Arbitrarily at random

A recent Times crossword (#25410) used arbitrarily as the definitional part of a clue; the answer required was at random.

I was inclined to quibble: haphazard, unarranged, accidental, maybe. But arbitrary suggests just personal whim.

The OED seemed to provide some support. Arbitrary does not appear in any of the definitional entries for random, & random does not appear under the definitional parts of either arbitrarily or arbitrary.

Interestingly, however, according to the OED, random play is ‘a facility on a digital music player for playing tracks in an arbitrary order’. One wonders just exactly how the algorithm works for that choice.

Even more interestingly, the word random itself comes originally from Norman French & means speed, haste, impetuousness, violence, or to run fast, gallop. Hence, presumably, the lack of time for thinking & deliberating on your random choices.

Related posts
Getting my knuckles in a twist
Humpty Dumpty on statistical sampling

Phagias & phobias

We have been hearing a lot, recently, about various human phagias & associated phobias.

First there was the horsemeat scandal; a post on the Wellcome Trust blog introduced me to the word hippophagy, a fancy word to describe the eating of horsemeat.

This morning Erica McAlister presented a programme on BBC Radio 4 designed to persuade us all to indulge in more entomophagy – the eating of insects. We already do more of that than we know about.

Suddenly it hit me – if -phagy means ‘eating’ what on earth is a sarcophagus? This is a word I have only ever heard used in connection with the burial of human bodies. The original meaning hardly bears thinking about.

Time for some etymology.

According to the OED, phagia comes from the Ancient Greek word for eating, & is used to form scientific terms denoting conditions related to eating or ingestion.

-phagy is used to form nouns with the sense ‘that feeds on, or in the manner denoted or described by (the first element)’. It appeared in English during the 1600s, but the Victorians added plenty more varieties to the list.

A sarcophagus was originally a kind of stone, reputed among the Greeks to have the property of consuming the flesh of any dead body (not just a human one) deposited in it; this meaning is now described as Obsolete in everyday use by the OED. Sarcophagus as a word to mean any kind of stone coffin appeared first in 1705.

The OED also records sarcophagy as a word used to describe the eating of any kind of flesh, but quotes nothing more recent than what sounds like a splendid rant from HG Wells in 1901: “The movements against vivisection, opium, alcohol, tobacco, sarcophagy, and the male sex”.

If you like you could become ophiophagous (eat snakes).

But do try to curb your pamphagous behaviour. The OED defines this ‘All-devouring, omnivorous’ but has only one quotation to illustrate its use, dating from 1702: “He ... eat with such a Pamphagous Fury, as to Cram himself with ... Eighteen Biskets at one Stolen Meal”.

Sounds plain greedy to me.

Links
Wellcome Trust: Flogging a dead horse
BBC Radio 4: Who’s a pest

Signs of hard times for the middle classes

‘With a name like that, we had better be able to afford school fees’ - Times Birth Announcements 9 February 2013

‘We had to make sure we didn’t choose names that meant we had to send our sons to private school’ – Times Birth announcements 9 March 2013

The middle classes must be expecting the recession to last for the next 18 years.

But just think of Lord Coe, now one of the most admired & honoured men in the land. With a name like Sebastian, going to a comprehensive school oop North in gritty Sheffield in Yorkshire  must have been the making of him.

Link
Lord Coe receives award at palace

Milk-bottle shoulders

Jack Malvern, writing in The Times, describes as ‘a woman with milk-bottle shoulders’ Olivia Boteler Porter, the subject of a portrait held in the Bowes Museum in Durham now said to be by Van Dyck.

Milk-bottle shoulders as a term used to describe sloping shoulders does not seem to be in widespread use at all – not in the OED & Google turned up only one result.

Links
How a lady came out of the closet
Van Dyck portrait spotted online
Related posts
Sloping shoulders

Μορε ον τηερεφορε

I cannot now recall how my Googling led me last week to Mathematical Writing by Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts – a report based on a course of the same name given at Stanford University during autumn quarter, 1987. It is not as if I do any of that.

However I was intrigued to see the following, very early on, #3 in a list of 27 points considered to be especially important:

Don't use the symbols ; replace them by the corresponding words. (Except in works on logic, of course.)

I don’t suppose those 5 proscribed symbols come out on the blog – I had to use Word’s Font → Symbol → Insert → Symbol to get them in since a copy & paste from the PDF did not work.

I shall not disgrace myself by trying to name all 5; I think I recognise 3, but have no recollection of ever having seen the fourth. It is, after all, (gulp) now half a century since I had to try to force anything of the sort into my reluctant brain.The first one in the list is however was engraved in childhood & would be familiar to anyone who did old fashioned school geometry – the triangle made up of three full stops, which means therefore.

It is a source of great frustration to me that the instructor did not see fit to explain this ban.

Links
Mathematical writing
Earliest Uses of Symbols of Set Theory and Logic
Related post
Wherefore therefore?

Tickled my fancy

Recent links I liked:

Why Twitter Makes Us Want to Add Extra Letterssss & How long is a tweet string? - answering the important questions of our time.

Ageing and productivity: Economists and others. Given we are all going to have to work for longer it's good to know the older folk can keep up.

The evolution of Consciousness: Part 2

Alcohol consumption higher than reported in England. Here we go again. The report is behind a paywall so I cannot check whether they have addressed the questions of how much is consumed by visitors to Britain, how much by people who do not live in private households, & how much by those who are too drunk to co-operate with social survey interviewers.

A Closer Look at College Completion Rates for Full-Time Students: A new American study, for example, finds that men are less willing to tolerate loan debt than women are. Which may mean that girls in the majority at college may not be the all-round good thing we might like to take it for.

Multilingual dictionary keeps humans in the loop - At a (biggggg) price

Irish fingering

A contributor to a discussion about domestic politics on RTE Radio 1 on Friday morning talked of putting a tricky issue on to the long finger. From the context I understood this to mean what we might call kicking into the long grass (in the hope that it might go away).

But surely something would stay all too plainly in view if it were on the prominent middle finger? Could the phrase perhaps imply something worse – referring to a gesture which is at least rude, if not insultingly obscene?

The OED offered no help as to a figurative or colloquial meaning, defining long finger as merely the middle, or sometimes the three middle, fingers.

The Macmillan Dictionary blog suggests that to put something on an mhéar fhada in Irish means to postpone something. The Phrase Finder suggests that it comes from “the [uniquely Irish?] custom of wearing a ring on the index finger of your left hand if you are not engaged or married, on the second (long) finger if you are engaged, on the third (ring) finger if married, and on the little finger if entirely disinclined”& Collins English Dictionary gives examples of the phrase in use, sometimes to mean postponed or ignored.

But no real help as to why.

Links
Example Sentences Including 'long finger'
Long finger
Phrase finder
BBC News: When did the middle finger become offensive?

Welsh booby

Somebody boobed with a temporary road sign in Shrewsbury: they put an h into Whelsh.

A sad reflection on modern standards of education, said the Queen’s English Society. You’ve got to be dopey to make that sort of error, said a local.

Well, it is embarrassing, so close to Wales, but it’s not that hard to understand how easy it is to confuse Wales with whales, from where ‘tis but a short step, via whelp to Whelsh.

It is also crushingly easy to make misspellings when your attention is focused on forming the letters properly, as I found out when I tried my hand at calligraphy

Related post
An area the size of Whales

Blue blood

An absorbing new series on Radio 4 talks to people who must listen – intently- for a living.

It was while cardiac surgeon Jonathan Pitts Crick was talking about de-oxygenated blood returning to the heart – the blue blood – that it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why we use the phrase blue-blooded to mean aristocratic. What can be good, admirable or desirable about not having enough oxygen?

It seems unlikely that it could really be a dig, suggesting a class which is effete & decadent (in contrast to more lusty red-blooded types), since I always understood blue blood to be admired.

The Phrase Finder suggests that it a literal translation of the Spanish 'sangre azul', attributed to some of the oldest and proudest families of Castile, who claimed never to have intermarried with Moors, Jews, or other, darker skinned peoples. Their skin was whiter than white, fair enough for you to be able to see the blue in their veins.

The OED does not give us an etymology, but does include a quotation from Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies (published in 1863): Like an old blue-blooded hidalgo of Spain.

Yet another word to be careful about using.
Link
BBC Radio 4: The Listeners
Phrase finder: Blue blood
Related post
Passing white

What's in your beef?

Beefing up public-key encryption My first reaction to the headline was to assume that yet another twist to the horsemeat in burgers story was being revealed.
.
Not sure if it is more a less alarming that this story is ‘MIT researchers show how to secure widely used encryption schemes against attackers who have intercepted examples of successful decryption’.

Language orders

Feeling bereft of inspiration for a topic for a quick post today I resorted to an old standby – look at how they celebrated Valentine’s Day 100 years ago.

I did not get that far – diverted by yet more evidence that there is absolutely nothing new in ‘political correctness.’

The following is an extract from The Times of 14 February 1913.

The nomenclature of Indians

Official orders

The use of the word ‘native’ as a synonym for ‘Indian’, customary for generations in official & public speech & writing, has been discouraged in recent years, & more particularly from the time of Lord Minto’s Viceroyalty, owing to the dislike of the appellation shown by the educated classes.

Though it has now been generally discarded in official correspondence, reports & returns, the Government of India have deemed it desirable to give a definite direction to this effect to their officers.

The notification … recognises that in certain contingencies it is impossible to avoid the use of the word, eg in such phrases as … ‘statutory native of India’ (a term which includes the domiciled whites). But generally officers of Government have been directed to use the word ‘Indian’ instead of ‘native’ in all official papers …

Our readers are aware that this has long been the practice of The Times.

That last sentence speaks volumes about the gulf that can grow between those at 'home' & those who fondly believe that everything in the old country remains as it was when they left, something that can affect migrants everywhere.

Related posts
Terminological debate
Old fashioned political correctness
Another N word

An area the size of whales

"In South Africa, I was doing an aerial survey of Wales".

That is what I heard conservationist Mark Carwardine say on this morning’s Radio 4 programme In Living Memory.

But I was simply momentarily confused, my mind automatically linking the idea of surveys with areas of land, & thus with that well known unit of measurement, an area the size of Wales.

In reality it was whales of which he spoke, confusingly, in a programme which was actually about the disproportionate terror we have of sharks.

To prove that sharks  are really not that dangerous, he quoted some great stats. My favourite – an American is 25 times more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than by a shark.

Links
BBC Radio 4: In Living Memory - Sharks
[PDF]Mark Carwardine
Mpumalanga

Met a pieman

Today I noticed two small white vans, within quite a short space of time. One was in the village, near the chippy, the other in town as I walked towards the market. One declared itself to belong to the Great North Pie Company, the other to Lord of the Pies. The first makes artisan pies, the second hand-made gourmet pies.

Both are local. Perhaps my seeing two so close together is evidence of a burgeoning small industry at a time of despondency, cold weather & economic distress (there is nothing so cockle-warming as a hot pie). From makers who hopefully are close to & familair with all their suppliers of meat & other raw materials.

Or perhaps noticing the first one just primed my brain to notice the word pie.

Links
Great North Pie Co
Lord of the Pies

Whatever the weather

I am writing this on my laptop at home, having decided by mid-morning that there is no point in trying to go out today. This unsettled & unsettling weather has thrown a surprise snow storm at us – unforecasted, as far as I can tell. The local councils cannot have known, since no roads were gritted. So, although the snow does not amount to all that much, there is traffic chaos, including on the main A6 all the way to Stockport, & some schools are closed.

Yesterday was cold with a blustery wind, plus heavy rain in the late afternoon/early evening. Even stronger winds, gale force in some places, were forecast for today, with scattered wintry showers, (longer spells of snow & sleet possible over Scotland). As ever, it was hard to tell what we should expect in our corner of the world, but it was only the prospect of high wind that was of the slightest concern.

I got a surprise when I went to put out the rubbish for collection last night; as I bent to tie up the bag bits of something kept falling out of my hair. I assumed my head must have brushed against the philadelphus, to which a few leaves still cling, until one of the frozen snowflakes caught the light. None of them was settling on the ground however & the wind was still blustering.

Another surprise lay in wait as I caught the tail end of Tony Livesey’s programme on Radio 5 Live – broadcast from Manchester – where colleagues were teasing Tony about the problems he would face on his drive home after 1am. Even Rhod Sharp joined in when he came to give his plug for Up All Night, astonishingly saying that anyone trying to drive to Buxton would be facing a real challenge, & he would be keeping listeners updated on his own programme. I still assumed they must be talking about high winds.

Sleep came before the promised elucidation.

Even before those late night excitements I had been beginning to mentally draft a post for today on the unsettling weather, inspired by thunder & lightning. We had had more of this around 8 or 9 in the evening, a few long rumbles rolling around the hills, not too close, the lightning imperceptible from inside with the curtains drawn, except for one flash which briefly made the lights flicker & the radio stutter. This makes the 4th or 5th such episode since the first snow began to melt, all very similar except for one in the early hours of Sunday morning which was loud enough to wake everybody up & with lightning which must have been sheeting across the whole sky, lighting up the room even through the curtains.

All while having an argument with myself: not another post on the weather.

The seductive power of writing about the weather I have come to recognise only since starting this blog – gives plenty of free rein to description & the use of adjectives, something frowned upon in official & academic writing. But it’s my blog, I can do whatever I like, nobody else has to read it – I used to skip all those bits myself, especially when attempting a Victorian novel with pages of the stuff. For heaven’s sake, all you need do is establish that ‘twas a dark & stormy night, no need to go on so.

However, sometimes language itself can lead you to weather science. Language Log provides some very useful links to discussions of how the pattern of rain has changed (in Britain at least), just through a discussion of how we should name, which word we should use for, this ‘new’ kind. One option is ‘convective rain’ since it is thought to be produced by processes similar to those which produce thunderstorms. I find that curious, since its frequency in these parts seems to be correlated with a fall in thunderstorms, suggesting something else is going on as well.

Perhaps it’s the bacteria in the clouds. Some of which have a pink pigment which acts as a sunscreen, enabling them to resist death by ultraviolet ray, even thousands of feet up & so much closer to the sun. Although it remains a mystery how they get up there. One speculation is that hurricanes & violent winds help create a kind of hovering effect which sweeps them up into the storm clouds. (I paraphrase all this from an intriguing Weather Eye column by Paul Simons in Monday’s Times). So I expect the jet stream is ultimately to blame – one way or another it always seems to end up getting the blame for our current unusual weather ‘events’.

Links
Georgia Tech: Study Finds Substantial Microorganism Populations in the Upper Troposphere
Research on Airborne Ice Nucleating Species (RAINS)
Can Bacteria in Clouds Influence Global Weather Patterns?
Live Science: Earth's Clouds Alive With Bacteria
National Geographic: Rainmaking Bacteria Ride Clouds to "Colonize" Earth?

Crossword games

I am so pleased I found Times for the Times
This nice, unfussy site just gives the solutions & explains how (or why) the clue is a clue. At first these clarifications were just as likely to make my lip curl as not, but then the magic word was mentioned.

Pangram.  Someone likes playing (undeclared) games with us.

I would never have noticed. Never expected them, and my habit of not filling in the unchecked lights would have done nothing to alert me.

I don’t really like these games-for-the-sake-of-games, like writing novels without the letter e – you admire the effort & ingenuity, but the result is not especially satisfying to the reader. With crosswords it can lead to obscure words & tortured clues.

But I noticed the first pangram for myself the other day, & it certainly helped to realise that the remaining clues must contain within them somewhere the letters j, x and v. Job done

But if they are going to do this then the editor ought, as a matter of routine, to include a line of alphabet above or below the grid to save the solver the chore of writing it out for themselves – after all they do something of the sort for codeword solvers.

And the whole business has sparked an idea for the sort of investigation that might while away a wet Sunday afternoon in winter: compare & contrast the frequency distribution of letters in the cryptic crossword solutions with that in ordinary English

Link
Times for The Times
Center for Book Arts
Related post
Thunderer on the pull

Idle hands

It came as a bit of a surprise to read last week that the word ‘unemployment’ dates back (in English – French may be different) only to 1888, when it was used in an article in the American journal, Science. The OED notes that it has been in common use only since about 1895. Before that time there was simply a choice between work & pauperism.

By the first decade of the C20th the scourge of unemployment was a topic of regular discussion in intellectual periodicals such as Contemporary Review. It was a ‘thing’ (like justice or security), with which society & government had a responsibility to deal, & not just the fault of the feckless. (They however, continued to figure in the arguments – indeed the OED gives us a quotation from the St James’s Gazette, in the year before the first recorded appearance of Unemployment, referring to ‘Persons who are unemployed because they are unemployable’.)

By the middle of the following century, in 1948, the United Nations recognised that “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment”

And the idea & scope of a contract of employment continues to grow – with its guarantees of protection from unfair dismissal, harassment & discrimination, & guarantees of equal pay, holidays & respect for family commitments.

At the same time however, we are seeing a growing tendency for the young – in particular – to be expected to work without pay, in the interests of gaining relevant experience & networking opportunities.

A recent article on the Guardian Datablog attempted to disentangle the numbers of those working without pay from the total numbers of ‘employees in employment’. The fact that job numbers are growing while the economy is stalling is causing much scratching of heads.

This revelation about the word unemployment makes me want to revisit the contemporary sources from the earlier C19th : what words were used, for example, to describe the plight of the ‘operatives’ who were laid off during the Cotton Famine. Or, indeed by the Chartists. And did Tawney use the word ‘unemployment’ in his Commonplace Book.

I may yet be a convert to the linguistic turn

Links
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Linguistic Turn
Employment figures: how the unpaid get counted
Related posts
Statistics leading to philosophy
RH Tawney’s Commonplace Book

The world turns

… in a world … where new university students raised on laptops struggle to write by pen for 3 hours in an exam hall; where postal services flounder for want of handwritten letters; where we will soon once again have to pay monks to write letters for us when needed …

Times 3rd leader January 2013

Related posts
A record of things that hath been
The human continuum of space & time

Fingering the ring

Sham wedding ring exposed by familiar faces in photos

So read the headline in The Times.

You had to read the article to understand that the ring in question was not the familiar band of gold but a gang who organised ‘bogus weddings’ to brides from Eastern Europe for men who hoped thereby to claim the right to live in this country under the EU open borders laws

Spuugh-slang

While listening to the radio this morning I found myself wondering what COBRA stands for. I think we are expected to be reassured by the news that COBRA is sitting – often chaired by the prime minister - whenever there is an emergency in progress.

How’s about Cabinet Operations Before Real Armageddon?

Links
Cobra: The UK's emergencies team
The Home Office's Response to Terrorist Attacks
Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms

Pretty girl in crimson rose

I have just read Sandy Balfour’s book Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) . I had meant to read it when it was published in 2003 but never got round to it, until I was nudged into remembering during a recent Radio 4 Archive programme on crosswords.

Well worth the wait & a particular pleasure to read during these dismal winter days. Especially as I was beginning to feel so scratchy & irritated by some recent Times crosswords which do not suit my style at all, wondering sometimes if, after more than half a century, I might finally have to give them up altogether.

The book is a story of love, travel, migration to a new country – and yes, cryptic crosswords.

That particular British obsession is a trope which Balfour uses to explain his love for his girlfriend – who introduced him to the puzzles – and what it is about Britain that made him adopt it as the country in which he wished to live, in preference to his native South Africa. It is beautifully written & crafted, a good read even for those who regard crossword addiction as an affliction of the socially inadequate. I am by no means sure that too many will be persuaded to take up the pastime, but that really is not the point of the book.

I found it particularly intriguing that Balfour makes much of the idea that solving a puzzle is not simply a technical process – to really get the most out of the game you must see through to the stories hidden in the clues.

Some present day setters – drawn form the world of computing rather than the clergymen or Oxbridge classicists of the past - as well as the solvers, do indeed seem to treat both cluing & solving as a problem of pure analysis & reduction, but the real pleasure comes from that ‘A-ha’ moment, the endorphin rush which comes with the feeling, not of victory over an opponent but of minds meeting.

And this distinction between stories & analysis in the business of words is worth thinking about, along with all the thinking I am doing about the ‘problem’ of stories v statistics & the theory of probability.

I also loved Balfour’s insistence on the idea that those who race against the clock to complete a puzzle are missing the point.

And I treasure the quote from Shed (who sets puzzles for The Guardian) that Ximenes, like Marx, suffers from the quality of his disciples.

Links
From easy to cryptic: 100 years of the crossword
Related posts
Stories & statistics
How to fill in a crossword puzzle