Strickly

A well-wisher at work presented us with a box of chocolates just before Christmas – to wit, the Mint Connoisseur Collection from House of Dorchester. These are pretty high-end chocs. And yet I feel repelled by the language used to describe them.

One mint is ‘finished with a strickle of white chocolate’; another is ‘finished with a natural green coloured chocolate strickle’. I’d argue for the hyphenation of ‘green coloured’ or even the omission of ‘coloured’ altogether (Alan Hansen, take note), but my real beef is with ‘strickle’. I can see what’s happened. Some chocolate marketing bod has decided, quite wrongly, that the words already provided by the English language will simply not suffice. What the squiggly bit on top of the chocolate is, he reasons, is a sort of cross between a trickle and a stripe. A portmanteau word is clearly called for. Having vetoed ‘tripe’, he settles on ‘strickle’. And there the word now sits, adorning many thousands of boxes of chocolates.

I’m not against the evolution of language. Those French tosseurs who try and invoke the law to stop their mother tongue from being besmirched, I think they’re boum out of order. I like new words. Tweeple, webinar, laters, cromulent, paedogeddon. Every word has to be invented at some point. Dickens himself came up with ‘boredom’ and ‘dustbin’. The problem is, strickle already is a word — a word that, unless I’m very much mistaken, most of us use every day. OED defines it as:

n.
1.
a. A straight piece of wood with which surplus grain is struck off level with the rim of the measure. Sometimes applied to the amount so measured.
b. Applied to various instruments used for similar purposes in casting or moulding
2. A tool with which a reaper whets or sharpens his scythe. Also a mechanical grinder

v. trans.
To strike off with a strickle (the superfluous sand) in moulding; to shape (a core) or form (a mould) by means of a strickle.

It’s certainly a word that must pop up regularly in societies where grain and casting/moulding still feature heavily. It doesn’t take a genius to foresee the problems the House of Dorchester’s mindbogglingly careless use of language must inevitably create. Yevgeny turns up at his farm or his iron foundry after Christmas, asks ‘Hyend me thyet strieckel,’ and receives a chocolate in return. He can’t fulfil the daily grain quota, his family can only afford one potato a day (plus the chocolate), the Russian economy collapses, and China takes over the world. Thanks a lot, Dorchester.

Trickle is a lovely word. It sounds like what it is, flowing water, a babbling brook. It needs no addendum. If a new word is really needed to describe a stripe atop a chocolate, I would suggest squizzle (squirt/drizzle).

But the chocolates were very nice. Merry Christmas.

A fantasy

It snowed yesterday morning, a miniature blizzard in Cambridge, a fight against the elements in the biting cold. Head down, I arrived at work besnowflaked and damp.

Later in the morning, the snow turned into rain. I looked out of a window across the Backs, the snow melting on the lawn, and saw the University Library in the distance. I suddenly had the sensation that I was Leo in The Go-Between, in an unfamiliar house, the grey-brown sky outside, the puddles.

Perhaps if I try hard enough, I will become Leo, I thought. Sometimes when I really want something that my rational mind knows to be impossible (normally invisibility), I can make myself believe, momentarily, that it may happen.

I had to stop being Leo and go back to work, but for a few seconds it was nice to be somewhere else.

Christmas songs

I love Christmas. My very favourite time of year, especially musically speaking. I like to play Christmas carols and songs on the piano. In theory one could play ‘See amid the winter’s snow’ all year round, but it wouldn’t feel special without the eleven-month break.

Anyway, in the spirit of festivity, here are a few of my favourites.

I’m singing this Villette motet in a concert on Monday, for the first time in nearly ten years. What a fabulous piece. The final phrase should sound ecstatic, and will send shivers down the spine of choir and audience, if sung well (and in a good acoustic). We aspire to be as good as these young singers (age 13-18).

A touching song of a selfless act of charity.

A curiosity. The Wiener Sängerknaben from 1964, and quite an unprepossessing bunch they are, but their performance has charm and evokes something that is missing from Christmas today. Perhaps I have conceived some kind of false nostalgia for a German Christmas I never had. Gemütlichkeit and so on. The carol is originally Sicilian, I believe, and is also the basis of the Eels song ‘Baby Genius’.

A beautiful setting by Michael Praetorius of ‘Quem pastores laudavere’, not quite the same as the tune one usually hears. From one of the best Christmas CDs around, just rereleased at budget price.

Probably the definitive version of this classic.

And something from King’s, of course, featuring the choir of a few years ago. I have fond memories of singing John Joubert’s ‘Torches’ as a teenager when I first started singing in choirs. I hadn’t realised singing could be so exciting, though I don’t think I was ever quite as mad-eyed as the boy in the middle at the climax of this performance.

I’ll be around again before the month is out, I’m sure, but in any case let me take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Le vainqueur noir que rien ne protège

At school I knew a boy who was bullied by pupils and teachers alike. I never wronged him myself, but I was complicit in his torment by my failure to intervene. On one occasion a couple of hundred of us witnessed him being stoned before school. Another boy, a close friend of mine and the gentlest of people, became involved in fights absurdly easily. One day he returned from lunch with broken glasses.

These people were mistreated, but they would not have suffered as badly if they had only possessed some instinct for self-preservation. They were the dodos of our school, trusting, credulous and the easiest of prey. Their experience at the hands of bullies appeared to leave them no less ignorant of the threat they faced.

Bespectacled and bookish, and conscious of my vulnerability for these reasons, I kept my head down and avoided trouble. Caution reigned over my adolescence, and I remained safe. It’s an effective solution in the short term, but the danger is that when you grow up, you find that you have forgotten how to live, perhaps never even knew how in the first place, and now it’s too late to learn.

Ce coup de poing en marbre était boule de neige,
Et cela lui étoila le coeur
Et cela étoilait la blouse du vainqueur,
Etoila le vainqueur noir que rien ne protège.

Il restait stupéfait, debout
Dans la guérite de solitude,
Jambes nues sous le gui, les noix d’or, le houx,
Etoilé comme le tableau noir de l’étude.

Ainsi partent souvent du collège
Ces coups de poing faisant cracher le sang,
Ces coups de poing durs des boules de neige,
Que donne la beauté vite au coeur en passant.

This marble punch was a snowball,
And it starred his heart
And it starred the victor’s jacket,
Starred the black victor whom nothing protects.

Stupefied he stood
Barelegged in the lair of solitude,
Beneath the gilded walnuts, mistletoe and holly,
Starred over like the blackboard in the classroom.

Often this begins at school,
These punches that fill the mouth with blood
These hard snowball punches,
That beauty jabs at the heart in passing by.

Jean Cocteau
English translation by Margaret Crosland

Image from Wikimedia Commons.