calendarize or calendarise?

In our local library today I heard a new word in use. One librarian said to another that he would ' 'recalendarise it'.

The meaning seemed obvious from the context. I thought he was going to rearrange a schedule. I've just checked online for a definition and found calendarize at Urban Dictionary:

1. calendarize
To add a scheduled event to a planning calendar, so that it may serve as a future reminder.
A friend invited me a to a party he is holding in a few weeks. I calendarized it so that I would not forget.

2. calendarize
(V): The action of placing an event or occurrence onto a calendar.
I need to calendarize my dentist appointment.

Given that the speaker had an Australian accent, I would prefer to find calendarise, but I've had no luck with that one. Writers Events did have a definition, but it wasn't of the sense in which I heard it used in the library.

1. accounting.
To divide (eg a budget) into equal units of time, usually months, within a year.
Etymology: 20c.

My first reaction was that it's a horrible word, and that he could have simply used reschedule. On second thoughts, however, I'd have to say that recalendarise has a slightly different tone to it, because it gives me an impression of modern technologies in action. When I heard it I assumed he was going to do something on a computer. Also, schedule doesn't have the extra meaning of noting the date on a calendar.

colly birds and wollemi pines on the last day of Christmas

Tonight we'll take the decorations off our Christmas tree, because we follow the tradition that on the 6th of January Christmas is over. It's a Wollemi pine, and we are happy to grow an amazing tree that dates back to prehistoric times and was thought to be extinct until its recent discovery.

I once heard this is the only Christmas tree available for Melbourne that actually enjoys being inside the house. And I've been surprised to see how true that is. It's been out in the garden since last December and was starting to look a bit sad. In this photo you can see the scorch marks on the leaves.

But now that it's inside it is sprouting fresh new growth. So it will stay in the house for a few months and get some tlc.



While I was taking the decorations off the tree the refrain of 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' started running through my head and now I can't stop myself singing 'Five go-old rings'. I did read that some versions sing golden rings, so that you don't have to hang onto that note in 'gold', but that's not the version I learned.

Likewise I sing four colly birds, not four calling birds - as in the clip I linked to above - and I got to wondering whether my version was the older one and what a colly bird is.

Once I discovered that the word means a blackbird, all became clear! I began to see the connection with the color black. A colliery is a place where coal is mined, and coal is black.

And in wandering around I came across a suggestion that border collie dogs might be so called because they herded black-faced sheep - or because the dogs themselves were black.

Dogbreedinfo.com says:

The breed's name probably comes from its charge; the Scottish black-faced sheep called the Colley.

But I guess I had better leave discussions of dogs to my other blog.

more about the novel 'Pompeii'

I loved the novel Pompeii so much that I can't resist writing about it again.

I don't want to post a spoiler, of course, so I have to be careful here...

But the whole time I was reading it I was thinking of the fact that the Romans didn't know what a volcano could do, because the only volcano to have erupted near a city was Etna, in Sicily. Only an extremely highly educated and well-read citizen would have recognised the warning signs of a volcanic eruption. This was one of the gripping aspects of the story - I winced each time Attillius, the main character, pondered the strange things he was seeing.

Two of the Pliny family play a part in the story, uncle and nephew. I've just come across the nephew's account of that day. It must have been a terrifying day. Parts of it remind me of the night in 1983 when I drove through ashy smoke to the Upper Yarra Valley, trying to find my uncles, who were trapped in East Warburton during the Ash Wednesday Bushfires. There was an air of general panic, and a young constable standing at the crossroads at the town of Yarra Junction told me East Warburton was burned to the ground and everyone was dead. Pliny's account of fleeing from Misenum with his mother as part of a panicked crowd seems to have had similarities to the misinformation and fear that governed the night of our bushfires. He wrote:

We had scarcely sat down when a darkness came that was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but more like the black of closed and unlighted rooms. You could hear women lamenting, children crying, men shouting. Some were calling for parents, others for children or spouses; they could only recognize them by their voices. Some bemoaned their own lot, other that of their near and dear. There were some so afraid of death that they prayed for death. Many raised their hands to the gods, and even more believed that there were no gods any longer and that this was one last unending night for the world. Nor were we without people who magnified real dangers with fictitious horrors. Some announced that one or another part of Misenum had collapsed or burned; lies, but they found believers.

As far as I know, Misenum survived the eruption okay. And my uncles were fine, by the way. They were asleep in bed!

Some trailers for the 2009 exhibition in Melbourne, 'A Day in Pompeii', give some idea of what it must have been like for those people in Roman Italy so long ago:
here and here.

I remember that I wept when I saw this one in 3D.

Here's a link to the published letters of Pliny the Younger. I couldn't find the one to Tacitus about Vesuvius, though. Perhaps I didn't persevere long enough. I'm looking forward to reading through them one by one. It's a great insight into the life of a man I'd like to have met.

matrix - a mother of a word

Matrix. What a word. It has so many meanings these days that I won't even try to cover them all. However, I will mention the fact that matrix comes from Latin and has a sense of 'pregnant animal', 'womb', or 'mother'.

I've just finished reading the novel Pompeii by Robert Harris. Unputdownable! It's quite a feat to keep the reader's interest to the last word when a story is set in Pompeii in AD 79, because we all know it must end with the eruption of Vesuvius.

The story opens when 'the engineer' is climbing by moonlight up a hill overlooking the port of Misenum. He's the new 'aquarius' - water engineer - sent from Rome to replace the mysteriously missing Exomnium.

I think I fell in love with the book on page 10 when, in the engineer's point of view, we read;

Oh, but she was a mighty piece of work, the Augusta - one of the greatest feats of engineering ever accomplished. It was going to be an honor to command her. Somewhere far out there, on the opposite side of the bay, high in the pine-forested mountains of the Apenninus, the aqueduct captured the springs of Serinus and bore the water westward - channeled it over ravines on top of tiered arcades, forced it across valleys through massive siphons - all the way down to the plains of Campania, then around the far side of Mount Vesuvius, then south to the coast at Neapolis, and finally along the spine of the Misenum peninsula to the dusty naval town, a distance of some sixty miles, with a mean drop along her entire length of just two inches every one hundred yards. She was the longest aqueduct in the world, longer even than the great aqueducts of Rome and far more complex, for whereas her sisters in the north fed one city only, the Augusta's serpentine conduit - the matrix, as they called it: the mother-line - suckled no fewer than nine towns around the Bay of Neapolis; Pompeii first, at the end of a long spur, then Nola, Acerrae, Atella, Neapolis, Puteoli, Cumae, Baiae, and finally Misenum.

There's a mild romantic interest in the story, but the true love in this book is the engineer's passion for the 'mother-line'. I think I'll never use the word 'matrix' again without thinking of the complex engineering that brought water to this section of Italy in the first century.

I've walked parts of the O'Shannassy Aqueduct Trail above Warburton - not the whole thirty kilometres! - and always had a sense of walking on the flat, so I think that aqueduct may have a gentle drop similar to the Augusta. There's a history of the O'Shannassy here.

Although the two books are quite different genres, Pompeii reminds me of Robert Drewe's novel, The Drowner, because each has a protagonist who comes from a family that lives by a deep, almost spiritual, understanding of water.

The complex engineering of The Augusta is an integral part of the plot of 'Pompeii', so I was fascinated to see a photo of the castellum aquae of Pompeii - the little chamber where the water entered the town and divided into three conduits - as part of the Wikipedia entry about the novel.



Photo by RHaworth (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

when words are lost, we all suffer

In Overland Issue 205 There's an article titled 'Language and politics in Indigenous writing'. It's a report on a PEN panel, originally presented at the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival.

In the first of three follow-up essays, John Bradley talks about his work with the Yanyuwa people of the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria.


He writes:

The more, however, I think about this language, the hardest thing to write about or explain is how the language seems to belong in the land and sea: it is as if it rises up out of the Yanyuwa country.

But:

Today, only the old people speak Yanyuwa. A lot of other people can understand it, but they can't speak it, which is something the old people continue to worry about.

Further on:

When the British flag was raised at Sydney Cove 222 years ago, there were 250 separate languages spoken on the continent later known as Australia. There were therefore 250 cultures, nations, each with their way of understanding the place they called home. In addition, there were at least 600 dialects of these languages. Whichever way these numbers are viewed they speak of diversity. In 2011, less than one hundred of these languages are spoken, some by only one or two people; of this one hundred, 15 are considered strong: that is, all generations of the language community are speaking the language.

He says it has been suggested by some linguists that by 2050 perhaps only a few indigenous languages will be spoken.

All of the above writing makes similar points to what I heard recently at the talk at Preshil.

It seems that the message is getting out to the average Australian (me, for example) that we should be concerned at this potential language loss.

Bradley added something I hadn't thought about, that there is other knowledge disappearing with the languages, knowledge that might be important in my own life, as well as that of the native speakers of these tongues.

Thus we are confronted by an epidemic of silencing that will result in language and cultural loss, an epidemic that has in part been produced by thinking that everything we need to know can be said in English. Yet only now, as these languages fall silent, have biological and ecological scientists begun to see how much of the knowledge that lives in these languages and cultures is also of value to them: fine-grained details of species and micro-environments have been named and worked with for millennia by Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants. In the words of the Malawian-born author Amadou Hampaté Bâ from 1966: ‘An old person dying is a library burning.’

A friend of mine, who emigrated from Argentina, once told me his grandfather had been the repository of a wealth of information about Argentinian plants and herbs, and that information had died with him.

I wonder what sort of world we are headed for, where languages die and knowledge is devalued and lost to the human race.

Origin of the word golf

As I drove along today, I passed a Volkswagen Golf, and wondered why they named it that.

I thought I recalled that Golf is the German word for a gulf. (I checked it on my great little Franklin electronic translator, and I was correct.

Wikipedia gives this etymology of the name:

The Golf name is derived from the German word for Gulf Stream and the period in its history when VW named vehicles after prominent winds, including also the Passat (after the German word for Trade wind), Jetta (after the Jet stream), Bora (after Bora) and Scirocco (after Sirocco). "Golf" is also a sport, a theme that is shared with the Polo and Derby.

Here in Australia, and apparently in most of the world, it's called the Golf, but in America it's called the Rabbit. Edmunds.com says:

Why did Volkswagen decide to call the new front-drive small car it called the "Golf" everywhere else in the world the "Rabbit" in America? Go ahead and guess, because VW has never offered an official (much less believable) explanation.

Anyway, to get back to my musing as I drove along...

I began to wonder where the sporting name golf originated. I probably wouldn't have followed this up, except that today's Grammarphobia post was about this very word.

And an interesting read it was, too!

So now I know. Or I don't, really, seeing the origin is obscure.

Facetious worship of saints, and Scrabble

My new word for today comes from an article in The Age about young Victorian, Anand Bharadwaj, who recently became the World Youth Scrabble Champion, in Malaysia. He said his favorite word is douleia, meaning worship of saints and angels. It uses all the vowels.

The word wasn't in the dictionary on my computer, nor was it in the online Macquarie Dictionary, but I presume it is one of the 130,000 words officially accepted in Scrabble. I'm not sure where one would find this list of words, but perhaps it would be here.

However, I don't think I'll be using this word anywhere except possibly in a game of Scrabble, because I can't figure out its definitive meaning. In some places it's defined as meaning slavery, and in other places, worship.

I think I'll stick to an old favorite, facetious, which is fun to say and has the vowels in alphabetical order.