I happened to open the front door this morning at about 7:30 and I saw shafts of sunlight coming through the trees. Everything is slightly damp with dew and old raindrops.
In my non-expert opinion these are pictures of a frog. We often see toads, but they’re much smaller; this one was about four inches (10 cm) from nose to bottom.
Something about the way it was resting its weight on its left arm, it looked as if it might make an earnest speech
or tell me the logic behind Norwegian tariffs on imported plastics .
What you really want is goat pictures. I’ll try to take some today while the sun’s out.
A Bad Guide 
Wonderful pictures! You can see why there are so many tales of people turned into frogs or the opposite.
Here is a Native American legend of the Columbia River area: a young man forbidden to marry the girl of his choice renounces human society and seeks refuge in the river. He is presumed drowned, and only his best friend keeps coming to the river to mourn him. After a while a frog-like monster appears to the friend and talks to him: it is the young man, who is gradually metamorphosing.
Metamorphosing into a frog? It doesn’t sound like he’s got much of a future. We, at least, consider frogs as ugly although their overall form is beautiful. They are quite human with their wart-covered skin and their little hands and arms, but I think it must also be because of their heads. They have very prominent eyes and nose and a broad mouth that together can evoke a human face; it’s similar to the way a very simple cartoon line drawing can also vividly bring back a human expression.
We spend a lot of time looking for frogs in the local canal. The goats, on the other hand, we know were to find.
I’m pretty sure there isn’t a lesson in that.
Huh. I’ve always “known” that frog translates Norwegian frosk and denotes the lesser one without warts, while toad translates padde and means a bigger, warted one.
That’s way too technical, Trond. Though I agree that frogs are green. Brown is toads.
The people of the Low Countries learn to separate the frogs from the sheep and goats, whereas the highlander is always mixing them up.
Something about the way it was resting its weight on its left arm, it looked as if it might make an earnest speech
You’re absolutely right!
It’s a pity you don’t talk Frog.
(What a delight the smell I imagine in the first picture!)
I agree with Crown that Ginger was a toad and this new one is a frog.
Over here:
– The things called toads are warty and the things called frogs frogs are not.
– The toads hop around on the land. Most frogs spend most of their time in the water, or right next to the water ready to jump in.
– The largest kind of frog (bullfrog) grows bigger than any toad, but among toads a particularly large individual may be bigger than any other kind of frog.
WiPe tells me that taxonomically there is no distinction. Maybe if biologists use the words at all they consider toads to be a subset of frogs.
Larkin referred to “the toad, work”. “The frog, work” would sound more larkish than Larkin.
and it seems that toad has no known cognates, while English has a little known cognate of padde, namely paddock.
In Scots, “puddock”.
“The Puddock” by J. M. Caie
A Puddock sat by the lochan’s brim,
An’ he thocht there was never a puddock like him.
He sat on his hurdies, he waggled his legs,
An’ cockit his heid as he glowered throu’ the seggs
The bigsy wee cratur’ was feelin’ that prood,
He gapit his mou’ an’ he croakit oot lood
“Gin ye’d a’ like tae see a richt puddock,” quo’ he,
” Ye’ll never, I’ll sweer, get a better nor me.
I’ve fem’lies an’ wives an’ a weel-plenished hame,
Wi’ drink for my thrapple an’ meat for my wame.
The lasses aye thocht me a fine strappin’ chiel,
An’ I ken I’m a rale bonny singer as weel.
I’m nae gaun tae blaw, but the truth I maun tell-
I believe I’m the verra MacPuddock himsel’.”
A heron was hungry an’ needin’ tae sup,
Sae he nabbit th’ puddock and gollup’t him up;
Syne ‘runkled his feathers: “A peer thing,” quo’ he,
“But-puddocks is nae as fat as they eesed tae be.”
P.S. “I believe I’m the verra MacPuddock himsel’” was much used in our house when we saw Mr Blair preening on the telly.
Thank you for that treat, dearie.
On reflection, I think my online source has got the last line wrong. I’m no expert, but I think it should read “But-puddocks is nae fat they eesed tae be” i.e. fings ain’t wot they used ter be, frog-wise.
The intrusion speaks sadly of the modern obsession with fat.
Cute frog/toad (whatever), but gorgeous morning fog! Lovely photos, Mr Crown. I take it your leg is better (after the Wolfhound attack)? Hope so!
Hm. EtymOnline says it’s from tadige/tadie, which I think is an irregular development. The Eng. oa vowel is usually from a:, in turn usually from ai, and thus corresponding to No. ei in a wide range of cognates (loaf/leiv, broad/brei(d), stone/stein etc.). There are some words where the long a seems to be original (e.g. soap), but I don’t think there are many from short a..Anyway, toad is found only in English, while the rest of Germanic have some version of padde. Could toad < tad- belong here too, with an unexplained t- < p-?
From the OED:
I’ve just left the whole entry, for the hell of it. Although I started, I’ve given up putting back the bolded words & dates; it’s too much work.
mab, thank you for liking the other picture. I thought it was an amazing sight.
My leg is still very painful, but it’s probably not going to kill me. Since you’ve given me an opening, I might as well say I’ve also had a really bad splinter buried in my finger for a week now. My wife says I ought to soak it in a bowl of porridge, I think this is called a poultice.
How are you?
Dearie, thank you very much indeed for “puddock” & the poem, I’m sure your version of the last line is the right one – and thank you Ø, for “paddock”, which I’m glad to know. Padde is a word that comes up a lot around here so I like knowing some British cognates.
The word for tadpole in Norwegian is rumpetroll (“rumpe-troll”, rumpe being one’s bottom). Don’t ask me why, I expect Trond knows the reason.
Julia: It’s a pity you don’t talk Frog.
Like most native speakers of English, I would really appreciate it if the frogs would start speaking my language and then I wouldn’t have to go to any trouble.
Thank you for remembering Ginger, Empty. He looks very different from this one.
I think I’ve been asked this before… Rumpe can also mean “tail”. There are some older words for “tadpole” too, but I can’t recall them now.
I wouldn’t be surprised. Frogs and toads come up a lot, and I’ve got a bad memory for some things.
Or I may be wrong, or it may have been somewhere completely different, or somebody else about something else..
A bad memory for bad memories, I thought. It sounds like some old song line, but it gives only seven hits on Google.
AJP, next time try to speak very loud but very slow, many people think this is effective in every language.
Trond, you had a great idea, but I rather like a song called A bad memory for GOOD memories. Isn’t it sound more melancholic?
Is there around here any poet/musician who could make it happen?
Version with that other last line.
Crown, you should probably soak your finger in something. Or do you have any bananas there?
It turns out that “poultice” from a word for “porridge”, and that “porridge” and “pottage” come from a word for “leek”.
Should you perhaps take your leg to a doctor? Something about the way in which you downplay this injury is unconvincing.
Thank you, Ø . Quite why the author decided that herons come from the neighbourhood of Aberdeen, I don’t know. But – perhaps they do.
What’s Aberdeen about it? “The lochan’s brim”?
Ø, having soaked it now I’m trying the banana treatment. My leg just needs time, I think it’s the cable on the side (ligament?).
Julia’s right, I don’t know why no one has used the phrase. “A good memory for bad memories” gets only 3 hits.
I don’t know about frogs, but dogs respond much better to movements than they do to sound. My daughter can get Topsy to do all sorts of things by using hand signals. Nevertheless, people much prefer yelling at their dogs to communication by hand gestures. I think it must be a) people* are too lazy to learn the hand signals and b) they don’t trust them as much as something they (the people) are used to using, like plain English.
*(i.e. me)
All three can be meloncholy, depending on the rest of the song. Even A good memory for good memories is melancholy, if the point is that everything else is (just barely) forgotten.
Meloncholy is when you long for old fruit.
Take the leg to a doctor and the dog to a lector.
Perfectly said, Trond! Listen to him and Ø, Crown, please.
Here we would use “ Agua D’Alibour” to soak the problematic finger. It’s an old remedy from our grandmother’s times… but I think it’s only known around here.
Q: What do you get when you cross a cantaloupe with a sheepdog?
A: A melon-collie baby.
(See, there’s this old song that goes “Come to me, my melancholy baby …” …. )
Hohohoho…
I quite like the sound of this magnesium chloride, at least in translation:
It’s good for melting ice in the winter, too.
Yes. “Less toxic to plant life and less corrosive than sodium chloride”. And more intellectual.
I think Agua d’Alibour is a disinfectant.
I quite enjoyed using the banana skin; it was a bit of a conversation piece, although I think some people found it distracting. The splinter has not yet emerged. It may be waiting for Groundhog Day.
I read the puddock poem to my family last night, during a lull in a game that we were playing. Of course I put real effort into it, striving to do full justice to the sense and the rhythm while giving my best imitation of the true Scots pronunciation. People seemed to appreciate it, but I must have been doing something wrong: afterwards my throat hurt.
“What’s Aberdeen about it?” ‘fat’ for ‘what’. I refer m’learned friend to the running joke in one of the Rebus novels where Aberdeen is referred to as “furryboot city”. It was not an allusion to the long winters.
Well what was it an allusion to – or is it obvious and I can’t see it?
Fat means barrel in Norwegian; so fat øl is in fact draught beer, although it always sounds to me that must be something oily and fattening.
If you’re going to declaim in Scottish, first you ought to stand in a hot steamy shower and suck some throat capsules.
The joke is that it’s obvious only in retrospect. If an outsider outsider turns up in Aberdeen, a local will enquire “Furryboots ye frae?”
From whereabouts are you from? But that uses “from” twice, I’m not sure I like that. Shouldn’t it be “Urryboots ye frae?” or “Furryboots ye?”? I like Furryboots, though.
If I’m not missing something, the question directly translates as “Whereabouts you from?”. f is used to render the local pronunciation of wh-.
It makes sense with an effect like that between [xw-] or [hw-] and [w-]. But is it a regular labiodental [f] or rather a bilabial [ɸ], recognizably different from the phoneme /f-/ to local ears?
stand in a hot steamy shower and suck some throat capsules.
Yes, I see that iit was very reckless of me to attempt it cold like that. Should I try to get my hands on some eau d’Alibour, do you think?
¡jajajaja! Crown, that translation is superb! ¿Don’t you see google translation is fantastic?
Thank you, Ø, you found what I was looking for! And we always thought that “water” was made by someone named D’Alibour, like D’Artagnan…
Ø: “porridge” and “pottage” come from a word for “leek”
Not exactly, the history is a little more complex. “Pottage” comes from French “potage”, originally meaning something cooked in a “pot”, specifically a kind of thick vegetable soup (the word is still used as a more elegant term than “soupe” in restaurants and in some families). In the Middle Ages there was another French word “porée” or “porreie”, meaning ‘leek soup’ (‘leek’ being originally “por”, later “porreau” and eventually “poireau”). In England there seems to have been a confusion between the two French words “porreie” and “potage”, since both meant some kind of soup, resulting in the English hybrid “porrage”, eventually spelled “porridge”. The phrase “pease porridge hot/cold” shows that “porridge” has not always been made with oats.
Trond: About “wh”: But is it a regular labiodental [f] or rather a bilabial [ɸ], recognizably different from the phoneme /f-/ to local ears?
I don’t know about the Scots pronunciation, or the effect on local ears, but I used to have an Irish landlord who pronounced “wh” as [fw], as in “for a fwile”. I did not ask him to demonstrate, but I heard it on many occasions and it sounded definitely labiodental, as in “for”, not bilabial.
(sorry, the last para should have been in regular type, not italics).
Oh, I see, that makes more sense than what I thought I read. Thanks, m-l.
Then I take back my criticism of the Aberdonians.
The phrase “pease porridge hot/cold” shows that “porridge” has not always been made with oats.
Porridge in Norway (I used to spell it porrage, but I’m not sure it’s still acceptable) – grøt, in Norwegian – means the method rather than the material. Any sort of grain is acceptable to be made into grøt.
So d’Alibour was one of the three musketeers? Porthos , Athos, Aramis and d’Alibour – four. Four musketeers.
I just read somewhere else that the s of whereabouts originated as a genitive marker, not plural.
Yes, that’s how it’s used today. It’s like thereabouts, of there; it’s not one whereabout, two whereabouts.
You can ask “whereabouts are you from?”, but you can also say “I inquired about his whereabouts”.
A Wodehouse character related the following gag:
A woman says to the maid: ‘Do you know anything of my
husband’s whereabouts?’ And the maid replies–‘They’re at the wash.’
“porridge” has not always been made with oats.
Of course in the US we call oatmeal porridge “oatmeal”. If we need to mention the raw product that one cooks to make oatmeal we might call it “oats”. If we ever mention other breakfast cereals that are served hot, what do we say? “Cream of Wheat” is one. Generically they were called “hot cereal” in my family.
Robertson Davies called (cold) breakfast cereal “breakfast food”. Is that standard Canadian?
Around here we know the word “porridge” mostly from the story of Goldilocks*. Once when my wife was a little girl, she and her parents were visiting a Scottish couple. In the morning her hostess offered her porridge, and she replied “Porridge is for bears!”
*Also, Bob Marley rhymes “oatmeal porridge” with “courage” in No Woman No Cry.
My father always ate his porridge standing or walking. I’d assumed it was an idiosyncracy until there was an exchange of letters about the habit in The Times. I find myself increasingly walking about the kitchen while I eat my muesli . It must be the oats.
Thanks for all the “porridge” references, Ø. Considering the vowels don’t rhyme at all, the Bob Marley one works quite well. Porridge is for bears, and (I think I’ve mentioned this before) muscular Scotspersons with two right legs. I see that Scott still spells it “porage”.
The thing is dearie, do you walk while you’re eating your muesli, or do you eat muesli while you’re walking? Big difference.
It appears that in Scotland the shot put is a downhill event.
Probably, after your bowl of Scott’s Oats, it just seems like a downhill event. They’re just trying to put that thought in your head.
When I was young, he was tossing the caber. Are there any other Highland Games events that I might see him participate in before I die?
You know I thoucht he oucht to be tossing the caber.
This substitution of the 16 pound shot for the traditional telephone pole is outrageous. What are they doing? Trying to boost sales by sowing their oats more widely? By appealing to a lowest-common-denominator international clientele? I feel like, I feel like … something …
You feel like doing the highland fling.
No, I feel all curmudgeonly, like dearieme when–I’ve got it now–when he discovered that La Vache Qui Rit is being sold as The Laughing Cow.
But nothing is what it seems: It turns out that Scott’s is owned by the US giant Quaker Oats–as is Paw Ridge.
On the Flocons d’Avoine Écossais box he’s playing boules. That Paw Ridge box looks a lot like Scott’s Oats.
There is somebody in some book I’ve read more than once…one of those “U and non-U” books – who points out that the “more authentic” or socially ascendant way to refer to porridge is to treat it as a plural:
“These porridge are too runny” is the phrase cited. I am not at home, so I cannot find the referent at the moment. Does this resonate with anybody? Dearie?
Murray of the OED. Maybe not a U/UU thing, but a dialect thing.
Ø, I don’t understand your Murray reference, although it looks like an interesting book – more so than the Simon Winchester one, probably.
But, speaking of the OED, it says under Porridge: In Scottish and English dialect, usually construed as collective plural. Annoyingly it doesn’t give any examples of them, though. I don’t think the OED distinguishes between U and non-U, unfortunately(?).
Did you see the linked page? The author, his granddaughter, describes Murray complaining to the cook about “these porridge”.
Come to think of it, that’s pretty vague and irritating. What do they mean by “usually”? I’d never heard of porridge having a collective plural, before Catannea mentioned it.
Dammit, Ø. I still can’t see it. But googling the quotation “these porridge web of words” led me to
You can see these here.
Maybe it’s “U” in the sense of being knowledgeable about an old usage, rather than as being a shibboleth of old upper-class speech
In other news, hurricane Irene is whistling around the house here. See my blog for further details.
The other thing about porridge is that it had a post-war, I think only British, meaning of “imprisonment”. There was a BBC television comedy called Porridge, in the 1970s.
Irene news from Nova Scotia (Canada): I have been following the tracker map, and we should be well to the east of the path, but as often happens with US hurricanes we get their tail end in the form of warm wind and rain. After two days of hot and heavy weather, last night there was a warm breeze which made it very nice to sit outside after sunset. It was windy all night and still is, but not enough to shake the dead branches off the neighbourhood trees. We lost electricity last night, I was already in bed so I just fell asleep, but this morning everything is back to normal in the city, although I saw from a map that most of the western half of the province (closest to Maine) is without power. Things might get worse as the storm moves Northeast, but perhaps not since it is steadily losing power.
Meanwhile, I have not had breakfast yet so why not make porridge?
Le porridge.
I feel as if we are in the tail end of the hurricane since it’s been pouring with rain here. But I know it’s nothing compared with what you lot had to endure. I do hope Ø’s house didn’t get flooded; it sounded like there was a lot more water damage than there were things blowing away.
Well, that was it for the hurricane here, but we did not expect much to happen in the city. The worst part is happening West of our area, some in Québec and New Brunswick but especially in the NE states where there is widespread and severe flooding. It seems that the damage there is much worse than what happened on the US coastal areas where the hurricane actually hit and people had taken precautions to resist the wind (boarding up windows, etc), and the wind was not as strong as it could have been by then. You can’t resist flooding that easily, especially in areas where it rarely happens.
Where does Ø live?
On his blog (you get it if you click on his name) he says “We are on vacation in Westport, Massachusetts”. When I look on google maps, that’s very close to Martha’s Vineyard, Buzzard’s Bay and the beginning of Cape Cod. I haven’t heard from him since the hurricane.
But I’m glad you’re ok, m-l. Thanks for checking in.
We’re fine.