Harmless Drudgery: October 2012

Monday 29 October 2012

Missing a trick

Emerging from the NT shop at Lacock Abbey I said (of an omission that needn't detain us) 'They missed a trick there'. And that set me off to thinking about idioms (and even single words) based on card ganes.

When someone misses a trick they fail to make the most of the cards they are dealt
When they are secretive they play their cards close to their chest
When they follow suit they respond in kind
When they come up trumps they pull off an unexpected coup, revealing powers thitherto unexpected
Their secret advantage is their trump card
Trump can even be used as a verb ('That trumps my proposal')
Someone who hides something to their advantage has one or more cards up their sleeve
Their characteristic advantage is their long suit
When they act so as to invite a strong response they play into your hand
When they act with nous they play their cards right
A reliable person is a straight dealer
... [I'm sure others will come to me]

From across the pond come several others, such as poker face, ace in the hole, and passing the buck. I have met many explanations of the provenance of this 'buck', ranging from a piece of buckskin to a buckskin-handled knife. But it is always a token that circulates to mark who is dealer - the ultimate authority; in Wild West gambling saloons it (the knife) was even said to be stuck in the table (ruining the baize, presumably).

Also from the USA of course was the famous Edmond Hoyle, whose book is still in print after two centuries. If you do something according to Hoyle you do it 'by the book' (and I wonder if that's the Bible or Hoyle).

From my background in languages I have racked my brains trying to think of examples in other languages; I'm sure there must be some. But the only one I can call to mind is rather a literary one - paciencia y barajar, often attributed to Miguel de Cervantes - as it was used in El Quijote. But Cervantes shares with Shakespeare, in this respect at least, the status of 'linguistic Hoover'. As David Crystal says in The Stories of English:

[A] 'first recorded usage', for any author, actually tells us very little about whether that author coined the word. Shakespeare may have been the first person recorded as using the oaths 'sblood ('God's blood') and 'slid ('God's lid') but he certainly did not invent such everyday expressions.

Similarly, I imagine Kenny Rogers wasn't the first to say 'You gotta know when to hold 'n when to fold', although it's hard to avoid his name when doing a Google search for the phrase. [There's another one; they get everywhere.]

But revenons à nos moutons - paciencia y barajar. Surely this idiom was in use in Spain as an expression of doing your best with the cards you're given and hoping for better fortune after the deck's been shuffled. Cervantes was, like Autolycus, a 'snapper up of unconsidered trifles'.

Please add, in Comments, to my list - especially in other languages. As I said, I'm sure English is not alone in this frequent reference to card games; but my exposure to cards in a foreign context is limited to an exchange visit in my early teens when I played more games of Trente-et-un than there were rain clouds in the Normandy sky.

b

+ various updates to the footer, the most recent being on 2013.10.06.12:05

Update 2014.12.0716:55 – added PS and updated footer.

PS Commentary on the latest débâcle in Sri Lanka...

<digression>
and why FFS does the continuity wallah on 5 Live Sports Extra have to refer to 'the coveted third round'? Isn't a round a rather odd thing to covet. Neighbour's wife, OK, covetable (though not in the case of Li'l Miss Lebensraum). What football clubs covet is a place in the third round [of the FA Cup].
<digression>

...reminded me of another function of metaphors; they invite organic imagery, bringing in new words that aren't established metaphors. One commentator said 'Ali is Morgan's trump card... [all very well – an established metaphor that any native speaker is likely to understand]...and this pair are drawing trumps'. Drawing trumps isn't a metaphor in current usage. It's what a bridge player does when leading a card that will force the opponents to play their trumps at an early stage, so that at the end of the hand the side that have drawn trumps will have supremacy. Returning to the ODI ('Oh Dear, 'Im'), Sangakarra and Jayawardene were playing so effortlessly as to force Morgan to use up Ali's limited quota of overs early on, so as to reduce Morgan's fire-power [I've already done armaments here] during the last overs (when a chasing side will typically score more freely than in the earlier overs).

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs – but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 48,200 views and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Thursday 25 October 2012

Oops

The title of my last (that is, first) blog was imperfect, as Schomonymic doesn't fit the pattern. I was thinking about the pseudo-Yiddish device that repeats a word with the opening consonant changed to the cluster [ʃm], in connection with a UsingEnglish discussion I had recently been involved in. As I said there

There are lots of Yiddish words starting with [ʃ] + <consonant-cluster> (schmuck, schlmiel, schtuck, schlep...). I first met it in a joke about St Paul being addressed as 'Saul of Tarsus' (his pre-Christian name), to which he replied 'Tarsus Schmarsus, my name's Paul already'.

As is my wont, I added a footnote.

That timeless use of 'already' is also typical of Yiddish-influenced Am. English. I've heard it said that the 'TEA' in Tea Party is an acronym for 'Taxed Enough Already'. (And there was I thinking it was a reference to The Boston Tea Party.)

I felt insecure about the words 'I've heard it said....'. I thought I was riding my reputation for omniscience a bit too hard, and that my bluff would be called by someone unimpressed by my Moderator status.

But my bedside book for the year (I'm a slow reader), David Crystal's The Story of English in 100 Words, came to my assistance this morning, justifying both claims. The main one was this (pp. 182-3):

English previously [to the late 19th century] had borrowed few words from [Yiddish].... Schm- in particular seems to have caught on, because by the end of the decade [the 1930s] we find it being used in a remarkable way, forming nonsense words.
'There's a crisis,' says one person, and another disagrees. 'Crisis schmisis!' The usage conveys scepticism, disparagement or derision.

The 'heard it said' one is on p. 139:

In 2009, tea even became a political acronym in the USA, when the Tea Party was formed. TEA? Taxed Enough Already.

I knew I had heard these two nuggets somewhere before. I had read as far as p.139 - so that's where I got it. But I hadn't yet reached the schm- explanation. It was probably in an earlier Crystal work, possibly The Stories of English - I'm something of a fan, and since ~~retiring~~* his retirement from academia his output has become extraordinary. This necessarily involves a fair amount of repetition

But such a high workload has its disadvantages. In the earlier book he writes:

It is not what the orthodox histories include which is the problem; it is what they omit, or marginalize. The 'story' [quotes sic] of English, as it has been presented in the mainstream tradition, is the story of a single variety of the language, Standard English.... [F]or every one who speaks Standard English there must be a hundred who do not, and another hundred who speak other varieties...

He does not say so explicitly here, but from the rest of the book I imagine that his first 'hundred' refers to native-speakers born in the UK; and that his second 'hundred' refers to national varieties - South African English, Australian English, and so on. In both cases, I'd question his numbers (as gross under-estimates - especially when the two sorts of variation are multiplied: local variants of national variants [where I use local metaphorically to cover all sorts of context - not just the geographical]).

But this is not my point. I'd just like to observe that making such a big thing of a plural 'Stories' is a hostage to fortune, when only half-a-dozen years later you're going to add to the canon of books covering The Story of English ...

This is longer than I had planned, and I'm off tomorrow for a rain-sodden visit to the Land of Crystal's Fathers (though not mine). So stay tuned, but don't hold your breath, for more Harmless Drudgery.

PS 20122910 *Profound apologies for the dangling participle!

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Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.0: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU, and IA-IU, and – new for V4.0 – OA-OU. If you buy it, contact @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**, and 4,400 downloads to date. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1570 views/700 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Sunday 21 October 2012

Homonymic schomonymic. They're puns already

Gwynneth Lewis, the first Welsh Poet Laureate, on the radio just now said that Dafydd ap Gwilym had done something /frɒm ðə geʔ gəʊ/. And because her accent was quite broad, and I was expecting lilting things like /’let.tə/ for ‘letter’, I misheard in a way that suggested a reptilian version of ‘from the horse’s mouth’. But geckos don’t enjoy the same position as horses in figurative English, so I was momentarily flummoxed.

But she wasn’t in the least aware of any possible pun; the perpetrators of puns often aren’t, particularly when the pun is in the mind of the listener – and depends on over-interpretation of an accent that the speaker, quite naturally, sees as unimpeachable. Perhaps the most interesting puns are ones like this – where the speaker is unaware of the pun (or ‘homonymic clash’, as I learnt to call puns when I was studying at the feet of Doctor (now Professor) Erik Fudge. [Sic]

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