News from Nowhere

One of the pleasures of quizzing is reaching into the bran tub of your memory and coming out with something that might be a piece of random word-association, but turns out to be the right answer. But sometimes you get spectacular results from something that takes no effort at all. This doesn't seem fair, but that's how it goes.

Last week at the pub quiz, the beer round -

- the beer round is a free-standing round: the marks don't contribute to your overall total, but there is a prize of drinks tokens, provided by the management. Its five questions are given at one time, which gives the Quizmaster a chace to breathe, count the takings, whatever. The questions can be verbal, but are more often pictures, and occasionally music. Scores are often very low, and there is usually a tie-breaker -

- and last week the challenge was to identify five flowers from Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Summer. I went straight through it, writing in the names: honeysuckle, poppy, foxglove, harebell, pimpernel. And I thought the Quizmaster had miscalculated here, and there would be a massive tie-breaker for all the teams scoring five out of five. Admittedly, of all the Flower Fairies books, summer is the one I had as a child, but these surely aren't difficult flowers to identify. The scarlet pimpernel might cause some problems, but ...

Which just shows how much I know. There were three teams (out of 20 - it was a busy week) who scored four, but we were alone is scoring full marks. Which was gratifying, if unexpected. What's more, talking to the Quizmaster afterwards I learned that we were the only team who had identified the harebell: he wasn't sure himself how it differed from the bluebell. It's blue, it's bell-shaped... I didn't tell him that it's also called the Scots bluebell, just that it's a completely different flower: bluebell; harebell. You're welcome.

Spotted in my local paper (which still survives, just about) the story of a little girl who fas donated her long hair to a good cause (story here). This wasn't altogether a sacrifice: the six-year-old explains that "My hair was really long and every morning when I brushed it it was so cottery. Now it is so much easier."

I hadn't met 'cottery' before, and at first I thought it must be a misprint. But no: her mother complains of "trying to get the cotters out." So this must be a word for tangles, but it's one I haven't met.

My Shorter Oxford doesn't know it either, though it does give 'cotted', meaning 'matted', applied particularly to a fleece. Online, Collins Dictionary lists it as a new word, suggested for inclusion and being monotored for evidence of usage (in 2012).

But outside the dictionaries, an internet search turns up more examples, and not just in a quiz about dialect: it does seem to be north-eastern, though ...

- some of the nine species of Lady's Mantle found in upper Teesdale, and studied by botanist Margaret Bradshaw, as reported in the Northern Echo.

There has been correspondence recently in the Guardian in which the writers display the merits of their preferred Wordle start words. If you are dismissive of Wordle in general, or having a preferred start word - let alone writing to the Guardian about it - this post is not for you.

Where I took issue with the writers was that they were unanimous in triumph at the number of vowels they had managed to squeeze into a five letter word: ADIEU was one, for example. I can see why you might choose that strategy, but my own start word - yes, I admit it, I have a preferred start word, and although I experiment with others, I return to it - is all about the consonants. Four consonants and an E gives me a structure, and has just allowed me to solve the Wordle on my second attempt (why does Wordle refer to 'guesses'? I'm not guessing) two days in a row.

This post is not intended as a boast about my cleverness. When the system tells me I have three correct consonants incorrectly placed, it gives me quite a big hint about the correct placing, and frees my imagination to pick a random vowel. The rest is luck.

Title of this post provided by durham_rambler's comment when I told him my start word: which is SHREW.

Tuesday started out pleasantly enough, but soon started to rain, and didn't stop. This was the day we spent sitting under a gazebo in J and J's garden.

Wednesday was bright and sunny, and we accompanied a different J to a photographic exhibition in a dimly lit gallery.

So it goes.

( In the garden, in the rain )

So that was fun. The next day we had a date with another J, to see an exhibition of photographs by Elaine Vizor (on Facebook) at a gallery in Newton Aycliffe (there's an art gallery in Newton Aycliffe? Apparently so, based in the community college. (ETA: There was at the time of writing, but the website seems to have vanished, so who knows...?).

( With or Without (a camera) )

The Leibniz Institute documents the state of the Germman language. In an average year, it reckons to identify some 200 new words; in the year of the pandemic it has collected a list of 1200, and counting. This is German, after all, a language in which Coronavirushotspot is a single word.

Some are more interesting: what does it tell us about Germany, that it has a word for a socially distanced beer (abstandbier) - as compared to the UK where we can currently meet a friend (just one) for outdoor exercise, but must not drink coffee while walking together / apart? I liked, too, Schnutenpulli - a jumper for your muzzle: the example given is verdammte Schnutenpulli - as in, where is ... muttered while fishong in the bottom of your bag for the necessary item.

Guardian article.

BBC World Service (starts 18 minutes in).

A blowy morning, and the recycling collectors, in their usual haste, dropping the waste bins where they fall - our green box was picked up by a gust of wind, and I chased it across the street, where it was captured by a passing neighbour.

By the time we reached the Farmers' Market, the wind had dropped, and the rain had set in: the stalls huddled round the edge of the Market Place, and there were several empty frames in the centre, where stallholders had decided the wind was too much to manage, and gone home.

But it's spring: the vegetable growers, who only come in the winter, were making their last appearance. No more muddy, tasty carrots until the autumn.

The rain wasn't heavy, but it was steady. Not a giboulée, a new (French) word which I learned from a Flickr contact. She captioned this lovely picture "Giboulée de mars" and I had to look it up. According to my Collins Robert, a giboulée is a (sudden) downpour or shower, and a giboulée de mars is the equivalent of an April shower. Spring comes earlier in the south.

Meanwhile, we are warned that there may be snow tomorrow.

A game of Scrabble set me thinking about proper nouns, common nouns, whether there are also proper and common adjectives, and the use of capital letters. It arose, obviously, from a discussion of whether particular words are permitted or not, but went beyond the rules of Scrabble. Like many of the best after-dinner conversations, it may or may not make sense - but we won't know until I have written it down.

The house rules under which the game in question was played required that the youngest participant be allowed - or at least, given every opportunity - to win, so one or two words passed unchallenged, notably DETROIT and VINANE - formed by adding a V to INANE - and a fine pair of words they are, too. There was unrest when BoyBear divested himself of his last letter, which was a Q, by placing it in front of AT, and since the house in question was not this one, the only dictionary available did not acknowledge QAT (or QI, though he didn't try that one). So no-one made difficulties when a kibbitzer pointed out to the youngest participant where he could place a B to make IBO.

Afterwards, though, we talked it through: as the name of a language, it takes a capital letter, doesn't it? But does that make it a proper noun? Fortunately, it isn't necessarily a noun at all: it could be adjectival, as in 'Ibo vowels'. That's probably why I wouldn't think twice about placing ENGLISH or LATIN on the Scrabble board.

Yet, as BoyBear said, we learned in school that there is a big, important divide between proper nouns which are the names of individual people or things, and are marked by capital letters, and common nouns, which aren't. There are plenty of examples where this is simple and clear, but have we stumbled into one of those areas where the English grammar we were taught in school imposes rules which exist only in the minds of grammarians? I am trying to answer this question with the aid of three examples that this use of capital letters is not a universal rule:

1. The German language capitalises all nouns: do Germans perceive the proper / common distinction as we do?


2. French is much more sparing with capitals: language names, since that's where I came in, don't have them (English is l'anglais, un Anglais would be an Englishman, and crème anglaise is custard). Nor - can you tell it's nearly dinner time? - do wines (un bordeaux).


3. I thought that I had to some extent picked up this habit, and don't normally write things like 'the University'. But The Guardian is even more frugal, and I shout at it that this or that ought to be capitalised...

It's just me, isn't it?

I don't know; I turn my back for a moment (well, for the best part of three weeks, actually) and when I look again, there are old newspapers everywhere, and tabs open all over my browser. Can't something be done about this?

Words: Awumbuk:

From a Guardian article about words I didn't know we needed for emotions I didn't know we had (not all equally useful or desirable). Awumbuk is explained: "There is an emptiness after visitors depart. The walls echo. The space which felt so cramped while they were here suddenly seems weirdly large. Sometimes everything feels a bit pointless. The indigenous Baining people who live in the mountains of Papua New Guinea are so familiar with this experience that they name it awumbuk. They believe departing visitors shed a kind of heaviness when they leave, so as to travel lightly. This oppressive mist hovers for three days, leaving everyone feeling distracted and apathetic. To counter it, the Baining fill a bowl with water and leave it overnight to absorb the festering air. The next day, the family rise very early and ceremonially fling the water into the trees, whereupon ordinary life resumes."

Pictures:

Also from the Guardian, the joy of Soviet bus stops (accompanying words, if required)