Yarborough

 In the mid-90s of the last century Anu Garg was a MSc computer science student in Ohio. While still student, because he had the technical capacity and the interest, he started wordsmith.org to deliver A Word A Day AWAD to interested subscribers. As an early adopter of the WWW and e-mail for communication outside of academia he got there firstest with the mostest and now runs Wordsmith and AWAD full time. There are ~ half a million subscribers to AWAD, including me, and this addition to my inbox has generated a few Blobs. That's a lot of outgoing e-mail traffic and there's a lot of incommming as well: some quite shirty and cross. On dit que Mr Garg is a OneMillionaire and his venture employs 4 people. I wish him well even when he is occasionally wrong . . .

Take AWAD 7th April 2021. Yarborough n.  In a card game, a weak hand, especially one in which no card is above a nine . . . the occurrence of such a hand [see R]. The actual odds are 1827 to 1. But those odds, that probability, is only true if a card game is Contract Bridge or Whist where a hand is 13 cards. Which was an opening for Clever Clogs to reply It's clear nobody Chez Garg plays cards [and more power to them all!]. The odds mentioned apply to a 13 card Bridge hand. A Yarborough Poker hand [8%; 12 to 1]  is a regular occurrence ; and a Yarborough Blackjack hand [37%; 2 to 1] happens pretty much every deal. It's unlikely Yarborough played Contract Bridge which didn't become trendy until after his death; more of a whist man.

Someone was clearly burning the midnight oil at AWAD head office in Seattle because ek dum I got back: "For the rest of us, you'll have to include what those percentages mean, what "12 to 1" and "2 to 1" mean, and how many cards each hand has in poker, bridge, etc. Thank you."

So I had to beef and butter up my reply for 500,000 Arts Block logophiles: The odds mentioned apply to a 13 card Bridge hand. In the standard 52 card deck, there are 32 cards with values 2 thru 9. The chance of getting 13 such cards is 32/52 x 31/51 . . . 21/41 x 20/40 = 0.00055 = 5.5 chances in 10,000 or, to use a convention commoner at race-courses and AWAD "1827 to 1".  A Yarborough Poker hand [5 cards; is considerably more likely: 32/52 x 31/51 . . . 29/49 x 28 x48 = 0.077 = 8% or 12 to 1] is a regular occurrence ; and a Yarborough Blackjack hand [2 cards; 32/52 x 31/51 = 0.374 = 37%or  2 to 1] happens pretty much every deal if there are a handful of players. 

This task was considerably lightened with Excel [L, show your working]. It was the first occasion I've had to use the function 

=product(C1:C5) 

as a shorthand for

= C1 * C2 *C3 * C4 * C5

so I've learned something from the exercise.

But really, without getting judgmental, are there a lot of people who don't know how many cards in a poker hand? Maybe my expensive education, normalised card-playing in an unhealthy way - although I've never played cards for real money.

Afterword: when the AWAD 980 weekly round-up came in late on Sunday, another comment of mine was published about "Apgar", based on my Women-in-Science Blob. 

Fundraiser: Anu Garg has offered a Covid-troubles moratorium for these coughing up actual money for a sub to AWAD. Only a subset of people are making money during the pandemic while many, many, more are struggling. He'd love for you to spread the word <hoho, see what I did there?> to all your friends'n'relations thus.

Lox lag brings bagel boom

I remembered this [source Alistair Cooke's Letter from America] as a headline in the newspapers 50 or more years ago, when there was a supply crisis in the salmon trade of Eastern North America. Google Books [above] says it was a Not-Headline. It was, in any case, similar in its implications of cultural disaster to the cold winter last year which threatened the supply of gefilte fish. Lax/laks/lox is pickled salmon which is traditionally served with cream-cheese and bagels. If there is no lox you have to bulk out with the bagels, already. Lax and bagels are both quintessentially Yiddish words, which have worked their way into the vocabulary of gentiles wherever they can be used appropriately. Wordaday is doing Yiddish words this week, probably because of an article the proprietor Anu Garg was encouraging us to read last week.  In Ireland we do other stuff with our salmon, so Lox is more likely to mean Liquid Oxygen here especially among scientists.  But I think everyone knows what is a bagel.  When I lived in Metro-Boston in the 1980s, Yiddisher words were common parlance and I used some of them like a native: chutzpah, glitch, kvetch, klutz, mensh, maven, spiel, schlep, schmooze. Some even appear in The Blob. So these words come from Yiddish, but where does Yiddish come from? . . . and where is it going?

The answer to the second question is that it is going out with a whisper after engendering a rich culture that valued a certain type of education [picking through the holy book with microscopic tweezers for example] for about 1000 years. Yiddish long ago lost the battle with Hebrew to become the secular language of Israel. There, cultural imperialism was as strong against Yiddish as Madrid's against Catalan, Gallego and Asturiano, or Paris in its attempt to grind out the southern French dialects of Langue d'Oc to establish a truly monoglot francophone nation all singing the Marseillaise in tune. And of course, it didn't help that 6 million Yiddish speakers had a one-way ticket to the station at Auschwitz.

The first question was settled more than 100 years ago by concluding that Yiddish was developed from the German spoken in the Rhineland provinces of Western Germany. Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language argues that Yiddish came from the West and is fundamentally German, perhaps built on a foundation of medieval French, which has acquired a lot of Slavic words from contacts in the cities of Eastern Europe.  Paul Wexler, contrariwise, argues in The Ashkenazic Jews: A SlavoTurkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity that Yiddish is a Slavic language with some words assimilated from German and Hebrew.  Speakers of English will appreciate the dilemma; English is a German language where whole sections of vocabulary (cooking and law for starters) have been borrowed and absorbed from French. Linguistic archaeology is not what you'd call an exact science. Geneticist David Goldstein famously carried out a study of Y chromosomes from Ashkenazi Jews about 4 years ago and concluded that they were most likely to have arrived in Eastern Europe from Asia rather than from the Rhine Valley.  Intriguingly, there is a lot of evidence supporting the from-the-East hypothesis in the 750 close-typed pages of notes to Max "Westie" Weinreich's book. There is a suggestion that he left on the cutting room floor anything that didn't agree with his originally held views. He wouldn't be the first or the last scholar to do that.  If the last linked long-form article on the Origins of the Jews and their language isn't enough, there's more here, with maps!

I think perhaps that the controversy might reflect the parable which I heard long long ago from dreamy philosopher Alan Watts:
"Is a zebra a black horse with white stripes or a white horse with blacks stripes?"
"Neither, it is an invisible horse colored black and white so people don't bump into it by accident"

Stats Blip

I've no idea how many people read The Blob on the regular. To the nearest whole number per post, zero readers make a comment. Blogger/blogspot, the barely supported platform which hosts The Blob pretends to gather data on traffic and make these available to owners / clients but these stats are frankly, in two words, in credible. Take last year: I can believe that me and a couple of hundred yous are having 7½ mins of daily fun . . . but not that '000s of, like, people tuned in during Aug and Sep and then drifted off back to titktok. I figure it must be scraper bots:

Heck, I don't have many legs to stand on in complaining about Blogspot comms. The Blob pays €0 = nothing for the privilege of over-sharing.

Comment-bots are an intermittent thing. "Nadia Adams" and "Anna Greens" recently left a flurry of nine (9!) urgent comments on a Blob about Storm Jocelyn. 

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These intrusions appear in my Social Gmailbox, so I know they're there; but are rare enough that I can carefully delete them one-by-one. You're on your own if you want to follow Anna and Nadia to an emporium of cheap revels, soy sauce and wizz.

The other thing I've been freeloading on for many years (longer than Blogspot, that's for sure) is Anu Garg's AWAD feed. A-Word-A-Day has been delivering M-F what it says on the tin for 30 years! In addition, he sends out a digest of accumulated comments every weekend. The traffic is not entirely one way: occasionally I'll have something to say by return and very occasionally these comments finish up in the AWAD digest which gets send out to ~350,000 subscribers. In 2015, I won a prize for comment-of-the-week. Last week of Jan'24, the AWAD theme was eponyms; and readers were invited to submit their own favorites of that genre. The Blob has had rather a lot to say on the subject and I clipped some of my copy and sent that in. Thus

• Chisholm, noun. A billion³ = 10²⁷ = the number of “Prochlorococcus”, the world’s most abundant organism, in the ocean. Named for Penny Chisholm, their discoverer. Sometimes called a Chisillion to match billion, trillion ...”There are about seven chisillion cells in an adult human body.”
• Hopkins Ratio, noun. The amount by which office space was/is diminished for female faculty members. Named for Nancy Hopkins who documented the discrepancy at MIT in the 1990s. “The Hopkins Ratio is just one example of pervasive, insidious, unconscious sexism”.
• Finally, Gabriela, a heartwarming and inspiring story of a teenager who, despite coming from a “vocational school” and an immigrant background, discovered that she was as good as anyone else in the room ... indeed, on the planet.

2 out of those 3 links are Blob-cites and there was (at last, a pageview spike has a rational explanation) a blip in Blob-views:

It looks like the excess views were almost exclusively focused on my posts about Penny and Gabriela.  I hope that will have been edutaining for those who clicked through; but suspect that many will have felt blatted by TMI and gone back to TikTok.

Ichthyphallic

Years ago, I subscribed to AWAD A Word a Day which is what it says on the tin. Feller called Anu Garg picks words, often in weekly themes, M-F and gives each an etymology, a usage sentence and an unrelated quote-of-the-day. I wouldn't pay for the service but it gives 2 minutes of Different each day, which is no harm. Anyway last week the word was Ithyphallic: adj: a) lewd/salacious b) priapic. In my rush to scan the day's incommming e-mails I misread it as Ichthyphallic [adj: fish penis like?]. 

I wondered about "Ichthyphallic": it seems a bit of a unicorn because fish don't have 'em. That hasn't stopped folks from the Arts Block using that word w.r.t. things that ain't fishes! Google finds "Melville's ichthyphallic god" a dense Lit.Crit essay about Moby "Not-a-fish" Dick: "

"Most critics of Moby-Dick, especially in recent decades, would agree that Melville's motives for writing it included powerfully subversive and iconoclastic feelings. There is broad agreement that Melville's discomfort with and alienation from the culture in which he found himself pervade his most memorable work. If Ishmael's need to go to sea . . .". But while we're dicking about on the Pequod, Chapter 95 The Cassock deals with using 3 feet of the skin of a whale penis as a protective apron. <blush> I don't where to look. I wrote quite enough about it back in 2013.

Google also delivers waggish tweets about "Thousands of 'Penis Fish' Washed Up on a California Beach" which is all about Urechis unicinctus an invertebrate [not-a-fish] annelid worm.  The Vice story features a picture showing an invertebrate holocaust as far as the eye can see from which I've clipped a small sample from the foreground [L]. The picture taker David Ford said “Those creatures are in a phylum all by themselves with three other things and have been on their own path of evolution for 400 or 500 million years,” But that's a bit of an exaggeration. Science agrees that Urechis unicinctus and other Echiura are "worms" in the Phylum Annelida. Actually they are Polychaetes, related to the common "fish-bait" lugworm Arenicola marina. Mr Ford was not without a leg to stand on when he claimed a special status for Echiura because, unlike regular Annelids, they are not segmented. They are just big pink blobby feeding sacs. But a 2009 analysis of their mitochondrial DNA plonked them firmly into the segmented worm phylum. Their unsegmented anatomy is a secondary adaptation to a sedentary life-style.

It is considered a chewy deli delicacy in Korea and other parts of coastal East Asia: Gaebul or Hǎi Cháng will deliver recipes.

Lexicographer

"A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words."  That was how Dr Samuel Johnson described himself after spending nearly a decade assembling one of the great dictionaries of the world.  He was/is known widely as Dr Johnson but he never earned it in the normal way, although he was eventually given an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin when he was in his mid 50s.  Like everyone of his generation he had two birthdays OS and NS to take account of the change (in the United Kingdom) from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar on 14 September 1752.  So Johnson was born on 7th Sept 1709 (OS) but the day was/is generally celebrated after 1752 on 18th September.  For example, his birthplace Lichfield is having a knees-up this weekend.

And to show that  Lexicography is alive and well and living in Chicago, check out Erin McKean and her on-line meta-dictionary wordnik, which offers a word-a-day.  But then so does Anu Garg at AWAD.  McKean's Law aka Muphry's Law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error." been there, done that.

No scientist today working on whatever sort of contract, would tolerate the privations that Johnson endured at the centre of a life in letters.  His great indignant rolling polemic against his 'patron' the Earl of Chesterfield "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it." calls forth a Wildean "I wish I'd said that", and serves to illustrate how his rich pals imagined that he could live on air and invective.

Johnson was famous for other things, like his opinion of The Giant's Causeway "Worth seeing? yes; but not worth going to see; or his eulogy to our own Oliver Goldsmith "No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had" a sentiment echoed in verse by David Garrick 

"Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,
Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll" 

and his bewildered contempt for Scotland through which he was dragged by his friend and biographer James Boswell: ". . .the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England. But it is dictionary that we credit and excerpt today.

COUGH A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity.

DEPUCELATE: To bereave of virginity. 

NETWORK Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

OATS A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

PATRON One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is repaid in flattery.

PENSION An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

And for dessert, less you think that Johnson's is the only dictionary with a sense of humour:
ECLAIR A cake, long in shape but short in duration (Chambers 20th Century).

Viva la Arts Block!

lagniappe

Never refuse a gift, refusal may cause offense. That applies to children, even grown-up children, when their parents press money on them at the end of a visit. Advice - just accept gracefully: the folks won't be here much longer. The only time to regularly refuse gifts is when they are won in a Pub Quiz which is raising money for charity. It would be hard to refuse the gift that arrived in the post today, because it had been sent from America and didn't have a proper return address. I had ordered something bookish from Amazon but this parcel was weighing too light in the hand for that and it took me a while to twig that it was my PRIZE.  For the last several years I've had a sub to AWAD which was started long ago by a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University. Anu Garg started his education under a mango Mangifera indica tree in India and didn't see a library until he went to college. In 1994, the internet was thin on the ground and it was easier to go viral.  There are now >million subscribers who get not only A-Word-A-Day like it says on the tin but also a little essay and the word used in context in a real sentence in a real publication.  For good measure, you get a quote-of-the-day as well. The quote is often from someone whose birthday is being celebrated and I've often used that as a direction to cobble together my 600-words-a-day SHWAD.  At the end of the week you get a bonus Weekly Compendium with Feedback from readers.  These also are occasionally interesting to read.

I lurk, I rarely contribute but a tuthree weeks ago the word was
Fribble: A wasteful or frivolous person or thing.
That had a huge resonance for me because, when we lived as impoverished students in Boston in the 1980s, going to Friendly's was our occasional treat for The Boy. I was inspired to send the following comment:
Wrong wrong almost right.  As anyone from New England will tell you, Fribble is the name used by the restaurant chain Friendly's for their milkshakes. As the standard portion of this calorie-rich beverage is 22oz > 600g the result is a waist-full person. Should be consumed with a "Very Berry Hot Fudge Sundae" to fill the hips as well.

And at the end of the week AWAD published my comment at the top of the feedback as Comment of The Week. I was delighted, not least because I got a couple of e-mails direct from other readers who shared my affection for Fribbles. Several days later, I got an e-mail asking for my postal address because I had won a PRIZE for my witticism.  It was on the kitchen table when I got back from work last night.  Big parcel, much packing, small tin with a bunch of scrabble-like tiles labelled One-Up and a bitty sign saying "This is a lagniappe" [I've corrected the rogue capital L, we're not Germans] which is a Quechua word that has come to American English via Louisiana French meaning a bonus or freebie - the 13th bun in the dozen, the mints next to the cash-register. That's a new word for me, the second in as many days - superjacent.  My father lived all his adult life in England but he would still insist on giving back a luck penny when he received a wodge of cash (for selling the family silver, that sort of thing) - it's a custom much more widely practiced in Ireland but probably less so nowadays as the old ways die out.

Last week I was at it again because Monday's AWAD was Kenning - a conventional poetic phrase used in place of the usual name of a person or thing.  These are very common in Anglo-Saxon, Old English and Icelandic Eddas and featured on The Blob before. As The Blob gets life-encompassingly bigger, it will soon contain everything I can remember - that's falling precipitously so it's a bit of a race. Accordingly it was easy to recycle a fragment to send another comment that was published in the Weekly Compendium this last weekend:
Some kennings are so common in the (nautical and military) language that has come down to us from the likes of Beowulf or The Battle of Maldon that they are clichés. hron rad (whale-road) is the sea; svana fjöll (swan’s mountains) are waves; grand viðar (wood’s bane or wood-crusher) is fire. But what about hjálms fyllr (helmet-filler) for sword - that’s so disturbingly visual that it should be the title of a particularly violent graphic novel.
No prizes though: there are a million other AWADies out there to encourage!