Via Adam’s Notes for January 30, I bring you this cacalicious quote from Chris Wickham’s Sleepwalking Into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century:
Girardo Cagapisto is significant for another reason, too: his name. It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say ‘shit’. The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this, and older historians at most refer to it glancingly and uneasily, although an excellent recent article by François Menant finally lists the names and discusses their etymologies; but it was certainly important for Milanese identity and self-representation. (Similar names exist in other Italian cities too—Menant stresses Cremona in particular—but they are not usually so prominent.) Cagapisto probably means ‘shit-pesto’—as, for example, in the pasta sauce. In the case of the two brothers Gregorio and Guilielmo Cacainarca, again both iudices and active consuls between 1143 and 1187, their surname means ‘shit-in-a-box’. That of Arderico Cagainosa, consul in 1140 and 1144, means ‘shit-in-your-pants’. Other prominent families included the Cagalenti, ‘shit-slowly’, the Cacainbasilica, ‘shit-in-the-church’, the Cacarana, ‘shit-a-frog’, the Cagatosici, ‘toxic-shit’, and there were many more. The twelfth century was a period when nicknames became surnames or even first names in Italy; there was a vogue for Mala- names, boasting of evil, among the aristocracy, for example (as with the Milanese aristocratic consul Malastreva, ‘evil-stirrup’), whereas in more clerical Rome, alongside some Caca- names, many names were formed from Deus-. But what would, say, the German court have thought, full of snobbish aristocrats from old families as it was, to find an authoritative representative from northern Italy’s biggest city called Shit-pesto? In fact, we can tell; for one of them, Otto of Freising, when he narrates with some schadenfreude the travails of Girardo in 1154, calls him Girardo Niger, ‘the black’, a name never attested in Milan, which Otto must have invented as a politer alternative. This may have also been in the historian’s mind when, just before, he wrote his famous trope about how awful it was that Italians allowed ‘youths of inferior condition’ and even ‘workers in the contemptible mechanical arts’ to assume the miliciae cingulum, that is to say public office. Not that it is likely that any of the people we have just looked at were also artisans, as Otto implies, but there is no reason to take that statement too seriously—anyway, for Otto, a medium landowner called Shit-pesto with a leading civic role would have been quite as bad as a rude mechanical. It is important to recognise that shit-words were not taboo in Europe in this period; medieval Europe did not ever match the squeamishness of polite society in the years 1750–1950 in this respect. The Investiture Dispute, for example, has clear examples of Hildebrand being called Merdiprand and similar by ecclesiastical polemicists on the opposing side. But this in itself shows that shit-names were at least insulting, in many contexts, in our period. Not always in Milan, though, evidently. The earthy sensibility shown by local naming, I would go so far to say, is one of the major Milanese contributions to the ‘civic’ culture of the twelfth century; and it was both new and, as they must have soon realised, aggressive to outsiders.
Supercacafragilisticexpialidocious!
Not worth a separate post, but it has been brought to my attention that there is a word tetraplegia that is synonymous with quadriplegia and that, according to the OED (entry from 1986), has been around, if not in general use (it’s not in my print M-W or AHD), since 1911. Why?? I realize that quadri- is Latin and ‑plegia is ultimately from Greek (though we got it from Latin), but so what? Does that justify creating a pointless alternative term just to confuse people? What’s next, teleorasis for television?
I’ve always said “tetraplegic.”
Perhaps they were not squeamish then, but poo smelled then as it does now, and “shit-in-pants” was an insult, even be it less, uh, visceral than it would be today. Why would anyone keep such a nickname? No one today would willingly adopt a nice, clean surname meaning “ugly fool” or whatever. I think there’s more to this than just greater equanimity in the face of feces.
Roman cognomina are frequently pretty unflattering, if not quite to this degree (Valgus, Varus, Calvus, Balbus, Strabo, Naso, Cicero, Flaccus, Brutus …) I recall a paper that linked this with the distinctively Roman-not-Greek literary genre of satire.
In Nkore-Kiga, all personal names are insulting, in order to avert the Evil Eye.
I’ve always said “tetraplegic.”
Huh. Is that how you were taught? Is it a Welsh thing, a Scottish thing, a Calvinist thing? (Presumably not an Oti-Volta thing.)
ha! in italian “tetraplegico” is the more common version with quadriplegico being a minor variation
? Recall the Sopranos’ convention of names like Uncle Pussy …
German doctors seem to prefer Tetraplegie. In everyday German it’s just Querschnittslähmung (a wider term).
There were real life mobsters with nicknames like “Big Pussy”.
So I guess it’s regional, like Eneolithic. Strange that I never ran across it before.
Already in 1898, the Nouveau Larousse illustré (1897–1904), under tétraplégie, condemns quadriplégie, vol. 7, p. 982, available here. Neither tétraplégie nor quadriplégie appear in the Grand dictionnaire universel (1866–1876).
I was wondering whether Charcot invented or intervened on behalf of any of these terms. Apparently Farquhar Buzzard attributed the invention of English quadriplegia to William Gull. Maybe someone can follow up on that.
Turns out if you try to find the wikipedia article on quadriplegia, it bizarrely enough redirects you to an article on “tetraplegia, which I had never heard of. Evidence that the site has been taken over by shape-shifting lizardmen from outer space?
I am still wondering about the question I posed here—whether mafia nicknames were a Roman cultural inheritance or something recreated later in imitation of the classical practice. (The thread is also has a wealth of information about Carolingian mafia nicknames.)
Perhaps [some subset of] medical professionals have convinced themselves that “quadriplegic” is a lay solecism/ shibboleth?
Me, I’m open-minded. I don’t even spit when people say “quadrilogy.” Not everyone has had my advantages.
However, the implication that “tetraplegia” is some sort of weird neologism confined to pretentious people strikes me as a bit … how shall I put this tactfully … American.
Tetrapods (zebras, people) and quadrupeds (zebras, mantises) overlap, but are not the same. Maybe quadrupods should be used for their intersection.
Hey, when I want to say “pretentious people,” I say it. I don’t use “shapeshifting lizardmen from outer space” as a mealy-mouthed euphemism.
FWIW, the google books ngram viewer shows “tetraplegia” moving significantly toward closing the frequency gap with “quadriplegia” since around 1990 but also shows “tetraplegic” moving mostly horizontally over the same time period and not meaningfully closing the gap with “quadriplegic.” I’m curious about the lack of parallelism; perhaps one of the pairs is more frequently used in certain contexts/registers than the other?
EDITED TO ADD: the reason the (English) wikipedia article on a particular subject should use the basic word for that subject from my idiolect rather than some synonym I don’t use as much has nothing to do with pretentiousness vel non; rather it is a logical consequence of the theoretical commitment to “neutral POV.” What could be more admirably neutral and unmarked than my idiolect, I ask you?
For medical info I go to the Cleveland Clinic instead of wiki. Not for better info, but because they speak American, like normal folks. They do offer a little sermon about why “experts” prefer tetraplegia. But they still rely on quadriplegia because you know what Americans think about experts.
Oh, for… Do they not understand how many English words “mix parts of two different languages”?
I can go to bed happy.
Yes, but those who already have them do keep them. Germany is adorned with a Prof. Deppert and a Prof. Wappler.
That’s also common in Cantonese, and maybe it explains why the name Nenad is so popular closer to home even though it looks like it ought to mean “not needed”.
Is there a good master list somewhere on the internet compiling such so-called English “chimera” words, which aggravate certain peevers by mixing Latin-derived morphemes with Greek-derived morphemes? One could probably concoct some pretty entertaining example sentences therefrom.
They can even be found in medical jargon, where Greek-origin roots that may be opaque to the layman are especially common and thus all-Greek compounds should be easier for the insiders to coin. “Tonsillectomy” appears to be one such example. One problem appears to be that the plausibly all-Greek “amygdalectomy” is dangerously ambiguous since the Greek word for tonsil (ἀμυγδαλή) somehow got eventually used in a loose metaphor to name a portion of the brain, which like literal tonsils is sometimes surgically removed, but I assume generally in circumstances where a tonsillectomy would not necessarily be desirable and vice versa.
OT, since we are talking about medical terminology: why do neurobiologists drop the article when speaking about parts of the brain, like “thalamus” or “cortex” instead of “the (ditto)”? A quick check of Nature Neuroscience suggests that the practice may be going out of fashion.
I am pretty sure this already came up on LH, but google cannot find, so here goes again: A certain merchant with last name Семижопов (seven arses) appealed to the tzar to change his name to something better sounding. The tzar reasoned that seven is too much and ordered to change the merchant’s name to Пятижопов (five of the same).
While looking into some quadr/tetr mutations, I came across a sport called (in US of A) “quad rugby” as an informal variant of “wheelchair rugby”, but the original name was “murderball”.
There was an eponymous 2005 documentary on murderball. I’ve heard it’s good.
Bigorexia
In England there is a family of Crappers, http://www.crapperandsons.co.uk that I know through their contributions to a charity I support.
There are claims that the word crap originates as a back-formation from the appliances made by Thomas Crapper, sanitary engineer, in the 19th century. But in fact he was born after the word was in use.
Of course, the genuine Milanese variant would have been the former, with Northern lenition.
The Romagnol used to be famous for their tradition of insanely extravagant names, partly out of anticlericalism (to avoid giving the name of a saint). One unfortunate girl was apparently named Antavléva (“I-didn’t-want-you”), allegedly by a father hoping for a male child after a succession of female ones. I do not know whether this actually happened, but Antavléva was striking enough to become the name of at least two fictional characters, in an Aldo Busi novel as well as in the worst Italian movie ever made.
“amygdalectomy” is dangerously ambiguous
cf. anorexic, anorectic, and anorectal
, the implication that “tetraplegia” is some sort of weird neologism confined to pretentious people strikes me as a bit … how shall I put this tactfully … American.
‘Tetraplegic’ is what I’ve always said, and I’m a Brit untainted by Celtic/Gaelic influence.
On a quick (unscientific) scan of a NZ news site, there’s about equal occurrences.
why do neurobiologists drop the article when speaking about parts of the brain
I’ve never encountered this in medicine (and I was a teenage neurosurgeon.) This only happens if the noun is used adjectivally, as in “brain rot.”
Unlike the Nkore-Kiga speakers, the Kusaasi are not greatly into apotropaic names, but they do have some. I used to work with an Atampuri “Rubbish Tip.” (Also an Aruk “Pot”, which is also an apotropaic name, though less obviously so.)
Antavléva= “io non ti volevo” in standard Italian? Wikipedia makes it seem like Romagnola, unlike Italian or French, is not a pro-drop language. It appears to work more like French, i.e. “a so”=”je suis” “Me a so”=”Moi je suis”.
It looks like romagnolo can be even more pro-add:
Mè a m’arcòrd ancora ad cl’eltra guera (io mi ricordo ancora dell’altra guerra) [lit. me ío mi ricordo ancora.. ]
https://www.cristella.it/blog/dizionario-romagnolo-a-l/
Ah, hence Amarcord.
@PP: The second mi looks like it’s reflexive, not a third subject pronoun; verbs of remembering are often reflexive (French je me souviens, German ich erinnere mich).
Yep, exactly. North Italian languages developed along very similar lines to French in this respect (as well as in many others): the old subject pronouns became obligatory clitics (that a being the phonetically very eroded remnant of ego), while the old oblique forms became (non-obligatory) subject pronouns.
To take the example of the closely related Bolognese:
a sän ≈ je suis
mé a sän ≈ moi je suis
Cf. also the similarities in negation:
(me) a (n) sän brîṡa ≈ (moi) je (ne) suis pas
and interrogative inversion:
saggna (< *sän-ia)? ≈ suis-je?
(ä = /ɐ/ or /ɛ̠/, in rather free variation. ṡ = /z̺/. ggn = /ɲ/, graphically doubled to signal that the previous vowels is short).
As I said, some version of such a system used to be more or less ubiquitous in Northern Italy. Nowadays, Emilian-Romagnol preserves it best, while e.g. Milanese — to sort of get back on topic — is gradually losing the clitics outside of the 2nd and 3rd person singular. (By way of compensation, in the 2nd sg. the morphological marker is repeated *three* times total: TI TE càntET ‘you (sg.) sing’).
(And yes, the m in a m arcòrd is the reflexive pronoun, just as in Hans’ examples or indeed in Italian mi ricordo).
Cagapisto probably means ‘shit-pesto’—as, for example, in the pasta sauce
Like hell it does. Some kind of mash or pulp, ok, but pesto (and pasta sauce in general) did not exist in the twelfth century.
One unfortunate girl was apparently named Antavléva (“I-didn’t-want-you”)
My husband’s great-aunt was named Erite, which sounds charmingly Greek to Italian ears until you get the backstory that it meant “eri te che non volevo.” When her father died the family didn’t exactly mourn.
@DE: Picking article titles at random from GScholar, I find “Regulation of the GABA cell phenotype in hippocampus of schizophrenics and bipolars”; “Representation of actions in rats: the role of cerebellum in learning spatial performances by observation”; “Cross-modal synthesis in the midbrain depends on input from cortex” [!], etc.
Titles have their own syntax, like headlines (if not to the same degree.)
You need examples from the text of the papers.
I mean, you may be right*, but More Research is Needed.
* I’ve never been a great one for reading neurobiology papers. Neurosurgery is really rather more akin to orthopaedics …
[Some instances may in fact be derived uses as mass nouns. I will never forget the wise words of a senior neurosurgeon I once knew: “You know, it’s amazing how much brain you can flush away down the sucker and the patient seems to be none the worse in the morning.”]
“Despite this, one consistent finding is that ERK activation, which at least to some extent, is dependent on neurotrophin concentration, is decreased in hippocampus and cortex of aged rats.”
“Further studies showed that lesions of different parts of cerebellum may result in different postural deficits because of their various afferent and efferent connections.”
“Conduction time was approximately the same whether the latency was measured from cortex to the [!] thalamus or to the more caudally situated tegmental area of the brain stem.”
Yeah, I think these guys tend to think in terms of substance rather than location or a specific part of a specific brain (unlike, you may be glad to hear, neurosurgeons, who tend to be finicky about precise location.)
In fact, if (God forbid) I were writing a neurophysiology paper, I would myself entitle it “Marmalade levels in rat hippocampus on alternate Tuesdays”) rather than “in the rat hippocampus.” “The rat hippocampus” sounds too pompous. Something for the definitive monograph rather than the research paper.
I once knew a actual research neurophysiologist quite well. I still remember him laughing as he looked through the neurophysiology sections in one of my medical textbooks. Perhaps it was the articles.
I would myself entitle it “Marmalade levels in rat hippocampus on alternate Tuesdays”) rather than “in the rat hippocampus.” “The rat hippocampus” sounds too pompous.
Max Stirner wrote a book which among other things is an attack on the word “the”.
I’m told that there are people who only read Playboy for the articles.
I was a teenage neurosurgeon.
Worst exploitation film ever.
Yes, you told us that the good man added a proud note about the imperial decree to every use of his new name.
Like the geneticists who find genes expressed “in mouse” or “in chicken”.
@rb, hans
Thanks. I suppose I have a weak “pleonasm parser”, so *”a me (ío) mi ricordo” is too much for it. In fact I do not find this phrase online (does not mean no one uses it, depth two “same” object pronoun piles without reflexive like a me mi pare/piace are used and don’t bother me). The Romagnolo sentence would correspond to a sentence in French like *”moi, je m’en souviens…”, which I think would also upset my “pleonasm parser”, something like * “ils ces romagnols sont fous”…
@Plastic Paddy:
You cannot find *a me (io) mi ricordo because it’s ungrammatical, not only in the school sense that your teacher will mark it as a mistake, but also in the stronger sense that the grammar of even spoken Italian doesn’t allow it. As Hans and Roberto Batisti already pointed out, the mi is a reflexive pronoun, which cannot be expanded into a me.
I suspect there exist varieties of Italian, diverging from the school standard, that admit the same pronoun pile-up as French “Mais toi, est-ce que tu te souviens?” in the more compact *”Ma te, tu ti ricordi?” (which I bet colloquial spoken French admits too).
I confess that subject te rubs me very much the wrong way, which only goes to prove it’s definitely out there in the wild (though perhaps not in my conjectured sentence). I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered subject me and would presume it doesn’t exist.
P.S. Not sure how your pleonasm parser will react to the observation that “Noi romagnoli siamo matti” is perfectly grammatical in even the most formal register, so much so I wouldn’t advise a non-native to use a first-person verb there without its pronoun.
@Giacomo: te tu is common (or indeed obligatory?) in contemporary spoken Florentine, but that’s because the second pronoun has become a clitic, just as in the Romagnol examples. This is one of several North Italian isoglosses that crept into Northern Tuscan (in this case, though, quite too late to be accepted into Standard Italian).
The actual reason why mi cannot be expanded into a me in mi ricordo has do to with its not being a true reflexive (in which case the substitution would be grammatical), but a so-called ‘inherent reflexive’, where the pronoun is lexicalized (actually, ricordarsi is peculiar because it also admits a pronoun-less variant ricordare with no substantial difference in meaning. But cf. arrabbiarsi ‘to get angry’, which cannot ever become **arrabbiare sé stessi ‘to get oneself angry’ [the English gloss probably sounds less ungrammatical than the hypothetical Italian construction, although that’s for native speakers to judge]).
Contrast mi do = do a me (stesso) (possibly perfectly cromulent, depending on context), or mi lavo = lavo me (stesso) (not something one would actually say except possibly for emphasis, but still grammatical).
I romagnoli son matti per definizione e li amiamo per questo : )
‘to get oneself angry’ [the English gloss probably sounds less ungrammatical …
This native speaker finds that informal but acceptable (and avoids labels like ‘ungrammatical’). I can imagine describing a toddler as ‘getting themselves’ into a paddy/temper tantrum.
@Roberto:
Thanks! My recollection of grammatical categories is indeed hazy. I can’t even actually tell if all object pronouns that merely happen to be the same person as the subject count as reflexives, let alone “true reflexives.”
Those, of course, we can both add and expand to the intrinsically pronoun-less ricordare, not as a synonym for ricordarsi but when it means reminding rather than remembering. I could certainly say: “ti ricordo, e ricordo anche a me (stesso) …” I hope I’m not so pompous as to add the subject (“io ti ricordo, e ricordo anche a me …”), but that isn’t a grammatical constraint. Instead, duplication of the indirect object I find so grating I’m pretty sure I don’t do it. Yet, I expect there are other speakers who could naturally say “io ti ricordo, e *mi ricordo anche a me …”
@rb, gc
I really appreciate your taking the time to expand on what must be obvious to you. The te-tu-ti sentence sounds like something Serge Gainsbourg would put in a song.
Noi romagnoli siamo does not bother my pleonasm parser, the pronoun and noun are in apposition, I think, *”noi romagnoli, noi siamo” would be inelegant and probably impossible.
Further to David Eddyshaw on apotropaic names, I was told by an anthropologist working in rural Cyrenaica c 1978 that the people there would not refer to a newborn baby by the name it would eventually have for the first nine months or so, but rather as “Ugly” or “Stupid” etc, for fear of the evil eye. After that dangerous period it was OK to call the baby Jamila (beautiful) or Mahir (clever) or whatever.
My mother once made the mistake of commenting to a neighbor that she had a beautiful baby. The woman, panicked, exclaimed mag‘il! mag‘il! kof! gan ḥayot! ‘disgusting! disgusting! monkey! zoo!’ That became a family joke with us. The way my mother told the story, the word mag‘il was pronounced with the pharyngeal, and with the /i/ as [ǝ], which makes me think the woman was from Morocco.
Oh yes. Mais toi, tu t’en souviens ? is how I’d put it.
Max Stirner wrote a book which among other things is an attack on the word “the”
In fact, not all languages with a definite article even can use it in the way Stirner objects to; Kusaal (you guessed it) can’t:
Din ka Kʋsaas ye …
that and Kusaasi [say] that
“That’s why the Kusaasi say …” (drawing the moral of a story.)
You could only say Kʋsaas la “the Kusaasi” if you were actually referring to specific group of Kusaasi people who you’d just been talking about.
This proves that Kusaal is more advanced than German.
Actually, English doesn’t do this so much, either. “Woman is fickle” rather than “La donna è mobile.” I wonder if that construction with generic singular nouns is modelled on French? “Les droits de l’homme …”
very guttural philosophy, the stirnerite.
The reader may recall that at one time Americans heard a lot about what the American Negro wanted and deserved. At least that’s the example I always think of. The EFL student may want to consider that some of us object to that kind of lumping, though my objections aren’t very guttural.
“the modern woman”
“the youth of today”
Both of these are a little dated in connation, maybe, but still in use I think.
OH WAIT here’s one I’ve been hearing way too much about recently: “the median voter”
Yes, generic “the” is certainly grammatical in English, but except with plural gentilics (“the French”, “the Clintons”) it generally seems to me to belong to an “elevated” (not to say, pompous) or (pseudo)scientific register. That’s why I wondered if it was some sort of borrowing; though I suppose the contemporary facts would also be consistent with it being an archaism.
I see that CGEL has a brief treatment of this (p407), calling it “class use of the definite article”; it says the use with singular nouns is “somewhat indeterminate, but is clearly facilitated in the context of species, inventions, and areas of study, interest or expertise.” Its examples include
“The human brain has fascinated me ever since I was a child”
“The hospital doctor is an endangered species around here”
“The chapter describes the English noun phrase.”
“The man in the street.”
Interesting that in most of these acceptable cases, the noun has a qualifier of some kind.
I remember in Ghana hearing people talk about “the youth”, and reflecting that I, and probably most UK native speakers, would say “we have a problem with youth”, not “the youth.” On the other hand, “the youth of today” or “the youth of Ghana” are fine.
I find “the modern woman” definitely much more acceptable than “the woman” used generically.
“The modern woman is educated and independent”
is grammatical, if clunky journalese, whereas
“The woman is generally less tall than the man”
is actually ungrammatical if taken as generic in isolation. Foreigner English. It would only be acceptable in a context where the generic man and woman had already been introduced: “When a man and woman have reached adulthood …”
@David Eddyshaw: In all the examples with youth, with or without modifiers, I would interpret youth as a mass noun. On the other hand, “The modern woman is educated and independent,” is talking about a prototype.
This was in contexts like “The youth are a problem” where it is not possible to interpret “youth” as a mass noun. Again, “the youth of this country are a problem” is fine; so, indeed, is “the youth of this country is a problem”, though that is ambiguous, and might be referring to (say) the lack of solid historical foundations of the USA.
But in fact “The youth is a problem” is flatly ungrammatical to me as a generic statement. It can only refer to a specific young person. And no mass interpretation is possible at all: if this is meant to be a complaint about the state of being young being problematic, it must be recast as “Youth is a problem.” However, yet again, the article is allowable if you add a qualifier: “The youth of the candidate was a problem.” The qualifier might be implied by the context, rather than being explicit: “The sex of the candidate was considered irrelevant. The youth was a problem.”
@David Eddyshaw: I find, “The youth of this country are a problem,” and,”The youth of this country is a problem,” to be effectively identical in meaning. The latter is interpretible as, as I said, using a mass noun, while in the former, youth seems to act as if it were a plural tantum. And while I don’t find the mass usage in, “The youth is a problem,” very euphonious, it strikes me as grammatical. Of course, we know there are significant trans-Atlantic differences in whether structurally singular nouns with plural referrents take singular or plural agreement; this may be an example related to that.
“The yoofs are a problem, innit?”
Consider “the female of the species is deadlier than the male” where I suppose “the female of the species” differs from “the female” in kinda sorta the same way “the modern woman” differs from “the woman.” The relevant way I guess is that the first of each pair is overtly generic whereas “the woman” often refers to some specific (hopefully discernible in context) woman, rather than Woman generically. And Generic Woman is often anarthrous in that register of English, e.g. whoever translated some supposed bit of Nietzsche (I’m taking this from a secondary source that I’m not entirely convinced is reliable) as “Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior. All else is folly.”
@Brett:
Would you really accept “The youth is a problem” in the sense “Young people in general are a problem” without some sort of preceding context?
I think a fair number of generic “the”‘s are actually “the” in its familiar sense of “previously referenced (or implied) in this discourse”; contrary to what grammars sometimes seem to imply, nouns in such cases need not have specific reference (anaphoric personal pronouns may likewise have generic reference.)
If I say “The shamelessness is scarcely believable”, this cannot be meant as a timeless truth suitable for embroidering on a sampler; if I come out with the line out of the blue as an opening conversational gambit, then either I am implying that we are both following the same news (so this is the “familiar shared background” use of “the”), or I am Griceanly trying to prompt you to say “Whose?” so that I can continue my rant.
In those CGEL examples David E. posted a bit upthread, the last one beginning “the chapter” seems very different, because it’s not describing some generic sort of chapter but some specific individual chapter (in some specific individual book) that presumably context would have helped identify. That chapter is parallel to “the shamelessness” in the example he just gave.
I don’t the the “the” in “the chapter” is intended to illustrate the point in that example: its the “the” in “the English noun phrase.” The whole sentence is presumably meant to be a snippet from a description of the contents of a book, where the various chapters are being described in turn.
I was a bit surprised not to find more about this in CGEL, though it’s the kind of topic that tends to get scattered over many places, so I may just not have looked hard enough. But these issues, where the grammar is highly sensitive to overall context and discourse factors, are very difficult, and even very good grammars often struggle with them.
@J.W. Brewer: Was your secondary source William Shirer? I thought I recognized that translation as the one he quoted, since I am rereading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and so had my memory of it refreshed last weekend. Indeed, that does appear to be how Shirer quotes that passage in the book. He evidently took it from the 1890 translation by Thomas Common (about whom little is apparently known; quoth Wikipedia: “There is little information about him biographically, though indications are that he was a well-educated and literate scholar”). That was probably the translation that Shirer first read when he was young, although he was obviously fully fluent in German (among other languages) and could have emended it if there were anything deficient about Common’s rendering.
I looked at the original German text. and what Friedrich Nietzsche wrote was:
Common’s translation looks pretty accurate to me, although I would have used “reproduction” instead of “procreation”—as the former is both a more common word and slightly closer to the precise sense of the German. I am also reminded that Thorheit (“folly,” and a word Nietzsche uses a lot in Also sprach Zarathustra) just seems to be a very funny-looking and funny-sounding lexeme.
@David Eddyshaw: Yes, the mass usage in, “The youth is a problem,” is grammatical for me. It would sound better to say, “The youth is the problem,” but I don’t think that has anything to do with how youth is being grammatically construed.
I think on reflecting with my own Sprachgefühl (always a questionable activity) that I must concede the point re “youth”; I also agree that it confuses the issue considerably that it can be construed as plural. In such cases, I think it’s in much the same bucket* as “the French” (or “the young”, come to that.)
I do think that there is something going on with this business of adding qualifiers, though. Maybe English “the” can be generic, but not too generic.
The Nietzsche-Zitat couldn’t be rendered into English as
“The man shall be trained for war and the woman for the procreation of the warrior” in the Timeless Truth sense that the old syphilitic intended. That English sentence would need instead to be taken as part of the instruction manual for a planned Fascist utopia, probably where the New Adam and the New Eva had already been selected.
On the other hand, it would be repellent-yet-grammatical if it went “the superior man shall be …”
* Technical term from X-bar theory.
@Brett. Yes, Shirer, on whom I was unwilling to rely uncritically and I didn’t have sufficient time or interest to try to locate the underlying German or another translation thereof. Nietzsche certainly isn’t as much a magnet for false attributions as your Einsteins and Mark Twains, but one can’t exclude the possibility, especially in an environment like early 20th-century Germany where lots of Nietzschean-sounding quips might have been floating around that would seem more authoritative if attributed to Nietzsche himself. (In other words, it sounded much like something he – or perhaps a character in one of his works, if that’s not always the same thing – might have said, but still …)
i think there are some semantic limits on what can be genericized with “the” (as opposed to the “previously mentioned X” usage). the core usage, it seems to me, is with national/ethnic groups (“the American has an entrepreneurial character”; “the Hun is advancing on the Eastern front”; “what does the Pole want from a Chicago mayor?”; etc), and it mainly expands towards groups that can be understood by analogy to nations/ethnicities (“the Catholic crosses himself in one direction, the Orthodox in the other” “the teenager cares only about rock n roll and smashing the state”; “the aardwolf eats termites”). i think that’s part of why phrases that further delimit groups (“the modern woman”; “the unionized worker”; “the youth of today”) work a bit better – they’re more clearly bordered, and so easier to map onto nationhood.
Talking of Nietzsche-snippets, I gather from Duden that his impeccably Republican “Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!” is consistently misquoted as “Wenn du zum Weibe gehst, vergiss die Peitsche nicht!” Googling seems to bear this out.
IIRC Duden (lost my copy when I went to Africa) cites this as an instance of the differing connotations of Frau and Weib, but I also note that the pop-wife-beater version introduces an article absent in the original.
I had settled on the snippet I did because an initial google of what David E. referenced yielded a variety of purported English translations which may well in part have been a function of a variety of purported German originals. That the two German texts vary in arthrousness may be noteworthy but I would not assume that the idiomaticity/gramaticality of the presence/absence of a definite article in any given context would correspond 1:1 between English and German. And we already have trans-Atlantic differences within English, such as whether “to be in the hospital” or “to be in hospital” is the idiomatic phrasing. The other difference in the German is the use of plural “Frauen” in lieu of singular “Frau” as a generic. Using an article with the plural might well be weird for different reasons than using an article with the singular might be.
To rozele’s examples, note also the oft-referenced here “very guttural language, the Irish” (or the whatever). I suppose the *speakers* of a given language either are a nationality/ethnicity or can be analogized to one, so it’s only a small further step to the language itself. Or it may be that the arthrousness there is supposed to be dialectical and deliberately a little non-standard-sounding.
I agree that “the woman is typically shorter than the man” sounds like foreigner English, as David E put it. (Though I think your finger was in the scales when you wrote “less tall”, which adds to the awkwardness unnecessarily).
But does “the hand is typically shorter than the foot” seem acceptable to others? It does to me. What about “the geek is typically smarter than the jock”?
It has me wondering whether our instincts on this issue are less grammatical than substantive, related to (understandable) modern discomfort with reifying and speaking categorically about inherent human groupings
I would not assume that the idiomaticity/gramaticality of the presence/absence of a definite article in any given context would correspond 1:1 between English and German
Yes, I get the impression that even non-hifalutin German is a lot keener on generic definite articles than English is. But we have Hatters amongst us ideally qualified to comment on the issue.
Kusaal (in which the definite article can never be generic) and French seem to be at opposite ends of a spectrum.
@Ryan:
I’m sure you’re right in at least some domains; that also goes along with rozele’s point. I was wondering myself how much of this is syntax-à-la-Chomsky and how much is semantics (I, of course, deny that you can even separate the two except as a convenient practical approximation.)
With “the” and generic plurals this has of course been an actual political issue. I’m sure we’ve previously discussed this somewhere (generally a safe bet …) That is presumably Stirner’s focus, though (as we’ve been exploring) there are wider grammatical issues too.
Ah, yes, rozele did get there first.
@JWB: despite my crack about stirnerism above, i’m not really certain about how to parse the “the” in the house specialty guttural line. do you think there’s an implied abbreviation or omitted duplication of the preceding noun at play (“the Irish [language]”)? it’s also different from the examples i gave in not being a construction that uses a single exemplar (“the Hun”, “the aardwolf”) to stand in for the category (germans (or, i suppose, huns, depending on the century); aardwolves). but it being a phrasing that doesn’t, to me, feel at home in u.s. english makes me even more unsure how to understand it – an irish sprachgefühl (shprakhgefil?) seems like it’d be helpful?
Stirner may be being a bit naive linguistically if he is overinterpreting a cross-linguistic primarily syntactic issue as political. I doubt whether the Kusaasi are innocently free of all tendencies to stereotype ethnic or other human subgroups*, or that the French are much more given to this sin than the English. This might be a bit like those stupid attempts to make out that social attitudes correlate with whether a language has grammatical gender. Or not: Stu will know.
* In fact, Kusaasi friends had no hangups at all about explaining to me about stereotypical Ashanti, Kusaasi, Mossi, Mampruli, Europeans … Political correctness had not then made it to northern Ghana. Not by any means always negative stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless.
Common’s translation looks pretty accurate to me, although I would have used “reproduction” instead of “procreation”
I would use neither. Nietzsche writes “Erholung”, which means “recovery”, “convalescence”, “relaxation”. Nietzsche isn’t talking about reproducing, he appears to be talking about the woman’s role as nurse/sex provider to the man. Unless Erholung has some obsolete meaning I am unfamiliar with.
Re Ryan’s point re “modern discomfort,” it is probably true that you are less likely these days to see stirring texts like the following: “The Scotch type is one which has found many representatives in the New World, and is one that has ever been found foremost in giving impetus to the march of progress, in retaining a clear mental grasp and in directing affairs along safe and conservative lines. … The gentleman with whose name we are pleased to grace this article, Mr. L.S. Huntley [NB: one of my great-great-grandfathers], is the descendant of a Scotchman, and in him are found many of the sterling characteristics of his worthy ancestors.” This from Vol I. of _A Memorial and Biographical Record of Iowa_, published 1896.
@rozele: I don’t see nations as the prototypical example. Using “the” with the name of a species, or in “the female has different plumage from the male”, doesn’t seem particularly related to nations to me, and there are other uses the OED reminded me of, such as “He plays the piano” and “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Further examples are left as an exercise for the student.
As a general note, the OED says under the “animal, plant, or precious stone” usage,
“Not now used with man or woman, except as opposed to child, boy, girl, or the like: contrast the view that man is the norm, and woman is the opposite but better with the child is father of the man and you can see the woman in the little girl.”
Another note:
“With names of languages. Now chiefly Scottish and Irish English, except in elliptical use (e.g. from the German = ‘from the German language or from the German original’) or in the construction the—for—is ‘the equivalent for—in the—language is’ (e.g. the French for house is maison).”
I’d understand “Very guttural language, the [whatever]” as elliptical, but I wasn’t around when it became a thing here, and I could be wrong.
stirner, i think, is more than a bit naïve.
and JF makes a good point about “the piano” and “the pen/sword”! i do think, however, that those are the same kind of exemplar-for-category substitution that i was talking about, and that for uses about humans and animals the center of the semantic field is nation/ethnicity(/species), reinforced by the wider personification of that category. i’m now wondering, though, whether the human uses are all better understood as elliptical, as all the language examples so far have been: “the Hun[nish people]”; “the Aryan [race]”; “the female [gender/sex]”; etc.
Perhaps, rozele, though your earlier example “What does the Pole want from the mayor of Chicago?” works differently than these.
Notably, my mind doesn’t interpret that as being synonymous with “What do the Polish want?”
@Vanya: Huh, I had somehow (perhaps even originally influenced by this translation of Nietzsche) gotten the idea that Erholung meant “re(-)creation,” rather than “rec(-)reation.” I wonder how many times that led to confusion? (It’s probably not many, to be honest.)
On the topic of “the German” or “the Pole,” I am further reminded that, in older explanations of Tsar Alexander’s comment about “the sick man of Europe,” the “sick man” was sometimes characterized not as “Turkey” or “the Ottoman Empire,” but rather as “the Turk.”
I find ‘we have a problem with youth’ quite odd – I’d try to read it as ‘we are too young’ (lacking experienced members?). (Although I think I’d say ‘our youth’ rather than ‘the youth’ for what DE meant, despite it technically also allowing my misreading. Language is odd.)
”The youth of this country is a problem” suggests that it’s newly independent and hasn’t quite sorted itself out yet. Making my instincts unusually different from DE’s for once!
‘The Irish’ is grammatical but a bit informal for me – ‘he speaks the Gaelic’ is stereotypically something that a teuchter might say…
Hatters will be thrilled to learn that the reason why “in Welsh” in Welsh is yn Gymraeg instead of the expected *yng Ngymraeg is that the definite article formerly intervened: yn y Gymraeg “in the Welsh.”
I’ve no doubt but that you’ve all wondered about that.
@Ryan: would you say more? to me, those are pretty much identical in meaning – “the Pole” is a bit old-fashioned (i’d expect “polish voters” or maybe just “the polish” more recently), but that (and maybe an implication of a slightly obsolete version of nationalist / ethnic politics) is the main distinction.
For me, “the Pole” does call to mind what Brett called a prototype, though I’m not sure that’s quite right. It calls to mind the true model of a Pole. “The Polish” doesn’t have that implication of an individual for me. But both suggest some unitary sense of what it means to be a Pole/Polish, while for me “Polish voters” allows for variation from the norm. I’m not sure why that is, nor that others believe the phrase “Polish voters” carries the message I’m trying to burden it with, but that is why I tend to avoid the article and say Polish voters in those contexts.
(The French seems more colloquial and natural than the Polish for reasons that aren’t clear to me, maybe -ish constructions feel less like nouns for some reason, but I was trying to parallel your use of “the Pole”.)
That’s fascinating about youth. In German, Jugend is the abstract state of being young, and by extension it often refers to all young people as a resolutely singular mass noun; the archaic-literary barely adult man is a Jüngling… and that word is obsolete to the point of being risible. It was not used to refer to the Jedi kindergarten.
They’re both equally wrong, and rather stunningly so. Erholung is what Vanya said, to which I’d add “recreation” as in going on a quiet vacation or smoking pot; “procreation”/”reproduction” is Fortpflanzung.
Sounds just as funny in German, where it’s thoroughly obsolete nowadays (though well known). The introduction of orthography in 1901 cut down on how funny it looks, though, by reducing the purely cosmetic th to a mere t.
That’s because the original* is plural: “if you go to (any) women”. The pop-wife-beater version uses the generic singular (which has become rarer, and therefore more pompous, than in English): “Goest thou to Woman, forget not the whip!” – and that, in German, requires the definite article.
* …which I’m stunned to discover. I knew Nietzsche got flanderized after he died, but didn’t know this wasn’t limited to antisemitism.
Article usage even increases as you get away from hifalutin. Large parts of the west and south use definite articles obligatorily with personal names; and at least the linguistically Bavarian dialects even use indefinite articles obligatorily with mass nouns e.g. in “there’s water in there”, “if sand gets in”, “I have money”.
Why would not Thorheit be “Thorhood,” i.e. the state or condition of being the Norse god of thunder? Sounds more bad-ass than mockable, if you ask me.
So women are really there for helping the Warriors unwind. Glad there’s no X-rated stuff in there. I expect dulcimers are involved in some way.
Interesting stuff about articles in unhifalutin German. I knew the thing about personal names, but not about mass nouns. It does suggest that I may have been right about Stirner mistaking a purely contingent linguistic difference for an ideological position (he wouldn’t be the first.) But maybe his book is more sophisticated than I am imagining.
Greek is another instance of a language which uses definite articles with proper names – abstract nouns, too.
Someone must have written a treatise about how these things vary cross-linguistically. (Languages vary also in whether definite possessors and/or personal pronoun possessors automatically make the possessum definite – I think that’s another thing we’ve discussed before.)
Various kinds of Spanish also use definite articles with personal names. I’m not sure which ones, though – maybe in Colombia?
Yes.
Dulcimers and food and sex on demand. Everything, thoroughly.
Hausa definite article usage seems to be like Kusaal, though even Jaggar’s very extensive and detailed reference grammar treats the issue fairly briefly, and comments on the difficulty of pinning it all down neatly. The similarity is probably not accidental: there are quite a lot of semantic similarities between Hausa and its (genetically quite unrelated) Volta-Congo neighbours. On the other hand, developing definite articles from weakened demonstratives seems to be a worldwide phenomenon, and there must be a huge amount of convergent evolution. As it were. Proto-Western Oti-Volta seems not to have had articles, and even quite closely related modern languages have very similar article usage (as far as I can tell – grammars rarely do a great job of treating it) while the articles themselves are not related. Other Oti-Volta languages have quite different systems, not marking the same categories at all.
Songhay too seems to be quite different again in this. Lameen will know, of course.
Everything, thoroughly
Amazing language, German. All that from one verb …
On Nietzsche’s Peitsche, loathsome though the sentiment is, the original, I think, is a minor example of N’s artistic skill: Frauen is surely quite deliberately chosen over Weiben, to contrast with the violent character of the proffered advice. The merely thuggish version misses the point.
Various kinds of Spanish also use definite articles with personal names. I’m not sure which ones, though – maybe in Colombia?
Northern New Mexico, I assure you. I’ve been told both that it’s respectful and that it’s disrespectful. One thing it’s good for is trying to think of names. “He married… la… la… la Yvonne, what was her last name?”
ETA: I’m remembering what I heard when I moved here 30 years ago, and then it was people over 50 or so.
Are nationality jokes allowed here?
“Are you latina?”
“No, I’m la María. La Tina stayed in Costa Rica.”
[‘kosta ‘ʒika]
I’ve seen people from Spain use it, but I don’t know the regional or social distribution.
In AmEng, at least, “dulcimer” is fatally ambiguous as between referring to a so-called “hammered dulcimer” (apparently Hackbrett, auf Deutsch) and the so-called “Appalachian dulcimer.” So I have no idea what our valued Welsh and/or Austrian contributors are referring to because I don’t know what the unmarked/default meaning of “dulcimer” in their idiolects might be. Perhaps the Nietzschean Superman can somehow use a Peitsche to coax sound from either possibility, though?
That the Hebrew lexeme in the 3d chapter of Daniel that the KJV renders as “dulcimer” is rendered in other translations as “bagpipe” is yet a further complication.
Chilean Spanish, at least colloquially.
The topic came up here before, for sure.
Kusaasi friends had no hangups at all about explaining to me about stereotypical Ashanti, Kusaasi, Mossi, Mampruli, Europeans
Actual proverb I discovered in Naden’s dictionary:
Ya’a pɛsig kambʋŋ zɔŋɔ o faandnɛ dɔɔg.
if hand.over Ashanti entrance.hut he seize.Imperfective.Focus house
“Give an Ashanti a hallway and he’ll take over the house.”
(Not altogether an unnatural sentiment to find among the “Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland.”)
@JWB:
My dulcimer was from “Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream.” Ask Coleridge (once he’s come down.)
I thought I saw Sam Coleridge last night, alive as you and me…
I like Coleridge very much, but I am not ashamed that I have only read Rime of the Ancient Mariner as the comic book by Hunt Emerson (with a snarky introduction by Gilbert Shelton). Both similarly brilliant, each in his own way.
I would highly recommend the original. The sidenotes alone are worth the entrance fee. Also “Unhand me, greybeard loon!”
It mystifies me that anybody can take it seriously. It is basically high camp. But it’s altogether wonderful and infinitely quotable.
I’ve also read Christabel, though I have yet to meet anybody else who has. It’s not up to Rime of the Ancient Mariner level, but it’s worth the time. It has a (sympathetic) lamia and a Sophist (with a capital “S.”) What’s not to like?
On reflection, I think there actually is one common thread in definite article usage in all of the Oti-Volta languages which have articles at all, in Hausa, and (I think) in Songhay: the definite article varies when it comes to things like previous-mention, shared-background or mass versus count, but in any case it is not used with generic reference. Unlike most (all?) of SAE that has definite articles at all.
So “can the definite article appear with generic reference” might be the one for the WALS guys to plot (assuming they haven’t done it already. Haven’t looked.)
DE: It is the original (minus the marginal notes) — but with illustrations highlighting the camp, every iota of it and more.
trans-Atlantic differences within English, such as whether “to be in the hospital” or “to be in hospital” is the idiomatic phrasing.
And recently a new one for me: “are you going to prom?” [teenager in Heartstopper]
> And recently a new one for me: “are you going to prom?” [teenager in Heartstopper]
Thats how we said it at California public school about 15 years ago. If Hearststopper is set in Britain (as the wikipedia summary makes it sound with its talk of school “forms”) then it seems less like an example of cross-country difference and more like different dialects closing a gap!
(Im also familiar with people using the definite article there –i.e. “Are you going to the prom?” — but it sounds markedly old-fasioned to me)
If Nietzsche had been the product of an English public school, readers would not have consistently misread the statement about the whip. Friedrich was a very naughty boy.
Also, in the other quote, an editorial conspiracy has changed the original Züchtigung to Erholung.
If Hearststopper is set in Britain … different dialects closing a gap!
Brit end-of-term socials (which only happen in posh schools, which I think wouldn’t apply here going by Wikipedia description) are called ‘balls’ or ‘formals’.
‘Prom’ in that sense has always been only U.S. AFAIAA — and wiktionary agrees with me.
Is Stu sure that’s what he heard? Even if it was ‘Proms’ that would be arthrous.
@de, et al.
The use of the article for the language in Irish is similar to Welsh, i.e., “in Irish” is “sa Ghaeilge” contracted from “in san Ghaeilge” (with article). But you would just say “She is speaking Irish” (without article). The Christian Brothers’ grammar has:
—
7.14 Úsáidtear an t-alt freisin sna cásanna seo a leanas
…
le hainmneacha teangacha nuair atá a mbrí forleathan: is í an Ghaeilge
teanga ár sinsear; tháinig an Béarla isteach; bhí an Ghearmáinis go maith aige
—
The [definite] article is used also in the following cases:
…
with the names of languages in general statements [lit. when their meanings are general]:
[with article] Irish is the language [without article, i.e., “language”] of our ancestors; [with article] English came in, his German was good [lit. he had the German well]
One would prefer an interlinear edition of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in order to see what Ethiopic (? or maybe Tungusic?) lexemes he was rendering by “damsel with a dulcimer.” Although here’s someone who thinks the phrase was a typological prophecy of Jean Ritchie (1922-2015), who played an Appalachian/mountain dulcimer rather than a hammered one. https://sandiegotroubadour.com/jean-ritchie-damsel-with-a-dulcimer/
I expect it has come up on prior threads, but there has been a quite definite shift in AmEng over the course of my lifetime in the arthrousness of “prom.” U.S. teenagers of my generational cohort idiomatically went “to the prom” (if they went at all) whereas U.S. teenagers of my daughters’ cohort idiomatically went “to prom,” even though the phrase sounds bizarrely wrong to the ears of their elders. No obvious rhyme or reason to it, just random-walk linguistic change. I am younger than Stu but sarah is older than my daughters.
My end-of-primary-school dance was called ‘the qually’, despite the fact that there hadn’t been a qualifying exam (rough equivalent of 11+) for maybe 20 years. End of high school was ‘Sixth Year Function’.
But I think most of the high school ones are called proms now.
End of university was ‘Graduation Ball’ – I think St Andrews holds more random formal events (because what else is there to do in St Andrews), and might even call them ‘formals’, but I don’t really know.
For a BrEng datapoint, I note the arthrousness in XTC’s fine 1979 number “Life Begins at the Hop.” That’s wiktionary’s sense 5 “(UK, US, slang, dated) A dance; a gathering for the purpose of dancing.” Not clear to me whether it was already dated-sounding in a Swindon context by ’79, although it could have been. In an AmEng context I think of a “hop” as the sort of dance my parents’ generation went to when they were in high school in the Fifties, but there of course may have been regional variation etc.
At (the) hop.
@jen
Didn’t anyone go to their debs?
Is Stu sure that’s what he heard?
I’ve watched Heartstopper about 40 times by now, so I’m sure. Any of you book boys have anguishes about that, we can step outside.
U.S. teenagers of my generational cohort idiomatically went “to the prom” (if they went at all)
Same.
An instance of “to prom” near 6:10 on Netflix: Sorry.
‘‘Prom’ in that sense has always been only U.S.’ was true 25 years ago, but isn’t now. I’m not sure how universal proms are in the UK (not enough contact with the relevant age group), but they’re certainly not uncommon. ‘Balls’ and ‘formals’ I didn’t encounter until university. In the mid-to-late nineties we still just left school after doing our exams (ritual burnings of uniforms by small groups on Cannock Chase lacking both names and official sanction).
I had wondered about yn Gymraeg, so thanks DE.
Probably XTC got the “at the hop” phrase from Shanana’s version in the Woodstock movie.
It would have been Weiber.
Note that the whole chapter uses 3 words: das Weib — that’s in Zarathustra’s lofty sexist generalisations, das alte Weiblein — his interlocutor*, who pretends (?) to agree with his sentiments and who herself at the end uses Frauen — real live women, individuals, who might be quite different from Z’s (not necessarily Nietzsche’s) generalisations, and perhaps that’s why he might need a whip if he should meet one of them.
And let us not forget that famous picture of Nietzsche with Lou Andreas Salomé, whe she holds the whip, and N. looks simply ridiculous with his oversized mustache.
And the title of the whole chapter is “Von alten und jungen Weiblein” — how could this chapter ever be read as anything but irony?
*possibly imaginary, Z. says she spoke “zu meiner Seele”; this may be simply the faux biblical style of Z., but perhaps it means the whole conversation takes place in Z.’s imagination. Which may prefigure N.’s own descent into mental illness, whether it was schizophrenia or neurosyphilis.
> And recently a new one for me: “are you going to prom?” [teenager in Heartstopper]
Thats how we said it at California public school about 15 years ago. If Hearststopper is set in Britain (as the wikipedia summary makes it sound with its talk of school “forms”) then it seems less like an example of cross-country difference and more like different dialects closing a gap!
I was in California public schools more than 30+ years ago and we would have always said “going to the Prom” with a “the”. Maybe this is really a generational difference, or maybe it’s both that and cross-country influence from Britain (or somewhere else.)
My mother (b. 1920, Martin County, far Eastern KY) used to say “in the bed” for “in bed”–I mean she didn’t have “in bed.” I think I also remember “I’m going to the bed.”
The Abyssinian maid’s dulcimer was presumably of the hammered type. the plucked Appalachian “dulcimer” was shown (or at least asserted) long ago to be a variety of the German zither.
Wikipedia asserts with great specificity but no citation that “Life Begins at the Hop” is based on recollections of “Friday night youth dances that [Colin] Moulding, in his teenage years, had attended at St. Peter’s Church in Penhill, Swindon.” Moulding was 23 when XTC released the song and it does sound rather like a 23-year-old’s memories of being let’s say fifteen and so green you couldn’t go somewhere w/ booze and had to ask girls to dance in a church hall offering only nuts and crisps and “c-c-c-cola on tap.” I don’t doubt he was likely familiar with Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop” song, with or without the mediation of Sha Na Na, but the question remains whether Swindon teens of circa 1970 contemporaneously used the now “dated” sense of “hop” to refer to such wholesome youth dances. Of course they might have just seen the Woodstock movie at some cinema in Swindon and picked it up from Sha Na Na.
Of Swindon I can say nothing, but I seem to recall that in the 1970s we Young People of the United Kingdom usually referred to such events as “discos.” Those were different times …
‘The Hop’ could be a proper name, in which case it would be a minister’s or earnest volunteer’s idea of what teenagers might call a dance…
@Rodger C: The hammer dulcimer, being trapezoidal with screw-mounted strings, seems to be a zither which merely has strings that are struck rather than strummed. However, that’s not to say that the Appalachian dulcimer isn’t just as zither-ish, albeit in a different way.
My understanding is that hammered and Appalachian dulcimers are part of a family of plucked and hammered instruments like the medieval psalter and the qanun that are spread across large parts of Europe and Asia.
There is even a Mexican variant called the salterio that can be heard in this famous waltz by Mexican composer Juventino Rosas:
https://youtu.be/9hqfs50tpo4
That instrument is often used in Mexican film and television to evoke a sense of nostalgia in scenes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Reminds me of Háry János:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cimbalom
Likewise, in German you can go ins Bett (i.e. in das, with the article) or zu Bett; a geographic difference as far as I’m aware.
Thanks Stu. Case closed without need to step outside.
I’ve simply never heard the usage in Blighty, neither could I find a dictionary saying it had crossed Pond. Fair point that I’m nowhere near that milieu neither have I seen the series.
Grauniad crossword today:
I’m coming in sore after first of defeats – might I have been hammered? (8)
I like the chemistry-themed online cryptics better.
In general, British-style cryptic crosswords are hard, both because of thr nature of the clues and because they have more gaps than an Anerican-style square crossword. However, they are peculiarly easier in one respect; the clues always reveal the how multi-word answers break down. This is unnecessary but totally taken for granted by British cruciverbalists; I recall an online discussion of whether some peculiar phrase in a story was intended as a puzzle, when a Brit insisted that it could not be a crossword clue, because it did not include numbers of letters at the end.
D ulc(IM)er
ugh
Thanks for the explication! I wasn’t going to ask yet again…
I saw from the clue that it had to start with ‘d’ and probably contained ‘im’; that let me work out, from the fact that there must be some relevance to this thread, the solution. I had to puzzle out the relevance of sore in the clue, however, even after I knew the answer. But that was doing it all in my head; had I written down ‘[d]ulc[im]er’ everything would have been obvious.
For me, visual clues are very powerful at triggering verbal recognition and memories.* Doing crosswords on a computer rather than paper is very helpful to me, because I can stick in and erase letters with ease. Very often, just adding one guessed letter to the two or three or four that I already have in a long word will, if the guess is correct, immediately let me recognize what the full answer should be.
* I encountered this in a new form just last week. As I wrote to a friend the next day:
Wikipedia asserts with great specificity but no citation that “Life Begins at the Hop” is based on recollections of “Friday night youth dances that [Colin] Moulding, in his teenage years, had attended at St. Peter’s Church in Penhill, Swindon.”
There’s backing for this and more discussion of the song’s background here.
And on the datedness (not so much of the phrase but of the feel of the song):
@Brett: I must say the assumption “that that there must be some relevance to this thread” seems a questionable one to me given the range of Hattic practice, even if you got lucky with it this time.
Hey! My comments are always relevant!
(Just because some people have difficulty with following my dazzling intellectual leaps …)
@Ian Preston: I appreciate your further detail. The unsourced wikipedia thing did seem a little too weirdly specific to be a total hallucination. I also enjoyed CM’s “No …” answer and question the questioner’s grasp of these things because there is in fact a very stereotypically “1979 New Wave” feel to the song in question. By sheer coincidence I have just listened for the first time in quite some years to the entirety of the 1985 “debut” by the Dukes of Stratosphear, who depending on who you ask either were (a) an obscure late Sixties UK psychedelic act whose recordings were finally being released 17 years late; or instead were (b) Colin (sub nom. “The Red Curtain”) and his XTC bandmates pretending to be ditto as a lark. It holds up very well and ironically the fake-Sixties sound somehow means it now sounds more timeless whereas a lot of the late-Seventies/early-Eighties XTC-under-their-own-name stuff sounds very “period” and sometimes somewhat dated. Stop being so goddam “clever” and “quirky” I say to the clouds as I shake my elderly cane.