The Complexities of English.

Speaking of shit:

You’ve heard of “in vitro” (the study of things in test tubes) and “in vivo” (the study of things in a living system). Now meet “in fimo,” a new scientific term coined by researchers at the UNC School of Medicine and Notre Dame University to mean “excrement examined experimentally.” Their proposal was published in the journal Gastroenterology.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190103110727.htm

From Kory Stamper, because who else:

Then I think about the afternoon several years ago when a group of international high-school students were piled onto my couch, flipping through one of my dictionaries. One girl’s casual thumbing evolved into a susurrous cluster of girls, heads together, dictionary at the center. Their whispery knot would occasionally burst open with an “oh!” and a clatter of laughter. Now, dictionaries do not usually elicit such a response from teenagers, so I asked what they were doing. They all blushed deeply, and then one of the girls spoke up. “Please do not be angry, but we hear these words, like ‘shit,’ but sometimes you don’t understand how to use the word. These words are not in the dictionary in class. So how do you use it? If you use it wrong, the students think you are stupid.”

I did what any compassionate person would have done: I made them cookies, sat in their midst, and taught them how to “give a shit” and not “take shit” from their classmates, who were all, for the record, “full of shit.”

You’re a piece of shit seems very common.

in fimo

“But as can happen while digging into Latin, the pursuit of a proper name for the experimental study of poop became soiled with impurities.”

Laetamen is one of the best euphemisms I’ve ever seen, though.

I would have gone with “in stercore” myself, but the article makes a good case for “in fimo.”

(The creators of the comic are British.)

They’re Australian.

“Admit admit you’re shit you’re shit.” — from the outro of this upbeat pop tune recorded Jan ’78 (by young Brits from Manchester, if that’s relevant). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLE5tZCRHSw

This was originally a b-side so I guess they weren’t worried about being *counterproductively* daring as long as the a-side still got played on the radio.

“You are the shit” (who stole my car) is different again.

“That’s a bit chickenshit, isn’t it?” sounds fine to me as an American. Now, if it were “That’s a bit shit” (or “That’s a bit crap”), that would seem British.

Chickenshit is more of an adjective than shit is in American English.

I, too, have seen shit paper with shit as the same kind of quasi-adjective that fun often is (that was a fun paper to write).

Now that I think of it, shit paper would be grammatical for me as a noun-noun compound like ‘paper made of shit’ or conceivably ‘paper whose appearance resembles shit’. But it’s definitely a noun.

Clip from Glengarry Glen Ross of a salesman saying “You can’t close shit! You are shit!” The author is an American. The first shit is a noun meaning ‘anything’, with the same negative polarity rules; the second is another noun meaning ‘something worthless’.

Roger Shuy has a great LL post called “Getting to Know Jack”, showing jack has dual polarity.

President Eisenhower, so the story goes, once toured a farm and made a speech with frequent use of manure. The farm wife asked Mamie, “Can’t you get your husband not to use that awful word manure?” Mamie sighed and replied, “You have no idea how long it took me to get him to say manure!”

Earth remains in the Age of Bacteria

For biochemists, too: for whom all eukaryotes look the same and are all BO-ring.

The “shit” in “You can’t close shit!” has two distinct meanings depending on whether close or shit is emphasized, although the overall gist of the sentence is fairly similar either way. If close is emphasized, then “shit” just means stuff, things, whatever; “you can’t close shit, you can’t close stuff” has a bit of a stoner ring to it. Someone who was entirely sober would probably find a more felicitous way of making the same point (whatever that is).

With shit is emphasized, then the sentence is in the pattern of “You ain’t shit!” Here “shit” has the full impact of describing something worthless and bad. I think this construction is comparable to “You aren’t five feet tall!” i.e. you are less than that, not even five feet tall. Note that “You aren’t five feet tall!” in this sense sounds old-fashioned; it’s no longer idiomatic.

@Savalonôs: You’re right – the contemptuous meaning (=[not] anything) is a negative polarity item, while the “stoner” meaning (=stuff) isn’t.

Fire and fury.

I’ve always felt that the second declension was more boring than the third.

Someone who was entirely sober would probably find a more felicitous way of making the same point

I am always entirely sober (in that sense; I do laugh), and yet I could easily say “I have to get this shit off the floor” in any sense from ‘excrement’ to ‘dirt’ to ‘something that shouldn’t be there’ (e.g. water) to just ‘stuff’. It just seems like plain semantic weakening to me.

From kremen’ ‘flint’

Is this at all connected with kamen’ ‘stone’, which may or may not be (I hope it is) cognate with hammer?

I don’t know if it’s part of a general trend in English of clipping adjectives, but I see a lot of people online using shit/crap to mean shitty/crappy: “I’m a shit golfer”, “this is a crap cellphone”, etc.

There should be a word for cases like “fire” and “pyre” where they actually are cognates but by coincidence they sound more similar than you’d expect distant cognates to.

Not if it’s a present participle.

I was reading it by analogy with flatulentus, virulentus, corpulentus etc.

Green-Spiked Punk Thrush

FTW.

flatulentus, virulentus, corpulentus etc.

I confess I didn’t even know these forms. Will have some looking-up to do.

The kamen’/hammer cognacy

Looking it up on Wiktionary and getting lost in Weise’s law and other matters before having to go, I found that the only piece of evidence ever seems to have been kamor “stone” in one Slavic language. That would leave the question open as to why the metathesis (*ak- > ka-), motivated by the Proto-Slavic dislike for syllable-final obstruents, would have happened in Germanic.

I think “kinda chickenshit” or “a little chickenshit” would work better for me.

It just means “is a load of crap”…

…and of course it’s a shitshow. It’s quite the spectacle to watch from what treacherously looks like a safe distance.

Strong supporter of European Integration as I may be, I’m actually getting fed up with over-the-top disaster predictions. Britain may choose the pit, but if they can negotiate time for the practical (and mutually beneficial) arrangements to avoid short-term disruption, medium term effects could be weathered off by reasonable deficit spending and a cheaper pound, and the long term would be trend growth from a lower level. The British will be poorer, but not that much poorer. The real loser here is Northern Ireland, and I don’t primarily mean economically. Their biggest political party are doing all they possibly can to close the border to Ireland against a clear majority in the people. There’s no way that can end well.

Also, the European Union is perfectly capable of taking Brexit as a signal that it must run itself into a pit of its own. And when they’re both down there, yelling insults at eachother for being stupid enough to end up in a pit, I’m not sure who will get out first.

if they can negotiate time for the practical (and mutually beneficial) arrangements to avoid short-term disruption

That would be a deal, as opposed to no deal.

“BBC Europe editor Kayta Adler said the mood in Brussels was one of disbelief – that the UK still does not seem to know what it wants.

She said EU leaders were also questioning the logic of arguing over things like a customs union or Common Market option at this stage, because right now, the UK has only three options as they see it – no deal, no Brexit or Theresa May’s deal – and anything else is a matter for future talks once the UK has actually left.”

the UK has only three options as they see it – no deal, no Brexit or Theresa May’s deal – and anything else is a matter for future talks – BBC Europe editor, Brussels

If Britain ever wants an orderly exit from the European Union, it must pass the withdrawal agreement painfully negotiated with the bloc – NY Times

This isn’t true. If the UK parlt and PM agreed together to a customs union or better, a single market (this means freedom of movement and is aka “the Norway option”), the EU would be delighted to comply. Neither is possible under May’s withdrawal agreement; “future talks” with the EU don’t cover it, because the PM could back out at any time without committing to it internally.

It’s all quite complicated, much like the Schleswig-Holstein Question.

I guess I just can’t imagine them not doing something sensible eventually.

A lot depends on who are the “them” of whom you’re so confident, and/or whether there’s enough time left to wait for “eventually”.

“They” are mainly the British government and MPs, but also everyone involved on the EU side. I still think they’ll have a backup agreement to fall back on whwn everything else falls. Deep into extended time, when both parties finally understand that the other party won’t cave in and there’s no time to take an offer as a point of further negotiation, they’ll agree on a few practical arrangements which allow business as usual for some time while the actual diplomatic negotiations can take place without all the posturing and slogans. They may not even write anything down, just an unwritten agreement of no sudden movements. “As long as you don’t move we won’t move either..” That’s how the greater good is served in international politics.

But I may be too optimistic.

And yet not a word is being said, publicly or (I’ll wager) privately, about the ultima ratio regum, perhaps because reges are no longer involved on either side.

ultima ratio regum

Not an issue. Also the House of Lords hasn’t been involved at all (it might possibly be later this week because protocol) which strengthens my argument to get rid of a 2 chamber parlt.

My suggestion regarding the queen is that she offer to become Head of the EU as a sort of independent body like God. She has a good record of presiding over nations with different religions.

impossible EU conditions (half the UK doesn’t want the Irish backstop)

Without the backstop or another form of customs union, Brexit will break the Good Friday Accords. That is widely expected, locally and elsewhere, to bring back the grassroots version of ultima ratio regum.

The DUP just don’t seem to mind.

leaving Mozambique as a unique exception

Not any more since Rwanda joined in 2009, as far as I could tell from Wikipedia.
(Ninja-ed by Jonathan D.)

Half the UK doesn’t want the Irish backstop

The problem with the Irish backstop, as far as I understand it, is that the two main trade markets of Northern Ireland are Great Britain and Southern Ireland*, not necessarily in that order – and the Irish backstop as proposed would allow the latter at the expense of the former, while a backstop-less Brexit (including a no-deal Brexit) would allow the former at the expense of the latter.

It appears (I’m not sure to what extent this is actually true) that keeping ties with Southern Ireland is more important in terms of possible border issues, for obvious geographical reasons – thus the backstop; but that Great Britain is otherwise the bigger market – thus the DUP position.

Ideally, of course, both Great Britain and Southern Ireland should be able to stay trading with Northern Ireland; by transitivity, this would put Southern Ireland on Great Britain’s side of any customs border – and since Southern Ireland, in turn, wants to trade with the rest of the EU, this means that there is no customs border, i.e. that the UK would have to be in full customs union with the EU.
(IIRC, the option to put the “backstop” between Ireland and continental Europe had actually been suggested at one point, and received a very polite version of being laughed out of court.)

 
*) i.e. the Republic of Ireland

I am quite enjoying the Brexit show, to the degree that i’ve scanned the order paper on a couple of occasions and literally set with a pencil in hand when the results of the first round of indicative votes were announced. The one thing that I cannot quite get that seems to be apparent to everyone else is why Theresa May is apoplectic about European Parliament elections. The UK will certainly elect a bunch of really disagreable characters, but it’s the EU problem. Let them deal with it.

why Theresa May is apoplectic about European Parliament elections

The expense to the British government, which is considerable and will be wasted if Brexit.

The expense to the British government…

Well, yes, but it seems only penny wise. The costs are around 100 mil compared to direct payments to the EU on the order of 30 bil and overall influence on the economy on the order of 1% of GDP depending on how exactly things go. Let’s make it 0.5% over 2 years which is in the ballpark of another 30 bil. I mean, not a small change for a man, but a trivial figure for UKind.

Another cause of what Theresa calls the log-jam is her great loyalty to the Conservative party. She wants at all costs to stop it breaking up, so she has had to appease its ERG right-wing (incl. Johnson and Smogg) at the expense of what others in the UK want. Her new scheme is to talk to the Labour leadership about what’s acceptable to both sides. We may know before the weekend if that works. Labour will only agree to a scheme that allows freedom of movement. If that includes a customs union it makes imo the call for a second referendum (and of course the backstop problem) moot.

Ant, it’s interesting that small countries including NZ & Norway have such comparatively efficient, fast-acting and in general sophisticated systems of gov. I don’t know if small size is the reason, or just a reason.

I’ve given up providing links in comments, because they (the comments) disappear.

I’ve given up providing links in comments, because they (the comments) disappear.

One link per comment usually goes through. But if you edit a comment with a link in it, it is retroactively sent into moderation. Comments with more than one link go there straight away.

Ant, it’s interesting that small countries including NZ & Norway have such comparatively efficient, fast-acting and in general sophisticated systems of gov. I don’t know if small size is the reason, or just a reason.

Germany?

(Germany has an interesting mixed system where real estate is given some say in who becomes an MP, but not much. I can’t claim to have understood it.)

“chickenshit” is not in my dialect and I can never remember what precise insult it means. Apparently it’s somtimes specifically cowardice and sometimes generic inferiorty; I see now how my previous attempts to infer from context would have failed. Not that I’ll remember next time I see it.

are you saying it’s something you regard as a normal element of speech, in the sense that it’s frequently used?

Besides the aforementioned “You’re shit, and you know you are” (to the tune of the Village People’s “Go West”), other datapoints:
* Usain Bolt had to deny news reports that he had described the 2014 Commonwealth Games as “a bit shit”.
* 2015 Christmas stockingfiller book “Is it just me or is everything shit?”

QE and her heirs as — Heads of the Commonwealth

My understanding is that the position of Head of the Commonwealth is not hereditary, although QE2 recently asked the heads of Commonwealth to let Charles have it when she’s done.

Brexit will break the Good Friday Accords

So did the Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland

the fact that the first referendum was held under false pretenses – heaps of lies, some of which were openly admitted within hours after the referendum was over – means that it must be repeated

There is a practical problem with this argumen, as with any statistical argument: hardly any of the Leave voters is going to admit that they were one of the people who was fooled. Of course the Remain press can find a few to write “I see now how wrong I was” but they are regarded as any tribe regards any turncoat.

In the Australian version of parliamentary democracy, binding referendums are the method of constitutional amendment. As a result, we tend to avoid calling anything else a referendum, instead using the word plebiscite.

In the Republic of Ireland, a referendum is when a bill passed by both houses of the Oireachtas (parliament) is put to the people. When anything else is put to the people it’s called a plebiscite. The only referendums have been on bills to amend the constitution (some of which are to ratify important treaties). The only national plebiscite was to approve the constitution itself; there have been local plebiscites on changing placenames, and will be some this May on directly elected mayors.

But if you edit a comment with a link in it, it is retroactively sent into moderation.
– That must be what’s happening. I’ll stop the editing.

Germany?
I don’t know anything about the real estate thing, just that construction in Hamburg when I lived there was totally SPD-controlled, as was everything else. At the federal level it seems like German gov. functions well; it has a well balanced election system https://www.bundestag.de/en/parliament/elections/electionresults/election_mp-245694 with much better, more spacious seating for Bundestag members than the hideous creaking old palace of Westminster has for MPs.

Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung is a very long word, imo it’s an example of a rule that needs reworking.

the first referendum was held under false pretenses – heaps of lies, … it must be repeated
There was a lot wrong with it from start to finish. There’s an argument that another one would prolong the navel gazing and general ennui and could resolve nothing, so better to have the soft brexit.

This is the ‘Norway option’ that seems entirely nebulous
The Economist had a good explanation of this (you can sign up and read 5 articles/month free.) https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/10/07/the-difference-between-europes-customs-union-and-single-market

It’s taxation without representation.
Or as I prefer to think of it, access to markets without having to follow EU rules on farming and the environment. Maybe I’d be allowed to import English plants & fruit trees, and I vaguely remember the EU protocols are a bit retarded concerning rewilding and poisonous sprays (or something).

The House of Commons as of January 1649 was that of the so-called Rump Parliament, several hundred insufficiently extreme MP’s having been forcibly excluded by the military the month before in the coup d’etat traditionally called Pride’s Purge. So the events leading to the regicide were not simply an abandonment of a balanced regime in which Commons, Lords, and King each had a structural role, because there was no longer even an arguably-legitimate Commons. No doubt current voting on Brexit-related matters would have yielded less ambiguous results if the current Army leadership had simply figured out which outcome it wanted and then sent in the troops to force out all the MP’s inclined to vote against it.

Sadly, like the police, the ruddy faced retired colonels all look amazingly young these days.

Regicide
I had a great uncle called Reggie. In 1922, he shot someone and committed suicide.

Explanation unnecessary, I understand the convention. We do it in Norwegian too but with less rigour. Some younger people don’t do it at all. Always the way.

It’s obviously quite common in bicameral legislatures to have two different voting systems in use so you don’t put all your eggs in one procedural-approach basket — indeed a bicameral legislature with identical voting systems for both houses is sort of pointless. The BRD approach of using multiple systems but mushing together their outputs into a single legislative chamber is more unusual, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t work for them in practice. I guess in the US the Electoral College sort of mushes together into one pot aspects of the two systems separated by chamber in the regular federal legislature.

ETA: obviously they also have an upper house (Bundesrat? I can’t be arsed to google it) so they maybe have at least three systems yielding a two-chamber output.

@Keith Ivey, I think historically in at least some parts of the country there was more divergence in selection mechanism between the two houses of certain state legislatures, but there’s less than there used to be especially since the federal courts for better or worse put the kibosh back in the Sixties on state senates that tried to organize themselves on some explicit principle other than equal-population districts. So now it may be an inertia-driven tradition as you suggest that isn’t adding a whole lot of structural value most of the time. There are still some state senates that have longer terms than the lower house and maybe even a few that still have staggered terms so they can’t entirely turn over in a single “wave” election. Simply having different membership sizes (thus different district populations) is probably not enough to make that much of a difference in the typical scenario where there’s only two or three lower-house members for every state senator, but in the extreme situation of New Hampshire (24 members in upper house but 400 in lower) it probably does make the fundamental dynamics of the two houses structurally different.

In case anybody cares: I did mean generic, not genetic.

I think historically in at least some parts of the country there was more divergence in selection mechanism between the two houses of certain state legislatures

Indeed. Specifically, a county-based upper house (counties tend to be either cities or reasonably equal-area subdivisions) wound up giving rural areas more senators and cities more representatives.

That’s why the ballot is secret.

Polling in 1976 or thereabouts showed that Nixon lost the 1972 election.

Except Nebraska.

Curiously, the unicameral legislature, though called simply the Legislature, is the institutional successor of the State Senate; it was the lower house that was abolished. The members are still called senators.

One unusual property of the U.S. system is that representatives (although the constitutional requirement is only to live in the state from which one is elected), must as a political rather than a legal matter permanently reside in their district (with some exceptions). Furthermore, they are chosen by local or at most statewide party committees. Our members are truly members of, not merely for, their districts.

Another curious property is that because of primary elections, anyone may register with their state as a member of any party, and the party has nothing to say about it, since most primaries allow voting for a party candidate only by the registered members of that party. Registration does not imply that one supports the party platform or will necessarily vote for that party in the general election.

For example, in four of the five boroughs of NYC the Democratic Party is so dominant that nomination (by primary) is tantamount to election, so if you are not a registered Democrat you are effectively disenfranchised.

It interesting that David, as someone outside any district-based electoral system, describes even an association with a district (as in Germany and New Zealand) as “real estate having a say”. To me, that phrasing brings up the idea that land areas (equivalently, lower population density) might influence the division into districts, rather than simply population. This could be in the sense sometimes seen in discussion of the US electoral college, where it may be a reasonable summary of the effect of something actually more arbitrary (after all, Rhode Island gets the same benefit as similarly populated less dense states), or in a more deliberate sense seen in the Western Australian upper house.

I don’t think my mother ever knew about this.

Same here. My grandfather rarely spoke about his family and I’m guessing his brother the murderer may be the reason. Oddly and one hundred years apart two men in separate branches of my family have shot women shortly after arriving in Australia and then escaped conviction for murder.

Discussing family secrets, “25 fascinating guests, including … Felicity Huffman.”

Felicity Huffmann’s big secret for me, I now find, was that she is married to Donnie Smith of Magnolia! She’s got that going for her, at least.

So many countries have one or other form of pr now. In Britain the idea is so popular and so unlikely to happen, they say, because it’s not in the interests of the two major parties. But other 2-main-party countries have introduced pr, surely? I wonder how they managed to introduce it.

@Stu Clayton: On The Colbert Report, whenever Stephen Colbert talked about celebrity couples with combined names (like “Brangelina”), he would mention “Filliam H. Muffman.”

change New Zealand‘s voting system has turned Kiwi politics into a confusing game of musical chairs …

Indeed. Changing to PR took a couple of General Elections to bed in. The first election under PR would be better described as the last FPP election: the two main Parties campaigned as if they only had each other to beat. And then didn’t know what to do when neither of them got anything like a clear majority. There was 3 months of coalition negotiations.

They’re nowadays far more adept at figuring out likely coalition partners in advance of elections: it actually increases their likelihood of votes if their potential voters know that. There’s a middle-ground party that was part of nearly every government (of either shade) until recently. There’s ‘strong and stable’ for you.

@AntC: Parties that will join any governing coalition in proportional representation systems may have moderating effects, or they may pull the politics in unproductive directions. If you have a small, basically single-issue party that is willing to compromise of virtually everything else—so that they can be a reliable coalition partner for any of the major parties—you can have a situation where the major players all end up honoring that party’s position on their one primary issue. As an example, the Shas party in Israel has been part of almost every government since 1984. Even after the chairman of the party, Aryeh Deri, was convicted of corruption charges, it took extraordinary circumstances for the prime minister Ehud Barak to be able to kick the party out of his ruling coalition.

And to genderless people.

If you have a small, basically single-issue party that is willing to compromise of virtually everything else—so that they can be a reliable coalition partner for any of the major parties—you can have a situation …

where they’ll get biffed out of Parliament at the next election. And/or the party that was stupid enough to go into coalition with them will get biffed out. That is, in any polity based on consensus /for politicians who want to stay in government for longer than one term.

Israel is full of nutters who would vote according to their religious affiliations, even if a jerkass were standing. (I know, I’ve lived there, and that was at relatively peaceful/consensual times.)

I presume that’s the reason Donald Trump is President: Mike Pence and his religious affiliates are of the jerkass vote persuasion. Trump is a reincarnation of Cyrus the Great, apparently.

Can anybody explain why Trump’s approval rating is up around 40%? I’d be amazed it could be so much as the people in his will, and not even all of them.

but I think it’s safe to say

“Thanks, we cry, ’tis thrilling! / Take, O take this shilling / And let us have no more!” —Lewis Carroll

There may be some similarities, but Trump supporters don’t wear their grandfather’s harris tweed overcoat and long for the return of rationing and the Spitfire. That’s what’s a bit worrying about the brexit lot. I’m pretty sure America can survive Trump, but economies don’t run on nostalgia.

the return of rationing and the Spitfire

No, but some of them long for the return of white supremacy, all the while their opposite numbers insist that it is still in full force. As someone said, when a U.S. state feels the need to say that English is their sole official language, that means that English is no longer their sole language.

I thought Americans voted for Trump for his entertainment value.

I thought that was Reagan.

I thought Americans voted for Trump for his entertainment value.

Oh no. Even Al Franken wasn’t elected for that.

I think the other two explanations offered above are correct. Early in the campaign, Cruz was the candidate of the Tea Party, the first and last True Conservative running for president, the one who would finally, finally make things as they ought to be; and Trump was the candidate of the Beer Party, the one predicted by The Onion back in November 2012. (…Huh. That article used to be longer.) The Tea Party, and everyone else, pointed out that Trump’s behavior was very far from that expected of a True Conservative. Trump hardly disputed that (remember “strong Christian”?). Instead, he promised to nominate lots of True Conservative judges who would finally, finally make things as they ought to be; and Cruz’s candidacy became redundant.

As it so happened, Mitch McConnell had kept a lot of federal judiciary positions open just in case the next president would be a Republican. They’re being filled now.

“I never said he was the best example of the Christian faith. He defends the faith. And I appreciate that very much.”
– Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, about Trump in late November 2018

I always get the feeling that Trump is a product of anti-intellectualism. Something like this:

Pervasive anti-intellectualism in society >
Many aspiring intellectuals go to big cities, make good, have no sympathy for the rednecks that pushed them to leave >
People back home get angry at being left behind and ignored by the rich and powerful in the big cities >
Trump, rich and powerful but the ultimate anti-intellectual, gets elected >
No matter what he does, he’s still our down-to-earth guy, better than any East Coast intellectual

I’m probably wrong, as usual…

Trump is a product of anti-intellectualism.
I’d hardly call any of his competitors pointy-headed intellectuals, but why now? I think dumb-but-sly is simply a personal trait, like his hairdo, that didn’t get him elected, it just didn’t disqualify him.

I’m probably wrong, as usual…
Probably. But who isn’t?

That getup is sheep’s clothing? Who would you rather be stuck on a desert island with, Donald or Hillary? I think Hillary, but I’m not certain. Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn: Jeremy, without a doubt.

He’s the only one of the four I could eat.

With relish.

imagining that’s it’s persecuted.

In my understanding, “defending the faith” in Christian discourse means debate about religion, not actual persecution.

1 Peter 3:15

There’s also “wessel” for vessel.

Yes, and I keep that one in performance. Usually I perform to just a few people or even just one, but on one occasion there was an audience of maybe 150. They also got “Casey At The Bat”, where the changes due to the folk process are even more numerous and intense. The urtext begins:

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
the score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
a sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

whereas I recite:

It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day;
The score was two to four, with but one inning left to play.
And when Cooney died at second, and Burrows did the same,
A pallor wreathed the features of the patrons of the game.

I have no idea how many of these changes are authorial, if any, though it is known that authorial variants do exist.

On the other hand, I sing “Scarborough Fair” as pure Simon and Garfunkel, though it too is a folk ballad.

It is rumored that king Henry was assisted by the future patron saint of Statesmen and Politicians

the 19C Cockney near-merger of /w/ and /v/ as [ʋ], since undone

A complete merger, said Trudgill, undone only by social pressure after exposure to the unmerged standard, in a way that passed through a stage where [w] and [v] were allophones. Also interestingly, Trudgill never mentioned [ʋ] even as a theoretical possibility, only the bilabial unrounded approximant [β̞], which is apparently preserved on a few islands.

Heny VIII used his position as “defender of the faith” as one of his kettle logic arguments that his takeover of the church in England was justified.

The Norwegian parliamentary election system is 100% built on party lists. There’s no way for voters to influence the selection of candidates made by the parties. On election day, we pick a single party list. When votes are counted, members are assigned to the parties according to a slightly modified version of the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method. This gives a result where every member represents close to an equal number of representatives, but the smaller parties will have relatively larger unrepresented tail ends. To compensate for this, the last member from each constituency is selected based on the national count, between parties having received 4% or more of the votes nationally.

To me, this system has the virtue that all regions are represented by its full political specter, and most voters have a member in parliament who represents both the local district and the voter’s own political views.

The number of seats from each constituency is assigned according to population size. For the last two decades or so the population number is adjusted with the equivalent of 1,8 people per square kilometer. This is reassessed every other electoral cycle, i.e. every 8 years.

Traditionally each fylke is a constituency, but there’s an ongoing reform of local administration, and it seems that the constituent parts of the new merged regions will continue as separate constituencies, at least for the next parliamentary election.

In local elections, we select both names and parties. We do this by picking a party list and adding and removing names. The number of representatives from each party is decided from the count of party votes, and the actual representatives from each party is decided from the count of personal votes. Since you may replace all names on a party list with candidates from other parties, and it will still count as a vote for the party, you may use it to decide who represents the parties you didn’t vote for.

I dream of a reform of the EU decision system into a three-chamber model. The parliament is the lowest chamber, being permanently assembled and having powers of budget and European law. The uppermost chamber is the EU council, made up of the prime ministers or presidents of each member state, making decisions that according to treaty have to be unequivocal or nearly so. Exclusion of member states. Declarations of war.

And then there’s the intermediate chamber, representing the national parliaments. The EU lacks an easy way to amend treaties and respond to changing needs. Everything of any importance turns into a media show where national politicians have an incentive to use European issues to grandstand on some minor detail of overblown importance in national discourse.* There’s no easy solution, but I think one major issue is the disjoint between the European and the national level of politics. I would suggest a chamber consisting of members selected proportionally from the party groups in the national parliaments and empowered to make decisions on their behalf. The number from each member state could e.g. be equal to the number of representatives in the European parliament. Normally they’d meet once or twice a year to make a formal acceptance on behalf of the member states that the decisions made by the EU parliament are within its powers according to treaty, and to accept or reject decisions that go beyond, amounting to changing the treaty itself. Decisions in this chamber could be made according to rules for qualified majority which might be different on different issues. Ratifying amendments to treaties might e.g. take a majority in a sufficient number of national delegations as well as a qualified majority overall.

*) Angela Merkel’s Germany prevented an adequate response to the 2008 crisis for the sake of German banks and due to internal German political considerations over popular prejudice about lazy Greeks. More than 10 years on, the EU is hardly recovering, and Germany, having suppressed internal demand for two decades, is sliding into recession without powerful growth in southern Europe to pull it out again. Shifting British governments were strongly opposed to the EU’s social dimension and any measures against social dumping, seeing it as a threat to the post-Thatcher British labour market but posing as fightng against overreaching bureaucracy. It’s not hard to see the consequences in the Brexit referendum.

Whatever happened to the word “shitty”?

Still going strong in American English.

all regions are represented by its full political specter

The specter that haunts them, no doubt.

(I’ve noticed this error before, or I wouldn’t mention it. In English, the French borrowing specter/spectre means only ‘ghost’ and by extension ‘something to be feared’. The scientific and mathematical senses and their metaphorical extensions to other kinds of ranges are represented by Latin spectrum. The two words split some time in the 18C, although Thomas Henry Huxley uses auditory spectrum to mean not ‘range of audible notes’ but ‘musical hallucination’.)

(Alas, for some nefarious reason, nobody has asked this politically passive citizen of a non-EU country how to reform the EU.)

Germany has excellent regulation of thermal insulation. If I were Angie Merkel, and it’s a big if, I’d start one of those funds like the Norwegians have.

Budget surplus and tittering on the brink of recession, plus the country that cannot set it’s own monetary policy. Time to cry havoc and unleash the tax cuts?

Of course, I meant teetering, but I proudly own this mistake.

According to the OED, the words teeter and totter are a doublet. Cognates appear to exist in essentially all Germanic languages, but the specific paths by which the two English words arrived at their modern forms are unclear. There is also another synonym, titter, unrelated to the imitative “laugh” sense, which still exists but seems to be regional (and which is poorly documented, historically).

“Titter ye not!” – Frankie Howerd, Up Pompeii. But I can’t find a clip.

Only in America, as far as I know. But Tittermatorter is supposed to be the old Norfolk word for a seesaw from something (don’t know what) Scandinavian.

Perhaps because Brett had written ‘the words teeter and totter are a doublet’. In den Vereinigten Staaten sind aus Sicherheitsgründen an die Stelle der Wippen heute meist Schaukelreittiere getreten. I don’t know what the Sicherheitsgründen are and anyway it’s not Sicherheitsgründen it’s fear of being sued.

Russian, weirdly, seems to treat seesaws as a kind of swing.

old Norfolk word …

Gansey – heavy jumper made of oiled wool

Norfolk? I could have sworn that’s Irish. At least I’ve heard it used by a very senior/now departed Irish woman who (AFAIK) never visited Norfolk.

Ah, it’s for ‘Guernsey’s, meaning “sweaters worn by fishermen around the coasts of the UK”. Also “Traditional Dutch” — which would suggest they borrowed the word if not the thing. Thank you Google.

Guernsey jersey

As Trond says but also ‘ganser’ which I was always told as a child was a pronunciation of ‘Guernsey’ for a dark blue fisherman’s sweater. What the dark blue fisherman was… etc.

Russian, weirdly, seems to treat seesaws as a kind of swing.

That occurs in German, too – I don’t really have Wippe in my active vocabulary, and use Schaukel at least as the cover term. Schaukeln refers to any kind of swinging back-and-forth motion: Schaukelstuhl “rocking chair”.

…So I looked up where Wippe, with its suspicious pp, comes from (Wiktionary > DWDS). Both of my suspicions are borne out! It’s a 17th-century loan from Low German, and it’s a root cognate of vibration!

one in the former Further Pomerania (Wieprza in Polish)

Surely this one is about boars? Though of course that might be a folk etymology.

I am not sure which of these King George V of the UK had in mind when he considered changing his overtly (and overly) German house name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Wipper during World War I

…This and the follow-up sounded so much like one of those made-up historical-esque factoids that I had to look it up. Apparently it really did happen (and even the Kaiser’s alleged comment was really reported).

The two rivers named Wipper in Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia are fairly close both to each other and to the ancestral lands of Wettin. It appears that the one in Saxony-Anhalt was closer to said ancestral lands, but it’s hard to say which one was intended, if either.
One source for the house name question mentions a “district of Wipper”, which doesn’t appear to exist at all (there are only two Google results for that string, one of which is said source and the other apparently a scanning error).

Surely this one is about boars?

With these Germanic/Slavic name pairs that seem meaningful on both sides, I wouldn’t bet either way.

There’s also

Wipper, Wupper, Wim, and Wenders, attorneys-at-law.

Funny thing – just yesterday I happened to be reading about the Mexican city of Cuernavaca (“cow horn”), corrupted from the Náhuatl Cuauhnāhuac (“near the woods”).

Presumably one of the names is the original and another is the folk etymology, but it’s essentially unknowable which is which except by plausibility

…and, now that I think of it, in principle there’s also the option that both are folk etymologies and the original was Baltic or Celtic or Finnic or Neanderthal or whatever.

or Neanderthal

Indeed not – the place was under a mile of ice even later. 🙂 I’ll also rule out Finnic in this far southwestern place, but the other two probably aren’t completely out of the question.

Or “rowan place” among other options

True, but for present purposes a tree is a tree is a tree is not a boar.

How old is your jar of crystalized ginger compared to the age of this Scandinavian children’s playground?

Denne ingefær er ungefahr yngre enn gyngene.

This ginger is (roughly) younger than the swings.

York is regularly from Jórvík, I believe.

Cf. Shakespeare’s intermediate “Yorick,” which I suspect he read somewhere was the “Danish” ancestor of “York.”

Yes, I thought of that too. Makes sense. Alas, in Dansk, Norsk, Nynorsk, and Svensk [sic], York is boringly just York, nothing like its lovely names in the Celtic languages: Cymraeg Efrog, Gaeilge Eabhraig, Gàidhlig Eabhrig, Kernowek Evrek (that’s boring KK, not proper Cornish spelling at all according to my prejudices), and at one remove Nouormand Évèroui — but back to York in Brezhoneg, wassamattawitchem.

GAA players wear jerseys, definitely.

I don’t know, I didn’t go in to Burger King.

…If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
It’s up to you, New Efrog-frog.

It turns out that not only is there a New York in Lincolnshire (just over ten miles from Boston), which I knew, but there is a York in New York State, in Livingston County in the center of the western part of the state. Joseph Marron, one of the inventors of lidar (laser-based radar) had some connection with York, N.Y., but I don’t know just what.

One of Thomas Jefferson’s drafts for the Constitution for Virginia refers to “George Guelf king of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover”, and contains a preliminary version of the list of George’s crimes that wound up in the Declaration of Independence. The republican William Cobbett, aka “Peter Porcupine”, spelled it “Guelph”, and one William Hudson, evidently also a republican, was tried for “seditious and inflammatory words”, to wit:

The king, what is he? — George Guelph, a German hog-butcher, a dealer in human flesh by the carcass, he sells his Hanoverian subjects to his British subjects for thirty pounds a piece, and not content with that, he goes partner with the prince of Hesse-Cassel, and has fifteen pounds a head for each of his carcasses.

The jury found him guilty for this as well as his toasts “Equality!” and “The government of France!”, and the judge gave him two years in Newgate and a fine of £200 (about £23,040 today) or imprisonment until he paid (which I doubt he ever could have). If he ever did get out, I certainly hope he went to America afterwards.

The Gaelic Athletic Association uses jersey in English and geansaí in Irish As “jersey” is giving way to “shirt” in English soccer parlance,* I’m sure “shirt” has some inroads among less racy-of-the-soil gaelic footballers, but it’s not the default.

* the anachronistic “boot” is retained over the more accurate “shoe” for the bared-ankle modern footwear.

Cradles are vugger

Wugs! Wugs at last! ^_^

The story they tell tourists in the original York, Yorkshire, England is that the ‘Jór’ is the ‘bor’ of Latin Eboracum.

No, it’s the whole Ebor-, via Old English Eofor-, where f is [v] (intervocalic allophone). And interestingly enough, the Norman version is evidently directly from the Old English, too.

Then I’m not seeing ‘Yorick’ would be any sort of intermediate.

Between Jórvík and York.

I don’t think OE wic “village” and ON vík “bay” are strictly cognates, since the Scandinavian word has a perfectly good etymology from víka “recede, retreat, yield”. But as homonyms in WGmc they were early confused, which might explain why the borrowing is feminine while Latin vicus is masculine. Or we could follow through on that logic and argue that they are cognates after all, descended from the same inherited Germanic word for “bay”, but semantically contaminated in WGmc. with a Latin word for “village”.

In North American Icelandic when that was a going concern

…It took me a while to realize that this is not referring to Vinlandic.
(I doubt that anything is known about Vinlandic at all, and for that matter I somewhat doubt whether it even existed as a separate dialect at any point. The Vikings of Greenland probably did have their own dialect, but I’m not sure if anything is known about it either.)

That said, a variety of Icelandic with a significant layer of borrowings is fascinating in its own right – I had no idea it was a thing!

Quite possibly, although the OED s.v. amber thinks it’s already ‘one(-handled) bear(er)’ in Proto-Germanic and at most influenced by amphora. From two handles to one. The OED also says that amber doesn’t appear after 1100 in actual English text, only in the form ambra in Anglo-Latin (proper Latin situla). Bucket is also curious: once you discard the French diminutive, there are two paths: inherited buck and Frankish buk ‘belly’ > VL bu:cus > French buc > English. No sorting out that!

I’d say the expansion of Australian Rules north of the Barassi Line is not entirely successful in taking the word ‘guernsey’ with it. In any case, the old (even then) jumpers/jerseys I wore as junior last century seemed a bit closer to a fisherman’s oiled woolen garment than the modern equivalent does.

In 1916 A. P. Herbert, then a Sub-Lieutenant, wrote a poem about Major General Cameron Shute, commander of the Royal Naval Division (sailors fighting in the trenches as soldiers). Shute, a deeply unpopular soldier, hated its unconventional nautical traditions and tried to stamp them out. He’d been particularly critical of their latrines.

THAT SHIT SHUTE
The General inspecting the trenches
Exclaimed with a horrified shout
‘I refuse to command a division
Which leaves its excreta about.’
But nobody took any notice
No one was prepared to refute,
That the presence of shit was congenial
Compared to the presence of Shute.
And certain responsible critics
Made haste to reply to his words
Observing that his staff advisors
Consisted entirely of turds.
For shit may be shot at odd corners
And paper supplied there to suit,
But a shit would be shot without mourners
If somebody shot that shit Shute.

– A P Herbert

I hadn’t realised that calling someone a shit was as old as this.

Good, isn’t it. Apparently in WW1 poetry it was unusual to attack someone by name. I’m not sure when this was published. I can see Herbert getting into a shitload of trouble if it was known during the war.

selling gingerbread for two weeks now

And a very fine foodstuff it is, too. I see no reason whatever why in this modern age it should not be sold on the feast of St. John as well as the feast of Christmas.

I note that the form gingerbread is a folk etymology:

From Old French gingembras, gingimbrat ‘preserved ginger’ from Medieval Latin *gingimbrātus ‘gingered’, presumably referring to ginger that perhaps had a pharmaceutical use for some medicinal preparation, with intrusive /m/ added to gingiber < Latin zingiber ‘ginger > Ancient Greek ζιγγίβερις zingíberis > Sanskrit. The third syllable was early confounded with bread, and the insertion of an /r/ in the second syllable completed the semblance of a compound word: ginger +‎ bread.

Under the Greek word we further find:

From Middle Indo-Aryan/Prakrit, cf. Pali siṅgivera, Sanskrit शृङ्गवेर śṛṅgavera (influenced by शृङ्गं śṛṅgaṃ ‘horn’) < Old Tamil இந்சி வேர் iṅci vēr lit. ‘ginger root’, cf. modern Tamil இஞ்சி iñci ‘ginger’ + வேர் vēr ‘root’.

(The above are basically Wikt, but I have edited their idiosyncratic style, vaguely resembling Merriam-Webster style but with a lot more parentheses, into something more standard.)

ObWanderingMind: Wondering about the Royal Naval Battalion from the Herbert poem above, I went to the WP article, which explains that the battalion distinguished itself at the Siege of Antwerp during WWI. Their peregrinations took them through the town of Sint-Gillis-Waas, a name which immediately caught my eye as being perhaps connected with my wife’s hitherto mysterious (but long-abandoned) birth-surname Waas. It is known that her paternals were Dutch Jews from the Maastricht area, but perhaps they got the name because they came from this town; it’s in Belgium but right on the Dutch border about 25 km west of Antwerp.

Sure enough, the arms of SGW (per Heraldry Wiki) show not only St. Giles, their patron, but also a beet:

Emperor Charles V once visited the city of Sint Niklaas [15 km south of SGW] and obviously a crowd gathered to see the emperor. Among these was a small farmer holding a huge beet, which he wanted to hand to the emperor. The guards, however, prevented the farmer to reach the emperor. The emperor, however, noticed that something was happening and asked the farmer what he had in his hands. The farmer answered that he had a giant fruit and that he wanted to give it to the emperor. The emperor was intrigued and let the farmer pass the guards. The emperor accepted the beet and awarded the farmer with a large purse.

Seeing the reward for a simple beet, a local horsebreeder imagined the award he would fetch if he gave the emperor a good horse. So he offered the emperor a beautiful horse. The emperor responded, saying that for a beautiful horse, he would donate one of his precious possessions, and handed the breeder the beet. Embarrassed the breeder had to accept the beet, which ever since has been the symbol of the Waasland and its fertile soil.

The Waasland is also called the Land van Waas, but here the trail goes cold, apart from a speculation that Waas is connected with waste ‘uncultivated land’; the soils there were waterlogged and poor before being drained. It was apparently the Waasland that first used turnips in crop rotation, a practice conveyed by Charles “Turnip” Townsend to East Anglia in the early 18C: the “Norfolk four-course system” uses wheat, turnips, barley, and clover in rotation, without a fallow year.

Gale loves beets, both cooked and in cold borsht with sour cream. (I don’t like the taste, and anything you put a beet into, save perhaps salad, tastes to me exclusively like beets, so we agree to disagree.) Perhaps it is an inherited propensity on her part.

(A pity that Gale’s father Len Waas and his cousin Les Waas, author of the Mister Softee ice-cream truck jingle and Provisional President of the Procrastination Society of America, are both dead: they would have liked this story.)

Are you telling me that Turnip Townshend didn’t invent crop rotation? It was [sic] a Dutch thing? I must say I’d forgotten him, though he featured many years ago on the O-Level History syllabus. Now the wilding people & others are saying crop rotation is very bad, although it took 250 years to find out. I was wondering if Gale might be related to Dave & Don Was but now I find out that wasn’t their real name! Two illusions gone within minutes.

Tell Me That I’m Dreaming!
Haha.
I haven’t thought about them in decades.
It’s where I dwell way too much of the time.

all states of the US* currently let their choice of presidential electors depend in some way on a democratic election

True.

(which, as it further happens, they all let end on the same day)

Not so true. Federal law dictates on what day the elections for presidential electors, representatives, and senators must occur. Originally, the states had a 34-day period ending on the first Wednesday in December to hold elections, but (in an amazing feat of quick and effective political response to technological change), Congress set a single date (the 29th day before the cutoff date) the very next year after the invention of the telegraph, so that word of early elections in some states would not affect later elections in others.

“as it further happens” was wrong; the election date – which, thanks to early voting, is actually the end of an extremely long voting period during which October surprises have been known to happen – is set by federal law, not state law as I thought last year. (…and I failed to wonder about DC.)

and 1836 (faithless electors)

Only regarding the VP position, which is actually supposed to be chosen by the Senate, not the House, in such circumstances.

Fun fact: the House of Representatives is supposed to decide between three top (electoral) vote getters, which means that someone who won in just one state could in principle win the election as a compromise candidate if neither of the other two got the majority of electoral votes.
The projections at FiveThirtyEight estimated a roughly 0.1% chance of this happening to Evan McMullin in 2016 (that is to say, an overall 0.1% chance, which is actually extremely high for a third-party candidate in the USA; IIRC, the chance of him winning if the election came to the House and he was in the running was estimated at about 10%).

Me, April 3rd, 2019:

all states of the US* currently let their choice of presidential electors depend in some way on a democratic election […]

* Except Georgia. Georgia’s election results have been unknowable since 2002, when paper-free electronic voting machines were used for the first time. The impending replacement does produce a paper receipt – which can easily be made to say something else than the vote it actually recorded.

These new machines were indeed used this time, and Georgia’s secretary of state, a Brad with the almost Austrian surname of Raffensperger, keeps getting death threats – along with his family, as usual – because he didn’t steal the election as he was supposed to.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

John Cowan, April 8th, 2019:

Further Pomerania

Vorpommern is Pre-Pomerania, like “Pomerania’s front porch”. It has also been called Vorderpommern, Front Pomerania, and lies next to Hinterpommern, Back Pomerania.

I wonder if physical world maps in school atlases have stopped mentioning Vorderindien (Indian “subcontinent”) and Hinterindien (Indochina).

(Hinterindische Verbindung “extremely exotic compound” is probably still in use in organic chemistry.)

“mit”

Bagdelen is the mildest term if you don’t want to go medical (or use very old-fashioned circumspections like den nederste del af ryggen). The statue is generally called Venus Kallipygos — I have no idea where the stress is officially supposed to be, I am classically corrupted and put it antepenultimately — and then you can snigger if you have the Greek. (Antiques dealers sell lots of Kai Nielsen statuettes under the name Venus af Kalipygos).

I missed the discussion on “shit”.

Doesn’t anyone use “ratshit”?

I’ve heard wretched pronounced that way…

my wife’s hitherto mysterious (but long-abandoned) birth-surname Waas.

While she was in the hospital but still talking, Gale responded to the classical orientation question “What’s your name?” with “Gale Laura Waas”. I explained to the doctor that it was her maiden name, but she hadn’t used it for more than fifty years.

 did you know it was ours alone?

Have to admit I’ve never heard the word in that sense. But then I’ve only lived in NZ since 1995.

I haven’t heard John Clark/Fred Dagg use it, nor Dame Edna. Perhaps it’s very dated?

Dill, n.6

Does occur in German as Dillo. It’s rare, though, and I don’t know how widespread it ever was.

I know dill “fool” from East Anglia (where I lived during my Blue Period); it’s not confined to Australia and New Zealand at all, even if the OED says so.

FWIW, Sampson’s altogether wonderful The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales doesn’t throw up any obvious Romani origin for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crazy_Stranger

And at Dilly adj. …

I nearly suggested some link with Dilly. (I’m still travelling so can’t easily access references but …) I see wikt has Aus dilly-bag.

And at 1873 could derive from Piccadilly. When did ‘Dilly-boy’ become a term for male prostitute? Do I remember that term in the Oscar Wilde biopic?

Dillo is the name of a lightweight graphical browser without Javascript support, which means that it can be used to escape from Javascript-based firewalls. The name is short for armadillo.