poetry

From Yehoshua to Geez

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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.)

“unbristled excitement”

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The Korea Herald reports that:

In a rare display of unbristled excitement, residents of Pyongyang took to the streets Monday to celebrate North Korea’s Under-17 women’s football team, which claimed the World Cup title by defeating the Netherlands.

(which the state television station didn’t broadcast until two days later). 

Unbristled excitement is quite simply wrong, but I can’t decide whether the reporter chose the wrong word deliberately or accidentally, or it’s an autoreplacement which no-one spotted.

Unbridled is a rare word, and probably only found in contexts of horses or excitement etc. Google Ngrams shows the top 10 results for unbridled *_NOUN (which shows the top 10 results) as passion, lust, power, passions, fury, discretion, license, tongue, licentiousness, licence. So where does unbridled excitement rank? There is something wrong with Ngrams’ programming, because unbridled excitement ranks between license and tongue, so it should appear in the top 10. Incidentally, (the usage of) unbridled passion and unbridled lust have increased greatly over the last 30-40 years. The rest have increased slightly, except for unbridled discretion, which peaked in 1986 and has been decreasing since. 

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A single syllable

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I recently composed music for a poem which contains the word single. When I was typing the words in the music notation file, I was momentarily flummoxed by where to divide the word (indicated with a hyphen in music notation). sin-gle didn’t look right, but sing-le looked totally wrong (as it’s not related to ‘sing’). Various websites suggested sin-gle, but Google’s AI Overview told me “No, you should not hyphenate the word “single” because it is a one-syllable word.” Huh?

A syllable is built around a nucleus, which is most often a vowel, but in English can be a small number of consonants, l, r, m, n or ŋ (ng). Other languages allow more (see the Wikipedia article.) The nucleus of the second syllable of single is l. Or maybe it’s ə for some people.

There are two complications. The first is that we pronounce single as sɪŋ g(ə)l, which should be spelled sing-gle, which looks totally wrong. The second is that we sing vowels for as long as possible, and either place the consonant on the beginning of the next syllable (especially if it starts with a vowel), or as late as possible (especially if the next syllable starts with a consonant. (One score one choir I sing in found on the internet took this to its logical extreme and had words like e-xce-lsis and a-gnus, which were very distracting.)

The same poem contains the word nightingale, which similarly is night-in-gale. gale is clearly a separate syllable, but the same two complications apply.  

I thought I remembered another song using single, but it’s actually simple, to which most of the same issues apply.

PS Language Log has a series of posts on AI’s inability to count the number of times a certain letter appears in a word or word in a text, starting here.

Inextricably rooted in my memory

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I often browse through previous posts. This afternoon as I was walking I happened upon this post from 2019 (scroll down to the fourth paragraph ‘At one choir camp …’), in which I pondered the memory of singing a choral work which contained the words “inextricably rooted”. I didn’t note the author when I sang it, and couldn’t find it online when I drafted that post. I tried again. Searching for “inextricably rooted” brings up a variety of results, none of them them relevant. Searching for ‘“inextricably rooted” poem’ on my phone while I was walking brought up Google’s AI Overview saying ‘The poem you’re looking for is “Inevitable” by Robert Frost’. Searching again on my laptop at home brought up ‘The poem you’re looking for is “Inexricably Rooted” by Robert Frost.’ So possibly Frost, but he certainly didn’t write a poem titled Inexricably Rooted, and appears not to have written a poem titled Inevitable – it’s not on the first few poetry sites I searched, or anywhere where Google can find it.

So either a published choral composition uses a poem which is nowhere on the internet, or I’m misremembering something. 

Singing in Latin (or not)

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One of the choirs I sing in has just performed Rossini’s Stabat Mater. The words, a meditation on the sorrow of Saint Mary at the Crucifixion, are in Latin and date from the 13th century. They start:

Stabat mater dolorósa
juxta Crucem lacrimósa,
dum pendébat Fílius.

A close translation is:

The sorrowful mother was standing
beside the Cross weeping,
while the Son was hanging.

A poetic translation is:

At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful Mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.

The edition we used shows the Latin text in full on the first preliminary page. On the second page is an English text titled Tribulation, which is not a translation or even loose paraphrase of the text, but a completely different text about personal repentance and forgiveness. It starts:

Lord most holy! Lord most mighty!
Righteous ever are Thy judgments
Hear and save us, for Thy mercies’ sake.

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New is old and old is new

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I am looking for poems or other texts to set to music. I was browsing through The Norton Anthology of Poetry and saw a short poem by Geoffrey Chaucer (c 1343-1401) which starts:

Madam, for your newfangelnesse,
Many a servant have ye put out of grace.

So even in the 14th century people could be known for their fondness for novelty. Note that the word first applied to people, then later to things or ideas. I wonder what was considered ‘novel’ in those days.

I would have thought that newfangled was from far later. On the other hand, oldfangled is from far later. Merriam-Webster dates it from 1842. So newfangled is oldfangled and oldfangled is new(er)fangled. Nothing now is ever simply fangled, even Dracula’s dentures.

These days, Chaucer might complain about his madam’s new fangirl-ness. 

ruth (lower-case)

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Some time ago I wrote about the word ruthless and the just-word ruthful. I didn’t mention the word ruth, which means pity or compassion; sorrow or grief; self-reproach, contrition or remorse (Dictionary.com). It is derived from rue (feel sorrow, repent, regret).

Recently Youtube suggested a video of Seven part-songs by Gustav Holst (as compared with Seven-part songs). 

Number 5, titled Sorrow and joy includes the line And she [sorrow, personified] with ruth will teach you truth. The video doesn’t list an author, but the internet found Robert Bridges, who I know enough about to know that he used older words at times. The final verse is:

Blush not nor blench with either wench,
Make neither brag nor pother:
God send you, son, enough of one
And not too much o’ t’other.

(Pother and t’other don’t rhyme in my pronunciation, if I ever pronounced them.)

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micturition

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A document mentioned micturition, which is simply a fancy word for urination, which is simply a fancy word for pissing, peeing or weeing. When a word is defined entirely in terms of another, more common word, you may as well use the other, more common word in the first place. Urination/urinate/urine also has the advantage of having a basic noun form, while micturition/micturate/?micture doesn’t. 

The context was medico-legal. We might equally write and talk (medico-legally) about post-micturition dribble or post-urination dribble, but we wouldn’t talk and certainly wouldn’t write about post-pissing dribble, post-peeing dribble or post-weeing dribble. (Post-micturition dribble has about 10 times as many results as post-urination dribble, but urination is by far more common than micturition.)

(I first encountered micturitions in Vogon poetry, so didn’t think it was any more real than any others Douglas Adams uses.)

(I typed micturation several times, but Pages for Mac corrected me.)

PS Thurs 14th: I possibly secondly encountered micturition at least 18 years ago when a choir friend told us that he’d passed out after urinating in a public lavatory. The medical term for this is micturition syncope, which is defined and explained in terms of urination/urinate/urine.

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.

my guide

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Speaking of bachs: In December 1933 the German composer Richard Strauss wrote a song titled Das Bächlein, (originally for voice and piano but the first recording that came up is for voice and orchestra), in which a wanderer asks a mountain stream where it came from and where it is going. It answers “I come from the womb of dark rocks. A merry childlike spirit drives me onward, I know not whither. He who called me forth from the rock, He, I think, shall be my guide.”

Strauss set the words for my guide rhapsodically. There can be no doubt that he realised the double meaning of mein führer (leader/guide). There is still debate about his interactions with the Nazi regime, even though he was cleared by a denazification tribunal in 1948. In the early days he might have seen it as the (or a) solution to the chaos of the previous 20 years, but after he reluctantly accepted the position of president of the Reichsmusikkammer he quickly lost whatever illusions he had and fell from favour, especially because of his professional relationship with author Stefan Zweig and personal relationship with his daughter-in-law and her family. The song wasn’t published until after his death. 

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