Procrastination

According to the Oxford English the word ‘Procrastination’ is derived from the Latin ‘procrastinare’ which translates into: the prefix pro-, 'forward', and the suffix – ‘crastinus’, meaning 'till next day'. Which is fair enough, some things have to be done tomorrow or next week or year. But ‘Procrastination’ comes with an overtone of dawdling or dallying (which is a word I quite like).

procrastination clock

I actually don’t like procrastination. I like getting stuff done and out of the way. I can then relax. I like a ‘to do’ list in the morning with things done from yesterday that I can put a line through.

I was thinking that there would be a single word to describe getting stuff done in time but the various synonym sites don’t think there is one. I think there should be. As procrastination comes from the Latin I’m going to follow the same path.

Using a couple of Google sites I’m going with ‘in tempore suo’ which means ‘in its time’. I think I can use ‘in’ as the first part of my new word. How about ‘tempor’, so that’s ‘intempor. I’m presuming I can mess about with the ending as ‘suo’ could be tricky and anyway ‘tinus’ goes to ‘tinate’. I’m going for ‘intempesate’. Then it could be intempestation.

I’ve just looked it up and there are no references to such a word other than what seems like a misspelling in a paper’s records in the 19th century.

the intempestate man is able to relax

When I was looking up various sites about procrastination I came across pages and pages of self help advice as to how to avoid it. For instance this from The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

...It can be difficult to tell when you are procrastinating. Think about the clues that tell you that’s what you’re doing: for example, a nagging voice in your head, a visual image of what you are avoiding or the consequences of not doing it, physical ailments (stomach tightness, headaches, muscle tension), inability to concentrate, inability to enjoy what you are doing.... 

How do you procrastinate? Try to ignore the task, hoping against hope that it will go away?

Over- or under-estimate the degree of difficulty that the task involves?

Minimize the impact that your performance now may have on your future?

Substitute something important for something really important? (For example, cleaning instead of writing.) 

The University’s advice for those with a problem is actually good and useful for all and not just students. And even if one is not a procrastinator then the following is appropriate:
‘While you are thinking about where to write, consider also when you will write. When are you most alert? Is it at 8 a.m., mid-morning, mid-afternoon, early evening, or late at night? Try to schedule writing time when you know you will be at your best. Don’t worry about when you “should” be able to write; just focus on when you are able to write.’

When I was looking stuff up I also came across the fascinating Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis. Apparently he is best known for his epigrams, which became popular and influential in European poetry over a millennium after his death. 

M Valeri Martialis

In these short, witty poems he satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. And some of these poems made me blush. He wrote a total of 1,561 epigrams and also coined the word plagiarism.

Procrastination by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 40-104)

LVIII

To Morrow you will live, you always cry;
In what far Country does this Morrow lye,
That 'tis so mighty long e'er it arrive?
Beyond the Indies does this Morrow live?
'Tis so far fetch'd this Morrow, that I fear
'Twill be both very Old, and very Dear.
To Morrow I will live, the Fool does say;
To Day it self's too late, the Wise liv'd Yesterday.

Translated by Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)

from M. Valeri Martialis Epigrammaton, Liber Quintus

Thanks for reading, Terry Q

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Achievement

Many men and women deserve credit for moving human civilisation forward, for helping to cultivate the tree of knowledge, if you like. That being the case, it's almost invidious to pick out a greatest achiever or achievement. It would be akin to having to select a player of the match after a brilliant team display by Blackpool FC this afternoon. Nonetheless, I'm going to nominate Carl Linnaeus, as one worthy among many. His crowning achievement was to be the father of taxonomy. Sorry Hatshepsut, Aristotle, Euclid, Hippocrates, Pliny, Galileo, Newton, Merian, Darwin, Curie, Einstein et al. 

For those of you not familiar with Linnaeus, he only went and classified the natural world back in the 18th century.  "The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science." 

This classification, as outlined in 'Imperium Naturae' and 'Systema Naturae' is still the basis of the formal scientific naming system of animals, minerals and plants 300 years later. Good on him.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

Linnaeus, born in Sweden and educated at Lund and Uppsala universities, was a biologist and physician who not only became a Professor of both Medicine and Botany but who also spent much of his life collecting, discovering and classifying plants and animals. By the time of his death he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe, known variously as the Prince of Botanists, the "Pliny of the North" and one of the founders of modern ecology. 

From an early age he had a love of plants and the natural world. As a child he was given his own patch in his father's garden where he could grow flowers. At school he would bunk off and go exploring in the countryside looking for plants. As a student, at Lund and then Uppsala, he was lucky to have excellent mentors who encouraged his love of botany in particular.. 

the Linnaeus summer home at Hammarby near Uppsala

His greatest legacy is the system of classification that he developed and expounded in those seminal works of the mid-18th century, written in Latin as the international scientific language of the day. Linnaean taxonomy, his formal and rigorous multi-level system of naming things, soon superseded all previous attempts at codification. There are seven layers to Linnaean classification, applicable to all living things, and the sequence goes as follows: Kingdom - Phylum - Class - Order - Family - Genus - Species. (If you want a mnenonic by which to remember the sequence, I give you: kids prefer candy over fresh green salad.)

There are only five kingdoms: Animals (all multicellular living organisms), Plants (all green plants), Fungi (moulds, mushrooms, yeasts), Protists (amoeba etc) and Prokaryotes (bacteria and algae).

There are many phyla, including: Chordata (with backbones), Arthropods (jointed legs, exoskeletons) and Annelids (segmented worms).

Class is a subdivision of a phylum. For chordata, that might be: Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, Fish, Reptiles.

Within class there are orders. Within mammals are found such orders as: Carnivores and Primates.

Orders are further subdivided into families. The order of carnivores includes, among others, the families of: Canidae (dogs) and Felidae (cats).

Genus follows on from family. Felidae contains the likes of: Acinonyx (cheetahs etc), Panthera (lions and tigers etc), Neofelis (such as clouded leopard) and Felis (domestic cats).

Species is the lowest level of classification and, as you might have deduced from the paragraph above, divides a genus into specific animals (or plants or fungi etc). In my drill-down example, Panthera comprises just five species: Jaguar, Leopard, Lion, Snow Leopard and Tiger.

Because Linnaeus wrote in Latin, all seven divisions of any creature's full taxonomy are in Latin, and its binomial is always the genus and species. Accordingly, what we call a jaguar is termed Panthera onca and its full seven level classification is: Animalia - Chordata - Mammalia - Carnivora - Felidae - Panthera - Onca. Oh, the beauty of it.

What Linnaeus did for animals in the example above, he also did for plants.

frontispiece of Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, 1729

I don't know how far he got with his system of classification, whether fungi, protists and prokaryotes were afforded the same level of attention, but his methodology became universally accepted and scientists ever since have used it when discussing or writing about existing species, but also to categorise both 'new' species as they have been discovered in the last 300 hundred years, and to retrospectively categorise 'extinct' species as evidence about them  has come to light. That's quite some legacy, and a phenomenal achievement, I think you'll agree.

To conclude, a new poem from the imaginarium.

Shopping For Green Tea And Honey

Saturday market by the harbour wall

between rows of tamarisk trees,

sometimes referred to as salt cedars.

They shade the stalls in this island port.

Linnaeus, himself named after a lime tree,

devised the taxonomy by which this avenue

of tamarisks is known as Tamarix parviflora,

occasionally by its synonym Tamarix cretica.

I don't tell you any of this, you'd be bored.

Not much has essentially changed here

in centuries, except for tourists of course

and the euro replacing the oldest coinage.

I'm happily shopping for green tea and honey

but you're impatient to strip off, start tanning.

You'll burn, you always overdo it, won't be told.

We have two glorious weeks ahead. Go slow.

Camellia sinensis. loose leafed, weighed out

into a brown paper bag. And honey comes in

so many colours, depending on the varieties

of plants Cretan bees collected nectar from.

I prefer thyme honey, from Thymus capitatus.

Would you be interested to know that honey

is an excellent natural treatment for sunburn?

Green tea also. I'll save those facts for later. 

Thanks for reading, have a good week. S ;-)

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Achieving Nuance In Wording

A guest post by C J Heyworth

The first "Latin tag" that I remember is the motto of my father's chosen Armed Service, The Royal Air Force, in the mid-1920s through to demob at the end of WWII in the year before 1946 when I was born. I was one among many War Babies in the mid to late 1940s when our fathers returned from walloping The Nazis and their fellow-travellers. The RAF Motto is Per Ardua Ad Astra (Through Toil To The Stars as Dad rendered it, and even at a baby's age, I think I understood that I had to graft away if ever I was to get anywhere).

Even now I can see that Dad's youthful wanderlust - he served in Aden, Singapore and North Africa before coming "back to Blighty", and meeting, courting and marrying Mum, and their settling here in Blackpool - has been passed on to me at least in imagination, and encouraged me to want to learn at least a smattering of languages other than English.

Please listen to this clip before reading the remainder of the article:

Confusing in sound, aren't the various languages, though the closer we are geographically to the country of origin, the more clues there seem to be in similarity of vocabulary?

I'll begin with three short pieces in their original languages which have developed into modern English (which I see as English English) which have stuck with me over the past 50 years or more:

"Ad astra per alia porci" was a favourite insult thrown at us or written on an essay we had submitted by the late Eric Hood, a History master who encouraged us by predicting inevitable failure for us in public exams unless we "bucked up". It was not until much later when I had qualified as a teacher myself that I learned of the insistence by writer John Steinbeck that this phrase appear with the title of whichever of his books was being published. The tag translates exactly as "To the stars on a pig's wings", a slightly more poetic way of saying "You are no writer, sunshine - Give Up!", and the novice Steinbeck had suffered the insult as frequently as we did from one of his tutors who chortled at Steinbeck's stated ambition to become a writer, but Steinbeck "had the last laugh" (often) as the saying goes.

Secondly, "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" in the 16th. century French of poet Francois Villon.  "Les neiges d'antan" is usually rendered as "the snows of yester-year" and which led to the coining of a fresh word into English, borrowing the sense of yesterday into year-long passages of time, and blanketing remembrance into a cloak of colourless and cold snow. I can remember being taught that "antan" carries with it in French so much yearning for what is no longer with us that the English had to create a fresh word to render it more accurately; one of my first lessons in how inadequate it is to render one language into another as our environmental and cultural experiences are so different dependent on where we spend most of our lives. And it is not just a single experience of snow we lament, but the varying experiences year-by-year. The plural form "Snows" gives me the Christmas I emerged from a four-month stay in hospital at five years old, but was not allowed "out" to play in the deep snow, a most unusual occurrence in Blackpool, warmed as we are by the Irish Sea. So my friends from our street congregated outside our front-room window, built a snowman for me in the road, and entertained me with a snowball fight. And through the other rare Winters in Blackpool when the sea and Stanley Park Lake froze, and once when our baby daughter was marooned with her godmother, Judy, near Blackpool Airport at the south end of town while we waited for them in North Shore.
 

A page from François Villons (1431-c.1474) "Grand Testament de Maistre François Villon"

As this short explanation of the origin of the phrase in Wikipedia makes clear, wondering about the passage of time (or Ubi Sunt? poems) date from Classical times - we humans are forever delving into the past, and regretting the tendency of familiar experiences we enjoyed 'back then" to be no longer available to us:

"The Ballade des dames du temps jadis ("Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past") is a poem by François Villon which celebrates famous women in history and mythology, and a prominent example of the ubi sunt genre. It is written in the fixed-form ballade format, and forms part of his collection Le Testament."

The section is simply labelled Ballade by Villon, but the title des dames du temps jadis was added by Clément Marot in his 1533 edition of Villon's poems proving how publishers and even their printers may adjust what the reader believes is the author's choice of words. And "antan" and "jadis" though both referring to Times Past require a different nuance when translated into English English.

Finally, the phrase "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes" in Virgil's Latin of The Aeneid (II,49) original has been useful in so many different settings.  It has been paraphrased in English as the proverb "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts", even though its literal meaning, "I fear the Danaans, even those bearing gifts", carries a somewhat different nuance to the usual English version of the phrase.

Its origins are related in the Aeneid thus.  After a nine-year war on the beaches of Troy between the Danaans (Greeks from the mainland) and the Trojans, the Greek seer Calchas induces the leaders of the Greek army to offer the Trojan people a huge wooden horse, the so-called Trojan Horse, while seemingly departing.

The Trojan priest Laocoön, distrusting this gesture, warns the Trojans not to accept the gift, crying, Equō nē crēdite, Teucrī! Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentīs. ("Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I fear the Danaans, even when bringing gifts.") When immediately afterward Laocoön and his two sons are viciously slain by enormous twin serpents, the Trojans assume the horse has been offered at Minerva's (Athena's) prompting and interpret Laocoön's death as a sign of her displeasure. Minerva did send the serpents and help to nurture the idea of building the horse, but her intentions were certainly not peaceful, as the deceived Trojans imagined them to be. The Trojans agree unanimously to place the horse atop wheels and roll it through their impenetrable walls. Festivities follow under the assumption that the war is ended.

During the Cold War of the late 1940s through to the 1970s there have been numerous occasions when uttering "Timeo Danaos...", the abridged version of the tag, has been too frequently appropriate, and unfulfilled promises are the bane of any diplomat's life.

Today, I'd argue that Ian Duncan Smith's insistence that he is changing things "for the better for everyone" through attempts to introduce Universal Credit should have Timeo Danaos... stamped on every mailing from the Department of Work and Pensions.

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