Words.

I do like to find out the origin of words. Yesterday it was the turn of "grog". According to an article I found yesterday we gained that word this way. Sailors used to receive a daily tot of neat rum. I knew that already, as a matter of fact. What I didn't know was that the practice continued until 1970. Maybe someone decided that it was not a good idea to be operating increasingly technological machinery after drinking a tot of rum. The practice was introduced in the first place because the water they took with them on the boats was so foul. 

Anyway, in 1740 a certain Admiral Edward Vernon introduced a mixture of one part rum to four parts water, flavoured with lemon juice (to provide vitamin C and try to prevent scurvy) and brown sugar. The admiral was known as Old Grog because he wore a cloak made from grogram, a waterproof fabric. And so the drink was given the name grog in his (dubious) honour. His aim was to reduce drunkenness but many sailors used to save up their drinks and then go on a spree, ending up feeling "groggy". 

It's interesting to discover where the words for feeling out of sorts come from. Words that we use all the time without thinking about where they come from. There's "groggy" and there is also "lousy", which comes from a time when it was difficult to combat headlice and the constant need to scratch your head as the nasty little creatures nibbled away at you made you feel ill. Oh my goodness, I now want to scratch my head! 

Back to grog: the fabric that old Grog's cloak was made from - grogram - gets its name from a mispronunciation of a French word "grosgrain" which means "rough weave", producing a tough, heard wearing fabric. Actually, it's not so much a mispronunciation as an anglicised spelling of the French pronunciation. The Spanish have the habit of "hispanifying" borrowed foreign words in this way, "leader" became "lîder", "meeting" became "mítin" and "croissant" became croisán". They have not yet put an accent on the first syllable of "penalty" but then, they simply mispronounce it, putting the emphasis on the second syllable. But they have made "goal" into "gol". 

You can't win them all.

Tolerance

Discussion of matters political continues here with only a few weeks to go the election. It seems that in the televised debate on Thursday Ed Miliband has persuaded some people that he might not be such a bad bet for the role of Prime Minister after all. This does not stop some very personal attacks from his opponents though; if anything it probably provokes them. There is some very nasty campaigning going on this time. Whether it is this or the much publicised almost open racism of a certain party but some people appear to feel they have been given carte blanche to be downright rude to campaigners. 

A Labour Party candidate introduced herself to an elderly man (it is impossible to call him a gentleman) on the campaign trail. His response was, 'I know who you are, I've got your leaflet. Get off my doorstep, Jew.' It's rather worrying to think that people feel that it's all right to shout abuse in this way in public, which is what the old chap did as the campaigner walked away. Are we really becoming a less tolerant society and, disturbingly, one where it's okay to voice your prejudices out loud for all to hear? 

I was reading an article about the American writer Saul Bellow, who spoke Yiddish or Russian at home with his parents, spoke English or French at school and learnt Hebrew from the age of three. By his own account as a young child, "I didn't know what language I was speaking and didn't understand if there was any distinction among these various languages". The natural tolerance of children, I suppose. He also spoke the street slang of Chicago, spending time on the streets with other youngsters. He said that the neighbourhood schools "earnestly tied to convert or civilise their pupils, the children of immigrants from every European country. To civilise was to Americanise us all." To "Americanise" is a wonderful turn of phrase. I wonder if you could still say that now. Is it politically correct? 

Here are a few odd facts. 

The first curry house in Britain was opened in Brighton in 1809 by ex-sepoy Dean Mohammed. 

English converts to Islam numbered about 1,000 at the turn of the last century and supported the building of Britain's first purpose-built mosque in 1889 in Woking. 

These facts were gleaned from a review of "Exotic England" by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, herself a Ugandan Asian who came to the UK in 1972. She asks, "What kind of England will emerge in the coming years? Will it become soulless, colourless, mean, closed off and small? Or will it choose ... to be open, big, international and curious, easy with diversity because it always has been?" 

Then the Observer ran a poll on all sorts of things concerned with Europe, immigration, the state of the UK, housing, money and so on; you name it, it was included! Now, I wonder, of the 48% of those polled who said that they strongly agree that "immigrants coming to this country should embrace the British way of life rather than hold on to the lifestyle they had at home" go on holiday abroad and look for places serving an English breakfast and English fish and chips and turn their noses up at the "foreign muck" served in restaurants in those sunny places. 

So much for tolerance.

Second hand stuff.

In our local Co-op shop there is a TV screen with a rolling programme of odd news items and reminders that the Co-op belongs to it's members (other shops have loyalty cards but the Co-op cardholders are "members", going back to the original idea of the Co-operative movement. I don't accumulate points that have to be used in store; I receive a dividend which is paid into my bank account. I can still remember going shopping for my mother and being asked in the co-op for her "divvy" number - 9232 by the way!) and urging members to swipe their card, by buying stuff, and so be entered into a draw at the end of the month. 

One of the news items this morning was something about a dress worn by Vivien Leigh in her role as Scarlett O'Hara in the film Gone with the Wind. It had sold for a fabulous sum of money, which seemed to me a bit much for a dress that might have been made out of curtains. (An impoverished Scarlett makes a dress out of green velvet curtains when she wants to impress society and persuade them that she is still doing fine.) 

So I googled the news item when I got home from my run into the village. It turned out not to be the curtain dress. It's a much shabbier affair. Everyday wear, I suppose, rather than what you choose when you dress to impress. The collector who was selling it had bought it originally for $20, saving it from just being thrown away, and now sold it for $137,000. Not a bad profit! 

In the same auction, Scarlett's straw hat sold for €52,000, a suit worn by Clark Gable as Rhett Butler for $55,000 and a black bonnet worn by both Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Olivia de Havilland as Melanie Wilkes for $30,000. You would have thought that the last item might have got more as it was double memorabilia but clearly the world of nostalgia is as fickle as fame itself. 

Either way, that's an awful lot of money for a pile of second hand clothing.

Modern Times.

I continue to find social media strange and somehow alien. Oh, certainly, I post stuff on Facebook and indulge in arguments there with former students about whether it is more valid for people to post pictures of where they are than pictures of their babies' progress. (As far as I am concerned, both work as a way of keeping your friends (real friends) up to date with what you are currently doing.) But I haven't got my head round tweeting. I read today about someone who tweets pictures of stuff he finds in ancient manuscripts in his work at the British Museum: ancient pictures that look like Yoda from Star Wars, for example. And then there's a shepherd who tweets about his work out on the hills with his flock. At first he was amazed to find he had 700 followers. Now he has around 7,500. All interesting stuff. 

And then there are the death threats. It appears to have become the norm for people to send death threats to famous folk who do something that offends them. Sack Jeremy Clarkson: death threat! Be a possible replacement for Jeremy Clarkson: death threat! Make almost any statement about anything at all: death threat! How did expressing your displeasure at something or your disagreement with an opinion change into the need to threaten violence? Why is that acceptable? Some of these messages are so horribly explicit that they are truly disturbing and the recipient has to withdraw from tweeting altogether. Are the people who send these messages the sort who would resort to fisticuffs in the pub if someone said something they disagreed with? Surely not all of them! The amount of money wasted because the police have to investigate a fair number of these threats and provide protection for the recipients must be quite considerable. And of course, if they ignored them and something happened to one of the high-profile receivers of threats, there would be a major outcry. We live in a crazy world! 

Over in Cannes, where they are gearing up for the Film Festival, they are trying to reduce the number of selfies taken during the proceedings. They are trying to put a limit on the number of selfies that can be taken with the Palais du Cinema in the background. Quite how they will do it is a different matter altogether. You would think that the famous would not need to take selfies but apparently some do. Surely they have enough pictures taken by the paparazzi! 

My lack of understanding of social media and how they work does not stop me from finding bits and pieces of stuff that amuse me. Here is a link to an article about expressions in modern everyday usage that are really annoying to its writer - and to me, for that matter!

And here's another thing that I have been getting a little stressed about recently: sloppy use of language. Today a certain Ben Jacobs was writing in the Guardian about Hillary Clinton and her attitude to same-sex marriages. Suddenly I came across this: 

"While first lady, former president Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma), which prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages." 

Now, to my way of understanding things, that sounds as though Bill Clinton was once First Lady. Really? Was he? Did this happen in an alternative reality? Of course, what the journalist meant was " While Hillary Clinton was First Lady ....". However, that is not what he has written. This isn't even a case of my being pedantic. This is just plain sloppy. And it is not the first example I have come across. 

What is going on? Is there a younger generation of journalists who never paid attention in English lessons at school? And where was the editor, or at least the sub-editor, when this was allowed to go to press? 

Ok, another rant over!

Life's casualties.

Well, so much for the promised fine weather. On the radio I heard someone commenting on the blue sky in Camden, I think it was. Here we have cloud and fine drizzle. To be fair, the newspaper does say that the country is split, summer in the south and back to winter in the north. That's the way it goes. 

It was fine and dry enough for a good run this morning but by the time I went out later to the post office it was decidedly damp and miserable. I needed to post a pair of pyjamas left behind by one of the young Spanish chess players. Initially when I asked for his address, the responsible adults in Spain responded by saying we didn't need to post the pyjamas. They know we are due to go back to Galicia some time soon and suggested we just took them with us. So I had to explain the hand-luggage-only travel philosophy that we follow. We really need every milligram of the 10 kilos each for stuff of our own. We have it down to a fine art and could probably run seminars an the art of travelling light! 

It is, however, very easy to leave stuff behind when you travel. We once had to contact a French hotel to retrieve a jacket carelessly left behind by a friend of ours when we were on holiday together. This was in the days before internet and so we had to find the phone number of the hotel in order to get in touch. I seem to remember we put a ten franc note in an envelope to cover postage. That is not as good as the German exchange teacher who once left half his summer wardrobe behind in our son's bedroom. He had brought shorts and tee shirts just in case the weather proved warm (no chance!) and never wore them. Our son discovered the clothing when he moved back into his room, having doubled up with his sibling for the duration of the visit. We were a little surprised at the amount of stuff left behind though. Did his suitcase not feel extremely light? 

For as long as I can remember there has been an old tramp (probably no older than I am, truth to tell) who could be seen wandering the length and breadth of Oldham town. I have seen him in all sorts of far flung spots. A friend of mine once found herself standing behind him in the post office, an uncomfortable place in the queue. Every few years you might notice that he had a new, or new-to-him, parka, soon rendered as disreputable as the rest of his attire. I never once saw him beg. He simply walked and walked and walked. And now, this morning, my daughter tells me that the news is "all over Facebook" that he has died. I must have the wrong friends as the news is not there on my Facebook. 

I wondered what happens about the funeral of someone like this but my daughter commented that she had heard that he came from quite a wealthy family. He even had a place in a care home but would not stay. She had heard that he went off the rails when his wife died. Now, that must have been years ago for he has been tramping the highways and byways of Oldham for nigh on twenty five years. 

What pushes people like him into a life choice like that? I remember an old, truly very old, lady who we used to see around our village years and years ago. A strange fey creature, she never spoke to anyone, managed a bit of a smile for children and would buy bits and pieces in the local shops. This was back when we had more shops than the Co-op which is all we have now. She lived in an old caravan, a tiny little place, parked up in the hills above the village. If you went hiking, someone was sure to point it out. And she lived there summer and winter, come rain or shine or even snow. Often she would be seen in snowy weather with the most inappropriate, broken footwear. She was another who was said to have come from a wealthy family. Rumour had it that she became reclusive and strange after her heart was broken but nobody seemed to know the truth of the matter. Rumour also had it that she had been cheated out of her fortune by a family member taking advantage of her distress. From time to time someone would organise a place in a residential care home but she always returned to her caravan where she died, years ago now. 

Another of life's casualties. 

It always seemed to me that her story could well have fitted into Laurie Lee's "Cider with Rosie, except that it was taking place some forty or fifty years after his tales. And yet we still seem to have people falling through the cracks of our society and simply not coping with life. Let's see one of the political parties put that right.

Political nonsense.

I am growing more than a little tired of hearing David Cameron tell us that his party is the party of working people. The party of people who work in extremely highly paid jobs perhaps! How are ordinary people persuaded to vote for the Conservatives? It has always mystified me. 

His latest ploy is to promise to revive the right to buy your council house, assuming that you are actually renting a council house and not paying an extortionate amount of rent to a private landlord. Being able to buy council houses won't help those people to get on to the property ladder. And we are a little obsessed in the UK with the idea of having to own our homes: an Englishman's home is his castle and all that sort of thing. Now, I can understand the desire to own a bit if property. And I know that my parents would probably not have bought a house if the chance to buy their council house had not come up. And yet ... and yet, having sold off council property in the past something was lost along the way. 

It used to be the accepted thing that a young couple rented their first home, usually a council house if they could manage it because that was the most reasonably priced. This enabled them to save up the deposit for a little place of their own. Some people never managed it and remained in their council house forever but no one thought any the worse of them for that - unless they were unfortunate enough to live in a really rough council estate, in which case the were pitied rather than looked down on. But if the only council housing available is precisely on those rough estates where no one chooses to live, then young couples nowadays are forced into the more expensive private rental market and bang goes their chance of saving any money for a house of their own. 

Surprisingly (to most British people anyway), in some other European countries it is much more common to rent and nobody feels inferior because they don't own the place they live in. Or maybe they do and nobody talks about it. Maybe I am just talking total nonsense. However, I still don't think David Cameron should pretend to be a man of the people. In fact, I don't think any of our politicians can truly claim to be a man of the people. That era seems to be in the past and nowadays they are all professionals, unfortunately! 

I came across a curious article about politicians, all about the most frequently Googled questions about them. For almost all of them, one of the things questioners wanted to know was how tall the politician was. Almost all the leaders of the main parties are nicely tall, hovering around or just above six feet tall, probably a sign of the good diet they had as children. Nigel Farage is considerably shorter, about five feet eight. This does not stop him making a lot of noise. Nicola Sturgeon is only five feet four but she is a Scotswoman after all and her people seem to look up to her anyway. 

But what a strange way of judging people. Maybe the ballot paper should tell us the age, height, marital status of candidates as well as the party they belong to. Perhaps we could also have a photo so that we could vote for the best looking!

Things going on.

Yesterday was something of a right-off. I had suggested that our younger grandchildren be dropped off at our house for the afternoon so that our daughter could get on with preparation she needs to do for her ongoing school placement, the final stage of her becoming a fully qualified teacher. So, of course, it rained! The small boy, who really wanted to go and kick his ball a round in the garden, had to make do with football ranted activities on his iPod. These seemed to involve a lot of electronic communication with a friend doing the same thing in another place. His sister, who had brought her wellies in case she hot to paddle in the river, used some of the time to string beads. How fortunate that I had kept a few packets of very small glass beads. She only managed to spill them all over the floor once! Not quite the day of outdoor activity that we had planned. Everyone enjoyed roast chicken for tea though! 

Today, by contrast, has been dry and bright but very cold! Windy as well. So, what do you do on a bright and windy day? You wash anything that is not nailed down and hang it out to dry. The gardens of all the neighbours are evidence that this is the case for a large number of people living in the north of England. No space for children to play our today: everywhere is full of loaded washing lines. 

Here as some things in the news today:- 

The German writer Gunter Grass dead. He lived to the ripe old age of 87, which is In itself quite an achievement. He managed to be a respected but sometimes controversial figure as well. I read his first novel, "The Tin Drum", years ago but I have not read anything of his since. Maybe this is another writer to add to my list of people I want to rediscover. 

Hillary ( I can't spell my own name) Clinton has announced that she is running for president of the USA. (I am sure her name should really be spelt "Hilary" but it is her name so I suppose we'll have to accept her version of it.) It is reported that a lot of people in this country have been tweeting their excitement about this announcement. They are much more excited about this than about our own imminent elections. Maybe that is not so surprising; the campaign here is being reduced to a lot of nastiness and name calling. We can only hope that they start to talk politics instead of scandal and backbiting before too long. 

If Hillary Clinton achieves her ambition and becomes POTUS - President of the United States - I wonder what Bill Clinton's title will be. I have recently seen a photo of Michelle Obama with the caption "FLOTUS ... (does something that I have forgotten already)". FLOTUS stands for First Lady of the United States. Would Bill be First Gentleman? How would we all pronouns FGOTUS? Of course, this is all hypothetical. She still has to win the election yet. So far she has been to Iowa. 

I have never understood why Iowa is so crucial but from watching "The West Wing" and "House of Cards" I am aware of its importance. All I really know of Iowa is that Bill Bryson began his book "The Lost Continent" with the words, "I come from Des Moines. Someone had to." It sounds so apologetic that I have often wondered what the place is really like. 

In France the Paris-Roubaix cycle race was almost hit by train. The peloton approached a level crossing. Some of them got through. It became clear a train was coming. Most of the remaining peloton stopped but one or two opted to nip through, hoping to remain with those who had already crossed. They were almost cycling history! Dedication to your sport is one thing. So is the ambition to win. But risking your life for it by dodging trains is something else again. 

On the subject of trains, here is a link to an article about amazing train journeys. Picturesque rides through distant lands. Well, mostly distant. One of them was in Austria where a train runs from the unbelievably named Gloggnitz to somewhere or other. Mürzzuzchlag was the name I think. I should not laugh at odd-sounding names when we live in area which has places called Mytholmroyd and Micklethwaite and Slaithwaite (pronounced Slawit). And don't get me started on places with names like Hunsingore!

And since we have had cycling, a sport which has had its problems over cheating in recent years, today we have the strange story of a chess cheat. Grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze, the 25 year old Georgian chess champion has been thrown out of a tournament in Dubai when it was discovered that his frequent trips to the loo were in fact visits to his hidden iPhone to consult a chess programme. 

Too silly! He should have realised he would be spotted. Now, just as Lance Armstrong was stripped of his Tour de France victories, this chap might find himself losing his GM title. For there are other chess players saying that he reached grandmaster status through cheating as well. And he could face a 15 year ban from the sport! 

 It must be very hard to be very good at something but not quite good enough to be the best without cheating in some way. And unless you are among the very best in chess it's hard to make a living at it. The poor chap might have to look at another way of earning a crust!