supercilious attitudes

therigatha asked me to define supercilious and when I looked at the meanings, I thought at first it should only be used to refer to facial expressions or bodily posture.

The online Macquarie dictionary says:

adjective haughtily disdainful or contemptuous, as persons, their expression, bearing, etc. [Latin superciliōsus]

Dictionary.com says:

adjective
haughtily disdainful or contemptuous, as a person or a facial expression.

Wordorigins.com has the history and I was interested to see it comes originally from a facial expression:

supercilious
Word History
Date of Origin 16th c.
The etymological notion underlying supercilious is of raising the ‘eyebrows’ as a sign of haughty disdain. It comes from Latin superciliōsus, a derivative of supercilium ‘eyebrow’, hence ‘haughtiness’. This was a compound noun formed from the prefix super- ‘above’ and cilium ‘eyelid’ (source of the English biological term cilium ‘hair-like process’ (18th c.), whose meaning evolved via an intermediate ‘eyelash’).

However, it seems to me it can be used also in a wider sense, to relate to the tone in a piece of writing, because I came across this quote at The Acheh times:

Geoffrey Norman, regarding your article about college football and the significance of football relative to the disastrous events of the past week, I appreciated it on the whole, but found it to be slightly supercilious in tone when talking about those who might have caused the atrocities. We should be angry with them and we should demand that payment be made for the evil done, but believing we are better than they are will not only not help in achieving those goals, but it will also prove to be incorrect. —— Jan Perkins in 'Readers' Reactions to Terrorist Attacks'; ESPN

There are plenty of examples on the internet of people speaking in a 'supercilious tone', so it seems to me that since writing is a way of expressing speech, therefore it can be used for spoken or written attitudes. Here's one example, from The Man With The Broken Ear by Edmond About:

"No, sir," replied Fougas in a most supercilious tone, "I'm in want of nothing, and I'd rather die than accept anything from an Englishman! If I'm calling the conductor, it's only because I want to get into a different car, and cleanse my eyes from the sight of an enemy of the Emperor."

sparrowgrass, aka asparagus

As I was browsing gardening sites to check where I should plant my twenty-one baby asparagus plants, grown from seed last year, I came across a reference to sparrowgrass.

I think I prefer that name.

It's a folk etymology. It came into English from the Latin form, asparagus, but by the seventeenth century had been shortened to sparagus, after which it was anglicised to sperage. Alongside this form, some people began to call it sparrowgrass, because of the similarity to those two English words. During the nineteenth century, the folk name died out and it reverted to asparagus. All this I read on word-origins.com. The article says grocers still call asparagus grass. I've never heard anyone do so, but I've never talked to a grocer about this plant.

All very interesting - well, to me.

But the fun part came when I looked at an ABC Science site. Apparently, many people have stinky urine after eating this plant. (Hmm, I'll have to enquire amongst my friends - close friends).

However, although we've been eating asparagus for thousands of years, and people have written about it for at least two and a half thousand years, no one mentioned the stinky wee until the seventeenth century. In the article, Dr Karl S. Kruszelnicki looks at some theories about why this might be so.

And he's written another article about the chemicals behind this stinky wee. And wouldn't you have guessed it? One of them is called asparagusic acid!

grey or gray?

When I posted recently about Tennyson's poem 'Break, Break, Break', I referred to 'cold grey stones' in my post title.

But I did notice that the word was spelled gray in the poem:

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

So I started to wonder - as apparently many have before me - whether one spelling is preferred over the other. I thought the British and Australians used grey and Americans used gray.

It seems both are acceptable.

If you search for gray in the Macquarie Dictionary (Australian), you read: 'adjective, noun, verb. Chiefly US' and the entry refers you across to grey.

A Wikipedia entry says

The first recorded use of grey as a color name in the English language was in AD 700. Grey is the British spelling, whereas gray is the American spelling, though the latter was also in common usage in the UK until the second half of the 20th century, and the former is considered acceptable by most American dictionaries and is commonly seen in usage, e.g. in the Grateful Dead hit Touch of Grey.

A website called greyorgray - rather specific! - says

There are two acceptable spellings. Gray is used primarily in the United States and other areas that use US English. Grey is used in Great Britain and areas that use UK English.

the uncaring sea breaks on the cold grey stones

I've been in Lorne for a few days, and each time I saw the wintry sea breaking on the stony outcrops I wanted to recall the exact words of Tennyson's poem about loss and sadness.

So I looked up my copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry:

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.



O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!



And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!



Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

a life full of adumbration

Well, the title of this post is an exaggeration. My life isn't full of adumbration, but there have been two occurrences of it in twenty-four hours, and that's spooky.

Yesterday I was reading book called cabbages & kings; the origins of fruit and vegetables, by jonathan roberts. (The title page and cover used lower-case letters, so I thought I'd better do the same in quoting it.)



I read the following passage and stopped to try to understand it:

The evolutionary careers of fruit and vegetables can be adumbrated, in some cases, long before human history begins; of the avocado, for example, whose Persea genus is thought to have rafted across the Atlantic on North America when the supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, broke up and drifted apart; or of the strawberry, herbaceous descendant of the shrubby, thuggish blackberry - consider the similar way in which their suckers arch over and root where they make contact with the earth.

adumbrated? What did that mean?

I was pleased to find that no one else in our word-loving family had ever heard it, but one bright spark suggested it must have something to do with umbra, shade.

The Macquarie dictionary says:

adumbrate
verb (t) (adumbrated, adumbrating) 1. to give a faint shadow or resemblance of; outline or shadow forth.
2. to foreshadow; prefigure.
3. to darken or conceal partially; overshadow. [Latin adumbrātus, past participle, shadowed]
–adumbration // (say aduhm'brayshuhn), noun

I was still not quite clear how to understand it in the sentence, but we decided to go with the second meaning.

And that was fine. A new word heard but not fully understood. I continued to read and enjoy this delightful book.

However, what do you know! Today the word from A Word A Day came into my email box and it was adumbrate. The theme this week is words that can seem confusing because they have seemingly contradictory meanings:

Sometimes people, even Supreme Court justices, turn to a dictionary to resolve disputes. They may believe language is something exact, well-defined, as if words were precision molded in a foundry under exact specifications.
But the truth is different. Words can be vague, they may have multiple shades of meanings, and even completely opposite senses. In my mother tongue, Hindi, for instance, the word "kal" can mean both "yesterday" and "tomorrow". Is that a problem? Not at all. Context brings clarity. I have never seen anyone become confused by the use of the word -- would this meeting take place tomorrow or do I need a time machine to go back to yesterday?

Sometimes, though, the contrary senses of a word can be confusing. When you table a proposal, your intention depends on what side of the pond you are on. In American English you put it on the back burner, while in British English you bring it forward.

This week we've picked five such words. Each of these words has meanings as different as black and white. Call them contranyms, heteronyms, janus words, two-faced, words with split personalities, or coin your own word!

So, here's what it said:

adumbrate

PRONUNCIATION:
(a-DUM-brayt, AD-uhm-brayt)
MEANING:
verb tr.:
1. To foreshadow.
2. To give a rough outline or to disclose partially.
3. To overshadow or obscure.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin umbra (shade, shadow), which also gave us the words umbrella, umbrage, and somber. Earliest documented use: 1599.

USAGE:
"Mr Cameron should adumbrate painful decisions; he should sketch out the principles that will inform them; but he should not be drawn into spelling out what exactly they will be."
Walter Bagehot; Coming Clean; The Economist (London, UK); Mar 26, 2009.

"To create her three-dimensional composition, Robin Osler variedly manipulated floor and ceiling planes so as to adumbrate virtual spaces."
Monica Geran; Shadow Play; Interior Design (New York); Apr 2000.

I don't believe I'll ever use this word in writing or speech. But who know?

varlets and valets

Last night I watched the first episode of the period drama 'Downton Abbey'. Well, actually I watched until the first advertisement irritated me into leaving the room, but I've recorded it and I'll watch the rest tomorrow.

I was surprised to find that the pronunciation of the word valet includes the final T. In the modern usage of the word, valet parking, we say the word as if it were a French ending.

Hearing the way they said it in the show, I wondered if the original word might be related to the word varlet, so I looked it up. And found the Online Etymology Dictionary does say the words are related.

"personal man-servant," 1560s, from Fr. valet, from O.Fr. valet, variant of vaslet "man's servant," originally "squire, young man," from Gallo-Romance *vassellittus "young nobleman, squire, page," dim. of M.L. vassallus, from vassus "servant" (see vassal). Modern sense is usually short for valet de chambre; the general sense of "male household servant of the meaner sort" going with the variant form varlet. First recorded use of valet parking is from 1960.

Podictionary has an interesting post about the word, also.

The Macquarie Dictionary gives both pronunciations, and defines the word as:

noun 1. a male servant who is his employer's personal attendant, caring for the employer's clothing, etc.; manservant.
2. someone who performs similar services for patrons of a hotel, etc.
3. any of various contrivances, as a rack or stand, for holding coats, hats, etc.
–verb (valeted, valeting)
–verb (t) 4. to work as a valet for (someone).
–verb (i) 5. to work as a valet. [French, variant of Middle French vaslet. See VARLET, VASSAL]
–valetless, adjective

It refers to the related word, varlet:

noun Archaic 1. an attendant.
2. a page attached to a knight.
3. a rascal. [Middle English, from Old French, variant of va(s)let VALET. See VASSAL]

lillydale, lilly dale and lilydale

I visited Lillydale Lake recently. It's odd that this lake is smack in the middle of a township called Lilydale.



Apparently there are a few theories as to why the township was originally spelled with the doubled letters. Here's an explanation from OnlyMelbourne:

The discovery of gold in the upper Goulburn River and Woods Point areas in the late 1850s caused the formation of a miners' access track. The place where the Woods Point Road crossed the Olinda Creek was chosen for a town survey. The origin of the name is uncertain. One version is that the Government surveyor, John Hardy, suggested that the town be named Lillydale after hearing his chainman singing a popular song "Lilly Dale". The name was also inspired by the surveyor observing lilies growing in pools of the creek. The other version is that a district surveyor's wife was name Lilly. Council clerks and the local schoolmaster shortened the spelling to Lilydale.

Given that the town was named in the 1850s, the song theory seems possible, as the tune was written in 1852 and was sung in America in the 1850s. Many Americans worked on the Australian goldfields.