The Patience of a Saint

 

The first thing to say is that this is from Judaeo-Christian linguistic culture.

The most obviously patient Biblical character is Job - see the Epistle of St James in the New Testament, ch 5 v 11

Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job.

In the Old Testament, Job's faith is tested by the loss of everything he has, but he never loses his faith, and patience sees him through.

The phrase 'the patience of the saints' appears twice in the book of Revelation in the New Testament, referencing endurance under persecution, and this is most likely what we think of when we use this phrase. Note that the phrase 'the patience of a saint' implies that patience is a virtue applicable to all and any of the saints, an essential virtue of sainthood if you like.

Most likely this is a case of what is easier to say - 'the patience of a saint' rolls off the tongue more easily than 'the patience of the saints', even though the latter sounds more impressive.

There may be instances where saints have given way to impatience. Perhaps Saint Nicholas giving coal instead of toys to naughty children. Perhaps St Francis getting so fed up with being ignored by people that he goes off and preaches to birds. But the most impatient of the lot, way above the saints, has to be God - that story of the flood is about someone just losing it in a big, big way.

Seamstress

There are a number of interesting directions here, the word itself, the suffix –ess, and the disappearance of sewing terms, particularly with a supposed association to the female gender.

‘Seamstress’ would indicate that there was a male counterpart, a seamster, but this word seems to have disappeared. It is of course dangerous to say that a word has disappeared – you offer yourself as a hostage to fortune. The words ‘furlough’ and ‘catafalque’ could reasonably have been expected to be lost long ago, but re-emerged in recent years.

 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the frequency of use of 'seamstress' is currently at its highest since 1750, but that may be just because of more documentation, from more printed sources.

 

'Seamster' was around pre Norman Conquest, so it is Old English, but is fading a bit from its highpoint 1860-1880.

 

Both of these are from ‘seam’ meaning the join between two pieces of cloth, two bones in the cranium, or two planks, again used in the Old English period, before 1100, and a common Germanic word – there are similar forms in Danish, Swedish and German – and  a core form can be traced back thousands of years.

 

If 'seamstress' is disappearing it may be to do with two reasons, the general loss of the culture of sewing, and the –ess suffix.

 

Though the word ‘haberdashery’ sounds Victorian and old-fashioned, there is still a haberdashery department at John Lewis stores, where you go to get needles, thread, zips, and so on. There used to be haberdashers and upholsterers and milliners on most high streets, but now they are mostly sewing supply stores, furniture repairers, and hatmakers. Haberdashery is of uncertain origin, upholstery has been to do with the idea of working with cloth since the 16^th century, and a milliner from the 16^th century again sold hats and women’s fancy goods from Milan.

 

These words did not carry female connotations, though some words to do with clothworking and sewing did. ‘On the distaff side’ – a distaff being the stick used for winding newly twisted wool onto – meant on the female line of a family. A fairly recent invention.

 

‘Seamstress’ is clearly declaring its female credentials. The –ess suffix derives from Latin, and is one of the last relics of gender in English nouns. Fifty years ago you would hear women being given the terms authoress, bus conductress, laundress, lecturess, sculptress, even Jewess. Why on earth the selectivity I don’t know. I would say that you didn’t have teacheress or doctoress, but both these forms are documented in the OED, ‘doctoress’ as recently as 2006. Spellcheck balks at only two of the above terms. We still have the term ‘actress’, sometimes used by female actors. There is an absurdity about this. We have a lioness, and a leopardess, and a tigress, but not a pantheress (oh yes we do, says the OED) or a lynxess. We still have hostess and sorceress and heiress and empress. It adds to the wonderful unpredictability of language.

 

As my son pointed out ‘seamstress’ is as daft as calling a female truck-driver in the USA a teamstress. But that would be being a hostage to fortune again.

Joystick and Cockpit

The latest enquiry via BBC local radio in Coventry (28 July 23) concerns two early aviation terms.

The most curious aspect of this is that they come to be used for aviation within a year of each other, according to available documentation. The earliest documented use of ‘joy stick’ is as slang for a baseball bat, in 1908, but according to a diary entry of 1910 (appearing in print in 1935), it is in use for the multidirectional pivoting lever that controls the ailerons and rudder of a plane.

 

The mechanism that the joystick superseded was the ‘cloche’, invented by Bleriot, which had a similar pivoting lever, at the base of which was a metal hemisphere, open side downwards, from the edge of which, at four opposing points, were connected the wires which controlled the movements of the ailerons and rudder. Cloche, being the French for bell – think of a hotel counter bell.

 

Cockpit was a much older word, appearing in 1556 as the arena for cock-fighting (‘arena’ meaning ‘sand’, takes that etymology back to Roman amphitheatres). Within two years it was being used metaphorically, for the site of battles or campaigns; and by the end of the century Shakespeare used it as a metaphor for a theatre, in Henry V, perhaps developing the military connotation.

 

Later metaphorical/physical usages included the business area of Whitehall government and the more crowded part of a ship. By 1904 the word was being applied to the driver’s compartment of a racing car, from which it was an easy progression to the same area on a biplane or monoplane, in 1909.

Neither term seems to have made it into phrasebooks in use in the First World War until 1917, arguing a strong American English influence. The earliest use I have found is in Termes D'Aviation / Glossary of Aviation Terms published in New York in 1917, which gives 'joystick' as 'manche a balai', and 'cockpit' as 'carlingue'.

Of course, both words have slang usages, conveniently apportioned to male and female body parts.

 

All dates from the OED.

Is 'spew' a rude word, and if so, why?

Can you have too many books as a child? I grew up in a household with many books but few that I chose myself – which may explain why I favoured those few that did not come heralded with heavy parental recommendations, but as presents from distant relations or family friends. One of these was the Ladybird book What to Look for in Autumn (1959), by E L Grant Watson, with illustrations by C F Tunnicliffe, which I read often, the illustrations becoming fixed in my memory. Only many years later I read the other books in the series, including What to Look for in Winter, which currently sits in a place where it is certain to be opened, more or less daily.

In describing yew berries, Watson talks about them being eaten by thrushes and blackbirds, which ‘usually spew them up again. If you look near yew trees, you will see their spewings’.

The Oxford English Dictionary currently describes the word ‘spew’ as ‘Not now in polite use’. It was once polite enough to feature in the King James Bible, in four locations, notably the well-known ‘because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth’, in the Revelation of St John, and the lesser known, but more generally relevant ‘Drink ye, and be drunken, and spue, and fall, and rise no more’, in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah.

In passing, as an indication of how polite the word once was, the OED cites Alexander Pope’s Epistle to the Earl of Burlington (1731).  

The rich Buffet well-colour'd Serpents grace, 

And gaping Tritons spew to wash your Face.

Lucky Earl of Burlington.

Farmer and Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present (1905) offers only the obscene application of the term, and only in the spelling ‘spew’, with no indication that the word in the sense of vomiting was dubious. H C Wyld’s The Universal Dictionary of the English Language (first published in 1931) had no concerns regarding acceptability, offering the definitions 1 To vomit. 2 (of gun) To sink at the muzzle after too quick firing. And as a transitive verb To vomit up, eject. 

There are two questions here, first regarding its degree of impoliteness, and second regarding spelling. The term does not feature in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but seems now to sit at the edge of acceptability. When did it start to become dodgy? Presumably some time after 1960.

The spelling ‘spue’ emerged during the Middle English period, but according to the OED faded in the 19th century, while the –ew spelling survived throughout from the ninth century to the present.

Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1730 edition) gives only ‘spew’, as does the abbreviated edition of Johnson’s dictionary (1788). Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1852 edition) gives ‘spew’, and though Webster did change his mind about spellings, this was the spelling used in the first edition, of 1828, and further back in his The American spelling book: containing the rudiments of the English language : for the use of schools in the United States, of 1809. 

Nuttall’s Standard Dictionary of 1926 gives only ‘spew’, but Wyld’s Universal Dictionary gives two spellings – spew and spue; these two spellings were offered also in the 1980 edition of The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary. The current online OED gives only ‘spew’. 

The dictionaries seem to have preferred the spelling ‘spew’ alone up till around 1930, and dropped ‘spue’ after 1980, which roughly coincides with the point at which the word came to be deemed impolite. Is a connection fanciful? Does the spelling ‘spew’ somehow mimic the sound of the action more closely than ‘spue’, and thus render the whole thing unpleasant? Do analogous spellings help? Flue, glue, blue, true, are completely neutral, contrasted with chew, threw, blew, flew, and the possibility of graphically physical associations. These are selected to make an entirely unscientific point, but another approach might be more fruitful. Given the choice of two spellings in the two sentences following, which spelling looks more appropriate, ‘spued’ or ‘spewed’?

The animal …. its guts out on the ground.

The locomotive …. fire and sparks out onto the track.

It is noticeable too that in the scientific citations from after 1800 given in the OED the spelling ‘spue’ strongly outnumbers the spelling ‘spew’. 

All of these are tiny influences, but tiny influences can have strong effects in language change. After a conversation with friends regarding whether ‘-ize’ or ‘–ise’ is preferable, it is clear that the slightest thought that ‘-ize’ might be an Americanism turns out to be an absolute decider. No matter that the spelling may have originated in the British Isles.

Gone West, and other places

Over the winter of 1914/15 there was in The Times letters page a correspondence concerning the origin of the phrase ‘gone west’. The question ‘Does any one know the origin or meaning of the soldiers' curious phrase for death, ‘Going West’?’, posed on New Year’s Eve, firmly placed the phrase as one that was associated with, and possibly originated by, soldiers, the association continuing at the beginning of Israel Gollancz’s answer, published on 8 January. Gollancz, at the time Professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College London, and a Shakespeare scholar, quoted in his letter lines from a poem from the time of Chaucer:

Women and mony wilsome wy

As wynd and wattir ar gone west

(Women and many a good man

Like wind and water are gone west)

Gollancz’s letter leads down a path linking going west to travelling clockwise and its association with luck, as opposed to travelling widdershins; but more usefully mentions the wide association with the setting sun. But there are also regional origins supposed – including the idea of the condemned felon’s trip from London’s Newgate Prison westwards to the gallows at Tyburn. While the poem is identified as either originating in the West Midlands, or heavily influenced by the dialect of that area, Gollancz also questions whether the phrase was being used more by soldiers from particular areas of the British Isles – Scotland, Ireland or the West of England – noting that a previous correspondent had heard the phrase used by soldiers from Munster, the south-west of Ireland. All of these areas may be seen as having Celtic cultural influences (though what this actually means is difficult to determine), which links to the current definition of ‘gone west’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The sense became widespread during the First World War (1914–18). The relationship between quot. a1532[the poem quoted by Gollancz]  and the later evidence has not been firmly established. Apparently ultimately with reference to the west as the place of the setting sun and perhaps also to its identification (esp. in Celtic traditions) as the abode of the dead. 

The idea of a connection between death and the setting sun continued to be referred to by people fascinated by the phrase during the war, bringing references to other potential sources: the ‘Miscellany’ writer for the Manchester Guardian 25 September 1917 wrote that he had discovered the Chinese phrase hui-hsi, meaning ‘returned west’, or ‘gone to heaven’. The connection seems so natural that it perhaps needs to be pointed out that it is not universal; when Homer’s Odysseus decides to visit the land of the dead he is driven by a wind taking him southwards; and current American slang proposes ideas and processes that fail as having ‘gone south’.

Equally though it is worth wondering why its colloquial use early in the First World War had such a strong take-up. It is notable that the phrase does not appear in Farmer and Henley’s 1905 edition of A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial Usage; Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937) dates its popularization to the First World War, but notes the general idea appearing centuries earlier in English with the reference to the journey to Tyburn. Partridge believed this to be ‘the operative origin of the phrase’ but extended the referential field widely, noting associations he described as romantic, that connected the setting sun to the end of life, quoting a Greek proverb that translates as ‘life draws towards its evening, the west, the setting sun’. Partridge's trajectory of the phrase through five centuries cemented the link to death, from the 15th century to the 16th (‘55 women … are gone west’ [sadly with no reference but possibly a reference to religious or superstitious persecutions]), through the penal irony of the 17th and 18th, to a revival in America in the 19th with associations of the failure of many pioneering adventures; and finally to the cynicism of the trenches in Flanders. It must be said that Partridge ends this chapter of Words! Words! Words! (1933) with uncharacteristic emotion – ‘too many of our friends and our people meet their death like a gallant sun dipping over the western horizon that a better day might be born’. Perhaps the present tense use of ‘meet’ indicates the ongoing nature of the mental experience, but it is rather different in tone from the soldiers’ related terms offered on the same page – ‘pushing up the daisies’ and ‘copping a packet’.
 

Lockdown art from art

When we look back at the popular cultural practices prevalent during the lockdown period the home tableau reproduction of famous paintings will stand out as among the most creative, witty and challenging. As an art practice it is not new, and has become a part of how we engage with visual culture, a kind of homage through imitation, representation being the major theme of Western art for several centuries. However, the particular aspect of the present practice is the choice of items used, enforced by lockdown - we dress up using the items to hand, we use modern processed food and domestic items to imitate the seventeenth-century still-life and the fifteenth-century portrait, we sometimes go for deliberately bad imitation, using references of shape and colour but not the status of the object. We have fun with it, but we take it seriously. It is widespread enough and sufficient creativity is employed to make it worth asking some questions:

Is it more than just fun?

Why do people put so much work into it?

What is its relation to the selfie?

What governs which paintings people choose?

What does it tell us about how we locate ourselves culturally?

What does it tell us about how we evaluate particular art objects?

Does it have anything to do with not being able to visit art galleries? In fact, what would we find if we asked an individual or a group creating a live tableau reproduction of a famous painting, ‘when did you, or were you last able to, last see that painting in real life?’

Is this being done with any art that is not found in major galleries of western 2D art?

What do the people doing it get out of it? Is it competitive, and if so, how is success or failure judged?

While it may be proposed that what makes people do this is a mixture of boredom, fun, and following a wave (imitation of imitation, or indeed in terms of representational art, imitation of imitation of imitation), the over-riding questions that may provide the most fruitful thinking are ‘why these objects?’ and ‘what do we want from it?’

There is an undeniable sense of wit and ingenuity involved in the hockey-stick used in place of the staff of office, the dog standing in for the infant Christ, the garden chair used in place of Venus’ shell in the Botticelli painting, the saucepan and earphones used in place of headware. These replacements do not represent, for the saucepan does not represent the hat, it pushes it aside, it debases, domesticises and mocks the original, at the same time as acknowledging its importance. It uses similarities of colour and form to downgrade the original without upgrading the replacement; it resonates and represents while speaking its own difference. Despite the longevity of the portrait, it addresses the original with the challenge of similarity: in the current circumstances it says ‘for all your finery you are as mortal and as fragile as we are’.

What governs the choice of paintings? This presumably includes the point that the picture may be a favourite, may be easily reproducible, the subject may resemble the person or people, there may be sudden flashes of similarity between a prop in the painting and an item in the person’s home, or the idea of the challenge may give rise to absurd incongruities, such as the saucepan on the head. And why famous works of Western representative art? Is it because they are unchallengeable? They have already been turned into scarves,ties, tea-towels, food-trays, wrapping-paper, so why should representing them with ourselves be any different? Or are we saying, this is who we are, how we choose to be represented for our seconds of fame, as we hope to go viral?

A structure for this was provided by the Getty Museum, as reported by John Crace in The Guardian6 April 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/apr/06/how-i-became-the-duke-of-urbino-getty-museum-recreate-masterpiecebut the blog acknowledged that this was a case of major art institutions catching something that was happening already, in itself noteworthy. A major art institution appropriating something that might be seen as mocking high art could devalue any mockery, and announce, ‘this we can take, because we are unassailable, and this gentle mummery highlights the superiority of high art’. The Getty Museum blog labels the activity ‘recreating’, and recreation it is – the practice is directed towards fun rather than art, the offerings are described as ‘creative interpretations of iconic artworks’ and ‘ingenious and hilarious’https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-artworks-recreated-with-household-items-by-creative-geniuses-the-world-over/ Despite the status of Arcimboldo’s imitations of portraiture using fruit and vegetables, despite Sturtevant’s work using reconstruction from memory, despite the prescient work of Nina Katchadourian http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/photography/sa-flemish.phpand Hendrik Kerstens https://www.ifitshipitshere.com/with-his-daughter-as-muse-photographer-hendrik-kerstens-emulates-flemish-paintings/, they are not ‘art’. 

At art school I collaged myself into photocopies of famous paintings (scalpel and glue in those days) for a laugh, and later made serious work using recreative photography to understand through recreating an eighteenth-century family portrait. I have thought about recreating a painting and seeing what my ingenuity might achieve. But I would be more tempted to recreate with domestic objects cultural artefacts that are found beyond the National Gallery, a Sepik River mask from Papua New Guinea, an Indonesian shadow puppet, or an Ice Age sculpture; Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Weddingin the National Gallery in London is part of what made me me, but I would want to go beyond affirming the worth of western visual mimesis. However, stepping outside western art would be cultural appropriation taken into a frame of digital competence, the wit, ingenuity and mockery suddenly becoming uncomfortable. Would I dare to dress up (undress up rather) as the Willendorf Venus, as the statuette of Zeus hurling a thunderbolt, or downgrade into something from British folk-art – a toby-jug, a flatback Staffordshire pottery figure? Now the wit becomes self-mockery, pointless, missing the joke, and pointing out that it is primarily a joke.

As we examine the choices being made we see the boundaries that are implicit, and how they turn us inwards; Western art being played with by western people (and if you look at the reporting of this activity on https://www.businessinsider.com/at-home-recreations-of-famous-artwork-during-coronavirus-quarantine-2020-4?r=US&IR=T#-to-edvard-munchs-the-scream-from-1893-on-toast-12and the Getty’s own selection, as on 16 May 2020, what do you notice about the skin colour of the participants?) A lockdown within the lockdown.   

William Blake and mixed etching and engraving techniques

As is well known to Blake students, the artist was apprenticed to an engraver in his mid-teens and maintained a career as a jobbing engraver, which both gave him an income and introduced him to artists and publishers, some of whom became patrons*. Blake’s engraving work on Hayley’s Life of Cowper, published in 1803, was arduous though the results were far beyond competent; rather than thinking of this as drudgery, Blake was pleased with both the work he did and the standard of printing achieved by his wife Catherine – ‘She does [it] to admiration’. Inspection of the print shows Blake’s skill as an engraver, maintaining the curvature of broken line, and using a line of varying width in cross-hatch for nuances of form and tone. He was working at a time when engraving had reached its apogee, before the introduction of Fielding’s parallel line cutting process rendered engraving mechanistic and flat.

With this in mind it is tempting to assume that Blake kept apart the famous relief etching technique, for his own work, and the engraving, for reproducing the work of others. While visiting the recent Blake exhibition at the Tate Modern, at a time when I have been working with both engraving and etching, I spotted an interesting contrast of technique, and one which touches on a longstanding fascination with the reproduction of cross-hatch in printing.

In the title-plate for Chapter 2 of Jerusalem, which he worked on from 1804 till after 1820, two lovers embrace within the blossom of a flower lying on the surface of a pond; a leaf extends forward to the edge of the picture frame. Blake’s standard process in the work is relief etching, painting varnish onto the surface of the copper, and etching the plate in acid to leave a high flat surface which would take the ink from a brayer for contact printing, which water-colour applied afterwards (it is a process which is generally credited to Blake himself). In this image, in the area to the left of the blossom, below the title, there is an area where white line crosshatch lies on a dark background; to achieve the continuity of line (and from the Cowper portrait we can see how important and achievable this was for Blake) there were two possible processes, either to paint in all the intervening lozenge-shaped spaces, or to cut or scribe through a body area of varnish. Surely the second process would have been the instant choice of an engraver; what we do not know though, is whether the cut lines, registering as white, were done by engraving into the plate or just cutting through the varnish. Given the irregularity of the spacing between the lines it was more likely to be the latter. A few centimetres to the right the shading and form of the figure’s clothing is rendered in black line cross-hatch – in this case it is easy to assume the process here was painting the lines in varnish, so that the lozenge/square spaces in between were removed in the etching process. Just above and to the right other shading methods – dot within lozenge, and parallel line – indicate differences of form, texture and tone, both involving the scribe or graver rather than varnishing brush as the mark-making tool.

The leaf that extends to the foreground also shows a range of techniques: to the left black line cross-hatching, and to the right white line hatching. Except that close inspection brings doubt. On the left the lines do not show a continuous flow; it seems to be a net of lines, but some patches of line are thicker than others for very short distances, while others do not match up at all. Here evidently Blake was making the design by the creation of the white spaces between the lines, but how, and why? It is a technique that was used in woodcuts in the 15^thand 16^thcenturies, and even when Blake started working in wood-engraving in the 1820s he used the by then convention of shading and form though parallel lines rather than cross-hatch. Was he then cutting these, for Blake, irregularly shaped lozenges into the surface with a fine chisel or graver? The right-hand side of the leaf shows a cleaner flow of line, white this time, which would have been straightforward to produce using a soft varnish and a scribing tool. But the central area of the leaf moves, from right to left, from white-line cross-hatch to black-line cross-hatch, with a clear demarcation line where the lozenges change from black to white, and on to white-line parallel lines approaching the central vein of the leaf. Such design choices in such a small area show a mind thinking in advance of the moving scribing tool or graver, creating small areas of detail that indicate Blake working as thoroughly on the detail of composition as on the broad sweep of his spiritual cosmography.

*Proof of how Blake was influenced by the material he worked on as a jobbing engraver can be seen in the poem 'The Fly' in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake supplied engravings for Joseph Ritson's A Select Collection of English Songs (1783), one of which, a drinking song ‘Made extempore by a Gentleman, occasion’d by a Fly drinking out of his Cup of Ale’, supplied Blake with both theme and sentiment.