June 2010
30 Jun, 2010
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic poet, described clouds as the daughters of Earth and Water and the nurslings of the Sky. The word cloud comes from Old English, and from a most unpoetic source, originally meaning a lump of rock. It’s brother, clod, means a lump of soil and its cousin, clot, a lump in a liquid.
So how did our light and airy cloud manage to escape it’s family of clods and clots? The probable explanation is that large, dense cumulus clouds were thought to resemble lumps of rock so took the name, cloud, and the lumps of rock were left being called lumps of rock.
Meteorologists have named clouds in a very ordered and logical way as you might expect. The main types of cloud have good scientific names chosen from solid Latin roots:
Alto – high cloud – from Italian for high and from Latin Altus;
Cirrus – thin, wispy cloud – from Latin for curl, fringe;
Cumulus – tall, fluffy cloud – from Latin for a heap or pile;
Nimbus – rain-bearing cloud – from Latin for raincloud; and
Stratus – a broad flat cloud – from Latin for spread out.
These basic cloud types can be combined to describe in-between types, for instance, a cumulonimbus is a cumulus cloud bearing rain or a cirrostratus is thin and wispy and spread out.
However, there appears to be some mischievous meteorologists out there who find this all far too dull. Watch out for mammatocumulus or breast clouds (from Latin mamma for breast or udder); tuba clouds that look like trumpets hanging from cumulus clouds; and scud clouds that shoot along under storms (scud, related to scuttle, means to move quickly and perhaps comes from the Middle English scut meaning to race like a hare).
You can only think that Shelley would have been proud of them.
16 Jun, 2010
I have watched my first game of the World Cup. I was surprised by the constant, boring bee-drone of the crowd – I had never heard anything like it before. Of course, I soon found out it is the vuvuzela, the soccer horn. It is plastic, a metre long, brightly coloured and sounds like an amplified bee! The instrument is played with huge enthusiasm by the South African and visiting fans but is also causing a huge amount of annoyance to television viewers.
The vuvuzela can perhaps claim ancestry from the kudu horn. The kudu horn came from a large antelope and was the traditional call to African villagers to attend village meetings.
There are two explanations of the origins of the word vuvuzela One theory suggests it comes from isiZulu for making noise. The other, that it comes from township slang for shower, because it showers people with music and looks like a shower head.
The vuvuzela has created the tournament’s early controversy. Many people hate them and there have been calls to have them banned. BBC broadcasters are contemplating turning off the crowd noise after receiving hundreds of complaints. However, many of the local and visiting fans are enjoying the noise far too much. The FIFA president, Joseph Blatter, has ruled out a ban, saying on Twitter that:
I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. … Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound.
Boogieblast, a South African manufacturer of vuvuzela, suggest a simple explanation (and a nice little piece of marketing):
… you only hate them, if you don’t have one …
11 Jun, 2010
We often hear about octogenarians, those folk aged between 80 and 89. Being an octogenarian is an achievement of an advanced age beyond our allocated three score years and ten (according to Psalm 90) so is something to be celebrated:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
But becoming a quinquagenarian, being fifty-something, a person aged between 50 and 59 years, is not an achievement that is happily celebrated. Being fifty is generally accepted as being the beginning of late middle age – not a milestone to be welcomed. Youth has flown away.
The effects of ageing have become undeniable; quinquagenarians have found their eyesight has deteriorated, their muscles ache and their memory matter is disappearing in a process of cognitive decline.
Quinquagenarians have started to realise that the process of ageing is inevitable. So they have started thinking about activities recommended to minimise the decline including staying mentally active (for instance, by reading word-of-the-week blogs), staying socially active, exercising, reducing stress, and maintaining a good diet.
Although there is no cure for ageing, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have recently discovered that feeding old rats a combination of acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid has rejuvenated the rats. The research leader reported “these old rats got up and did the Macarena”. These supplements are available from health food stores.
However, Oscar Wilde probably summed it up for the majority of quinquagenarians when he wrote:
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
7 Jun, 2010
My daughter was laughing at me for reading the dictionary and I desperately needed to rescue myself. So I challenged her to guess how many words starting with fun were really fun and how many were not. For you, my fellow dictionary readers, I present the results. Please note that this will only work for the Concise Macquarie Dictionary, which was the particular book that I was enjoying.
We only count the non-compound words and find that fun words are not at all that much fun. There are 25 fun words listed in my Macquarie that start with ‘fun’. There are six words that are no fun at all: fundament, fundamentalism, funeral, funereal, fungicide & funk.
There are a lot of neutral words (thirteen): function, functional, functionalism, functionary, fund, fundamental, fundus, fungi, fungible, fungoid, fungus, funicular, & funnel. These excite no passions at all.
But once the survey is complete there are only six really fun words: fun, funambulist, funfair, funky, funnies, & funny.
This interpretation would be different if undertaken by a specialist. An economist might find fungible (where one unit or portion of something can be replaced by another) and fund to be quite exhilarating. A mycologist may find fungus and fungi exciting and a fungoid (fungus-like) absolutely distracting. Anatomists might find the fundament (the anus) and fundus (the base of an animal organ) the sort of words to raise their passions. However, we, as laypeople, shall remain un-emotional about them.
The fun words are undisputable: the funambulist, the tightrope walker, is fun and being funky is certainly not dull; I would spend time reading funnies (comic strips) if I didn’t have my dictionaries; and there is no doubt that a funfair is enjoyable.
Neither is there any dispute about the un-fun words. The fundament becomes, somehow – with -al and -ism added, religious fanaticism, a very serious business. There is very little fun at a funeral nor at something that is funereal (funeral-like). Fungicide (fungus killer) would send any mushroom into a funk (I am cheating a bit here counting funk as a black mood and not a bit of soul music but it has its representative in funky).
Statistically, fun has let us down. Only 24 per cent of fun words are actually happy words, the remainder, 76 per cent are just no fun whatsoever. This is, of course, what you learn when you read the dictionary!
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