781-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

And more on sentences Clark Stevens e-mailed: "Your discussion took me back to my seventh-grade English classes, Mrs Isabelle Stead presiding. Her unwavering opposition to beginning a sentence with and or but was matched only by her admiration for the novels of Sir Walter Scott. One day, as we were plodding through Quentin Durward, a smart aleck in the back of the room spotted a sentence starting with and. Seizing the chance to ally himself with a colossus of literature, he pointed it out and asked, 'Why can't we do that?' All 4ft 10in of Mrs Stead was momentarily nonplussed. Then she said: 'Young man, you may begin a sentence with and or but when you can write like Sir Walter Scott.' And that was the end of that."

Several readers pointed out that the many ands in the quotation from Genesis in the King James Bible are a quirk of Hebrew. Shayna Kravetz commented, "In part, the reason is the grammatical structure known in Hebrew as the vav ha-hipuch or, in English, the conversive vav. The letter vav, when used as a prefix, functions as 'and'. But in biblical Hebrew a vav prefix also converts the tense of a verb from past to future or vice versa. The phrase translated as 'and there was light', is literally the conversive vav plus the future tense. Modern translators usually don't bother to reproduce the breathless narrative pulse that this string of ands provides in the Hebrew, and simply turn the verbs around and drop the ands."

"And another thing...", e-mailed Anthony Massey, who went on to say something I was groping to express. "While using and at the start of every sentence can give a childlike feel, in the work of a great poet the effect can be one of tremendous power. Take the first half of William Blake's Jerusalem, four sentences of which begin with and. As Blake knew very well, if you take and away it's not the same at all:

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England's mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic Mills?"

Sooth In giving its origin, I should have said that the Sanskrit adjective satyas is a relative, not its origin. In the jargon of the etymological trade, it's a cognate. Both words actually have a common origin.

Speaking of common origins, others remarked on soothe. Though its meaning has substantially diverged, soothe has the same origin as sooth. In Old English soothe meant to verify something, to prove it to be true. From the sixteenth century on, soothe successively came to mean corroborate some statement, then to flatter or humour a person by agreeing with them, then mollify or appease and so to our current sense of rendering a person or animal calm or quiet. When I searched current newspapers — for the most part unavailingly — for examples of sooth, I was intrigued to see how often soothe was now being spelled sooth. Those who make what is still regarded as an error are actually returning to the word's roots.

Cooking with Poo Gerry Foley wrote, "In Thai, the word for crab is pronounced with an unaspirated p, which is something between a p and a b — hence crab is sometimes written as bpoo." So the word doesn't really sound the same as English poo, though often written that way. In the official transliteration of Thai to English, p represents the unaspirated p, while ph represents the aspirated p (p as in English poo). That's why Phuket is spelt the way it is — and not pronounced as a coarse expletive." Roger Denny added, "The correct Thai response on being given a copy of the above book as a gift would be kop khun krap, or 'thank you'. Krap is a male participle used as a polite termination to a sentence or remark."

Voting time again World Wide Words has once again been nominated in the LSOFT Choice Awards (now the Mailys), in which you may recall we gained an award in 2009. The contest is organised as monthly heats from April to August; the winner of each becomes a finalist. You can vote every day until 31 August if you want and you have the stamina.