DIALECT AND WORD MEANINGS

[Stanley]

A scabbling hammer is one with a rough serrated surface which tends to level off small peaks in the stone when it is hammered.

[Tizer]

As you all know I have a slight interest in mineral specimens and some of them are beautiful. I saw a description of one on a sellers web site yesterday that said a specimen was `memorising'. He probably chose the wrong word from those the spellchecker offered!

[Stanley]

Mesmerising? See THIS Wiktionary article on the word.

[Tizer]

That's what I guessed he meant. Unfortunately there is a lot of confusion in spelling - mesmerising, mesmorising, mesmerizing, mesmorizing etc.

[Whyperion]

I was thinking about running the mobile shop from Sough round the farms and two words came to mind, sweets were always 'spice' and animal feed was 'provender' or more usually 'proven'. Another old word you came across a lot was agistment. This was the letting out of grazing to other farmers if you had any to spare. Commonly shortened to 'giste'.

Old word sounds french (as most tenancies and interests in land are)
Is that where the idea of getting the drift, or gist, of an arguement or point of view comes from?)

[Whyperion]

One could go on about the names and how the Calendar was derived. with 52 7 day weeks in a year (roughly).

So the Week is 7 days 0f 24 hours divided into Night and Day (yes I know) or was Genesis Day then Night for the First Day (oddly a period without Sun for the light of the day - not impossible given the probable start of the solar system and light from electical and plasma sources exceeding the Sun's Hydrogen reaction method of generating heat and light. Odd choice given the Moon to mark the night, given , nowadays , its missing a quarter of a month and hardly there for half of it.

Depending on one's day of rest, or worship, the Week either ends with a day of rest, or starts with one - though ones diaries oft start on a Monday (and Compact Sat/Sun to footnote status to get 3 days to a page to work ! - a pain if your busiest days are the Week-End).
So if Sat and Sun are Week-Ends are the other Five The Week ? or Weekdays ? Some idea that Saturday might be a weekday to (remember old contracts, plus the half day Saturday Shop Closing , or a half day work day (even now sometimes Sats are a short day with knocking off at 4pm unless you are on a shift of rolling days and hours to be done.
So the Week , can be 5 or 7 days.
But time is more than defined, its also percieved, so our use of the 'Long Weekend' - normally a Fri-Sun or Monday. Sometimes a vacation away, sometimes a task to be done. Indeed if not nowadays a 4 day working week , Fridays are a wind-down (indeed from experience I would say NEVER take on a new contract on a Friday, - experience in Insurance and Building Trade is that something happens, about 4pm that day, or over the weekend and NO-ONE anywhere else is avalilble to sort the problem out. We have films - The Long Good Friday, about events that seem to fill more time than 24 hours would suggest. Sunnier days and longer daylight too give the illusion of the 'Long Weeks' of Summer , and Long Days of Autumn (harvesting).

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... ty-dissent so even if its not got a clear definition there is an acceptance that either more events get packed in (or ignored) for a length of time beyond the 24hour expectation.
So, The Long Week - a pedantic non-existence, or an acceptable speech idiom ? Any other cultures or languages have a similar way of describing such things?

[Stanley]

Education was different 80 years ago, we learned things like this...
"Begone, dull care! I prithee begone from me!
Begone, dull care! you and I shall never agree.
Long time hast thou been tarrying here
And fain thou woulds't me kill,"
And sang it to Benjamin Britten's setting. These things stick in your head and yesterday one word kept bugging me. 'fain' so I looked it up.
"Old English fægen ‘happy, well pleased’, of Germanic origin, from a base meaning ‘rejoice’; related to fawn"
That's another itch scratched. Totally archaic now of course.

[Cathy]

This one is for Tizer
Today I heard a gardener say
‘Rocks are a man’s Diamonds’
I thought of you Tize

[Tripps]

Begone, dull care! you and I shall never agree.

Brings back a few memories. . .

Begone Dull Care - Quick March of the Royal Corps of Signals

[Tizer]

This one is for Tizer
Today I heard a gardener say
‘Rocks are a man’s Diamonds’
I thought of you Tize

Thanks, Cathy - of course I agree with the man! In the 1700s and 1800s visitors to Bristol (UK) would buy so-called `Bristol diamonds' as a souvenir and local lads who couldn't afford fancy gems would give pieces to their girlfriends. They are quartz crystals which are quite common in many places but not in the Bristol area and in the old days most people didn't travel far, so the Bristolians were quite happy to have their own `diamonds'. An example is shown below.

[Cathy]

Sweet. It even looks like a love-heart shape.

[Stanley]

Cathy, I didn't know about that. Ours was "Wha wadna fecht for Charlie'.

[Tripps]

I heard someone (quite posh) use the words 'bog standard' a few days ago. That of course got me thinkig so I looked it up. Best result was from World Wide Words which was a site I'd forgotten about. I used to get an email every Saturday morning, but I think the chap who ran it - stopped doing so and retired. Good to see it's still there.

The usual mixture of credible and incredible post hoc explanations. Short answer seems to be 'no one knows'. Interesting to see no connection with boggart.

Alasrair Campbell is said to be the first person to use it - maybe some one should ask him where he got it from.

[chinatyke]

American Standard was a toilet (or bog) wasn't it? Could this be where it came from?

[Stanley]

Bog as a euphemism for a lavatory was certainly about long before Campbell. I had a furtle and found this:
"Unknown, but probably derived from a corruption of box-standard under influence from bog (“shitter, coarse slang for an outhouse or toilet”), possibly via bog-wheel (“Cambridge slang for bicycle”), or from bog (“unsettled swampland”) in reference to a lack of sophistication or polish. Sometimes folk etymologized as separately deriving from bog (“toilet”) + standard after a supposed similarity among chamberpots or toilets (despite box-standard predating it by a century and bog's original use only in reference to latrines and outhouses) or from the unattested acronym BOG, allegedly short for British or German, referring to the supposed dominance of British and German engineering during Victorian times"
So the short answer is that nobody is sure.

[Stanley]

Heard from a lady talking about the Cummings evidence. " He was particularly eviscerating about Matt Hancock".
I don't think there are degrees of eviscerating. You either do it or you don't. I think perhaps she meant to say 'excoriating'.

[Tripps]

I think perhaps she meant to say 'excoriating'.

It's a close call as to whether you can gently excoriate though. I think she said what she meant - or thought she meant.


Seen elsewhere - there is a big difference between contingency and contingent.

"and writing maketh the precise man"

[Tizer]

Execrating might have been the word she needed!

[Stanley]

A word from my days in Warwickshire popped into my head this morning. 'Luttering', as in the bouncy motion of unevenly shaped objects (Lie Swedes?) tumbling out of a container.
Never heard it anywhere else.

[Tizer]

Input now gets used as a verb. Heard today on radio: `We're going to input to the scheme'.

[Stanley]

So is 'uptick' Peter.

[Tizer]

Yes, I wrote to Inside Science asking them to stop using `uptick'. I pointed out that, if anything, it's suggestive of an increase in something good and so is inappropriate to describe an increase in deaths from covd.

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

Two thoughts this morning. First is that Rishi Sunak is using another piece of 'millennial speak', he has made diligence into a verb as in "It was absolutely right to diligence the options in this case. It's right to diligence things." (Sunak in front of the Treasury select committee the day after the Cummings outburst.)
I don't know why but it occurred to me this morning that in Scotland a wooden fence post is a 'stob'.

[Tizer]

I wondered about the origin of the word kerf and found this... Wiktionary