The months have flown past since the last edition of my ramblings and we are now into  ‘the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’.
I hope that you will enjoy this edition, and should you wish to add comment or contribute please feel free to do so.
 

Bant – meaning to diet.

Strictly speaking, not any old diet, but a Victorian precursor of the fashionable Atkins high-protein diet. Few people know it was anticipated by William Banting, in Victorian times a London cabinetmaker and undertaker to royalty (his firm buried Prince Albert, for example, and years later his sons organised the funeral of Queen Victoria).

Banting was overweight, but neither diet nor exercise helped him. Finally he consulted a doctor, who told him to cut out carbohydrates from his diet. This was so successful that Mr Banting published a booklet in 1864, A Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public, extolling its virtues, which sold some 60,000 copies (he made no money from this, not wanting to profit from sufferers; he gave early printings away and the income from later editions was donated to medical charities).

Gantlope  - meaning  a military or naval punishment.

This word is from an old Scandinavian word, "gatlopp", which is a compound of "gata", a road or street, with "lopp", meaning a course. You will probably not recognise the first part, but as "gait" it survives in English in the sense of a particular manner of walking. Also, in the north of England a gate is not necessarily a barrier across a road but the actual road itself. For example, streets in York have names such as Coppergate and Micklegate, given to them by the Vikings who occupied the city before the Norman Conquest.

"Gatlopp" was borrowed in the seventeenth century in the corrupted form "gantlope" for a type of military punishment in which the victim, stripped to the waist, was forced to run or walk between a double row of men who struck at him with sticks or knotted cords.

At this point, you may be saying, I know that as "running the gauntlet". That's the result of a folk etymology that has turned the foreign "gantlope" into something that's more familiar, in this case the old word for a mailed glove that formed part of a suit of armour. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, "gantlope" had vanished in favour of "gauntlet", almost always in the form "to run the gauntlet".

Apocope  - meaning leaving out the last letter, syllable, or part of a word.

When you hear about the "huntin', shootin', fishin'" aristocracy of 18th century Britain, the speakers are committing apocope. In the same way, when you talk about "mag" instead of magazine, "fab" when you mean fabulous, or "cred" for credibility, these are all apocopic cases.

"Apocope" comes from the Greek word "apokoptein", to cut off, made up of "apo-", from or away, plus "koptein", to cut.

However, if instead you cut the sound off the start of a word, the right name is "aphesis" (an example being "squire", an aphetic form of "esquire"); if you drop sounds in the middle (for which the classic - and extreme - example is "fo'c's'le" for the crews' quarters on board ship, in full "forecastle"), the process is called "syncope".

Hair of the dog

An old folk remedy for healing a wound caused by a dog bite, was to place a burnt hair from the dog which had given the bite on the wound. Unlikely as it may seem, this was believed to be best cure for dog bites.

From this has come the metaphorical use of the term ‘hair of the dog’ to describe an old cure for a hangover, which consists of drinking the following morning a little of the same beverage that had brought on the hangover in the first place.

So, ‘hair of the dog’ is often the rueful comment made by the sufferer of a hangover at the first taste of drink the following day.

Cock crow at bedtime

Many birds announce the arrival of rain and the farmyard cock is one of the most noticeable. The sound of cocks crowing is usually associated with dawn: however, if they crow in the evening, it foretells the onset of rain.

If the cocks crow when they go to bed,
           They’ll sure to come down with a watery head.

The black sheep

From the time when the wool trade became established as the backbone of the English economy in the Middle Ages, black sheep were considered less valuable than white ones, because their wool could not be easily dyed.

Since most domestic sheep range in colour from light to brown, black sheep have always been in the minority. By the eighteenth century, a ‘black sheep’ had come to mean a person out of favour; someone oddly different and therefore a renegade.

The idea of the ‘odd one out’ in a flock is still current when the least successful or admirable member of a family is referred to as ‘the black sheep of the family’.

'Rooks only build nests where there’s money'

The presence of rooks on a farm was always taken as a sign of good fortune and some farmers even went to the lengths of paying youths to climb trees carrying bags of twigs to build artificial nests in the hope of attracting rooks to settle and bring luck to their farms.
 

During her lifetime, Queen Victoria’s influence on all around her was so great that few could imagine life without her.

Not long after the death of Queen Victoria, the royal family were at prayers in the chapel at Frogmore when a dove was observed to enter. ‘That’s Mama’s spirit,’ some of the younger ones agreed. ‘No, I’m sure it is not,’ said Princess Louise. ‘Dear Mama’s spirit would never have ruined Beatrice’s hat.’

The evidence does not support the widely held view that Queen Victoria was a humourless monarch who never laughed. In this instance we see a very human side to the little Queen:

In order to know how HMS Eurydice, a frigate sunk off Portsmouth, had been salvaged, Queen Victoria invited Admiral Foley to lunch. Having exhausted this melancholy subject, Queen Victoria enquired after her close friend, the admiral’s sister. Hard of hearing, Admiral Foley replied in his stentorian voice, ‘Well, Ma’am, I’m going to have her turned over, take a good look at her bottom and have it well scraped.’ The queen put down her knife and fork, hid her face in her handkerchief, and laughed until the tears rolled down her cheeks.

Traditionally at royal coronations, the Royal Champion challenges anyone to dispute the king or queen’s right to the throne. Although the position of champion became an honorary one centuries ago, it is theoretically possible for someone to take up the challenge. What happens next is anyone’s guess...

At the coronation banquet of King William III and Queen Mary an old woman on crutches took up the Royal Champion’s challenge. Suspecting a hoax, the champion refused the challenge and in theory the monarchs were subsequently dethroned. At the banquet that followed the coronation of Charles I, the king’s champion rode into the great hall, declared his willingness to fight any man who questioned the right of the king to the throne, and then fell off his horse.

The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was an event of worldwide importance, and heads of state from many foreign countries came to London to participate. Prominent among those who attended were the leaders of the recently created Commonwealth of Nations.

The first head of state to arrive at Westminster Abbey was the very large and immensely popular Queen Salote of Tonga. Opposite her in her carriage sat a diminutive man in white, who nobody seemed to recognize. Someone asked Noel Coward, ‘Who is that with the Queen of Tonga?’

‘I expect it’s her lunch,’ he replied.

Mr. Blair is a man of hidden shallows (Hugo Gurdon, Daily Telegraph)

[Saffy – of whom was it said that 'He rose without trace'?]

I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland (Sydney Smith)

Every time a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies (Gore Vidal)

An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff - and prints the chaff (Adlai Stevenson)

Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible (Havelock Ellis)

A triumph of the embalmer’s art (Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan)

Well, he seemed such a nice old gentleman, I though I would give him my autograph as a souvenir (Adolf Hitler on Neville Chamberlain)

Take a letter. Add another letter to make a word. Add a third letter to make a new word. Keep on adding letters and making longer words until you have to stop. Here is how it’s done…

      The first letter of the alphabet:  a

                       The indefinite article:  a n

 The hairy part of an ear of barley:  a n g

             Trouble, affliction, anguish:  a n g e

                             A heavenly spirit:  a n g e l

                           A town in Sweden:  a n g e l i

      Having the nature of an angel:  a n g e l i c

 A sweet dessert wine produced in California: a n g e l i c a

                          Having the nature of an angel: a n g e l i c a l

                                       Extinct order of nuns:  a n g e l i c a l s
 

Get the idea? Try this one yourself:

    The fifth letter of the alphabet:  _

                               A musical tone:  _ _

                    The past tense of eat:  _ _ _

        A charge, payment, or price:  _ _ _ _
 
                                             Angry:   _ _ _ _ _

                         A nautical robber:   _ _ _ _ _ _

                                      Voiceless:    _ _ _ _ _ _ _

 To pronounce with an h sound:    _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Gaius Caligula, Roman Emperor, d.41 AD

Stabbed to death by his own guards - (as reported by Roman historian Tacitus):

“I am still alive!”

James French, d. 1966

Prior to execution by electric chair in Oklahoma:

“How about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? French fries.”

Malcolm X, Black leader, d. 1966

Spoken to his assassins, three men who shot him sixteen times:

“Let's cool it brothers . . .”

[Whatever happened to humourous and witty epitaths? I suppose the angelic sentimentality surrounding the fact of death during the Victorian age finished them off, and we have never quite recovered].

Saffy – October 2003 (saffron200@hotmail.com)