CRM and Punishment

 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that companies use to manage interactions with customers and potential customers. CRM helps organisations streamline processes, build customer relationships, increase sales, improve customer service, and increase profitability. 

Source

There are of course many software packages, and (in this smartphone-centric ...

<tangent>
I heard on the radio this morning of a restaurant in Verona that is offering a free bottle of wine to diners who agree to relinquish their mobile phones for the duration.   The man on Radio 3 didn't – as is his wont – attribute this  snippet of news, but I found it in this piece in Monday's Guardian:

An Italian restaurant is offering a free bottle of wine to customers who relinquish their mobile phones during meals.

Angelo Lella, the owner of Al Condominio, a restaurant that opened in the northern city of Verona in March, said the aim was to encourage diners chat to each other instead of constantly glancing at their phones.

“We wanted to open a restaurant that was different from the others,” he said. “So we picked this format – customers can choose to renounce technology while enjoying a convivial moment together. Technology is becoming a problem – there is no need to look at your phone every five seconds, but for many people it is like a drug … This way they have an opportunity to put it aside and drink some good wine.”

Her words 'like a drug' have a basis in fact. I believe the same dopamine receptors are involved in drug dependency and mobile dependency, and I suspect similar physical withdrawal symptoms affect both – FFS as they used to say in the standards world: 'for further study'.
</tangent>

 
...brave new world) apps that provide support for CRM,

<autobiographical-note>
The NHS must be using one such package, as this experience attests: last week I was at the Royal Marsden for a check-up involving a short consultation preceded by a blood test. The phlebotomist was chatty and friendly, and after giving her my name I added 'People usually call me "Bob".'

After she'd done her stuff I went back to the waiting area to settle in for my usual hour or two's wait. But before I had even sat down a nurse called for "Bob Knowles" (not the usual "Robert" of that ilk). The phlebotomist must have had a CRM app open at the entry for "Robert Knowles" and filled in the (previously blank) "Preferred common name" field. And later the same day I received a letter addressed to "Bob". From now on I fear I'll always be "Bob" in all contexts, formal or informal. I question whether this 'improve[s] customer service'.
</autobiographical-note>

All Trussed Up

Earlier this week I listened to the Liz Truss interview on Newscast. This was met in the Newscast section of Discord with the foreseeable anti-Truss reception (much of which I agree with). One among many was this:

 

At the time I agreed. I felt that her veiled accusations against other actors in the incredible financial shambles  that accompanied her 7 weeks' Reign of Error were simply indicative of her child-like inability to admit that she had screwed up flamboyantly.

But later in the week I came across Robert Peston and Steph McGovern's 3-part piece in The Rest Is Money blog, entitled...

<rant>
(and spare me from the 'titled' nonsense – I've explained elsewhere [that's the first of many whinges] why that suits the social background of American English; old fuddy-duddy that I am I'm sticking to my British English guns [flintlocks though they may be]).

</rant>

...'Who Killed Liz Truss?' Unarguably she made several gross missteps (I initially wrote 'miscalculations', but decided that that was giving her too much credit for strategic thinking), but it turns out that her finger-pointing at other culpable participants in the tragi-comedy/farce was to some extent justified.

So. unlike that contributor on Discord (who couldn't bear a second listen) I did go back and listen to the Truss interview again, giving her credit for not taking all the blame.

 But this has gone on long enough, and the lawn is crying out for attention.

 

b

Qualis artifex

Meet the Roman Emperor with Mary Beard. broadcast earlier this week referred to the words attributed to the Emperor Nero just before his suicide:

Qualis  artifex pereo

'What an artist dies [in me]'

 – or, as it is more often quoted (rather fancifully. I think, here, for example) 'What an artist the world is losing'. 

<autobiographical-note>
I may have some across this at school, but in 1978 (as I was working at the time on the 3rd edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) it was at the forefront of my mind as I checked all the Latin entries.
<autobiographical-note>

And Mary Beard's reference reminded me of a bon mot of mine, one of which I am inordinately (unreasonably? at any rate, typically) proud; arguably it was my meilleur mot. I've cast a fair few pearls before a fair few swine in my time, but in this case I could be sure of my audience, Richard Brain (RIP), an erudite classicist and friend; also,  at the time, my boss.

<autobiographical-note>
After my time in London, working as an assistant on ODQ, I moved to Oxford in 1979 to work as Editorial Assistant to Richard. I was writing a report on an unsolicited proposal (not yet a full manuscript) dealing with the Emperor Nero, written by a man named Perowne.

<tangent>
I imagine the risk of a libel action is minute, but as his name is crucial I think it's worth taking anyway.
</tangent>

Some of the ideas in it were interesting, but I had my doubts about his prose style. In the last line of my report I said we must ask ourselves the question  Qualis artifex Perowne?  (LITTLE THINGS...)

<tangent type="more OUP larks">
one of my better efforts, I think, rivalling the rhyme '...eponymous hero/...anonymous Pierrot' (especially apt as it was sung by Peter Pan, and Pierrot is a diminutive of Pierre).
</tangent>

</autobiographical-note>

The first programme in the Mary Beard series started with a description of  a dinner laid on by   Domitian in a room whose walls were painted black. This was presented as part of a ghoulish joke. I'm sure the Professor was right, although it's an interesting coincidence that the new find unearthed (unashed?) at Pompeii features a banqueting hall with black walls.

The black room is the latest treasure to emerge from the excavation, which started 12 months ago - an investigation that will feature in a documentary series from the BBC and Lion TV to be broadcast later in April.

Source

(And on the subject of Pompeii, anyone who's so inclined is welcome to do some background reading in this old post of mine.)

Gotta go, Grass needs cutting before a jaunt to North Yorkshire.

b

<rantette type="ps">
I wonder what genius at Wokingham Borough Council, or  the recycling contractor, or  maybe a committee involving both, came up with the scheme that requires  a wheelie bin not to be emptied  unless it is displaying an easily-removable sticker (costing £86.00). They might as well insist on  an unsealed envelope sellotaped to the bin containing the money, marked

PLEASE TAKE ONE
WDC welcomes careful sneak thieves

To give them their due, they were quick to replace the missing sticker, but what's to stop the same thing happening again? (And I'm sure I can whistle for a rebate to cover the collection not made.)
</rantette>

 

Shameless plug no. 2

I wrote No. 1 more than eight years ago, when the Wokingham Choral Society was giving a concert that included three pieces that I'd sung before. This time there's only one piece I know I've sung before, though as the programme involves madrigals and I have sung several before...

<autobiographical-note>
In 1979 I was working with the rump of the OUP General Division (don't ask) who had not yet migrated from London to Oxford – mostly a small team working on the 3rd edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Early Music department. Both these teams were focused on books to be published to coincide with the quincentenary celebrations.

<parenthesis>
'500 years of publishing at Oxford' [not all OUP, but still...]
</parenthesis>

The music book was the Oxford Book of English Madrigals, and at the launch party there was a performance of some of the songs in it, given by a group of singers from that London outpost. Many years later I was in the Reading u3a Madrigals group.
</autobiographical-note>

...I expect a lot of the music in this concert to be familiar.

 

When I was looking out the music for the main piece, John Rutter's The Sprig of Thyme I found between its pages the programme from  the last time I sang it, in 1999.

<autobiographical-note type="prescript">

In an earlier blog I wrote of the main piece in that 1999 concert:

A good few years ago, I sang (not with my present choir) Howard Blake's Song of St Francis. The setting was mid-late 20th century, but the text was by St Francis of Assisi, written in whatever Italic dialect he spoke – Umbrian of the 13th century, probably.  But saying it was written in that dialect is an oversimplification. Vulgar Latin had various different substrates – whatever medium of spoken communication underlay it – throughout Romania (in the historical sense of 'that part of the world that was directly influenced by the Romans'). St Francis may have thought (if he thought about it at all) he was writing Latin. Strongly influenced as his life was by Latin texts, it is probably a rather Latinate form of his dialect.

Anyway, speculation like that is something I left behind 40-odd years ago...

(The rest of that post is quite fun though I says it as shouldn't including a speculation about Respighi and the Doppler Effect, but I'll leave it to interested parties, if there are any, to do the necessary clicking.)

Anyway, the point is that the programme includes a translation of that 13th century text, signed "RJK". I don't remember doing it, but it must have been me.
</autobiographical-note>

 

Enough, or as they say in Portugal Chega!

<note-to-self>
Must tell Alastair Campbell, whose The Rest is Politics podcast is great fun, how to pronounce the Portuguese party  of that name.
</note-to-self>

It promises to be a charming concert. Don't miss it.

 b 

The forensic arena

In Tuesday's The Life Scientific Dr Sheila Willis, a forensic scientist...

<oops>
Jim Al Khalili used the term "forensics" before Dr Willis said she disapproved of it as 'meaningless' She had the good grace not to correct him, and he (as far as I noticed – though it's not a nit I'm particularly keen to pick)...

<american-trait status="query">
These two dictionary excerpts suggest that 'forensics' as shorthand for 'forensic science' is more common in American English,

Anerican Heritage Dictionary

Collins Engllish Dictionary

And the Google Ngram Viewer confirms this:

American English

In American English, 'forensics' is nearly always the commoner form, while in British English the form 'forensic science' was preferred until the early years of the twenty-first cemtury.

British English

Then it is quickly overtaken by 'forensics', which has a sudden steep rise in fortune. (Incidentally, the TV series CSI – Crime Scene Investigators first appeared in the early years of the millennium. Just saying.)

</american-trait>

...  didn't repeat the error (?slip?bone of contention'/???).

</oops>

...was reflecting on the derivation of the word 'forensic' – from the Latin forensis (='pertaining to the market place or forum, public, out of doors'). The  point of forensic experts is that they have to present  their analysis for all to see.

<tangent>
Link with 'autopsy' (= 'see for yourself').
</tangent>

Jim Al-Khalili ...

<parenthesis fivolity-quotient="5">

(who I can never listen to without imagining his evil twin, Midge Acidid {'Midge' doesn't look like the polar opposite of 'Jim', but looked at in terms of phonemes {natch} it's a palindrome: /mɪʤ/ versus /ʤɪm/ . See? Stark raving sane.

</parenthesis>

...asked her to contrast this sort of presentation with the sort of acacdemic situations that experts are usually called on to speak in. And she said 

The court is certainly a very different arena from the scientific conference mainly because the adversarial system is designed in such a way as to... undermine your opponent; that's the nature of the game....

<etymological aside>
I doubt if she knew how appropriate the word 'arena' was in the context of an adversarial system. You can't get much more adversarial than gladiators  (not the Spandex and greasepaint sort with a capital G, but the Roman sort who actually spilled blood). And so that the blood of the previous fight wouldn't interfere with the spectacle of the next, the fighting area was covered with sand (Latin arena).

<tangent>
In the same way that a covering (in this case, sand) became – by the magic of metonymy –  a word refering to the whole fighting area, a fallen boxer 'hits the canvas'. Maybe not, though. The arena is the ring, not the canvas. Still, there's a link there somewhere...
</tangent>

<//etymological aside> 

Westminster Diary 

We understand that there's no truth in the rumour that Rishi Sunak plans to replace the KCMG with the KChNG (pronounced Ker-ching)..

That's all. There's a break in the clouds, and it's time I got out.

b

Down the rabbit hole

 A recent question in the UsingEnglish forum has got me thinking about the expression 'down the rabbit hole'; and, predictably enough, that's where I've gone.

'Down  the rabbit hole' - the wilderness years and sudden rise

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the source of the quote, was published in 1865, but apart from a few uses in the later years of the twentieth century it didn't take off until the turn of the millennium. And then the curve rose steeply. Why was that?

Most social media apps started in the new millennium, with one or two early starters in the '90s, and they were very good at spreading, misinterpreting, and amplifying wacky ideas. In the BBC podcast/Radio 4 programme  Things Fell Apart  (now in its second series) Jon Ronson looks at some of the results  (interestingly, if you can tolerate his voice – which for me is quite trying).

<alternative-meaning>
Later in that UsingEnglish discussion an alternative interpretation of the phrase was

mooted – if that's the word...

<passive-agression>
(more like ASSERTED, it seems to me; but I take it in my stride, as ever.  I'll not rise to it)
</passive-agression>

... in which  it refers simply to a series of digressions. But I think a more  useful interpretation of the phrase involves threads of an argument getting further and further away from reality (or, as Alice thought, "curiouser and curiouser".)

</alternative-meaning>

Anyway, it looks as though the expression "down the rabbit hole"  took off at about  the same time as the rise of social media – not that correlation has to imply causation. It seems plausible though. And I'd hazard a guess that very few of the users of this expression have any idea of its provenance.

But another issue turned up in my investigations – the appearance of a similar expression. but with "a" rather than "the".

The version with "a" is less than half as common as the version with "the". This makes sense, as "down a rabbit hole" invites a definition (such as "where black equals white amd white black').

But the Google Ngram Viewer makes it possible to focus the search on American/British English, and this shows an ineresting difference in usage: whereas in American English the version with just "a" is about a third as common as the "the" version, in British English it is well over half as common.

<proviso>
I have said elsewhere that there may be a subjective/dubious argument behind the AE/BE distinction, but in this case it seems to me that it is probably simply geographic.
</proviso>

Enough of this, or as Wordworth put it in The Tables Turned

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you'll grow double:

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

Why all this toil and trouble?

L'Envoi

I see The Times Feedback column has had to resurrect the Great Referendums Debate, a perennial so hardy that it merits capitals just as much as l'Affaire Dreyfus.

I addressed this issue in a post so old that a crucial link is now dead. So here it is again, in new words: English doesn't have to follow the rules of Latin grammar (as that Feedback column points out). But even if it did, Latin grammar requires that a gerund (which referendum is – an abbreviation of referendum ad populum [= 'the putting of a question to the people']) HAS NO PLURAL:

I. The Gerund 

The Gerund is a verbal noun, always active in force. The infintive of the verbs supplies the nominative case: Legere est difficile = To read is difficult (reading is difficult) The other cases are formed by adding -nd- to the present stem of the verb (-iend- for 3rd conjugation I-stems and all 4th conjugation verbs), plus the neuter singular endings of the second declension. The Gerund has no plural [my emphasis]. 

Source

 In an update to another post I wrote:

<reductio-ad-absurdum>
There are in principle four cases, each of which could have its own word:

• referendum (one of these things)

• referendums (two or more of these things)

• referenda (on the analogy of "agenda", a list of questions to be put to the people; to be clear, the usage would be "a referenda")

• referendas (two or more such lists)

Fortunately we don't live in a world where this could ever work.👺

</reductio-ad-absurdum>

Some dictionaries (unaccountably) say that referenda is an acceptable plural "in formal contexts", but – it being simply wrong both in English grammar and in Latin grammar – I don't see why formal contexts call for a display of ignorance.

b

As similar as so-and-so

In Saturday's Feedback section of The Times Rose Wild was (as quite often) saying 'Nothing to see here. Both versions are acceptable; calm down  everybody'.  And she cites a few Google searches to justify her equanimity.

A correspondent had objected to the phrase 'dull as dishwater', holding that the phrase should be 'dull as ditchwater' and that the 'dishwater' version was wrong. The columnist said it was all much of a muchness: '"Ditchwater" and "dishwater" have been interchangeably dull for more than 100 years.'

The Google Ngrams Viewer more or less confirms her position: 'dull as ditchwater' used to be the commoner, but recently there's no strong tendency either way – if anything, the trend is in favour of 'dull as dishwater':

The case for interchangeability

But that Viewer also lets you specify whether you are interested in British English or American English, and those results tell a different story.

In the one for American English there is a preference for the 'ditchwater' version until about the beginning of the Second World War, followed by a period of mixed fortunes for about twenty years, and then – since about 1960 – there is an increasingly strong preference for the 'dishwater' version. And since about 2010 the two have been diverging, with 'dishwater' waxing and 'ditchwater' waning:

The state of the nation

I wonder why. The recent (strong) preference for 'dishwater" might suggest some environmental explanation: could there be fewer ditches in the USA? Of course not. 

<parenthesis>
(Although I suppose there may be fewer miles of ditch per unit area or per capita, because of the distribution of farmland...? Perhaps I'm overthinking this.)
</parenthesis>

Besides, 'ditchwater' was the preferred comparator for over 100 years before that.

Meanwhile, in the Ngram for British English there is a marked preference for the 'ditchwater' version throughout the two phrases' coexistence, though the 'dishwater' version seems to have had a growth spurt after the war: in 1945 it was about ten times less common than the 'ditchwater' version, but by the time the Ngrams data runs out 'dishwater' has risen to about two thirds of the level of 'ditchwater'.

So it's tempting to conclude that the many contributors to The Times's online Comments (which I don't have access to) who decried 'dull as dishwater' as an error were sticklers for British English.

A preference for ditchwater

<shibboleth-warning>
Of course this all depends on how the Google Ngrams people define 'British/American English'. There's a whiff of the No true Scotsman ...

<glossary>
'No true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.'

'But what about N?'

'He can't be a true Scotsman.'

'Why not?'

'Because no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.'

</glossary>

...fallacy here. A lot of self-styled Guardians of the King's English call a lot of things 'American English' although they have strong and healthy roots in British English.

<autobiographical-note>
When I worked at OUP (whose house style was to use -ize endings where there was an option...

<innocent-bystanders>
(This is a crucial proviso, 'televize' is just wrong [and 'analyze' is an abomination – though admittedly {not to say lamentably} standard in some parts of the world]. Many innocent bystanders are caught in the zeal for 'modernizing' spellings by making s-endings zs)

</innocent-bystanders>

....) Professor Richard Cobb, a Francophile who wrote chiefly about things French (and in French there is no -izer option for -iser verbs), had a dispensation.

<suspicion>
I doubt if their present  editorial policies (presumably more automated and unbending than they were in the more humane [some would say wet] 1980s) would allow this if he were writing today.

</suspicion>

He alone among OUP authors was allowed to use '-ise' spllings. His editors knew this, but other departments (publicity, production etc.) occasionally caused friction by 'correcting' his aberrant ss.
</autobiographical-note>

In a previous post  I wrote: 

<prescript> 

In a UsingEnglish discussion many years ago on this sadly common issue I wrote

There's nothing unBritish about the spelling 'apologize'. It has been the house style of The Times for well over a hundred years, and is used by many large and influential publishers (Oxford University Press, for example). I'm tired of being accused of flirting with modernity and excessive American influence, just because I use a spelling that millions of British people use (so long as they haven't been got at by generations of school-teachers peddling misinformation).

That may have been true of The Times at the time of writing, but 'the times they are a-changin'. A few cases of '-ize' pass the scrutiny of the subs' eyes - especially when there is a strong etymological justification - as in the case of 'baptize' (where there is a zeta rather than a sigma in the original Greek); but fewer and fewer. 

</prescript>

But I suspect the Google Ngrams definitions of British and American English are purely geographic.

</shibboleth-warning> 

Later in the column she writes about her use of the expression 'carloads of cash', which had prompted a correspondent (who obviously has too much time on his hands) to point out that the usual metaphor for an inordinate amount was 'shedloads'. 'I'm not sure why I opted for carloads' she writes. Well  I have a possible answer: alliteration. And alliteration explains the popularity of 'dull as di...hwater'. Many other similes (most? Discuss) are alliterative– 'bold as brass', 'cool as a cucumber', 'dead as a dodo/doornail', 'fit as a fiddle', 'good as gold', 'hungry as a hunter'...

<admission-of-defeat type="alphabetical">
(And speaking of defeat, who does Pope Francis think he is – Pius XII? But I digress...)
J has me foxed, and I suspect that the second half of the alphabet is less fruitful, so I'll go on to a few digraphs.
</admission-of-defeat

'cheap as chips', 'thick as thieves'... (there must be more: where's Brewer when you need it?) 

But that's enough for the time being.

b

Update: 2024.03.12.19:50 – Added Pius XII link

A quickie...

 ... at least, that's the plan...

A few months ago, a Vodafone ad assailed my ears with the apparently meaningful (but it's up to the listener to put 2 and 2 together) line 'if you're out of contract you could be out of pocket". Hmm...? If you're out of pocket you end up with less money than you should after a deal; you don't pay more than you need to. So the ad produces a mindless jingle that sounds clever with its 'out of.../out of...' wordplay, and leaves the poor punter to do the mental arithmetic: 

<monthly salary> - <monthly payment> ⇒ 'less than I could have';  ∴  'I'm out of pocket'. 

But could isn't the same as should, so the wordplay doesn't really work if you think about it. As so often, the huckster relies on the fact that mostly punters don't think about stuff like this.

<autobiographical-note>
A similar near-miss struck me in the late '70s, when I first heard the album (not yet a stage show) Evita. In the song 'Don't cry for me Argentina' the lines  Dressed up to the nines/At sixes and sevens with you  don't quite work. You are 'at sixes and sevens' with a thing. You might say 'I'm at sixes and sevens with computers' or 'I'm at sixes and sevens with social stuff'; you can't be at sixes and sevens with a person...

<warning reason="neologists at work">
(or maybe you can since Tim Rice had his evil way – who knows what solecisms he held the door open for)
</warning>

But the lyricist wanted a clever-clever bit of wordplay (up to the nines/at sixes and sevens) so coined a new usage.
 </autobiographical-note>

The phrase 'out of contract' was once used almost exclusively, in British English, in sporting contexts. The British Natiional Corpus finds 22 instances of the phrase, and all but a handful are about sports (mostly football and rugby). By contrast the Corpus of Contemporary American English finds only 31, one of which is a misfire (...'walked out of contract talks'). This tally (30 in a billion-word corpus) is relatively much fewer, as COCA is ten times the size of BNC.  And only about a quarter of those deal with sports; the rest deal with screen actors, buildings, cell phones... – a much wider range of contexts than in British English.

So that Vodafone ad was adopting an American usage ...

<inline-ps>
To clarify (as  I'm usually annoyed...

<aside>
 (too strong? – well at least having to control a reflex lip-curl)
</aside>

... when people commenting on British English say 'This is an Americanism'. These so-called 'Americanisms' are often features of regional or historic forms of British English ('fall', 'gotten'...); in fact, somewhere (in  an Open University book that I did a Prospero on a few years ago [I didn't throw it in the sea, but I got rid of it]) I read of an eighteenth-century claim in Parliament that people should send their sons to America to learn proper English.

When I say Vodafone borrowed the phrase from America I mean that while the phrase did exist in British English (chiefly in the sporting context) the mobile phone provider (probably in an international company) knew of the American usage in the case of cell phones  and said 'I'll 'ave some of that', not being aware of the phrase's applicabilty in other contexts.
</inline-ps>

...and now I find that they're all doing it. On Saturday afternoon, looking for a provider who'd charge less than an arm and a leg for broadband, I saw that Plusnet were using exactly the same line:

Plusnet using the same line

But Vodafone may  not have been the first; they were just the first ones I noticed (and I may have noticed them only because of the ear-bleedingly awful woman who said it [and who has probably the most ubiquitous voice-over presence in the UK😖])

But that's enough; time to do a bit of note-bashing for this:

Update 2024.03.02.21:10 – Added <inline-ps />