I dispute irregular verbs with William Cobbett

John McWhorter

Some surprises in a New York Times piece on English usage.  John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at Columbia University, says that what is considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion. 

First surprise.  He makes a fuss about using they in the singular as in Tell each student that they can hand the paper in until 4.  Whilst he concedes that Shakespeare and Thackeray both did this, he seems to think it's unfashionable now. Huh? How else would you tell each student that they can hand the paper in until 4?  Unless you used the ghastly he/she.

2nd surprise.  Apparently, in the 19th century it was the fashion to say a street was well-lighted: lit was considered vulgar.  And to this day it's the New York Times house style to use well-lighted. Reprehensible!  I know irregular verb forms have a depressing habit of dying out; but all right-thinking people ought to mount a vigorous rearguard action in their defence.

William Cobbett 1763-1835

It seems I would have had a fierce opponent in William Cobbett. In his 1818 A Grammar of the English Language (a series of letters to his 14 year old son) Cobbett denounced the past tense forms awoke, blew, built, burst, clung, dealt, dug, drew, froze, grew, hung, meant, spat, stung, swept, swam, threw and wove. The well-spoken person, Cobbett instructed, swimmed yesterday and builded a house last year.

Now I've got this far, it's dawned upon me that I shouldn’t really have been so surprised by Cobbett’s preference for builded over built. Did not William Blake ask if Jerusalem was builded here among these dark satanic mills? I had always imagined that was merely dictated by the meter. And then I can call to mind a much earlier instance, from the 1611 King James Bible, where Cain builded him a city [1]. So these irregular verb forms have been dying out longer than I thought. Hmm.

That doesn't make it right however, and I shall persist in my campaign to retain them.

Another nugget from John McWhorter (unconnected with the foregoing). He gives an example from Charles Dickens to demonstrate “the magnificent evanescence of what is considered sophisticated”. In David Copperfield, Aunt Betsey (a distinctly proper lady) says “Mr. Dick is his name here, and everywhere else, now – if he ever went anywhere else, which he don’t.”

Thanks to Tom for drawing this article to my attention.

John McWhorter’s latest book is What Language Is, What It Isn’t and What It Could Be.

[1] Genesis 4:17

Lloyd George: 500 men chosen from the unemployed

House of Lords reform in the news. 70 Tory MP’s to rebel and refuse to support the Bill so dear to Nick Clegg and the Lib-Dems; and much speculation that the coalition government will break up.

Lloyd George in 1908 the year before
he made two cracking speeches

During these past few months, whenever the House of Lords is mentioned, you can be sure to find Lloyd George describing it as a body of 500 men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed.

For example, Nick Clegg writing a comment piece in the London Independent on 21st June:

Lloyd George once described the House of Lords as being "a body of 500 men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed". In the years since he made that remark all that has really changed is the number – we are now pushing nearly 1,000 peers who get £300 tax-free a day just for turning up, more than half from the ranks of retired or failed politicians. For those retired MPs in the Lords, this amounts to a £1m top-up to their pensions.

A catchy phrase "chosen at random from amongst the unemployed", so what did Lloyd George actually say and when did he say it?   

It's in a speech he gave in Newcastle on 9 October 1909, in the course of the controversy over that year's People’s Budget.  The House of Lords had vetoed it because of a modest land tax to fund pensions for workers.  Lloyd George argued that the House of Lords had no right to the veto since it was an established constitutional principle that the House of Commons had the final say on budgets.  And he challenged the Lords thus:

Let them realise what they are doing. They are forcing a revolution, and they will get it. The Lords may decree a revolution, but the people will direct it. If they begin, issues will be raised that they little dream of. Questions will be asked which are now whispered in humble voices, and answers will be demanded then with authority. The question will be asked whether five hundred men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, should override the judgment, the deliberate judgment, of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country.

This is good stuff. There's more. And take note, this a Chancellor of the Exchequer speaking. 

That is one question. Another will be, Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite? Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth? Who is it who is responsible for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labour to win a bare and precarious subsistence for himself, and when, at the end of his days, he claims at the hands of the community he served a poor pension of eightpence a day, he can only get it through a revolution, and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night, whilst he slumbers, more than his poor neighbour receives in a whole year of toil? Where did the table of that law come from? Whose finger inscribed it? These are the questions that will be asked.

Read the Newcastle speech in full.

Also worth reading is his Limehouse speech given a couple of months earlier. I remember the name from school history lessons. Write an essay on the reforms of the 1906 Liberal Government. 10 points to include, no 7, the Limehouse speech.  Limehouse, I know now from Wikipedia, but I probably didn't know then, was one of the poorest areas of the East End of London.

Higgs discovery a disappointment

So they’ve discovered the Higgs boson.  When I heard the news from Switzerland last Wednesday my initial reaction was a pang of disappointment.  Much more exciting had they failed to find it; or had they found conclusive data meaning of necessity it can't exist. 

By the way read no further if you want an explanation of what the Higgs boson actually is, because I can't tell you. The best is probably this video by Ian Sample in The Guardian.

But insofar as I do understand, the question at issue is: what is matter and why is it heavy.  Why in other words is the universe the way it is, and why are we here. And the answer, for several decades, has been the Standard Model of physics.  To make the Standard Model true, there must be a Higgs field.  So finding it, is a very significant step in confirming that the Standard Model is correct.

This is disappointing for two reasons. Scientific revolutions come about from unexpected results not from expected ones, as Stephen Hawking says in this BBC interview.

Moreover the Standard Model is ugly and unsatisfactory. It specifies a menagerie of particles which seem to defy any rime or reason, it doesn't attempt to explain gravity, and can't explain dark energy or dark matter; which by my reckoning leaves out 98% of the universe.

Here’s an article in the New Yorker Is the Higgs Boson a Disappointment?

I don't doubt that if the discovery of the Higgs field is confirmed (and I haven't seen anyone suggest it won't be) this is a crowning achievement of modern physics and a triumphal moment for science.  But still and all ….

One last point: the image I've used is highly inappropriate as it implies “god particle”.  An annoying expression which even Ian Sample uses and he shouldn’t.

Examiner editor panned over corruption gibe

An editorial in Friday’s Irish Examiner moved on from a draft anti-corruption Bill to take a swipe at household charge protesters - it suggested that non-payment of the household charge is itself a form of corruption. Can't let them get away with that. Out with the green ink bottle.  Let them quake.  

The trouble is that one of the TD’s supporting the campaign, by the name of Wallace, happens to be a sort of maverick building contractor who made a false VAT declaration. Just the sort of support the campaign could do without really. Anyway here's the letter signed by Eileen and myself. 

Dear Editor

We've seen government supporters suggest that participating in the household charge non-payment campaign is a form of tax evasion, but we were surprised you used Friday’s editorial to endorse this line, and indeed to conflate non-payment of the charge with corruption.  Boycotting taxes deemed unjust has an honourable political pedigree.  In the early 1990’s when living in the UK we refused to pay the poll tax and although this stand cost us, financially, more in the end, we pride ourselves that our action contributed in a small way to prime minister Thatcher’s downfall.  We're sorry if one of the TD’s supporting the household charge campaign has proved himself unworthy by misleading the tax authorities over his VAT liability; and if you believe that household charge non-payers are also wrong then by all means say so. But you won't advance your cause by implying that all of us are not merely wrong but corrupt.

Yours etc

That’s told them or what.

Published 27th June

A Transit of Venus DIY parallax kit

I've been wondering what the parallax effect in a Transit of Venus actually looks like. I know the 18th century astronomers used it to measure the solar system, because it says so in books. (See my post of June 6th The Transit of Venus in history which includes some good links). But just how pronounced is this parallax effect? Can anyone see it or is it miniscule?  Well, see for yourself ...

Here's a pair of computer generated images of the transit that happened a fortnight ago. 

Transit of Venus, 6 June 2012, 02:00 UT from Capetown

Transit of Venus, 6 June 2012, 02:00 UT from Cork

They show the transit at the same instant, 2am Universal Time.  One from Cork and the other from Capetown.  The pronounced black dot is Venus. The grey dots are sunspots. There is a small but quite definite difference in where Venus appears on the Sun’s disc. The effect is much too small to detect when you view these two images together on the screen. But you can see it very clearly if you flick between them.

Try it! It's a bit a of do-it-yourself job I'm afraid, and here's my suggestion how to go about it.

Create a new folder on your computer’s desktop and save each image into it.[1] Then click on one of the images to view it …  this will open your computer’s viewer software … now click the right arrow key to view the other image ... by repeatedly clicking the right arrow, you will see Venus shifting up and down. That’s parallax. 

Venus seen from Capetown appears higher up (further north) on the Sun’s disc than Venus seen from Cork.  

In the diagramme, A is the apparent position of Venus viewed from Capetown, and B is the apparent position of Venus viewed from Cork. (The diagramme hugely exaggerates the AB distance. Strictly speaking the Earth should be a small dot like Venus.)

Seeing Venus wobble as you flick between the two images, helped me to appreciate what Edmond Halley was banging on about when in 1716, he instructed the next generation of astronomers: go to the ends of the Earth to detect the parallax in the 1761 Transit of Venus, and use this to measure the solar system.  I won't go into how, as it involved trigonometry.

That, and some additional notes and links, are in this pdf file.

Thanks to Tony Jackson and Terry Moseley for help putting this together.

[1] In case you need instructions for saving the two images, here goes for Windows users. I assume you’ve already created a new folder on your computer’s desktop called Venus. Now hover over one of the above images, right click, and choose the menu option Save Image As. Save it into the Venus folder. Do the same for the other image. Your Venus folder now contains two images and you can flick between them.

Libraries without money better than money without libraries

Just seen a rather good libraries slogan, pity it's a bit long for a placard ...

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries

Library campaigners with placards outside the high court in December 2011 [1]

Attributed to Anne Herbert, an American writer, born 1952, of whom I know nothing.  It seems she derived it from a quote of Gilbert Shelton (of whom I also know nothing): "Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope."

Another of her pronouncements is:  "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty."

UK Library campaigning links:

    Voices For The Library  

    UNISON libraries campaign  

    Save Our Libraries campaign, one year on (Guardian books blog, Jan 2012)

[1] The high court protesters were from Brent, in an unsuccessful bid to obtain a judicial review of closures. (Photo: Guardian) 

The Transit of Venus in history

Watched today's transit of Venue on the web. Many crashes. Slightly disappointing. No, it's the history that excites me. There's a heap of stuff on the web about how the Transit of Venus was used for measuring the heavens in the 18th century.  Here's the best I found.  First,  Stuart Clark on the Guardian science blog.  He says that in scale and ambition, plans to record the transit of Venus were the 18th century equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider.

There's a book just brought out by the historian Andrea Wulf: Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens, which documents the collaboration required to observe and track the 1761 and 1769 transits.

She discussed the book on the Guardian Science Weekly podcast of 28th May.

And a few days ago she gave a lecture to the Royal Society. This link allows you to see the video, or download the audio.

The maths: how the Transit of Venus tells us our distance from the Sun

Imagine two different people, one on each pole of the Earth, viewing the transit of Venus. The person on the North pole sees Venus following one path across the Sun. The person on the South pole sees Venus follow a slightly higher path, one that's shifted a little to the north. Because we see the Sun as a circle, these two different paths will have different lengths. Halley proposed that an easy way to measure the difference between the lengths of these two paths would be to time the transits, using the four phases of the transit — the first, second, third, and fourth contacts — as indicators. With the two different paths known, the distance between the Earth and the Sun can be pretty easily calculated using trigonometry and Kepler's third law of planetary motion.

If you want a bit more, including just a few equations,  this explainer is for you, it's from the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco.

Guardian Science blog: Transit of Venus as it happened

The Guardian, as we used to say, and I still do, is definitely where it's at. Trawl through their live blog, dead now of course, for snippets of history, images of the transit, and comments as it occurred.

Edmond Halley, portrait by Thomas Murray, c. 1687 (detail)

This is Edmond Halley, the English astronomer and geophysicist.  A true giant. From beyond the grave, he it was who launched the world expeditions to view the transit. In 1716, he instructed the next generation of astronomers: This is what you have to do. Fifty years from now, in 1761, there will be a Transit of Venus, and you all have to work together. It's all in the Guardian blog, scroll down for this image.