Rowen, Roughings.

I’ve always liked the word aftermath (which sounds so old I’m surprised to learn from the OED it only goes back to 1496: “Item iijs. iiijd. yat ye same Water r[eceyved] of Recharde Andru for aftur mathe of Senjorge Closse” in W. H. Stevenson, Records of Borough of Nottingham III. 296), and I recently learned of a couple of interesting synonyms. Rowen (attested from 1440: “Raweyne, hey [Pynson MS. rawen], fenum serotinum,” Promptorium Parvulorum 424) is from French:

< Anglo-Norman rewayn and Middle French rewaing, revayn second growth of grass, aftermath (c1285 or earlier in Anglo-Norman; compare earlier Old French rewains autumn (mid 13th cent.)), variant of Anglo-Norman and Middle French regain, in the same senses (c1176 in Middle French; French regain) < re- re- prefix + gain harvest (see gain n.²; compare gain v.²); in β forms and probably also in α forms showing folk-etymological association of the first element with row adj. (compare later roughings n.). Compare post-classical Latin rewaynum, reweynum, regainum, rewannum, rewannium, regwannum (frequently from 1230 in British sources).

It’s “Now chiefly English regional (south-eastern and East Anglian) and U.S.”; I’d never seen it, but sure enough, the AHD has it (as New England). And from it, in some obscure fashion, is derived roughings (from c1575: “All the roughen and feedinge of the Edishe is free for the townshippe and parisheners untill Candlemas daye followinge,” Auncient Custoums Dedham in G. H. Rendall, Dedham in History ii. 33), “Originally English regional. In later use also U.S. regional.” That one is unknown to the AHD, but the OED has this citation from the Lebanon (Pennsylvania) Daily News of Aug. 10, 1914: “Plow and harrow the earth very fine and turn under a good fertiliser; some use roughings and manure.”

Huh, and what do you know, there’s yet another word, eddish “Grass (also clover, etc.) which grows again; an aftergrowth of grass after mowing” (from 1468: “Frutex, a styke, a yerde, and buske, vnderwode, or eddysche,” Medulla Gram. in Promptorium Parvulorum 136), but that one is “Of uncertain origin.”

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    eddish

    My mother encountered this word in the wild in the oeuvre of D H Lawrence*, and decided (having married into the name) that “Eddyshaw” must go back to a primaeval “Eddisher”, presumably “Dweller on the Eddish.”

    This theory turns out to be incompatible with what is known of the actual history of the name (we appear to be, rather, the People of Goat Ridge),

    https://languagehat.com/mer-monk/#comment-4474138

    but it might have given us some much-needed Lit Cred, I suppose.

    * Having been traumatised by reading The Plumed Serpent when I found a copy on the bookshelf of a holiday cottage, I have not myself delved any further into Lawrenceworld.

  2. I imagine fans of “aftermath” and “rowen” have read Longellow’s poem “Aftermath”. (I’d read it, since Avram Davidson mentions it somewhere, but I wasn’t curious enough to look up “rowen”.)

  3. There is also “afterclap,” oldest citation from 1587, according to Wikiwand, Merriam-Webster, and other places that offer wisdom on the Internet, but afterclaps tend to be surprising and often unpleasant. Could this be where “the clap” comes from, referring to gonorrhea?

  4. David Eddyshaw says

    Idly chasing up references from WP’s F R Leavis page, I came across a Spectator article by William Gerhardie (March 16, 1962) which cites the following assessment of The Plumed Serpent. (I think it’s from Hugh Kingsmill, but the archive has unfortunately cut off the attribution):

    Not so lush as The Rainbow and Women in Love, The Plumed Serpent is at least as preposterous; the difference in verisimilitude being only such as might exist between Tennyson’s Idylls of the King rewritten in a madhouse by Dostoievsky and Rider Haggard’s She transposed by Nietzsche into the style of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

    I think this is a bit mean to Dostoevksy and Rider Haggard, but otherwise quite fair.

  5. Yes, it’s from Hugh Kingsmill, D.H. Lawrence, p. 209.

  6. David Eddyshaw says

    “The biography’s inadequacy ‘lies in Kingsmill’s reluctance to linger for any length of time upon the positive nature and quality of Lawrence’s genius.'”

    Personally, I am quite prepared to accept that The Plumed Serpent is a literary atrocity so atrocious that it could only have been created by a writer of genuine genius. (I feel much the same about Idylls of the King, a view which seems to have been shared by Kingsmill … it would be a pity if anybody first encountered Tennyson through that and was put off, say, In Memoriam. Too late for me and DHL, though.)

  7. David Eddyshaw says

    Almost entirely irrelevant (but this is LanguageHat), in the course of pursuing F R Leavis’ notorious attack on C P Snow’s The Two Cultures (which is what Gerhardi was responding to), I came across this excellent article by Lionel Trilling on the affair (in the course of which he actually does a much better job of refuting Snow than Leavis did):

    https://www.commentary.org/articles/lionel-trilling/science-literature-culture-a-comment-on-the-leavis-snow-controversy/

    (There are also some uncomfortable points bearing directly on our current political problems, and some eminently sensible remarks on great writers with repellent politics.)

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    Though the definitive critique of Snow’s thesis can be found here:

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=VnbiVw_1FNs

  9. I came across this excellent article by Lionel Trilling on the affair

    Ha, I actually have that in a Trilling collection my mother-in-law (of blessed memory) gave me many years ago! I shall read it forthwith.

  10. Having written my MA thesis on Lawrence and C. S. Lewis half a century ago, I now find Sons and Lovers and The Abolition of Man pretty much all I can stomach from them respectively.

    My high-school English Lit. textbook had “Gareth and Lynette” among the selections and (IIRC) only bits of In Memoriam in the section introduction. Of “Gareth and Lynette” I remember very little, but I can still recite those bits of In Memoriam.

  11. OK, I’ve read the Trilling article and am glad I did so; it confirms my long-held belief that Snow was neither a good writer nor a good thinker, and I like Trilling’s take on the controversy. But I was also reminded of why I rarely pick up Trilling for pleasure: he writes with a kind of plummy expansiveness that I associate with Oxford dons and makes me long for a good old barbaric yawp like Ez’s “Literature is news that STAYS news.” And referring to Snow as “Sir Charles” would make me bristle in any event, but what’s a nice Jewish boy from Queens doing bending the knee to the port-sipping class?

  12. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Linking two threads once again (although I can’t remember which the other was), almost all I know about C P Snow is that he wrote a book which everyone in Gaudy Night disapproves of.

  13. David Eddyshaw says

    His novels aren’t that bad. I count myself an expert, having read the whole Corridors of Power series bar the last, which I started but gave up on out of sheer boredom. The Light and the Dark is the best of them, I think. A perfectly decent novel. And The Masters is entertaining, at least. He’s got a strange tell-not-show style which takes some getting used to.

    I would think it would be the two-cultures stuff that would get up the noses of all self-respecting Sayers characters other than outright villains.

    I haven’t given Snow much thought for years. I suppose he was what we rabid left-wingers now call a technocrat. We hates them, precious. (But he certainly meant well, as Trilling – unlike Leavis – appreciates. And he made many perfectly valid points, too. As they do …)

  14. David Marjanović says

    Though the definitive critique of Snow’s thesis can be found here:

    “Don’t synthesize anything I wouldn’t synthesize!”

  15. For me, “Sir Charles” will always mean Barkley. I was never a fan of Barkley (who was a huge asshole), but he was a significantly better power forward than Karl Malone (who was also even more of an asshole).

  16. referring to Snow as “Sir Charles” would make me bristle in any event,

    Yes, bristle so much I can only read the piece in short bursts.

    What’s going on with the occasional “Charles Snow” (4 of, compared to 66 “Sir Charles” and one “Sir Charles Snow”)? I suppose “Sir Charles” is mostly contrasting to “Dr. Leavis” — who quite often appears as bare “Leavis” but also occasionally ‘F. R. Leavis”. “C. P. Snow” appears a few times, and bare “Snow”. “Arnold” is mostly unadorned after introduction, but there’s a few stray “Matthew”s; no “Mr. Arnold”.

    It’s a proofreaders’ nightmare.

    It’s like the piece was written in several gobbets and stitched together later. I can’t see that the styling is betraying particularly-snide mentions vs mock-respect.

    Was it not standard practice by 1962 to refer to your protagonists using bare surname after introducing them in full?

  17. David Eddyshaw says

    I think this is just meant as elegant variation.
    Could be worse. At least he never says “Sir Snow.”

    I don’t think Trilling is really into the mock-respect thing. And after all, in this article he’s responding to Leavis’ famously intemperate and ad hominem attack on Snow, so pointedly good manners would be the order of the day, even if Trilling had been given to that kind of snark, which I don’t think he was (though Hat will know better than me. I haven’t read a lot by him.)

    Much of the naming strategy seems par for the course for 1962 to me. (Though I was quite young at the time and may be misremembering …)

  18. No, snark was not in Lionel’s wheelhouse. I don’t think it had been invented yet.

  19. I strongly suspect that Trilling didn’t become the first Jew tenured in Columbia’s English dep’t by coming off as unclubbable to or unassimilable by the port-sipping class.

    Of course, you can tell I went to an unusually posh (by US standards) US university and/or moved in eccentric circles therein because sometimes in my undergraduate years we would drink cheap port out of plastic cups as a respite from drinking cheap beer out of plastic cups, which was not a variation I think the median or modal US undergraduate of the time pursued.

  20. David Eddyshaw says

    cheap port

    They have that, in America?
    Explains so much …

    (No doubt de Tocqueville notes the phenomenon.)

  21. @David E.: There may have been cheaper, but what I recall pouring into those plastic cups was usually the lowest-end Sandeman’s Ruby. You can get a bottle of that around NYC for maybe $15 these days if you know where to shop. I don’t remember pricing as of four decades ago, but it must have been … a lot less than that? Reasonably competitive at the time w/ cheap beer once you adjusted price for %age alcohol.

  22. David Eddyshaw says

    These anthropological insights are one of the many pleasures afforded by this site.

    * Sniffs disdainfully in a superior manner *

    (Talking of sniffing disdainfully, I was just reading something of Trilling’s which draws parallels between Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche … obvious once it’s been pointed out …)

  23. These anthropological insights are one of the many pleasures afforded by this site.

    Indeed. My undergrad years it was all cheap beer, but we did stretch to glasses for it. (Doesn’t a plastic cup make it taste even the cheaper?)

    Cheap port was as in port’n’lemon for the ‘ladies’ of indeterminate age and morality in the Snug.

  24. cheap port

    Chateau Fleet Street

  25. I went to the same university at around the same time as J.W. My circle didn’t drink a lot of port. Or any that I can recall, but we weren’t fussy. I do remember a dumb phase when we were all drinking Brass Monkey and Four Roses because we public school kids/rock musician types liked to flaunt our proletarian backgrounds in front of the Exeter/Andover kids.

    I also recall a lot of cheap vodka, which prepared me well for my future career working in Russia. My education did have some value.

  26. J.W. Brewer says

    Four Roses! (This was, it should be noted, at a time when the Four Roses brand had gone very downmarket/bottom-shelf in the U.S. The owners have in more recent decades significantly improved the quality of what’s in the bottles and thus recovered much of the old-timey prestige of the brand.) I was a Jim Beam White Label man myself in those days when it came to whiskey. Ideally swigged straight out of a half-pint bottle rather than decanted into a glass of any sort. Although I don’t know (and shudder when I now think about it) exactly what godawful cheap-ass well whiskey was involved when you ordered a bourbon sour at the not-yet-gentrified Anchor on College St. from that colorful-to-psychotic lady (Dee? Dot? something like that …) who was there for decades.

    Somewhere in there during sober intervals I was learning the morphosyntax of NT Greek and Old Norse and also having meandering discussions in a subterranean seminar room about ergativity in Dyirbal. Good times!

  27. Dee was her name, she was a classic. I remember those bourbon sours, it may not have even been Four Roses quality but who noticed?

    I just remember „Venus“ by Shocking Blue playing on the jukebox there seemingly endlessly.

  28. Good god, the Anchor! It’s even got its own Wikipedia page. It’s apparently now revived as the Anchor Spa.

  29. The new establishment inside the Anchor space which perpetuates the name makes nice upscale drinks and seems to be run by perfectly nice people but is so radically unlike the old Anchor that it is IMHO in poor taste to keep the same name. I can’t claim to have conducted any sort of exhaustive survey, but if one wants a friendly/divey drinkin ambiance near campus the place known as Three Sheets (presumably as in “to the wind”?) that’s in the old Rudy’s space by the corner of Elm and Howe is currently a good option. (Rudy’s got gentrified and relocated to Chapel St., on the other side of the same block – I think – that once held Kavanagh’s, where we would go for the Mudslides if we wanted a more upscale cocktail experience than the Anchor offered. The Eighties were pretty dire for cocktails, actually …)

  30. I don’t think I want to go back to New Haven — well, maybe for a Pepe’s pizza, but I fear trying to revisit my old haunts. When I did it twenty years or so ago it was already too depressing for words.

  31. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @David Eddyshaw:

    cheap port They have that, in America?

    The dark recesses of the bottom shelves of American liquor stores hosts 3-liter jugs of “Taylor Port,” produced in New York with (shudder) Concord grapes and sold under that label in the land of the free for so long it’s the Portuguese import known elsewhere as Taylor’s Port that must be relabeled “Taylor Fladgate” for the US market.

  32. @hat: Pepe’s has turned into a multi-location chain – it looks like the locations closest to you are at the latitude of Hartford. Not the same ambiance as the mother ship but at least at the Yonkers location (close enough to my house that you can drive a take-out pie home without it cooling down overmuch) the quality of product is pretty good.

    The expansion of the Sally’s Apizza empire out from its Wooster Square Urheimat is much more modest but they do have an outpost in Wethersfield just south of Hartford as well as one in Stamford which is close enough to my house to go there to eat in but not IMHO to do takeout. The Modern on State Street (my own none-of-the-above answer to the traditional Pepe’s/Sally’s question) has thus far refused to replicate itself anywhere else.

    National pizza cultists have become increasingly enamored in recent years of Zuppardi’s in West Haven as an equally excellent practitioner of the old-school New Haven style. It was never on the radar of most students because at least by my unrigorous day three miles from campus didn’t sound walkable, but it’s very good and if you’re arriving in the area by car it’s just as convenient and maybe more so (parking sometimes less challenging). If you plan your route right you could avoid N.H. proper.

  33. Yum, Concord grapes. OK, I’m not saying they make good wine.

  34. JWB: Thanks, that could be useful information! I’ve never heard of Zuppardi’s and would love to try it.

  35. I fear trying to revisit my old haunts. When I did it twenty years or so ago it was already too depressing for words.

    Hmm. I have a significant birthday coming up and am agonising whether next year I should revisit old haunts in Blighty (as probably it’ll be the last chance to travel that far/that long). Perhaps they won’t all be “too depressing”?

  36. Oh, the town itself was fine — it was my foolish desire to revisit old haunts (like bookstores) that not only disillusioned me but eroded my memories of what had been. Visit Blighty, but do it carefully!

  37. J.W. Brewer says

    For almost any American city, “hey, what’s going on with the bookstore scene?” seems like one of the worst possible focuses for a return visit if hoping to avoid evidence of change for the worse since circa 1980. You could probably only do worse if what you’d most loved about the old New Haven was its payphones and pinball machines. Or maybe if you were hoping to catch a minor league hockey game and didn’t know that the team and left town and that arena had been demolished w/o being replaced.

  38. There’s no way I’m going back to haunt the bookstores and dives around Harvard Square. Many of them had already disappeared, replaced by generic franchises, before I even moved away. I know I have mentioned the Bow and Arrow (which wasn’t my place, but I had friends who drank there), which closed long before The Handmaid’s Take‘s crackdown on immorality. (The Bow and Arrow was across Mass Ave from The Wall wherethey hung up the corpses of abortionists.)

  39. J.W. Brewer says

    @Brett: Earlier this year I was near Harvard Square one day and stopped for a drink at Grendel’s Den, possibly the nation’s only still-in-business dive bar to have won a U.S. Supreme Court decision (in 1982, back when Bill Rehnquist could still end up on the losing side of 8-1 votes), and it didn’t seem all that gentrified all things considered and I was happy they were still in business.

  40. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @Brett:

    There’s no way I’m going back to haunt the bookstores and dives around Harvard Square.

    I cannot speak to the dives, which I never haunted. On the other hand, I suspect the bookstore situation in Harvard Square remains better than in most other places. We can all be nostalgic about defunct favorites: mine is McIntyre & Moore. On the bright side, though, not only the Harvard Book Store but even the Grolier Poetry Book Shop are still there. Rodney’s Bookstore (formerly of Central Square) has also moved next to the Christian Science Reading Room — a location that didn’t host a bookstore when I was a student, though it had since hosted Raven Used Books.

    Most important, albeit some 4 miles from Harvard Square, Boston still has the Brattle Book Shop, which is a must-visit establishment in my book. Long live Ken Gloss!

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