Wednesday’s shrinking market. A bit of linguistic investigation. Travellers having problems of one kind or another.

It’s Wednesday so I set off to catch a bus to the market in Uppermill. I was out earlier than planned and my Bee app (the app that gives me info about Greater Manchester public transport) told me my bus was not going to come for about 15 minutes. So I walked a couple of stops along the route. It was a fine and sunny and waiting at a bus stop in the open air was more pleasant than standing in the often rather smelly bus shelter at the crossroads. 

The market was more depleted than ever. In the square there was only the fishmonger. Maybe the shoe and slipper man (shoe-and-slipper-monger?) was on holiday as he quite often goes off to Spain. The other stalls that used to be in the square disappeared some time ago. On the other side of the road, outside the Methodist church, there is still a busy flower and plant stall but really it is hard to call the whole set-up a market any longer. 

Having wondered about the possibility of saying “shoe-and-slipper-monger”, I decided to do a bit of research. It’s something of an occupational habit among linguists. The first thing I found was this:

monger /mŭng′gər, mŏng′-/

noun

A dealer in a specific commodity. Often used in combination. 

"an ironmonger."

A person promoting something undesirable or discreditable. Often used in combination. 

"a scandalmonger; a warmonger."

A trader; a dealer; -- now used chiefly in composition. 

"fishmonger, ironmonger, newsmonger"

Other sources reinforced the idea of a “monger” as someone not to be admired:

a person who is involved with something in a petty or contemptible way (usually used in combination).
a gossipmonger.

a promoter of something unpleasant
warmonger

It turns out to be an old term:

Origin of monger

First recorded before 1000; Middle English noun monger(e), mounger, Old English mangere, equivalent to mang(ian) “to trade, act as a monger” (ultimately from Latin mangō“salesman”) + -ere agent noun suffix; cognate with Old Norse, Old High German mangari.

There you go!

I said that wondering about words was a bit of an obsession among linguits. linguists. Out of the blue yesterday, Phil pondered about the origin of the expression “the elephant in the room”.  This is what my research gave me: 

“In 1814, Ivan Krylov, (1769–1844), poet and fabulist, wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man", which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant. The phrase became proverbial. Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel Demons wrote, "Belinsky was just like Krylov's Inquisitive Man, who didn't notice the elephant in the museum...."

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first recorded use of the phrase, as a simile, in The New York Times on 20 June 1959: "Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room. It's so big you just can't ignore it.According to the website the Phrase Finder, the first known use in print is from 1952.

This idiomatic expression may have been in general use much earlier than 1959. For example, the phrase appears 44 years earlier in the pages of the British Journal of Education in 1915. The sentence was presented as a trivial illustration of a question British schoolboys would be able to answer, e.g., "Is there an elephant in the class-room?"

There you go!

 I thought my Spanish sister was safely home with her family in the south of Spain. It’s about 10 days since she and her daughter and grandchildren left here to have a few days in London. I knew she planned to visit a friend once her daughter and co had set off for Spain but I really thought she had returned home by now. Then today I received this message: 

“Hi Anthes. I am stranded in Gatwick 😂After three hours sitting in the plane yesterday, we were told our flight, and all other flights had been cancelled due to a major air traffic control problem. I finally managed to get a flight to Gibraltar today at 16:30, but It was impossible to get a hotel and I have been in the airport all night, luckily in good company with people I met xxx”

Well, as I’ve read reports about continuing chaos at Gatwick, we are now keeping our fingers crossed that she manages to depart today.  One night sleeping in the airport is a bit of an adventure but a second night would be rather excessive.

Also excessive is the continued speculation about those travellers and would-be family rejoiners the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. So here’s a cartoon to that effect:

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Tree-cutting. Looking at the Bayeux Tapestry. Patriots. Starting a new school. And surnames.

 I woke up this morning to the sound of tree surgeons at work. Returning from my run yesterday I saw them at work too. Today I saw them removing overhanging branches from the driveway of the across the road neighbours’ house before I set off for my run. As I returned there was no sign of them but I’ve heard them from time to time all day so far. It seems to be work going on in the gardens of a row of houses a short distance along the road from here where there are some very large mature trees. I’m hoping they’re just pruning rather than cutting down whole trees. And If the latter, then I wonder if they have permission. We are fortunate to have plenty of trees around here but we need to keep them. I am opposed to cutting down trees without good reason.

Weatherwise the day has been odd. There was very heavy rain in the dead of night. Thundery showers and a light breeze are forecast for today. I wore a light raincoat when I ran first thing but despite the dismal forecast I did not get rained on. Neither did thunder occur. Later I contemplated hanging some washing out to dry but it was just starting to rain, not heavily but rain nonetheless! So we are back to hanging washing indoors to dry. It has been very pleasant over the last couple of months to hang washing in the garden and to being it in splendidly dry. Of course, since I hung the washing on a drier in the spare room, the sun has emerged once again. So it goes.

Important people have been looking at the Bayeux Tapestry.

The Labour MP Lisa Nandy, accompanied by the British Museum chair, George Osborne, views the tapestry. 

King Charles, alongside Queen Camilla, speaks to Emmanuel Macron as they view a section of the tapestry at the British Museum in London. 

It is interesting that Lisa Nandy had to wear a protective apron but King Charles and his party did not.

Here’s a link to an interesting update on the tapestry.

Here’s a cartoon portraying the black-clad, balaclava-wearing “patriots” involved in the anti-immigration protests over the weekend. 

They call themselves Patriot Platform - an army of Christian Patriots. ii’s curious how the followers of a man who advocated turning the other cheek and tolerating people from other races end up being violent and claiming to do so in the name of religion. From the Crusades to colonising English and Spanish forcibly converting Native Americans to Patriot Platform! 

The founder of Patriot Platform, aka Danny Tommo, like other rightwing agitators was privately educated - hardly a deprived child then! After some time in prison for attempted kidnapping he  "claims to have turned his life around, attending church every week and 'praying for forgiveness'." If he’s going round inciting violence he’s going to need to do some more praying for forgiveness!

Incidentally, on the subject of private schools, Prince George has just begun his time at Eton. It has always struck me as a strange practice to send the children you love away to boarding school for quite long chunks of time. It would be interesting to have a future king educated at a local comprehensive school, carefully selected of course! 

As another member of the royal family has been in the news lately, Harry having brought his family back to England, I wondered about surnames. Well, it seems that young George began primary school as George Cambridge but at Eton he will be George Wales, his name varying according to the title given to his parents. So presumably Harry’s children will be called Sussex, as their parents are the duke and duchess of Sussex. And all of them can fall back on Mountbatten-Windsor, if they so choose. 

So much choice and apparently so easy.

Our Granddaughter Number Two went through quite a bit of red tape and paid I don’t know how mu h money to change her surname. She didn’t want her father’s name, which figured on her birth certificate, but wanted our family name.

Surnames are interestingly different in  different countries. Spain large.y used he father’s and mother’s surnames together. So former King Juan Carlos is Bonbón y Borbón, King Felipe is Borbón y Grecia while Leonor, Princess of Asturias, heir to the Spanish throne, is Borbón y Ortiz. More ordinary folk don’t bother with ‘y’ between the surnames. 

I like the Danish option. in 2006 Denmark reinstated patronymic and matronymic surnames as an option. Thus, parents Karl Larsen and Anna Hansen can name a son Karlsen or Annasen and a daughter Karlsdotter or Annasdotter.

That’s enough nonsense for today.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Birthdays. Quails. Protestors. Tom Petty. Noisy tennis.

Yesterday we did mid-birthday celebrations at our house. Granddaughter Number Four was 10 last Wednesday. Her brother, Grandson Number Two, will be 7 next Wednesday. So we had a family celebration at the midpoint, yesterday. I roasted a chicken, with all the usual trimmings, and Granddaughter Number Two made a shared cake.

Granddaughter Number One regaled us with news of one of her quail who has been hatching her own eggs, something quite rare apparently among domestic quails. We have decided to rename Granddaughter Number One as Grandmother of Quails. Not quite so impressive as Mother of Dragons (Game of Thrones reference) but there it is.

A good time was had by all. The washing up was mostly done communally (big family dinners are the only occasions when I feel the need for a dishwashing machine) but there were still some dishes that had been put on one side and forgotten until this morning. 

Also this morning I stripped the chicken carcass, with enough meat left to make a chicken hotpot for this evening’s dinner, and put the bones in a pan to make chicken stock and eventually soup. We do a good line in leftovers at our house.

Over the weekend, people dressed in black and wearing balaclavas staged a protest in Dover and then in Southhampton against a boatload of immigrants arriving to be processed. Some of the reports suggest this was a spontaneous protest. It’s funny how they all spontaneously wore black and covered their faces. Perhaps they all spontaneously followed a call to action on social media. Part of a report in the Guardian says, “Hundreds of men, some dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, tried to stop the arrivals from being transported for processing until 3am, when police removed them with threats of arrest.”

Hmmm! THREATS of arrest! Had they been pensioners expressing support for Palestine Action they might not have been threatened by actually arrested! Clearly not a proscribed terrorist organisation.

It’s almost nine years since Tom Petty died, not long after I danced barefoot to his music in Hyde Park. Tom Petty, of course, was one of the Travelling Wilburys, the supergroup made up of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty himself. Here’s a cartoon somebody posted on a Tom Petty site on social media: 

Tennis is one of those sports that demands silence. The umpire at Wimbledon calls out, “Quiet please!” at the start of a match. The noisiest I imagine is John McEnroe shouting out in anger at the umpire’s decision: “You can’t be serious!” Well, it seems that the US Open has become extremely noisy. There’s ambient noise from cooling units just outside the stadium, railroad noise of trains going to Long Island, forklift trucks delivering supplies of champagne and such like to the stadium and planes flying overhead. But principally it seems to be the spectators among whom are influencers who chatter continuously or talk into their phones to accompany the videos they are making to put out on social media. The ubiquitous mobile phone is disrupting another bit of life as we know it.

Perhaps this photo, with its caption saying, “Fans look at their phones during the 2025 US Open”, says it all. 

The writer of this article says that New York is indeed a noisy city but contrasts the noise of another district of the city with the noise at the US Open:

“Continuing west you’ll eventually land in Corona, a densely populated working-class neighborhood with a significant presence of Mexican and Ecuadorian immigrants. Here the contrast with the hordes at the US Open is genuinely fascinating. The streets are clamorous and intense, filled with the clatter of the elevated 7 train, the pop and sizzle of the food trucks, the chatter of twilight conversations on stoops and sidewalks, and the slap-slap-slap of the games of dominoes that crowd every corner. But there are no phone-gazing zombies meandering across pavements; there’s none of the greedy insensitivity of the masses at the Open; there aren’t even many devices visible. These streets are packed with people and thrumming with life, but their vibrancy is neighborly, uplifting, and welcoming, rather than hectoring, selfish, and bland as is the case for the hyperactivity beyond the entrance gates of the National Tennis Center.”

Interesting!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Cats. Seduction. And taking what does not belong to you.

 When my Spanish niece visited England for the first time, 35 years ago or more, we were out for a walk when we came across a cat walking along the top of a garden wall. We stopped to take a look at it, as you do when a friendly cat approaches you, but the little girl backed off, declaring, “Es un gato salvajel”. After all back then you saw very few domestic cats on the streets of Spain. They were, and probably still are.

(Incidentally we had a similar incident with her son during their recent visit here. I have mentioned the chap who leaves baking apples on his wall for passers-by to take. Well, out on a walk, my ‘Spanish” sister, her daughter and grandsons came across some of these apples. The 14 year-old advised his grandmother not to take any on the grounds that they might be poisoned!)

Here in the UK, back when I was a kid it was accepted as fairly normal that cats were let out in the mornings and came and went as they saw fit. Some stayed out all night! Come to that, many dogs were fed at breakfast time and set free to roam the neighbourhood until suppertime. These were, of course mostly mongrels. More expensive purebred, thorough-bred, dogs were only set free in the back garden. And there were not so many odd crossreeds of dogs back in the day. 

Nowadays, as regards cats being indoor or outdoor pets, it’s probably about 50-50. Granddaughter Number One has indoor cats. Our daughter is negotiating with a cat rescue organisation about adopting  couple of rescue cats win special needs. Someone needs to inspect her house and family set-up before agreeing to the adoption. These too will be indoor cats. Yet we have regular visitor-cats in our garden, clearly perfectly normal cats exploring the neighbourhood.

There is, however, a threat to those ordinary, perfectly normal outdoor cats in the shape of “cat seducers”. Cats have always been very independent and prepared to take advantage of any situation. Our son has two cats, one of which will happily help himself to the contents of his slower-eating brother’s food dish. And cats have long been known to go and scrounge an extra meal in a neighbouring house. But according to this article, such behaviour is causing friction in communities as some folk claim ownership of cats that take to wandering into their home to be fed. Accusations of “encouraging” scrounging abound. Beloved moggies return home plump and well fed, sometimes with their collars removed or replaced with a new one. Some stay away from home for weeks, seduced into new homes. Who knew that such troubles went on? Appropriating stuff that is not your own.

Of course, more serious appropriation of other people’s property, land and livelihood is still going on in Palestine. Here’s a report from Thursday by Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem:

“Israelis have shot dead two teenagers in a Palestinian village encircled by settlers, and Israeli troops have razed an entire village outside Hebron, in the latest attacks in a surge of Israeli terror and ethnic cleansing across the occupied West Bank.

The shootings targeted Khalil Abu Alia, 16, who was about to start 11th grade at the al-Mughayyir boys school, and 19-year-old Omar al-Nassan, who graduated from the same institution with top marks this summer.

The teenagers were killed soon after sunset, when a group of settlers entered the village under police and military escort to steal dozens of sheep from a Palestinian home, village residents and Israeli activists said.

Snipers took up position on rooftops and one shot Abu Alia in the neck, his English teacher, Waheed Abu Naim, said in a phone interview. The boy was on the doorstep of his home when he was targeted.”

It’s still happening!

Life foes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The wind and the rain. Things in the garden. The Bayeux tapestry. NEETS, education, phones and AI in general.

It was raining when I went to bed last night. It may well have rained all night. When I woke up this morning it was not just raining x it was positively torrential. I gave up on the idea of running round the village and did some indoor exercises instead. Not quite as satisfying but there it is.

Later in the morning, after breakfast, in a lull in the weather (it’s very windy again and consequently the weather keeps changing) I stepped out into the garden to check on the progress of my stray sunflower. All good!

The next door neighbours’ son and his girlfriend were removing water from the roof of the gazebo which was erected in the garden early in the summer. It has served as a sunshade and as protection from the rain. In the spells of hot weather clothes were hung out there to dry overnight. The son and his girlfriend shelter there to smoke when it rains. The overnight rain had collected in the roof of the gazebo, stretching and weighing down the fabric.

I read that King Charles and President Macron had a visit to the Bayeux tapestry yesterday. Did they speak French or English, or maybe a mixture of the two? I wonder. Anyway, here is a Bayeux tapestry related cartoon:

Simon Jenkins was writing in todays’s Guardian about NEETs, the young people not in employment, education or training, calling for a change in the way we prepare our young people for adult life. Here’s a link to his article. 

I was particularly struck by this section:

   “I used to notice pupils at my local secondary breaking up for the day. They would burst through the gates conversing in twos, threes or larger groups. These groups would merge and dissolve down the street like clouds. I liked to see them as a metaphor for the economy at work.

Today those same groups are quite different, composed of pupils with heads buried in phones and with just a few of them shouting into the air. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in “The Anxious Generation” finds this a universal facet of younger generations on both sides of the Atlantic. Social media is denying them the art of conversation, of intellectual tolerance. It is electronic introversion and there is no GCSE in that – let alone a job interview. These phones must disappear.”

Coincidentally, here is a link to a short article which comments on the fact that people in general, people of all ages, are talking less and less. We do so many things online these days that casual conversation is disappearing. Personally I am conduction a sort of mini campaign, talking to people on buses, trying not to use self-serve checkouts if I can avoid it (this has a double purpose, keeping cashiers in employment and keeping chitchat alive), shopping in person instead of doing a weekly shop online. But it becomes increasingly hard to avoid the intrusion of AI into our everyday life. Here’s a comment about that. 

Quite so! It’s bad enough that my phone seems to listen in to all my conversations, resulting in my receiving advertisements for items I have just mentioned in passing. I really don’t need my household equipment spying on me as well.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!