suppose, whereas the English-flation does not have that meaning at all but bequeaths to the words that it helps form a clear signal that they are related conceptually to inflation.

And what about the word inflation?

It’s been in English since the fourteenth century. Not in the meaning we’re looking at here, but as ‘The condition of being inflated with air or gas, or of being distended or swollen as if with air’, e.g.

It purges þe longes of inflacioun. (the lungs)

Rolle, Psalter, before 1340.

Charles Darwin used it similarly almost exactly five centuries later in 1839:

By the inflation of its body, the papillæ, with which the skin is covered, become erect and pointed.

Darwin in R. Fitzroy & C. Darwin Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s ships Adventure and Beagle, between the years 1826 and 1836 III. i. 14

Among its several other meanings, inflation can also signify  ‘The quality of language or style when it is swollen with big or pompous words; turgidity, bombast’:

A style which to an English reader will appear to border on inflation and bombast.

Beaumont tr. Barthelemi Travels of Anacharsis in Greece (1796) I. p. vi, 1791

Only in 1838 did the meaning we are concerned with appear:  ‘An undue increase in the quantity of money in relation to the goods available for purchase; (in lay use) an inordinate rise in prices’:

The property pledge can have no tendency whatever to prevent an inflation of the currency.

D. Barnard Speeches & Rep.195, 1838

And just as we know who ‘invented’ stagflation (Iain Macleod) so the British economist Pippa Malmgren is credited with coining shrinkflation in 2015, at least in the meaning discussed in this blog.

Note: This is an updated version of a post originally published a couple of years ago

1 I don’t often get the chance to use quondam, meaning ‘former’ or ‘one-time’. But then it raises the question: does the person so described have to be alive to qualify?

2 In Latin it seems that inflātĭo referred to a literal swelling. Cicero writes habet inflationem magnam is cibus (faba) Literally, ‘This food has a great swelling’, the food in question being faba, i.e. broad beans or faba beans, eschewed historically by Pythagoreans and currently by anyone who wishes not to alienate old friends.

Bonfire or Guy Fawkes Night – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Oops! Collins failed to post this in time for last Friday. Never mind. ‘Meglio tardi che mai’, I always say.

After the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, Nov 5 has been celebrated in Britain with bonfires and fireworks. Here are some related words!

Source: Bonfire or Guy Fawkes Night – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

COP26 – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

My language notes for Collins Dictionaries on COP26.

With COP26 currently underway in Glasgow, we look at the large and constantly evolving lexicon of climate change.

Source: COP26 – Collins Dictionary Language Blog

Bee imagery; not the bee-all and end-all; busy bees; beeline

4-minute read

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,And live alone in the bee-loud glade.W.B. Yeats.

Nowadays we’re all relentlessly exhorted to keep or make our gardens bee-friendly.

Earlier in the summer it was a joy to see how many swarmed around the burgeoning thyme. Now, in our descent into autumn, a few drowsy hangers-on float about the giant hydrangea. Coincidentally, at the moment I’ve got a particular bee in my bonnet: metaphors derived from the animal kingdom.

A conversation with my partner set this train of thought chugging along, and then all of a sudden, we were going full steam and writing down dozens of animal-related words and idioms. (Yes, I know, we should ‘get out more’ as the jolly old Private Eye meme goes, but we quite like it at home.)

Anyway, among the words I’ve lighted on [Geddit!] in this connection comes bee. Whether that name is onomatopoeic I cannot say. It’s from Old English bēo, which is of Germanic origin and is related to Dutch bij and German dialect Beie (the modern German is Biene).

As with so many other entries in the OED, once you start to look, the miracle of polysemy hits you. Well, not really a miracle, more an example of the economy of language: just re-use the same configuration of sounds while attaching a new meaning to them as the years move along. This diminutive apian certainly has more than its fair share of meanings. Here we’ll look at just four idioms in strict historical order, as per the OED.

What intrigues me is how long it can take for a word to grow particular metaphorical wings. Or conversely, how quickly that can happen with certain other words & meanings.

Rather younger than I suspected is…

busy bee

Meaning  1 b. Often used as the type of busy workers.

First recorded in 1535, this metaphor was later taken up by that Alexander Pope of English hymnody, Isaac Watts:

  How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour!

c1720   I. Watts Divine & Moral Songs 

Anyone who has ever attended Anglican or related services will surely remember Watts’

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.

which I’m sure I must have sung several times in school assemblies.

The trope of bees as workers goes back at least as far as Virgil, but that’s another matter.

Image courtesy of PollyDot on Pixabaya bee in one’s bonnet

It’s meaning category 5 in the OED, defined as follows:

To have bees in the head or the brains, a bee in one’s bonnet: i.e. ‘a fantasy, an eccentric whim’, a craze on some point, a ‘screw loose.’ (Cf. maggot n.1 2a, and French grille.)

To my mind the way a bee lights on a flower, hovers, lifts off, then lands on another, then repeats that recursively ad infinitum strikes me as a perfect analogue to the way an obsessive thought settles, lifts off, hovers for a while, but then inevitably returns. (I should know: I’m obsessive.)

The first OED citation is from a Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid; or rather, from the prologue to Book VIII.

1553   G. Douglas in tr. Virgil Eneados viii. Prol. 120   Quhat berne be thou in bed, with hede full of beis?

(Quhat = What; berne = poetic word for ‘man’)

The next is from that Elizabethan proto-comedy that anyone studying Elizabethan drama was once forced to read:

a1556   N. Udall Ralph Roister Doister (?1566) i. iv. sig. C.ij   Who so hath suche bees as your maister in hys head.

But we had to wait for De Quincey to equip the phrase with its now customary titfer:

John Hunter, notwithstanding he had a bee in his bonnet, was really a great man.

1845   T. De Quincey Coleridge & Opium-eating in Blackwood’s Edinb. Mag. Jan. 124/2  

(Note the use of notwithstanding directly as a conjunction without that.)

beeline for

bee-line  n. a straight line between two points on the earth’s surface, such as a bee was supposed instinctively to take in returning to its hive.

The OED notes this as first in print in an American source (1830). Thanks, America, for yet another crucial ingredient of our joint lexicon!

He of The Raven used it:

   A bee-line, or, in other words, a straight line, drawn..to a distance of fifty feet.

1845   E. A. Poe Gold-bug in Tales 35

Nowadays it is generally not hyphenated and is almost invariably used in the set phrase ‘to make a beeline for’.

bees knees

What’s intriguing here is how it developed. Originally, as the OED puts it, it was ‘a type of something small or insignificant’:

   It cannot be as big as a bee’s knee.

1797   Mrs. Townley Ward Let. 27 June in Notes & Queries (1896) X. 260

At this stage there is only one knee.

Gerard Manley Hopkins took the phrase to be Irish:

1870   G. M. Hopkins Jrnl. (1937) 133   Br. Yates gave me the following Irish expressions... As weak as a bee’s knee.

Yet this next quotation is from a book about the folk phrases of four West Midlands counties (Gloucs., Warks., Staffs. & Worcs.)

 As big as a bee’s knee.

1894   G. F. Northall Folk-phrases 7  

Sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century it started to be used as a teasing or nonsense phrase, in the same was as sky-blue pink for a non-existent colour.

Then, in 1920s US flapper lingo, its meaning was flipped, thus making it a sort of contronym of the original, meaning the ‘acme of excellence’. This meaning can be antedated to a year before the first OED citation, which follows:

   You’re the bee’s knees, for a fact!

1923   H. C. Witwer Fighting Blood iii. 101

Apart from those phrases below mentioned by Mencken, bee’s knees belonged to a broad menagerie of fanciful animal phrases, including the kipper’s knickers and the cuckoo’s chin. Made endearing by its rhyme, it has survived along with the cat’s whiskers/pyjamas.

1936   H. L. Mencken Amer. Lang. (ed. 4) 561   The flea’s eyebrows, the bee’s knees and the canary’s tusks will be recalled.

(The dog’s bollocks, though, shows that the pattern is not entirely dead.)

As for ‘the bee-all and end-all’, as I was writing this, I bet myself there would be an eggcorn for ‘be-all and end-all’ and sure enough there is. Here’s an example:

In turn, that consensus is cultivated by the repeated slogan that prosperity is the bee all and end all of political achievement .

This is an updated version of a previously published post.

Carthorses for courses – interesting uses of a metaphor for clumsiness, ungainliness, etc.

Sometimes a word is only ever a metaphor, like tipping point: there is no literal meaning describing something or someone physically tipping. Many other words have absolutely no conventional metaphorical meaning, like arctic tern or Polyfilla – though no doubt someone somewhere sometime could use them to create a novel metaphor.

In between these extremes sometimes a word’s metaphorical uses far outnumber the literal ones – although there are literal ones. Take gadfly, of which more, briefly, below. Unless you’re a vet or an equine specialist, you’re unlikely to come across it in its literal meaning although most dictionaries, in line with tradition, give that literal meaning first. (One exception is of course Cobuild true to its mission of illuminating words in real use.)

Man Leading a Cart-horse. Artist unknown. National Galleries of Scotland. Gift of Mrs. Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1985

Another word turns out to be a less extreme yet surprising case of this metaphorical/literal imbalance.

I have long since described to myself a woman in the yoga class I used to attend – but for obvious reasons politely withheld my mental description from others till now –  as ‘a great carthorse of a woman’. No insult was intended: to my mind, it is an objective description of a woman who has a large frame and gives the impression of massiveness and solidity without being overweight, let alone obese.

Viewed in that light, it arguably comes close to being a compliment. After all, who doesn’t love a carthorse, horses in general and carthorses in particular being such noble beasts? But anyway, intentions aside, as there is nothing new under the sun and as language consists to a vast extent of endlessly repeated patterns, my curiosity was piqued: does the frame ‘a carthorse of a NOUN’ exist? After all, it’s not uncommon to compare a swift, graceful woman to a gazelle, so why not, at the other end of the spectrum, a carthorse?

So far, a delve into my usual sources suggests this is not a recognised pattern. Nevertheless, journalists routinely use carthorse used to describe different classes of people, especially sportspeople. Those people are mainly men, but there are exceptions.

Metaphorical carthorses far outnumber literal ones, which is perhaps not that surprising. When did you last see a carthorse? Apparently, before the Second World War carthorses in Britain still outnumbered tractors, but the industrialisation of agriculture long ago redressed that imbalance. It is also true that the term carthorse is primarily British. Synonyms are draught horse (UK) draft horse (US) and dray horse, but they are almost never used as metaphors or in similes.

When it comes to carthorse examples, Theresa May, the former British Prime Minister, in case anyone has forgotten – which no doubt many have and many more still would wish to – was doubly metaphorised in a piece in The Times:

For now he [sc. Jacob Rees-Mogg] is happy to play gadfly to the prime minister’s slow-moving carthorse but as spokesman for supporters of a hard Brexit his sting is becoming ever more potent.

I say ‘doubly metaphorised’ because of the coupling with the gadfly metaphor – and if you’ve only ever come across gadfly as a metaphor, as I had, in the above article it is doubly appropriate because it also partakes of its literal meaning: a gadfly is ‘A fly that bites livestock, especially a horsefly, warble fly, or botfly.’

Moving on, we swap the ungainly and unfortunate Theresa May – once seen, even the most potent mind bleach could never erase the memory of her squirm-inducing entry on stage at the 2018 Conservative party conference to the strains of Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ – for the titanic queen of R&B (with huge dollops of schmaltz), Tina Turner, ‘like an angry carthorse trying to ice skate’:

Whatever her age, Turner spent much of Thursday’s show in Cologne wearing spangled micro-dresses that revealed her legendary legs in all their glory. Imagine twin columns of pure sculpted muscle, tightly wrapped in corned beef. She also mustered plenty of energy for her signature shuffling dance moves, like an angry carthorse trying to ice skate. For some reason, Mickey Rourke’s butch, bruising exertions in The Wrestler kept springing to mind.

The Times

To complete a triad of feminine inelegance, read how the British media personality Carol Vorderman, known to the red-tops as ‘curvaceous Carol’ and sometime winner of the ‘Rear of the Year’ award, dissed a duo of erstwhile style gurus who used to tell the clothes-blind how to make themselves more appealing. She described them, respectively, as ‘an anorexic transvestite’ and ‘…like a carthorse in a badly-fitted bin liner’. Miaooow, miaooow and miaooow.

Comparing sportsmen to carthorses is a staple of British sports journalism which cuts across different sports, including golf, rugby, football, tennis and even snooker:

‘When Ronnie’s [O’Sullivan] on song, everybody else looks like a carthorse in comparison’, said world-champion Steve Davis: ‘It looks as though snooker is what he was put on this planet to do.’

But the metaphor can also be re-applied from the physical to the mental or intellectual. Take Alfred Austin, the now largely forgotten turn-of-the-twentieth-century Poet Laureate, ‘who wrote as if his muse was a carthorse and owed his appointment purely to his personal and political friendship with the Marquess of Salisbury.’ Why a carthorse? As a clodhopping contrast to the mythological winged steed Pegasus, swift and agile, who was associated with the Muses.

A similar metaphor was used by the writer Margery Perham, ‘who had always thought Elspeth’s [Huxley] prose was Swiftian, whereas she was a carthorse by comparison — had asked Elspeth to help her correct the book…’.

In Animal Farm, Orwell used the carthorse Boxer to represent the working class. According to Jon Snow in his autobiography, when on VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) in Africa and teaching Animal Farm, the children asked ‘What’s a carthorse, Sir? What’s a sheep?’ I suspect many British children today would have to ask the first of those two questions.

Apart from being a literary metaphor, in the hands of the cartoonist David Low (1891–1963) a carthorse was also a visual metaphor for the TUC (Trades Union Congress) viewed as obstinately conservative or honest but simple-minded. In the 1956 cartoon linked here, the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, is shown as Tarzan battling with the TUC carthorse. This carthorse characterisation was much later punned on by the Farmers’ union head, who said that it was ‘biologically impossible for the T.U.C. carthorse to sit on the fence.’

When in 2015 the Independent chose to portray the TUC as a carthorse, the TUC’s press office itself was baffled and had to be informed about its own history. So much for ars longa, vita brevis.

Incidentally, carthorse is mentioned in some sources as the longest single-word anagram in English (orchestra), but that’s a huge, fat canard. At a puny nine letters it is leagues behind the Guinness Book of Record’s conversationalists = conservationalists, which frankly, however, reads like a bit of a swizz, first because only a few of its letters play musical chairs and second because, really, does anyone know or use those words? We’re on safer ground with twelve letters, as in mountaineers = enumerations, and several others, but each time one of the two terms is unlikely to trip off the tongue.

Wishing you a joyously poetical National Poetry Day.

For National Poetry Day this 7th October, I expound on the place poetry occupies and select a few choice examples for your delectation.

Source: Celebrate National Poetry Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog