Oh what a tangled web we weave...

...when we try to organize our thoughts about language ...

<digression>
(and it's no accident that the idea of weaving is at the root of the word text – 'from PIE root *teks- "to weave, to fabricate, to make; make wicker or wattle framework."', as Etymonline puts it. They quote Robert Bringhurst, from The Elements of Typographic Style:

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

</digression>

I've written before about the damage done by thinkers about language, who create their whole petty world of Mrs Thistlebottom's "rules", policed by Strunk & White, purveyors of jackboots to all discerning grammar Nazis. Here, for example, I wrote

When Dr Johnson defined a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge' I think he knew what he was doing. Lexicographers can make life much more difficult for students. They say 'Look, what a boon is standardization'; but look at the mess they make!

(Interested readers can look in that post for examples of the mess.)

But, as  a representative of a pattern-loving species I have to put my hand up for the fault of  seeing rules where there is only (messy, almost chaotic) usage.

In The Changing English Language (my entree into Linguistics, which I first read in the late 1960s), Brian Foster wrote:

Nouns ending in "-ee" have long been a feature of the English  vocabulary, and such a modern-looking  formation as "payee"  goes back to the 18th century, while "recognizee" (the person to whom one is bound in a recognizance) is dated 1544 by the SOED, These particular examples show the fairly characteristic passive meaning implied by this suffix..

There are many examples of this passive sense. The Macmillan English Dictionary (not a notable authority, but the publisher of the dictionary software I happen to use) lists addressee, amputee,  appointee, deportee, detainee, employee, evacuee, franchisee, inductee, internee, interviewee, licensee, nominee and payee – all unarguable  patients of the verb in question. An element of indirectness is discernible in referee: the person is not referred; what is referred (to the referee) is a point of fact or interpretation. Devotee is also different, in  that the actor and the patient of the act are one and the same – except in the case  of forced conversions (where "devotee" would in any case be a misnomer). And the passiveness in the case of retiree is questionable; some people "of pensionaable age" are happy to put their feet up; it is only their more dedicated colleagues who fit the passive pattern and are retired  against their will.

But Brian Foster goes on to say

Such indeed is the usefulness of this device that an endless succession of nonce-words based on it  is made possible,  like the one made up by Gilbert Harding when he wrote in his Book of Manners that '... a hug from the Russian bear might well crush the huggee to death.' This semi-humorous [HD Only semi- ? Well, maybe not a rib-tickler, but definitely jocular] procedure is not a new one, for in Mr.  Sponge's Sporting Tour, published in 1853, R. S. Surtees refers to a person being toasted as the 'toastee'.

But, he goes on

... the possibility of using this suffix in an active sense is old-established, because 'absentee' goes back to 1537 and 'refugee' came into the language in 1685, the year of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV when many French Huguenots fled the country to escape persecution. Escapee is attested in 1865...

Hang on, I thought when I read this. S'abstenir is reflexive anyhow, so someone who does it to him/herself is an absentee with no problem for the seeker after passives. And both  s'échapper and se refugier are as my old French master would have said verbes de déplacement: someone who has escaped s'est échappé[e], and someone who has sought refuge s'est refugié[e]; again, there's no problem for the passive-o-phile. (If you've met the argument about 17th- and 18th-century grammarians making the mistake of trying to force English into the grammar of Latin [so, for example, no sentence-final prepositions], you may get a sense of dêjà vu here: it's just that the mistake here is the adducing of French grammar.)

So despite evidence to the contrary, I still have a quiet resentment of arriviste non-passives like attendee.

<autobiographical_note>
This issue came to a head when I was in a working group that had rotating minute-takers. Many of my colleagues had knocked up a clever bit of time-saving software that highlighted differences from meeting to meeting. As I was their junior, and they expected a flag to mean Something's new rather than Bob's at it again, I soon learnt not to change Attendees: to Present:
</autobiographical_note>

But that evidence to the contrary  (to the contrary, that is, of the passive implication of -ee endings) keeps mounting. Attendees are joined by resignees, even dilutees (unskilled workers who dilute the skill-level of a group of skilled workers).  I feel that these new -ee words with no passive implication are in some sense regrettable. But they happen, and a student of language can only recognize it and avoid creating yet another angels-on-a-pinhead  "rule" for the unwary to stub their toes on (and yes, I did write their).  

b

PS 

Some clues:

• Before? After? Get up, with last going first. Ridiculous! (12)
• Truncated Hamlet done recast as contemporary political thriller. (8)

Update: 2018.11.22.10:30 – Added PPS.

PPS: The answers: PREPOSTEROUS and HOMELAND.

Quod erat pudendum

Prove is a tricky word; "to try, test; evaluate; demonstrate," says Etymonline
with the line  between test and show falling about halfway down that list. The idea of trying is (it seems to me – I can't think of a way to show this) waning in English; in Spanish, on the other hand, the trying end of the "meaning pool" is quite deep: a stall-holder in a food market in Barcelona will invite passers-by to probar their produce, whereas the equivalent stall-holder at a Farmer's Market in Swindon would say "Try some"; calling "Prove it" wouldn't help sales.

It was not always this way .  When a printer wanted to test how accurate his typesetter had been, he produced a proof copy – whence comes the use of proof as a verb meaning "read and correct a proof copy" (which is not to deny that proof was already a verb; Etymonline puts it at 1834).


Which brings us to "the proof of the pudding is in the eating", mangled by people who didn't understand this meaning of proof.  There are various juxtapositions of words beginning with p. Something is (?) "the proof in the pudding"...

<example source="Boston Globe, 2003, quoted in Quinion piece, vide infra">
"While the team’s first Super Bowl victory back in 2002 could be explained away by some skeptics as a fluke, the second victory is the proof in the pudding in cementing the Pats’ status as the cream of the NFL crop."
 </example> 

...but far and away the winner is "the proof is in the pudding". Google shows the size of the victory – about 6 times more for the meaningless newcomer.

Full form: 159,000 results

Demonstrative charcuterie:  1,080,000  results

In a 2012 edition of Morning Edition, Boston Globe language columnist Ben Zimmer anointed the meaningless interloper thus:

Well, the proof is in the pudding is a new twist on a very old proverb.

Hmm...."New twist", sounds pretty catchy. He goes on to fill in the back story:

The original version is the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And what it meant was that you had to try out food in order to know whether it was good....Back then, pudding referred to a kind of sausage, filling the intestines of some animal with minced meat and other things - something you probably want to try out carefully since that kind of food could be rather treacherous.

OK. That's the way language works: a sort of linguistic Gresham's Law:

Bad language drives out good

But I know what I know; my prescriptivist in descriptivist's clothing credentials are unchanged. My lip will always curl when I hear about the proof being in the pudding. And I agree with Michael Quinion's

The proverb is ancient — it has been traced back to 1300 in a rather different form and is recorded by William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain of 1623. It’s sad that it has lasted so long, only to be corrupted in modern times.

More here

But that corruption is terminal. "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of thee..." Well, best not to make a fuss.  :-)

b

Beware geeks bearing gifts

Poor old Jeremy. If he wasn't such a wazzock I'd feel sorry for him. As poisoned chalices go, his brief in the Commons the other day was a doozie. His PPS, or whoever does these things told him "There's been a bit of a whoopsie. A number of women in their late sixties, who were meant to be invited for their last smear test, weren't. As a result a few hundred may die – we can't be sure how many (if any)  but in any case we're jolly sorry. Now go out and tell the world."

What he didn't say, though, as Professor David Spiegelhalter said on More or Less last Friday, is that as a result of the absence of invitation, a few hundred may LIVE – we can't be sure how many (if any). Or, as Doctor Karsten Jørgensen summarized,

The evidence says that this is a close call, and increasingly the benefit is being brought into doubt and people are beginning to worry more about the harm.

But this is a nuanced problem, and experts are inclined to say things that are on the face of it quite upsetting to a non-expert's equilibrium, like "Of course, these people haven't died yet" (which invites the non-expert to add an unsaid "... so what's all the fuss about?" And given the length of the grass and the growth of the hedge, I don't have time to do it justice. But have a listen.

Before I sign off, though, I am reminded of a related programme in the Inside Health series a few weeks ago, about prostate screening (which I should say Doctor  Jørgensen said was a whole 'nother thing, because some sorts of screening have more hope of predicting the usefulness of possible treatments then others... but still). Dr Margaret McCartney warned about what the presenter called "a poor test" (screening for Prostate-Specific Antigen):

 ... [M]y heart sinks very often when we hear celebrities tell us that their life was saved by having a PSA test done... 

<accidental_fingerpointing>
Because of the timing (early March 2018 programme) I assumed Dr McCartney was thinking of this celebrity endorsement:

 

 

But the Inside Health programme was a repeat, so Mr Fry just happened to have his head above the parapet at the time of that fusillade.
</accidental_fingerpointing>.

...And part of this is what’s called often the popularity paradox and that’s where bad tests become more popular.  The worse a test is, the poorer it performs, the more false alarms we create.  And the more false alarms are created the more treatment people have for conditions that were never going to become life threatening and were never going to harm people in any way.

Margaret McCartney on Inside Health 6 March 2018

Stuff happens... Live with it (until of course circumstances force you to suspend that operation in the land of the mortals.)

b