The Castle Ad

Progressive is running an ad on TV, the "Castle Ad." In the course of the dialogue, Marge remarks, "We have broughteth a bounty of discounts to our customers."

What she should have said, of course, is "We have brought a bounty of discounts to our customers," because the verb bring has never taken the form, "broughteth," whether during the period castles were built or now. But that doesn't sound archaic enough.

Now, I say to my little-old-lady teacher within, why should we care? People will think we are carping needlessly about something that is meant to be silly. Can't we just go along with the joke?

Well, of course. And if you think so too, then my blog is not for you. Just say, get a life and be done with it.

But if you are like me, this is your life and you cannot be done with it. You start thinking things like, what if readers come to Chaucer and Shakespeare and expect language to be a free-for-all, instead of the foundation of the grammar, rhetoric, and usage we still use today?

What if somebody thinks bring has a very fluid form, instead of a real conjugation?

And other questions of equal gravity.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

I am rereading the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hutchison), a wonderful romantic, swashbuckling, 1905 adventure novel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy, set during the early French Revolution. Our hero, Sir Percy, passes for a foppish baronet. His alter ego, the Scarlet Pimpernel, along with nineteen friends, smuggles French aristocrats to England before they are guillotined by French revolutionaries in the Reign of Terror. After each successful venture, Sir Percy or one of his company leaves a scrap of paper with a drawing of the little red flower, the pimpernel.

Just as Dickens introduced the first detective in literary history, Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, so, according to the Wikipedia entry, at least, Orczy gives us the first hero with a secret identity, the ancestor of Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman.

I say rereading because I know I must have read it a hundred years ago.  As a teenager, my dad read his way through the Santa Barbara Library, dictionaries and all. At some point in my young life, he mentioned this book, and so I read it.

But I did not follow my own rule:  if you don't know a word, put down what you are reading and look it up. I know this because I just now came across the word defalcation, which, as it happens, means embezzlement, and did not know its meaning. Apparently, I just could not drag myself away from the story to look it up in a dry old dictionary.

To this day, I still love the hero who lives as Everyman but does great deeds in secret. And I try to follow my own rules.

Anagalis arvensis, the scarlet pimpernel, a low-growing plant in the primrose family native to Great Britain.

CC by-SA 3.0. Created by Jean-Jacques Milan.

Tall, Grande, Venti

My philosopher friend went into a Starbuck's and asked for a tall glass of water.

The barista said, "Do you want a tall, like a Starbuck's tall, or do you want a really tall glass of water?"

Now Starbuck's, as I and other word-nerd customers discovered early on, have introduced some understandable confusion. When you order at Starbuck's, you are supposed to use tall to mean a small 12-oz. drink, grande ("large" in Italian) to mean a medium 16-oz. drink, and venti ("twenty" in Italian) to mean a large 20-oz. drink.

So my friend thinks, "If Starbuck's doesn't know the real definition of tall, we're in big trouble!"

He was telling me this story and, as a word-nerd bonus, it came up that he had deduced that tall must be an Italian word like grande and venti.

A logical assumption, and my friend is logical.  Unfortunately, not true. Tall is from Old English tæl, ġetæl.

All of which goes to show the mischief inherent in redefining good old English words and mistranslating good old Italian words.