"What a bunch of moaning me minnies commenting on this article: had some great wild swimming days in Scotland and hope to be swimming in Loch Morluch tomorrow- forecast for Aviemore this weekend is 30C."

A comment, commenting on comments like "Hypothermia, optional. Midgies, inevitable" on the London Times article "Five of the best walks with a swim in Scotland/The author of Wild Swimming picks his favourite hikes to hidden pools and waterfalls" (London Times).

Minnie is, according to the OED, a way to say grandmother (or old woman) in Orkney and Shetland. For example, Robert Burns wrote, in "Tam Glen":

My minnie does constantly deave me, 

         And bids me beware o' young men; 

They flatter, she says, to deceive me; 

         But wha can think sae o' Tam Glen?

Midgies are just midges, the "annoying insects" featured in last month's post "What are these annoying insects that were swarming like mad by Lake Mendota at sunrise today?"

30C is 86°.

"People used to say, 'It snew last night' or 'It's snowen all week' – and not so long ago."

I'm reading "An alternative vocabulary of winter" by Ruth Walker (in the CSM).

That article is a decade old. I dyggyd it up this morning because — waiting for the blizzard — I wondered why the past tense of "snow" was not "snown," like the way the past tense of "show" is, at least sometimes, "shown."

From the article:

"I saw a bald eagle in the wild a few years ago, and to be honest, it looked, even as it flew over the snakey river and the murmuring pines and the hemlocks—Canadian trees, according to Longfellow, whose 'Evangeline,' is a poem of exile I adore—like a bigot."

Sentence of the Day. 

Sentence of the Day is a declaration I make now and then — certainly not every day — when I encounter a complicated and weird sentence. 

That's in "Of Mice and ICE" (at the Poetry Foundation). The author is Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, an English professor at the University of Toronto, who teaches poetry and postcolonial theory and literature. She was writing in 2018, when the ICE problems were Trump's. 

I got there as a result of googling "beastie," a word I used in the previous post, about a fox, and have used now and again and again on this blog. 

A "beastie" is "A little animal; an endearing form of beast n. Also applied jocularly to insects. (Originally Scottish)" (OED). The oldest usage is in the Robert Burns poem that is referenced in that Poetry Foundation piece with the complicatedly weird sentence. 

Here's the Burns poem with "beastie" in the first line — "Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie."

Here's Longfellow's "Evangeline" — which begins "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks...."

What other sentences have caused me to declare "Sentence of the Day"? There was this, in 2005:

"Plump couches, radical books, free WiFi, $5 microbrews, killer sound system, a menu that runs from catfish and collard greens to peanut butter, banana and honey sandwiches: a cool, comfortable, slightly bourgy haven for a hot, bothered, slightly bourgy peace movement."

This, in 2017: 

"It is a mildly disconcerting experience, seeing conscious evolutions and experiments in style; baroque, ornate, urgent, dyspeptic; the repetitions and modalities at various points and the stylized categorizations and oppositions – prudes and perverts, monsters and insanity, measures and tests, inquiries and examinations, bodies and boys, punishment, pleasure, asceticism, suicide; the going back over old themes in new ways; how the old becomes new but how the new can never entirely disown the old; the desire for both fidelity in the evocation of moods and worlds, but not necessarily strict historical accuracy, whatever that might in the end be taken to mean; and the desire to write all this up somehow as a history of the present." 

And here's another 2017 example: 

"You know like any face I made when I was young was adorable and now if I’m worried there’s this pathetic gleam of how do I look and yet we love an old dog or an old leather couch so why not an old female arm or an ass all its own, speaking powerfully shabbily in time."

Did the Pope say "allow ourselves to be smitten" by the love of Jesus?

Last night's "Smitten by his love" post brought email from ddh:

Your suspicion that the Pope did not say "smitten" is correct. After an introductory paragraph in Portuguese, the Pope switched to his native Spanish and said, according to the Vatican:

Pero la Cruz invita también a dejarnos contagiar por este amor, nos enseña así a mirar siempre al otro con misericordia y amor, sobre todo a quien sufre, a quien tiene necesidad de ayuda, a quien espera una palabra, un gesto.

I translate this sentence as:

"When Franco says the word 'prestidigitation' behind his stoner’s grin, it’s as if he’s uttering it for the first time in English class."

Apparently the new 3D Disney "Oz the Great and Powerful" is terrible and James Franco is "woefully miscast" as the Wizard of Oz.

Is anyone ever miscast and not woefully miscast? Woefully is to miscast as scantily is to clad. Sorry, but the reviewer (WaPo's Ann Hornaday) invited English class thoughts.

Starting with a woefully miscast James Franco in the title role, continuing through a lame story line that’s merely a warmed-over version of the 1939 movie adaptation, and extending to visual effects that never approach the dazzlement and wonder of its revolutionary forbearer, “Oz the Great and Powerful” is a big, over-processed misfire that with a little more care and ingenuity might have lived up to its name.

Okay. Tough luck for fans of 3D children's material for kids and adults. It's all the same to me. But back to English class. Do you know the difference between a "forbearer" and a "forbear" (or "forebear")?  Hornaday doesn't. A "forbearer" is someone who refrains from doing something. If anyone is not a forbearer, it's a revolutionary.

An ancestor/forefather/progenitor is called a "forbear" or "forebear." You may think "forbear" is only a verb, but "bear," the suffix, comes from "beer," which means "one who is or exists." Does that seem weird? Break it in half. It's be-er. So you see why you don't need the "-er" on "forbear"? It's there already, in the "-ar." Don't let the drink "beer" or the animal "bear" confuse you here. Your forefathers are your forbears, and if they were forbearers you would not be a beer.

The OED quotes a 1786 Robert Burns poem "The Death And Dying Words Of Poor Mailie, The Author's Only Pet Yowe" which isn't about a bear but a sheep (yowe = ewe):

An' may they never learn the gaets,
Of ither vile, wanrestfu' pets—
To slink thro' slaps, an' reave an' steal
At stacks o' pease, or stocks o' kail!
So may they, like their great forbears,
For mony a year come thro the shears:
So wives will gie them bits o' bread,
An' bairns greet for them when they're dead.