Some thoughts

<rant>
This rant has been bubbling away for a few weeks, ever since Priti Patel's "fulsome apology":

As so often after the breaking of an imagined "rule", this was followed by a Twitterstorm. These snapshots give a taste:

The BBC, to my relief, were a little more measured, allowing themselves a couple of diffident question marks.

(But they still used the loaded phrase "the official definition". For pity's sake, there ISN'T one )

In the #WATO programme that examined the issue  Martha Kearney exemplified this well-meaning misprision...

<digression>
"Tee hee hee, doesn't he mean misapprehension?" hoot the monolexicopaths (OK, I did make that one up) "Misprision means 'wrong action, a failure on the part of authority, early 15c.' [Etymonline], and Ms Kearney certainly did nothing wrong." Well I have chosen to use it to mean failure to grasp (which, incidentally, I have just realized, may well underly Wilde's choice of name for Miss Prism).
 <digression>

 ... by saying that "you and I" as an object phrase is "incorrect" (and was quickly slapped down by Oliver Kamm). And Kamm, at  the beginning of the piece, responds to the ubiquitous official definition Shibboleth: "There is no central arbiter of what words mean, they are part of a social contract between the utterer and the hearer or the writer and the reader." Humpty-Dumpty was right (though on the extreme right, where misunderstandings are likely to occur).

One good thing that came out of the kerfuffle was this idea:

which was taken up the next day by Wayne Myers in this tweet (and youTube posting).

The British National Corpus, for what it's worth, records "fulsome apologies" as the 5th most common "fulsome + <noun>"  collocation; COCA has many more, but neither apology nor apologies. I wonder if this suggests that our American cousins are less tolerant of this usage....
</rant>

Enough of the rant . Another thing that came of the Twitterstorm was my thinking more about -some words. Etymonline has this to say:

-some (1)

word-forming element used in making adjectives from nouns or adjectives (and sometimes verbs) and meaning "tending to; causing; to a considerable degree," from Old English -sum, identical with some, from PIE root *sem- (1) "one; as one, together with." Cognate with Old Frisian -sum, German -sam, Old Norse -samr; also related to same.

Nouns include these:

adventuresome, awesome, bothersome, burdensome, fearsome, frolicsome, handsome, mettlesome, nettlesome, noisome, quarrelsome, toothsome, troublesome, venturesome, winsome. 

The relationship between the noun and -some is not predictable (as often happens when words come together: crocodile shoes are made from part of a crocodile, but crocodile tears aren't). And the other thing that leaps out is that  they often hold fossils of words that no longer have a free-standing life in their own right: what is a noi or a win? The Etymoline entries for noisome and winsome explain.

Adjectives include these:

darksome, fulsome, gladsome, lissome/lithesome,  lonesome, wearisome, wholesome/halesome

<autobiographical_note>
I put halesome on the end there as I first met this dialect word in a song I sang at primary school:

Buy ma caller herrin

They're bonny fish and halesome farin

Halesome is to wholesome as hale (now preserved chiefly in the phrase hale and hearty) is to whole. Health comes into it as well. Healing is making whole.

<digression>
One site I visited to find this song introduces an interesting typo: halesome sarin . Sarin can be called many things, but halesome is not one of them.
</digression>

</autobiographical_note>

I'm not sure why Etymonline includes verb as a parenthetical afterthought:  "element used in making adjectives from nouns or adjectives (and sometimes verbs)".

buxom, cumbersome, irksome, loathsome, meddlesome,  tiresome, worrisome

In any case "More or less any noun can be verbed" (as wossname said – Mark Twain?..); so my putting trouble-some among the nouns and worr[y]-some among the verbs is arbitrary.

Again, there are fossils: things don't cumber much nowadays (in fact I wasn't sure at first what part of speech it was). And in the case of buxom, some spelling changes have tried to cover its tracks. The first part of buxom shares its derivation with the bendy sort of bow; and indeed with elbow. It originally meant something like pliable. It would be neat to say that buxom simply means curvaceous, but that would be an oversimplification. To quote Etymonline:

The meaning progressed from "compliant, obliging," through "lively, jolly," "healthily plump, vigorous and attractive," to (in women, and perhaps influenced by lusty) "attractively plump, comely" (1580s). In Johnson [1755] the primary meaning still is "obedient, obsequious." It was used especially of women's figures from at least 1870s...

But enough of this. SOME things are beyond me.

b
PS: A couple of clues:

• Top dog – a rapper detox, reformed. (4,8)
• Measure up for inclusion in modification – tricky. (11)

Update: 2017.12.01 – Added PPS

Inspired by Etymonline's 'meaning "tending to; causing; to a considerable degree"' I started to make a Venn diagram showing overlapping shades of meaning (which could be seen as not fitting in with my opening rant –  only the meanings I'm toying with are more in a spirit of description rather than of proescription). But I'm not satisfied with the result: I ended up just chasing words from one category to another (and speculating on the usefulness or otherwise of a three-dimensional Venn diagram). Still, here it is:

Update: 2017.12.06 – Fixed typo (although proscription and prescription tend to go together in the same minds).

Placebo - you will, eh?

“Italy, this is the apocalypse,” was the headline in the country’s leading sports paper La Gazzetta dello Sport on Tuesday morning [14 Nov.], perhaps an understandable reaction for a nation whose passion for football is so great that the same publication concluded that “a love so great must be reserved for other things [than the World Cup]”. 

La Gazzetta dello Sport, as quoted in the Guardian

Which reminds me of the word gazette's derivation;  to quote Etymonline

 <etymological_note>
"newspaper," c. 1600, from French gazette (16c.), from Italian gazzetta, Venetian dialectal gazeta "newspaper," also the name of a small copper coin, literally "little magpie," from gazza; applied to the monthly newspaper (gazeta de la novità) published in Venice by the government, either from its price or its association with the bird (typical of false chatter),

Or both, I would surmise. I can imagine some Venetian satirist greeting the first edition of the gazeta de la novità making a punning reference not only to its price but also to its vapidness.
<etymological_note>

Which  seems a strangely prescient reference to Twitter. :-) Anyway;  football...

In January 2011, Science Daily reported a Mumbai study:

According to recent research the color, shape, taste and even name of a tablet or pill can have an effect on how patients feel about their medication. Choose an appropriate combination and the placebo effect gives the pill a boost, improves outcomes and might even reduce side effects. Now, researchers at the University of Bombay, New Mumbai, India, have surveyed users of over-the-counter (OTC) medication to find out just how much the color of a tablet influences patient choice.     

Football.... I'm getting there. Stay with me: 

Three years later, The Atlantic  reported

...Blue pills, contrary to what Breaking Bad may have you believe, act best as sedatives.... 

When researchers take culture into account, things get a bit more complicated. For instance, the sedative power of blue doesn’t work on Italian men. The scientists who discovered this anomaly think it’s due to ‘gli Azzuri’ (the Blues), Italy’s national soccer team—because they associate the color blue with the drama of a match, it actually gets their adrenaline pumping

But this was not a novel  phenomenon. The sedative effect of blue in particular was reported in The Lancet in 1972. (The Placebo Effect, in general, of course, had already  been in regular use by shamans and witch-doctors and faith healers for thousands of years.)

A recent Radiolab programme on Radio 4 Extra brought this to  my attention; 18 minutes into the piece,  this blue/sedative correspondence is discussed. I have to admit that I took agin the interviewee, possibly because he gave gli Azurri a /ʒ/, no doubt because of what we call in the trade L1-interference: he transferred the /ʒ/ of his English "azure " to the unsuspecting (and undeserving) Italian word. But what aggravated my response to this minor barbarism was his arrogating to himself this observation. When asked what causes this he says "Well, I'm not really sure [sic – his emphasis] but my speculation is...[Azurri idea]". By "my speculation", of course, he means "the speculation of the authors of a research paper  written when I was still wet behind the ears".

But what may indeed be his speculation is the unnecessary and irrelevant gilding of the lily; Italian women aren't affected because of their devotion to the Virgin Mary, who is traditionally depicted in blue, so it makes Italian women feel calm...

WHA...? Millions of women in Catholic countries supposedly have this same association; so why should the Italians be any different?..

<digression>
That claim was made over a background that featured a recording of Ave Maria [Schubert‘s], which reminded me of a recent ad I heard for Aled Jones's latest album, which has him singing both with his son and with his younger self. And in the words Pleni sunt coeli et terra Ave Maria, gratia plena I noticed with grim resignation  that the successful present-day tenor has lapsed into the lazy /eɪ/  diphthong in both the first and the thirdfourth words, in regrettable contrast to his younger self (with the choir master's voice no doubt still ringing in his ears) singing a pure monophthong.
</digression>

Maybe, because Italian society is painfully patriarchal (with women doing the cleaning and cooking and washing and child-rearing while their menfolk slump in front of the football) they just don't have the time to be that bothered about gli Azurri.

But if women all over the world are affected in the same way by the colour of tranquilizers, why bring the Virgin Mary into it at all? Besides, I'm not sure I buy the whole football thing. Are French fans any less fanatical about their support for les Bleus? Still, it's interesting.

And the Italians (not sure it's just the men) are certainly... distraught [I don't think  that's an overstatement] about the exit of lgi Azurri from the World Cup  – Blexit?


b

• Showing concern about lines of communication, and getting tooled up. (8)(This was a duplicate.)
  
• Speed about Britain, achieving fame (9)
• Set a trap with son for performers of fandango or tarantella?. (9)

Update: 2017.11.16.22:35 – Specified the composer of that Ave Maria setting.

Update: 2017.11.19.11:25 – Fixed quote (wrong prayer)

Update: 2017.11.21.10:45 – Added PS

PS In defence of the subject line:

I've always wondered about the word placebo. 

<etymological_note>
For the non-Latinists, it means "I shall be pleasing [to]".  OK, all a placebo does is give the impression of  treatment, and to that extent it can be seen as pleasing in some sense. But why bring the first person into it? It reminds me of a bus I once saw bearing the sign "Sorry, I'm not in service!" "WTF...?" I thought (anachronistically – as that abbreviation probably hadn't yet been invented [it was in the mid-'60s]) "What are you, Bertie the Bus?"

<digression>
No, it can't have been as a matter of fact. (The Rev'd W. Awdry's) Bertie was a single-decker.  And the miscreant I remembered was a Routemaster.
</digression>

London Transport (as was) soon learnt their lesson, and I never saw this gratuitous personification again (on buses, at least). But I regret I have seen it on an estate agent's (realtor's...

<digression>
I find it interesting that the Land of the Free insists on preserving this [usually unknowing, I imagine] etymological hat-tip to royalty in the name of their land dealers.
</digression>

...) sign: "I'm sold". And it is quite common on the packaging of the twee-er food products: example.
</etymological_note>

But why does placebo have to do this? I can't, off the top of my head, recall a similar use of the first-person in an etymological context.

Update: 2017.11.22.15:45 – Added PPS

PPS 
I've been thinking about that last point: there are lots of third-person examples (different moods, voices, and aspects):

• fiat, exeat, caveat ... (3ps subj.)
• habitat, aegrotat, non sequitur,  exit, tenet ... (3ps indic.)
• imprimatur...(3ps passive subj.)

(NB 'sequitur' may look passive, but it's not).

The only other first person example I've found so far is ignoramus (3pp) ["=" "we do not know"]

Update: 2017.11.26.10:45 –  Replaced duplicate clue (in text) and added to 3ps examples.

Update: 2018.03.06.18:45 –  Added PPPS

PPPS
The answers to those clues: CELEBRITY and CASTANETS.

We need to talk about Kelvin

On Neil McPherson's WalkLiving with the Gods  [oops: Gods/dinosurs – easy mistake to  make] recently (not to suggest that he is an egregious source of things that make me wince – he's wise and thoughtful, and his series is well worth a listen [if not two]) – I heard an example of one of my most abhorred assumptions: that "Centigrade is always more".

In the world usually inhabited by most of us (in what is popularly referred to by the mealy-mouthed euphemism humankind)...

<apologia_pro_prejudicio_suo>
I‘m sorry about this. In the words mankind, womankind, etc... the  structure is  "<noun>+kind". I was mentally scarred by an English teacher who insisted that the word "human" was  an adjective: ‘If you mean "human being" SAY "human being"‘ he used to rant. I know this is rubbish; but I have drunk the Kool Aid. So whenever I see or hear the word "human"  my adjective-filter springs unbidden into action – I‘m not proud of it, but that‘s the way it is.
</apologia_pro_prejudicio_suo>

...there is a belief that, when talking about the weather, for a given value, Centigrade denotes a more extreme temperature than Fahrenheit – so that the word Centigrade is often used as a reinforcer: "They have to survive in temperatures of 50 or 60 °Centigrade..."  (Gosh, how hot is that?), or "Temperatures commonly reach -20 °Centigrade (Cold or what?).

In the case of weather, in contexts likely to be met by human observers, the rule of thumb Centigrade means more extreme works more often than not.  But we all know (or most of us do, anyway) that something happens at -40 °C or F, which inverts the hyperbole: "Temperatures commonly reach -50 °Fahrenheit (Cold or what?) (Just to be clear, -50 deg. Celsius is -58 deg. Fahrenheit.)


In any case, though, (and perhaps in Neil McPherson‘s), the word "Centigrade" may be justified on the grounds that it's just informative and doesn't express any sense of hyperbole. I suspect, though, that anyone doing no more than conveying information would tend to say "Celsius" rather than "Centigrade". So when he said "temperatures below -50 degrees Centigrade are common" I thought the worst.

Anyway, time's wingéd chariot is doing its usual trick. Having sung to a ... not exactly packed church, though  pretty full, last Saturday, I must get learning the German for next month's concert:

b



















PS And here are a couple more clues:

• Lacedæmonii – (only the extremists) tear strips off, then set free. (8)
• Showing concern about lines of communication, and getting tooled up. (8)

Update: 2017.11.14.10:30 – Corrected typo in line 1.

Update: 2018.03.05.11:50 –  Added PPS.

The answers: LIBERATE and CARRYING.