The lake is half frozen across and today we had the first snow to settle properly.
Both Topsy and Jack were absolutely thrilled.
The goats only came out for five minutes. They don’t really play in the snow.
You can see from the tabletop that we only got about 8 cm (3-4″) and for all I know it’ll have melted by tomorrow.
Still, it’s deep enough snow if all you’re trying to do is shake a frisby to death.
A Bad Guide 
It’s very refreshing to see these photos.
True. We are melting “south here”!
Did I say before that Jack is lovely? Not enough times =)
I’m sorry you lot are all so hot while we’re so cold. Where is the place that’s a comfortable temperature? North Africa & the Caribbean, maybe?
Jack is very expressive. He has very soft silky fur, which you can’t see in the photographs.
Here we got a lovely inch or so of snow last night — better than nothing, I mean. But it quickly turned to slush. I’ve been putting up strings of Christmas lights indoors and outdoors.
We’ve only had a little snø here, just enough to look pretty for a few hours before it mostly melts away. I’m looking forward to getting a few inches at least, hopefully before Christmas.
Here it’s been about 23F. Do people cross-country ski in Massachusetts?
They do, and we used to; our skis are still sitting in the garage expectantly awaiting their next outing. But my wife’s rheumatoid arthritis now makes it impossible for her to go skiing (something she dearly loves), so the skis will just have to be disappointed.
In French skis need to be “farted” (i.e. fartés, past participle of the verb “farter”), which might sound amusing to an English ear. But it shouldn’t smell anything — though I can’t say much about the odour of this or that type of fart.
I love all the different usages of “fart” in different languages, which I’m sure are all related. In Norwegian fart means “speed”, and so it would be a good verb for ski waxing, but instead they use å smøre, which is to spread or to butter (the noun smør means butter).
My wife is also a great ski lover who had to stop because of bad joints. I wish I looked half as good on skis as she did.
Would there be a chance that smør and smear be cognates?
I think they are, but of course I know nothing about linguistics. In New York, you go into a deli or a coffee shop, usually run by Greeks, and ask “Can I get a bagel with a schmear, please?” – a schmear being a very thick smear or slice of Philadelphia-type cream cheese. I’ve always assumed the word is Yiddish.
Would there be a chance that smør and smear be cognates?
They are indeed. OED:
In sense 1 common Germanic: Old English smeoru , smeru, etc., = Old Frisian smere (East Frisian smiri , smēr, North Frisian smēr, smör, West Frisian smoar), Middle Dutch smere , smeer (Dutch smeer), and smare , smaer, Old Saxon smero (Middle Low German smere, smer), Old High German smero, smer (Middle High German smer, German schmer) fat, grease, Old Norse smjǫr (Icelandic smjer, Swedish smör, Danish and Norwegian smør) butter < Germanic *smerwa neuter. The stem smer-, with different suffix, is represented in Gothic by smairþr neuter, fat. Cognate forms outside of Germanic are Lithuanian smarsas fat, Old Irish smir (Gaelic smior) marrow, and perhaps Greek μύρον ointment. The later senses are mainly, if not entirely, < smear v., like German schmiere.
And schmear is from Yiddish shmir, smear, smudge, from shmirn, to smear, grease, from Middle High German smiren, from Old High German smirwen.
Now to see if my HTML tags were all closed properly…
Bah, all my carefully placed tags in the OED etymology were wasted because the software renders the entire blockquote in ital. Bah.
Plus I forgot to close the ital tag after “Yiddish shmir.” HTML FAIL
Since Yiddish is mostly a Germanic language, it could well be related to smear, which itself seems to be related to smør (see etymonline.com: “cf. Old Norse smyrja “to anoint, rub with ointment,” Danish smøre, Swedish smörja, Dutch smeren, Old High German smirwen “apply salve, smear,” German schmieren “to smear;” Old Norse smör “butter”” — http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=smear).
Coming back to the French word fart (ski wax), which can be pronounced with or without a final -t sound, it seems to have been borrowed from Norwegian, at least if you refer to the TLF: “Prob. du norv. fart «voyage, vitesse» (Falk-Torp); cf. all. Fahrt «voyage, marche»” — http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/fart. Now, do you really have the word fart in Norwegian meaning “trip, speed”?
Now, do you really have the word fart in Norwegian meaning “trip, speed”? ► My dear self, please refer to AJP’s comment made on 10 December 2013 at 9:00 pm.
LH, thanks for your feedback. This clean, crisp post about snow is now getting all greasy.
I think I’ve kind of fixed it, Language – God knows you’ve fixed enough of mine over the years – except there’s a “<" before the word "Germanic" that in HTML is written as " & l t ; " (but without the spaces), and I don't know what to do with it.
Sig, the French fart might easily have been borrowed from the German Fahrt rather than the Norwegian fart.
But I’d suspect that Norwegians are farting much more than Germans, per capita. Take the French word télémark for instance: it cannot be German.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9mark
except there’s a “<" before the word "Germanic" that in HTML is written as " & l t ; " (but without the spaces), and I don't know what to do with it.
Ah, that’s the HTML for “<"; if you just write “<" it disappears and takes the succeeding chunk of text with it, or at least it used to do that on LH, which is why I got into the habit of using " & l t ; "
But I see you can use < in WordPress without worry. Good to know.
Calling skiwax fart is smearing.
Should I tell that j’habite the famous comté de Télémarque? But I still haven’t used the esquies this winter.
I remember an American (who knew no German) being endlessly amused when on a cycling tour in Germany people kept wishing him “Gute Fahrt”.
My knees (and maybe to some extent my feet) would have some difficulty with skiing these days, as would my wife’s feet (and maybe to some extent her knees).
Trond, are we talking of Télémarque, fils d’Ulysse, or does it have something to do with a German TV programme during which people are supposed to become millionaires?
Incidentally, have you come across the Norwegian word fart meaning “trip, journey”, as mentioned by this large dictionary known as the Trésor de la langue française ?
Sig, Telemark, in skiing, refers to the use of a special type of ski where the toe of the boot and the ski itself are connected only by a hinge at the front of both. I wouldn’t dream of trying it, but I expect it’s no problem for the likes of Trond.
I’ll leave “fart” for “journey” or “trip” for Trond, because for that I always use “tur” like French “tour”. I suppose you know by now that speed limit in Norwegian is “farts grense” (written as one word, fartsgrense) and that it’s often accompanied by a sign that’s the silhouette of two bumps (in the shape of a bra) that as drawn would cause much farting to take place in the cars.
Télémarque is a very elegant way of skiing, with that bent knee on the inside of the curve. It might not be the quickest, but I find it nicer to see than the more brutal way of skidding sideways with parallel skis. To do it though, I would need to go to Trond so that he could teach me how to do it, which might not be easy since I haven’t been on skis for more than 20 years.
No. fart is a borrowing from Low German. The native cognate is ferd “journey”. The meanings of fart are diverse, but radiating out from something like “motion”, as in i fart “in motion”. It’s also (or foremost) the standard word for “speed, velocity”, in shipping it means “trade, traffic”, and it’s used figuratively about people and places bursting with life or energy.
It’s quite likely that the French meaning is derived from “speed”. It could be because early Norwegian ski instructors in France used it for the quality they wanted to achieve, but it would also have made a good name for an early brand of Ski Wax.
I’m not the best Telemark skier around. I need solid shoes and deep snow. The toe binding alone is more fit for cross country skiing. There are more solid mountain models that are popular with Telemark skiers, but they often prefer bindings with a wire around the heel for better sideways stability. But so do mountain skiers…
It occurred to me that the idea that Fart came to France as a brand name might be googlable. And Norwegian Wikipedia can tell that Fart was the name of the first patented ski wax in 1897, brought to France by a military ski instructor in 1903.
The dominant brand of ski wax my whole life has been Swix. It’s about to be launched on the North African market under the name Sfinx.
Heh! The equity company owning Swix is called Ferd. It all adds up.
Skiing down the pyramids, you’ll need to smear some Fartsgrense.
One has to admire the early pharaohs for their foresighted public investment program. Unfortunately they didn’t add lifts, but even they couldn’t foresee the tremendous rise in labour costs of the following three millennia.
Egyptian hieroglyphs bear clear evidence of both skiing with one pole and the distinct Telemark knee-bend.
Labour costs have risen, but we now have the pyramid scheme to cover them. And pyramids are all slope – four sides for the price of one – that’s a lot for the money.
Oops, I meant “their four-sided public investment program”.
Here it is traditional to leave some cookies for Santa Claus on that special night. Is it true that in Norway you leave porridge?
I would hope they’d leave akevitt. It’s cold out there.
According to something Tesi saw in the paper, in France they leave carrots, in Holland they leave carrots and hay, and in Norway they leave porridge. My immediate questions are: in each of these cases is the recipient Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, or who? And does porridge mean oatmeal porridge, or what?
We had a half bottle of Løiten Linje Aquavit (“the best-known akevitt in Norway”) this weekend, with lutefisk and other Norwegian Christmas dishes that my daughter was showing to her English boyfriend. I hardly ever drink spirits, but it was very good. It’s called Linje because they take it across the Equator (actually to Australia and back) in barrels. According to Wiki, “the constant movement, high humidity and fluctuating temperature cause the spirit to extract more flavour and contributes to accelerated maturation.” My guess as a grinch is that it’s just a gimmick.
Father Christmas in Norway is the julenissen. He seems to be cobbled together from all the usual international suspects, St. Nicholas, Santa etc., combined with the nisse elf. There’s also a Christmas goat that is made of straw. About this time of year, Des von Bladet usually shows a Swedish newspaper report of a huge one that somehow has managed to burn to the ground.
We don’t leave food, but I’m guessing the porridge is rømmegrøt. This is always translated as porridge but it isn’t anything like the Scottish oatmeal that Englishmen apparently give to their horses. It’s a thick smooth sauce, really. The other words that are always mistranslated are hutte which means mountain cabin but ends up been called a cottage, and slott, meaning palace, that gets called a castle. Slott might be a mix up that began with the translation of the French un château, that sometimes means a palace or country house but can also be un château fort (fortified castle).
Yes, we have Linie every Christmas with our Norwegian meatballs and cabbages and beer (nobody in the family can stand lutefisk) — my wife’s first husband was Norwegian and so was my mother, so it’s a tradition everyone can get behind.
I only recently got it straight in my mind that there are, broadly speaking, three distinct ways to prepare oats for making porridge. We might call them the Scottish way, the Irish way, and the American way.
1. Grind them up in a mill to make a meal (like a coarse flour). The result is “oatmeal” in the strict sense. If you cook it long enough it becomes a very smooth porridge. There are also other things you can do with it. One of them is called cranachan.
2. Cut them into chunks. The result is sold hereabouts as “steel-cut oats”. I used to think that someone was putting on airs about which metal is best to cut them with*, but I think the real point is cut oats as opposed to ground-up oats. You have to cook these even longer to make porridge of them, and it’s a very different kind of porridge.
3. Soften them by a steaming process and then squish them. These “rolled oats” require the least cooking time of all. In some versions, they are so thoroughly steamed and so thoroughly rolled that they take almost no cooking time at all, making them suitable for us impatient Americans.
Of course, over here we call oat porridge “oatmeal”, regardless of whether it was made of milled, cut, or rolled oats.
When Tesi was a little girl, she was offered porridge for breakfast by a Scottish friend of the family. She memorably replied “Porridge is for bears!”
* like those high-class brands of Italian pasta that boast of being made with bronze dies
Thanks, that’s very good to know. Now I’ll have to examine some oats. I grew up with Scott’s Porridge Oats which are rolled and now apparently come under “the Quaker Oats umbrella” (hard to believe oats are waterproof). I think I’ve mentioned them before.
I think of Lyle’s golden syrup as being for bears. I don’t quite know why. Anyway I love that reply of Tesi’s.
The dominant Norwegian brand of oatmeal is Bjørns havregryn. So that. Owned by Swedes now, though.
I’ve been meaning for days to say something about the Norwegian nisse, but my iPad has a bad habit of reloading the page when I return after checking something in another tab, so I shy away from long comments.
But let’s try. Nissen is a merger of Saint Nicholas with the ancient idea of the guardian spirit of the farm, the genius loci. Even his name may be such a merger. Well, he had many names: tomtegubben or tuftekallen “the old man of the dwelling”, gardvorden “the homestead guardian”, haugbonden “the mound farmer”, rudkallen “the settler”, etc. While all of these point to an origin as the spirit of the first settler being buried in a mound near the houses on the farm, Nisse seams like a straightforward use of a familiar form of Nils “Nicholas”, but Bjorvand & Lindeman, following Ingebjørg Hoff, point to a possible origin in something like niðsi “dear little relative”.
The food he was given was what everyone else had, I think, since he couldn’t be fooled and mistreating him meant bad luck, but there were some foods he was especially keen on. At Christmas he wanted porridge, at least in more recent times when Christmas porridge meant rice pudding.
Bjørn means bear, in Norwegian.
Bjørn as in Béorn, of course. Béorn is a Swede now, too. It all adds up.
I’m going to launch a brand of single-grain cereals under the name Unicorn. Of course, it’s easily expanded to Bicorn, Tricorn and Multicorn.
I know somebody not far from you who got a goat in their Christmas tree tonight. Do you know where your goats are?
It looks as if Crown is gone… to fetch the goats in the trees.
Our goats are safe inside. I don’t know about the neighbours, are they here for Christmas?
Not your neighbours exactly, those are not the circles I most frequently. I have some old friends near Sandvika who announced on Facebook that their garden Christmas tree was invaded by a goat. When I lay all available evidence together, a pattern emerged.
God jul til folk og fe!
That first sentence is a food related accident. I wrote it in the kitchen while I was preparing Christmas dinner.