Occasionally scraps of great poems pop into my head, seemingly at random: "Lhude sing cuccu," for instance, or "Whan that Aprille with his shores soote/The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote," or, lately, "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?"
Nothing wonderful about that, except for how much I enjoy the rags and tatters left to me. These are some of the most famous lines in English and French literature.
And when I investigated the Villon line, "Mais où sont . . . ," I discovered that I would have heard it most recently when the dowager countess quotes this line to Mary, in French, during Downton Abbey's 2015 Christmas Special and series finale. She is consoling Mary about her lost love, and remembering a great lost love from her own past.
"Hmm," I thought, our word "snows" doesn't seem to have much in common with "neiges" or other Romance language words for snows, "nevi" (Italian), "nieve" (Spanish), "neves" (Portuguese). So, I wondered, are the words "snows" and "neiges" related or not?
Happens they are, and the link is hinted at in the German word for snow, "schnee."
According to the Wikipedia entry for snow, the word is from "Middle English snow, snaw, from Old English snāw (“snow”)" and is "cognate with Scots shaw ('snow'), West Frisian sine ('snow'), Dutch sneeuw ('snow')," and so on.
What can I say? Sometimes we word nerds just get to go all out.
Saturday, December 16, 2017
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Richard II and the First Angel Roof
Westminster Hall is the oldest surviving building of Westminster Palace. Once used for feasts, coronations, and, ironically, the deposition of King Richard II, it is now the meeting place of the British Parliament. The palace is in central London, on the north bank of the Thames River.
If you've visited Westminster Hall, you've gazed up at the beautiful late Gothic ceiling that looks a little bit like heaven, the first angel roof. In 1397, master carpenter Hugh Herland (ca. 1330-1411), working in oak, designed this angel roof for Richard II as part of a remodeling project.
The purpose of the remodeling was twofold. First, replace the original closed roof trusses with open trusses, making the space look bigger without changing to its volume. The ceiling spans more than 68 feet in all, but is now open in the center for over twenty-five feet of the span, from the end of one hammer beam to the other.
Second, populate this new heaven with angels in honor of Richard II (1367-1400). Carved wooden angel sculptures decorate the hammer beams and appear to be hovering between heaven and earth.
Richard II used the iconography of the angel to help support his ideas about the divine right of kings, a fact to which Shakespeare alludes in his play Richard II. In Act 3, Scene 2, the king says,
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.
In 1377, during his coronation procession from the Tower of London to Westminster Hall in 1377, Richard accepted his crown from a mechanical angel (Richard II, The Art of Kingship, ed. by Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie, London: Clarenden Books, 1999).
In 1392, at the procession marking his reconciliation with the City of London, Richard again received his crown from a mechanical angel, as an eyewitness reports: “At his entry into Cheapside ... came two angels down from a cloud, the one bearing a crown for the king...and the other another crown, which was presented to the queen . . . ."
On September 30, 1399, Richard laid aside his crown in Westminster Hall in favor of the upstart, Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV.
If you've visited Westminster Hall, you've gazed up at the beautiful late Gothic ceiling that looks a little bit like heaven, the first angel roof. In 1397, master carpenter Hugh Herland (ca. 1330-1411), working in oak, designed this angel roof for Richard II as part of a remodeling project.
The purpose of the remodeling was twofold. First, replace the original closed roof trusses with open trusses, making the space look bigger without changing to its volume. The ceiling spans more than 68 feet in all, but is now open in the center for over twenty-five feet of the span, from the end of one hammer beam to the other.
Second, populate this new heaven with angels in honor of Richard II (1367-1400). Carved wooden angel sculptures decorate the hammer beams and appear to be hovering between heaven and earth.
Richard II used the iconography of the angel to help support his ideas about the divine right of kings, a fact to which Shakespeare alludes in his play Richard II. In Act 3, Scene 2, the king says,
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.
In 1377, during his coronation procession from the Tower of London to Westminster Hall in 1377, Richard accepted his crown from a mechanical angel (Richard II, The Art of Kingship, ed. by Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie, London: Clarenden Books, 1999).
In 1392, at the procession marking his reconciliation with the City of London, Richard again received his crown from a mechanical angel, as an eyewitness reports: “At his entry into Cheapside ... came two angels down from a cloud, the one bearing a crown for the king...and the other another crown, which was presented to the queen . . . ."
On September 30, 1399, Richard laid aside his crown in Westminster Hall in favor of the upstart, Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV.
Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster, London as drawn by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin for Ackermann's ''Microcosm of London'' (1808-11).
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Style Sheet Revisited
Writing, editing, and proofreading are as much a part of me as my fingernails. I write, edit, and proof, as part of the way my mind works. I can hardly help myself.
You would think, then, that, on beginning a blog, especially one about words, I would have started a style sheet first thing: just a few notes on how I handle things that come up all the time. Pretty much all publishing houses, newspapers, and corporations keep them to maintain consistency from one document to the next.
For instance, I use and firmly believe in the serial comma. With the serial comma, the reader--final arbiter of clarity--never has to stop and think about meaning. In this obviously English example from the Guardian Style Guide (cited in the Wikipedia entry on the comma), "he ate cereal, kippers, bacon, eggs, toast and marmalade, and tea," the reader is not tripped up wondering whether he ate toast and marmalade or whether he actually ate toast and, separately, swallowed a spoonful of marmalade as if to disguise the taste of a bitter pill.
However, if you had assumed that I started a style sheet as a matter of course, you would have been overestimating me. About twenty-five posts in, I started keeping some notes on the back of a #10 envelope, which became a bookmark for a while and then drifted off into the stacks of printouts, bills, to-do lists, and other papers at my house.
Now, some 82 posts in, I bemoan my lack of methodical approach and think, every once in a while, that I have to go back and reread every post and come up with that style sheet, just for my own sanity. I can never remember whether I italicize words as words or put quotation marks around them; how I cite a book or article I am using heavily; or any of the other small matters that niggle at a writer's mind.
My father's mind worked much the same way mine does, and, from his position as a college professor of sociology, he corrected his students' papers like an English teacher. Once, as a kid, I asked him why the sign in a shop window had a misspelling on it. Not realizing that many people do not have his and my gift (or curse) for language, his answer was: "That's so you'll go inside the shop and tell the people inside that the word is spelled wrong."
You would think, then, that, on beginning a blog, especially one about words, I would have started a style sheet first thing: just a few notes on how I handle things that come up all the time. Pretty much all publishing houses, newspapers, and corporations keep them to maintain consistency from one document to the next.
For instance, I use and firmly believe in the serial comma. With the serial comma, the reader--final arbiter of clarity--never has to stop and think about meaning. In this obviously English example from the Guardian Style Guide (cited in the Wikipedia entry on the comma), "he ate cereal, kippers, bacon, eggs, toast and marmalade, and tea," the reader is not tripped up wondering whether he ate toast and marmalade or whether he actually ate toast and, separately, swallowed a spoonful of marmalade as if to disguise the taste of a bitter pill.
However, if you had assumed that I started a style sheet as a matter of course, you would have been overestimating me. About twenty-five posts in, I started keeping some notes on the back of a #10 envelope, which became a bookmark for a while and then drifted off into the stacks of printouts, bills, to-do lists, and other papers at my house.
Now, some 82 posts in, I bemoan my lack of methodical approach and think, every once in a while, that I have to go back and reread every post and come up with that style sheet, just for my own sanity. I can never remember whether I italicize words as words or put quotation marks around them; how I cite a book or article I am using heavily; or any of the other small matters that niggle at a writer's mind.
My father's mind worked much the same way mine does, and, from his position as a college professor of sociology, he corrected his students' papers like an English teacher. Once, as a kid, I asked him why the sign in a shop window had a misspelling on it. Not realizing that many people do not have his and my gift (or curse) for language, his answer was: "That's so you'll go inside the shop and tell the people inside that the word is spelled wrong."
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