Stan Carey of Sentence first has an occasional feature he calls “Link love” in which he presents his readers with a bouquet of intriguing links; I hereby pass on to you Link love: language (20), which starts with “Emailing while sleeping” and concludes with a couple of rude bits from the Log. In between, one of my favorites was “Do you have a book with a title that was written by an author?”—a link to a 1978 cartoon by the wonderful Mark Alan Stamaty. I was working in bookstores in those days, and I can assure you that’s just what it was like.
As lagniappe: “L’Office du Jèrriais est l’office tchi fait la promotion d’la langue Jèrriaise.” Mèrci bein des fais, Geraint!
Do you have elaborate spam that was written by the spammer?
Yeah, maybe the title “Link love” was a bad idea. I wonder if Stan gets that kind of spam?
My parents honeymooned on Jersey.
Thanks. And to Stan too. I’m not through the links yet. I went into Replicated Typo and couldn’t get out.
I was on Jersey for a few days last summer – besides from a few bilingual signs on official buildings (where the texts looked like Standard French), one wouldn’t know that anything but English was spoken natively on the island. Among the non-tourists I met, I overheard many speaking Polish and some Portuguese, but noone speaking Jerriais.
Lots of placenames and road names are in Jèrriais, plus as from this year the new issue of banknotes has Jèrriais on. To have a good chance of hearing Jèrriais spoken out and about these days, you have to go to places like cattle shows, or country fêtes. But thanks to immigration, we have more Polish speakers and Portuguese speakers than Jèrriais speakers.
BTW you can spot a foreigner by the way they tend to say “on Jersey” or “on the island” in English. We naturally say “in Jersey” and “in the Island” (like in Jèrriais: “en Jèrri” and “dans l’Île”).
(And thanks for the link love!)
As long as the cattle speak it there’ll be no problem.
On bookshops: I had fun trying to buy the book called “What is the name of this book?”
I wonder if Stan gets that kind of spam?
Yes, but not so much for the Link Love posts. I can’t discern a pattern to the spam. Sometimes it’s a deluge, sometimes a trickle, and with few exceptions there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to it.
Thank you for the lovely link to my link love — the latest links are seeing a lot of love. To all who exhaust the post and thirst for more, I’ll happily recommend the archive; few of its links have dated.
I was born in Jersey, though it’s the one Across the Water (meaning the Atlantic Ocean or the Hudson River, depending on where you are).
So you speak Joisey rather than Jèrriais.
@John Cowan: New Jersey – Jersey’s second colonial settlement after Sark, I think (both now lost to us). There’s some interesting linguistic background to the Latin name “Nova Caesarea” for New Jersey. The attribution of the name “Caesarea” to Jersey probably resulted from an antiquarian misinterpretation of the list of islands in the Roman “Antonine Itinerary” compounded by scribal error or folk etymology that transformed a putative *”Caesea” (indicating a greenish island) into “Caesarea” (for Caesar). The greenish island in question was almost certainly (although it depends which expert one believes) Guernsey. Jersey’s Roman name was “Andium”, but antiquarians assumed that the supposed island of Caesar would be the largest island, and so the Latin names got misattributed. The name “Jersey” is Norman, with the typical “-ey”, meaning island, of Scandinavian origin.
GJ, thank you for those precisions! I hope to visit Jersey some day.
a putative *”Caesea” (indicating a greenish island)
So it’s not the moon, but Jersey that is made of green cheese (caseus) ??
@Grumbly Stu: “isle of cheese” is one of the few interpretations, I think, which has not in fact been floated. Latin “caesius” appears to be one of those words that denotes any point on a grey/blue/green continuum depending on cultural perception (is “caseus” cheese-related?).
Interestingly enough, for an island famed for its cows and the richness of its milk, there’s no real native tradition of cheesemaking (a point which is commented on historically by visitors). The richness of the milk meant that butter was the primary dairy product, and bread and butter was eaten instead of bread and cheese (cheeses of cheddar and camembert type are now produced commercially – you can check out “Lé Fronmage” from the Jersey Dairy http://www.jerseydairy.je/product-category?category=cheese). And while we’re on the subject of colour perceptions, in Jersey, milk is yellow (I regularly do a colour matching exercise in schools between grocery words and colour words – the children usually match the words for milk and yellow). “Milk-white” doesn’t resonate here.
is “caseus” cheese-related?
Geraint, caseus is the Latin word for cheese. As far as I can tell (not very far), it has nothing to do with grey/blue/green, tsars or “Caesea”. I was just being silly.
But if yellow milk goes slightly off, might it turn greenish ?
Jersey and Guernsey cows are worldwide breeds now, originating on those islands. They may be less popular than they were, with the health panic over animal fat. I still do see them now and then.
Wiki: “The unique qualities of the milk produced by the Guernsey cow have made the breed world famous. The milk has a golden colour due to an exceptionally high content of beta carotene. Beta-carotene is a source of Vitamin A, which has been touted to help to reduce the risks of certain cancers.[1] The milk also has a high butterfat content of 5% and a high protein content of 3.7%.”
Wiki also reports that people used to prefer “Golden Guernsey”, the brand name for all-Guernsey yellow milk.
Exports of cattle and semen were for a while an important economic resource for the island….
The OED gives:
Here is a citation:
@Grumbly Stu “caseus is the Latin word for cheese” : Oh yes, hence “casein” – which, luckily enough, is unrelated to the element “caesium”.
And “fronmage” comes from the “form” or mould that was used to press the curds.
“We call it frommage because it’s from a mold, like and outage when the power is out.
Exports of cattle and semen were for a while an important economic resource for the island.
Oh, blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down
Way aye blow the man down
We had Channel Islands’ milk when I was growing up, in London in the 60s. The bottles had a gold-metal top, and next to the ordinary silver-top milk it was much yellower — creamier, we said. I suppose only the cows were really from the Channel Islands, not the actual milk.
It actually was creamier, which dosesn’t help it nowadays.
I still remember fresh milk delivered to our doorstep, with the cream on top. On very cold days the milk would freeze before we got it and pop off the cap.
I still remember fresh milk delivered to our doorstep, with the cream on top. On very cold days the milk would freeze before we got it and pop off the cap.
Yup, same here.
And the birds would peck holes in the foil milk bottle tops which primary school children would collect and the mass collection would be sent off to some charity.
We’re old, in other words. For me wax cartons and homogenized milk were a real loss. In certain respects I have never recovered.
My mother gets milk in proper bottles, in New York. Some special kind that’s hand-made by honest cows. She has to pick it up herself at the shop though, they don’t deliver.
“Hand-made by honest cows”!
What the Krongs don’t know about the cows won’t hurt them.
We stopped at my friend’s house every week to get milk. His family owned a dairy farm. There is nothing like fresh organic unpasteurized milk.
It does a body good:)
Unpasteurized milk is so healthy that the occasional Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria deaths are not really anything you have to bother with.
Hmm. Fresh (unpasteurized) milk is blue, but fresh cheese is green.
I recently discovered that a dairy cow costs (in Norway) $2,500-$3,000 (1,800-2,500 euros). Buying your own milk supply isn’t cheap.
Unpasteurised camembert or brie has much more flavour than the normal kind. It’s worth the slight risk, in my opinion.
Unpasteurised camembert or brie … [is] worth the slight risk, in my opinion.
For sure. However, it’s a good idea to buy such things at a reputatable cheese store, not in a supermarket. The people who produce such cheeses are extremely cautious. They know what they’re doing and will give you good advice even when you think you know-it-all (there really are people like that …).
It’s the non-specialist retail outlets where ignorance reigns as to how to store things: temperature, humidity, how long etc. That applies not only to cheeses.
I once got mild food poisoning from a wonderful lait cru French cheese with an orange slime on it that I bought in a supermarket. In retrospect I would say that the cheese itself was already past its prime. I made the additional mistake of letting it stand around unrefrigerated for about 2 days so that it would be even yummier.
There’s a quite good cheese shop in Othmarschen, in Hamburg, with well-aged gouda — one of the few things I miss about Tyskland (they sell it here, but not so sharp).
Venezuelan beaver cheese?
Thanks, don’t mind if I do.
Unpasteurised camembert or brie has much more flavour than the normal kind.
Unpasteurized camembert and brie are the normal kind, and putting such cheeses in the fridge stops natural aging and flavour development. It is only the EU rules made by people unfamiliar with those types of cheeses that imposed pasteurization and refrigeration. (At the time of the ruling, Prince Charles came out publicly against it – who says Prince Charles has nothing useful to contribute?).
French people do not get food poisoning from traditionally made, naturally ripened cheeses. The mold on those cheeses is actually good for you: mold and bacteria are antithetical, as a French doctor discovered about three hundred years ago, long before there were scientific understandings and techniques to make use of this discovery in medical contexts.
Grumbly, the cheese that made you ill was probably contaminated by some foreign mold or bacteria unrelated to the cheese itself, after it left the dairy where it was made.
New Jersey – Jersey’s second colonial settlement after Sark …
Surely England was Jersey’s second colonial settlement, counting Jersey as part of Normandy …
I was told years ago in France that you should never put any kind of cheese in the refrigerator.
Of course, that was before global warming …
They make cheese in warmer countries too.
If (in spite of recommendations) you put cheese in the refrigerator, you should take it out well in advance of eating it, to bring it to room temperature, like red wine.
Most foods are safe unrefrigerated as long as flies and other such creatures are kept away. In Taiwan, a subtropical country, People had little screen hemispheres that they’d sometimes put over food instead of refrigerating it.
It’s tomatoes that should never go in the fridge.
Prince Charles has done a great job with his little organic farm and garden — other royal families could learn a thing or two from him about that — I just don’t want him or any other Germans as Britain’s head of state. Much better to have a goat, they know about cheese too.
I’ve just had a thought: when the queen dies, we could give Charles an honourary role as head of the Commonwealth. He could drift from place to place, waving and “learning” about things, poverty and so on, and all the Commonwealth countries could pay for it. Meanwhile Britain could become an aegocracy, with goats at Windsor Castle.
French people do not get food poisoning from traditionally made, naturally ripened cheeses.
Yes, marie-lucie, that was the point I was try to make, indirectly. Although the cheese had an orange-colored rind, I said “orange slime” because that was what it became after I left the cheese standing around. Die linke Bazille was clearly in my apartment, not in the cow.
A linke Bazille (dishonest germ) is a devious person who tries to take advantage of other people.
with goats at Windsor Castle
That reminds me … but Queen Mum’s the word !
AJP – it’s plain to see you are the “gafr gaffer”!
I was amazed to find out you don’t need to refrigerate eggs–I didn’t have a fridge in the Middle East for several years. When I make lebna (that thickened spreadable yogurt), it stays out overnight before being drained in a bag all day–it’s probably out of the fridge at least 24 hours. And unpasteurized camel milk is great straight from the camel mixed with a little mint tea and sugar.
Yes, I remember the milkman too (and the bottles with the cream at the top). At might my mother would put out the empty bottles with milk tickets in them. When it was really cold he would put the milk inside the storm door. I remember his singsong call “milkman” at the crack of dawn when he opened the door. He had sort of a munchkin voice. My mother always got up to take in the milk so it wouldn’t freeze. We would leave cookies for him at Christmas.
Eggs are very durable if not cracked. My sister and I don’t eat eggs personally but occasionally buy them for family gatherings (since some of us, following our mom, don’t believe that breakfast is real without eggs). Leftover eggs will last for more months than we remember.
It is only the EU rules
The FDA prohibits the importation and interstate sale of unpasteurized cheese aged less than 60 days.
Within a state, rules vary. A handful have bans, based mostly on people with already compromised immune systems dying of listeria (rather than having a few bad nights like Grumbly Stu). Pretty much every state has a PR campaign against unpasteurized cheese and yogurt, particularly in ethnic communities.
Here in Massachusetts, one can buy raw milk from a farm that has an inspection certificate. Last spring there was a crackdown on buying clubs, where a group would send a few people to pick it up for them. But after much negative heat from the locavore movement, the MDAR backed down on that.
MMcM it is only the EU rules
Sorry, I was only thinking of the traditional producers of Brie, Camembert, etc, not of cheese produced in the Americase.
@zythophile: As a conquering Norman, I draw a delicate distinction between conquest and colonial settlement. The conquered and the colonised may beg to differ…
And back to dairy produce: there are large swathes of Europe (without even venturing further afield) without great cheese traditions (I remember years ago mystifying some friends in Moscow with a camembert). The range of fermented milk products is fascinating, and among the delights of the Polish presence is the availability of kefir. And then there are the variations on tvaroh and smetana and suchlike.
a few bad nights like Grumbly Stu
It was only one night in the hospital. All they did was put me on a saline drip with an antiemetic and a soupçon of Novocain. Now there’s a pleasant way to restore the old animal spirits. My symptoms vanished within 20 minutes. After that it was all benevolence and floating on air.
I had two other such experiences within a space of two years – raw fish in a Japanese salad in 100-degree summer heat, a piece of supermarket meat that was ready-marinated, probably to disguise its age. I have become more cautious about what I eat, but I still go for sushi and unpasteurized cheese. At the worst I might have to go to the hospital briefly, but it’s well worth it.
I didn’t know the word “locavore”. The WiPe refers to a “2007 Dewey Health Review” that I couldn’t locate in the net:
I doubt that this study would stand up to a serious statistical review. The participants seem to have been neurotics (“night terrors”, concern for “sturdy bowel movements”), possibly overweight ones as well (“sleep apnea”).
I’m all for the basic idea of “local food”, but the ideological obsessiveness of some of the movement people is clearly visible. The same phenomena are present in Germany.
I am generally OK with people eating slightly-unsafe foods out of curiosity or because they like the taste. What really bothers me is when people drink raw milk because they think that it’s healthier or more nutritious, because it actually is less healthy. Here in Minnesota we just had an outbreak of e. coli infection sourced from a single dairy. No fatalities, but one near miss.
It’s odd, because raw-milk drinkers are the same people who refuse to eat commercial hamburger because of the danger of e. coli etc., the same danger as with raw milk.
When I was a kid we still got warnings about various diseases spread in milk, and it strikes me as a wonderful thing that we don’t have to think about them much any more. And it’s really annoying that health nuts are trying to revive the risk.
That’s interesting, Eel. Geifr certainly looks like geit, which is the Norwegian word for goat. I don’t know any Welsh, though, so it’s hard to tell.
My sister and I don’t eat eggs
In any form? Why not, John?
According to the Guardian, Jersey has more sunshine than the rest of Britain, but the information is being suppressed.
Because they’re cracked ?
We don’t refuse to eat eggs. We just don’t end up eating them because neither of us especially likes them, so eggs can sit in the fridge for a year untouched.
I’m all for the basic idea of “local food”
So am I. I was recently reading about the concept of high-rise farms, i.e. you will just take the lift down to the 14th floor, where they grow the arugula. It’s a good idea in some ways: no tractors required, water all concentrated in one place, etc.
Luckily I’ll be dead by then.
Dead of laziness, I don’t doubt. Instead of sourly fantasizing about how far away the 14th floor would be from your penthouse, you might consider smartening up your attitude. Go out and uproot some carrots ! Your sleep will be less fearful and noisy, and your chair will be sturdier.
We’ve all got to die of something. All the carrots will go to the horses in 12B. I want “Luckily I’ll be dead by then.”, an optimistic note, inscribed on my gravestone.
Curious detail: do you really want the final period (“dead by then.”) included in your epitaph ? Is there a convention for single-sentence epitaphs ? I wouldn’t know where to look in the net for reliable information. In the WiPe on epitaph, some copyeditor has defaced (“unwittingly” [?] improved on) the gravestones. Mel Blanc’s epitaph is reproduced as
but the picture of his gravestone shows
without a period. The quotes make sense, because the epitaph is a quote.
We’ll have to put Crung’s death on hold until we can agree on the punctuation.
I think he’s already trying to delay it. I wouldn’t put it past him, at any rate. Now he’s started a punctuation hare – he knew I would go after it.
Your lack of self-control really pushes our tolerance to the limit, Grumpy.
Obviously, if I’ve died, there should be a period at the end. Three dots would imply belief in the next world (as would a question mark).
@AJP Crown: According to us hardened cynics, Jersey Tourism are trying to whip up some free publicity out of a minor grumble, and a gullible press are spreading the information.
But surely free publicity is a Good Thing ? There must be someone clever working for Jersey Tourism.
If the punters are disappointed, Tourism can always blame it on the weather, i.e. global warming.
Everyone who doesn’t benefit directly from their presence hates tourists. There isn’t really much mention of the Channel Islands in London, lucky Jerseyans (Sweaters?), and I often forget they exist. Like Dearie’s parents, my uncle & his wife spent their honeymoon in Jersey (it’s peculiar that I’ve remembered this), in the early 1950s when there was an airline sending planes to & fro from England and it was probably more of a tourism hotspot.
I saw a documentary in German on the Channel Islands. It covered in gushing detail a few select places where supposedly the common tourists don’t go – and was thus auto-destructive coverage. Or perhaps another Jersey Tourism ruse ?
Cologne has more tourists in a year than have been in the Channel Islands for the last hundred years, I bet. Yet I can go from one year to another without ever encountering any tourists. I think they naturally agglomerate around certain things – like a big cathedral, the souvenir shops, topless dancing bars and the like.
Most of the inhabitants, like myself, have their noses to the grindstone 24×7 and no time or inclination to go to those tourist sites. So there is really no problem, right ?
I seem to have overlooked the fact that the Channel Islands are smaller than Cologne, so that there are fewer places whither to flee from the tourists. Perhaps, for more peace of mind, the Islands could be enlarged by wresting more land from the sea, on the model of the brave little Dutchmen.
The thing is that everyone in Jersey knows that the UK Met Office forecasts for Jersey are notorious for their unreliability. So the carefully-timed campaign of synthetic outrage from Jersey Tourism is mere machiavellian marketing. There are, of course, times – and all too frequent at that – when the Jersey Met Office seems incapable of simply looking out the window and accurately reporting what the weather is like at the moment, but at least they’re better than the UK’s feeble operation. The best forecasts come from France: if you know what the weather’s like in Saint Brieuc or Saint Malo, then that’s probably what’s heading our way.
On honeymoons, there was naturally enough a tax angle which explained the targeting of UK honeymooners during the off-peak holiday season. It’s explained in this BBC feature: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/jersey/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8812000/8812187.stm
To the English, as to many other primitives, big fat cows are a fertility symbol, especially big fat cows on semen-exporting islands. It’s all there in Frazer and Eliade.
I’d go to Cologne just to see the unwashed Rhine:
The river Rhine, it is well known
Doth wash your city of Cologne.
But tell me, nymphs! What power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
Geraint, can you tell us how Saint-Brieuc is pronounced in French, Jèrriais or whatever ? The WiPe doesn’t say, and for the monk Brieuc I find only these scatter-brained remarks:
I think I can conclude from this that in French one can say ~bri-euc~ with “eu” as in peur – but I’m not sure. That last aussi throws me off, because one of the aussis, ~bri-ec~, has already been stated.
Instead of “one of the aussis“, read “one of the forms”.
There’s a wonderful train ride you can take (I’m sure Crumbly will support me) from Cologne to Frankfurt that goes down the Rhine through vineyards and past Vierzehnheiligen or Melk or one of those great baroque places on the edge of a cliff (it can’t be them though because they’re miles away). It’s very nice to sit in the dining car. I did it several times when I lived in Tyskland.
If Jersey is trying to attract tourists, obviously they should just make up the weather forecast. Sunny and 82 degrees with a light breeze, that’s it.
Very few Aussies in the Channel Islands, I’d imagine. Maybe a few for the water sports.
Saint Brieuc: Rather than looking at the Breton version of the place name, it’ll be of more help to look at the Gallo version “Saint-Berieu”. For my own pronunciation: since my accent is rather a western one, I have an open “eu” tending towards “a”, so my pronunciation is probably of no help at all.
I have an open “eu” tending towards “a”
?? Oh well, Geraint, thanks for trying.
from Cologne to Frankfurt that goes down the Rhine through vineyards
That’s the old line along the Rhine. As Crown says, it’s a very pleasant experience, especially when sitting in the dining car sipping wine – which I always did too ! It’s even better, I think, when it’s rainy weather and the cliffs come and go in languorous fog. Don’t take the new line though, the one for the fast ICE that runs inland through Siegburg-Bonn, Montabaur and Limburg Süd to Frankfurt. There are a few one-tree-hill castlets in the aforementioned, but nothing to write home about.
The fast line is the one where, about three months ago, one of the doors of an ICE flew off the hinges just as it and another ICE were passing each other (maybe torn off by the turbulence). It struck one of the dining car windows of the other ICE and scared the bejeesus out of the diners.
Saint-Brieuc:
GJ, thank you for the tip. I don’t know Breton at all, but in French the name of the saint is normally pronounced as if the final c was not there: “briyeu” (as in “les yeux”).
It is possible that in an older version of French this was pronounced “bryeu” in one syllable: the Gallo pronunciation reflects the local insertion of a vowel between “b” and “ry” to break up the difficult sequence “bry”. In Standard French this is done by adding “i” betwen “br” and the sound “y”.
I always wanted to stop off at Koblenz but I never did. Actually I was going to Wiesbaden, not Frankfurt.
Yes, after all it’s Frankfurt am Main, you know, not Bingen am Rhein (which you must have passed). I didn’t want to mention it and be stamped as an incorrigible pedant. I am corrigible, a little bit.
Bingen am Rhein, Hatto and the mouse tower. Hatto?
Saint-Brieuc, of course, being the birthplace of Villers de L’Isle-Adam from the other thread.
You’re kidding!
The inhabitants of Saint-Brieuc are called briochins, which leads me to wonder about their consumption of brioche.
Hat: I grew up just outside the old PRICE-CHOICE merger isogloss, so it’s never been “Joisey” to me. Of course, that merger is now highly recessive even in NYC itself.
Well, I used to get milk in cartons; now I get UHT milk in cartons — I find I prefer the taste. And anything is better than milk in plastic jugs! Ugh.
I don’t hate tourists, and I live where tourism is the second industry after financial services (but I’ve neveer worked in it myself). I rather like it when they see me sauntering down the street reading a book, and assume that I can provide directions or help them to read a subway map. And what is more, I can.
I knew I was a New Yorker when I realized I could correctly tell tourists which direction Broadway was in, no matter where on the grid I was.
You’re kidding!
It’s true, I just checked: Villiers de L’Isle-Adam was born in Saint-Brieuc.
“Villers” crops up here occasionally. The French WiPe on Villiers says nothing about an alternate form, but “Villers” yields many search results in the net.
“Villers” crops up here occasionally.
Oops. It was a typo. I have no idea why I made it but mea culpa. There’s certainly no deep significance behind my mistake, just clumsy typing.
I have a feeling that the name “Villiers” is sometimes pronounced “Villers” in England (I could be wrong).
I have a feeling that the name “Villiers” is sometimes pronounced “Villers” in England (I could be wrong).
You could be right. Pope’s lines on the death of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham seem to back you up, because the name must be two syllables to fit the metre correctly.
In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half-hung,
The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies – alas how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim…
Yes, the English name Villiers is traditionally pronounced “Villers.”
The alternative pronunciation is /vilyɚz/, also two syllables.
Poor old Duke of Buckingham.