Maundy and maun

 At church on the Thursday night before Easter, I was most interested to hear in the homily that the older name for that day is 'Maundy Thursday'. We generally call it 'Holy Thursday'. 

The priest said that the older meaning was that Christ gave us a 'mandate' to love one another and serve each other humbly - as he demonstrated in washing the the feet of his followers. Sure, when I looked around the internet, the same definition popped up.

A Scottish word then occurred to me - maun. When I looked up the meaning, there is was: Maun means must.

the origin of the word grotesque

 Since the advent of the Corona virus and all the subsequent problems, I don't yet feel like travelling. However, one of the places I would one day like to see is the Domus Aurea of Nero in Rome.

I was reminded of it today, when I received my regular text from Delanceyplace.com. This email consists of excerpts from books, and today's was from Haunted, by Leo Braudy. It was a discussion of  the origin of the word grotesque, which comes from the Italian word grotto, meaning  a cave.

 Here is a little quote from today's Delanceyplace excerpt.

In the late fifteenth century, Raphael Sanzio, more remembered as a great painter, who was then head of antiquities for Rome as well as the chief architect of the Vatican, supervised the partial excavation of Nero's Domus Aurea (Golden House), which had recently been discovered to exist under what was other­wise assumed to be a natural hill near the Colosseum. The site had been dis­covered in the course of digging a well there, when workmen broke through what was found to be the dome of an enormous room. Lowered down on ropes to explore this vast underground construction, they discovered a series of equally large rooms on whose walls were paintings of mingled human and animal forms fantastically tangled with vegetation, fruits, and flowers that were dubbed grottesca -- the kind of visual images to be found in grottoes.

It would  be fabulous to tour the partially restored building and wear virtual reality equipment to experience it the way it originally was. Maybe one day I'll get there. In the meantime, here are a couple of sites that give an idea of what that tour might be like. 

This one is in German. 

Here's another one in English. I think this site is worth a visit, because it explains a little of why the place  disappeared from history after Nero died.

the benefits of research in a second language

 It has been a long time since I put anything new here. I'll just write a quick post to keep the blog alive. 

At the beginning of the long lockdowns here in Victoria, Australia, I, like many others, was looking for some intellectual stimulation to help me deal with the stress.

It occurred to me to take up my study of German again, after many decades of not reading or speaking the language. 

I was very lucky to come across a great class run by the CAE here in Melbourne - German language online.

At first, to me it was a matter of learning the language, then after a while it became learning in that language, and finally I've arrived at the stage where it's learning about things in the new language.

This ability to discover information in German has opened up many new doors for me. For instance, recently my dog Peppa had a grass seed in her foot. (Major bother and major expense.) When I went to the vet today for what I hope is the final check-up on her recovery, he told me how grass seeds drill into the flesh of dogs, and are formed in such a way that they resist being pulled out.

I felt quite pleased to say that I'd read about this recently on a German website. I'd visited lots of blogs and webpages about the problem, as any concerned dog owner would, but that specific piece about the structure of grass had been in German. 

I'd taken notice of it because I was looking for the translation of the word Grannen on the German site: the word means awn in English. Wikipedia has a rather scary explanation of how the awns of wild emmer wheat bury themselves in the soil. I'd better not go down that rabbit hole, or I'll never take my dog to a grassy area again. Here's hoping the grasses around here are less active. 

Knowing German is great fun, because there's so much of the internet to explore.

what a rigmarole!

 I was visiting a blog called Misadventures of Widowhood and wanted to comment. In one of those mysterious internetty-occurrences, I had to sign out of Blogger in order to make my comment and I wrote about the rigmarole involved. 

Well, I had thought I was going to use that term, but after trying rigamarole, rigmorale, rigmorole, I had to admit to myself that I didn't know how to spell this word. 

It's one of those words that you say and think you know, but in the end have little idea of its origin. For me, knowing the history of a word helps the spelling stick in my head. So I visited Mental Floss to see what I could discover.

I enjoyed reading that site's take on the history of the word.

A visit to en-academic.com gives lots of definitions and histories for the term. 

Hopefully, after writing this post I might remember how to spell it.

a frantic start to 2022

 I titled this post as if I'm frantically running around on the first day of 2022, but obviously I'm actually sitting at my computer doing nothing special. 

However, seeing it's a new year, I thought I'd like to resume writing posts - perhaps only occasionally. 

As my new puppy was racing past after pinching yet another sock from the dirty clothes basket, she seemed rather frenetic. And then I wondered if that's the same as being frantic.

It seems the two words come from the same historical roots, with the underlying concept of a mind gone mad. Well, in human terms stealing items of clothing and chewing on them might seem crazy, but I'll  bet to a puppy it makes sense.

I think the concept of 'affected by wild excitement' might fit the bill.

I enjoyed reading this blog post.

 I noticed a sign locally saying 'Mercedes Benz' and wondered if there would be any connection in the 'Benz' part with the word 'benzine'. A quick search of The Online Etymology Dictionary came up with the word spelled as 'benzene', but as having been coined by the chemist  Eilhardt Mitscherlich as 'Benzin'. He had obtained it from a distillation of benzoic acid.

On Quora there's a reliable-looking answer that says benzine is the obsolete spelling of benzene. However, the Macquarie Australian dictionary has it with both spellings.

I'm feeling a bit silly about this, because I actually thought benzine was another word for petrol (gas, in the US). At least I now know the word has no connection to Mercedes Benz and it means:

a colourless, volatile, flammable, liquid, aromatic hydrocarbon, C₆H₆, obtained chiefly from coal tar, and used as a solvent and in chemical synthesis. (Definition from The Macquarie  Dictionary)

But it still lurks in my subconscious that there's some connection, given that the German word for ''the petrol' is  'das Benzin'. Well, at least this should help me remember the gender of that word - neuter. I always find it tricky to remember what gender German nouns are. 

Just a jiffy

This morning, on ABC Radio Melbourne, the presenter was having fun with 'useless facts'. I love useless information, because it's never actually useless.

They talked about the word jiffy. It turns out that this term has a couple of specific meanings, apart from its handiness in referring to an indeterminate short period of time. I looked around on the Net and found this link to its meaning in physics, chemistry and computer science.

I've arrived at the stage of life where there's not much room in my brain for new information, so I'll leave it to you to follow the link and discover this not-useless fact.

It's believed the word has been in use since at least the late eighteenth century.  The English Language and Usage site quotes it in a text from 1780. The lengthy discussion on the site also mentions the variant jiffin from 1767.

The Phrase Finder says the coiner of the word jiffy did not refer to a specific item that epitomised quickness, but to me this seems strange. There's never a totally random nature to the coining of a new word. I notice that in the examples given of idioms of similes that do refer to an existing item that was known to be speedy, one is 'as fast as greased lightning.'

This gels with what was said on The English Language and Usage site - that jiffy was originally a thieves' cant term for lightning.

It beats me why thieves would have needed a secret word for lightning. But that's language for you - interesting and mysterious.