Beautiful English Online

Reason-raisin-raising

Shakespearean puns and the Great Vowel Shift discussed and illustrated here.

Chaperon

The headgear this man is wearing is called a chaperon -- related to the modern French word chapeau. The chaperon could be a simple hood or a very elaborate one with a liripipe or hanging point so long that it had to be wound around the head to avoid tripping over it.

The picture is from the Chapel Saint-Erige, probably completed in the year 1451, a time when chaperons were extremely fashionable throughout Europe.

It was not until the early part of the eighteenth century that people began to use the word chaperon or chaperone to designate elderly aunts, ladies-in-waiting, or other persons charged with making sure that young people didn't get into the sort of mischief they are likely to get into when left to their own devices.

Apparently, the term was originally metaphorical. The chaperon protected the young person the way the hood protected the head.

The headgear this man is wearing is called a chaperon -- related to the modern French word chapeau. The chaperon could be a simple hood or a very elaborate one with a liripipe or hanging point so long that it had to be wound around the head to avoid tripping over it.

The picture is from the Chapel Saint-Erige, probably completed in the year 1451, a time when chaperons were extremely fashionable throughout Europe.

It was not until the early part of the eighteenth century that people began to use the word chaperon or chaperone to designate elderly aunts, ladies-in-waiting, or other persons charged with making sure that young people didn't get into the sort of mischief they are likely to get into when left to their own devices.

Apparently, the term was originally metaphorical. The chaperon protected the young person the way the hood protected the head.

Do Support: It's Not a Type of Hair Gel

If you went back about 600 years or so, you'd find that the word "do" was a reasonably unconflicted, straightforward, happy little verb, which most of the time did nothing more than act as a synonym for "perform," "act," or "accomplish." We still use it that way of course. We say "Do the equation," "Do my laundry," "I'll have to do something about the moths in the pantry," etc.

It was also called upon to perform auxiliary duties in positive indicative sentences (like "Then he did play the flute most winningly") or positive imperatives (as in "Do you now take up the sword for Henry.") Now we never use the latter function (unless we're being purposefully archaic) and we only use the former for certain kinds of emphasis, such as "Yes, he DID play the flute" in response to a contrary claim.

As the age of Chaucer gave way to the ages of Shakespeare and Milton, some very strange and wonderful things happened to the English language. One of these was the Great Vowel Shift, which made us stop talking like Frenchmen and start talking like us. Another was the release of "do" from its duties as a positive auxiliary and its capture and enslavement for use in negative and interrogative functions. This rearrangement in the verbal duty roster occurred over several centuries and was pretty much complete by the end of the eighteenth century.

In days of old when knights were bold, they could say things like "Why pickest thou thy nose, varlet?" "A knight pickest not his nose," or "Pick not thy nose, thou surly churl." Today, we can still say, "Why pick you your nose?" "He picks not his nose," and "Pick not your nose," but people tend to point at us and laugh when we do. That is because a "do" auxiliary is now required to form questions, negative statements, and negative commands -- unless the main verb is "is" (and sometimes "has" if you're British or a bit old fashioned). We can still say, "What is it?" but we have to say "What does it do?" "What does he have?" and "What do you mean?" Things get a little trickier with "Where has he gone?" (British) and "Where did he go?" (American), but this discrepancy gives us a peek into the process of change as it must have appeared to the people of an earlier era when "do"-volution was in full swing.

Just imagine it:

Old guy: Where went they? I see them not.
Young guy: I don't know. Why do you ask?

And that's what we language types call "do-support."

Frequent use keeps verbs irregular

In Chaucer's time, the principal parts of the verb help were help-holp-holpen. Now we say help-helped-helped. Yet  think-thought-thought has remained  the same. What's the difference? Apparently it all boils down to frequency of use, as Cosmos reports:

Anyone who has tried to learn English will have been struck by its surfeit of stubbornly irregular verbs, which render grammatical rules unreliable. The past tense of regular verbs is formed by adding the suffix '-ed', but this luxury is not afforded to their irregular kin.

Over time, however, some irregular verbs 'regularise'. For instance, the past tense of 'help' used to be 'holp', but now it is 'helped'.

Mathematician Erez Lieberman from Harvard University in Massachusets, U.S., and his team performed a quantitative study of the rate at which English verbs such as 'help' have become more regular with time. Of the list of 177 irregular verbs they took from Old English, only 98 are still irregular today.

Amazingly, the changes they observed obey a very precise mathematical description: the half-life of an irregular verb is proportional to the square root of its frequency. In other words, the more an irregular verb is used, the longer it will remain irregular.

Proto-Indoeuropean Language Tree

See how many languages are related!

Buono appetito

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti has discovered that lasagna comes from the Latin word for chamber pot.

The History of "Basket Case"

We now use the phrase "basket case" to refer to someone whose emotional state is so disturbed that he or she is unable to function; however, it was originally used in reference to a soldier who had lost all four limbs, a quadruple amputee who supposedly had to be transported in a basket rather than on a stretcher.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the phrase "basket case" to a 1919  "official bulletin" by the U.S. government:

(U.S. Comm. on Public Information) 28 Mar. 1/1 The Surgeon General of the Army..denies..that there is any foundation for the stories that have been circulated..of the existence of ‘*basket cases’ in our hospitals.

The phrase is defined in a 1944 edition of Yank magazine:

12 May 17 Maj. Gen. Norman T. Kirk, Surgeon General, says there is nothing to rumors of so-called ‘basket cases’ cases of men with both legs and both arms amputated.

Both of these statements may well have been true. There were only two cases of quadruple amputation in all of WWII -- and only four in the Korean War. So it is not surprising that as Phrase Finder points out, "the term was never used to describe anyone - only in order to deny that any such servicemen existed."

I have no idea if "baskets" were ever used to transport the disabled during the WWI era when the phrase "basket case" gained currency, but wicker was used in the manufacture of wheelchairs, as shown in this photo of General Dan Sickles:

General Sickles was a bit of a psychological basket case himself, at least when it came to a cheating wife. As Penny Richards of Disability Studies -- Temple U blog writes:

Daniel Sickles (1819-1914) was a Union general in the Civil War. Before the war, he was a lawyer in New York City, and a US Congressman; in 1859, while he was a member of Congress, he killed his wife's lover, but was acquitted of the crime, in what is remembered as "the first use of the insanity defense in US history." Though he had no military experience, he was a successful recruiter for the Union Army, and was made a general in 1861. At the Battle of Gettysburg, he lost his leg to a cannonball injury. He had his shattered legbone preserved and donated to the Army Medical Museum, where he is rumored to have visited it annually.

Thanks to Hood for suggesting the topic.

By and Large

The common phrase by and large, meaning "generally," has a much more complicated history than you might imagine, as Phrase Finder explains:

To get a sense of the original meaning of the phrase we need to understand the nautical terms 'by' and 'large'. 'Large' is easier, so we'll start there. When the wind is blowing from some compass point behind a ship's direction of travel then it is said to be 'large'. Sailors have used this term for centuries. For example, this piece from Richard Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1591:

"When the wind came larger we waied anchor and set saile."

When the wind is in that favourable large direction the largest square sails may be set and the ship is able to travel in whatever downwind direction the captain sees fit.

'By' is a rather more difficult concept for landlubbers like me. In simplified terms it means 'in the general direction of'. Sailors would say to be 'by the wind' is to face into the wind or within six compass points of it.

The earliest known reference to 'by and large' in print is from  Samuel Sturmy, in The Mariners Magazine,  1669:

"Thus you see the ship handled in fair weather and foul, by and learge."

To sail 'by and large' required the ability to sail not only as earlier square-rigged ships could do, i.e. downwind, but also against the wind.

In the Doldrums

I thought I knew where this phrase came from, but PhraseFinder has disabused me. If you would like to be disabused, read on. If you would like to be abused, I can't help you.

The Doldrums is the region of calm winds, centered slightly north of the equator and between the two belts of trade winds, which meet there and neutralize each other. It is widely assumed that the phrase 'in the doldrums' is derived from the name of this region. Actually, it's the other way about. In the 19th century, 'doldrum' was a word meaning 'dullard; a dull or sluggish fellow' and this probably derived from 'dol', meaning 'dull' with its form taken from 'tantrum'. That is, as a tantrum was a fit of petulance and passion, a doldrum was a fit of sloth and dullness, or one who indulged in such. . . .

'In the doldrums' came to refer specifically to sailing ships that were becalmed and unable to progress.

The region now called the 'The Doldrums' wasn't named until the mid 19th century and the naming came about as the result of a misapprehension. When reports of ships that were becalmed in that equatorial region described them as being 'in the doldrums', it was mistakenly thought that the reports were describing their location rather than their state.

The illustration is Three English Flagships Becalmed, by Peter Monamy 1728