A few years ago I posted about the other, rarer mystery, the one meaning ‘craft, art; trade, profession, calling’ and deriving from post-classical Latin misterium ‘duty, office, service,’ altered from classical Latin ministerium by confusion with mystērium ‘mystery’ (in the usual sense’); at DC Blog I just found a beautiful example of its use in this discussion of the history of to-day, to-night, and to-morrow (which lost their hyphens around a century ago):
The steady disappearance of the usage in the 20th century was influenced by Fowler, who in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage comes out against it: ‘The lingering of the hyphen, which is still usual after the to of these words, is a very singular piece of conservatism’. He blames printers for its retention, in a typical piece of Fowlerish irony: ‘it is probably true that few people in writing ever dream of inserting the hyphen, its omission being corrected every time by whose who profess the mystery of printing.’
At least if you trust one wikiarticle’s etymology, the medieval “mystery plays” were so called not because of the supernatural/sacramental overtones of “mystery” (whose Greek antecedent had an ecclesistical sense millenia before Agatha Christie was born), but because they were typically run by the various craft guilds individually devoted to the art and mystery of baking, or cooperage, or goldsmithery, or what have you. Although another wikiarticle claims that this was Middle English wordplay capitalizing on the two different senses . . .
Ah, I see this subject was hashed out in the prior comment thread and indeed another point I might have made was made by me in that prior thread . . .
I’m never sure whether it’s more gratifying or troubling to come across an old comment one finds enjoyable, well written, and/or appropriate but can no longer remember making. And more than once I’ve posted something I thought was interesting only to have a reader point out that I posted the same thing a few years ago.
…by whose who profess the mystery of printing.’
I think “profess” adds to the charm of this use of the word.
What a to-do about little.
That’s “…by those who”, surely? An appropriate place for a typo, I suppose…
I’m never sure whether it’s more gratifying or troubling to come across an old comment one finds enjoyable, well written, and/or appropriate but can no longer remember making.
The best/worst is when you read through your own old comment with enjoyment and approval but don’t notice it’s your own work until you come to the end.
Exactly!
What a to-do about little.
Yes, that looks like a place where Fowler couldn’t have avoided a hyphen.
I dreamt last night that Hat had closed this thread with a message asking for further subjects we could profitably repeat, to which i was determined to be the first one to reply:
“We could do with another anti-prescriptivist rant. You can never have too many of them.”
I’ve got to try and diversify my browsing habits.
Aha, LH is infiltrating people’s dreams. Slowly my plan of world conquest comes to fruition!
Some great comments drifted in on David Crystal’s blog post over the years, including this wonderful observation of a moment in history:
And a couple of years later, the same commenter found that the Telegraph made that change in 1965, “between 27th April and 7th July”.
Crystal also remarked in the blog post, referring to all three words: “The current online OED says simply ‘also as two words and with hyphen’, though this is likely to be revised”. (That note was added in 1989 to the Second Edition, which removed the hyphens from all three headwords, where the First Edition had had them.) By now, today and tomorrow have been revised, and now have a note:
Note that they make no effort to be specific about “earlier”. They have only tried to collect representative samples for the *meanings* and not the spellings, so their last hyphenated examples are still decades before the actual end of use.
Incidentally, though tonight has not had its full revision, its Shakespeare quotes have been revised per Third Edition policy of using the earliest quarto publication, but one of these revisions is a slight mistranscription: in “I dreamt a dreame tonight .” (from Romeo and Juliet), it should be “to night.” A solid “tonight” would have been unusual in Shakespeare’s time, though I can’t swear it never happened. (Caution for digital searching: OCR on Early Modern English often reads “to night” as “tonight”, since that’s what it expects.)
After the thebboleth / tebolleth debacle, I don’t trust modern editions of anything.
from “Imperial and Foreign News” to “Overseas News”
The former seems more correct to me: N’Iron and Man are “Overseas”, but the former is definitely not “Foreign” and the latter may possibly be “Foreign” but is certainly “Imperial”. (The crown of England was first called “imperial” in a statute of Henry VIII, though I can’t lay my hands on its date or title at the moment.)
I don’t know how it works for English overseas but its German equivalent Übersee has a strong implication of distance and even exoticity, so you don’t use it for islands off the mainland belonging to the same country or even foreign islands that are only a couple of hundred miles away – one wouldn’t apply the term to Sylt or Haligoland, and even applying it to places like Bornholm or Britain would raise eyebrows. OTOH, you can apply it to places on the same landmass, like India or China, as those are places that used to be reached by sae travel.
@Hans: I haven’t perceived much difference in how the terms are used in English and German. Stu might have a more nuanced understanding, however.
Yes, English overseas definitely has an implication of “distance and even exoticity.”
I mentally translate English “overseas” as Bulgarian “отвъд”. The concepts are quite similar. Там някъде.
EDIT: Beyond the X?
Sorry, I failed to use proper orthography : тамъ нѣкъде — in there somewhere.
отвъд: “Значението на думата все още не е въведено. Можете да го добавите, както и да попълните част от останалата липсваща информация, като щракнете на редактиране.” Wiktionary doesn’t even give the stress; which syllable is it on?
It just means “beyond”. I’m surprised it’s not in wikitionary. The stress is on the ъ. It’s not an obscure word.
Thanks!
You commenting in Bulgarian threw me off for a second before I realized you were quoting generic wikitionary text — it’s unusual to me to see actual Bulgarian sentences here, however stilted in the wiki style. Seriously, “щракнете”? It’s a weird combination of high register and computer geek low register.
If I wanted to keep the register consistent, I would have used “натиснете”.
I wouldn’t describe Argentina (as seen from the U.S.) as “overseas”, no matter how distant and exotic it is. But I’ve never been there.
That’s because it’s not overseas, you can drive there.
Hans said that India or China could be called Übersee from Germany, and Brett said he didn’t perceive much of a difference from overseas. I’m pointing out why those two claims taken together with the anglophone non-use of overseas for places on the same continent don’t make sense.
Ah, good point.
I would want to see more evidence from a wider range of AmEng native speakers as to whether or not Argentina counted as “overseas,” rather than treat the combined intuitions of hat and John C. as representative. Certainly before the days of aeroplanes the vast majority of Americans who had occasion to visit Argentina did so by sea rather than overland. And of course you can’t actually/literally drive there (with any sort of normal vehicle) because of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap.
Sure, and I’d be curious to see a survey too. My opinion is mine and it satisfies me, but it holds no further sway.
Of course, the ability to “drive” from point A to point B does not necessarily exclude the use of car ferries to traverse a particular body of water that poses an obstacle to normal driving. I remember as a boy routinely going on trips where a car ferry was used to cross a fairly wide river at a point where the existing bridges were either too far upstream or too far downstream to be efficient to use. (Wikipedia tells me that the bridge that made that particular ferry obsolete finally opened to traffic in 1974.) My first father-in-law has childhood memories of a vacation in the early 1950’s in which his family drove from Havana to Chicago and back, using a drive-on/drive-off car ferry to ford the wet bit in between Cuba and Florida. (I think the paperwork formalities at the U.S. end before they let you drive off in your Cuban-license-plates car and keep heading north were pretty minimal in those days.)
But I don’t have the sense that the number of drivers trying to go straight through on the sogenannte Pan-American Highway is currently sufficient to support a regularly-scheduled car ferry between Panama and Columbia side-stepping the gap in actual drivable highway.
COCA has one hit for “overseas * Argentina”, namely “In 1982, a second course was held overseas in Argentina.” That’s pretty minimal.
@JC the anglophone non-use of overseas for places on the same continent don’t make sense.
I think Brits wouldn’t usually count France as ‘overseas’ — even before there was a tunnel. Or they’d do so only tongue-in-cheek.
When I was a kid, the family took a car ferry (overnight) to Norway. I wouldn’t really think of that as ‘overseas’ either. I think it needs a several-days/weeks sea journey to count.
FWIW, ODS (in 1936) defines oversøisk as hinsides verdenshavene. “Beyond Ocean,” that is, so England would not be overseas from Denmark. (The North Sea is not part of the Atlantic, in this view). The British world view may well have been different.
Also a larger class of ships was used for such traffic, and harbours would be classified by their ability to handle oversøisk traffik.
I actually tried a few years ago to figure out how to get from Mexico to Uruguay with a car. IIRC, it involved a Carribean island (Jamaica?) with regular car ferries to Vera Cruz (or maybe Cancún) and to Venezuela. The driveability of the remaining stretch was not determined at the time, since I had more interesting things to waste my time on, but at least there are highways marked on the map. And I’d really prefer a train anyway.
There are two inhabitated Columbian islands, San Andres and Providencia, some 200 km off the coast of Nicaragua. I don’t know if they have (ever had) car ferries to Puerta Cabezas.
IIRC, at the time there were well publicized doubts about the safety of Columbian highways. Not that Venezuela has a much better reputation now… If I were to repeat the exercise, I might look at Columbia first, or indeed French Guiana. As it were, I may have checked for ferries (or freight lines taking private passengers) on the Pacific side but I don’t recall if I found any.
Brazil extends quite far up the eastern coast of South America, bordering French Guiana, and borders Uruguay to the south. The Colombian route would mean crossing the Andes range at some point, and while field work in sweet potato nomenclature might be fun, it could also reasonably be called a detour.
As I was going back over this thread I came across this comment:
I dreamt last night that Hat had closed this thread with a message asking for further subjects we could profitably repeat, to which i was determined to be the first one to reply:
“We could do with another anti-prescriptivist rant. You can never have too many of them.”
I’ve got to try and diversify my browsing habits.
I thought, “What a curious comment”.
Then I noticed it was my own. This seems strangely apt coming after Hat’s earlier comment I’m never sure whether it’s more gratifying or troubling to come across an old comment one finds enjoyable, well written, and/or appropriate but can no longer remember making. Unfortunately I can’t figure out exactly what I meant at the time, especially the reference to browsing habits, so I can’t say that any combination of “enjoyable”, “well written”, and “appropriate” actually apply in this case. More like “maladroit”.
With relation to the current topic of the thread, I remember the late Japanese interpreter Masumi Muramatsu saying in the 1980s that Australia doesn’t describe visitors from other countries as “foreign”, preferring the term “overseas”. He claimed that this was because Australia did not want to refer to British citizens as “foreign visitors”, since Australians did not regard the British as “foreign”.
I thought this was a curious interpretation at the time. After all, Australia has an entire continent to itself, so “overseas” is a perfectly natural choice in the circumstances. Looking back, however, it seems to me to be spot on. I think Australians would still find it peculiar to refer to people from Britain as “foreign visitors”. (I think the same would apply to New Zealanders and Canadians, although not to Americans — although the universal use of “overseas visitor” would make it difficult to test this.) Interesting mentalities are revealed through the choice of words.
Interesting indeed. (And of course I love the previous comment, which with any luck you will eventually repeat…)
Me: Puerta Cabezas
It’s the head doorway to Nicaragua.
I think Australians would still find it peculiar to refer to people from Britain as “foreign visitors”. (I think the same would apply to New Zealanders and Canadians, although not to Americans — although the universal use of “overseas visitor” would make it difficult to test this.)
We see here the continuing influence of Calvin’s Case (1608) and its followup Craw v. Ramsay, which settled that a Scot was or was not an alien in England with the various disadvantages of alienage (notably the inability to inherit land) according as he was or was not born before the Union of the Crowns, these being the antenati and the postnati respectively. From the latter decision:
So Canucks and Kiwis “were [and are] born [or naturalized] under the same Liegeance” as Aussies and so were (at common law) “no Aliens” in the Commonwealth, but George III had declared under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1783) that Yanks were not now (however they had been born) in allegiance to him, and that in terms which would bind his heirs and successors forever. It has been well said that common lawyers have “little or no sense of time”: not only is Calvin’s Case good law not only in England but in America, but the opinion in that case makes reference to ninth- and tenth-century precedents.
And speaking of overseas, as late as 1803 we find a lawyer claiming in a Pennsylvania case that the statute of limitations did not run against the plaintiff because the defendant had been during part of that time “beyond seas” in the (neighboring) state of Delaware. I don’t know how the case came out, but at any rate the argument was not laughed out of court.
ObHat: Note the use (in the first-quoted paragraph of the decision) of “reason […] because” in a situation where we would today write “reason that” or “reason why”.