h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I remember Shakespeare using "to dote", but I've never heard it in speech, not even in Ireland.

Not even in the 'to dote on...' sense? I'd have thought it pretty common. And, yes, I did get the connection to 'dotage' - although that's a bit of an archaism, perhaps. A piece of 'tushery' even (ie an archaic word or phrase employed as a cliché, aka 'Meinhost-ese')

My wife was interviewing job applicants yesterday. She's an employee of the state, and whenever they select candidates for interview, they draw up a 'short liet'...ie what anyone else would call a 'short list.'

It appears to be a term used only in Scottish government/legal circles. Googling it, I can only find one English-language example in the right context (it happens to be top of the search list...er...liet) - although it does appear to mean something in Dutch.







They also do this other thing that amuses me. The interview panel meets beforehand and agrees a single set of questions to put to everyone. That's not what happens in the real world!

Oh, I know the term "to dote on" meaning to "love a person to bits". What I was saying was, I never hear the term "to dote", meaning to ramble incoherently, other than in Shakespeare.

Single set of questions. In government, local and national, as far as I know, you would be varying from equal opps if you didn't have an agreed list of questions. I remember sitting on a panel and nearly swooning when one panel member threw in very pointedly "Have you ever been convicted?"

Oh, I know full well the reasons - 'fear of litigation'. And I always contend that we don't have a litigation culture...nobody's actually litigating...but we have a *fear of* litigation culture.

But it just doesn't work like that in the Real World. 80% of jobs aren't even advertised, and when they are, interview questions depend on who you're interviewing. Feel discriminated against? Then take it up with your union!

Government jobs have to stick to one rigid set of questions in the UK. I know peopl;e that have recently been involved in recriuting to Transport for London and in the MoD - both had just the one set and were not allowed to stray from it. They did try to make some of the questions extremely open to allow the candidate to make sure they got out everything they wanted to say - but they aren't supposed to ask follow-up (non-scripted) questions.

I thought this was a bit and just meant they had to craft the questions to include the follow-up bits up front.

It seems it's 'short leet', not 'liet'. You get a lot more Google hits if you spell it like that. See also http://sco.wikipedia.org which has a 'Leet o airticles that aa Wikipædias shuid hae' link.

The third Google hit reminds me...'deputy' in Scots is spellt 'depute' -(As in Depute Head, Depute Governor, Depute Director) although it's still pronounced 'deputy'.

F19585?thread=3203157

Mind your Ps and Qs! I'm sure you've gone over this one, but someone was asking about it but I couldn't remember the answer...

As for "dote" - has anyone else ever wondered if it's the origin of "dotty" for "slightly mad".

I'm going slightly mad, I'm going slightly mad, it's finally happened
It finally happened I'm slightly mad - oh dear!
I'm knitting with only one needle
Unravelling fast its true
I'm driving only three wheels these days
But my dear how about you?

ahem

excuse me.

Ps and Qs. Typesetters used to confuse these letters, because typeset letters are mirror-image, so the p looks like a q and the q like a p; hence, the need to mind them.

Incidentally, in big newspapers, the sub-editors had to read the final articles in mirror-reversed form on the typeset blocks as a proofread before printing could go ahead.

At least they didn't have to cope with HTML or Guide ML to boot.

Mind your greater-than and less-thans?

'Back in the day' (why has everyonse suddenly startyed using this phrase?), I worked briefly with the LISP programming language in which(everything (has (to (be (nested (in (parentheses))))))). It was damnably easy to mess up a piece of code my having the wrong number. Rumour had it that LISP stood for 'Lots of Infuriating Spurious Parentheses'.

>> ....anyone else ever wondered if it's the origin of "dotty" for "slightly mad". <<


Yes. That was a thought I had after reading the first couple of replies that didn't see such a great leap from dote to dotage.

Thanks all! I can see now that equating affection to 'being mad' (or words to that effect)is quite common. There are indeed several phrases and figures of speech that reflect the mildly neurotic nature of love.

Upon reflection I realise the problem isn't one of cultural ammendment in regard to attitudes toward madness and senility but rather my own subjective values and the degree of madness one attributes to doting and dotage.

In the first place I don't have much use for kids and always scorned those who doted on them. But seeing it more objectively, doting is just a mildly neurotic obsession just as dotage was once just mildly neurotic distraction. At least it was before the advent of all these new dementias.


~jwf~

I may not be around much anymore, but I couldn't just desert Brit Eng. So here are some replies from way back...

Funnily enough, the 'h' in 'posthumous' was erroneously added on analogy with 'humus'. It comes from the Latin 'postumus', the irregular superlative of 'post'.

Trait - might have been a bit hasty there 'Pretentious' is an easy to chuck at people. A better argument is that there's already 'tray', so why have two words pronounced the same if you can avoid it?

Me, in a 2-minute posting: >It occurs to me that trebuchet [TREbyooshet], a fine Anglo-Norman word, and sans [sanz] - *not* written in italics - are examples of refrenchified pronunciation.<

TC: >Sans, however, (when not italicised, as Jack says), when pronounced sanz, is surely an anglicisation rather than "refrenchification". <

That wasn't very clear of me. [Sanz] is the authentic English pronunciation of this word in English. Both those words, and many others, were borrowed into English back when Anglo-French was the prestige language in many parts of Britain. That is, as Recumbentman said, they have a long pedigree of being pronounced that way. One could argue that the determined mispronuniciation of French words is the most visible remant of this otherwise dead language.

Another example of this is cinque, as in Cinque Ports (lived in one, went to school in another), which should sound the same as 'sink', but is pronounced 'sank' by many people.

Maintainability. Surely, like all words with an -ity suffix, it's pronounced maintainaBIlity? Though where the secondary stress is I'm not so sure.

That's all for now

Could the Scots Depute (pron. deputy) be a hangover from the French deputé? Which may well be the origin of deputy anyway. French influence in Scots English (from the time of Mary Queen of?) would (presumably) also include "bonny" and "tassie"

...And possibly "canny"?

Eejit too. Or is that via Ireland?

Canny . . . can't think of the French connection there (poor France, just watched them losing after dominating the match). Eejit I always took for an oldfashioned pronunciation of "idiot" as used in Ireland, but the feminine French "idiote" is a very convincing candidate for the origin of it.

Another Franco-Scotism...

You can buy 'butcher's pies' - pre-cooked steak pies. These are sold in large, rectangular/oval foil trays (or sometimes even ceramic, with a deposit). They are also known as 'ashet pies'. An ashet is a serving dish. cf 'assiette'.

Then there's 'gushet', the triangular spit of land where a road forks. From the french 'guichet', now a ticket office, originally a tollbooth. (And it also refers to a variety of genital piercing. Google if you don't believe me!)

Onto Germano-English (having been reminded by the deposit on ashets): When I worked in Canada, student-aged, they used the word 'Pfand' for the deposit payed at a bar, repayable on return of an empty glass. This seems to be understood in several countries...but not in the UK.