DIALECT AND WORD MEANINGS

[Stanley]

Do you remember that Stanley Holloway song 'My word you do look queer'?

[Cathy]

Watching a tv presenter who was stood in front of a group of people, , and he said to the camera ‘We are all cobbled together’.
Haven’t heard that one before.

[Stanley]

'Cobbled up' or together is quite common Cathy. Means roughly made or gathered. A temporary repair to something is often referred to as being 'cobbled up'.

[Cathy]

As the saying goes
“An Apple a day , keeps the doctor away.”
Originated in Wales in the 1860s. It’s said the original wording to the rhyme was,
“Eat an apple on going to bed and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”

[Stanley]

I always stick to that one Cathy, an apple a day and bugger the fruit sugar!
Something that got my attention this morning is 'hoity toity'.
From the archaic verb hoit (“to play the fool; to behave thoughtlessly and frivolously”). Pompous, self-important and snobbish.

[Cathy]

I’m still looking up Graupel

[Stanley]

I like Graupel, never seen a name for that sort of snow before.

[Stanley]

I was berating Jack yesterday for making a mess and the word intrigued me so I looked it up. Here's what I found. As usual, there's more to it than meets the eye!

When “mess” first showed up around 1300 (spelled mes in Middle English), it meant a serving of food or a meal, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Although English borrowed the word from Anglo-Norman and Old French, the ultimate source is the Latin verb mittere (to send or let go).
What, you’re probably asking, does sending or letting go have to do with food? Here’s how the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains it. In Late Latin, which dates from the third to the sixth centuries, mittere came to mean to put or place. And missus, Late Latin for a course of dinner, referred to the putting of food on a table.
The OED says the original meaning of “mess” as a serving or a meal is now seen only in regional dialects or historical references. However, the dictionary notes that another culinary sense of “mess” arose in the 1300s: “A portion or serving of liquid or pulpy food such as milk, broth, porridge, boiled vegetables, etc.” Oxford points out that “a mess of pottage” appears in some 16th-century versions of the Bible “alluding to the biblical story of Esau’s sale of his birthright (Genesis 25:29–34).”
Here’s a secular example of the usage, from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602): “I had as leeue you should tel me of a messe of poredge.” And this is a more recent example from Tooth and Claw (1983), by the Australian mystery writer Gabrielle Lord: “She stirred the mess of lentils.”
Let’s back up a bit now for a new twist in the history of “mess.” In the 1400s, the word came to mean a small group of people who sat together at a banquet and were served the same dishes. This usage evolved a century later into the military sense—at first referring to a group of soldiers, sailors, or marines who take their meals together.
The OED’s earliest example of the military usage, from a 1536 entry in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, refers to expenses for the “meis of marineris, gunnaris, and utheris.” Later, the term “mess” also came to mean the place where such groups took their meals, especially groups of similar rank. Here’s an 1822 example in the OED from British military regulations: “Commanding Officers are enjoined, when practicable, to form a Serjeants’ Mess, as the means of supporting their consequence and respectability in the Corps.”
So how did “mess” get its messy sense? The Chambers etymology dictionary says Alexander Pope’s use of the term “in the sense of a kind of liquid or mixed food for an animal” led to “the contemptuous use of a concoction, jumble, mixed mass.” In Epilogue to the Satires (1738), Pope refers to hogs eating each other’s excretions: “From him the next receives it, thick or thin, / As pure a Mess almost as it came in.” It wasn’t until the early 1800s, according to the OED, that “mess” took on the sense of “a dirty or untidy state of things or of a place; a collection of disordered things, producing such a state.” The dictionary’s first citation is from the 19th-century English theatrical producer William Thomas Moncreiff. In Tom and Jerry (1826), a character says he doesn’t use chalk because it “makes such a mess all over the walls.”
We’ll end with a more dramatic example from The Old Front Line (1917), a prose description of the Battle of the Somme by the English poet John Masefield: “All this mess of heaps and hillocks is strung and filthied over with broken bodies and ruined gear.”

[Tizer]

Eton mess. Wikipedia: Eton mess

[Stanley]

Words fascinate me..... I remember when I was being taught the Bible at Wycliffe Sunday School the phrase about Esau's 'mess of pottage' fascinated me.

[Stanley]

Is 'Z' becoming more popular? I noted the Chancellor's use of 'Conzervative' earlier this week and this morning the Met Office forecaster repeatedly referred to 'Selzey Bill'. Interesting.....

[Stanley]

The current 'in phrase' is 'Herd Immunity'.....

[Tripps]

I just surfed into an article about husky dog sledge racing in Alaska - like one does. Nice warm glow when I knew it was called the Iditarod without looking at the headline.

Good memory for rubbish - I think it's Thursday today isn't it?

[Stanley]

I call it 'Velcro memory' David. Attracts the strangest items and never lets go!

[Tizer]

'Velcro memory', that's a useful description for me to use too. Perhaps it's something we OGers have in common!
I learnt what niella was last night while reading an archaeological article about a gold ring that had a pattern `inlaid with niella'. `Niella is a black substance made by combining sulphur with silver, lead or copper' (Collins) It comes from Latin nigeller, derived from Latin niger, black.

[Stanley]

Velcro memory very common on OG!
A new word has appeared.... 'bupofren'. Another consequence of sloppy speech and not bothering to enunciate clearly.

[Tizer]

It might be worth getting your hearing tested once the virus has gone!

[Stanley]

No Tiz, very clear. Speaking too fast, gabbling.
"He gabbles like a goose midst a swan like quire" Dryden.
(Applies to Johnson also!)
Keep an eye open for the revival of a wartime phrase; "for the duration".

[Tizer]

My dad used to accuse people of gabbling until he got hearing aids!

[Stanley]

You mean that I am wrong when I accuse people of speaking too quickly?
I was musing about the relationship between 'mendicant' and 'mendacious' yesterday. Modern usage seems to have prised the meanings apart even though I assume they are from the same root.

[Tizer]

In Blackburn if you were gabbling it meant you were not making sense.

I had to look up a plant by the name of silphium and it turned out more interesting than I expected. Brew yourself a pot of tea and get a biscuit before starting the article! LINK

[Stanley]

reinforces the value of the site. One for a wet day I think!

[Stanley]

Thinking on the lies of carrying on as near normally as possible I remembered the dialect saying, 'Keep t'band in't nick'. The origin is:- 'Band' is string and nick is the groove on the rim of a spinning wheel. As long as you kept t'band in't nick you could be spinning normally.

[Stanley]

Rishi Sunak has changed our language. People are not 'laid off' but are 'furloughed'.

[plaques]

And in Australia you are not made redundant you are retrenched.