Perfumed Candles, 1705

Perfumed candles, to make them 

Perfumes of this kind are very grateful for the entertainment of company, when they have a double advantage of pleasing two senses by it, one in seeing the cheerful light and the other in smelling the delightful odours, it disperses from its beams. To do this, take dried charcoal made from the branches of willow an ounce, wood of myrrh, storax, calamita and aloes of each an ounce and a half, of labdanum an ounce, of amber and musk each seven grains, oil of spikenard two ounces, spirit of wine wherein gum tragacanth is dissolved two ounces, bees wax four ounces, make these by a gentle heat so soft that you may rowl them up like small candles over a cotton wick, and when you see your time light one or more of them and they will give a tolerable good light, and perfume the place with a very pleasing odour; but if they give not light enough for the entertainment, you may set common  candles amongst them, and these burning by the bedside of a sick person, will be a great refreshment to the fading or drooping of spirits. 

You may make this composition, leaving the wax out, into little cakes or balls, and burn it in the day time for being set on fire, it will burn out without putting on any live coals; but rather in such a case, make it up into little rowls the length of your finger.

Beauties Treasury 1705 

I have been trying to make sense of the use of the comma in this text. The first paragraph seems to be straightforward, with commas between clauses, or marking good places to take a breath, until the very odd comma between 'odours' and 'it'; odd that is until I realised that with the addition of 'which' before 'it' there is no problem at all. There does seem a serious need to have a comma between 'time' and 'for' in the second paragraph, for there is a definite change of direction in the sentence, as there has been in this one. The comma between 'ounces' and 'make' in the first paragraph would now be replaced by a semi-colon; and that between 'person' and 'will' is needing only its counterpart between 'these' and 'burning' to satisfy modern sensibilities (i.e. mine). 

Punctuation, and particularly the locating of commas, seems a very personal and idiosyncratic business, to do with how we make meaning as we write: the weight we give to clauses and the connections we wish to emphasise. Originally designed to indicate to an orator where to take a breath, the comma still carries something of this, as well as indicating a break between blocks of closely connected meaning in a sentence. At my school one teacher taught us that if you could read five consecutive words within a sentence and they 'made sense' there was no comma needed; and if they didn't, then one was. But I don't think this can be much more than a rule of thumb, or perhaps it was designed to get unruly boys to think about how to communicate effectively.

How pleasant to see that people were making scented candles in 1705. But shouldn't there be an apostrophe there - Beauty's Treasury rather than Beauties Treasury? That's another story.
                   

The Britisher’s back-bone

The Britisher’s back-bone

Very powerful muscles along the back support a man’s back-bone, and if the correct balance and poise of the body is to be attained, they must be cultivated with that object. How often do we hear the statement that so-and-so is man with “plenty of back-bone”? Sometimes the phrase may be meant to imply that he is a man full of pluck, sometimes to suggest that he possesses staying-power and endurance; sometimes it may even be used in an attempt to describe him as possessing the essential qualities of a Britisher. Yet a man with a good back-bone is merely a man who supports himself in the upright position with dignity and carriage. Such a one is reckoned within the British Empire to be typical of his race and tradition.

Physical Jerks, Thomas Lowe, 1921  

Captain Lowe was clearly a man with a mission: in the preface he states 'The war proved that the British were a C3 nation in physique and an A1 nation in ideals.' Had the War stiffened the British back-bone? Was there a need for the British male to get fit or to keep fit? Had those endless exercises at the Bull Ring at Etaples actually improved the physical fitness of the British serviceman, or made him so resentful of physical training that any form of PT was to be avoided?

A Notable Thing

A certain wench was born within fifteen miles of London, who within a year and a half after her birth did begin to eat earth, stones, brick and gravel. And so continued therein (having all her delight in eating of such baggage), also she did eat the woollen sleeves that were on her arms, besides that she did eat a glove. And on a time as her mother did feed her with milk, there chanced to fall a great piece of soot out of the chimney into the said milk, which soot the said child did take out of the dish with her fingers, and did eat it most greedily. She abhorred then bread and butter, and other such natural food. Whereby she was marvellously consumed with a flux, and yet she liveth, having nothing in her but skin and bone. I saw her in June 1577. She was born in Charsay, within two or three miles of Staines, at which time she was full three years of age.

This is from ‘A Thousand Notable Things’ compiled by Thomas Lupton, and published in 1579, and again in 1601. His grammar and/or punctuation seem to have gone a little awry, since he implies that she was full three years of age at the time of her birth, which alone would have made this a notable thing. I assume Charsay to be Chertsey.

Thomas Lupton was a protestant polemicist, who proposed to Queen Elizabeth the notably intelligent idea of a scheme of national insurance, including taxing the wealthy to support the sick and poor, and a national fund to repair bridges and coastal defences. His most well-known text, ‘A Thousand Notable Things of Sundry Sorts’, which remained in print into the nineteenth century, is a collection of folk recipes, observations, and odd ‘facts’ drawn from several medieval encyclopedias.

Of which more later.

Pregnacare Venus

Images from the series I am working on, called Pregnacare Venus (1, 2, etc.). ‘Venus’ with reference to the name usually given to European prehistoric carvings of pregnant women, though I don’t think it’s entirely appropriate. The figures represent women who may be about to give birth or may have just given birth, not a state usually attributed to Venus. ‘Pregnacare’, because that is the name of the raw material; so their generic name may change in the future. They are carved by hand from Pregnacare tablets, which measure 19 mm in the longest dimension.

  

 

To trench

'A boy from the town, trenching on Smith's monopoly, was selling papers with the afternoon's news.'

This is in H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds. This use of the verb ‘to trench’ in the sense of ‘to encroach on’ is very enjoyable. Which way does the trench go? Does it move over no man’s land on a broad front or is it a sap, moving directly forwards? The OED offers a single quotation, and that from 1631 – ‘Who did it? I? I trench the liberty o’ the subjects?’ from Staple of Newes by Ben Jonson. Sharp eyes will note that the earlier use did not require ‘on’, and that it is designated 'obs', for obsolete.

Any chance that, as a part of the centenary commemorative events next year, ‘to trench’ could be reinvigorated? Will the Labour Party trench the electorate’s faith in the Coalition? Does the knowledge that I have to paint the back door trench the prospect of a sunny weekend? Will a London football club trench Manchester’s apparent monopoly of the Premiership title? Can I trench the ground ivy’s domination of the topsoil at my allotment – and, by digging a trench, could I do that simultaneously metaphorically and physically?

One Day Wonder 3

On a not so warm June day we were very pleased to welcome so many new visitors to Valentines Mansion. A few views of the day:

 

Works seen here are by Anna Kiff, Pete Smithson and Shelagh McCarthy:

by Shelagh McCarthy and Helen Rousseau:

by Anne Eggebert and Angela Conway:

and Lynn Hewitt's performance work on and from the grand staircase balcony:

Off of

This looks fun: off of.

I have a few close friends and relatives who use ‘off of’, as in ‘take your feet off of the chair’, and others who don’t. I feel instinctively that it is incorrect, while those I know and respect use it all the time. A Google search raised a few questions – clearly I am not alone in feeling interested in this point, and more than a few people are distinctly worried about the phrase.

‘How can I explain to people that the phrase off of is grammatically incorrect?’ asks a writer to English Language & Usage (http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/619/how-can-i-explain-to-people-that-the-phrase-off-of-is-grammatically-incorrect); answers given include attempts to find analogies with other phrases (optimistically irrelevant because this seldom works with English), and an awareness that American English uses the form more than British English. This may lead us to the idea that it is an Early Modern English form, and true enough the online Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the first documentation of the form as 1567. Merriam-Webster also states that ‘The of is often criticized as superfluous, a comment that is irrelevant because off of is an idiom’ (fair enough, so is the f*****g in ‘abso-f*****g-lutely’; I’m not sure that claiming something as an idiom gets us anywhere). 

I note that the OED online does not recognise the phrase when queried, but the 1998 Modern English Usage (R W Burchfield) refers to several examples in the OED, beginning with one from Shakespeare. Burchfield does state clearly though that the phrase is 'still strongly present in the language of the less well educated but is indisputably non-standard in Britain' . Does that 'still' imply 'despite the best efforts of the British educational system' or 'a sadly obsolescent dialect form'? Burchfield goes on to note that all the twentieth century quotations in the OED are from 'sources representing non-standard speech', and Webster's College Dictionary (1991) states that it is 'widespread in speech, including that of the educated ... but is rare in edited writing'.

From earlier authorities I can find no references in the copies of Lindley Murray, William Cobbett or Henry Alford that are to hand, but an early edition of Nathaniel Bailey's Dictionary (1733 I think) gives the spectacular typo: 
Of - belonging to
Of - from 

Should I gently guide my children away from ‘off of’, as a creeping return-invasion from across the Atlantic? Or should I take comfort from the no-nonsense approach of Jane Strauss’s The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation:

Correct:
Take your shoes off the bed.

Incorrect:
Take your shoes off of the bed.

(And should that be Jane Strauss’ rather than Jane Strauss’s?)

http://www.grammarbook.com/grammar/probPrep.asp

I was very relieved about a year ago to find that ‘chronic’, which as a child and adolescent I, along with all my school-chums, used in the sense of ‘bad’, was seen as Essex dialect usage by the Rev Andrew Clark (Echoes of the Great War: The Diary of the Reverend Andrew Clark, 1914-19). Is ‘off of’ a UK regional dialect usage? Though it does not appear specifically in Edward Moor's Suffolk Words and Phrases (1823) there is the entry ‘Of’ with the gloss ‘We use this preposition in, I think, an unusual way – redundantly – “I missed of him” – “Taste of it” – “He is leaving of him”.’

This is promising. East Anglian migrants took several worthy things to America – clapboard housing, the Mayflower (built in Harwich), and I suspect the sound /d/ instead of /t/ in ‘beautiful'.

Discussion around the dinner table considered whether it is easier to say ‘take your feet off of the chair’ than ‘take your feet off the chair’. It is, but why? Why should it be easier to say two words than one word, especially if the two-word phrase contains the one word of the other alternative? Admittedly it is easier to say ‘I was like’ than ‘I said’ – there’s an unavoidable hiatus between ‘I’ and ‘said’ which is elided away in ‘I was like’. The dinner-table consensus was that somehow we manage to elide ‘off of’ to make it feel faster and more comfortable than just ‘of’. But I would not like to allow ease of pronunciation prime role as the ruler of language change.