Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 February 15

= February 15 =

Deceased person's name in red
What does a deceased person's name in red mean? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:981:4402:7DD0:B107:93E0:CA12:10E6 (talk) 00:43, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
 * In what context? On Wikipedia, a red link indicates that an article on that subject does not exist. clpo13(talk) 00:56, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
 * In many East and Southeast Asian cultures, writing a (living) person's name in red ink is taboo because it is believed that, depending on the specific culture, that person or a relative will soon die. In some of these cultures, the superstition exists because it is/was customary to use red ink when recording a death or listing a deceased family member in family registers or genealogies. I first encountered this superstition in Vietnamese culture, but it also exists in Korea and China. You can peruse the links in this google search for more examples.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 01:13, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
 * In the West (specifically, Christianity), highlighting words in red is called rubrication. Our article doesn't mention any specific meaning pertaining to deaths, but this book suggests that death notices in medieval manuscripts were rubricated to draw attention to them and pay respect. Smurrayinchester 09:33, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

"Yea, buns, and buns, and buns!"
In A Tangled Tale Lewis Carroll starts one chapter with the quote "Yea, buns, and buns, and buns!", attributing it to an "Old Song". Since I'm German, I don't know any English old songs. There actually is a song that contains this quote, it's The Three Badgers from Sylvie and Bruno. So I'm wondering whether there actually is this old song he refers to, or whether in A Tangled Tale he is just referring to his own poem (which was actually published later). --Schnark (talk) 09:10, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
 * You can't find any pre-existing song with such a line and neither can I. My guess is that Carroll wasn't referring to anything whatever, that he only wanted to start the chapter off with a single line of nonsensical whimsy he'd just made up and then years later worked it into his song for Sylvie and Bruno, but I don't suppose there's any way of knowing that he hadn't already written the song as early as A Tangled Tale.  Epigraphs taken from non-existent works were something of a 19th-century tradition, practised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Eliot, for example.  Walter Scott probably started it all, with chapter mottoes labelled "Old Play", "Old Ballad", and once "Old Song" (The Betrothed chapter 13).  Sometimes they were meant to deceive, and sometimes I think the reader was meant to be in on the joke, as with scraps of verse Scott supposedly took from "The Loves of the Seaweeds", "The Hog Hath Lost his Pearl" and suchlike titles. --Antiquary (talk) 11:21, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


 * On the one hand, many of the quotes in that book seem to be genuine - Knot II's is from a Thomas Hood poem, and Knot IV's is from Merchant of Venice. On the other hand, it wouldn't be out of character for Carroll to quote his own work and pretend it was an old poem - Jabberwocky started as a parody of Anglo-Saxon prose before becoming a whole poem. None of the genuine quotes are labeled with their source - only Knot X - which adds to the suspicion that it's a joke. Smurrayinchester 11:39, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


 * The same question was asked a few years ago on The Lewis Carroll Forum, but answer came there none. Alansplodge (talk) 08:54, 16 February 2017 (UTC)


 * First of all, thanks for all your answers!
 * Almost the complete text of both volumes of Sylvie and Bruno was written by early 1885 (as Carroll says in the preface), so the Three Badgers probably already existed when he published A Tangled Tale as a book.
 * All the other quotes are genuine, most by Shakespeare (I, IV, V, VII), II as said by Thomas Hood, III by Tennyson, IX by Coleridge. VIII starts with This Little Piggy, and VI can be found in Chinese stories for boys and girls by Arthur Moule.
 * I know of one other work where Carroll is quoting a work of his own in joke: The "old proverb" in Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing has actually been invented by himself, as he admits a few lines later. --Schnark (talk) 09:35, 16 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Just in case you didn't read my Carroll Forum link above all the way through, it also identifies the reference at the end of Knot X to "closed not o'er" and "lonely bark", which is from Isle of Beauty by Thomas Haynes Bayly. Not something that would be known by most modern readers. Alansplodge (talk) 19:09, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Narrowing as a verb?
Is it acceptable to use the word "narrowing" as a verb? As in: "When narrowing the width of a page layout column, check the hyphenation settings." --Navstar (talk) 20:42, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes, the verb to narrow has been used transitively for more than a thousand years (since Old English).   D b f i r s   21:06, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


 * As Wiktionary points out, it can also be used intransitively, as in "The road narrows." Loraof (talk) 22:27, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes, intransitive usage is also more than a thousand years old, as in Old English Riddle 25: "Feleþ sona mines gemotes, se[o] þe mec nearwað" ( — it might mean confines rather than narrows here — the answer to the riddle is an onion, by the way ) I don't know which came first.   D b f i r s   23:16, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
 * "Narrows" may also be used as a noun, in just the same way as "barracks", which was discussed here not so long ago.  What the OP is describing is a gerund. 86.148.119.30 (talk) 16:50, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I see no gerund? Were you thinking of the narrowing of the width?   D b f i r s   20:44, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Reporter: "What is your office doing in the investigation?" Cop: "Narrowing the list of suspects." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:25, 16 February 2017 (UTC)