It’s been raining solidly for three days, and now the hillside is covered with Queen Anne’s lace. I hope the cows like it. I don’t know where they’ve gone.
Tonight there’s a gale. I hope it means the rain is passing, because there’s a lot of stuff coming out on this wildflower bank in the garden.
They aren’t really wildflowers, they’re things I bought cheap at the garden centre — on sale in the autumn — and buttercups.
This is the bank seen from the top. It’s not visible from inside the house, which is why I need it to stop raining.
A Bad Guide 
The first picture of your bumpidented hillside reminds me of a useful word I learned last night, from an arte documentary on the Irish Coast Guard in a small town in County Kerry. Among other things, there was a mission to rescue an old man with Alzheimer who had wandered off along the beach one morning. Since he hadn’t returned by the afternoon, his wife called the coast guard. The film showed the coastal area between the sea and a road leaving the town. The ground was covered with waist-high grass and had small rises and depressions. If the man had stumbled there and fallen down, you would not be able to see him. The commentator called the area accidenté.
When I heard that, my first thought was: “Another French weirdness ?? Are they calling the ground accidenté because you can have accidents there ?”. A chastened Grumbly then found that the word simply means “having irregularities”. There is even an English word “accidented” with the same meaning. The more I thought about it and related matters, the more natural it seemed. It goes back to substance and accident in philosophy: a basic whatever and the little features that distinguish it.
The last entry for accident in the PR was about music, and a word I knew from playing the piano as a kid but have not encountered for decades: accidentals in music notation.
Some of the bumps are paths made by the cows. I’ve noticed in the garden that the accidented (oh, my spelling checker doesn’t like this new word) nature of the slope is disguised when the grass has grown a little bit. The lawnmower cuts the whole top level. It’s ever so slightly dangerous, but it makes filling the holes unnecessary.
I didn’t know that music term “accident”, which is quite interesting. Also, I’m glad that music makes use of “chromatic”, that it’s not only the visual arts that need the crutch of metaphors (architects are the biggest culprits here: never saying what something is, always comparing it to something else).
Note that the music term is “accidental”, not “accident”.
(architects are the biggest culprits here: never saying what something is, always comparing it to something else)
Example ? From my point of view, architecture is one of the prime sources of “is” things that serve as metaphors in other areas of life. “Show someone the door”, “window of opportunity”, “pillar of the community”, “bring down the roof”, “eavesdrop”, “he’s a real brick”, “that common experience cemented their friendship”, “he is a drain on my energy”, “the cornerstone of this project”, “the foundations of mathematics”, “a lintel goes a long way”.
“Bring the house down”, “the threshold of a new era”, “to buttress an argument”, “she became unhinged”, “paper the cracks over”, “freemason”, “jerrybuilt”, “build a house upon sand”, “esprit de l’escalier“, “to shout it from the rooftops”, “besser ein Spatz in der Hand als eine Taube auf dem Dach“, “the noise subsided”, “double helix as winding staircase”, “Potemkin village”, “that’s a mere facade”, “a veneer of plausibility”.
“Bats in the attic”, “skeleton in the basement”.
I don’t think there are that many expressions in German:
I left out German expressions with English counterparts I have already cited, such as “Säule der Gemeinschaft” and “Windeltreppe“. Also, I have permitted myself 3 corny puns altogether.
I know a bank where the wild thyme grows …
“Accidental”, right. By the way, I saw a typo in the article: “note” instead of “not”.
Most architects are hopeless writers, but they’re unaware of it. They recycle metaphors like “the palette of materials” (204,00 hits) for the stone, wood, metal etc. in a room or a building. “Procession” of spaces (145 hits) instead of “sequence” is one that slightly irritates me. As with most repeated figures of speech, the speaker stops thinking about its literal meaning. In the “palette” case, a bemused client once came up to me after a meeting and enquired what the fuck artists’ palettes had to do with his building’s facade.
Forgetting it’s only a damn metaphor is a bigger problem when they’re utilised to design a building: a big interior space on a floor of offices becomes “a courtyard”, say. It’s a useful tool, but designers usually forget that while it’s obvious to them, it may not be clear to anyone else. Or that the summer breeze — that’s wafting through the offices, thanks to the courtyard — doesn’t really exist. Unlike real courtyards, metaphors aren’t under any obligation to be consistent.
I like some architectural metaphors. “Phenomenal transparency” is one of my favourites.
Your flowers are lovely and so your colourful pictures (are you trying to compete with studiolum and hortus carmeli?)
In Spanish is also usual talking of “un terreno accidentado” (for a “rough land”).
Nevertheless Grumbly question about architectural metaphors is very clever. Me too would like to know what you meant by saying
“architects are the biggest culprits here: never saying what something is, always comparing it to something else”
But perhaps we all do that. That’s the way language works. Or the way our mind needs to work for expressing itself
“Phenomenal transparency”
??
“Procession” of spaces
That reminds me of someone’s example of the slightly overheated English of some educated Indians: “We are proceeding to Calcutta” (we are going to Calcutta).
I like the standard, unfancy word Zimmerflucht (flight of rooms [?]). Filmmakers like to show that receding perspective of open doors behind open doors of rooms, when they are filming in big old luxury houses.
In architectural English they say “enfilade”.
Transparency Literal And Phenomenal is an essay by Robert Slutzky & Colin Rowe from the 1960s. Really, you’d have to read it, and it’s not that useful unless you’re a visual artist. It’s an analysis of how shapes that are overlaid on one another read through phenomenally and how that reading can also be applied to buildings. “To read” is another overused metaphor in architecture.
architects are the biggest culprits
I would not use the word “culprit” here, as it implies a moral failure if not an actual crime.
Architects (among others) use metaphors because they are visual persons. Visually oriented people need metaphors to express themselves. People will well-balanced minds use both their left and right brains: the right brain sees an image, the left brain interprets it into words for the sake of communicating with other people. A writer who does not use metaphor is deadly boring (like many philosophers).
On the other hand, ordinary language uses a lot of metaphors: it is not architects who invent “pillar of the community”, etc, it is ordinary people who take metaphors from common experiences with buildings (which, being complex, provide a lot of different aspects to draw on for metaphors).
A certain linguist was described to me by someone who knew him as a student as truly exceptionally intelligent. Reading some of his work later, I was struck by an indefinable quality that I could not identify at first but which put me ill at ease. After a while I realized that his writing was entirely devoid of metaphor, so there was no relief from purely intellectual concepts and arguments.
This is someone whose brain, in my opinion, is unbalanced, with only the left side working. Actually this is true of many academics, as the educational system rewards left-brain activities, often leaving the right brain undeveloped. But the truly original scientists use both parts of their brains.
“To read” is another overused metaphor in architecture.
I am frantically fed up with all the philosophical writings of the last 40 years or so, particularly of French origin, in which everything is mystified as “inscriptions”, “text”, “markings”, “code” etc. I have the impression that that “Death of the Author” stuff by Barthes gave the tendency a big push in 1967-68.
By the way, I nearly wrote “apostrophized” instead of “mystified”. I thought “apostrophize” meant “address in a grandiloquent manner”, until I just now checked the OED. It is a technical term in rhetoric.
Very interesting, thanks, m-l. As I tried to say at 1:23, my biggest problem with architects is that they don’t use metaphors in a well-controlled way, but I’ll bear what you wrote in mind.
that receding perspective of open doors behind open doors of rooms,
Several years ago I was struggling to learn a (native Canadian) language without the help of a (non-existent) grammar or dictionary. Sentence structure was often baffling: I could not figure out why a certain sentence type meant what it was supposed to, or why I kept making mistakes in trying to use that structure. Eventually I would give up on an intractable problem and turn my attention to another feature. But after a few weeks or months, going back to an earlier problem, the solution had somehow become clear! This happened time and time again, and each time I felt that I had been in one of those enfilades and kept “hitting my head” against a closed door, and suddenly I had found the door open and there was another corridor behind it (before the next closed door).
By the way, enfilade is a French word, apparently from Occitan. The root is the word fil “thread”, and the verb enfiler means “to thread (a needle, beads, pearls, etc)”, ie to make a thread go through it/them, so metaphorically “to go in a straight line through” (a suite of corridors, streets, etc). Une enfilade is such a suite of identical thoroughfares, or similar buildings along a street.
The rain here today was so light – the merest smirr – that we sat out for lunch and had a barbie. We saw a wren but no goats.
So a chapelet is a relaxed enfilade. I like “sausage rosary” (chapelet de saucisses). Is that only for short sausages ? Or can they be long too (“string of sausages”) ?
the merest smirr
There are many things I like about Scotland, not all of which are fit to mention in company, but the words are lovely.
In Glasgow, I’m told, the part of your garden where you sit out is called the “sitooterie”.
Plain-speakin’ with a slidget of French sauce. That’s my line !
In architecture, an enfilade is in contrast to a series of rooms each of which leads off a corridor. You see it in many museums. My guess is it arrived in English in the nineteenth century via the École des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Sitooterie is another French word that we architects use to show that we’re worth the money.
Julia: perhaps we all do that. That’s the way language works. Or the way our mind needs to work for expressing itself
I’m sure you’re right. As far as I know, it’s used by everyone. It’s good to keep the metaphors under control, though.
Grumbly: So a chapelet is a relaxed enfilade.
NO! a chapelet originally is a string of beads, with a particular structure, as a reminder to say particular prayers. The word can be used metaphorically for strings of other things too, like un chapelet de saucisses as you say. But you cannot go through a chapelet, as opposed to going through une enfilade of rooms, etc. In the metaphor un chapelet d’îles “a string of islands” the islands in question are considered as a group, for instance as shown on a map, not as places one could physically go through.
I like “sausage rosary” (chapelet de saucisses). Is that only for short sausages ? Or can they be long too (“string of sausages”) ?
The word saucisse applies to a soft sausage, which may be sold pre-cooked or have to be cooked before eating. A hard, dry , ready to eat sausage such as salami is called un saucisson. Un chapelet de saucisses is created when a length of gut is filled with set portions of ground meat at intervals, and twisted after each filling to make sure the filling portions remain separate. The resulting string of sausages can therefore be as long as the piece of gut, but you buy the number you neeed. But saucisson is not sold that way, although the original filling method must be the same.
Enfiler: you can also say enfiler une rue “to start walking or driving through the length of a street”, and even enfiler les kilomètres which is what the Tour de France cyclists do.
“Sitooterie” is another French word
Another French word ??????????
Since this word is used in Glasgow, I suppose it is a sit-out-erie.
marie-lucie: On the assumption that “sit out” is pronounced “sit OOT” in Glasgow, I think it’s reasonably funny to say “sitouterie” is French. Think of charcuterie.
“I need it to stop raining”: something universal in this sentiment.
Grumbly, that’s what I figured out after the initial shock of non-recognition. But “charcuterie” does not rhyme with “sitouterie” – the vowels are different (like “ü” and “u” respectively in German).
Nobody said they rhymed ! But surely you will admit that to a non-French speaker they might sound sufficiently similar to justify a mild joke.
bijouterie
Good one, Ø.
What joke? There are sitooteries down the Champs Élysees, in that bit in the middle; there’s an intermittent sitooterie condition along the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice; there’s a lovely little sitooterie in Arles that Van Gogh painted. It’s a kind of French-Scottish architectural term. Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed a stone one with black ladder-backed benches outside the Glasgow School of Art.
TC: something universal in this sentiment
Tom, that’s an amazing rain picture you put up with that link. I don’t know how it’s done.
Lovers of poetry should read Tom’s blog.
There are sitooteries down the Champs Élysées,
Paris is full of them, but they are not called that way.
There is also filouterie, but that is not a place (it is the action of a filou – a crook, say Bernie Madoff, but not necessarily on that grand scale).
Tom, that second picture of rain is amazing!
the verb enfiler means “to thread (a needle, beads, pearls, etc)”, ie to make a thread go through it/them, so metaphorically “to go in a straight line through” (a suite of corridors, streets, etc).
This reminds me of Odysseus, home at last, shooting an arrow through the holes in a row of whatever it was.
Then I look the word up and find that in fact it does have a military use related to having lots of targets in a line. Apparently the architectural use is older than that, though.
“Queen Anne’s lace” is a rather flowery name for just a humble wild carrot, isn’t it?
In our house it’s usually called “cow parsley”.
Though it doesn’t grow in our house, you understand.
“Queen Anne’s lace” is a rather flowery name for just a humble wild carrot, isn’t it?
It has several names, but it is indeed a very flowery flower.
Yes, we call it cow parsley too, though they aren’t the same (Daucus carota vs Anthriscus sylvestris). I occasionally say QAL, and Americans quite often call it that (that’s why I wrote it).
“Queen Anne’s lace” is a rather flowery name for just a humble wild carrot
It is a beautiful name for a very delicate composite flower. I would never call it “cow parsley”. It is odd to discover that this beautiful, airy plant grows from a tiny little miniature carrot.
QAL is truly lovely and for that matter I find cow parsley easy on the blurry old eye as well.
Impaired vision however can be dangerous around the latter as it is so easily mistaken for poison hemlock and false parsley.
And then its larger cousin the Giant Hogweed, similar in appearance yet larger. And scary. A whole village of burnt children in New Zealand, scorched by touching Giant Hogweed, will attest to its inflammatory powers.
And this fellow in County Durham solicits Giant Hogweed-fighting advice, offers a Global Giant Hogweed Map, says he’s seen Giant Hogweed near Manchester growing up to twelve feet tall (holding hands with pink elephants in United shirts perhaps), and suggests this plant is the model upon which the novelist Wyndham drew Triffids.
Nothing so bad as the Chinese Uggh!leeches mind you, but still.
I don’t think the wild carrots have smaller roots than the tame ones. The main difference is that the tame ones taste good to humans. I am told (by my wife, who in her time was what she calls a “horse-mad girl”) that the wild ones taste good to horses.
Tom Clark, QAL is related (as I’m sure you know) to angelica*, which we have in the garden.
*(Tom is married to Angelica).
AJP,
OMG (as one says), a seven-foot high Angelica!
Just when one thought a more formidable Angelica impossible to conceive.
It’s curious how people with interesting names often seem to live up to or into those names, or else maybe sometimes vice versa. Whatever that means.
The “true Angelica”, at any rate, may either prove or disprove this assertion, depending.
I am aware that Angelica archangelica is also among the possible Giant Hogweed lookalikes (at earlier stages of the GH’s development one hastens to add); but this is rarely spoken of in the household.
(A’s father, who by the way lived briefly in Norway while in flight from Austria in 1938, was a great admirer of Fra Angelico, and from this admiration her name apparently derives; though I can’t imagine that, as he was horticulturally aware, the name of the plant didn’t also enter into the calculations. At any rate I’ve always thought it a pretty good fit.)
We grow angelica too, though we’re not sure why. Lovage is the most absurd herb we grow – a vasty vastness, from which we cull wee bits for our omelettes. But delish, I’ll give it that.
In Canada there is a plant similar to Giant Hogweed, called Cow Parsnip or Indian celery. It does not seem to be as dangerous as GH, although some people get a skin reaction from touching it. Indian children eat the young stalks. So do bears.