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Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

20 July 2016

10 Words For The People You Know - 500 Words Ep. 27


You might have spotted this tweet over on the HH Twitter feed the other day:


Which, as our friends at UWG English pointed out, is probably not the most appropriate word for that kind of person…:


But what about all the other characters that we know and love and love to hate? What other words are hiding out in the dictionary to describe them?

Well, from unknowledgeable critics to penniless friends, this week’s HH YouTube instalment is looking at 10 words for precisely those kinds of people:





 One word that didn’t make the final cut here, however, was zoilist:


Just as (spoiler alert if you haven’t watched the video yet...) the ultracrepidarians of this world take their name from a story from Ancient Greece, the carping zoilists have their roots in a fourth-century BC Greek grammarian and literary critic named Zoilus of Amphipolis. 

 Born in what is now Macedonia c.400 BC, Zoilus was one of the most scathing critics of the Greek poet Homer. Despite being the author of both the Iliad and Odyssey and one of the most well respected writers of Ancient Greece, writing two cornerstones of Western literature was not enough, it seems, to impress Zoilus. 

 In a long-lost essay called Homeric Questions, Zoilus challenged Homer’s portrayal of the gods, and called out a number of plot holes and inconsistencies in his works: in the Iliad, for instance, Menelaus dies in battle only to be seemingly revived to witness the death of his son several pages later. Other writers might have fallen victim to Zoilus’ criticizing glare of the years, but it was for these criticisms of Homer’s writing that Zoilus was best known—and for which he deservedly the nickname Homeromastix, the “Scourge of Homer”, among his contemporaries. 

Zoilus’s writings have not survived, and as a result it’s unclear just how harsh his criticism really was. But the enduring popularity of Homer’s works has nevertheless led to history being somewhat less kind to his harshest critic. 

Various historical accounts record that Zoilus died having been thrown from a cliff by an angry mob, stoned to death on the island of Chios, or else tossed alive on top of a funeral pyre in Smyrna. Whether any of these gruesome demises ever truly occurred is debateable, but instead it’s likely that they are all just myths and smears rooted in little more than the unpopularity of Zoilus’s opinions—but it’s precisely those opinions that led to Zoilus the zoilist earning a permanent place in the language. 




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27 April 2016

10 Figures of Speech

Rhetorical terms and words for different figures of speech crop up every now and then on the HaggardHawks Twitter feed, and are without exception brilliant, brilliant words:


But with our YouTube channel now in full swing—incredibly, this is already video number 16!—we thought it might be good to dedicate an entire episode to bringing together a choice set of ten:


 Many of the words language experts use to describe tropes like these—including all those included in the video—are based on Greek word roots, which are often brought together in quite inventive and memorable ways. Take one of those from the video, antanaclasis: it refers to a word being used with two different meanings, like “I can’t wait to wait tables all day” (which no one in the service industry has ever said) or “I can’t wait to bar him from the bar” (which absolutely everyone in the service industry has said). Because of this repetitious, back-and-forth arrangement, the word antanaclasis derives from the Greek word for a reflection.

Likewise another term from the video, chiasmus, takes its name from the X-shaped Greek letter chi because it refers to the criss-crossed arrangement of repeated words found in “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. 

 And elsewhere in the rhetorician’s dictionary we find words like zeugma, which refers to the use of a single word in two different contexts in the same sentence, like “I will take my camera and some photographs”. It derives from the Greek word for an ox’s yoke, in the sense of one word “yoking” its two meanings together in one sentence. A prodiorthosis is a warning that you’re about to deliver bad news, and essentially means “a pre-apology”. Hendiadys is the emphatic use of two separate words rather than a single word and a qualifying adjective or adverb—like “the rain and the weather spoiled our holiday” rather than “the rainy weather”—and as such literally means “one through two”. And prosopopoeia is a form of personification in which an inanimate object is portrayed as talking:


Brilliantly, it literally means “making a face”.



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25 April 2016

#Shakespeare400


You probably noticed a bit of a hoo-hah at the weekend surrounding the 400th deathiversary of someone called William Shakespeare. We marked the day with a video about 10 unsolved Shakespearean terms over on YouTube and a missing words quiz here on the HH blog, while over on Twitter we were ridiculously busy bombarding you with half-hourly tweets about the great man himself all day Saturday. And apologies to all non-Shakespeare fans out there, but we’re going to do the same again now.

There were quite a few calls over on Twitter for us to collate all our Shakespeare facts in one place. And as ever, your wish is our command. So from a Shakespearean shipwreck to a man extinguishing his trousers with beer, here is our #Shakespeare400 list in full:

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23 February 2016

Cloud

So, this peculiar little fact cropped up over on @HaggardHawks the other day:


We’ve tweeted about clouds before:


…which sparked quite a debate over on Twitter back in December, and similarly this time around, a few cloud-related comments were soon obnubilating our Twitter feed:


Granted, there aren’t all that many overlaps between etymology and meteorology, but the fact remains that cloud derives, oddly enough, from an Old English word, clúd, that once meant “rock”, “hill”, or “mass of stone”.

Because of that—as those astute followers worked out—cloud has some fairly unexpected etymological cousins in modern English, including clod (a lump of mud or earth) and clot (a congealed mass), as well as a handful of more obscure words like clout (an old word for a small piece of leather or iron, sheared from something larger), cleat (a wedge or bolt), and clew (a 1000-year-old word for a spherical globule or conglomeration of something smaller, like a snowball or a ball of string).

Shameless Plug #3,514: there’s more on that in the HaggardHawks fact book, Word Drops.



But how does a word for a mass of rock come to be used as a word for a mass of water vapour? Well, it’s presumed that Old English speakers were quick to notice that thick, heavy, dark-grey rainclouds (the type anyone living in England knows an awful lot about) looked, well, a lot like thick, heavy, dark-grey masses of stone. Consequently the Old English word clúd gained a second meteorological meaning, and by the early fourteenth century this meaning had all but replaced the older one entirely; from the Middle English period onwards, clúd (or clod as it was spelled by then) was being used almost exclusively used to refer to clouds. And it’s this meaning that has remained in use ever since.

It might seem like a odd connection, but it’s by no means alone. When the word cumulus first appeared in English in the mid-1600s, for instance, it originally referred to a mound or pile of something, or, according to the OED, to “the conical top of a heaped measure”, like a piled spoonful of flour. Etymologically, cumulus is derived from a Latin word for “heap”, and it’s a relative of words like accumulation and cumulate.

Only one question remains, then: if clúd meant “rock”, what on earth was the Old English word for cloud?

The answer to that is weolcen, which is the origin of the somewhat old-fashioned English word welkin. Sadly, welkin has all but disappeared from the language today outside of literary circles and a handful of local English dialects, but it remained in use right up to the nineteenth century. You’ll find it in the works of William Wordsworth, Charles Kingsley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, and Charlotte Brontë, among others, as well as in the original opening line of the Christmas favourite Hark! The Herald Angels Sing—which was originally a solemn and considerably un-Christmassy hymn beginning, “Hark! how all the welkin rings”.

Like clúd, however, welkin also steadily changed its meaning over time. Although it originally meant “cloud”, its use broadened and grew ever more figurative, so that by the time Wordsworth and Brontë and everyone else were using it in the nineteenth century, it was taken to mean “the heavens”, “the firmament”, “the upper atmosphere”, or “the entirety of the sky”. Likewise, to make the welkin ring, or to rend the welkin, is an old English expression describing an impossibly loud noise or cheer. Like a rock concert. Or should that be a cloud concert? (No. It shouldn’t.)


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A very gracious and enthusiastic hat-tip to Dave Galvin III (@dwgalviniii) for the bonus knowledge about Charles Wesley’s original lyrics for Hark! The Herald Angels Sing here, which was not in our original post of this blog. Much appreciated!  

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2 October 2015

Carpet

Since the first HaggardHawks post for BuzzFeed went up last week, it’s been viewed more than 300,000 times and, incredibly, has boosted the Twitter account past the 13,000 followers mark—so you can now pit your wits against the fourth HaggardHawks Quiz… But of all 53 language facts cherry-picked from the Haggard Hawks fact book for BuzzFeed, one has attracted far more attention than all the others put together: 


This fact actually went up on the Twitter account a few months ago (bonus fact: nothing rhymes with month either), and caused quite a stir back then too. But in the comments section over on BuzzFeed, the same debate has been sparked all over again:











 So. Does nothing really rhyme with carpet? Exactly what does it take for two words to be classed as rhymes? And just how rare are unrhymable words anyway?

Well, as some commenters quite rightly pointed out, determining whether or not two words rhyme depends of course on your pronunciation, and what kind of rhyme you’re looking for. As a benchmark, rhyming dictionaries understandably limit themselves to one standard accent of English, and to finding only the most accurate and most straightforward form of rhymes, known as ‘perfect’ or ‘full’ rhymes—otherwise they’d be overflowing with words, pairs of words, and entire phrases that almost-but-not-quite rhyme with one another.

British English rhyming dictionaries tend to use standard Received Pronunciation as their basis, but naturally things are different elsewhere—that’s why American English rhyming dictionaries, based on General American pronunciation, will tell you that nothing rhymes with iron (pronounced /aɪərn/, with a noticeable R sound), aside from derivatives like gridiron and andiron, while British dictionaries (which give the pronunciation /ʌɪən/, without a heavy R) will quite happily tell you that it rhymes with a whole clutch of words, including the likes of lion, Ryan, O’Brien and Uruguayan. (Note to self: write a poem later about a Uruguayan lion named Ryan O’Brien.)

Regardless of your accent, however, seriously—nothing rhymes with carpet. 

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, for two words to form a perfect rhyme, the final stressed vowels in both words and all the sounds following them have to be identical. In the case of carpet (RP: /kɑːpɪt/, GM: /kɑɹpɪt/), the stressed vowel is the ar sound in the first syllable, which means that any word or words that we can safely say rhyme with carpet have to end with the full combination of sounds /-ɑːpɪt/, or /-ɑɹpɪt/. And in English, there just isn’t anything else that works.

Pet is too short (and is pronounced /pɛt/, not /pɪt/ or /pət/). While trumpet, armpit, basket, pulpit, market, parapet, and all the other suggestions being thrown back and forward in the comments section don’t follow the same pattern, and so don’t quite fit the bill. Almost-but-not-quite rhymes like these are often labelled ‘slant’, ‘half’, or ‘imperfect’ rhymes, but by definition the consonants in a slant rhyme should remain the same, while the vowel sound varies (like hand and bend, or rhyme and Rome); market, trumpet and basket all just take too many liberties.

By far the best suggestion here is tar pit, which appears to match all of the phonological criteria required. The trouble is that both the Oxford English and Merriam-Webster Dictionaries list tar pit as two separate words—and if separate words are required to form a rhyme, then it’s no longer classed as a perfect rhyme but a ‘mosaic’ rhyme. After all, we could just as easily claim that car pit, star pit, sitar pit, or Jordanian dinar pit rhyme with carpet if we’re not fussed about ‘mosaicking’ words together.

There are, of course, lots of different forms of rhyming, and some intrepid poet will no doubt at some point have used the word carpet and quite happily (and successfully) rhymed it with armpit or parapet. (In fact, the stories behind two undeterred writers’ attempt to write a poem about a carpet and rhyming story about oranges are explained in Word Drops.) But so long as we’re drawing the line at perfect rhymes based on a standard pronunciation, then it’s true—nothing rhymes with carpet.



But just how rare are unrhymable words? Well, although a lot of words you might think have no rhyme actually do, the problem with limiting ourselves to perfect rhymes—which require the stressed vowel and everything after it to rhyme—is that the further back from the end of a word the stressed vowel is located, the more troublesome finding an appropriate rhyme for it becomes. 

So while a handful of monosyllabic words—like month, scarce, gouge and ninth—contain such a tricky combination of sounds that nothing else matches them, in polysyllabic words, as the stress shifts further and further back in the word (to the penultimate syllable, as in carpet, neutron or penguin, or even the antepenultimate, as in animal, dynamo or citizen), the rhyming element of the word (–arpet, –ynamo, –itizen) becomes longer and more complicated, and the chances of finding a perfect match for it diminishes. So potentially there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of unrhymable words in English—of which carpet is just one.

Now then. There once was a lion named Ryan. Whose passport was stamped Uruguayan...


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6 June 2015

Grandmother

When it came to being amazed, those Victorians really knew how to respond:
If ever an old fashioned phrase needed bringing back into circulation, it was this one. But where does a saying as bizarre as this one come from?

The earliest record we have of this beats my grandmother! dates back to 1833, when it first appeared in a comic poem included in an American elocutionary reader, The United States Speaker. The poem, “Logic”, outlines a light-hearted back-and-forth conversation between a young schoolboy—“an Eton stripling”—who has just returned from boarding school, and his uncle, Sir Peter, whom he is visiting:


 “Well, Tom, the road; what saw you worth discerning?
How’s all at college Tom: what is’t you’re learning?”
“Learning?—Oh, logic, logic; not the shallow rules
Of Lockes and Bacons, antiquated fools!
But wits’ and wranglers’ logic; for d’ye see
I’ll prove as clear as A, B, C,
That an eel-pie’s a pigeon; to deny it
Is to say that black’s not black;”—“Come, let’s try it?”
“Well, sir; an eel-pie is a pie of fish:” “Agreed.”
“Fish-pie may be a jack-pie:”—“Well, well, proceed.”
“A jack-pie is a John-pie—and ’tis done!
For every John-pie must be a pie-John!”
“Bravo! bravo!” Sir Peter cries,—“Logic for ever! 
This beats my grandmother, and she was clever!”

Tom’s grandmother-beating argument is that the eels in an eel-pie are fish, as are the jacks (an old nickname for a young pike) in a “jack-pie”. Jack is a pet form of John, and “John-pie” when reversed gives “pie-John”— hence, “pigeon”. Ipso facto. Quod erat demonstrandum. Logic forever, indeed.

The poem is unfortunately anonymous, which makes it hard to pin down the precise origin of this beats my grandmother. Its appearance here in an American textbook makes it tempting to presume it’s an American invention, but the reference to Eton College confuses things, as does the fact that the entire “pigeon”/“pie-John” argument is apparently considerably older than this poem might suggest: a reference to it here, for instance, from a book published in London in 1821, suggests that it was already fairly well known even by then.

But regardless of its American or British ancestry, one question remains—why on earth does it beat my grandmother? 

Well, oddly enough, this beats my grandmother! was just one in a long line of bizarre eighteenth-nineteenth century slang expressions that emphatically alluded to the speaker’s grandmother. So all my eye and my grandmother! meant “don’t talk rubbish”. So is your grandmother! was the Victorian equivalent of that schoolyard favourite, “I know you are, but what am I?” And to shoot your grandmother meant to find out a juicy bit of gossip, only to discover that everybody else already knows it. (Shameless plug: there’s more on this here.) 

Some of these expressions even made the leap from everyday colloquial English into hard-copy literature. Dickens, for instance, used the emphasizing expression not even to your grandmother in Our Mutual Friend (1865). Anthony Trollope dismissively used your grandmother! in his novel Phineas Redux (1873), as did Mark Twain in his short story How I Edited An Agricultural Paper Once (1870). And chances are you’ll have heard someone warn not to teach your grandmother to suck eggs—which Henry Fielding used in Tom Jones as far back as 1749.

As well as being the only one of these phrases to still be in use today, this egg-sucking grandma is also the oldest—and as such provides the best clue to the origin of this entire clutch of expressions. It’s earliest record dates all the way back to 1707, but before then, seventeenth-century speakers were telling each other not to teach their grandmothers “to sup sour milk”, “to make milk-kail” (a type of cabbage soup), and even “to grope a goose” (meaning to poke a goose’s rear end to see if it’s ready to lay an egg—which is likely the origin of the egg-sucking grandma).

Some geese: boy, has grandmother got a surprise for you...

 The implication of all of these sayings was the same—don’t try to tell an informed, experienced person how to do something they already know how to do. Tellingly, a similar meaning is implied by another expression, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, which has been found in a list of proverbs dating back to 1636 but is probably much, much older: a book on animal husbandry written in 1534, for instance, advises that “it is harde to make an olde dogge to stoupe [i.e. be compliant]”. The same book also explains the best technique for greasing sheep. Truly, it’s an indispensable read.

The implications in the old dog new tricks and grandma to suck eggs might be different, but there’s only a slight semantic sidestep from “old dog” to “old person”, and hence to “grandmother”—so it’s likely that the one inspired the other, and, eventually, its plethora of later variations. 

And if that doesn’t beat your grandmother, I don’t know what will.


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3 June 2015

Gotham

Yesterday, we tweeted this:
It’s a surprising one. To most people, Gotham is just another nickname for New York, and in that guise it’s by far and away best known as Batman’s stomping ground. 

 Hang on—has someone done a superhero called Hawkman yet? They have? Curses. There really is nothing new under the Sun. But we digress. 

 So—Batman. New York. Newcastle. Gotham City. How did all that happen?

Well, this particular story starts not with a bungled robbery in an inner-city alleyway, but way back in Tudor England. Sometime around the mid-fifteenth century, the name Gotham began to be used as a byword for any unsophisticated, backwater town or village, whose populace were all proverbially foolish, bumpkin-like characters. 

The earliest record we have of that comes from one of the Wakefield Mysteries, a series of thirty-two religious plays first performed in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, sometime in the mid-1400s. We know from the only surviving script of these plays (housed here) that one of them contained the line, “foles all sam, Sagh I never none so fare, Bot the foles of Gotham”—cut through all the late Middle English spelling and jumbled syntax, and you’ll have something along the lines of, “they’re all fools, I never saw a fool so fair [game] as the fools of Gotham.”

This allusion became so widespread in Tudor English that in 1540 an entire book of comic anecdotes about the ironically-named “Wise Men of Gotham” was published, including one story about a Gothamist who rode his horse while wearing a huge sack of grain on his back so that the horse didn’t have to carry all the weight, and another about a gang who decided to punish an eel that had eaten all the fish in a pond by trying to drown it. The joke even inspired a sixteenth-century folk rhyme, which described the hapless misadventures of three wannabe seamen from Gotham:

 Three wise men of Gotham,
Went to sea in a bowl.
Had the bowl been stronger,
My song had been longer.
It’s unclear whether or not this proverbially foolish “Gotham” was based on an actual place. It’s been suggested that the real-life village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire may well have been where these Tudor writers had in mind, but connections have also been drawn to a long-lost “Gotham Hall” in Essex, the proximity of which to the capital could have made its rustic inhabitants a prime target for jokes among the more urbane Londoners nearby (although if that’s the case, it’s doubtful that the earliest written record of Gotham would appear 200 miles north in Wakefield). 

 But whatever or wherever the original Gotham might have been, over time use of its name started to change—and that’s where Newcastle comes in.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Gotham began to be used as a nickname for any place whose inhabitants were seen as less sophisticated or less cultured than those of larger, more cosmopolitan cities. In this context, it was probably applied to a number of different places across England, among them—entirely unfairly, of course—Newcastle upon Tyne. But as those Tudor folktales and rhymes steadily dropped out of fashion, the name Gotham began to lose all its negative connotations so that by the time the nineteenth century came into view, it was merely being used as a byword for any large town or city, regardless of the sophistication of the people who lived there. And in that context, it remained particularly associated with Newcastle. 

The earliest record of that that we have—which provides the earliest reference to any large city being labelled “Gotham”—comes from a local Newcastle ballad called Kiver Awa’ (“a command used in drilling”, according to the English Dialect Dictionary) written in November 1804, and first published in a collection of Rhymes of Northern Bards in 1812:


The “Gotham of the Tyne” mentioned here was Newcastle, and the first few lines of this, the last verse of Kiver Awa’, prove that by the time the poem was written Gotham was nothing more than a local name for the city—and clearly one used with considerable pride. 

So where does New York come into the mix? Well, English emigrants are presumed to have taken Gotham, their old nickname for a large city, across to America in the early 1800s and there began using it in reference to New York. It first appeared in print in the United States in an instalment of Washington Irving’s satirical magazine Salmagundi in November 1807, which made reference to “the chronicles of the renowned and antient [sic] city of Gotham”. 

 For Irving’s article to have made sense to its readers, we can presume that the nickname Gotham was already fairly well established in New York by the time he came to use it in 1807. But given that Kiver Awa’ still predates Irving’s essay by three years—and given the lengthy history that the name Gotham had back in England—we can safely say that the first city we know of being called “Gotham City” was Newcastle upon Tyne, not New York.

So the dark night rises—just over the Tyne Bridge. 




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