As I walked the dog this morning I watched a crow going about its mid-winter business - gathering sticks, perhaps for its nest - and I wondered why a group of crows goes by the collective noun, a murder. I've seen some very amusing behavior by crows and I think they're fun to have around. (Maybe the Australian birds are actually ravens, but that distinction is in the 'too hard' basket for me, so I'll just call them crows.)
And this evening, on Boing Boing, I've just read an anecdote in which the expression murder of crows was used. Okay, that's a sign. I need to discover the truth about this harsh noun.
A "murder" of crows is based on the persistent but fallacious folk tale that crows form tribunals to judge and punish the bad behavior of a member of the flock. If the verdict goes against the defendant, that bird is killed (murdered) by the flock. The basis in fact is probably that occasionally crows will kill a dying crow who doesn't belong in their territory or much more commonly feed on carcasses of dead crows. Also, both crows and ravens are associated with battlefields, medieval hospitals, execution sites and cemeteries (because they scavenged on human remains). In England, a tombstone is sometimes called a ravenstone.
The Grammarphobia Blog, on the other hand, suggests the expression might be a fanciful one and not a genuinely medieval collective noun.
Reading The Big Issue today, I came across the word remora.
It was explained in Mic Looby's regular column. He said the word comes from the Latin for 'delay', because 'according to one legend, a few affixed remora can slow a ship's progress'.
Online Etymology Dictionary says: "sucking fish", 1567, from L. remora, lit. "delay, hindrance," from re- "back" + mora "delay"...Pliny writes that Antony's galley was delayed by one at the Battle of Actium.
I wondered how large they are, that they could slow a ship, so I had a look at a video clip of one attaching itself to a diver who was waiting out a decompression stop on the way up from a dive, and it only seemed as long as his forearm.
In ancient times, the remora was believed to stop a ship from sailing. In Latin remora means "delay", while the genus name Echeneis comes from Greek echein ("to hold") and naus ("a ship"). Particularly notable is the account of Pliny the Younger, in which the remora is blamed for the defeat of Mark http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifAntony at the Battle of Actium and (indirectly) for the death of Caligula.
Good on you, little (or not so little) remora, I say. Caligula was no loss, from what I gather.
Here's a fascinating essay with interesting quotes from Pliny. It seems that "Upon its being shown to the emperor [Caligula], he strongly expressed his indignation that such an obstacle as this should have impeded his progress, and have rendered powerless the hearty endeavours of some four hundred men. One thing, too, it is well known, more particularly surprised him, how it was possible that the fish, while adhering to the ship, should arrest its progress, and yet should have no such power when brought on board" (Id.). Thus, Pliny points out, "did an insignificant fish give presage of great events.
Encarta says they grow to about 90 centimetres long, so I suppose if you were rowing around in a galley, a few remoras on the hull might slow you down.
1875, originally a legal term for "authorization to a debtor to postpone payment," from neut. of L.L. moratorius "tending to delay," from L. morari "to delay," from mora "pause, delay," originally "standing there thinking." The word didn't come out of italics until 1914. General sense of "a postponement, deliberate temporary suspension" is first recorded 1932.
Well, enough of standing here thinking... I'd better stop.
When I visited the Melbourne Museum's special exhibition, A Day in Pompeii, I was surprised to learn that Latin had no word for volcano.
I had expected to enjoy the exhibition in an uncomplicated way, but reckoned without the fact that the ancient disaster would evoke such strong memories of the recent bushfires here in Victoria. Embarrassed by my reaction, I surreptitiously wiped away the tears as I watched a realistic 3-D computer animation of the pyroclastic cloud rolling down the mountain towards the town of Pompeii. I wondered how many others had the same reaction - the teenage girl beside me spent the entire time sobbing into her mother's breast, the mother gently rubbing her daughter's shoulder.
And the room with the plaster casts of people and animals who died in agony...too confronting in Victoria in 2009.
The striking point made in the exhibition - in what I am sure would be an unintentional reference to the current Royal Commission into the recent deaths here - is that the Pompeiians had to decide whether to stay to defend their property or leave early. Those who fled lived, those who stayed died.
They didn't know what they faced, because they didn't know what a volcano could do. Which seems strange, given the Latin root of the word.
Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture by Christopher Tuplin and Tracey Elizabeth Rihll, contains an article by Harry M. Hine suggesting the word volcano was coined by Italian or Portuguese sailors as recently as the fifteenth century CE.
When the ancients discussed volcanoes, it was specific named volcanoes, such as Etna, which was one of the more well-known ones. They didn't have a tradition of discussing volcanic activity in a general way, because there hadn't been many eruptions in Europe. Opportunities to witness volcanic activity were rare and localized. Before Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, Etna was the only volcano close enough to major cities to be visible from them.
The modern city of Naples lives on the edge of disaster, as the ancients did - the difference being that the inhabitants have a word for volcano, understand what can happen and should receive some warning beforehand. In a short film about Naples, the narrator argued the necessity for a plan to evacuate the city.
And I wondered how we could evacuate our towns buried in the heart of the flammable bush, with the only possible exits along narrow tree-lined roads.
Let's hope it isn't another drought-stricken summer.
I sometimes wonder why we call our canine pets dogs and reserve the word hound for a sub-group of dogs, given that the German word Hund is the translation of dog and The Free Dictionary gives the etymology I would have expected:
[hound - Middle English, from Old English hund; see kwon- in Indo-European roots.
This question came back to the forefront of my mind when I was browsing the archives of A Word a Day, and read this anecdote, which I've posted on my dog blog:
Our seven-year-old daughter Ananya has developed an interest in etymology. Often she'll interrupt her play in the backyard and peek in my downstairs study to ask about whatever word comes to her mind. Some time back she barged in with, "So how did the word dog came about?" I explained to her that the word dog came from Middle English dogge which came from Old English docga. Satisfied, she went back to her play.
I had completely forgotten about it when a few days later I overheard her talking to her grandmother on the phone, "Amma, we got a dogga." I was puzzled and later asked why she said dogga instead of dog. She patiently explained, "You know, Amma is old. That's why I used Old English with her."
Okay, that explains the word dog, but why has it prevailed over hound as the general term?
For centuries, sportsmen have bred dogs for their tracking abilities. A "sleuthhound" was a dog trained to follow the track (sleuth) of a quarry in all weather. This Scottish bloodhound not only hunted game but also tracked down fugitives.
Aha! I was on the track (or slot, or sleuth), of my word origin.
And then...I didn't need to search any more, because I found a fascinating post about the underlying human-canine relationships that formed these differences in English vocabulary. It concludes:
It seems that hound and dog are not the same. The word dog implies common in every sense of the word. The word hound implies hunter and nobility. It seems that no creature escapes the class system in our society.
Basically the writer suggests that hounds were for hunting and dogs were for guarding.
Hmm...does that mean it's rather common to keep a dog as a pet? Yes, perhaps in more than one sense of the word, given the ownership rate of dogs. (37.3% of Australian families owned a dog in 2006.)
My sister prepared a chocolate cheese cake last night and we just ate some of it, in a celebration of all that is unhealthy in delicious food, a symphony of fat and sugar that will sing through the veins and into the organs and probably settle on the hips forever. (I said 'prepared' rather than 'baked', because it's a frozen, uncooked one, and not such a good choice for a barbecue on a summer's day - but that's another story.)
We felt a teensy bit guilty eating it, but comforted ourselves with the knowledge that although it would have been unhealthy to eat a large portion, we each took a piece that was quite small compared to a huge serve. And then had to admit it was undeniably huge, compared to a small serve.
An example of chiasmus! The very first day after I learned this new word, it slid quietly into the lunchtime conversation.
A verbal pattern (a type of antithesis) in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first with the parts reversed. Essentially the same as antimetabole.
Of the examples quoted after the definition, my favorite would have to be Samuel Johnson's "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
I've been listening to a series of lectures by Brooks Landon on how to compose long sentences rich in meaning and yet easy to understand, and I'm loving the lectures, with their analysis of language and the great examples included in each session.
I've always loved grammar, but tended to see it as the analysis of written words rather than a means of constructing beautiful sentences. Now I'm seeing it in a different light, as a tool for the writer. Which makes me think of a comment about Hegel's Science of Logic in a novel I'm reading (Freedom and Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull. One of the characters writes about Hegel,
And, still in the introduction, he talks about how dry and empty are the forms of grammar when studied by themselves, but how full of meaning they are to one who has studied languages.
In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte presents-and comments on-more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language.
The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept-short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.
As an aspiring writer, I'm loving the book!
Here are a few of my attempts at long sentences. The first two are based on actual sentences quoted in Tufte's book and the third is my attempt to write a 500-word sentence. (As you will see, I couldn't do it!)
She tried to call the dog, at ease before the fire, his great serrated jaws looming like a cavern, his rough fur lying tufted and spiky along his spine, his enormous tongue and teeth in a gaping, panting yawn, and his sharp curved claws extended and stabbing into the rug.
By night-time, the dogs’ main exercise was undertaken restfully in the lounge-room, lying about on rugs or covering the distance to the couch, all vying with masterful Fido to drag themselves up by paws, claws and teeth like wolves conquering a mountain cliff, while the human woman, a grubby thickly-waisted little person, told them how to behave and yelled angry commands in a beer- soaked growl punctuated by occasional abrupt sneezing, as a result of which she was eventually taken to a hospital in the City.
Dreaming of the past, longing for a chance to make things right, to show Ronald, the man who now despised her, that she wasn’t as evil as he thought, Susan walked along the path in the sunshine, ignoring the songs of birds, the rustle of leaves and the chirping of sparrows; nevertheless, she noticed the mud underfoot, the dirty, stinking mud that coated her shoes and clung to the hems of her jeans, the very jeans she had worn when she betrayed Ronald, giving way to her temper (that temper having caused her enough trouble in the past that you'd think she'd have learned her lesson long ago) and set herself on the path to loss and suffering, not a path that she had taken consciously - she had lost the opportunity to choose when she drove her vehicle into the car park, saw Ronald with the woman, and jumped to such a hasty conclusion, one that she now regretted, and knew she might regret to her dying day.
These awful sentences make it rather obvious I've still got a lot to learn, but I'm having fun.
The article makes the book sound interesting and I'll be looking out for it, but the subsequent comments are also worth a read.
There's plenty of informed discussion of the variety of languages that have been invented and the motives of the people who invented them. Brian Barker's comments there relate to Esperanto.
One topic I didn't see mentioned was the Baha'i religion's attitude to a universal auxiliary language. My neighbor recently gave me a book about this religion, which I had never previously heard of (not proselytising, as she's not a member of that religion).
They seem an optimistic group (not unrealistically so, I hope) and aim for world unity and peace in the future.
Their site says, in relation to their vision for a future United Nations:
4. Making a commitment to a universal auxiliary language and a common script
The United Nations, which currently uses six official languages, would derive substantial benefit from either choosing a single existing language or creating a new one to be used as an auxiliary language in all its fora. Such a step has long been advocated by many groups, from the Esperantists to the Bahá'í International Community itself.18 In addition to saving money and simplifying bureaucratic procedures, such a move would go far toward promoting a spirit of unity.
We propose the appointment of a high-level Commission, with members from various regions and drawn from relevant fields, including linguistics, economics, the social sciences, education and the media, to begin careful study on the matter of an international auxiliary language and the adoption of a common script.
We foresee that eventually, the world cannot but adopt a single, universally agreed-upon auxiliary language and script to be taught in schools worldwide, as a supplement to the language or languages of each country. The objective would be to facilitate the transition to a global society through better communication among nations, reduction of administrative costs for businesses, governments and others involved in global enterprise, and a general fostering of more cordial relations between all members of the human family.19
This proposal should be read narrowly. It does not in any way envision the decline of any living language or culture.
The Baha'i site says:The Bahá'í community, comprising members of the Bahá'í Faith from all over the globe, now numbers some five million souls. They represent 2,112 ethnic and tribal groups and live in over 116,000 localities in 188 independent countries and 45 dependent territories or overseas departments. What was once regarded by some as an obscure, tiny sect is now recognized by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the second-most widely spread independent religion in the world, after Christianity.
If you put this number together with the Encyclopaedia Britannicas estimation that
more than 100,000 persons worldwide use the language [Esperanto], and several dozen periodicals are published in Esperanto(*1)
then perhaps in the future everyone might have a second language that makes understanding between individuals and groups more of a possibility.
Reference:"Esperanto." Britannica Student Library. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Welcome to Parlance’s blog about language. In the fifteenth century the printing press brought widespread access to knowledge that had previously been reserved for the elite. Later, the development of the telegraph, the telephone, radio and television provoked predictions of doom. Now mobile phones and the Internet are underpinning another massive change in our language. Not everyone is happy to see these changes. But I am. I love words and I’m agog to see how they change and adapt to the realities of twenty-first century life. I hope you’re visiting this blog because you feel the same.
Teacher, writer, dog-lover, gardener, miniaturist, - that's part of who I am. I hope through writing I can discover more about myself and more about the interesting world around me.
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