The Bluestocking - Invoking Split Pea Annexe B

[Magpiecomplex]

Welcome all, pull up a gerbil and make yourself comfortable!

I love them - thanks! Though perhaps the state of my windowsills is a dead giveaway that my feather duster doesn't get much use. A giant spider sitting in a cobweb, drinking tea, might be more apt. 😁

The windowsills are only your windowsills if you live on your own. Otherwise they are our windowsills and the state of them is shared.

I say this as someone who, in a convo with Boiled a while back, realised that I have never cleaned a window in my life and now realise that I have never swept a windowsill either.

Another glass of Mersault when you have a moment please gerbil.

The AI has gone TT, Jane, & won't give me any images of wine.😱

I got this email today and thought WTF is this about?
And then it dawned on me that it must have been prompted by a Bluestocking conversation about different names for bilberries. Where else.....??
I had completely forgotten about it!

New Definition
Hi there,
This is just a short note from Definitions.net to let you know that your suggested entry has been approved!
Here are your entry details:
Term: frawn
Definition: Frawn means a bilberry or whortleberry.
Example: There are no modern examples as this word is now obsolete.
^You may review your entry at: www.definitions.net/definition/frawn^
^You may also want to consider becoming one of our editors - more details here: www.definitions.net/signup.php^
Thanks for helping us build the largest human-edited definitions resource on the web!
Please feel free to contact us anytime with questions or suggestions - your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Yours truly,
The Definitions.net Team

I think a celebratory glass of Vosne-Romanée, bien chambré, is called for - I'll take it in Pedantry Corner, thank you gerbils

Windows don't get any dirtier after 7 years. I trust you use the same principle on your window sills?

Anyway is it even worth dusting if you can't write Dusty woz ere in the dust?

I didn't realise you had gerbil blood in your lineage Jane

I asked for a woman honest.

Of course if you have a cat plastering up the window that works nearly as well as a duster, and even better considering the cat is putting all the effort in.

You have a cat that does plastering?

I love the plastering cat! 😂
I showed it to my cat to see if she fancied an apprenticeship, but strangely she just gave me The Look, and went back to sleep.

Does it do lime plaster?
If so, send it over, as some has fallen off an elderly wall at Stourton Court....

Does it acknowledge that frawn is an anglophone's attempt to spell fraughan?

..which is itself an anglophone's attempt to spell fraochán
I did think of going back and adding that info to the definition, but the Sensible Self that sits on my shoulder said - 'Eh hello... the laundry? emptying the dishwasher...? a dozen other useful things you could do instead?' so I didn't!

Re plastering cats - thanks to the Definitions.net triumph, I'm still in Pedantry Corner since yesterday, so I can't help but point out that the cat is 'making good' gaps in existing plastering with a spackle knife, rather than plastering.

Maybe the fact that it would need to handle a hawk to do actual plastering is a bit of a problem - I don't know how cats and hawks interact, but a room with wet plaster on the walls is probably not the best place to find out😁

The other day there was an article in the Irish Times with the wonderful headline Never employ a cat. They are ‘unreliable, capricious and liable to absenteeism’

• I'll link to it but I'm not sure if it's behind a paywall, so here's the most relevant bit

According to the Postal Museum in London, the Post Office employed cats from 1868 to keep the mice at bay. They started with an allowance of one shilling a week and got a 6d per week pay rise five years later.

The matter arose in the House of Commons in the 1950s when it was noted with some outrage that the cats had not had a pay rise in decades. Defending the pay scheme the Assistant Postmaster-General told the MPs that the cats were “frequently unreliable, capricious in their duties and liable to prolonged absenteeism” ..
Never employ a cat. They are ‘unreliable, capricious and liable to absenteeism’ – The Irish Times

There is, I am afraid, a certain amount of industrial chaos in the Post Office cat world. Allowances vary in different places, possibly according to the alleged efficiency of the animals and other factors. It has proved impossible to organise any scheme for payment by results or output bonus. These servants of the State are, however, frequently unreliable, capricious in their duties and liable to prolonged absenteeism.

My hon. and gallant Friend has been misinformed regarding the differences between rates for cats in Northern Ireland and other parts of the United Kingdom. There are no Post Office cats in Northern Ireland. Except for the cats at Post Office Headquarters who got the special allowance a few years ago, presumably for prestige reasons, there has been a general wage freeze since July, 1918, but there have been no complaints!

Cats (Maintenance Allowances) - Hansard - UK Parliament

@MarieDeGournay wrote: "Re plastering cats - thanks to the Definitions.net triumph, I'm still in Pedantry Corner since yesterday, so I can't help but point out that the cat is 'making good' gaps in existing plastering with a spackle knife, rather than plastering."

I had only just finished trying to work out why the Irish are so good with language, and I had never heard of fraochán or fraughan Sunday, although I have picked and eaten bilberries many times over the years - when suddenly I am faced with wondering what the cats did with their wages?

As for a spackle knife, the plastering cat does not care.

So I had to look up the etymology of fraochán and now see that it's a diminutive of fraoch meaning 'heather'.

And then had to see how fraoch related to the Welsh word for heather, grug. Both from the reconstructed Celtic *u̯roiko-.

an anglophone's attempt to spell fraochán

anyone care to speculate on how people from (maybe a few generations removed from) an Irish-speaking background came to call them hurts, the old name around here? Without any of them having knowledge of the name wortleberry.

There's actually a very good, thoroughly researched and referenced book on Irish bilberries, I must look and see what it has to say.

Something, by the title

www.amazon.co.uk/Picking-bilberies-fraughans-Whorts-Ireland/dp/0953587657

You see, this is why I 💕love💕 the Bluestocking - Cher, you are my kind of pedant people
So fraochán and grug both retain the 'k' from the *Celtic source, but go their own ways over the p/ f sound, and the g sound at the beginning.

The only way I can make out the odd word in Welsh is to see if it has undergone that mysterious 'P' Celt and 'Q' Celt shift - so 'ceann' in Irish would be 'pen' in Welsh [and other Brythonic Celtic languages] and 'fionn' is 'Gwynn' -
(giving a possible etymology for penguin, as 'white head' in Welsh, which is fun but debatable).

Where did you get the etymology from, Cher?
It is a source of great disappointment to me that there is no etymological dictionary of Irish😠

I wonder will it be a good year for them? They are one of my favourite things to eat, and picking them is one of my favourite things to do.

I don't use XTwitter 'properly' but follow lots of accounts that seem interesting. One of them is a bloke who makes comments of stuff that's going on in the church, but also posts lots of images that resemble prayer cards of the saints of the day. I had wondered were some of them AI generated. He recently produced a shocker (and didn't seem to notice). I wonder do the people in that thread in Chat eat everything AI suggests without pausing for thought? I'm not prepared to trust the machines that much.

My Gàidhlig dictionary isn't etymological, but quite often gives Old Irish derivations and Welsh cognates.

From a quick look I see that the Scottish form is fraochag, in turn coming from fraoch which is defined as heath, heather; bristles; anger, a girning expression of countenance.

I quite like that last bit, and how you get there via bristles. It reminds me of the sometimes eccentric secondary definitions that pop up in Dinneen's dictionary.

I sounds like the sort of thing my grandmother (born in the 1890s) would say about someone she disapproved of, while denying she had a word of Irish. In there with lúdramán and amadán.

OK, 'hurts'.

From Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary.

HURTS, sb. pl. Cth. Pem. Glo. Sur. Sus. Hmp. Som. Dev. Cor. Also written herts Sus. Hmp. Cor.2; hirts Dev.4; and in form horts s.Pem. Dev.4 [ə̄ts.] Whortleberries,
the fruit of the Vaccinium Myrtillus.
Cth. (W.W.S.) s.Pem. There any 'mount of hurts in Cresselly Wood (W.M.M.). Glo.1 Sur. [Children] stained from head to
feet with the deep purple juice of the ‘hurts,’ Forest Tithes (1893)
49; Sur.1, Sus.1 Hmp. Children's all gone to Hind Head hert-gathering
(W.M.E.F.). w.Som.1 Common. The cry ‘Hurts! hurts!’ may be heard daily in the season, in most towns and villages of the district; but now, alas! the Board schools are corrupting the old name into ‘worts’ (s.v. Hurtle-berry).
Dev. Oftentimes during summer she goes to Dartmoor to gather hurtle-berries, called by the country people ‘hurts,’ Bray Desc. Tamar and Tavy (1836) II. 254; Dev.4, Cor.1 Cor.2
Hence Hurting, prp. gathering ‘hurts.’
n.Dev. Whorts are ‘hurts’ among the labouring people, and to go gathering whortleberries is to go ‘a hurting,’ Jefferies Red
Deer (1884) x.

So from Surrey westwards. Pembrokeshire English is closely allied to West Country English.

My grandmother would have said glipe or ganch or hallion, and if she had had a word of Irish it would have given her a whole rake of extra epithets.

Some of our folks, a hundred years ago, had no word of English, but that was in the back end of Donegal.

How the Irish became English-speaking is such a tangled web! a lot of it was coercion obviously, a lot was economic necessity, but some of it seems to have been 'Hey listen to me, I can speak a few words of this Béarla stuff they speak up in the Big House, how cool am I?'
There's a whole genre of 'macaronic' folk songs where one line is in Irish, the next in English, which obviously date from a time when the audience could be expected to understand both, and the performer was showing off by singing in both.
One day for recreation
Is gan éinne beo im chuideachta
I spied a charming fair maid...

So maybe the Irish-speaking people noticed that when they provided fraocháns to the kitchen in the Big House, they were referred to as 'hurt berries', an older from of whortleberries, and it caught on.

Hiberno-English has preserved some words as they were used in the English of the 16th and 17th century - starlings were called by the archaic word 'stares' up to recently - Yeats wrote a poem called The Stare’s Nest By My Window.

And the there's 'press' and 'cupboard' - now I've returned to Ireland I get funny looks for saying 'cupboard' after decades of getting funny looks for saying 'press'.

So it's possible that the word 'hurt' was being used by the English speakers at the time that the locals learnt it..

Let this be a warning to you all: 'anyone care to speculate' about language is like catnip to me😁

edited to say that I've read Cher's post now -what an etymological Dream Team we are, Cher😎

Oh, and I got the etymology of fraochán from Wikitionary.

Sorry to butt in, but eDIL (an electronic dictionary of medieval Irish ) can also be useful to anyone interested, though you might have to search using an older spelling, in this case fráech instead of fraoch.

Fráech was also the name of a hero/demigod of the Ulster cycle.

The berries are hurts where I am in the south of Ireland too @DeanElderberry.