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Seoul City Wall and Seoul Trail

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I have mentioned the Seoul City Wall (서울 한양도성, han-yang do-seong) and the Seoul Trail (서울둘레길, dul-le-gil). Here are some resources I’ve found about both at various times. 

Seoul City Wall 
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_City_Wall 
official site: https://seoulcitywall.seoul.go.kr/en/index.do
David Griffano (Youtube) I Hiked Seoul’s Ancient City Wall… in Just 1 Day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaz06y8idKc
Lost then found (Matt and Yujin) (Youtube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RDPrNywkRc
The Soul of Seoul (Hallie) The Complete Guide: The 8 Gates of The Seoul Fortress Wall https://thesoulofseoul.net/the-complete-guide-the-8-gates-of-the-seoul-fortress-wall/

Seoul Trail 
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_Trail
official site: https://english.seoul.go.kr/service/amusement/seoul-trail/01-seoul-trail/
Richard (no surname given) blog Roamad https://roamad.blog/places/korea/seoul/seoul-trail-dullegil/ (hiking and biking)
David Griffano (Youtube), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD5IFO8V4CBGZJueXGfTb3Na8PwN6mcoD (hiking. A work in progress. His latest video was posted in mid-October but was clearly filmed during summer.)

Nazis and nachos

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What do Nazis and nachos have in common?

First there was Egnat, an Etruscan family name of unknown origin and meaning. This was adopted by the Romans, who added the Latin case ending –ius and changed the first letter to I under the influence of ignis, fire, resulting in the name Ignatius, which came to mean fiery, ardent. This became popular among Christians, including Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), whose baptismal name, Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola (as in “Hello, my name is Inigo Loyola, you killed my father, prepare to die”) was one short form of Ignatius. Ignatius founded the Society of Jesus, a missionary and teaching order, in response to the German (and later other countries) reformation. One area of catholic orthodoxy was Bavaria, whose inhabitants were conservative, supposedly simple-minded and often named Ignatz, Ignaz or Nazi. A Bavarian named Nazi was as stereotypical as an Irishman named Paddy. 

Then there was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known as the NSDAP, whose members were originally largely from Bavaria, and also conservative and supposedly simple-minded. It was convenient for their opponents to refer to them as Nazis, and the name stuck and spread to other countries via German refugees. The Nazis, not surprisingly, hated it and didn’t use it themselves.

Meanwhile, in Spain and Mexico, the name Ignatius was often abbreviated as Nacho. (Other local varieties of the name exist.) One such Nacho was Ignacio Anaya, of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, who in 1943 served “Nacho’s Special” to a group of US military wives from an army base just across the border, and the name stuck.

So, Nazis and nachos are both fiery and ardent. If those names had developed in the opposite countries, we would be enjoying our nazis in a Mexican restaurant and worrying about the rise of neo-Nachos in society and politics. 

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Acknowledgeing spelling differences

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I was searching for information about attitudes to and practices of judging or correcting other people’s spoken or written language use. I found one series of posts by a blogger who I hadn’t previously encountered. The first post in the series starts (I was able to access this post and those it links to the first time, but not the second time, so you might or might not be able to):

My name is Chandra, and I am a recovering grammar snob.*

There was a time that it gave me a blush of pride to be referred to as “the Spelling Sergeant” or “the Punctuation Police”. I would gleefully tear a syntactic strip out of anybody who fell victim to the perils of poor parallelism or the menace of misplaced modifiers. I railed against atrostrophes and took a red pen to signs posted in staff rooms, bulletin boards and public washrooms. I was, to put it bluntly, really, really annoying.

(*It is possible that Chandra first wrote ‘grammar nazi’. One comment was about the use of nazi in this way. I can’t check now.)

This led to the following exchange:

[Commenter 1] “atrostrophes”? I assume you meant apostrophes? 😉
[Chandra] Atrostrophes = atrocious apostrophes, as in those used in a plural. But that would have been a fine example of Muphry’s Law, wouldn’t it? 🙂
[Commenter 2] Murphy’s Law ;).
[Chandra] Nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry’s_law 😉

Atrostrophes isn’t felicitous in my judgement, because it’s more likely to be perceived as a mistake than as a play on words (Chandra also uses ad homonym).

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“The land of the morning clam”

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The Korea Times has an article on a new movie titled The land of morning calm. It appears sometimes like that and sometimes as The land of morning clam. That might actually might be a suitable title, because it’s set in a fishing village, but what I found indicates that it’s a mistake.

The phrase The Land of the Morning Calm was coined by Percival Lowell in his 1885 book “Chosön [Joseon], the Land of the Morning Calm” (which I haven’t investigated – I’ve read some of the early accounts, which I might write a post about sometime). (Preliminary research: it’s available as a rare book, or on Google Books and the Internet Archive.) (Lowell is otherwise known for his speculations that there are canals on Mars, and founding the observatory from which Clyde Tombaugh identified Pluto.)

The article gives the movie’s Korean title as The morning sea gull is, which is clunky. The Busan International Film Festival Youtube channel has a trailer (not subtitled) giving the Korean title 아침바다 갈매기는, which Google translates as The seagulls of the morning sea, Bing as Morning sea gull and Papago as Sea seagulls in the morning.

Searching for The land of the morning clam finds three results, two of which are mistakes, but the blog Exile made easy has the subtitle Dispatches from the Land of the Morning Clam … err … Calm (The blog only has three posts from 2007.)

Overall calm is a far more common word than clam, and I would usually be able to type it without a problem, but once I got thinking about clam I kept typing it whether I wanted clam or calm.

Ah well, keep clam and carry on.

(For more about the various names of Korea through history, including Lowell’s choice of morning calm, see here.)

It was cake

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I recently discovered the blog Peaks and penguins, by a young Canadian/US couple who lived in South Korea for some years (and maybe still do). They chronicled their explorations of the mountains there, guided by the lists of 100 top mountains by the Korean Forest Service and a commercial hiking wear/gear manufacturer. (80 mountains appear on both lists and 20 are unique to each, so there’s 120 in total, which I think they explored all.) I am half disappointed that I spent so much of the time I was in Korea not exploring mountains and a quarter excited and a quarter daunted that there’s so much for me to do when I go there again (when, when, when?). And that’s just the mountains, not all the other things to do.

One of their early expeditions nearly ended badly: the weather changed, they were short on warm clothing and other provisions, and they lost their way. Fortunately they encountered a Korean hiking group who warmed them up and pointed them in the right direction. They wrote: 

Our descent was cake compared to our trials on the ridge.

Was cake, not was a piece of cake, which is an established idiom.

I haven’t been able to find any equivalent use of “was cake” (in quotation marks for exact match). There are sentences like When was cake first made?, We heard/were told there was cake and And then there was cake. But I can’t say that those bloggers are wrong; it’s very clear what they mean and is a natural shortening (<haha) of the idiom. Maybe people say it or write it in places Google can’t find.

According to Google Ngrams, is/was a piece of cake rose in usage in the mid-1970s. Without context, it’s impossible to tell how many occurrences before and after then were literal usages of the phrase, and how many were idiomatic. I had always assumed that it is/was a piece of cake was, in turn, a shortening of it is/was as easy as eating a piece of cake, but Ngrams shows no particular usage of as easy as eating.

Is/was a piece of cake seems to be used/usable in singular forms: My homework was a piece of cake, ?My exams were pieces of cake, My exams were a piece of cake. 

“Why aren’t there more fat Koreans?”

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When I went to Korea for the first time, I spent several days surviving on convenience store food between going for some meals in restaurants with colleagues, sometimes with their adult students. I knew that I’d have to find a restaurant I could go to by myself and/or cook for myself (which required some planning because I had to buy cookware, crockery and cutlery – my manager provided a very nice studio apartment with bed and pillow, but nothing else). 

Most of the restaurants I could see into had low tables and floor seating, but I found one that had Western-style tables and chairs. The manager placed the menu in front of me, pointed to the first page and said “Rice” (which I could actually see myself), then to the second and said “Dock”. Was that duck or dog? I was afraid to ask, so I said “Rice, please”. She and/or (a) waitress(es) brought out a bowl of plain rice, several bowls of soup and a major array of meat and/or vegetable dishes (I seem to remember 13 – I didn’t record this story in my diary of the time). I got through the rice and halfway through the meat and/or vegetables. At the end of the meal the manager offered me a big cup of shikhye (a sweet rice dessert drink). I first declined, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I forced it down somehow. 

Along the way I discovered that she spoke passable English, having lived in Brisbane, Australia for some time. As I paid and left, I asked “Why aren’t there more fat Koreans?” She said “Oh, is all vegetables, is all healthy”.

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Kingdoms and empires

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The hymn The day thou gavest, Lord, has ended (Wikipedia, performance) has as its last verse:

So be it, Lord; Thy throne shall never,
Like earth’s proud empires, pass away:
Thy kingdom stands, and grows forever,
Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.

We quite often refer to God as king and to God’s kingdom or the kingdom of God, but we almost never refer to God as emperor or to God’s empire or the empire of God, even though King of kings and Lord of lords is more analogous to an earthly emperor than a king. 

The only reference to empire/emperor/imperial in the King James/Authorised version of the bible is in the comparatively late OT book of Esther (1:20):

When the king’s decree which he will make is proclaimed throughout all his empire (for it is great), all wives will honor their husbands, both great and small. 

(The king being Ahasuerus and the empire being Persia.)

Of the other 27 translations on Bible Hub, one uses realm, four use empire and the rest kingdom.

 

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Ceiling wax

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One song I remember from my childhood is Puff, the magic dragon, sung by Peter, Paul and Mary and written by Peter Yarrow and Leonard Lipton. For some time I wondered what

ceiling wax

is. I don’t know how I found out that it is, in fact

sealing wax.

I obviously knew about ceilings before I knew about sealings.

Ceiling is a strange word. It ends with -ing, but it’s not related to a verb; we don’t usually ceil ceilings like we build buildings. (Someone has flippantly suggested that we should call them builts.) In fact we do, or buildingers do, whether they call it that or not. Dictionary.com records the verb ceil, meaning

1. to overlay (the ceiling of a building or room) with wood, plaster, etc.
2. to provide with a ceiling 

dating from 1400–50, from late Middle English celen to cover, to panel, followed by a rather vague < ? 

Seal is ultimately from Latin signum and is related to sign. The animal seal is from Old English with cognates in Old Norse and Old High German. There is a story that one holder of the British government office of Lord Privy Seal objected to being addressed as such because he wasn’t a lord, a privy or a seal.  

While I was researching for this post, I found a blog called of ceiling wax, which is about “reading YA, graphic novels and the spaces in between”. Its not-immediately-named author quotes Lewis Carroll’s The walrus and the carpenter (text, Wikipedia), which I’m not as familiar with and didn’t think of. She/he also originally mistook this for ceiling wax.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.” 

Some of Carroll’s poems are direct parodies of the poems Alice Liddell would have been familiar with, but this seems to be totally original. 

PS 3 Oct: information about the poems Carroll parodied.

Nothing about everything

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A few posts ago, talking about the way quotations are (mis-)attributed to people, I said:

Sometimes, an idea is stated in different ways before someone creates the most-quoted form of it, so it’s hard to say who should get the credit.

I have been thinking about the quotation, in probably its most familiar form:

A specialist knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. A generalist knows less and less and more and more until he knows nothing about everything.

Quote Investigator traces the quotation from the first attested “We are getting to know more and more about less and less” (reported as the saying of “a distinguished Scotsman”) to various expanded forms. The exact originator depends on which exact form you use.

I am definitely a generalist. Although my blog posts are mostly about language(s) and (because I’ve most recently studied linguistics and been working as an ESL teacher and/or magazine or legal editor during this time), I’ve also posted about music (my first study), geography/travel/tourism, science/maths, history, bible study/theology and photography (my dabbles) (and probably more). If I had set out to be more general in my blog posts, I might have named it Nothing about everything. In fact, there are blogs with titles very close to that, and the Urban Dictionary has:

everything/nothing
a genre of blogs in which the content means everything to the author but nothing to most everyone else; often abbreviated as “e/n”

(I wouldn’t say that the content of this blog means everything to me, but obviously I put some time and effort into it.)

The main reason I’ve been thinking about this quotation recently is that I’ve had a burst on inquiring about PhD study (again), and one of the problems is that PhD study is expected to be specialised; maybe one particular aspect of one particular language. I’m just not interested in spending four to six years of my life doing that. Unfortunately, universities don’t seem to give PhDs in general studies. Universities expect me to know what I will find by my research. I thought the point of research is not knowing what I will find.

Realistically, this study is less likely to happen, but I need to find out for sure. I might be able to do the same research as an armchair scholar, but there’s less incentive, mostly because there would be less (if any) recognition at the end.

PS WIkipedia has a page about misquotations/misattributions.

Abominable words

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A colleague informed us that today is National Grammar Day. He also has a desk calendar of Shakespearean insults, which often turn out to be strangely appropriate to what’s going on in our team, department and company. The combination of Shakespeare and grammar reminded me of the following quotation, from Henry VI pt 2:

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the Realme, in erecting a Grammar Schoole … thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.

Jack Cade was the leader of a popular rebellion in 1450. Wikipedia says that this rebellion was “one of the first popular uprisings in England that used writing to voice their grievances” but Shakespeare follows Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) and incorporates aspects of the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, which “was highly anti-intellectual and anti-textual” and “ha[d] people killed because they could read”. The real-life James Fiennes, 1st Baron Saye and Sele, the Lord High Treasurer (= Shakespeare’s Lord Say) was executed for treason.

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