Passion

I once failed at a job interview because, according to the
feedback from the HR manager (who was not part of the interview panel) I hadn’t
exhibited enough ‘passion’ for the post. I pointed out that the job description
hadn’t asked for passion. I thought they wanted: the right qualifications (tick), experience in a similar role (tick), proven competence (tick) etc. etc. etc. (tick,tick, tick). The HR manager was polite and sympathetic, but that wasn’t enough to manufacture up a job for me. At least she ensured my expenses were paid promptly. I’d like to say the rejection was the making of me, but it was a considerable disappointment at the time.

It wouldn’t have got me the job, but I wish I’d know then what the etymology of passion is. I might have been able to point out that passion
has not always been something that would prove an asset in the work place, or a way to market one’s services.

Passioun, came into English in the thirteenth century, via Classical Latin, Old French and Anglo Norman. Its original meaning was physical suffering, and it was used initially in this country to mean any kind of suffering. The references were often in relation to the suffering of Jesus and the Christian martyrs, and the meaning of passion in this sense lingers on to this day. Hence, we instinctively understand what Bach intends us to feel when listening to his oratorios – the St Matthew’s Passion and St
John’s Passion.

During the 1400s, passion started to mean a painful disorder or physical ailment. A couple of centuries later it could mean strong emotion too. By the seventeenth century it acquired sexual connotations. Milton wrote of ‘wanton passions’ in Paradise Lost, and in the early twentieth century DH Lawrence has one of his heroines in Sons and Lovers troubled by a lover’s ‘yearning’ passion.

The Oxford English Dictionary records the adjective passionate as meaning ‘susceptible or readily swayed by passions or strong emotions, easily moved to strong feeling, of changeable mood, volatile.’ I’m not sure too many employers really want a work force made up of moody and volatile employees – I understand just getting some to turn up rather than WFH (work from home) can be a challenge these days – but maybe I’m out of touch.

Passion is still strong in the advertising world. Look at all those restaurants who advertise themselves as ‘cooking with passion’ and florists for whom ‘flowers are my life’s passion’ Even a barber who markets himself as ‘passionate about hair.’ Which doesn’t sound very safe to me.

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Collocations

You may not be familiar with the term, but when speaking and writing we use collocations all the time. The word is closely associated with the verb, to collocate – to group or place items together in some system or order (like, if you still have them, your DVDs, CDs, cassettes or records). It can also mean the way we group together words in a sentence.

So, linguistically, what is collocation?

Collocation is ‘a predictable combination of words.’  For example, we can say ‘heavy rain,’ but not ‘strong rain’ because it does not sound right. Likewise, we tend to ‘do exercise’ but not ‘make exercise’. We talk about someone’s ‘cute little puppy,’ not her ‘little cute puppy.’  

Collocations can be made up of any kinds of words such as verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives. Although people have attempted to draw up rules – adverb before adjective (or is it vice-versa?) – there are no hard and fast rules for collocations. They are just combinations of words that we become familiar with, and then use correctly without thinking. Because there are no rules, people who have not been immersed in the language since birth will sometimes get it wrong, giving us native English speakers a completely unjustified (and often very temporary) sense of superiority over foreigners.

Linguists also use the term, collocation, to refer to the regular association of one particular word with another. Several people I know can never be frank, they are always ‘brutally frank;’ many optimists are said to have ‘rose-tinted spectacles,’ English landladies in seaside towns will offer you a ‘hearty breakfast’ before you set off for a ‘bracing walk.’ What is ‘fish,’ without ‘chips’?

New collocations spring up regularly – is there now any other intelligence than artificial intelligence? Or fade out of use – who worries about addled eggs in these days of refrigeration?

Sometimes, the difference between a collocation and a cliché is pretty blurred – are ‘a time bomb,’ or ‘a ticking clock,’ happy collocations or irritating, over-used, phrases that slide into many articles on, for example, climate change / the economy / the crisis in the NHS ….?

NB: Collocation – from Latin – collocare (co – together, plus locare – place)

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How Germany Remembers Past Wars

Typically, on Remembrance Sunday in Britain, many serving members of the armed forces, reservists, veterans, and members of ancillary services, don their uniforms to march, lay wreaths, and pay tribute to those who died or were wounded in the service of their country during two world wars and the many more recent conflicts.

Increasingly they have been joined by units from other countries that fought alongside British forces. Last year the German president accepted an invitation to attend the parade and ceremony at the Cenotaph in London.

But Germany does not have a Remembrance Day, or Remembrance Sunday, like we do. No parades, least of all with veterans included, for obvious reasons. Instead they have an official people’s day of mourning – the Volkstrauertag. This falls on the Sunday that is two weeks before the first day of Advent and was created in 1919 to remember fallen soldiers of the first world war. Now it is more of a state commemoration for all victims of armed conflict, oppression and persecution globally. No parades, no military or public involvement; just formal speeches in the national and regional parliaments – and a short feature in the evening news.

Another important date in Germany is 9^th November which is Schicksalstag, or day of fate. This is a day of historic significance in the country for several reasons:

On 9^th November, 1918, the Kaiser abdicated after acknowledging the defeat of Germany in World War One.

The Berlin Wall came down on 9^th November, 1989.

On this day in 1938, Germany most visibly turned against their Jewish citizens and smashed up their properties and businesses (Kristallnacht).

In 1923, Hitler was a part of a failed putsch in Munich that landed him in prison briefly, but made him a national name to be reckoned with in the process. Even then, ten years before the Nazis actually came to power, the national mood was turning against Jews, with mobs in the streets of Munich shouting Juden raus (Jews out). Jewish families warned to hide in their houses and keep their children away from school for their own safety.

Remembrance day, and in particular, Remembrance Sunday, are our annual reminders that we must never get into such a situation again.

And yet, almost exactly100 years to the day after that fateful putsch and its aftermath, we are where we are …

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Men Don’t Gossip

I have it on the highest authority (and I’m not talking about my husband) that men don’t gossip. They may confer with each other over open car bonnets, or when propping up the bar while the women folk natter about quantum physics, the crisis in the Middle East, or the price of nappies. But the men are having a discussion, the women – well the women are just gossiping.

In fact, I’ve just found in my reading of the book Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall, that there is some foundation for this distinction. In the Middle Ages, pregnancy and birth were almost exclusively female affairs (apart from the inception, obviously). A group of women would support the mother-to-be whilst she was having the baby and in the weeks that followed whilst she was ‘lying in’ and was confined to her room or apartment. (The wealthier the woman, the more prolonged this confinement could be – poorer women didn’t have the space or the luxury of time for much lying in. But, whatever your social class, a baby’s birth was still very much managed by the women around you).

After the lying in, a woman would go to church for – hopefully – thanksgiving for the birth of a healthy baby, and for purification. She would ask some of these women to be godmothers for the new baby or, in Old English, a godsip or godsibb – literally a god-relation. It is easy to see the slide in spelling towards calling a woman so chosen a gossip.

By the sixteenth century gossip was regularly applied to the women attending the birth and lying in. And if you are going to be stuck in a room with a bunch of other women, you are bound to chat about all and everything, from tips on breastfeeding the new-born, getting your figure back and avoiding getting pregnant again too quickly, to the shocking price of parsnips in the market, to world affairs.

It’s easy to see how the noun became a verb and gossip became a stereotype activity for all women given any opportunity to get together.

And why, despite the evidence of our eyes, men don’t gossip.

But that’s another story.

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A Word in the News

There is a word that was in the news a lot last week – including the Conservative conference in Manchester, in the Scottish courts, and reports about several women’s sports. The word is is the noun/adjective/prefix – trans. But what does trans mean, in particular when it relates to people?

For many it means transsexual, a small number of men (or women) who live as the opposite sex from the one they were born into. Images of Jan – formerly James – Morris, Caitlyn Jenner, who is happy to be remembered as the Olympian gold medallist Bruce, and film star Elliot Page, may come to mind. But Stonewall, a charity that lobbies for trans rights, and a number of other organisations, talk about about the ‘trans umbrella’ of terms that further define what it means to be trans.

This umbrella still includes transsexual, though it is seen by some, including possibly Page, as an outdated term. Here is a far from exhaustive list of other terms gleaned from the many such umbrellas you can find in a quick Google search: transgender, gender queer, non-binary, gender variant, cross-dresser, genderless, agender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine, neutrois, omnigender, graygender, eunuch, pangender, neurogender, man/woman of trans experience, demi boy/girl, sister girl/boy, demigender, aporogender, androgyne, pangender, polygender, intergender, trigender, multigender, maverique, two spirit, transvestite, intersex, genderflux, drag king/queen, gender non-conforming, hijra, fa’afafine, gender questioning. Many of the terms are not understood beyond the person describing themselves as such and their associates.  Many categories are also fluid.

Not everyone is happy to be brought under this umbrella, including men and women who have rare differences in sex development (DSDs), often inaccurately described as ‘intersex.’ Mostly these people live as the sex that was recorded at their birth. Many ‘two spirit’ people, who are members of the indigenous population in Canada, also reject being under the trans umbrella. The Samoan ‘third gender’ fa’afafine always play in male teams if into sport.

This broadness of the trans definition, as it has developed over the last decade or so, maybe a surprise to many. And the push for self-identification that got the former Scottish First Minister into difficulty, as she tried to support self ID whilst also saying that a newly trans-identifying male rapist, whose initial incarceration in a woman’s prison caused uproar, was ‘not really trans,’ may have added to the confusion.

Around 48,000 men identified as women in the 2021 census in the UK, although there is some dispute about the accuracy of this statistic owing to the ambiguity in the wording of the census question. Only about 5,000 have a gender recognition certificate (GRC) that says they are legally the opposite sex, apart from some exclusions covered by the Equality Act 2010 and the GRC itself. About 95% of trans identifying males retain full male genitalia.

That the range of definitions for the word trans keeps changing shouldn’t be surprising as language, like societies, evolve, though not usually quite so quickly. But it can be confusing, even for those of us who try to keep up. A recent – rather good – book was written by an author who has self described as a ‘queer femme girl.’ Not as it happens an additional trans definition. A friend tells me that this means a female who likes to dress in a feminine way. I suppose it sounds more edgy than calling yourself a ‘woman’ – especially when you’ve got a book to sell …

Note: The Collins dictionary definition of trans = prefix (originally Latin) meaning across/through/beyond.

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Bird Talk

I’m seeing a lot of robins about at the moment, not just in the garden and at the allotment, but on the Christmas cards the local charity shops have had on display since the middle of September.

A robin is also known as robin redbreast, or even just redbreast – a nickname, surely, based on the colour of their chests? No! redbreast is in fact the original name that was used for centuries. The ‘proper’ name for the European robin is erithacus rubecula (the first word coming from the Greek for red, and the second from the Latin for red). Robin, was a nickname that was first linked to the redbreast in the early sixteenth century.

Although Robin, as a name for boys in its own right, was first recorded in the thirteenth century, it was more often used as an affectionate diminutive for the name Robert. The Robin Redbreast therefore is likely to have been so named as a mark of the affection humans have for these cheeky little birds. In time it was the official name that faded into disuse and left us with robin.

The robin maybe the only small bird to have its original name replaced by a human name, but it isn’t the only bird to have picked up a human pet name. There’s the Tom Tit and the Jenny Wren, and the generic term for all small avians – Dicky Birds. These pet names have not replaced the original, but some birds have acquired human names that have been incorporated into what we now regard as their proper names. Like the Magpie, wherein a diminutive form of Margaret or Marjorie was added to its original name – pie. Or the daw  that is better known in conjunction with the pet form of John (Jack, now a name in its own right) – i.e. the Jackdaw. Many of these pet names were added in the sixteenth century, an occurrence noted by the satirist, Jonathon Swift: “pies and daws are often styled with Christian nick-names, like a child.”

No doubt the child-like names were added to the bird’s name because we humans have an enduring fondness for small birds. Not that this affection stopped our ancestors eating small birds in abundance, as evidenced by the nursery rhyme – “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” Though maybe, if instead of describing its colour, we’d given the blackbird a pet name – Like Jerry for instance, or Sue, we wouldn’t have had the heart to pop them in the oven.

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Mother Tongue

I’ve just purchased a Kindle copy of Mother Tongue, by Jenni Nuttall. I’ve glanced through it, and I’m very much looking forward to reading further.

We use the term mother tongue to mean our first language – English in my case. Mother tongue is translated from the Latin, lingua materna, and centuries ago it was a reference to the ‘inferior’ language spoken by the women – mothers – in the household when with their children and servants. By and large women spoke only in English because they lacked the classical education of the males who were taught to use Latin plus,maybe, Old French (brought into the country by the Norman conquest) and Greek.

Latin was the ‘father’s’ language, so to speak; though ‘father’ referred as much to the monks and educators as to actual fathers. By the sixteenth century society was evolving, not least because of the arrival of printing and there was an impetus for all classes and both sexes to communicate in English. Soon use of the mother tongue i.e. English became the norm in England.

But back to Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue in which she means, literally, the language used by and about women through the past millennium and beyond. Her book is described in The Publishers Weekly as ‘and eye-opening survey of the etymology of words used to identify women’s body parts, the kind of work they performed, and the violence they suffered from men … Required reading for logophiles, feminists, and history buffs.’

Mother Tongue promises to be an illuminating read and I may well come back to it in future posts, but here are a few gems to whet your appetite – be you a logophile, a feminist, a history buff, or just a bit curious.

Did you know, for example, that the word girl referred to both male and female children until nearly the middle of the sixteenth century? Or that during the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century girl was a derogatory term for young women who were deemed unruly?

In the fourteenth century, ovaries were sometimes referred to – no doubt with some feeling – as moder ballockes stones (mother-bollocks-stones), the vulva as the womb gate, and the clitoris as the hayward of corpse’s dale. There are sixteenth century records of the cervix being called the kernelly snout, and the vagina the privy passage.

Monthly periods – menstruation – were once called lunations (from the Latin Luna – moon and its 28-day cycle round the earth). More picturesquely periods were described as flourys (flowers) in some medieval texts. Hence – ‘I’m on my flowers,’ or ‘It’s flower time again!

Hystericus is the Latin/Greek word for womb. That women can be hysterical (on account of their wombs making them rather emotional) has been a constant stereotype in literature. Maybe, as Jenni suggests, we should balance things up a bit by describing ‘typical’ men as testerical – a word unaccountably missing from my dictionary.

I’m taking Mother Tongue on holiday with me next month. No doubt plenty more fascinating gems await me.

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On Logic and the Literal Truth

I had an eleven-year-old relative staying with me a couple of weeks ago. He is clever, has a very logical approach to learning, asks a lot of questions, and takes what you say literally. He wondered, at some length, about why I called the multi-bulbed light over the dining room table a chandelier or a candelabra, when clearly there were no candles in it; just several electric light bulbs. I explained that it was so called because at one time people did actually use candles, but this would be seen as dangerous and inefficient these days – hence the electric bulbs, albeit ones that looked like candles.

“Then why not call it something else?”

I responded by saying that chandelier and candelabra were just words we had all got used to and understood, so why change? Of course everybody knew there were no actual candles these days, but the intention – to light a room – was just the same.

He was unimpressed. To him, there was no logic in calling a device to hold electric light bulbs the same as a device to hold candles.

I decided to change tack, and asked him what he called the things perched on my nose. Allowing for a detour into the fact that they were not literally perched on my nose, but rather hooked over my ears, he eventually said he called them ‘glasses.’

“Aha!” I cackled gleefully. “So do I! And when I was your age, my lenses were made of glass. But they are not made of glass these days – they’re plastic. So why, following your logic, don’t we call them ‘plastics’?”

I answered my own question before he could draw breath.

“Because everybody, including you, has got used to calling them glasses. And we all know what we mean, despite knowing that they are no longer made of glass.”

“Maybe we should call them spectacles,” said his mother, long practised in defusing such debates.

*****

Words evolve and can mean quite different things from when first used. Even ‘literally,’ which literally used to mean something was the exact truth – “he literally poured all his tea over the table cloth to annoy her”; is now more often used as an amplifier – “She could have literally wrung his neck for ruining her tea party.”

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“Was Bostin, Now Busted”

The Crooked House, once Britain’s wonkiest pub, was situated to the east of Birmingham, near Dudley in the Black country. It has recently been burnt down in mysterious circumstances. Built in the 1700s, it became a pub in the 1830s and developed its distinctive list because of subsidence caused by the extensive mining in the area. I have never been there, but I know people who have, not just for the beer, but the feeling that you must have drunk more than you thought as you watch coins and marbles appear roll up the bar instead of down. It was, by almost unanimous local agreement, a characterful place for a fantastic night out.

The pub burnt down a very short while after new owners bought the property. Fire engines were hampered from getting to it by newly deposited piles of earth and rubble on the adjacent lane. Then, scarcely a day after the fire, and despite the fact that the council had deemed the property repairable, the pub was demolished by a digger that had been hired some days before the fire.

Not surprisingly, arson is suspected and the Police are making enquiries which includes ‘continuing to engage’ with the new owners, a married couple with a number of business around the Midlands. The couple have not been charged in relation to the pub, as all newspapers are at pains to make clear. It is in the public domain though that, among other things, they had the misfortune to have a fire on the site of a previous purchase, and own the landfill site close to the erstwhile wonky pub.

Nothing remains of the Crooked House but a pile of bricks and dust. On this pile, according to a picture in The Times, is a sign saying Was Bostin, now Bosted, which probably doesn’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t live in the Black Country (so named because the smoke from the iron forges and the coal dust from the mines at the height of the heavy industry era left its distinctive dusky mark on the landscape).

Bostin in Black Country lingo means great/fantastic. Bosted, though not unique to the Black Country, is, according to the Urban dictionary, a word to sum up a situation when something has gone (very) wrong. The sign seems spot on in the circumstances.

NB: Many people think the Birmingham accent, and typical Brummie phrases, are the same as those of the Black Country, but the two are proudly different. It doesn’t help unravel the confusion though, that a native of Birmingham is called a Brummie. But Brummie is in fact a truncated form of Brummagem, the word a Black Country inhabitant uses to refer to the neighbouring city.

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On Socks

Very many years ago, my four year old friend’s father begged her bawling baby brother to ‘put a sock in it.’ The baby didn’t oblige, so my friend helpfully trotted over to the crib, whipped off one of said baby’s socks and thrust it in his mouth.

It worked! But for some reason her father wasn’t best pleased, removed the sock pronto and told my friend off in no uncertain terms. An early lesson on the use of metaphor?

To ‘put a sock in it,’ is a phrase from the early twentieth century. It was believed at one time to be the way to quieten an early gramophone. If it was playing too loud, you put a sock down the flute and muffled the output in the hope you would not disturb the rest of the household. Critics of this theory have pointed out that the affluent middle/upper middle-class homes that had gramophones were unlikely to have odd socks to hand in the drawing room; and it would be very infra dig to remove one of one’s own in company.

A more likely explanation is that the term originated during the first world war when large groups of men were in barracks together. They may or may not have stuffed a sock or two into the communal gramophone, to avoid the wrath of the patrolling military police if socialising after lights out. This gave rise to the more likely use of the phrase as a term of exasperation when having to share a large dormitory next to a loudly snoring comrade who was keeping everyone else awake. A few nasally challenged sleepers may well have been brutally jerked out of their slumbers by the insertion of a smelly sock in the mouth.

People still talk about an event or object that will ‘blow (or knock) your socks off.’ This phrase was first heard during the second world war, and referred originally to someone being defeated in a fight. Over time, the phrase developed more positive connotations. Hence, a surprisingly good meal in a restaurant might be described as having ‘knocked your socks off,’ or a soldier’s visiting sister might be so beautiful, it would blow his comrades’ collective socks off if they saw her.

In time, using ‘socks’ in a colloquial phrase became common in conversation instead of ‘very hard.’ Hence ‘They laughed their socks off at her anecdotes.’ Or, ‘He worked his socks off to meet the deadline.’ (Socks, after all, are more acceptable in general conversation than references to working your butt or arse off!)

Also, if our industrious protagonist hadn’t worked so hard, he may have risked being told to ‘pull his socks up,’ if he wanted to keep his job. Pre-elasticated socks were notorious for slipping down and, unless held up by suspenders, or garters, or regularly adjusted, would crumple down over the shoe, making the wearer look both untidy and un-business-like.

NB: The word sock comes from Latin soccus, Greek sukkos, Old English socc – meaning a light shoe.

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