Muted on them? I checked the OED, and was delighted to find the bird-specific verb "mute":
a1475 Bk. Hawking (Harl. 2340) in Studia Neophilol. (1944) 16 9 (MED) Ye schull say þat your hauke mutithe and not sclisithe....1622 T. Walkley tr. J. de Luna Pursuit Hist. Lazarillo ix. 74 Aske a Philosopher why Flyes vpon a white thing doe mute black, and contrariwise, vpon a black, white.1679 J. Crowne Ambitious Statesman iii. 38 Flying rumours, which like Birds Soaring at random, mute on any head.1728 Philos. Trans. 1726–7 (Royal Soc.) 34 116 The Penis always came out some Inches when it [sc. the Ostrich] muted....1869 R. D. Blackmore Lorna Doone I. iv. 45 Great eyebrows overhung his face..and under them two large brown eyes, as of an owl when muting....
Posts
27 comments:
Now I'm afraid to use the mute button on my remote control.
So is it the Mute Swan because it’s quiet? Or because of its propensity to crap on people!
It will be hard to top Roger Sweeney...
Whenever I see Jimmy Kimmel, I push mute and send up a prayer that all such hacks will be repeatedly muted.
I was a big fan of orwell in the 70s and 80s. I think I've read everthing he ever published including 4 thick volumes of essays journalism and letters.
Great writer. It's a shame he's only known for 1984 and animal farm by so many. My favorite novel is "coming up for air"
I've also read a couple of bios and books about him and this has put me in a conundrum.
Right up to the end of his life he was adamant that he wanted NO biographies and NO scholarship on him or his writings. That's a shame because he was such an interesting man and life.
There is no way to stop this, especially once he is dead. But what about his fans? Should we be reading the bios and scholarship? I didn't realize about the ban until after I read the bios. I don't think I would have bought them if I'd known.
John stop fascism vote republican Henry
Oh, that is a wonderful language find!
Good for him. He must've been on the autistic spectrum. At least, it feels like all of us pre-Millennials are learning that part of what made us weird and brilliant was actually a mental defect.
Roger Sweeny @ 9:13: threadwinner.
One could say the current US Administration has been muting their people. In more than one way.
What does that mean he spend years "Editing" Orwell's papers? I get suspicious when I read that. It sounds like gatekeeping.
So what is this sclisithe thing?
'Now I'm afraid to use the mute button on my remote control.'
: )
But if you do, it gets quiet as shit...
Darkisland said...Great writer. It's a shame he's only known for 1984 and animal farm by so many. My favorite novel is "coming up for air"
I haven’t read coming up for air, but I agree—my favourite is Down and Out in Paris and London. Homage to Catalonia is what set me off on a now decades long interest in The Spanish Civil War.
He’s most famous for his fiction, but his autobiographical work is better.
"So what is this sclisithe thing?"
I found the answer. It's the past tense of the obsolete verb "slice" based on a French word meaning "to squirt, splash."
Definition: "Of birds: To mute, so that the fæces are ejected to some distance. Also transferred."
The same quote is given as an example:
c1450 Bk. Hawking in T. Wright & J. O. Halliwell Reliquiæ Antiquæ (1845) I. 296 Ye schull say that your hawke mutith and not sclisith.
I'm also seeing, more recently:
1710 True Acct. Last Distemper T. Whigg i. 5 The Criminal had sliced immoderately on the Sign of the Old Bishop's Head in Lambeth.
Kate said… At least, it feels like all of us pre-Millennials are learning that part of what made us weird and brilliant was actually a mental defect.
Thank god we now have labels for all those things that used to just be quirky personality traits. What a horrible time that was when we didn’t have entire industries dedicated to taking our time and money to strip us of what made us interesting.
The OED is so wonderful I feel like crying.
Now I'm afraid to use the mute button on my remote control.
Take it outside and point it at a bird. If it works, for the sake of the poor birds in the world, don't tell anyone outside this comment section.
"To mute, so that the fæces are ejected to some distance."
Well, MSNBC is a national channel, so.....
Quick, Meade! Your hanky!
I've deciphered a lot of bad handwriting in my time, and done some editing.
One thing an editor of personal papers tries to do is determine the sequence of the subject's notes and other informal writings in order to trace the development of his/her/xes works. In most cases what a writer as prolific as Orwell leaves behind is boxes and roomfuls of unorganized stuff (as archivists call it).
I worked with the editors of the Jefferson Davis Papers to ensure that some items of correspondence under my care were included in the latest volume. That set and others are ongoing.
R.I.P. Peter Davison. Would that you had lived to see Orwell become fiction again.
barely-legible original manuscript of Orwell’s dystopian novel '1984' by disporting his skills in paleography, the study of ancient and antiquated writing systems. Earlier in his career he deciphered Elizabethan manuscripts.
"What a piece of work is man..."
BTW, does the OED have that sense of "disporting" because I have never seen it used that way and it makes no sense, "deploying" maybe; one of those Slip Mahoney stile (<< Hey look, it just did it to me) malapropisms that spell check produces from time to time?
"BTW, does the OED have that sense of "disporting" because I have never seen it used that way and it makes no sense, "deploying" maybe; one of those Slip Mahoney stile (<< Hey look, it just did it to me) malapropisms that spell check produces from time to time?"
Yeah, I was curious about "disporting." It means playing or enjoying and doesn't seem quite right.
OED says: "to cheer, divert, amuse, or enjoy oneself; to occupy oneself pleasurably; now esp. to play wantonly, frolic, gambol, sport; to display oneself sportively."
So...
to transcribe a barely-legible original manuscript by disporting his skills in paleography
to transcribe a barely-legible original manuscript by displaying his skills in paleography sportively
Does that make sense? That's kind of how I read it. But I think you disport yourself. So I don't like the idea of disporting your skills.
You skills aren't having fun. YOU are.
If you are going with displaying, maybe it was "sporting," in the sense of "sporing a new set of togs."
I think 'display' is the right word. "Disporting" in the context is an atrocity against language.
He wouldn't have kept doing the transcriptions had he not been having some fun using his skills in paleography for that long. "Disporting" indicates his enjoyment in the exhibition of his skills. Sounds like a fun guy to have a beer with, and talk about paleography, which I've never heard of before today.
intransitive
That's not the way I see it.
I wonder if he has a photographic memory and so can easily assign the scratches to individual letters? Rejham, cover your ears, I wouldn’t want to send you into a fit of inchoate rage, like that guy from Notes from Underground, but I read in this book, The Search for the Great Attractor, about pre digital astronomy, and they had a guy on their team with such a memory and he was able to easily collate and organize the photos by the patterns of stars that appeared random to everyone else without close examination. It seems like the same thing.
So Orwell wanted bombard and some erudite editor switched to mute?
He must've been on the autistic spectrum. At least, it feels like all of us pre-Millennials are learning that part of what made us weird and brilliant was actually a mental defect.
I have a relative who does this presuming nonsense-- every oddity and weirdness and difference (which the other ear hears the entire urban intelligentsia lauding to the skies in the media, anyway) is susceptible to some variety of pharmaceutical correction: it is the default reaction in that particular haute bourgeois, suburban milieu.
Post a Comment