Bunged up

At the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992 I was a sort of official, so they provided me with a car and a young student to drive it. Antonio spoke quite good English, and when he needed an English word which he didn't know he would simply anglicise the Spanish. This usually worked well, but once when we were having dinner together I sneezed, and with some concern he enquired: "Are you constipated?".

When we explained, he laughed as much as we had. It was an easy mistake to make: constipado means congested. There are both English and Spanish words deriving from the Latin constipare (to cram together) but for us the general sense is obsolete: nowadays we use our word only to describe a medical condition.



My six-year-old grand-daughter probably knows this; she is totally bilingual , although in Spanish she has a strong Andalusian accent. The Spanish way of life seems to suit her and she loves her school, particularly the flamenco lessons on Wednesday afternoons.

Formidable millinery

Gwyneth Dunwoody, the longest-serving female member of Parliament, able, fiercely independent-minded and an all-round good egg, died last week. She will be greatly missed, even by those in the Labour party whom she had sometimes shamed or embarrassed by being persistent and outspoken in pursuit of the truth.

It was well-known that she did not much mind being described as a battleaxe and was indifferent to her personal appearance, but this photograph taken early in her career suggest that she was well aware of the role a significant hat can play in politics, and I am including it in my gallery of Hats That Changed the World.

The full Monti

In 2000 I spent a highly convivial evening at a restaurant in Prague, towards the end of which we asked the little orchestra to play the finest piece of Hungarian music ever to be written by an Italian: Vittorio Monti's Csárdás, published around 1904 and played frequently ever since by gypsy orchestras and every other kind of musical ensemble. The musicians at this restaurant were probably asked for it at least once a week but were quite happy to play it again and bring us all to our feet.

I looked the other day for a reminder of the evening to replace my old 10-inch 78rpm record of it (you know, black disk with a hole in the centre). There are fifty versions offered on YouTube but although no version of this classic piece can be totally without merit (except perhaps for the one of an infant singing German words to it, and another of a woman yodelling it), it was not too difficult to choose one.

For this kind of music, feeling for the idiom is more important than classical skill; Yehudi Menuhin, after some joint recitals with Stéphane Grappelli, said of him: "He plays the twiddly bits better than I do". So I rejected Nigel Kennedy and all those those whose names didn't suggest any claim to gipsy or at least Hungarian blood. This ruled out offerings by the United States Navy Band, Royal Danish Brass, Hørsholm Percussion & Marimba Ensemble, the Black Dyke Mills Band, and James Last.

Csárdás was written for violin and piano so I was not keen to have it on cembalom, accordeon, cornet or harmonica. In the end I settled for a version in iTunes which sounded much like my old recording. It is by The Mazmanians, who are a family of Armenian origin very popular in California who seem to me to get it just right. Anyway, it's a good 79p worth.

Computer to love, heaven to hell

These cryptic and intriguing words are part of the subject line of an email I have just received. What can the email be about?

It is in fact about the latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, which focuses on the revision of key words rather than on a specific alphabetical range. By key words they mean important English words whose meanings or application have developed most over the past century, like the four in the subject line.

On heaven and hell, they have this to say:
"... Heaven is expansive and open, its phrases largely positive (e.g. a marriage made in heaven, to move heaven and earth), though a flutter of frustration can intervene (heaven knows, for heaven's sake). Heaven occurs in Beowulf, and so has coexisted with all the changes that have taken place within English over the years.
Much the opposite can be said of its counterpart hell (which, however, shares with heaven its longevity in the language). Hell is a bleak word: its main senses fiery, and its phrases and compounds rough (all hell breaks loose, hell on earth, hell-mouth, hell-ship). Such description has, of course, no place in an OED entry, and so we should return to the facts.
Hell is the larger entry (with one hundred and forty-two sections to heaven's forty-six). Yet heaven has eleven new senses whereas hell has only six."

Another key word which has been recently brought up to date—clearly not before time—is one which can be used as a verb, a noun or an interjection; the revised entry for the verb alone runs to 4,431 words, including quotations: the word is fuck.

The email does not quote the revised entries for any words, but clearly the writer realised that this one is of absorbing interest, so he provides a useful note on its history, written with that sly wit for which top lexicographers are noted:
"The term... perhaps confronts lexicographers with the most significant challenges of the current release... a taboo word in English... Its relative absence from the record presents issues in terms of describing its history... it is now possible to reassert an early sixteenth century date, with indications that the word is earlier... The first definite evidence for the word comes from a manuscript in Oxford dated 1528. Fuck presents a number of other issues for the lexicographer... the absence of the word from most printed text before the mid twentieth century causes quotation difficulties... When the term or its associates do appear they are likely to be masked to avoid scandal or prosecution... The use of asterisks to mask the word is also problematic lexicographically... We might be happy to accept 'f—k' in the right context, but how much less certain might we be of 'f—'? And sometimes there is no letter at all to clarify what has been omitted ('—'). The entries for fuck and related words have been considerably expanded since OED2 (1989)... There the number of meanings and associated verbal phrases under the verb amounted to six... In the revised entry for the verb there are thirty-five components, showing a significant expansion of meaning and phrasal patterning (mainly from the mid twentieth century onwards)."

If you want to glance through these components, or the 2,039 words about the noun, or the half-dozen vigorous quotations listed for the interjection, you will need to go to the dictionary itself. In the UK a subscription to the online edition costs £195 a year plus VAT, or nothing if you have a ticket to an English public library. This does, of course give you access to the entries for another half a million words illustrated by 2½ million quotations, in addition to the ones mentioned above.

Actually, it didn't

A mantra which was current and much quoted in the twenties and thirties expressed a sincere but, as it turned out, erroneous belief that Communism was not a bad dream but would bring about happiness and prosperity for the world. In 1919 a more widely used word was Bolshevism, and an American journalist named Lincoln Steffens who was on his way out of Russia after having made contact with Bolshevik agents wanted to publicise his admiration for them and their policies. After much thought he perfected a one-line telegram which he hoped would electrify the world.

It read: I have seen the future and it works.

Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment

Maybe, but the song pointing this out has lasted well; it is a poem by Jean de Florian set to music by J P E Martini (né Schwarzendorf) around two hundred years ago. I have always loved it, and even hearing the dreary Joan Baez sing it in her twee style, missing out the centre section, or Elvis Presley turning it into something quite different, could not spoil it for me.

But when I wanted to get a recording of it I found that the choice was so huge that it took a very long time to choose one to share my life with. Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Scharzkopf, Jacques Brel, Richard Clayderman and hundreds of others have rendered it with varying degrees of distinction: iTunes alone offers 150 versions, so I sat down to try out the snippets which you can listen to for nothing.

Not all of them, of course. I felt I would not miss much by skipping the likes of Nana Mouskouri, Marianne Faithfull, Mary Hopkin (in Welsh), Mantovani, André Kostelanetz, the Schwenk-Baum Virtuose Akkordeon and Charlotte Church, though out of curiosity I did dip into a few seconds of Ray Ventura. Also, I tried Ronnie Ronalde, and I have to say that if it's a whistled version you are after, then he's your man.

Finally, I did it by elimination, rejecting those not in good French (which sadly ruled out several pleasing ones such as Tauber's elegant but accented English version), and those with orchestral accompaniments (though Berlioz wrote one in 1859).

This left me with three, all different but each with something to recommend it: Tino Rossi, the second most famous son of Corsica, was more than a Latin lover and cabaret artist, being no mean hand at the art songs of Massenet and Reynaldo Hahn, and his 1955 version of Plaisir d'Amour with harpsichord accompaniment is smooth and seductive. The song is really for a man (the singer gives up everything for the ungrateful Sylvie), but my other two choices were both women. Yvonne Printemps sings it well in an utterly French manner but her recording was made in 1931 and is a bit scratchy with a poor tone. Maggie Teyte's recording is also scratchy but is beautifully sung and has Gerald Moore at the piano, so that was my final choice; it is well worth the 79p I paid.

From Wikipedia:
Maggie Teyte changed her name from Tate because when she was studying in Paris she found that the French invariably mispronounced it. She became a pupil of the celebrated tenor Jean de Reszke and later, to prepare for her role in Pelléas et Mélisande, was sent to study with Debussy himself, every day for six months. By reputation he was a terror and a martinet, but according to Teyte he rarely corrected her and in fact hardly spoke to her at all.

Despite her early singing successes, she did not easily establish herself in in France and moved to America, performing with the Chicago Opera Company and the Boston Opera Company from 1914-1917, singing in Philadelphia and elsewhere.. Returning to Britain in 1919, she went into semi-retirement until 1930, when she performed as Mélisande and played the title-rôle in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. After an absence of nearly a decade she had difficulty in reviving her career and ended up performing music hall and variety (24 performances a week) at the Victoria Palace in London. Finally, in 1936, her recordings of Debussy songs accompanied by Alfred Cortot attracted attention, and recordings remained an important factor in her renewed fame, as she gained a reputation in England and the United States as the leading French art song interpreter of her time. She sang at the Royal Opera House in 1936-37 in Hansel und Gretel, as Eurydice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and as Butterfly, and appeared in operetta and musical comedy between the wars.

During World War II, Teyte sang in a series of concerts sponsored by the French Committee of National Liberation for which she received the Gold Cross of Lorraine for services to France. She made her first New York appearances in 1948, including a Town Hall recital followed by performances of Pelléas at the New York City Center Opera. She continued to record and perform in opera until 1951, making her final appearance in the part of Belinda (to Kirsten Flagstad’s Dido) in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Mermaid Theatre in London. Her final concert appearance was at the Royal Festival Hall on April 22, 1956.

In 1958, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Also in 1958, her autobiography Star at the Door was published. She died in London at the age of 88.

Yamamah done tole me

(Blues In the Night, Dinah Shore 1942, but that's irrelevant, really)

So the pleasingly named Lord Justice Moses has ruled that Tony Blair and his government acted illegally in halting the long-running investigation into secret payments made by BAE to Saudi Arabia. It is alleged that Prince Bandar, the heir to the throne of Saudi Arabia, threatened that the Typhoon contract would be stopped and intelligence and diplomatic relations pulled unless the investigation was dropped.

Prince Bandar (in Hindi, monkey) denied that the payment to him of £1 billion was in any way improper.

Back in 1994 the Guardian published two answers sent in by readers to the question: What is the difference between bribes paid to foreign politicians and consultancy fees paid to British politicians?

1: The difference is not unlike tax evasion and tax avoidance. In both cases, the objective and hence the end result is the same. The issue is not intention, but declaration. If it is not declared, then it is illegal. If it is, then it is merely unethical. In a fair world, however, there is no difference and there can be only one interpretation: corruption.

2: Some politicians need extra incentive to support decisions which are against the interests of those they supposedly represent. Others are willing to do such things without apparently needing outside inducement. So the answer is: bribes are necessary, consultancy fees are not.

Point-virgule

I gather that the French, or at any rate a few of their literati, are getting their culottes in a twist about an alleged decline in the use of semi-colons which they seem to believe is largely the fault of the Anglo-Saxons. The Guardian took this bit of paranoia seriously enough to print on 4th April an exhaustive piece about semi-colons; a letter the next day aptly described the row as "an agonised and pretentious debate". So read it if you like, but don't pay too much attention to any of it. It seems that modern French writers like François Cavanna and Philippe Djian are anti, while Proust and sundry Academicians were or are pro; over here, Shaw was ridiculously pro, Orwell was anti, but so what?

Lynne Truss in Eats, Shoots and Leaves provides a clear, witty and sensible summary of the long history of the semi-colon and of its proper use. My guess, not based on any real evidence, is that, in English at any rate, it is less popular than in the last century but is still widely used and is certainly not in terminal decline.

So far this year I have published on the net around 12,200 words, using 65 semi-colons. This is probably more than the average rate of usage by all those who use them at all, which many perfectly adequate writers do not. Perhaps half of these could be replaced by full stops or colons (never by commas except in lists) without damaging the sense or clarity, but replacing the others would, I think, be a pity.

Using a semi-colon just because a sentence looks a bit long and you want to split it up is to be avoided except where the separate parts have a closer relationship than that of sentences which are merely consecutive. It is also usually unnecessary: even a sentence like the first one here would not be improved by chopping it up.

When I looked back at pieces I had written in my twenties I was surprised to find that in those days I hardly ever used semi-colons. It may be that a predilection for the little dears is something that creeps up on you with advancing age, like arthritis, dribbling, and forgetting things.

As you see, I quite like Oxford (a.k.a Harvard) commas as well.

London Pride

It is heart-warming to know that millions of people all over the world watched the TV pictures of the Olympic Torch Relay through London yesterday, though to get a real lump in the throat you had to be there.

Even foreigners who despise the English have to admit that when it comes to putting on a spectacle we are among the best in the world. It really was a splendid sight: trolling along the streets came this colourful swirling mass: an outer ring of dark-clad riot police in their stab-proof vests, inside them more police in bright yellow jackets and those quaint cycling helmets ("in case they need to use cycles", though they didn't seem to have any with them), then a ring of Chinese heavies in rather fetching powder blue shell suits and baseball caps and finally, at the centre, a mêlée of assorted characters pushing each other about, falling over and generally carrying on.

An effective touch was provided by the flicker of flame which could occasionally be seen among the writhing bodies, and the merry cries of the spectators added to the fun.

All this excitement, contrasting with a very quiet and moving handover ceremony featuring about four people and taking place in the middle of an otherwise empty stadium, made a terrific show aptly symbolising whatever it was intended to symbolise. The opening ceremony in Beijing cannot but be an anticlimax.

Mayors, billiard tables and popery

The general view, and Ken Livingstone's, seems to be that the revelation (not that it was ever a secret) that he has five children with three women will not damage his chances in the election for Mayor of London.

It may even improve them, if we are still influenced by Victorian values: there is a story about Disraeli's principal political opponent, the septuagenarian Lord Palmerston, being caught in flagrante delicto with a chambermaid on a billiards table in a stately home in Suffolk. One of Disraeli's advisers then suggested that the story be spread around, to which the great man replied: "Good heavens, no! If this gets out, he will sweep the country!".

The same anecdote, which may well be apocryphal, sometimes crops up with Gladstone substituted for Palmerston. That version seems unlikely, as it is generally accepted that Gladstone was a man of the utmost probity: allegations that his work in founding the Church Penitentiary Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women and arranging employment for ex-prostitutes was not inspired entirely by altruism were investigated in a court case after his death, and the jury unanimously found that the evidence "completely vindicated the high moral character of the late Mr W.E. Gladstone."

It may be that the allegations were made by those who had been outraged by Gladstone's attacks on the Roman Catholic Church, which in pamphlets he had described as "an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism, and one dead level of religious subservience". He also commented that Church's Decree of Papal Infallibility had placed British Catholics in a dilemma over their loyalty to the Crown and their loyalty to the Pope, urged British Catholics to reject papal infallibility as they had opposed the Spanish Armada of 1588, and asserted that the Pope wanted to destroy the rule of law, replace it with arbitrary tyranny, and then to "hide these crimes against liberty beneath a suffocating cloud of incense". These remarks have a resonance today in the current dispute over the Embryology Bill.

This was strong stuff. It is hard to imagine a modern prime minister disparaging even a minority faith in such a way: it would lose more votes than any amount of alleged hanky-panky on billiard tables.

Ethnic dressing

Back in the seventies I was responsible for the overseas marketing of a range of home dyes manufactured by a small company in London, and we had the idea of running a campaign based on a photograph of some models from around the world wearing clothes made using our products.

I forget the names of most of the models, but the one wearing the silk batik sari was Persis Khambatta, a Parsi who had been Miss India at the age of 15 and later, with shaven head, played the part of Lieutenant Ilia in Star Trek: the Motion Picture; sadly, she never really achieved stardom in Hollywood or in Indian films, and died from a heart attack in 1998.

Those were days of (relative) innocence and simplicity in advertising and this photograph was a fairly banal concept. Nowadays we might have done it with a little more wit by changing round the clothes, with the Nigerian girl wearing the sari, the big Canadian redhead in the tie-dyed dress and head-dress, the blonde in the kimono, the girl from Tokyo in the green stockings, and Persis in the peaked cap.

From the archives (2)

More recycled posts from 2004:

food and drink
Recipe for a traditional English dish

business
How to corrupt an official

sport
The Victorian origins of two sports

quotations
What Orwell didn't say about the English

cinema
The Greatest Movie Never Made

art
A completely talentless artist

Making websites

During a break from blogging I have been looking at websites again. I haven't set up any new ones for some months because of the travails caused by my former webhost, but now that is all over and I have a large amount of diskspace to spare in my domains I am going to start again. I make websites mainly for charities, friends and acquaintances or anyone who would like to have one and has no time or inclination to bother with designing one, registering a domain name and so on. This is the sort of thing I do:

for small businesses...

...for artists

...or for musicians.

So, if there are any readers of Other Men's Flowers who would like to look at the details HERE and then form an orderly queue, I shall be happy to hear from them.

The Prince's eggs

Jeremy Paxman, in his book On Royalty, repeated a story he had been told by "one of the prince's friends" about the boiled egg that Charles enjoys after a day's hunting: it is alleged that seven of them are cooked for different times so that he can select the one that has exactly the desired degree of hardness.

Paxman describes this as so preposterously extravagant as to be unbelievable, but does not dismiss it out of hand, saying that it can sound credible because so many jaw-dropping stories have emerged about the way the prince's household is run.

Whether it is true or not, this suggestion hurt Charles so much that he found it necessary to have a denial published on his official website, though whoever wrote this obviously hadn't read the book because the allegation is quoted as referring to a breakfast egg, and even the eccentric Charles can hardly have a day's hunting before breakfast.

A hat for a Head of State?

This man, Ma Ying-jeou, a candidate for the presidency of Taiwan, is wearing a traditional aboriginal headress which he clearly believes may improve his chances. He may well be mistaken in this, but the Reuters photo appeared in at least one European national daily so he is certainly ahead of all his rivals in terms of world-wide publicity.

He looks a jolly fellow; let us all wish him the best of luck.

P.S. Since I wrote this last week, it has been announced that he did win the election.

Comme d'Habitude

Four years ago I discovered that My Way was a French song and posted a rather feeble note remarking unjustifiably that the French words didn't seem to fit the tune. This month was the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Claude François, who composed the original version, and Marcel Berlins in the Guardian makes some much more pertinent observations.

In French, the singer tells how he tries to carry on as usual while his love is ending. When Paul Anka put English words to it, with Frank Sinatra in mind, he turned a "delicate French song about love, loss and regret into a crass hymn to selfishness, an excuse not to care for anyone else's feelings and a justification for bad and boorish behaviour. The rhythm of the music has changed too, from sentimental to aggressive, from I'm so sad to Screw you".

Yes, indeed. But Berlins reflects that while François may have resented this, he would have been consoled to some extent by the large royalty cheques that flowed in (and are still going to his estate).

You can hear the what the somewhat androgynous Claude made of it here.

Cilantro

I have long hated the taste and smell of this without ever having heard of it, for I have only just discovered that it is another name for coriander. I don't care if Cato recommended chopped fresh coriander as a garnish to encourage an invalid's appetite; great Roman statesman or no, the man was clearly a silly old fool, for its taste is foul.

The etymology of the word says it all: it derives from the Greek koris, meaning bedbug, and the foliage of the plant has an odour which has been compared, unfavourably, with the smell of bug-infested bedclothes.

(The seeds are another matter, and used in cakes, stews, breads and, for example, garam masala, are a pleasant aromatic spice with no reminder of the vile taste and stench of the leaves.)

Of course, anything which repels people of cultivated tastes—Tony Blair, say, or the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber—always has its admirers among the undiscriminating, and there are a few websites expressing their aberrant views. Happily, these are far outnumbered by sites like this one, based on the reasonable premise that no normally functioning human being would ever in a lifetime consider coriander/cilantro edible.

What matter to me if their star is a world?

[Robert Browning]

There is a restaurant twenty miles from where we live which we have visited as often as we could ever since it opened, for it is the best within fifty miles. This year it gained a Michelin star, and we feel slightly superior to the riff-raff who are now flocking to it just because a tyre manufacturer in Clermont-Ferrand says it's good.

Of course the extra business a star brings is not to be sneezed at, and happily the prices have not yet soared and the food and service is still exemplary; the only change for old customers is that one has to book even longer in advance than before. For the staff, however, the influx of braying foodies holding their wine up to the light and generally showing off their knowledge by being demanding is something of a downside. But we usually go at unfashionable times when the other diners are mostly, like us, quiet browsers and sluicers, and we will continue to go as often as we can.

I won't mention the name or location of the restaurant because it doesn't need advertising (it never did), but we are not so selfish as to want to to keep such a treasure all to ourselves. It may well be that there are readers of Other Men's Flowers who would like to visit it, so any attractive and amusing couples who live in south-east England have only to send me an email inviting my family and me to be their guests at dinner there, with a bottle or two of some modest claret and perhaps a couple of glasses of the 1963 Dow to finish with, and I will be happy to suggest a convenient date, reserve our favourite table and give full directions for finding the place.

Choo kiko wapi?

Any old East Africa hand will tell you that that this is how you say Where is the toilet? in Swahili.

Happily, I have spent very little time in Dar es Salaam and have never thought it important to memorise this phrase or indeed to learn Swahili. In fact it is a long time since I set out to learn any languages at all; I first started to acquire a knowledge of colloquial English many years ago and I am now as fluent in it as one needs to be to cope with everyday life, though of course I have forgotten much and sometimes have to pause when writing or speaking while I struggle to find the right word.

But for the past three weeks I have been wrestling with a new and difficult language called Apple. Having realised after a quarter of a century of subservience to William Gates III that there is a world outside DOS and Windows which should be explored, I have acquired a MacBook. Through something called a Time Capsule (a menacing little white box which gets hot) it connects to an assortment of venerable equipment (though not, sadly, to my lovely old black 1985 vintage Apricot, which sits on a shelf in proud isolation), and I have to communicate with this dissonant assemblage in two different tongues.

It's rather like a European trying to learn Japanese: easy enough to remember that doitashi mashite means you're welcome, and that F11 on a Mac does the same as Windows-Shift-M on a PC, but the whole mindset is different: you have to unlearn things that always seemed naturally right, and acquire habits that seem perverse.

Anyway, during March I have made some progress, thanks to the help of a kind friend who set it all up and is instructing me in the arcane rituals of Macdom; besides being a poet of note he is a technological genius with more than a decade of Mac experience behind him, and today is his birthday.

I haven't as yet done anything useful with the MacBook, but I have played happily and created some pretty things, like this display of a selection of my websites and blogs:
[I shall not report further progress or indeed return at all to this topic; I do not wish to be like Stephen Fry, an erudite and witty man who nowadays spends much of his time writing unspeakably tedious articles extolling the virtues of various bits of electronic kit that take his fancy.]

Recycling (1)

Recycling, v. According to the OED, the word was first seen in print in 1926 in the Journal of the Institute of Petroleum Technologists, referring to an industrial process.

It was not used figuratively until forty years later, and ever since then all kinds of things have been re-cycled: hot money (Guardian, 1969); the output of the secondary schools (Nature, 1973); workers without jobs (Black Panther, 1973); fads (Weekend Magazine, Montreal, 1974); OPEC funds (Newsweek, 1974); repeat offenders (Washington Post, 1978), and so on, to this day.

I'm punctilious about putting bottles, paper, and plastic containers out for re-cycling, and it has now occurred to me that I should take the same care with the contents of Other Men's Flowers. Of course, the 741 posts currently mouldering in OMF's archives are unlikely to cause large-scale pollution , or to contribute towards global warming by giving off methane, so they are not an environmental hazard: it is a question of energy-saving, an equally important concern. If at least some of these items are re-used there will be a huge reduction in the amount of energy expended in creating new ones.

So I have decided that, starting today, the first post in every month will consist entirely of some old items, unchanged but dusted off and economically re-packaged with merely a note of the category and a description linked to the original. All these appeared in 2004:

theatre
Are actresses all actors these days?

sport
Pea-pushing: A sport in decline

cinema
An inspired choice of a screen name

quotations
Noël Coward speaks

music
Comparing the great ones

literature
A sly tribute to Somerset Maugham