Monday, June 22, 2015

The first Rose of the Season


6 comments:

  1. Rose of our heart, is Howard!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mum told me briefly about Bernie's great day in Denver. Go, Bernie!

    ReplyDelete
  3. It was a bust. :-( Sigh.
    It's a little like being a Red Sox fan, y'know?

    ReplyDelete
  4. The kp level is going back up.. to 8kp! If you have clear skies and live north of Colorado and Philadelphia, go outside and look!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have found a word I think I might add to my vocabulary; evidently very common British usage: WHINGE. From context I figured it must be similar in meaning to whine--to complain petulantly or some such. In fact, I wondered if it might be a variant or variant spelling of the same word. It turns out it is an older word (12th cent. vs. 17th cent.), of different etymology, and with a meaning of a stronger complaint than WHINE. Whine originally meant only a sound, then a weak complaint. Whinge means only complaint. Then comes the question of pronunciation. In most of England the wine-whine merger is complete, so it is pronounced "winge." In the north of England and Scotland it is often "hwinge." That led me to check up on the distribution of the wine-whine merger in the US, and the recorded patterns don't seem to make a lot of sense to me. They say it is predominant only in parts of the South--it looks like the Scots-Irish settled areas. But no one in my family or among our neighbors in my youth had the merger as far as I know, and none had any connection with the South. Evidently it was fairly common in the upper Midwest area and also in New England except Maine, but has become less common in those places.

    Anybody here have any personal local observations on wine-whine/witch-whitch? As in the coven caterer's complaint: "Which witch did whine about the wine?"

    I also discovered why, for instance, "whole" is a homonym of "hole." Originally the initial consonants were different, but so were the vowels. When the vowels changed, the consonants merged into the "h" sound.

    Now to check up on Bernie in Denver. I think his strength compared to Ms. Clinton is that he doesn't have to get reports from seventeen focus groups to figure out what he thinks. People can perceive that. I still wish he had some more creative bumper stickers. Well, I will get one from him anyway. Hmmm.....blue or white background? Maybe white.

    I really must get something done with a bunch of little side jobs, but will delay long enough to take some hot chocolate. Moctezuma brand, of course. I am feeling considerably restored this evening.

    --Alan

    ReplyDelete