A colleague pointed out our team leader’s last message on Thursday before the Easter weekend (four days in Australia). In one configuration of Microsoft Teams, messages are initially truncated after a certain number of letters, with the whole message appearing after clicking. The message was something like ‘Happy Easter and have a lovely long wee …’. (edit 9 Apr: I’d forgotten about this previous post, which includes another wee)
Alleluia x 162 (approx)
Easter Day services feature the word Alleluia/Hallelujah/Alleluya (see this previous post, 4th and 5th paragraphs) a lot. On the train home from church yesterday afternoon I counted 162 (maybe plus or minus a couple) throughout, mostly sung but sometimes spoken. Most notable are the hymn Light’s glittering morn bedecks the sky, which has seven per verse and nine verses, for a total of 63, and the anthem Ye sons and daughters of the King, arranged by Martin Baker, which has six at the start, one plus six after four of the verses and six after the other two, for a total of 46.
I have written a medium-sized anthem using this one word, which has at least 95 depending on how you count them (there are some overlapping entries and truncated words) and a round which could theoretically continue forever, but only has two per repetition of the round, so it would need to be sung 48 times to beat the anthem.
From Yehoshua to Geez
First there was the Hebrew name יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yŏhōšūaʿ, Yəhōšūaʿ, Yehoshua, Joshua), meaning approximately YHWH saves or (is) salvation. This sequentially became Hebrew/Aramaic יֵשׁוּעַ (Yēšūaʿ, Yeshua, Jeshua), Greek Ἰησοῦς (Iesous), Latin IESVS and Iēsūs, English Jesus (and occasionally Jesu) and Josh (and many other forms in many other languages), and slang Jeez/jeez/Geez/geez.
Joshua is most famously the Hebrew leader Joshua the son of Nun , but also Joshua the high priest (Ezra 5:2) and several others (using the spellings interchangeably). Jesus of Nazareth “who is called the Messiah(/Christ)” was named “because he will save his people from their sins” but the name also belonged to Bar-Jesus called Elymas (a magos/sorcerer: Acts 13:6-12), Jesus called Barabbas (a notorious prisoner Matt 27:16–17) and Jesus called Justus (a Jewish Christian in Rome Col 4:11). There was nothing unusual about the name.
It is most likely that Jesus of Nazareth, an Aramaic-speaking Jew, was addressed and referred to in his lifetime as Yeshua. The novel Me and Jeshua by Eleanor Spence imagines the childhood of Jesus, as narrated by his cousin Jude. (There is no (semi-)authoritative reference for the book.) A recent translation of the bible by Sarah Ruden (which I posted about here) uses transliterations from the Greek, including Iēsous, Simōn Petros, Andreas, Iakōbos and Iōannēs (which I commented “mak[es] them sound more Greek than they really were”).
In English-speaking countries, the name Jesus has been and is vanishingly rarely used, but the many other forms in many other languages are used to varying degrees, most famously Spanish Jesús (/xeˈsus/).
There is also “the name of Jesus” (Phil 2:10-11) at which “every knee shall/should/will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”, which clearly doesn’t happen every time anyone says the name Jesus.
In the bible, and and many cultures, a name represents the very essence of a being (human or divine). The bible has many instances of naming and re-naming, always significant for that being.
T S Eliot probably had this in mind when he wrote The Naming of Cats. He explains: “a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES”, the name that the family use daily; a name that’s particular, peculiar, and more dignified, that never belongs to more than one cat; and especially:
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.
(Afterword: Note that the commandment against taking “the name of the Lord thy/your God in vain” (Ex 20:7, Deut 5:11), specifically refers to את־שם־יהוה, et-shem-YHWH this-same name of YHWH. I am rapidly approaching the limits of my theological knowledge, so I’ll stop here.)
Geez
When I was a child, I somehow obtained a Disney comic. One character (so far as I remember, Goofy) said “Geez”. It is also possible that school friends said that. At some stage I said it within the hearing of my mother, who explained that it was a short form of Jesus, and that we didn’t say that. I replied that it was spelled geez (at least in the comic) and she said it didn’t matter how it was spelled, it all meant the same and we didn’t say that. As far as I can be sure of my own speech, I don’t say either Jesus (outside of religious contexts) or geez, but definitely have said gee at least several times. A short ponder about words like this easily finds golly, gosh; geez, gee, gee whiz, gee willikers (also spelled with j); crikey, cripes, jeepers creepers and jiminy cricket. In the other direction, there are also dickens, deuce, heck, darn(ed) and dang(ed). There was no comment from my mother about whichever of those I said (definitely golly, gosh and gee at various times).
In non-religious language, there are also the f-words, the c-words, the p-words and the sh-words, and I’m sure more. This is not limited to English: see the TV Tropes page Gosh Dang it to Heck (real life) (which obviously starts with the religious words but also includes the non-religious ones).
Continue reading-ling and trusting sources part 1
Some time ago, for some reason, I pondered whether, given that we have ducklings and goslings, we also have any other baby animals which end in –ling. A few days ago, I encountered bucklings, young goats. Bucks are most commonly male deer, but are first defined as the adult male of any animal.
So are there any other baby animals which end in –ling. Yes, no, maybe … The Free Dictionary has a list of 1,915 words that end in –ling, with most being the present participle of a verb ending in –l. That obviously took some time to wade through and it’s possible/probable that I missed some. The only one I definitely knew was pigling, from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland (which I know nothing else about. Coincidently, I am working my way through the set of Potter’s stories which I bought many years ago but have never read), but piglet is much more common. Also on the list are chickling, kitling, catling, hogling, cowling (all domestic or farm animals, compare chicken, kitten, piglet and calf) and codling (a major fisheries catch). Starling is questionable. Apparently, stær meant starling, so a starling is a little starling.
Birds can be hatchlings, fledglings, nestlings or cagelings. Mammals can be sucklings, yearlings or fatlings. Any animal or human can be a youngling, but the latter is more likely to be a youngster or child. Possibly related are princelings and lordlings, who may employ underlings and hirelings. [Added 22 Mar: I later also thought of worldling.]
Continue reading-some
A document quoted someone’s fear of harm from “terrible terrorists” in his country of origin. I commented to a colleague that I’d written a blog post about words like terror (n) – terrify (v) – terrible / terrifying / terrified / terrific (adj) and also awe (n) – awe (v) – awful / awesome (adj) and that we don’t use –some as much as other adjective endings (terrorsome exists but is very rare). He replied that there is a hymn, Let us with a gladsome mind. I responded with another, less well-known hymn O gladsome light, a translation of the ancient Greek hymn Φῶς Ἱλαρόν, phos hilaron, better known as Hail, gladdening light.
I started wondering how many words there are ending in –some. The Free Dictionary lists 272, but we can put three groups of words aside in short order.
The first is those in which –some means body (from Greek σῶμα, sôma), most often in words relating to the cells of biological and botanical bodies. By far the best known of these is chromosome, but The Free Dictionary lists 129 others, from aerosome to virosome. Some of these are very obscure. Pages for Mac recognises only 39 of them. In most cases, the first half of the word is a combining form ending in o-. If I know the meaning of the first half of the word, I might be able to guess at the meaning of the whole, but knowing that megasomes and microsomes are large bodies and small bodies respectively doesn’t help me know of what.
The second group is those which mean ‘a group of x people or things’, of which The Free Dictionary lists twosome to eightsome and also twasome, which seems to exist only in the name of a specific Scottish dance.
The third is a small number of place and personal names.
Continue readingDress
Last week a colleague informed us that it was Dress in Blue Day, which I later found out is for the cause of colorectal cancer awareness, and pondered whether brown might be a more appropriate colour (or not). As it turned out, I was dressed almost entirely in blue. Another colleague always dresses entirely in blue. The first colleague quipped that he wasn’t wearing a dress. I started pondering the relationship between uncountable dress and a countable dress.
The former is much older, and can still be seen in usages like national dress, fancy/(in)formal/casual dress and dress code, and the related get (un)dressed and (in)formally/casually/well/badly dressed, all related to clothes, and hairdresser, salad or turkey dressing and vinedresser (all from French dresser, arrange, prepare and Latin dīrēctiāre, dīrēctus, direct).
Nowadays a dress is a decidedly feminine item of clothing, but some boys or men wear them for various reasons. A few days ago at my local train station, some passed me wearing a white dress with a blue oriental bird/flower design. My first impression was this it was a young man, but I didn’t have the chance to take a closer look, and it may not have been polite to even if I did. I have otherwise occasionally seen men in dresses for reasons I can’t speculate on, and I have also seen people (men and women) near Gyeongbokgung, cross-dressing in hanbok.
related posts
frock https://neverpureandrarelysimple.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/frock-off/
chemise, camisole https://neverpureandrarelysimple.wordpress.com/2019/07/08/indo-european-clothes/
direct https://neverpureandrarelysimple.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/wish-quit-directed/
Wearing a sheepskin
Facebook’s auto-translator keeps doing it. A Korean friend posted a photo of himself with “a sheepskin you wear when you sleep”. The photo shows him with a small plastic mask over his nose and mouth, straps around his forehead and under his cheekbones, and an airhose leading downwards – in other words, what everyone other than Facebook would call a sleep breathing machine, a CPAP machine or a continuous positive airway pressure machine.
The Korean original is 잠 잘 때 착용하는 양압기다, with the crucial word being 양압기 (yang-ap-gi), which I didn’t know and wouldn’t have been able to guess at. After some searching, I found that 양 means positive (among other meanings), 압 means pressure and 기 is short for 기계, which means machine (which I knew – one textbook had 자판기, vending machine, which I have just discovered is short for 자동판매기, or automatic sale machine) (which may also be a joke by Koreans about the Japanese and their love of vending machines (but the Koreans aren’t too far behind)).
One of the other meanings of 양 is sheep, which I know from the liturgy of the Anglican Church of Korea (하느님의 어린양, ha-neu-nim-e eo-rin-yang = young sheep of God). But skin is 피부, pi-bu, which I know from many, many 피부과, skincare shops/clinics. Sheepskin is 양피, yang-pi or 양가죽, yang-ga-juk.
I can only assume that Facebook’s auto-translator’s dictionary doesn’t have 양압기, so it just takes a guess from what it can see. But then why ‘sheep’ rather than any other meaning of 양, and why ‘skin’ rather than anything else related to 압 or 기? Bing and Papago both translate it correctly.
Without the photo, my friend’s post would still have been comprehensible, because he went on to say (as translated) “due to severe increase in sleep apnea”. A sheepskin may be appropriate for poor sleep, but probably sleeping on it rather than wearing it.
Less or fewer
Earlier this week a Facebook friend alerted me to National Grammar Day (4 March or March fo(u)rth, geddit?) with a cartoon in which a woman says ‘Be super annoying in a convo in 4 words or less …’ and a man replies ‘4 words or fewer!’
Grammar isn’t about being annoying. It’s about being interesting, and about usage informing rules and not rules prescribing usage.
Prescriptivists state that less is used with uncountable nouns and fewer with countable nouns. But less with countable nouns is well and truly used. Google Ngrams shows that words or less has always been more common than words or fewer, peaking between 1920 and 1960, for some reasons to do to with international politics.
The complete list of results for ‘*_NOUN or less, *_NOUN or fewer’ (the top 10 results) shows: year or less, years or less, percent or less, hours or less, months or less, (per) cent or less, days or fewer, pupils or fewer, words or fewer, hours or fewer, persons or fewer, employees or fewer, years or fewer, dozen or fewer, number or fewer, words or less, pounds or less, percent or fewer, feet or less, days or less. Clearly, less and fewer are used pretty much interchangeably in this context, whatever the prescriptivists say. Maybe there is a slight difference: five years or less means any amount of years, months or days (treating time as continuous) while five years or fewer means four, three, two, one or zero years (treating years as discrete).
Continue readingRelatives
Last night I went to a small family dinner/party for my great-niece’s birthday. One of my great-nieces. My oldest great-niece. My oldest sister’s son’s oldest daughter. My nephew is my sister’s oldest child, but not her oldest son, because his two siblings are women. My great-niece is my nephew’s oldest child and oldest daughter, because her two siblings are girls. How much information do we need, and how many relationships do we have words for in English?
At the party were (I started typing all the reasonable ways to refer to each person, but it started getting messy. In most cases I could add ‘one of my _s’, because in most cases I have more than one of each):
my sister and brother-in-law
my nephew, niece-in-law (less used than mother/father/sister/brother/daughter/son-in-law) and great-nieces
my niece-in-law’s mother and father
my niece-in-law’s sister and niece
my niece-in-law’s uncle, cousin and cousin once removed (both female, but we don’t specify that in English)
It’s easier from my great-niece’s perspective, because she’s genetically related to everyone. There were her sisters, parents, aunt, cousin, grand-parents, great-uncles, first cousin once removed and second cousin.
I usually wouldn’t have to go into this much detail about who was there. In most cases I can just say ‘relatives on both sides of her family’.
Last week, for Seollal/Korean New Year, the Korea Herald had an article about relationship terms, especially newly-weds negotiating them at family gatherings. As well as my own Australian relatives, I also have my wife’s Korean relatives, who unfortunately I get to see less often. During my second stay in Korea I attended the family gathering without her (she’d visited between Christmas and mid-January but had returned to Australia by Seollal). A colleague who had also married a Korean woman was astonished that I would willingly attend/had willingly attended a family gathering without my wife. I like my Korean in-laws, even though/maybe because I can’t communicate much with them. Food, drink, no conversation, no problem.
As a COVID-time project I joined Wikitree, a co-operative genealogy site. The last I saw, they stated that they had 25 million profiles linked. That includes links by marriage, which obviously increase very quickly. Another brother-in-law’s brother-in-law’s second cousin’s husband is a Very Important Person, but Wikitree doesn’t know about some of those people, because it’s not my place to create entries for them. Instead, it links me to him a longer way around, not even tracing us to our common direct ancestor.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 