What has eight legs and lives in the garden? Our new badebur, or bathing cage:
It’s a complicated story; suffice it to say that due to a water leak upstairs in our house we’ve had to remove our old enameled bathtub and replace it with a shower. The plumber can’t install the shower until next week and in the meantime we decided we’d take baths outside.
The new location has a good view, and bathing outdoors is a delightful luxury.
Next to the tub is our outdoor birdcage. It hasn’t been occupied since Tango the parrot flew away last summer. We thought of selling it, but never got round to it.
Suddenly we thought of the badebur, or bathing cage: a permanent outdoor summer bathroom. No planning permission is required, and when you get bored with the view it can be moved down to the berry bushes. It’s rather like a Victorian bathing machine.
I’m not wearing clothes because of excessive modesty, I was merely trying the new location out for size. The bell (top left, below) is to ring for more wine.
This is the current view from inside the badebur:
A Bad Guide 
Four wheels and a motor … suddenly everyone could save time by having a bath during the drive to work. Think of the time saved, the leap in productivity. You could be the Henry Ford of the 21st century.
You could connect the steering wheel down the plug’ole.
Old-fashioned tubs with a view have appeared prominently in advertisements of a certain product in recent years, at least in the US.
Wow! Nice comeback!
But why do you need the cage to confine the bathtube? Let it be free!
I hadn’t seen that , Ø.
There are possibilities for an unconfined bathtub. I want to put one in the top of an apple tree overlooking the lake, but others feel the climb up a ladder would be too strenuous. I enjoy the security of the cage, though. You’d have to try it, it’s a great feeling: neither inside, nor out. And it’s going to be keeping out the dead leaves soon. We’re thinking of adding a glass roof, to protect it during the winter or something.
Yes, that’s true. It’s evident that you’re the architect here.
You can also put curtains around the cage to cover & uncover one or side or the other.
Dyveke says the cage is to keep birds from getting in and drowning. I like the curtains idea.
also very true… little rodents would be worst
I could see a roof made of hard, thick, transparent corrugated plastic, and around the sides a system of curtains that could be adjusted depending on sunshine or privacy concerns.
Question: how do you fill and empty the tub without having to carry vast quantities of water?
The thought of the tub in the apple tree makes me think of this.
Birds are too smart to drown in a bathtub unter freiem Himmel. Slugs and midges, on the other hand, are pretty dumb – and won’t be held back by chicken wire. Without the hindrance, every morning you would have robins perched on the tub rim bursting with matutinal melody.
The word bur reminds me of the German das Bauer, meaning “birdcage”. Not to be confused with der Bauer, as in “the dumbest farmer grows the biggest potatoes”. Duden sez the origin of both is the Old High German bur = house, room, cell: “eigentlich” “living companion”, “somebody who lives in the same village” (Mitbewohner, Dorfgenosse).
M-l, great ideas. You can always be an architect if the linguistics thing doesn’t work out. We fill the tub with a hose from the kitchen. Emptying it is easy, we just pull out the plug and the water drains on to the ground.
Ø, we’re maybe going to try the tub in the tree at our log cabin in the mountains. I’ll let you know how it works out (if I survive).
G. What is it with farmers? Bønder, farmers in Norwegian, is pronounced exactly like bønner, or beans. “Go and ask the beans for a plate of farmers”, or vice versa.
In a German restaurant we once had excellent pork steak with delicious beans. What, we enquired, was the herb used on the beans? The waiter was delighted to spend minutes in the kitchen quizzing the staff. He returned to announce, with pride, that they had used bohnenkraut.
Bohnenkraut is an herb that I like very much. Apparently it’s called “savory” or “summer savory” in English. I had never heard of or encountered it in the States. Is it used much nowadays (outside of Germany) ?
I’m going out to get some as soon as the markets open tomorrow.
Thanks for the compliment, AJP. A roof such as I describe would keep the insects out of the tub.
(Summer) savoury (Fr sarriette) seems to be quite popular in Canada, at least here in Nova Scotia where there is a small French-speaking village called Memramcook (a name from the Mikmaw language) which is famous for its annual crop of summer savoury. I think that this herb is added to hearty dishes such as stews, along with thyme or other mild herbs, whether fresh or dried. There is actually a fair amount of old German influence in one part of the province, where German soldiers who had fought the American revolutionaries were settled by the British government of the time.
When I was a child we sang a little song which started and ended with:
Jeannot Lapin
dés le matin
broute la sarriette et le thym
(“Johnny Rabbit/from early morning/nibbles on savoury and thyme”).
Das Bauer = ‘birdcage’
This word is probably related to English bower.
We grow both savouries, summer and winter: my point was just that the German name was a bit disappointing at the time – your beans were delicious because we cooked them with beanherb.
Still, that’s why we started growing them.
I’m outraged. I’ve just seen a photo of a supermarket cheese called “The Laughing Cow”. WhenIwasaboy, it was “La Vache qui rit”. Like the blessed label on the HP Sauce bottle, it helped us learn French. Now it’s all dumbed down. Bah! Indeed, moo!
marie-lucie, “bower” is related to bur (long mark over the u), as MW tells me. And it all derives ultimately from the same source(s) as today’s English “be” !?
We are all awaiting your book: “Principles of Historical Linguistics With Hundreds of Cute and Consciousness-Raising Facts”.
“Historical Linguistics For Gardeners”.
Dearie, no one learns languages now we’ve joined the Common Market.
Actually, I’ve got a “Latin For Gardeners“. Stearn, the author, recently died.
dés le matin
Did kids back then play dice-and-thimble in the mornings ?
I once entertained the idea that learning Latin anatomical terms would help me to learn Latin. That didn’t work out – I think the absence of verbs was just too hard for me to bear. I would probably fail at the same undertaking with “Latin For Gardeners”.
Haha. There are no verbs, but it’s a good book. I was going to give some examples, but I can’t find it. It must be in the out house.
On an extended stay in Germany I once got into reading murder mysteries in German (translated from Swedish). It may or may not have helped me in my day-to-day life, negotiating the bank, the post office, the grocery store, and so on. It certainly built my vocabulary in some odd directions.
Bønder “farmers” and bønner “I: beans II: prayers” *) aren’t pronounced exactly the same. It’s the textbook example minimal pair for Norwegian tonality. Bønder is pronounced in the first tone, i.e. with a contour like bisyllabic words in English and German **), while both types of bønner are pronounced in the second tone, i.e. with more equality in tone between the stessed and the unstressed syllables.
*) Hence the oldest joke in Norway: A priest is being served weak coffee and says: “Hope and faith are not enough, this takes bønner”
**) Except, of course, to muddle it further, that we Easterners use low pitch for stress.
the same source(s) as today’s English “be” !?
Bu or bo is the everyday verb for “live (somewhere)”. Jeg bor i Skien/Eg bur i Skien “I live in Skien”. West Germanic lost the locational semantics of this verb and mixed it into the paradigm of the existensial verb — as if that wasn’t messy enough already.
A bur was a house to live in. For a long time the word was used for the house of the unmarried women on a farm. The word burugle “bower-owl” is a derogatory term for an unmarried and perceived unmarriable woman — I think it may have come from being a perpetual inhabitant.
There are also the nouns bu “hut, shelter” = Danish and Swedish bod, cognate (or origin) of ‘booth’, bø “the central fields of a farm” <- "farm" and by “town, city”. Bø or By is often the name of the oldest homestead in a parish, a living memory of a distant time when it was simply “the settlement”.
Like a “bothy” on a Scottish farm or, now, set up for hill-walkers.
Great information, Trond! I had no idea where booth came from, now it makes sense.
Burugle seems to be a more colorful way of saying “old maid”, Fr “vieille fille”. In French there is a derogatory expression “vieille chouette” (lit ‘old barn-owl’) but I am not sure if it is restricted to old old maids. But English bowerbird refers to a beautiful and interesting bird.
Dearie, so a “bothy” is a shelter. Is it open on at least one side, like a booth ?
marie-lucie, I was hoping for a pat on the head for noticing the accent typo on dès. I mean, jeeze, how often do Texas farmboys succeed at learning that much French ? But maybe it came across as rural impudence.
Grumbly, I have to confess that I missed your pun. Double pat on your head.
I need new glasses – unless the light is very bright I don’t always see all the details, and in this case I was not sure if the accent I was seeing was the correct one. Obviously it was not, but wihout my typo you would not have been able to reply so cleverly!
empty, in the early ’80s I learned a lot of French slang from reading several of the surrealistic comic books (bandes dessinées) of Copi. I still have them somewhere:
The slang was low-life, and occasionally of a silly childish kind. As you say, it certainly builds the vocabulary in odd directions. The whacked-out surrealism made it easier – for me – to remember it all.
unless the light is very bright I don’t always see all the details
Same here – ain’t it the sad truth, marie-lucie ! But actually things are not so bad in the developed societies in which we live, since bright light is easily available. I have the impression that I need it not “in general”, but to see contrast better – which one needs in reading text.
dearieme, I second your “bah”.
Also, I have some red wax embedded, perhaps permanently, in the passenger seat of my car from when I carelessly discarded the wrapper of a Babybel and left it lying there on a sunny afternoon.
Mini Babybel, I mean.
Isn’t this fascinating? No, but imagine my feelings when I got back in the car and reached over to scoop up the trash from the seat next to me, only to find that the red wax among it was practically liquid and my scooping action was just serving to spread it around!
empty: I hope you don’t believe that the cow might be laughing at you personally ?
Not at all. By the way, I enjoy saying “la vache qui rit”. I think it’s because of the sequence of vowels.
Burgle? Inept burglars end up in the bur (“in the cage”).
@GS: in the hills it’s most often a hut or cottage – four walls and a roof. WKPD says the word might be from Norse or Welsh or Gaelic. There’s a mob who look after them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Bothies_Association
Ah, thanks, I see now. I thought they might be like the 3-sided rain shelters for forest and country-side walkers that are often found here in Germany.
Windy spots, the Scottish hills.
They have the same thing in Norway. Trond will have to help me with the name, which I can’t remember. It’s probably bot-related though.
A gapahuk? There’s been some semantic drift here. Traditionally, the gapahuk is a simple shelter made by (preferably) spruce branches leaning against a single beam.
I note that the Finnish counterpart is the laavu. I gather from the English article that this word traditionally denoted the same simple structure as Norwegian gapahuk, even if it looks like a cognate of North Sami lavvu “traditional teepee-like Sami tent”.
(Incidentally, my children and I have had a running joke the last couple of weeks translating gapahuk into any language. Favourites:
al Gafa:huq
l’huc gapant
kapahupahuka
gapahukaDu:Lam
ga?(W):
gapahuatl
Charles! Would you please let James know that I want scones and a cup of tea brought to my sleepingbag at eight o’clock tomorrow morning?]
I’m hoping your children are grown up, to be making such sophisticated jokes, but I suspect they’re quite young.
No – good word, gapahuk – but I was thinking of those overnattings places where people sleep, in the mountains…
What, laavu isn’t cognate with lavvu? We even have lavvus around here where we live, or the barnehage-aged children do. Bloody things are all over the place.
Oh, those. Boringly enough they’re called turisthytter, “tourist huts”.
Oh, I forgot: No, I would be surprised if Finnish laavu and North Sami lavvu weren’t cognates. What I meant to point out is that they are false friends, refering to entirely different types of shelter.
One reason I’m vague is that I didn’t find the word in Pekka Sammalahti’s The Saami Languages. Now I think North Saami lavvu might be a fairly recent inter-dialect loan from a Sami dialect that hasn’t undergone /a/ > /uo/ — e.g. one in Northern Finland — and thus a doublet/cognate with NS luovvi “scaffolding”, in last instance a Finnic loan from proto-Baltic.
The English (American?) word lean-to covers some of this same territory.
But I think that a lean-to is less substantial than those sturdy three-walled constructions. I guess they have to be oriented against the prevailing winds, otherwise they might fill up with snow in the winter, no?
I’ve no idea why the Wikipedia writer would have resorted to a Dictionary of French Architecture from the 11th to 16th Century (1856) for that obscure description of a lean-to, but it’s typical of the low quality of the architecture entries. The lean-to is still actuel in architecture, these days in glass. One architect who utilized lean-tos (leans-to?), and it was in one of his lectures that I first remember hearing the term used about something that wasn’t just a suburban garden shed, was Jim Stirling. Here’s what Stirling called a lean-to when he was describing his museum in Stuttgart. His History Faculty Library at Cambridge also has a sort of grandiose lean-to.
lean-tos (leans-to?)
Loans to ? Liens on ?
My type of gapahuk can be seen here. The use of gapahuk for permanent timber structures is quite new, I first encountered it ten years ago or so, anyway. I think it’s a result of the establishment of more accessible footpaths around the cities and of increasingly outdoorsy barnehager and SFO. These two developments are often connected.
One type of lean-to seems to cover the same ground. The other appears to be what we call a bislag.
Lean-to seems to mean two different things:
1. Some kind of free-standing structure with three walls and a roof (or triangular with two walls and a roof).
2. Some kind of add-on to a building.
Crown is referring to 2, I think.
I was thinking of 1. This can be further subdivided into
1a. Something permanent, for example something provided for overnight hikers by some kind of organization that maintains hiking trails
1b. Something temporary that you erect to give yourself a bit of shelter for the night. This may be what m-l is referring to.
Here is an example of 1b that reminds me a bit of Eeyore’s house.
Trond, your type of gaupehuk is what they use in the army, I think.
Ø, It’s not so much that it’s added on, more that it’s leaning against (or toward? Could it be the same “to” as in “heave to”?). And yes, that’s exactly poor old Eeyore’s house.
“Gapehuk”. No gauper involved.
By the army? Yes,probbly. Or in my case, by scouts. It’s essentially just replacing the spruce branches with a canvas. The one I pointed to is meant for more than one inhabitant. A one-man huk is better built like Eeyore’s.
There may not be gauper involved, but how about Tigger?
In cases involving dog-related injuries, of course, the simplest way to accomodate for the patient is to build a gapahuk by pulling a canvas over (or lean branches up against) the dog.
That’s why they call it recovery.
Funny you should connect this with the dog story, Trond. In English an Eeyore-house-shaped tent is called a pup tent
That’s because Pomeranians were used to hold the roof. These days it’s usually Poles.
There is also a kind of zelt that’s made of sprats.
My God, you guys are good. Do you do stand-up?
In Germany they use Dachshunds to hold up the roof when they can’t find anything taller. Curiously, “roof” is one of the few English words that dogs can pronounce.
At this rate and in this quality, I fear that empty will soon be booked into the middle of next year.
Perhaps you would care to be their agent?
Tak means roof in Norwegian and takk is thank you. A slight difference in pronunciation (“tahk” vs “tuck”), but I realise how really lucky one is to have English: the difference between “roof” and “thank you” is so very clear!
And the Dachsbracke has in-built wall support? There’s also the Norwegian buhund.
Lavvu is one of the few Sami words dogs can pronounce*). I gave up making sense of this for myself yesterday, but with such comparative evidence it can’t be a coincidence..
*) With the possible exception of Lapdogs.
To save space in crowded campsites, the Australians recently developed the Tenterfield Terrier.
Gimme sheltie.
The original name of the breed was “Shetland Collie”, but this caused controversy among Rough Collie breeders
All going “rough, rough”.
Very apt. I was thinking of the old joke:
Guy: My dog can talk.
Other guy: No way.
Guy: No, really. Watch this:
(to dog) What’s on top of a house?
Dog: Roof!
Guy: What is sandpaper like?
Dog: Rough!
Guy: Who was the greatest baseball player of all time?
Dog: Ruth!
Other guy: Get outta here!
(exeunt guy and dog)
Dog: Maybe I should have said Hank Aaron.
Getting back to the original topic: I’m not sure you want to roof the tub over in winter. I just remembered that years ago my wife and I had a blissful outdoor hot bath in the falling snow. It was at this place.
Wow, great. They seem to have outdoor tubs all over the place. No, I was thinking I don’t want to roof it over when I was sitting in it last; I enjoy looking up at the cherry tree.
I love that Hank Aaron joke.
Is Hank Aaron a breed of dog ?
I love to read your conversations again.
And I love the dog’s joke! we coulnd’t do it with Spanish… Or is it that dogs doesn’t speak Spanish?
AJP, that’s why my idea of a roof was of something transparent but sturdy like corrugated plastic, which is several millimeters thick. A roof that could be opened and closed would accommodate all weathers.
julia, the joke would not work in French either.
A James-Bondlike sliding roof with a remote control sounds perfect, but is way beyond my current repertoire of handyman tricks. I’m a simple carpenter. I’m hoping the wire netting will keep falling leaves out of the tub. If it doesn’t work this autumn I’ll have to think again.
I think the joke would probably work in German.
Here’s a similar joke in Jamaican Patois.
Ø, we’re maybe going to try the tub in the tree at our log cabin in the mountains. I’ll let you know how it works out (if I survive).
Crown, if I were you I would sparely use soap, or no soap at all, as it might make you slip from the branch. Pumice might be an alternative, especially since it will float in the bathtub and could easily be recovered once the snow has melted.
But have you thought about where to strip? If one does it on the ground, he/she will need to climb the tree “en tenue d’Adam (ou d’Eve)”, for the whole neighbourhood to watch the naked ape going up the tree, and down. But on the other hand (the left one), how to do it while clinging to branches?
You engineers are so practical. I hadn’t thought about the nudity; there might be complaints from the neighbours if I’m using a tall evergreen tree, like a pine, but only complaints that all the details are being obscured by branches. It has the possibility of being a very green concept if we put a washing machine below the tub, one that uses the recycled “grey” water from bathing. Above the tub we could have a rainwater tank and a couple of solar panels. A whole tree of washing – or as you say in French a lavetree.
If you are thinking of climbing a tree while naked, or even while scantily clad, let me urge to select a tree having smooth bark and very few protruding bits.
Can either of you maths guys tell me the formula for the height of a “rectangular” tetrahedron (i.e. the height of the kind of three-sided pyramid that looks like the sliced-off corner of a cube)? I can’t seem to find it on the web. I need it for a project of my wife’s that I’m helping with.
I may have to wear a wetsuit, though that kind of defeats the object of bathing.
I suppose I could swing over to the tub from an adjacent rooftop, Tarzan fashion. Come to think of it, Tarzan didn’t seem to incur injuries from scraping against tree bark and protruding bits.
Yes, I can see that this could be treat for the neighbors. I see them sitting down to a meal in their own garden, looking across the way and saying “Oh, can someone go get the binoculars? One of the Crowns is about to take a bath!” Or of course in cold weather they might prefer to stay snugly indoors (if they have a window facing the right way) as they watch you climb down out of the warmth of the tub.
Apart from the simple pleasure of seeing you go bright pink, they might also find themselves imagining the great moment, one long-ago day in the Great Rift Valley of Africa, when our arboreal ancestors first took to the ground.
But how well do you know these people? Are you sure they wouldn’t try to get you arrested for in-descent exposure?
For any sort of pyramid the volume can be expressed as one third of the product of the base and the height. If the side length of your cube is L, and if you choose as your base not the equilateral face of the thing but one of the other three (right-triangle) faces, then the area of that base is one half of the square of L, and the height is L, so the volume is one sixth of the third power of L.
In other words, your cut-off corner of the cube has one sixth of the total volume of the cube.
Thank you very much, Empty – and thank you for such clear instructions; even I can understand.
Are you sure they wouldn’t try to get you arrested for in-descent exposure?
And it’s not often one could be arrested for social climbing.
Whoops, sorry, I didn’t read the question the first time. You want to know what the height will be if you make the equilateral face the base. Arrange the cube in (x,y,z) coordinates with its vertices at (0,0,0), (L,0,0), (0,L,0), (0,0,L), (L,L,0), (L,0,L), (0,L,L), and (L,L,L). Consider the tetrahedron whose vertices are the first four listed. The center point of the equilateral side is the average, so to speak, of (L,0,0), (0,L,0), (0,0,L), i.e. (L/3,L/3,L/3). To get the distance from here to (0,0,0), add up the squares of L/3, L/3, and L/3 and extract the square root. So L times the square root of 1/3.
Dyveke says “say thanks from me”.
Wow, I’m in awe of your deductive ability.
the formula for the height of a “rectangular” tetrahedron
It’s (a/3)*sqr(6), where a is the length of an edge. Here is a picture, under “Space Height”.
Oops, that’s for a regular tetrahedron.
empty, there’s a neat formula at (4) here, relating the product of the edges of a triangle, their heights and the circumradius.
I hardly ever remember formulas, so I have to deduce them from scratch. In this case I drew the cube and the diagonals connecting three corners, and then the problem was reduced to a couple of pythagorean equations:
1. finding the distance from the corner of the bottom surface of the pyramid to the surface center (which I’ll confess I remember, but if I don’t it can be done by Pythagoras).
2. finding the distance from the top of the pyramid to the surface center.
Thank you, G and T. Yes there’s a lot of info about the regular-guy tetrahedron made up of equilateral triangles, but there’s less about this one. Actually, now my wife wants to use one that’s even shallower…
Ask her if she really wants her work of art to be that shallow.
Actually, now my wife wants to use one that’s even shallower…
But still a slice of cube ? If not, it might be easier to consider directly what tetrahedral height looks right, instead of trying to deduce height from slice-of-something-ness. This is my favorite approach – when I can’t solve a problem, I change the problem.
Or does “something shallower” mean (draws a deep breath, because this is going to take a lot of words) still a tetrahedron, and still with an equilateral triangle as base, and still with the apex directly above the center (so that the three upper triangles are all the same shape), but with the height being less (for the given base) than it would have been if the upper triangles were at right angles to each other?
How big is this going to be, by the way? Big enough for a goat to bother climbing on? And what will it be made of?
And speaking of pumice: I am sure I was taught that the word “lava” for volcanic rock goes back to the fact that the ancient Romans used pumice for washing themselves. OnlEtyDic does not bear this out. Has anybody else heard this tale?
She makes a lot of models to decide things like this (she’ll eventually need a number for the person who builds it, but I just needed to figure it out for the autocad drawing I was doing). She’ll be making more than one, and it’s important to get it right. With all the revolving computer drawings in the world, to make an aesthetic judgement nothing is as useful as a solid physical model, preferably 1:1 in scale.
still with an equilateral triangle as base, and still with the apex directly above the center (so that the three upper triangles are all the same shape), but with the height being less (for the given base) than it would have been if the upper triangles were at right angles to each other?
Yes, exactly. That’s what she’s doing.
They’re biggish (70 cm), and there are lots. Beyond that, my lips are sealed; it’s more than my job’s worth, Gov. It’s an interesting idea though, so maybe at some point I’ll get permission to disclose more.
According to the OED it’s from lave “wash”, but in the sense of washing down a hillside rather than Romans washing their faces – I’m surprised this “down the hillside” use of “wash” is found in other languages.
From the OED:
If I go to lave v. 1, it says:
I’ve pasted the whole thing for lave, the verb, because it’s quite unusual and interesting.
This being done lave and bounce it [the honey and water] very well and often.
Bounced, not stirred.
I find that bounce had a thumping and bumping sense before it had a bounding or rebounding sense. So in this quote it may mean something closer to “stir” than to “shake”. Maybe mixing it up by plunging the ladle in the bowl? Probably not mixing it up by causing the whole bowl to move up and down like a rubber ball?
Or like a baby being entertained on one’s knee.
“Thumping and bumping” is closer to “stir” than to “shake” ? But
I see that you’re trumping my idea with the experienced-father card, so there’s not much I can counter with – except the common knowledge that babies should be bounced, not stirred or thumped.
There’s a Norwegian verb lave “hang or fall in volumes”. Nowadays its main use is for heavy snowfall, snøen laver ned “the snow is falling heavily”, but the dictionary also has treet laver av knopper “the tree is bursting with buds”, According to the Bokmål half of the dictionary, the verb is related to lav< “lichen” *). I can’t find this group of words in Bjorvand & Lindeman.
There’s also archaic Norwegian laug “bath, washing, bathwater”, cognate with English lye. This appears to be derived by a k-suffix from law-, which is even found with a t-extension in Swedish lödder “soap” and English lather.
*) Bokmål lav “low” is a completely different word. The form with final v is from Danish, where final g becomes w. Nynorsk has the inherited Norwegian låg (as in Swedish). This is probably originally a verbal adjective meaning “lying down”.
Perhaps there is a detergent analogy with the English “sod”, past tense “sud”. “The sodding snow is heavy this year” and “the tree is bursting with suds”
I agree that in general thumping and bumping is not very close to stirring. My reasoning, such as it is, goes like this:
If a centuries-old recipe told me to “lave and bounce” a bowl of something before serving it, then my first thought would be that I am meant to somehow wash the stuff (“lave”) — what, pass it through a filter? add some disinfecting chloride bleach? — and then (“bounce”) throw the bowl down and watch it rebound from the ground? or maybe just heft it and joggle it roughly up and down, whether on my knee or otherwise? All of this seems unlikely.
By now I know, thanks to AJP, that “lave” could mean “to ladle”. And, having consulted my own old paper small-print-with-magnifying-glass OED, I also know that the primary sense of “bounce” was not always what it is now. So, making what I think of as an educated guess, I imagine that the writer intended for me to mix my drink by alternately (1) lifting up ladlesful (and pouring them back in) and (2) pushing the convex bottom of the ladle down into the stuff (if it’s not too much of a stretch to see this as thumping the bowlful of drink) for further mixing.
it turns out that when a Scandinavian utters the word lye I cannot stop from uttering the word lutefisk, which I believe is related.
In an episode of The West Wing, President Bartlet explains that James Bond’s “shaken, not stirred” marks him as a drinker of weak martinis because you get less melted ice in your drink when it is stirred.
Stu, on the subject of babies, I can only say
– My infant-related afterthought was, I thought, more intended to cover my ass in case you objected that the elastic recoil of rubber balls and the like is not absolutely central to the current sense of “bounce”. But probably you’re right: no doubt deep down I was engaging in an unfair kind of one-upsmanship.
– On the other hand, uncles can dandle babies, too, and I think that you once described yourself as being (not on the internet but in person) a sort of fuzzy avuncular type.
Fuzzy and avuncular: that’s me ! On the subject of detergent: recently, on visits to my friends with their 1-year-old kiddo, I have noticed that he has a complex redolence of many components, different each time and from hour to hour, often as a function of invisible events. I don’t like the artificial scent of perfumed adults, but this is – well – interesting. One smells civilization in the making.
Yes, and lutefisk. Actually I mis-shortened B&L’s entry on lut in the above. It seems that lut is from an ablauted form with a t-extension, while lödder and lather are from a form with a suffix þra-.
Civilization and lutefisk. You can’t have one without the other.
That is entirely true. One wonders, therefore, about the credentials of the USA, where lutefisk, Tilsiter, saure Nierchen and many another goody are frowned upon.
In fairness I should say that in the Southern States there is less frowning than elsewhere.
Blimey, saure Nierchen sounds awful! I’ve never liked kidneys. Joyce says something of them:
I agree, but it’s worse than that; I can only eat them very occasionally. Lutefisk isn’t smelly, just incredibly bland and disappointing for something people have gone to such trouble to make.
Trond, thanks for lave, which I didn’t know and seems to mean the same as “laden” – which reminds me of Ø’s “ladle” – and thanks for the nob-ordbok, which I also didn’t know.
I wonder if “awful” came to have the sense of “terrible/disgusting” due to interference from the near-homonym “offal”. Recently I read that Jane Austen still used the word in the sense of “inspiring awe”.
We have a vacancy for that meaning now that “awesome” means something else. Maybe we should bring back “awful”. The recipe for saure Nierchen inspired my awe.
I’m not sure that the diluted sense of “awful” has so much to do with disgusting. I would say that “terrible” came to mean very bad (and later very anything) rather than terror-inspiring, and “awful” came to mean very bad (and later very anything) rather than awe-inspiring.
A funny thing about “offal”, in the sense of organ meats, is that the same word also has the older sense of “stuff to throw away”. It’s funny that the two senses coexist.
We used to eat chicken livers, rolled in flour and broiled in butter if I remember right. It’s been years now. They were delicious, but I always felt that, even apart from the fat content, they must be bad for us.
Is Tilsiter cheese frowned upon?
Lutefisk is always spoken of as one of those crazy foreign foods that would probably never pass non-native lips except on a dare; but then on closer questioning one always hears that the only thing really striking about it is the texture. I hope I get around to trying it some day, but it doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as, say, rotted shark.
I don’t know about frowned upon, but I remember reading recently that Tilsiter is made using the same bacteria as occur in smelly feet, which is probably why it’s in bad odor.
There are some good smelly things in Norway, like gammelost (very strong, salty and not entirely unpleasant “old cheese”) and rakørret, which is smelly rotten uncooked trout.
I love chicken livers, why would you think that they were bad for you?
Oh, just some vague idea that since one of their functions is to eliminate toxins from the body then they must be toxic.
Rakørret: I’ll definitely remember to try that if I ever get to the right part of the world.
some vague idea that since one of their functions is to eliminate toxins from the body then they must be toxic.
One of the functions of the brain is to eliminate thoughts from the body. Yet the brain is not pensive, but rather gray and gelatinous like lutefisk.
Lutefisk is always spoken of as one of those crazy foreign foods that would probably never pass non-native lips except on a dare;
I read that sentence just after getting up, before polishing my glasses, and understood the last word to be “date”. It made sense in a way – on a date one wants to be accommodating.
Hahahahahahaha. I never went on that kind of date. I suppose it must occur sometimes, after Christmas.
“Oh, just some vague idea that since one of their functions is to eliminate toxins from the body then they must be toxic” You may larf, but I once met a Professor of Food Hygiene who used exactly that argument to explain why he never ate offal. (My suspicion was that the real explanation was that he had grown up as a spoiled working-class brat, but who knows?)
Professor of Food Hygiene is a funny job, you’d have to be really into germs. I’d rather be Professor of Food.
I would mail you some rakørret, Ø, but it’s supposed to be dangerous if it’s gone off and I’ve no idea how you tell, because it always tastes slightly as if it must have gone off even when it hasn’t.
Empty, lave (English lava) is said to come from medieval Latin lapida, slab, itself from lapis, lapidis, stone.
But to come back to the washroom, you have the word lavabo (washbasin), which is a future of Latin verb lavare and which, I believe, was borrowed by the Turks from the French though Turks seldom use it while saying mass. Therefore it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a lavabo in Turkey.
Lavabo inter innocentes manus mea
et circumbado altare tuum Domine.
Lavabo manus mea – so “I’m just going to wash my hands” is a very old biblical euphemism?
Sorry, there seems to be two separate words for lave in French, both feminine nouns and both spelt the same way. One is the molten rock, i.e. magma, and comes from Neapolitan lava, a word related to landslides or rock falls. The other, which I didn’t know about, is used for flat limestone, and is attested as laive in 1285. It is the second one which is from Medieval Latin lapida. I suspect it might be cognate with the word lauze, which are flat stones used to cover the roofs of some buildings.
AJP, Le Dico étymo (Jean Maillet) says it comes from Psalm 26 — whatever that is — and was pronounced by the priest while he was washing his hands during mass. Obviously when mass was said in Latin.
But, sans le latin, sans le latin, la messe nous emmerde… (Georges Brassens).
The King James Version of the Bible has for Psalm 26:
I don’t really understand why I’m washing my hands, but it can’t hurt.
Google translates lauze as “slate” – I’m not sure whether that’s right.
Lauze is not quite ardoise (slate). It is much thicker and far less “finished”.
My old French-Norwegian dictionary won’t admit to know the word. Strange behaviour since it only makes it look older. Petit Larousse says that lauze/lause is from Gaulish.
Judging from the explanations I think it’s a decent match to Norwegian helle, which I’d translate into English as “flatstone”. Well, the wild form anyway.