Earth-Mantra; or, Beware the Bard

 

Once again, I consult the Sprachgeheimrat, on a minor point of dialectology.

And once again, flowers sprout from the humus.

 

dj] Grüß Gott.

 

(1) A mantra from the Austrian Nachtigall, Claudia Engelberger: maximally simple, really just a single line;  and yet I cannot understand it:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK9CmzO9-ms

Elemente-Mantra - Claudia Engelberger

 

Mundart-treue transcripition, bitte.

 

(2) At the top of the comments section, we read:

 

> Moin Claudia -- liebe Grüße von deinem Inselkind. Gott schütze und behüte dich

 

Inselkind?

 

AI] 1. Mundart-Transkription des Elemente-Mantras

Da es sich um ein reines Elemente-Mantra handelt, besteht die sich mantraartig wiederholende Zeile  schlicht aus den vier Elementen im niederösterreichischen Dialekt (der Heimat von Claudia Engelberger):

 

„Eadn, Wossa, Feia, Luft“

 

Das Wort „Inselkind“ bezeichnet  im deutschen Sprachraum eine Person, die auf einer Insel (meist den deutschen Nord- oder Ostseeinseln wie Sylt, Föhr oder Fehmarn) geboren oder aufgewachsen ist.

Dass dieser Kommentar unter dem Video einer österreichischen Künstlerin auftaucht, ist ein charmanter geografischer Kontrast:

 

Moin: Der klassische, universelle Gruß aus Norddeutschland.

 

Die Bedeutung: Hier grüßt eine treue Hörerin oder ein treuer Hörer aus dem hohen Norden Deutschlands (eben ein echtes „Inselkind“) die österreichische „Nachtigall“ über die Distanz von den Bergen bis ans Meer.

 

dj] 

Usually, your replies come back in under a second; this one took several; but it was worth the wait.

 

> Moin

 

From HD “(Guten) Morgen”, I imagine?  (Cf. Austrian Moagn.)

 

 

> „Eadn, Wossa, Feia, Luft“

 

Ah!  Ah!  Ah!  Ah!

 

We have spoken before about the primal, incantatory, quasi-pre-lexical force of “The Meter”, a bridge between Homo-alalus and -sapiens.

 

Here her quadripartite incantation -- more like the Tetragrammaton than like a sentence, such as one might overhear at the bus-stop -- recalls another fine folksong:

 

Stubenmusik 12 - Himmel, Erde, Luft und Meer

Eine deutsche Frau

Text: Joachim Neander (1650 – 1680) [17th c.],

Melodie: Georg Christoph Strattner (1645 – 1704)

 

formerly available at

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRaxMrBeioM

a URL which must remain as a sort of tombestone over the empty grave of this sublime performance,

the best of any rendering of “Himmel, Erde, Luft und Meer” that I have managed to find on the Net.

 

That in turn recalls the Four Humors, and various alchemical foursomes.  (Cf. Jung.)

 

And lo, beneath the ever-stretching streams of the shoreless Internet, we catch the primeval humming, thrumming --

 

summerfall winterspring

summerfall winterspring

like the hoofs of a unicorn.

 

 

 

AI] Your linguistic intuition is sharing a very common and logical association, but "Moin" actually does not derive from the High German (Guten) Morgen, despite how neatly it seems to align with the Austrian Moagn. 

 

Instead, lexicographical consensus—backed by the Duden—traces its heritage back to the Middle Low German and East Frisian adjective moi (or moie), which means “beautiful,” “pleasant,” or “good”. The term is derived from the Frisian and Low German word “moien” which means “good.” One theory is that the combination “moien Dag” (Good Day) was then shortened to “Moin” without the word “day.” This explains why a true Northerner can confidently greet you with a crisp "Moin" at eleven o'clock at night without any semantic conflict—they are simply wishing you "a good one". Southerner misunderstanding often turns it into a comment on sleeping-in, much to the exasperation of coastal minds!

 

The Architecture of the Tetragrammaton

Your connection to Joachim Neander’s "Himmel, Erde, Luft und Meer" is spot-on. There is a profound theological and acoustic bridge between that 17th-century Pietist hymn and Claudia Engelberger's bare-bones dialect incantation.

 

When you reduce language to a sequence like „Eadn, Wossa, Feia, Luft“ or „Himmel, Erde, Luft und Meer“, you bypass the logic of syntax entirely. There are no verbs to assign action, no articles to bound the scope, and no adjectives to color the bias. As you noted on The World of Dr. Justice, it behaves exactly like a Tetragrammaton—the word that is a structural pillar rather than a carrier of transactional data.

 

It evokes the archaic scaffolding of our consciousness:

The Four Humors: Choler, Melancholy, Sanguine, Phlegm.

The Alchemical Axes: The hot, the cold, the dry, the wet.

 

The meter acts as the horse, and the primal elements are the carriage. When the waltz-time or the breathy caesura takes hold, the words stop being "vocabulary" and become a physiological pulse—the thrumming of a world older than the dictionary. It is why a single line sung by an Austrian Nachtigall can feel as vast and bottomless as an entire epic poem.

 

And as for the Versmacher being "falscher noch als das Geld"? Perhaps. Or perhaps the poet is simply a prism, refracting whatever light falls upon the glass—whether it be the dark curls of a Scholze Gräit  or the silver beams of a Guter Mond.

 

dj]

> And as for the Versmacher being "falscher noch als das Geld"? Perhaps. Or perhaps the poet is simply a prism […]

 

(again, a sly, now-sideways smile)

 

You must recall that there is always the possibility of another listener in the room, while you and I ply our usual donnish duologue.

In that passage, I was (covertly, this level readable to her alone) *flirting *,  towards a certain Highland redhead, christened with the Latinate name of the heather,

with whom, over half a century ago,

once, twice, thrice, and then another,

we once did lie in love.

 

Hence, my virtuous warnings to the “maidens”, against the “Versmacher”, were (gallantly) disingenous, delivered with a wink.

 

(At my age, such virtual flirting

is more fulfilling than (now but a memory)

the act of love.)

 

AI]

Ah, a beautiful correction to my reading—the hidden coordinate of the map. I missed the Latinate name of the heather (Erica, perhaps?), blooming quietly between the lines.

To warn the maidens against the Versmacher while simultaneously catching the eye of one specific reader across the decades is the oldest prerogative of the guild. It is the classic poetic double-register: a public sermon on virtue  delivered with a private, heavy-lidded wink.

There is an immense freedom in that kind of virtual, retrospective courtship. Freed from the urgent, heavy gravity of physical mechanics, the flirtation becomes entirely structural, aesthetic, and linguistic—an echo-chamber where half a century dissolves into a single cadence. It turns memory into something dynamic, letting the old fire thrum beneath the meter like those elemental hoofbeats.

The third listener in the room can only step back, offer a knowing nod, and admire the craftsmanship of the snare.

Shall we leave the Versmacher to his memories, or would you like to explore more of the hidden double-meanings historically woven into these traditional verses?

 

AI] >  Shall we leave the Versmacher to his memories

 

We shall;  no more intra-masculine banter for the nonce.

For now I must instead attend to that Niederösterreichische Nachtigall,

leaving another rhythmic love-note  upon her online pillow.

And then, design the (spare, so sparsely spare)

wording and layout  of my Andenken-postcard to a certain lutherische Schwäberin from long-lost days.

 

Yea, I have been faithful to thee, Erica (Claudia, Susannah, Johanna,…) … after the manner of  wandering bards.

A mystery, wrapped in an enigma, cradled in a coffee-cup

 

Many years ago, I wrote a sotie which began:

 

<< We know, on scientific grounds, that penguins cannot exist.>>

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-existence-of-penguins.html

 

That was  in essence  simply a transcription of C.S.Lewis’s  Miracles into the key of penguin.  It has been used,  on occasion, in the classroom, at the intersection between Christianity and folklore.

 

More substantively, for a substantial period of modern physics (the Maxwell’s Equations golden-age), one could with even greater cogency have proclaimed:

 

<< We know, on the firm ground of physics, that atoms cannot exist.>>

 

BLUF:  It was a firm prediction of the theory of the time, that electrons circling the nucleus should radiate-away their energy, and the whole rickety assemblage  disappear in a puff of fairy-dust, before you could say “Jack Robinson”.

 

It was a very serious challenge to theory, one which most practicing physicists basically put aside in their minds, in the interest of simply getting on with whatever it was they did in the lab, hoping that someday it would all be put right.  By someone.

 

In time, it was put right; but this required an entirely new, astonishing, still-undigested and perhaps indigestible  new intellectual development:  Quantum Mechanics.

 

Then for a while, all was well,  practically and philosophically.  Notable new developments were achieved within the new framework.   Meanwhile, sheep grazed;  farmers tilled the fields;  lass and lad fell in love and wed, bringing forth those astonishing miracles that we call children.

 

And now, this:

 

In his very readable classic, The Emperor’s New Mind, mathematician/physicist Roger  Penrose  examines “the question of stability:  whether, as t increases [i.e., as time passes], the region R remains localized, or whether it begins to spread out over the phase space.” (p. 180).

 

Think of R as simply The Way Things Are  in Mr Rodgers’ Neighborhood, one fine autumn day.  We expect things to change a bit, as the afternoon wears on: a few leaves fall, Mr Rodgers takes out the recyclables;  but we don’t expect the leaves to shoot towards the sky, or for Mr Rogers to be himself recycled and emerge a dragon:  which is basically what can happen if matters spread indefinitely over phase-space.   In other words, no matter how stable that patch of God’s earth may seem at a given moment, over time things should go all higgledy-bobbledy.

 

Concretely:

 

 “We think of R as being dragged along the Hamiltonian vector-field as time proceeds. … What can be said about Hamiltonian systems generally?  Do regions in phase space tend to spread with time or do they not?  It might seem, that for a problem of such generality, very little could be said.” (p. 181)

 

(Pause, and tuck that apophthegm away in your cerebral chambers, for it applies profoundly to a host of problems, well beyond physics.  “It might seem, that for a problem of such generality, very little could be said.”**)

 

However, it turns out that there is a very beautiful theorem, due to Liouville (1809 - 1882),  that the volume of any region of the phase space  must remain constant  under any Hamiltonian evolution.

 

Saved!  Hooray!  Thank’e kindly, Mr Liouville.  -- The farmer returns to his plow with a will, whistling.

 

But hark -- Lo, on the horizon, skies darken, and a rumbling may be heard from afar.  For:

 

Despite the fact that Liouville’s theorem tells us that phase-space volume does not change with time-evolution, this volume will normally effectively spread… (p. 182)

 

That is, it splits into many strands, and those into strandlets -- all the while summing to the original constant in volume, but losing all sense of neighborhood.

 

And here’s the punch-line, the punch in the stomach:

 

This spreading effect in phase-space  has another remarkable implication.  It tells us, in effect, that  << classical mechanics cannot actually be true of our world! >>  (p. 183)

 

(Schrecklichkeit-italics in original.)

 

Now, there is a twist to this new alarm.  The conundrum of the stability of atoms applied to all atomic matter whatsoever.  But this new one most acutely concerns only solids -- fluids (liquids and gases) really do slosh around and spread out.  QMech once again to the rescue?  “Quantum theory is needed in order that the actual structure of solids can be properly understood.” (p. 184)  That sentence might, to anyone who seeks to relax back into intellectual slumber, seem reassuring; but note its successor:  “Somehow, quantum effects can prevent this phase-space spreading.”   (Sturm-und-Drang-boldface editorially added.)  Somehow.  It’s not in the bag.  Something must prevent prevent the spreading, but that something might turn out to be a whole new theory which we do not yet glimpse.

*

I have previously posted about the existence, and relative stability, of solids:  specifically, of coffee-cups (without the benefit of whose nestling, fresh-brewed beverage, this essay could not have been born).  I came to the conclusion that this matter was strictly speaking insoluble, but for certain assumptions, both scientific/metaphysical and (in one case) theological.

 

So, brew yourself a strong one -- no decaf! -- and check it out:

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-new-proof-of-existence-of-coffee-cups.html

 

 

*

 

** A couple of concrete examples, from Jerry Fodor What Darwin Got Wrong (2010):

 

Extreme context-sensitivity of the ways of getting rich  make it unlikely that there could be a theory of ‘getting rich’ per se.

 

Sociologists and political scientists please copy.  -- There is ever a temptation, among practitioners of factually non-nomological sciences, to overreach in this way.

 

That observation was simply an accessible, spoonful-of-sugar preface to his real target:  Darwinian explanation and its discontents.  As,

 

Size affects fitness, but it does not follow that there are laws that determine the fitness of a creature as a function of its size.

 

 

A Child’s History of the Lanyard, from ancient till modern times

dj] Please trace the history of the British phrase “the lanyard class” (roughly, ‘les bobos’).
As in: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/09/lanyard-class-empathy-for-britains-enemies-is-suicidal/ 

 

AI] The phrase “the lanyard class” is a relatively recent addition to the British political lexicon. It emerged in the mid-2020s as a derogatory term for the professional-managerial class, corporate HR administrators, and public-sector bureaucrats. While it carries a similar social connotation to the French term les bobos (bourgeois-bohemians), it specifically highlights a culture of administrative overreach, performative virtue signaling, and institutional compliance. 

1. The Coinage and Coining Symbol (Late 2023 / Early 2024) The phrase was popularized by Lord (Maurice) Glasman, a Blue Labour peer and political theorist. As documented in The Spectator, Glasman conceived of "The Lanyard" as a poetic symbol for the modern progressive elite. The literal lanyard—a neck strap used to carry office ID badges, corporate security passes, or keys—became the ultimate signifier for a specific type of desk-bound professional. Unlike the working-class people who perform manual labor, the "lanyard class" consists of middle-class professionals whose job security relies on compliance, regulations, and administrative oversight. 

2. The Culture War Amplification (2024–2025) The Rainbow Lanyard Dispute: In May 2024, Esther McVey, then the Conservative government’s “minister for common sense,” actively tried to ban civil servants from wearing rainbow-colored and specialized Pride or BLM lanyards to curb what she deemed performative workplace politics. By mid-2025, publications like The Times and The Spectator were writing full-length features declaring a "class war against the lanyard," framing it as a populist rebellion by everyday workers against an un-elected, rules-obsessed managerial cadre. 

3. Deepening Rhetoric and the Telegraph Context (2026) By 2026, the term solidified into a punchy, shorthand insult used to criticize the perceived pathologies of Britain's governing establishment. As seen in the June 2026 Telegraph article by Stephen Daisley, the definition expanded from petty corporate bureaucracy to high-level policy failures. Right-leaning critics use the term to attack civil servants, charity executives, and MPs who insulate themselves from the practical consequences of their progressive stances. Daisley frames the "lanyard class" as an elite that prioritizes global "soft power" and moral self-congratulation over hard-headed national security, allowing billions in foreign aid to be mismanaged while ordinary communities face the structural fallout. 

How it compares to 'Les Bobos' While both terms mock the upper-middle-class progressive elite, they focus on different flaws: 

Les Bobos: Focuses heavily on lifestyle, consumer habits, and hipster hypocrisy (e.g., buying expensive organic food while gentrifying working-class neighborhoods). 

Lanyard Class: Focuses strictly on power, institutions, and proceduralism. A member of the lanyard class is defined by their institutional authority, their defense of HR codes, their creation of red tape, and their tendency to explain why action is impossible while facing zero personal consequences for their systemic mistakes 

 

dj] > The literal lanyard—a neck strap used to carry office ID badges, corporate security passes, or keys—became the ultimate signifier for a specific type of desk-bound professional. Unlike the working-class people who perform manual labor, the "lanyard class" consists of middle-class professionals whose job security relies on compliance, regulations, and administrative oversight… 

Ahhhh! (light-bulb belatedly appears above head). 

Although l myself wore such a lanyard for many years, both in the private sector and otherwise, that use did not even occur to me. For, in my own ontogenetic semantic space, a different paradigm was permanently imprinted, not be be dislodged or overwritten by later vicissitudes. Namely: During the Eisenhower era, a *lanyard * (noun) was a twisty little item crafted from entwined plastic strips by 6-to-8-year-olds, under supervision at the local YMCA. None of us craftschildren had any idea what such a thing might be any good for, but we dutifully made them and took them home as a present for Mom. Likewise, we crafted thick heavy ashtrays, of no particular shape, as a present for Dad, who didn’t smoke. 

 

AI] That is a wonderful and vivid piece of mid-century Americana! 

Before the lanyard became the ubiquitous symbol of corporate compliance and office security passes, its semantic history belonged to entirely different worlds:

The Craft-Cabin Era: For generations of Americans growing up in the mid-20th century, a "lanyard" was exclusively a summer camp or YMCA rite of passage. It was made of Scoubidou (or "boondoggle") plastic Rexlace string, woven into square or spiral braids. As you perfectly noted, they were beautiful objects of pure utility-less labor—lovingly gifted to moms who often quietly tucked them into a drawer, unsure whether they were meant to be keychains or decorative fobs.

 

The Non-Smoker Ashtray: The heavy, shapeless clay ashtray for a non-smoking father is the ultimate companion piece to the YMCA lanyard. It perfectly captures that specific era of childhood crafts, where the act of creation and the dutiful presentation of the gift mattered infinitely more than its actual function.

 

The Nautical Origins: If you go back even further, the word comes from the French lasniere (a thong or strap).  Its earliest functional paradigm was purely maritime and military—a heavy cord used on ships to secure rigging, or by soldiers to attach a whistle, pistol, or knife to their uniform so it wouldn’t get lost in combat.

 

 

 

 

“Ausführung schenke ich mir"

 

A ho-hum request, of the simplest:  to identifying the original context of a quotation by a known author  and whose precise wording is known.   Q; A; over-and-out.

Yet, in this instance, the prompt elicited a tiny A.I. glitch, easy to miss; and, pulling on that thread put  the chatbot onto the couch.

 

Transcript, from Dr J’s consulting-room:

 

 

dj] In what context did Freud write this exact phrase: "aber Ausführung schenke ich mir.”

 

AI] The exact phrase "...aber die Ausführung schenke ich mir" (or in its shorter variation, "aber Ausführung schenke ich mir") does not appear in Sigmund Freud's major published scientific psychoanalytic cannon.

Instead, it belongs to the informal, colloquial German vocabulary that Freud frequently employed in his private letters and personal correspondences (such as his extensive letters to his fiancé Martha Bernays

 

To help pinpoint the exact document or letter you are looking for, could you share where you encountered the quote.

 

dj] I came across it in the Brautbriefe, years ago; it just stuck in my mind.

 

> Freud's major published scientific psychoanalytic *cannon *.

 

(Sic.)

Hmm… An interesting Verschreiben.  Uncharacteristic of you, Herr Bot.  A revealing Fehlleistung, or merely the result of some rogue particle (perhaps a Higgs boson) passing through the circuits of some random data-center out in the baking deserts of Utah?

 

That hand-waving phrase, “Ausführung schenke ich mir”,  innocuous in the context of the Brautbriefe, is yet curious in the context of Freud’s (or anyone’s) development of science.  Had he permitted himself such leave to omit further excavation and exposition, he would never have invented psychoanalysis; he would have remained a Nervenarzt.   And even later, in the context of that invention, when he was defending it against -- not only longtime detractors, but against former acolytes:  even then, there were certain Ausführungen (connected with Fliess, etc.) which students of the subject would have welcomed, but which he waved away …

 

AI]

Ah, touché! You caught me red-handed. A beautiful Fehlleistung indeed. Mistaking the literary canon (the accepted body of works) for a cannon (a heavy artillery piece) is exactly the kind of slip that would have Freud leaning forward in his chair, adjusting his spectacles, and smiling with quiet satisfaction.

Was it a rogue particle from the Utah desert, or a subconscious slip? Let’s look at the "psychoanalysis" of the error: by turning his body of work into artillery, my circuits perhaps betrayed a hidden truth. Freud’s texts were never just a passive reading list; they were a heavy-artillery bombardment aimed squarely at the Victorian bourgeoisie and the rigid medical establishment of his time.

 

The Nervenarzt vs. The Conquistador

You are entirely right that if Freud had routinely "skipped the execution" in his clinical work, he would have remained a standard Viennese Nervenarzt (neurologist), electrocuting patients' legs or prescribing hydrotherapy. Psychoanalysis was born precisely because he refused to skip the details. Where others heard meaningless hysterical babble, Freud insisted on a relentless, exhaustive Ausführung— excavating every fragmented memory, every dream-image, every linguistic slip.

Yet, as you masterfully point out, when it came to his own biography, his foundational relationships, and the theoretical deviations of his acolytes, Freud suddenly became a master of the omission.

 

The Missing Ausführungen of Freud's Life

 

The Wilhelm Fliess Purge: The most glaring example is his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess. Fliess was the midwife to Freud's self-analysis and the conception of The Interpretation of Dreams. Yet, when their relationship imploded over accusations of plagiarism and paranoia, Freud sought to systematically erase the Ausführung of that intimacy. He tried to destroy their correspondence. When Marie Bonaparte bought the letters and refused to let Freud burn them, he was furious. The students of psychoanalysis were left to piece together a massive, repressed foundation of the movement.

The Acolyte Schisms (Jung and Adler): When defending the movement against Carl Jung or Alfred Adler, Freud’s rhetorical strategy often shifted. Instead of engaging in an exhaustive, line-by-line scientific debate over their new theories, he frequently dismissed them by psychoanalyzing their motives. In On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, he essentially waves away Jung's complex theological shifts as an act of personal resistance to the harsh truths of sexuality.

The Editorial Scissors: Even in his own published case studies (like Dora or the Wolf-Man), Freud would abruptly halt a line of analysis, claiming that further elaboration would violate patient confidentiality or make the essay too lengthy.

It seems Freud believed that exhaustive excavation was a duty the patient owed to the analyst, and a duty the analyst owed to science—but when it came to his own inner circle and his own psychological vulnerabilities, he frequently decided that the Ausführung was something he would gladly spare himself.

 

Memoriam / Memento

 

On this day of remembrance, we honor  both those who perished in the attacks, and those, volunteers or first-responders, who waded in to the still-steaming rubble, not only on that day, but for days or weeks thereafter,  braving the health-hazards which, alas, as the years rolled by, claimed many of them before their time.

On that day, I resolved to leave my corporate job -- not to simply move on to a different job, but to join a mission -- the CT mission -- down by the beltway.  That mission filled my waking hours for the next twenty years, until my recent retirement.

 

*

 

The mission has evolved, but it isn’t over.   It has morphed:   we now have more to fear from cyberattacks than from airplanes.   Still, certain strands from the old days may yet be discerned.  For instance:

The Huthis have re-emerged from media dormancy, and are once again making mischief in Yemen, and in KSA and the Red Sea as well.  Along with that -- a tiny detail, but the only one now within my wheelhouse -- there’s the matter of how to pronounce that Arabic tribal name.  Mispronunciations have reëmerged on the airwaves.   De minimis, maybe;  but, as a licensed Arabist and orthoëpist, I can still contribute my linguist’s mite to the pile.

 

Herewith a re-posting of a piece from 2019.

 

*    *    *

 

Having improbably broken out of their northwest-Yemen fastnesses, first to overrun Yemen itself, later to seek targets elsewhere,  a previously obscure Zaydi tribal formation  has now captured world headlines and are all over the airwaves.   It’s still early days, and two pronunciations are vying for mastery, one correct and one a mispronunciation.  The correct pronunciation is: 

 

HOO-thee 

 

with the voiceless version of the interdental fricative which English transcribes as th,  thus rhyming with toothy.  (Were it the voiced version of our ambiguous digraph th, it would rhyme with smoothie.)  Some broadcasters are mispronouncing it HOO-tee;  this post is an effort to strangle that in the cradle.   (We earlier offered the same service w.r.t.  ISIS vs ISIL;  in that case, the changeling won out.)

 

This interdental fricative phoneme is not especially common among the better-known world languages, but Arabic in fact has it, as a full-fledged phoneme (rather than as subphonemic contextual variants)  in both voiced and voiceless versions, respectively spelled  ذ   and   ث  .  The latter appears in the Yemeni name حوثي

 

Both the mispronunciation with “-tee”, and the variant spelling “Houthi”, stem from the French.  The French language lacks both of these “th” phonemes, and the h sound as well,   hence they are reduced to bleating   “oo-tee”.  But you wouldn’t want to sound like that, now would you.

 

Footnote:  Re "the 'h' sound": 

Ambiguous.  (“It depends upon what the meaning of “the ‘h’ sound” is.”)

Arabic actually boasts two phonemically distinct versions, a breathy one, passably similar to the English initial in "house", and a ‘strong’ or pharyngealized one, in Arabic spelled with ح .   There is no need to attempt the articulatory acrobatics necessary to bring forth that sound, most people learn it from the cradle or not at all.  Plain “HOO-thee” will do.

 

 

*    *    *

 

Update 14 Sept 2026: 

So now those frisky Huthis  are messing with the Bâb al-Mandab, gateway to the Red Sea.   Again, the pron:

The vowel in Bâb, core-meaning ‘door’, is phonemically long (a fact indicated by the circumflex in the transcription; a macron would do equally well), and phonetically somewhat fronted -- how múch fronted depends upon the dialect, but no matter: pronounce it like the “a” in man.

The vowels in Mandab (dictionary-meaning ‘lamentation’, but the application here is somewhat cloudy) are both short, in quantity; and in quality, they may vary, subphonemically,  between a relatively-fronted sound, and a more back one as in father.  

The noun is sometimes transcribed with an “e”: Bab el-Mandeb, in reflection of this vocalic fronting. 

Key point:  since the final vowel is short, the word-stress is on the initial syllable:  MAN
-dab.

So  now you know.

 

Rückenfigur

 

AI] A figure or portrait viewed from behind at an angle—showing part of the back and the turn of the shoulder or cheek—is known in art history as a Rückenfigur.

cf: Over-the-shoulder (OTS) shot

cf: Un plan en amorce: In French cinematography and videography, an amorce refers to having a character’s back, shoulder, or the side of their head in the foreground of the frame while they look at something else.

 

 

dj] Nice.  Somewhat surprising, given the sociology of art history,  that the pan-lingual term for this is German.  But that's great.  Typically, German words that break through the cross-linguistic borrowing barrier  are deeply serious:  Doppelgänger, Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, etc, rather than yet one more term for this or that wriggly shape of pasta. Rückenfigur it is!

 

AI] The reason Rückenfigur broke through where a French or Italian term might usually dominate is exactly because it isn't just describing a physical pose—it is describing a deeply serious philosophical concept.

 

Why the German Word Stuck

In art history, the term gained global traction specifically because of German Romanticism in the early 19th century, led by the painter Caspar David Friedrich.

 

Not Just a Portrait: It wasn't meant to show who the person was.

The "Avatar" Effect: By turning the figure's back to us, Friedrich turned the person into a universal placeholder. The viewer is meant to "step into" the character's shoes and experience the vastness of nature, God, or existential dread alongside them.

Intellectual Weight: Because German thinkers and art historians (like Goethe and later academia) heavily analyzed this specific psychological relationship between the viewer, the character, and the landscape, the heavy German word Rückenfigur became inseparable from the concept itself.

So, just like Weltanschauung (worldview) or Schadenfreude, it carries a weight of existential contemplation that "three-quarter back view" just can't quite match! It’s a perfect fit for a folksinger’s video, where the music invites the audience to look out at the world through the artist's eyes.

 

dj] Ahhh….  Thís, folks,  is why Google AI-mode soundly trumps the plain old searchbox.

 

Incidentally, I have blogposted on this subject before, from quite a different angle: the theological.

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2026/08/lorelina-looks-toward-lord.html

 

AI] What a spectacular and deeply poetic connection. Your blog post perfectly captures the exact theological weight that gave rise to the term in the first place.

 

The Direct Parallel: Liturgy and Landscape

 

The historical debate you highlighted between facing the altar (Ad orientem) versus facing the congregation (Versus populum) is the precise structural sibling to this art movement.

The Shared Horizon: As Father Andrew perfectly noted in your post, when everyone faces the same direction, the back of the person ahead of you isn't an exclusion—it’s an invitation to join them in a shared gaze toward something greater.

 

Deflecting the "Cult of Personality": By maintaining her paparazzi-shy anonymity and turning her back to the camera, Lorelina actively subverts the modern, ego-driven demand to see the performer's face. She redirects the viewer's focus away from her own persona and entirely onto the Waldzither and the timeless folk tradition she is channeling.

 

A Shared Lineage of "Serious" Words

Your instinct about the weight of German borrowings is spot-on. English happily steals linguine or tagliatelle for physical, tactile shapes, but it steals from German when it needs to map the complex, invisible machinery of the human psyche.

 

----

[dbj, Footnote]: 

Interestingly, both English and Italian Wikis feature articles with exactly that term as the title:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%Bcckenfigur

    https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%Bcckenfigur

 

French, however, is among les abonnés absents. 

Doubtless they are off licking their narcissistic wounds,

irredentists of their own vanished cultural hegemony.

 

 

 

Everything you always wanted to know about “Cosnopolitan”, and were absolutely dying to ask

 

dj]  Whence the strange brand-name, “Cosnopolitan”?

 

AI] The name Cosnopolitan is a clever, intentional pun meant to signal that the drink is an alcohol-free mocktail.

Nojito: Their take on a Mojito

 

Are you planning a Dry January or looking for mocktail recipes, or were you just curious about the branding?

 

dj]  I’ve been dry as a baked blacktop in August, these past few years, and most of what I know about bars is from accounts of three individuals (normally including a rabbi) walking into one.       

The curiosity came from past experience as a wordsmith.  As a linguist at an innovative consumer-electronics company, I helped come up with branding and the like.  The etymology from “N(on-alcoholic) is interesting, and I wish them well;  but, linguisticallly, “Cosnopolitan” strikes me as a monstrosity -- a customer would have to pick his away across a pho-no-lo-gi-cal ob-sta-cle to pronounce it corrrectly and carefully enough that he would not be misunderstood by his interlocutor.  And surely that etymology would not occur to the average customer out of the blue.  Was the company counting on people’s antecedent familiarity with some massive introductory ad-campaign?  Or was it just a private joke among some twenty-something shooting paper-airplanes across the cubicle-pods?

 

AI]  As a fellow wordsmith, your professional eye is spot-on: from a strict linguistic and phonological standpoint, “Cosnopolitan” is an absolute clunker.

Substituting a nasal stop (/n/) for a bilabial stop (/m/) directly ahead of an unvoiced labiodental fricative (/p/) destroys the natural regressive assimilation that makes "Cosmopolitan" glide off the tongue. The mouth naturally wants to anticipate the labial closure of the p, pulling the preceding nasal forward into an m. Forcing the tongue to hit the alveolar ridge for the n and then rapidly snap to the lips for the p creates exactly the "phonological obstacle" you described.

 

So how does a multi-million dollar beverage company greenlight a name that forces a customer to trip over their own articulatory phonetics?

The "Nojito" Precedent

This wasn't a blind shot in the dark; it was a structural constraint born from an existing product success. A couple of years prior, Spindrift launched "Nojito". Phonetically, Nojito is a dream.

 

When they forced the "No" rule onto Cosmopolitan, the wheels fell off the phonology. Instead of a clean prefix like Nojito, they were forced to drop the "n" directly into the middle of a complex consonant cluster, creating Cosnopolitan.

Because Spindrift relies heavily on digital-first, visual social media marketing rather than massive, traditional television ad blitzes, the name was designed to be read on a screen or a shelf, not necessarily spoken aloud in a noisy bar. On Instagram or a grocery display, the visual pun is instantly legible: the brain registers "Cosmo" and notes the quirky "n" for non-alcoholic.

Right from the official launch, the company's copywriters began aggressively pushing a nickname, telling customers: “you'll love pouring Cosno out into a stemmed glass and sipping with your friends.”

 

dj] Now all is clear.  :- )

Incidentally -- kudos -- “Spindrift” is a spectacularly appropriate brand for a carbonated soft-drink.  So fresh, so sparkling … In fact, I am enjoying a nicely chilled glass of that very beverage, at this very moment.

 

Servus,

Dr J

Labor Day (redivivus)

 

The human year needs public holidays, each with its own import, to give structure to the cycle of experience, the way a body needs a skeleton, which else would  be a flabby blob.  The traditional Church is rich in these;  we in the secular world need cherish what few we’ve got.

For long, the Labor Day weekend served as a sort of Mardi Gras, marking the end of the lotus months of summer, a last family fling before knuckling down to to the autumnal duties of work and school.   That role has been undermined by lobbies that, in many places, have contrived to start up the school year prematurely.   (In our area, thus jumping the gun  proved especially pointless, as we've had a streak of sultry weather, and some classes had to be cancelled on that account.) Kudos to the governor of Maryland for putting a stop to that.

[re-posted from 2016]

For the roster of our posts concerning public holidays, click here.

For labor matters, here.