books

By their books you shall know them

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This morning I left home a few minutes earlier and caught a different train than my usual (living in a major suburban hub, there are trains every few minutes in peak hour). I shut my eyes and maybe dozed, and when I opened them/woke up, there was a young man sitting opposite me reading The last picture show by Larry McMurtrie. I haven’t read the book, but watched the movie on video many years ago. 

This afternoon I was slightly delayed at work and caught a different train than my usual and sat in a different carriage. There was the same young man reading the same book. I tend not to look at people on trains, but can spot a book some distance away. I also tend not to strike up conversations with people, about books, movies or otherwise. 

Jezebel and other names

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Two posts ago was about the name Shad, which might be derived from the biblical name Shadrach. A few days after I saw that advertisement on that bus, I attended my great-niece’s baptism at her family’s church. Over morning tea I was a talking to a group of people including the minister and somehow the topic turned towards names. The minister said he and his wife had given their first two children perfectly respectable biblical names, then when she was pregnant again he suggested Jezebel. Why not? It’s a biblical name, and even has the -el ending (which may also occur in neighbouring languages and religions).

But Jezebel is the archetypal Bad Woman. Her fault wasn’t sexual; it was religious and political. She was the daughter of King Ithobaal of Tyre (note the -baal ending) and probably didn’t have much say in her alliance-sealing wedding to King Ahab of Israel. Like many such princesses/queens, she continued to worship her own god, but unlike many others actively instigated the replacement of Yahwism with Baalism, desecrating altars, instigating the killing of some prophets and forcing the leading prophet Elijah into hiding. The image of a painted Jezebel comes after the deaths of Ahab and his two immediate successors. As the new king Jehu approached the palace at Jezreel, Jezebel “painted her face, and tired her head” and mocked him (this was facing death with dignity), before some palace eunuchs threw her out the window and her body was trampled by horses (this wasn’t). (This story is highly coloured by the writer’s implacable opposition to anything non-Yahwistic.)

Wikipedia’s disambiguation page lists fictional people, notably in the 1938 movie with Bette Davis and Henry Fonda, and 1954 novel The Caves of Steel (and sequels) by Isaac Asimov, in which the perfectly respectable Jezebel (Jessie) Baley is married to Elijah (Lije) Baley (Asimov has Elijah improbably expound on the names and the history of the kings of Israel), but apparently no real people. Note also Ahab, possibly better known as the obsessed whaling ship captain in Moby Dick.

Among the many Old Testament names which are or were widely used, many others weren’t or aren’t. The twelve sons of Jacob are indicative: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph and Benjamin. (Most Dans are named after Daniel, a different person.) I have not encountered Naphtali, Gad, Issachar or Zebulun otherwise, and Asher once (a fictional character). The first four are moderately common/rare, leaving only the last two in widespread use.

prime numbers

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I have mentioned Alex Bellos’s Alex’s Adventures in Numberland before. I am re-reading that, and noticed a reference in the chapter on prime numbers. Before computers, prime numbers had to be calculated by hand, an increasingly onerous task the higher/longer the numbers got. Before the computer age, the highest known prime number was 2^127 – 1, which has 39 digits. Since 1952, computers or networks have discovered increasingly higher/longer numbers, which have no practical application. At the time Bellos was writing (2010), the highest known prime number was 2^43,112,609 – 1, which has almost 13 million digits. That won its discoverers a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is now offering $150,000 for a prime number with 100 million digits and $250,000 for 1 billion. Bellos plots a graph of the length of the longest known prime number over time (which has been quite consistent), and concludes that it “allows us to  estimate when the first billion-digit prime will be discovered. I’d put my money on it being found by 2025.”

“By 2025” has passed, and in 2025, I can say “Not even close”. Right now, the highest known prime is 2^136,279,841 − 1, which has more than 41 million digits. In the time Bellos estimated for a 1 billion digit prime number, mathematicians aren’t even half-way to 100 million. Though there is one more month before the end of 2025.

In terms of extrapolating very small or very large numbers (or any mathematical/scientific/technological advance) into the future, people, even experts often vastly under-estimate or vastly over-estimate. (Moonbases by 2001?) (See also million, billion, trillion.)

PS 31 Dec: I saw a video (on Matt Parker’s Stand-up Maths Youtube channel).

Sejong leaves

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Late last year I mentioned Percival Lowell’s book about his travels in Korea in 1888.  I found a scan of the book on the Internet Archive. I have been reading it in spare moments and might or might not post about it here later. But one passage demanded immediate comment. Lowell writes, at length:

There was once a certain king who, contrary to the custom of the usual king, realized to some extent the duties of his position, and spent his time in concocting schemes for the amelioration of society. It occurred, one day, to this wise monarch that learning would be more easily spread among the common people if a phonetic system of writing could be introduced to supersede the laborious memorizing of the Chinese character; for, as it was, a long study and a retentive memory were needed to learn the very means of learning, whereas, if what they read represented what they spoke, the two studies could go, as they should, linked hand in hand. So he set himself to invent a bond as simple as possible. This he soon succeeded in doing to his entire satisfaction. But the arose a more difficult problem, not unknown in more advanced literary compositions,—How should he get it before the public? He could, of course, launch it with his own sanction, but would it be taken up? Probably not; for the people were too addicted to precedent to be amenable to change. So he decided to try the effect of the anonymous, backed by the supernatural. 

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spank

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A recent question on English Language Learners Stack Exchange asked: “Can ‘spank’ be used in relation to other body parts, or is it used only in relation to the buttocks?” The current answer is that spank on the face and spank on the legs are both found in Google Books but are rare (and I suspect older). Certainly a spank is on the buttocks/backside until otherwise specified.

The questioner cited Wiktionary, which gives “a person’s buttocks or other vulnerable body part like the cheeks”. Other dictionaries I checked include Dictionary.com, which says “especially on the buttocks”, Oxford, which doesn’t specify a body part, only “with the open hand”, and Merriam-Webster, which says “to the buttocks”. 

Writers of dictionary definitions face the fine task of encompassing what people mean when they say a word, while excluding all others. They must also ideally not include any word more complex than the word in question, forcing the reader to find the meaning of that word.

The four definitions in full are:

Wiktionary: to beat, smack or slap a person’s buttocks or other vulnerable body part like the cheeks, with the bare hand or other object, as punishment, or for sexual gratification
Dictionary.com: to strike (a person, usually a child) with the open hand, a slipper, etc., especially on the buttocks, as in punishment.
Oxford: To slap or smack (a person, esp. a child) with the open hand
Merriam-Webster: to strike especially on the buttocks with the open hand

Slap, smack and spank are to some extent interchangeable. The Stack Exchange answer links to the Google Ngrams result for (slap/smack/spank) on the *.

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Singing in Hebrew

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One of the choirs I sing in is rehearsing Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, which is one of the few pieces in the standard choral repertoire in Hebrew. Unlike singing in Latin, in which most of the words have identifiable English equivalents, or German, which is a strange mixture of the familiar (the function words, some of the content words and the word order) and the unfamiliar (most of the content words), singing in Hebrew offers very little familiarity. 

The first section of the first movement is:

Urah, hanevel, v’chinor!
A-irah shaḥar 

which could be absolutely anything, and I wouldn’t possibly be able to guess. (The score uses transliterations rather than Hebrew script. Very few people can read Hebrew, and it’s written right-to-left, which would be almost impossible to fit under standard music notation. (I have seen a Christian hymn in Arabic, and the music is written right-to-left.)) 

The Latin is more familiar, and I would possibly be able to guess:

exsurge, psalterium et cithara; exsurgam diluculo

It’s ‘Awake, psaltery and harp: I will rouse the dawn!’ (108:2) in the King James Version – Hebrew numbering is different.

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Shortening names part 2

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In some cultures it is possible and/or acceptable for parents to name children after themselves (most obviously sons after fathers and daughters after mothers, but there are unisex names and male and female equivalent names), and in others it’s not. When a parent and child have the same name, it is necessary to distinguish between them. Formally, there’s (I) and II, which can continue to III and beyond (apparently Oscar Hammerstein III introduced himself as ‘Oscar Hammerstein the hundred and eleventh’ (compare Bilbo Baggins the eleventy-first), and (Snr) and Jnr, which can’t. Note George Foreman’s five sons, who combine both, being Jr, III, IV, V and VI, and one daughter Georgette. Wikipedia gives nicknames for III to VI, but not Jr, who may be ‘Junior’.

One less drastic solution is to use shortenings of names, which is what links this post to a recent one. The conventional wisdom is that the parent uses the full name and the child a shortened one. But I know more examples of a parent using a shortened name and the child the full one. I can immediately think of five, and I’m sure there’s more – I have a vague memory of counting eight or nine at one stage. I know or knew Jill and Jillian, Judy and Judith, Mick and Michael (who also uses Mike in some contexts) and Russ and Russell. Conversely, I knew a three-generation family of Elizabeth, Libby and Lizzy (<slightly disguised).  

Some people alternate between the full and short forms of their name in different contexts, with full names being more formal and short names being more informal. I remember reading in one book or article something like “Bill may be acceptable for a child or young man, but what happens when Bill becomes president of the United States?”. (This was before 1992!) I’ve just checked the book I have (which I mentioned in the last two paragraphs of this post), and it’s not in that. The USA has now had Jimmy, Bill and Joe as presidents (and Harry, who really was Harry). Bill became William Jefferson during impeachment proceedings but was and has remained Bill otherwise. Note that James Earl Carter Jr has the same two given names as his father. And I wasn’t aware until just then of Joe Biden’s second given name. 

PS 30 June: In fact, Joe Biden, like Jimmy Carter, has the same two given names as his father, and is Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, and his son Beau was III. I have just found that Carter has a son James III, but I can’t immediately find any more information about him. I guess that Jimmy and Joe were originally called that to distinguish them from their fathers.

Gondor, Gondar, Gonder and Gondour

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A document referred to Gondor (a fictional kingdom in JRR Tolkien’s writings) (you probably know that) instead of Gondar or Gonder (a city and district in Ethiopia) (you probably don’t know that). Having just read a summary (sensitivity warning!) of the recent report of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, I find myself unable to be flippant. 

Wikipedia also mentions Gondour, which appears in a short story by Mark Twain.

nyumnyum

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If I had ever even vaguely thought about it, I might have assumed that the sound/word nom/nom nom/nomnom etc had been created by the writers of Sesame Street or improvised by Cookie Monster’s actor (who I have just discovered was originally Frank Oz). Certainly om nom or om nom nom is so associated with it/him that Wikipedia redirects searches for that, to its page for Cookie Monster. (The video of Cookie Monster I found seems to use nom and nyom.)

In my last post I mentioned that I am listening to/reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Surprise – nyumnyum appears there. Just after the conversation I wrote about in my last post, Leopold Bloom remembers “Old Mrs Thornton” (?a midwife/child nurse) feeding babies “pap” (soft food, maybe bread soaked in milk). “O, that’s  nyumnyum”.

Not surprisingly, nom, nyom, num, nyum by whatever spelling and combination, doesn’t appear in any formal dictionary Google can find, given the informal spoken variability of it. It may have appeared in writing before Joyce, and certainly pre-dates him as a sound/spoken word.

Dictionary.com dates yum-yum from 1880-85, which means it was hot off the press when Gilbert and Sullivan used it in The Mikado. Surprisingly, yummy dates from later, 1925-30. 

Putting aside the results for nom and num (which have other uses), Google Ngrams shows nom nom and num num clearly ahead of nyom, nyum, nomnom, nyumnyum, nyum nyum and numnum, with no results for nyom nyom and nyomnyom (both of which show on a general Google search). I guess how you write it largely depends on how you say it, but it’s likely to clear from the context and no spelling is likely to have vociferous advocates telling you that you’re a nomskull for spelling it like that. 

Nomskulls actually exist – they are skull-shaped cupcake mo(u)lds, I’ve just found out. Throwaway silly jokes have a habit of sidetracking me.

Numskull has been the more common spelling for most of its history, until numbskull overtook it in the mid-1980s. Numbskull is literally numb + skull but num (by itself) is the older form (from Middle English nome, from an Old English word meaning taken, stolen (in this case, feeling)). The b was later added to conform with comb (which had a b in Old English) and limb (which didn’t in Old English = arm, leg, wing, branch, but did in Latin, limbus = edge of disk of sun or moon, graduated edge of quadrant). (Dictionary.com)

Having mentioned Frank Oz, a random memory. Many years ago I watched The empire strikes back in a cinema. When Yoda appeared a young boy in front of me whispered excitedly to his father “Kermit …!”. I wanted to whisper “No … Fozzie!”