Lady in Read – such a great pun – and it truly reflects Vidya’s approach to her blog – it might be described as Fusion – “Lady in Red” is a western song by Chris de Burgh and it has featured in several films and both Vidya’s avatar and blog banner show her in a red dress but in the content she goes further. For example, in this year’s A to Z (she is a veteran participant), she wrote poems about people and places from India and particularly Karnatka where she grew up. However, Vidya writes prompted by many blogging challenges including NaPoWriMo which was also running in April and rather than do two separate posts, Vidya gives us a mash-up or fusion. so in My Heart Beats for Harihar, her H post, Vidya writes a poem celebrating the town she grew up in as a Sea Shanty – the NaPoWriMo prompt! To have followed Vidya’s A to Z is to take a deep dive into Indian/Karnatka culture but served up with a fusion twist seasoned with a great deal of humour…
Vidya also explored using AI for both images to illustrate some posts and also to generate ideas for post titles and you can read about her assessment of her experiments in her Reflections Post.
“Ronel Janse van Vuuren hails from sunny South Africa” says her About page, and her blog is called “Ronel the Mythmaker” subtitled Dark Fantasy Author which has intrigued me ever since I came across her blogs – you see I can’t think of South Africa without thinking of sunshine so strong it bleaches out everything, mind, body and motivation. I have to imagine Ronel in a dark, cold cellar beneath a remote house in order to conceive that anyone could write about fairies and review books from all over the world. because, too, South Africa seems at the end of the Earth, last stop before Antarctica and whilst the internet means that you can wander, virtually wherever you wish to go in the WWW, that is merely rational and I am constantly challenged by these mental disconnects when I visit Ronel’s blog. That’s just my problem, because Ronel can, and does write successful books and blog posts about dark fantasies and this year she is another A to Z participant who double-blogged. On one of her blogs – Ronel the Mythmaker she reviewed books on the theme My A-Z of Book Recommendations and Reviews 2023 (AKA my languishing TBR) in which she shows us, graphically, her to be read pile, followed by a book review of one of them that she has read. What this does, is to let us glimpse into the mind of an author of dark fantasies, which is almost as good as reading her own creations – although I still have to imagine her hiding from the sun in a dark cellar…
Ronel’s other blog was her My A-Z of Faerie 2023: and whilst this guide to all things Faerie is not my preferred area of reading, if I ever want a comprehensive guide to the subject – this is it and I have it bookmarked. I half expect Ronel to vapourise my imaginings and tell me that she writes from under a shady umbrella beside a pool in a city somewhere in S.A….
J.S. Pailly was a sometime visitor to my blog just as I was to his, and what I found was fascinating so although I dipped in and out, Planet PaillyWhere Science Meets Fiction, is bookmarked for me to read all the way through… J.S.Pailly is not a scientist, though he is a Sci-Fi writer and a cartoonist and he chose this year, to write everything you ever wanted to know about the planet Mercury! Now I think you will agree that this is pretty niche and some people might hesitate to visit that niche, but, illustrated by his own cartoons, this is a very readable blog. One of the joys of the A to Z is to pick up on other bloggers via their comments, and one who would clearly have delighted in Mr Pailly’s theme was the author of My Hubble Abode, who is a student of Astrophysics and who started blogging to write free A-level notes for herself and her fellow students but then kept going as she moved up the academic ladder. If astrophysics is not your cup of tea, then she also gives out designs for her Crocheted planets and more. What’s not to like, I also share a passion for (Tunisian) Crochet…
Carrie-Anne, in her incomparable Welcome to My Magick Theatre, gave us, not forvthe first time, a tour de force – on the history of both Iranian cities and also pioneering Iranian women – the latter in homage to the current persecution of women in that country. Iran, arguably the cradle of civilisation, has cities that have risen and fallen so many times through history it makes one giddy! And the women Carrie-Anne describes are all fascinating, not least because of the way their stories are told…
As if this Abercadarium was not enough on it’s own – Carrie-Anne did one in her second blog – Onomastics Outside the Box which was on Persian names – a possible goldmine to any expectant parents to be who want to go with something different, more ancient, perhaps, name-wise… any way, Carrie-Anne drove herself to exhaustion as she explains in her TWO Reflections posts here and here! Carrie-Anne’s posts are not to be read from A to Z and certainly not in one sitting – no they are to be savoured, like a fine wine from the cellar, when the occasion demands…
It is late, and I have work in the morning and besides I cannot bring myself to add another review to stand in the shadow of Carrie-Anne and so to bed…
Shilpa Gupta chose to write Flash Fiction for her A to Z and here’s the thing about flash fiction, either you enjoy a writer’s offerings or you don’t, you find consistency rather than having to search for the rare nugget, and you keep coming back because, even though the pieces may be personal to the author, the pieces resonate for you… Shilpa delivered on all these things for me. A good example was M for Arithmetic in which a father posters the narrator to practice maths homework but is completely scathing about her exam failures. If you want to see what resonated for me you will have to read the post and find my comment…
Hannelore was interrupted in the middle of April by the sad death of her grandmother who, together with her late grandfather, was the subject of her A to Z and so she bravely presented the last letters in a compendium as part of the process of moving through grieving. The early posts, together with the rest of the month’s journey, deserve our attention.
Anne Nydam is a print artist who specialises in mostly one-colour block prints and for this year’s theme she chose to show us letters from many illustrated Abercadariums to which she brought a wealth of research and commentary. I can only repeat my comment on her Reflections post “Your posts were unique amongst the A to Z Challenge this year and I not only enjoyed them whenever I visited but have bookmarked your site to return to whenever. as I have said before, having been a signwriter and a graphic artist going back to letterpress printing at school – this was right up my street…”
So there you go – a few more of my frequent commenters reviewed – eventually I will get to some of the blogs I didn’t get too in April…
AI or Artificial Intelligence, is a hot topic at present with governments weighing up how to invest in the sector, insiders from the industry warning of the potential dangers and the media stoking fears from job losses to the eradication of the human race. During the recent A to Z Challenge 2023, I was highly impressed by the images selected by Misky in her blog IT’S STILL LIFE – A.I. ART & POETRY and decided to investigate the whole subject of AI for myself. I also wanted to know about Generative Text AI because my work demands various forms of word creation and I had heard that this might be one of the first areas to suffer job losses to AI.
This tile design was designed by Midjourney 5 with a prompt of no more than Passion Flower –tile. It lines up perfectly on every edge, a task which is difficult to do by hand…
Using a third-party software, you can turn Midjourney’s tile into wallpaper and appreciate the seamless matching of edges.
But first, a little thought about where I understand us to be right now. There is Soft AI (think Alexa) and then there is the dreaded Hard AI (think Terminator). Soft AI is already in use all around us, Grammarly, Predictive Text on your smartphone, Alexa, Google and other search engines but the reason people are not running around screaming “The terminators are coming!” as a result of all this Soft AI action, is because the intelligence quotient of this sort of AI is pretty low. For example, say to your “smart” speaker Alexa “Alexa! Tell me a joke!” and Alexa will oblige with a joke of variable humour, but then say “Alexa! Tell me another!” and Alexa will not know what you want – unless you specify “joke” in which case you could leave the “another” out since it is irrelevant to Alexa that she has just told you a joke. This means that Alexa is hardly conducting a conversation. On the other hand, she can sort through literally millions of bits of data to find and play you the song you want to hear. So this sort of AI is doing exactly what we want -conducting the repetitive, boring, difficult (because of the magnitude of data) tasks which we none of us really enjoy doing, or given the scale of data today, could even do! I was reading how when the sea-change brought about in Accountancy when computers could sit on every desk and more particularly, when those computers could run spreadsheets, there were fears of mass redundancies in accounting firms. And so there were at the clerk level of the business, but on the other hand, amongst the higher level accountants, jobs boomed like never before, because the things they could do with spreadsheets, the new things they could offer their clients had been undreamable before – so let us take the tales of mass unemployment with a pinch of salt – after all, I wouldn’t mind betting that some of the accounting clerks were able to upgrade their skills and move up the ladder with the help of a computer…
Above is an example of a tricky task for any graphic designer to do manually – to design a seamless tile repeat and I will come back to this particular task in the future, but to say that this task was accomplished in under sixty seconds, is for now simply amazing!
Text AI
So first of all, I want to look at my first encounter with ChatGPT which was developed by OpenAI and which they describe as a Large Language Model Generative pre-trained transformer Chatbot. What that means is that an AI computer programme has been fed a huge amount of written material, novels, adverts, and non-fiction from the World Wide Web and not only does the AI have access to all this material, but it can stitch information together according to very clever algorithms to write “original” material. So I thought I would test it out by asking it to write a piece about one of the more colourful phrases from my recent A to Z Challenge – phrases we mostly know the meaning of but have forgotten the origins of. First, here is my explanation:
“Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – you may be beginning to see the “lost in translation” aspect of sayings overheard from sailors by landsmen in which case, you will not be surprised to learn that this expression has nothing to do with statues of simians cast in brass losing their genitalia!
A “monkey” on a wooden ship, especially a warship, was a (usually) wooden tray with rounded depressions in which cannon balls were stacked in preparation for the battle – the last thing you wanted was heavy cannon balls rolling around the deck of a pitching deck – let alone a “loose cannon” – so cannons were secured (against recoil on firing) by strong ropes and cannon balls were kept on a monkey. I said that monkeys were usually made of wood, but admirals or very lucky captains, who had made a lot of money from their share of “prizes” (captured ships, evaluated and paid for by the Navy) – were allowed to prettify their ships with gold leaf, dress their crews in custom, fancy uniforms, and purchase brass monkeys rather than the standard issue wooden ones. Now here’s the thing, a monkey was carefully designed so that you could pile the cannon balls up in a pyramid to maximise your supply of cannon balls in as small a space as possible but the thermal coefficient of expansion of brass (the monkey) and iron (the cannon balls) is different – the brass monkey shrinks more than iron in very cold conditions. Now, the carefully spaced second and subsequent layers of the pyramid are too big for their positions and can roll off the monkey hence “Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – Simples! Not!
Now here is ChatGPT’s first attempt: “The expression “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is a well-known phrase that means that it is extremely cold outside. Although it is a common phrase, its origin and accuracy are often disputed. One theory suggests that the phrase originates from the age of sailing ships when cannonballs were stored on the deck of the ship in a brass frame called a “monkey.” The frame consisted of several round holes where the cannonballs were stacked. During cold weather, the brass frame would contract more quickly than the iron cannonballs, causing them to fall out of the frame. Hence, the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.” However, there is little historical evidence to support this theory. The phrase “brass monkey” itself is not found in any nautical dictionaries or records, and the idea that brass contracts more quickly than iron is also questionable. Another theory is that the phrase originated from a Victorian-era pub game called “brass monkey,” which involved placing brass balls on a tray and attempting to knock them off with a ball bearing. The game was typically played in cold weather, and if the temperature dropped low enough, the brass balls could freeze to the tray, making it impossible to play. Hence, the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” may have originated from this game. However, like the previous theory, there is little concrete evidence to support this theory. Overall, the origin of the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” remains uncertain. It is likely that the phrase has evolved over time, and its origins may be lost to history.”
So what do we think of this? Well firstly, the “the idea that brass contracts more quickly than iron is also questionable ” is simply not true – science tells us that brass both expands and contracts more than iron – so there is a lie right there! Secondly, Chat GPT says that there is no evidence of the phrase in “nautical dictionaries or records. Whether or not such dictionaries even exist, there are plenty of references to this particular phrase and it’s origin in many places on the web and in literature – I first heard of it in the books of Patrick O’Brien who spent much of his life carrying out research for his books in the Admiralty records and I would trust him implicitly. You have to find as many references as you can when researching a subject like this. There are, of course, always people who will dispute the origins of various phrases and so perhaps ChatGPT gave undue credence to these doubters. Still, then ChatGPT goes even further and completely fabricates an alternative theory! The idea of a “Victorian -era pub game called ‘brass monkey’…'” does not show up in any search of the internet whatsoever, so ChatGPT has not only dissed the correct explanation, but suggested a completely fictitious alternative – all done with a convincingly authoritative tone. Luckily, there is a Regenerate button and on dressing this, without any refining the prompt or critiquing the first result, ChatGPT came clean and produced a correct version of the explanation: “The expression “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is a colloquial phrase used to describe extremely cold weather. There are a few different theories about the origin of this expression, but the most widely accepted one is that it comes from the era of sailing ships. In the days of sail, cannons were an important part of a ship’s armament. The cannonballs were made of iron and were stored on deck in piles or pyramids. To prevent them from rolling around in rough seas, the cannonballs were often stacked on a flat brass plate called a monkey. When the temperature dropped below freezing, the brass monkey would contract more than the iron cannonballs, causing them to fall off. Hence, it was said to be “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.” However, it’s worth noting that there is no definitive proof for this theory, and other explanations have been proposed as well. Nonetheless, the phrase has become a part of English language and culture, and it is still used today to describe extremely cold weather.”
The second iteration is both factually more correct and more concise, but for a first encounter with ChatGPT to throw up such a blatant fabrication is worrying. It suggests that however miraculous the task of researching and collating this story might be, it definitely needs checking by a human being because otherwise, another false news item might find its way onto the Internet and go echoing around and around… Just such a story of defamation by a ChatGPT “news” story, happened to an Australian Mayor who rather than being portrayed as the whistleblower he actually was, he was reported to have gone to jail for corruption – he is suing ChatGPT‘s developers, OpenAI.
Not that I am fishing for compliments but what do you think of my explanation of the phrase compared to ChatGPT’s? After all, you might think I was too verbose and ChatGPT more concise…
Image AI
So far, I have only tried out the Midjourney bot (short for Robot, which I discussed in my “R” post in April) but I will be trying and comparing them and reporting back to you Dear Reader, but for now, I just want to share some images that I have created which were successful, although sometimes after several attempts to refine the prompts – more of that next time…
Each submission or message to the Midjourney Bot, produces not one, but four variations for you to choose from. You may then ask for an enlargement of one (see below) or to take one as a starting point for variation and another four will be developed. The prompt for this group was “flower_fairies_playing_amongst_blackberry_stems_and_fruit”
Here is the enlargement of the top left image.
I then decided to turn this into a tiled image (below).
The prompt for this image was “Village_beside_lake_style_of_Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh_pallette knife_oil_painting. I think the syntax should have been “in the style of” so I’m not sure that this owes much to Mackintosh but it is great – I think…
So we (if you want to come along with me) are on our way to investigating AI – so far Text AI dodgy, and ImageAI – amazing!
This is a review of blogs who participated in the A to Z Challenge 2023 starting with those who were frequent flyers in my Comments…
Misky over on IT’S STILL LIFE, has been posting poems accompanied by AI-generated images for the A to Z. Not only has she inspired me in my return to poetry writing, but since AI is a hot topic now, the incredible images in her posts have caused me to begin my own evaluative exploration of AI – and may I say how generous Misky has been in giving me pointers as to where to begin! Having tried creating some pictures myself, using the Midjourney bot on Discord, I still cannot begin to imagine how the AI creates the pictures. I can however, imagine the processes of Misky, the poet and I urge you to go and read and look… I should add that Misky is a multiple poster, she offers a Twiglet Writing Prompt as well as participating in many other peoples’ prompt series.
An image generated by Midjourney to the prompt “a community of bloggers around the world sharing their post“
D B McNichol is a seriously productive writer of at least 32 novels on Goodreads alone and whose perspicacity was demonstrated by the fact that she gave up the whole of April to the A to Z Challenge! Having pre-prepared all of her posts in advance, she was then free to spend at least four hours a day reading other people’s blogs 35-40 0f them, and commenting on them! Her own postswere lists of Small Delights, Simple Pleasures and Significant Pleasures which challenged the reader to consider and add their own favourites. Donna had retired from a career in IT before she even started writing books and if the effort she has demonstrated on the A to Z is anything to go by, it’s no wonder she has become a successful author – Kudos!
Deborah Weber is an old friend from the A to Z Challenge and each year she has written compelling Abercadariums of great subjects – and this year she wrote from a list of obscure colour names. Not only were the posts fascinating in themselves, but Deborah wrote in a free-association way (which she talks about in her Reflections post) rather than the more usual linear delivery. To my mind, this is not only the most preferable way of writing or talking (see my post on Alastair Cooke) but the essence of why we read blogs. A blog is not a textbook and Deborah with her free association gets my vote every time! I should say that as a sometime signwriter, specialist decorator and artist, Colours are right up my street anyway…
Sadje in her Keep it Alive blog, is another multiple-strand post-er of ideas and challenges, and although her domain name says “life after 50 for women” – her challenges and advice as well as her readers, are for and of both sexes. You only have to look at her use of Categories in the banner at the top of her site to see the variety of subjects tackled by Sadje… For her theme this year, Sadje posed a series of (challenging) questions designed to stimulate her readers to do more with mind, body and spirit – use it or lose it might be her motto…
Josna in Tell me Another (story) does just that – she shares stories about a recent visit home to India from the States where she now lives. Visits home are always a poignant mix of reminiscence and comparison with the person we are now and the place where we now reside and Josna does not disappoint. You will be transported to the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of Josna’s India as well as her more personal thoughts…
Lady Lee Manilla has been someone who once followed, has been the most prodigious presence in my Jetpack (WordPress) feed! Another multiple post-er, every day, Lady Lee has shared her poems, her photos and her life with her 1,438 followers of whom I am obviously just a recent addition! Her enthusiasm for poetry – her own and others – and the warmth of her sharing, have endeared Lady Lee to me…
I will be continuing these reviews because there are many left to describe but I have been working for three hours now and my stomach is demanding breakfast…
Another iteration (you always get four) from Midjourney to the prompt “a community of bloggers around the world sharing their post” – weird and wonderful…
The A to Z Challenge or the April month of madness as I usually think of it, has been a little less mad for me this year – I had about 12 posts ready ahead of time and managed to stay ahead until the letter X when I pantsed it but also wrote Y and Z ahead of the last days – a sprint to the finish!
I wrote about 16,600 words up to today, not including comments both replying to those who kindly visited, and I try never to leave any comment un-replied to! But then there are the visits back which sometimes elicited quite long comments on my part – because I hate just visiting back as an excuse to leave my blog post link – and in any case there were some very interesting posts that richly deserved a fulsome comment!
But what really marks my experience of each and every year of my four years of participating in the challenge, is the friends that either re-connect or, in the case of this year, the entirely new group of friends that have returned regularly throughout the month. Perhaps the nature of my theme attracts different people, perhaps the posts by those visiting, elicited more visits from me. The WordPress App was replaced by Jetpack and I soon found myself subscribed to a list of bloggers who participate in multiple challenges simultaneously and so, as well as the A to Z posts, I found my notifications full of poems, photographs and excitingly, some AI generated images. There is so much talk at present about AI that I have decided to try and keep the momentum of blog posting going, with a personal evaluative exploration of AI for both text and image creation at the end of which I hope to be able to express an informed opinion about whether we are likely to be under the thumb of AI or released from tedious labours…
I will be reviewing some of the wonderful bloggers I have met this year in my Roadtrip reviews so I hope you will stop by for that – I don’t know about you, but there is nobody whose every post I managed to visit and definitely some I want to fill in the gaps with!
As to my own writing experience, the posts certainly developed a life of their own, demanding much more research and crafting than I imagined as I built a list of possible phrases. But that work seemed to have pleased judging by the latter day comments which makes it worthwhile. There were only two posts that received no comments and one of those “X” manages to illustrate a Roman pagan festival with a pop video from Meghan Traynor of which I am quite proud, so if you missed it… Admittedly, by X and Y, I think everyone is suffering a little blog-fatigue! There was also the great article from Wikipedia on Cant Languages from which all about four letters were furnished with languages…
Did I have a favourite – well I could only narrow it down to four – M, N, Q and R…
Back in “J” for jiggered, we encountered modifying a word slightly to make it more socially acceptable and today with Zounds! We have an expression that may have changed through running the words together rather than deliberately disguising them Zounds is short for “God’s wounds” and similarly Blimey or Cor Blimey is for “God Blind Me” both of which are taking the Lord’s name in vain – not even recognised in current usage as swear words let alone as having a religious significance! Even Lordy is taking the Lord’s name in vain… Bloody – a very common swear word is short for the blood of Christ and is compounded in one of my mother’s favourite expressions of frustration “Hells Bells and Buckets of Blood!” which after our trip to Australia in 1968, where they use bloody with gay abandon, became “Hells Bells and Buckets of Bloody Blood!”
The Wikipedia article on Cant Languages became a feature of this year’s A to Z theme ever since writing about Cockney rhyming slang and I hope you have clicked through to a few. There is one language listed for Z but there is no article on it…
So there you have it, another year of A to Z letters completed – but there will be a Reflections post and I will start the Road trip by reviewing this year’s frequent flyers in my comment sections for which I thank you all and I hope you enjoyed it!
Today we get 2fer (two for one) or even a bogof (buy one get one free) because a Yard of Tripe – Cockney rhyming slang for Pipe, is accompanied by the similar Yard of Clay – which is a reference to the very long clay pipes smoked in past centuries – presumably the long pipe stem allowed the smoke to cool down before entering the mouth… The Yard of Tripe is more fun because it not only references the length of the pipe, but tripe is in itself a pipe – part of the stomach offal – clever Cockneys!
I may be wrong, and American advertising has moved on from the “This is the product – buy me for $x at such and such shop!” but on this side of the pond we have long since had a different, dare I say more sophisticated approach to advertising. If anything, a little American clarity would sometimes not go amiss! British ads can sometimes leave you guessing until the very end, what the heck they are selling and sometimes you are still not the wiser! However, certain catch-phrases coming from ads, have made it into popular usage eg. (Ronseal Garden Paint) “Does what it says on the tin!”(L’Oreal cosmetics) “Because you are worth it…” (Nike) “Just do it!” (Burger King) “Have it your way…” and wherever there’s a Burger King – McDonald’s must surely follow “I’m Lovin’ It” (Apple) “Think Different” The great thing about all these slogans is that they are catchy and adaptable to all sorts of situations in life and thus the catch-phrases give greater longevity to the ad and the brand.
The same thing happens with some plays or poems (from House of Cards – Francis Urquhart’s catchphrase) “You may think that but I couldn’t possibly comment!”
And then there are all those Shakespeare phrases I discussed in the “H” post…
There are no Cant Languages beginning with Y today – from the Wikipedia article…
The A to X Challenge is a form of Abercadarium and it is a testament to the imagination of the many bloggers who participate, that they manage to find twenty-six words each year, with which to furnish their blogs. Yet every year, depending on the theme, each blogger will struggle to fulfil certain letters but if there is one letter of the alphabet which almost always challenges – it is X… So I shall not be surprised to see a bit of cheating nor feel guilty to use the silent E in EX to resolve this dilemma for myself – after all, I am not just searching for a word, but for a whole phrase – and one that we know the meaning of but have forgotten the origin of!
But first, with no cheating, The Xmas Tree, whilst not quite a phrase, is something whose origins have certainly been forgotten – perhaps for good reason… Christmas, Xmas, and Yule-tide is the second most important festival in the Christian calendar – the birth of Christ coming second after the Easter festival which “celebrates” his death. The death of Christ and the symbolic meaning of it, is arguably the reason why the spread of Christianity has been so successful – God first gave, then sacrificed His only son for the sake of sinful mankind – it’s a powerful story but equally important in the acceptance of Christianity, has been its strategy of incorporating local, existing festivals wherever it has gone, and one of the first examples of this is Rome and the Romans who adopted Christianity under Emperor Constantine in an “if you can’t beat them join them” way. One of the Roman festivals which came near enough he date (somewhat arbitrarily fixed) on which Christians celebrated the birth of Christ, was the carrying of a Pine log through the streets to the Temple of Magna Mater ( Big Momma?) in memory of the goddess’ consort Attis. In the same way that Christianity subsumed other religious traditions, the worship of Magna Mater came to Rome from Greece and in turn, probably, from Phrygia.
The Goddess Cybele, is said to have found the infant Attis, in a basket in a reed bed (similar to the discovery of Moses) and raised him like a mother, to be her consort and priest for which he made a vow of chastity, to look at no other female than Cybele. He broke this vow with a nymph making Cybele so angry that she cast Attis out and mortified, he committed suicide by castration, bleeding out under a pine tree and being transformed into one himself. Cybele now relented her anger and brought Attis back to life and, having learned his lesson, Attis remained in faithful service to her (and who wouldn’t!).
A cult of Galli, meaning half-men, grew up around Attis in which priests ritually, and ecstatically castrated themselves and there is some suggestion that this was a trans-gender cult. This did not go down well with the Romans for whom castration, rather sensibly, was illegal. The logs carried through the streets by the Romans were adorned with an image of Attis dressed in women’s clothes – could this be the origin of the “fairy” atop the later Christmas tree? The Arbor Festival of which the Pine Log carrying was part, took place in March and is part of the coming of spring since Cybele was seen as the goddess of fertility and rebirth (and Attis’s resurrection) but may have been subsumed by Christianity as part of the turn of the year timing of Christmas.
Almost from the beginning of Christianity, the celebration of Christmas was criticised for its materialism and the more austere the variant of Christianity, the more it was criticised although it is said that Martin Luther, the reforming founder of Protestantism, was the first to bring a Christmas tree indoors and adorn it with candles after walking at night under a starry studded sky – certainly the tradition of the Xmas tree grew until its Victorian apogee with candles, baubles, tinsel and presents stashed beneath it…
Extras – here are a couple of phrases that I thought of too late for the date of posting their letter! Booting up (your computer) goes back to the 19th-century book “The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” by Rudolf Erich Raspe based loosely on a real explorer renowned for his telling of tall tales (hence Munchausen Syndrome). In one story he claimed to have climbed to the moon by pulling first on one boot bootstrap, raising his foot, and then on the other. Computers use a tiny operating system called the BIOS to start the underlying machine code operating system DOS, which finally starts your main operating system, say Windows or Linux – hence bootstrapping – now abbreviated to booting up!
Giving free rein to something – obvious when you think about it but most people are so far removed from the age of horses as a means of transport, that we may have forgotten that the reins are the steering wheel of a horse and so when you give a horse free reign, you are allowing it to find and pick it’s own way – perhaps because the ground is difficult and the horse knows best where to place its feet…
EXpelliarmus is the “Disarming Spell” from Harry Potter and whilst it is necessary to invent some Latin-sounding names for spells in such a book, some authors go as far as to invent whole languages for their books – I am thinking of J R Tolkien in particular where such languages reside in Appendices to his books. Of course, Tolkien was a Professor of Middle English at Oxford so he certainly had the skill to make such inventions but did they add anything to the books? Well, there are phrases spoken by say the Elves followed, mercifully, by the translation, but was it necessary to invent the whole language? I think not and I always skipped over those appendices. And what about those authors who put foreign language phrases and don’t follow them with the translation – how elitist is that!!! Of course, there are a few nerds who have fleshed out and talk Klingon (StarTrek) to each other at nerd fests and who knows – maybe there are would-be Elves whispering sibilantly to each other in Tolkien’s elvish tongue. But I think of the dwarves, elves, hobbits and orcs as archetypes of human nature rather than literal races who require a language inventing for them. Lots of science fiction and other fiction manage to put contemporary language into the mouths of their characters to perfectly good effect for the reason that the books are addressing a modern audience. Anyway, that’s my little rant over…
The Cant languages we have been showcasing from the Wikipedia article on that subject, are, on the other hand, perfectly justified because they are to defend one group from the eavesdropping of another and today we have just one:
