The Trojan Horse wasn’t.

Trojan that is.

So why are computer programmes (or anything else) designed to undermine systems from within called trojans?

It’s always bugged me that the word trojan is used in this way.

It’s a strange transference because it was the Greeks, not the Trojans, who actually built the horse. The Trojans were the victims, not the perpetrators. It wasn’t their horse.

But try referring to the Greek Horse and see if people look at you as if you’re the one who is daft.

The Trojan Laocoon, on seeing the wooden horse, is said (in Virgil’s Aeneid) to have uttered the phrase, “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” (translated as “I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts”) as a warning to reject the gift. This was before he was killed and the Trojans wheeled the horse in.

Given what happened to the Trojans “I fear the Greeks, especially when they bring gifts” would be an even more powerful sentiment. For here was certainly a case for looking a gift horse in the mouth! (There is, I know, a different origin for this latter phrase.)

Maybe all this trojan nonsense is because the Greeks won, albeit only by trickery, and history is written by the winners (or, in the Greeks’ case, by their successors and admirers the Romans.)

Of all the Trojans Cassandra in particular has subsequently got the worst press. (For being what Margaret Thatcher would have called a Moaning Minnie.)

But Cassandra was right, Troy was doomed. (Thank you, Private Fraser.) It was just her misfortune to be disbelieved.

Woe, woe and thrice, woe.

Do any of you say, “Are I?”
Thought not.

Would any of you say, “Are I not?”
Not likely is it? (Personally I would say, “Am I not?”)

Then why do we hear people say, “Aren’t I?”

It’s a horrible construction, ugly and ungrammatical. [In the jargon of grammatical discourse, the subject fails to agree in number with its verb; in plainer terms it combines a plural verb with a singular noun.]
And I hate it.

None of the characters in my fiction has ever uttered the phrase. If I had my way they never would. (Unfortunately, there will come a time when one has to because of who they’re supposed to be and where they’re supposed to come from. But I’ll still hate it.)

Where I was brought up the suitably grammatical phrase, “Amn’t I?” performed the function perfectly.

I do not expect it to catch on.

Golfers don’t get this wrong. They don’t speak of a good lay (except maybe at the nineteenth hole.)

The difference between lie and lay is that lie is an intransitive verb, whereas lay is transitive.
In other words you cannot just lay and leave it at that. You have to lay something. E.g. “He lays the cup on the table.”€

I as a person cannot lay on my back. I can only lie on my back.
I can however lay carpets. (Thank you, doctorvee.)

Similarly a ball cannot lay; it can only lie, so when it is in a favourable position to be hit it is in a good lie.

Also you can see the lie of the land (its appearance, how it is lying.) Land cannot lay anything because land is not an agent.

Since cars lie beside the road in one of them, a lay-by ought, then, properly to be called a lie-by. (Except for the litter of course, which is laid; or perhaps thrown.)

Hens of course are said to “lay” because what is laid (eggs) is understood and doesn’t need to be stated. “That hen is a good layer.” (Of eggs.)

I can see where the confusion comes from because lay is unfortunately the past tense (preterite) of lie.
Compare: “Yesterday I laid my book down” (past tense of lay) and “Yesterday I lay on the couch” (past tense of lie.)

That Flanagan and Allen song always annoyed me.
“Underneath the arches we dream our dreams away” Present tense
“Underneath the arches, on cobblestones we lay.” Past tense
“Pavement is our pillow,” (present tense again) “no matter where we stray,
Underneath the arches we dream our dreams away.” Present tense.
I know it was for the sake of the rhyme but it makes no sense for the second line to be in a different tense from the others.

So did the Troggs’ – and Wet Wet Wet’s (they should have known better) – “Love Is All Around.”
“I see your face before me as I lay on my bed.”
NO. NO. NO. As I lie on my bed.

You can discover if REM did any better in this clip.

REM: Love is All Around

I suppose the sexual connotation of “a good lay” comes from the fact that you may perhaps lie on a bed to perform the act and so the phrase has arisen from the confusion. (Unless of course you were carrying your partner beforehand and laid her/him down onto the bed first.)

The post title might have brought in a few new visitors, don’t you think?
How cruel of me to disappoint them.

I’ve not done one of these for a while but nobody’s remarked on any of them so perhaps it’s just me who cares. Still!

What is the number that comes next in the sequence 5,4,3,2,1, ?

I disagree with the dictionaries on this one. Along with other definitions they give the name nothing to the number concerned.

But!
Subtract (or most likely “take away” if you’re young Tom Daley) 4 apples from 4 apples and, yes, you are left with no apples; but you certainly do not have “nothing.”
You have the bag they were in or the plate they were on – or the symbol 0.

To my mind nothing means absence of thing. A void. No thing.

The number in the sequence above is nought, or zero. It is not “no thing.” It exists as an abstract concept, the number 0, and is one of the only two important numbers in the universe. (The other is 1. The rest of the numbers, 2-9 and all the possible combinations of digits, are just window dressing; an effusion resulting from the world view of ten-fingered bipeds.)

Even the symbol, 0, is not “nothing” – I can see it there on the page or screen.
It was, I believe, invented in India – like the other nine of our so-called “Arabic” numerals.

Without the number zero modern mathematics would be complicated and clumsy, if not impossible (think Roman numerals – they had no zero) and the world would be a very different place.

I wouldn’t be able to post this, for a start. I wouldn’t have a blog. No-one would.

0 is certainly not “nothing.”

The ship sunk.

No. It didn’t. In modern usage, the ship sank.
Similarly, no shirt shrunk in the wash and no-one ever shrunk from anything. In both cases they shrank.

This is almost the reverse of the case of span (see a previous annoyances post) except that rather than being full past tenses (preterites,) sunk and shrunk are now, in the main, used as participles and, unlike span, have no other function or meaning.

Sunk and shrunk ought to be accompanied by was/were (or perhaps is/are.) Grammatically they occur in the passive mood (or mode.)
“The ship was sunk”€ – done to the ship; passive.
Compare that with, “€œthe ship sank”€ -€“ done by the ship; active.

We are sunk is a metaphorical expression, but it is still passive.

I can’€™t see why there should be any difficulty here but there is a similar confusion with sung/sang, sprung/sprang and rung/rang. You hear it all the time. I can only assume people who employ the words this way have a tin ear.

For the record, sang, sprang and rang are active; sung, sprung and rung are participles.

Amusingly (to me) the Guardian published one of its famous corrections (it appears in the column’s last paragraph) about one of the subjects of this post on Saturday.

I heard young Tom Daley, the Olympic diver, use the expression “times it by”€ in a TV interview after his event.

Times it by? Times it by?

What superannuated numpty taught him this phrase?

Why employ it at all when there is a perfectly usable adult word, the proper mathematical term, which someone of 14 years of age – hell half that – ought to have no problems in using if they had been told it properly in the first place?

I assume the thinking process behind employing this horrible construction is that “multiply” is too complicated a word for children to cope with.
But why is it necessary to talk down to children in this way?
Does it really make the manipulation (sorry, I used a five syllable word there; I of course meant times-it-bying, only four syllables after all) easier for a child to understand by describing it in a childish way?

I know we refer to times tables, but the process is not called timesing, is it? (See how ugly this becomes?)

In any case it might be better to say, for example, 4 lots of 6 make 24, or four multiples of 6 give you 24, rather than 4 times 6 is 24.

Even if “times it by” were generated by children themselves they ought to have been told, “We don’t say that. We say multiply instead,” in much the same way you would correct a child who said buyed in place of bought.

Think how different phraseology would have been if this ugly usage had always been in vogue.

Be fruitful and times-it-by; and replenish the Earth? Hardly trips off the tongue.

Bobby Darin got it correct.

Multiplication. That’s the name of the game.

Bobby Darin: Multiplication

A small piece?

Perhaps it isn’€™t.

I first saw this word in print as “€œsmidgin”€ so I persist in thinking this is the correct spelling. This is why publishers, newspapers and writers of captions for TV news and the information pages on the red button have a responsibility to ensure any spellings they use are accepted ones. Anyone coming across a spelling for the first time could be influenced by it. Though it is as well to check a dictionary.

My Chambers doesn’t have an entry at all for it but my Shorter Oxford lists smidgen and smidgin. Dictionary.co.uk has only smidgen. Dictionary.com has all three.

I can only suppose smidgeon has arisen from an erroneous analogy with pigeon. I must say smidgeon looks very odd to me, especially as the two words are not connected in their origin.

When speaking or hearing them I always think “smidj-in” and “pidj-on.”

Surprisingly, to me at any rate, pigeon is an alternative spelling for pidgin (also pidgeon) – a mash-up of two languages which is not as fully developed as a creole.

So, in the strange way in which my mind works:- Pigeon? Creole?

Kid Creole and the Coconuts: Stool Pigeon

I know it’€™s in the dictionary but it’™s marked archaic damn it!

That means it hasn’€™t been in use more or less since printing came to Europe. So why am I reading it in a contemporary novel? Why am I reading it in a Science Fiction novel?

Come on guys and gals. It just sounds so wrong. The modern word is spun. Let’€™s leave span for gaps, bridges and hands. OK?