The derivation of King's Cross

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Unlike many names in Britain that of King's Cross is of relatively short standing - less than two hundred years old. However, the site of King's Cross has carried more than one name, and the oldest of these goes back around thousand years.

Unsurprisingly King's Cross refers to a king and a cross roads. In fact, a statue of King George IV stood at the crossroads from 1830 to 1845. It wasn't much of a statue apparently, a double life-size figure on a sixty foot column at the top of which was a camera obscura and at the base, a building. All of this was made cheaply of brick, even the statue, though the latter was coated to resemble stone. The building in the base of the column was initially a police station and later became a pub.

As with many areas of London, the site was once a village, here called Battlebridge, and was sited at a crossing of the River Fleet. A name such as this at a location of this kind would normally arise from an actual event, and it has been suggested, though with only slight evidence, that the battle was one that took place around 60AD between the Iceni led by Boudica and the Roman army. Today King's Cross is known as a district of London and widely for the main line railway terminus of that name that stands only a few yards from another such terminus, St Pancras - hence the name in today's photograph shot one early evening a few weeks ago.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: King's Cross, St Pancras and the Underground, London
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm (34mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:500
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A Decorated arcade

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Existing words are often appropriated by special interest groups to describe something new. Today's photograph is a good example of that. When Thomas Rickman devised his stylistic classification of the periods of English Gothic architecture he came up with the terms Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular to describe the three main styles (as he saw them) between the end of the round-arched Norman (Romanesque) period and the beginnings of the English Renaissance; roughly c.1190 to the early to mid-sixteenth century. Decorated, with or without the capital D, was an existing word with a widely understood, non-specific meaning. But Rickman chose it to describe the ogival forms and naturalistic carving that followed the geometrical, stern precision of the  Early English style.

Today's photograph shows blank arcading in the porch of the medieval church at Osbournby, Lincolnshire. The cusped, "S"-shaped pointed arches (usually called ogee or ogival) are characteristic of the Decorated period and date the work to the fourteenth century. It's quite unusual to have the expense of this kind of decorative carving in the porch of a village church: it is more often reserved for the sedilia in the chancel. The word "arcade", as it happens, is also one that has been appropriated for a variety of uses. It originally meant an arch or a succession of arches, so to describe what we see in the photograph in that way is correct. But, later centuries applied it to covered shopping areas with arched, glazed roofs and later still indoor seaside "amusements" with slot and video games used the term.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:4000
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Eagles, doves and aquilegias

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Sitting in an audience at a lecture about gardening the other evening I heard the speaker describe, aquilegias as "promiscuous". He wasn't, of course, referring to their morals, but to their habit of freely seeding and hybridising, producing offspring of many colours and tints.

I really prefer the name columbines for this plant. However, when talking to other gardeners about it you usually have to add "I mean aquilegias", and so I've come to use the Latin name. This derives from aquila meaning eagle and comes from the shape of the flower petals which were thought to resemble that bird's claw. Columbine comes from the Latin columba, meaning dove. This name is based on the resemblance of the hanging flower head to five doves with their bills touching at the top. It's interesting to note that the two most popular names for this plant relate to the polar opposites of the bird world, the war-like eagle and the peaceful dove. It doesn't end there, of course, because a common, colloquial English name for the plant is "Granny's Bonnet". But that's not something I'm going to delve into.

May is the month for this plant in England and I recently took the opportunity to photograph some of the examples that flower in our garden. When I came to look at my results on the computer I particularly liked the out of focus areas and decided to enhancing these with a blurred, lightened vignette. It's not my usual style but I'm not entirely displeased by the outcome.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 66mm (132mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec
ISO:800
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Snapshots, dog walkers and wind turbines

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The words "snapshot" and "snap" in connection with photography seem to have pretty much disappeared from use by all but people over the age of, say, fifty. That's a pity because the first word very well describes the act of quickly seeing and taking a photograph without indulging in the lengthy consideration that might be taken with, for example, a landscape. It is a very appropriate word for the sort of shot that is frequently used in street, wildlife or sport photography. "Snap" for a routine or quickly taken photograph is also a useful term. In these days of smart phone cameras and the impromptu shots that they are often employed for, one wonders why the word isn't more widely used.

Snapshot, snapshooting and snaps came to photography from the world of shooting with firearms - rifles, shotguns and pistols. Quickly taken shots at game, targets or even people, were so described in the Victorian era, and are often still described with these words. I'm not the sort of photographer whose output relies heavily on snapshots but I do take photographs rapidly when I want to include people (those who are unknown to me) in my photographs because I usually have a very clear idea where I want them to be in the overall composition. Moreover, for reasons lost in the mists of time, all my digital photographs are in folders that are described with the word "Snaps" followed by the year.

The other day, when walking over the sand and dunes towards the sea at Skegness in Lincolnshire I took a snapshot. A dog walker appeared on a low dune ahead of us. He was silhouetted against the sky, with the sea and wind turbines behind him and a large pool in the foreground. I knew that he would soon be less visible against the sky so I started firing off a series of snapshots having first decided that I wanted a vertical composition with the main interest towards the top of the frame. Today's photograph is the second of four snaps that I took and it came out rather better than I imagined it would. That's another interesting thing about snapshooting: because it's quick you have hits and misses, and the hits, because they are not arranged to the last detail, have a surprise element that often makes them more rewarding than shots where everything turns out as planned.

Incidentally, I often wonder what I'd do without the scale and human interest that dog walkers offer when I'm photographing in the open spaces beside water or on sea-shore grass and dunes.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 37.1mm (100mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1000 sec
ISO:125
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Devil's Alley and other street names

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Today's photograph shows an alley in King's Lynn, Norfolk. It stretches back from Nelson Street towards the quayside. Entry is through a carriage arch that gives access to the rear of the old houses that line this architecturally fascinating road. The narrow way goes by the name of Devil's Alley. The story goes that the devil arrived in King's Lynn by ship and slipped ashore to gather up some new souls. However, a priest followed him to this particular alley and used the power of prayer and holy water to drive him back to his ship. During his retreat the devil, annoyed at being thwarted, apparently stamped his foot so hard that it left an imprint in the alley. At one time a cobble could be seen that had an imprint like a large human foot, but this is no longer to be found.

The unusual name of this alley got me thinking about some of the other street names that have caught my eye down the years. The most recent is Breakneck Lane in Louth, Lincolnshire, a not especially steep, but quite narrow road, and one that may have caused people to come to grief in the past, perhaps the rider of the phantom horse that has allegedly been heard galloping down it! Then there is Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate in York. The derivation of this name is unclear: both "What a street!" and "Neither one thing or the other" have their supporters - the street is very short. When I lived in Kingston upon Hull I was very taken with the street name, Land of Green Ginger. This name has prompted many suggestions for its origin: from a place where spices were traded in the medieval period to "Lindegroen jonger"(Lindegreen Junior), a name associated with a Dutch family who lived there in the early nineteenth century.Other memorable examples include Dog and Duck Lane, Beverley (named after a pub), Bodkin Lane on Lancashire's Fylde (watch out for dagger-armed robbers) and Lowe's Wong, Southwell, in Nottinghamshire. If you thought wong has an oriental connection you'd be wrong; like "wang" it is from the Danish for garden or in-field and dates from the time of the Norse invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries AD.

You may be wondering if today's photograph was fortuitously lit. It wasn't, I added a vignette to give it an appropriately dark aspect.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17.6mm (47mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.2 Shutter Speed: 1/50 sec
ISO:160
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Catrigg Force, Stainforth

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"Deep down on your left is the partly wooded defile in which runs the turbulent beck that riots among the wild rocks and cliffs of Catterick. Follow the glen up along the top until there are signs of its disappearance among the tracts of heather. A little below this point you will come to the highest and grandest of the waterfalls, which, after a flood, makes a sublime sight, hardly to be matched in Yorkshire, and that is saying a great deal. The water comes down a lofty ravine, thickly clothed with trees and flowering shrubs, (amongst the latter the giant rose-bay, the finest of the willow-herbs, gives an effective colour), and falls in two magnificent leaps into a shadowy pool below, running then onward among immense boulders to fall again and again in lesser but still beautiful cascades."
from "The Craven and North-West Yorkshire Highlands" by Harry Speight (1892)

The description above, apart from the presence of summer flowers, is still a good description of Catrigg Force which we visited recently. When I was growing up in the area people called the waterfall both Catterick Force (or Foss) and Catrigg Force. Harry Speight uses the former. So does "Otley's Guide: Concise Description of the English Lakes" (1823), a Midland Railways poster of 1909 advertising Settle, and a postcard of the waterfall dated 1912. However, a map of 1896 prefers Catrigg Force, and so do subsequent Ordnance Survey maps. Interestingly the present day wooden finger post near the waterfall is marked Catrigg Foss. It's common to find "Force and Foss" used interchangeably for Dales waterfalls for reasons that I discussed in this post about Stainforth Force. However, it isn't common for the main name to differ in quite the way that happens in this instance. There is a suggestion that Catterick comes from "cataract", and yet Catrigg is the name of a nearby area of moorland from which Catrigg Barn and Catrigg Beck (the stream) take their names. The word "rigg" comes from the Scandinavian and means " a ridge or cultivated strip of ground",and that seems appropriate. It's a puzzle that I must look into a little more!

I'm not a great fan of massively blurred water of the sort that enthusiast photographers seem keen to use in their photographs of waterfalls. However, I did take a couple with some blur, of which this is one. I used a fairly slow shutter speed and put the camera on my monopod and wedged it in a crevice to the maintain sharpness of the trees and rocks.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11.3mm (30mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 1/3 sec
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

River names

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The names given to rivers are some of the oldest words to be found in the British Isles. Many of them are pre-Celtic in origin, belonging to a time of which we have little knowledge concerning the languages that were used. The river in today's photograph - the River Welland - is one such name. All we know of the word "welland" is that it occurs in the earliest written documents: we know nothing of its meaning. The same is true of the Lincolnshire rivers Ancholme, Humber and Witham.

When we come to rivers with Celtic names we are often in a position to ascribe a meaning, though sometimes this is no more than an educated guess. In Lincolnshire the name of the River Glen is likely to be of Celtic origin and probably means "the clean one", echoing the derivation of the Northumbrian river of the same name. The River Lymn is also Celtic and derives from the Primitive Welsh "lemo" meaning an elm tree, hence the river's name is "the place where many elms are found". The names of the rivers Trent and Nene are also thought to have Celtic roots.

Why should river names be among our oldest words? The answer is that rivers are important and enduring features of the landscape, a source of food and water, useful for transport and an effective and immutable boundary or defensive line. Such a significant geographical feature would be named before settlements, hills or perhaps even people.

I've photographed Deeping St James church and the River Welland from this location before at different times of year. It makes a fine composition and is an archetypal English rural lowland scene.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 37.1mm (100mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Love-in-a-Mist or Devil-in-the-Bush

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Can there be a garden plant with more contradictory common names than the annual flower, Nigella damascena? Love-in-a-Mist is delightfully evocative of the way the light, feathery foliage surrounds the modest but beautiful flowers. However, Devil-in-the-Bush paints quite a different picture and must surely refer to the seed pods, each wrapped in a net-like basket with multiple prongs, like a shroud of barbed wire. Other vernacular names are similarly inventive. Jack-in-Prison probably derives from theed pod and its surrounding entanglement. Love-Entangle may also be similarly inspired, though perhaps the "love" is the flower in the mass of lacy leaves. Hair-of-Venus must be based on the leaves too. A legend attaches to one of the names - Lady-in-the-Shade. The story goes that the Frederick I (1122-1190), Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, drowned when trying to catch an enticing, green-haired water sprite. Lady-in-the-Shade immediately sprang up by the water's edge, a reminder of the tresses of the temptress. As is often the case, the Latin name of the plant is simply descriptive. Nigella refers to the small, black seeds to be found in the pod, and damascena comes from Damascus.

In my macro photograph of the seed pod that I plucked from the garden I definitely set out to illustrate the Devil-in-the-Bush and Jack-in-Prison names. Concentrating on the base from where the "prison" originates I photographed it against a black background in highly directional light and converted the image to black and white.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Who shot the photographer?

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I was reflecting on the word "shoot" the other day. In particular I was wondering how long it had been an English synonym for "take photographs". A quick look at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) shows the earliest recorded use of "shoot" in the sense of "a discharge of arrows, bullets etc" being 1534 though in Old English an example is quoted from the early poem, The Battle of Maldon (993). As I worked my way down the list of meanings of the word - there are seven main definitions with many subsidiary ones - I tried to guess the date in the 1800s when it might have been transferred to photography. I was well wide of the mark (to use a shooting analogy). The first use that the OED cites is from Anthony's Photographic Bulletin of 1890 and around that date the word "shot" also starts to be used to describe the resulting image itself.

From our twenty first century perspective it might seem unsurprising that the act of taking a photograph should be described thus. After all, as with a gun (or bow) one takes deliberate aim at a target (or subject) and uses ones finger to release a mechanism at a precise moment to achieve the desired outcome. But, when I reconsidered what seemed the relatively late date of 1890, it occurred to me that perhaps the analogy wasn't quite as obvious as we think. After all, the shooting of a gun or arrow often results in a death or injury whereas a shot made with a camera merely fixes a moment in time on paper (or a screen). The former is frequently violent and negative; the latter usually harmless and positive. No, I thought, shooting isn't a word that transfers to photography as naturally as I first thought.

My reflection was prompted by the fact that a few days ago I was being repeatedly shot - by a camera. We were spending some time on the north Norfolk coast at Cromer and the shooter was my wife. Throughout our married life, as our photograph albums testify, I've done most of the family photography and my wife has taken shots mainly to ensure that I appear in the albums periodically. However, on our recent break she made a conscious effort to try and take a few more photographs of me. The result was I kept noticing that as I was taking my photographs I was also being shot. It was relatively painless as I'm a fairly co-operative subject. I've posted two of her shots today. Regular readers may find them a welcome relief from my obscured self-portraits! Incidentally, the rucksack isn't full of photographic equipment. I try to keep the gear and weight to a minimum when I'm out and about. It had only the 70-300mm lens to complement the 24-105mm on the camera. The rest of the weight was essentials for a morning at the coast on a day when a strong breeze was lessening the effects of bright sunshine.

photographs / text © K. Boughen / T. Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 37.1mm (100mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Wondering about words

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In a newspaper article I was reading the other day the journalist used the word "phoney" meaning false. Not unusual you might think, but it was a British journalist and I always understood phoney to be a U.S. word. That in itself isn't so unusual because English words travel both ways across the Atlantic to take up permanent residence each of the two main variants of English. However, it did prompt me to look up the word "phoney" in my Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It reported, unhelpfully, "Of uncertain origin", though it did note the word's origins in the United States. It was then, as sometimes happens, that a dim light came on in the recesses of my brain and I recalled the word "fawney". This word, I remembered, was British eighteenth century slang for "fake". A gilt ring being passed off as real gold was often described as fawney. Undoubtedly, I thought, there is a connection. And sure enough the web produced several references to the origins of U.S. phoney in British fawney. Can the OED, I wonder, verify this? For all I know it has already done so; after all my edition, like me, is getting on a bit.

The derivations of words popped into my head again as I was processing this photograph of dried Physalis franchetii that had been cleverly and effectively placed in the fireplace of a room in an old museum. The colloquial name for this plant is Chinese Lanterns after the similarity between the dried flowers and the Asiatic paper lanterns. It then occurred to me that there was a further interesting word that could be applied to the flowers when arranged in a fireplace - "flamboyant". Today this word usually means showy, colourful or florid, and wouldn't necessarily be thought especially applicable to this photograph. However, it derives from the French word for "flame" and originally meant flame-like in either shape or colour. Architectural historians use the word in this way, describing the flame-like tracery of Gothic windows as being in the Flamboyant Style. In the nineteenth century, both in Britain and the United States, the word was applied to things that had the colour of flames too. Consequently, it seemed to me unusual, but not unreasonable, to describe today's photograph with the words I chose.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 28mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/30 sec
ISO: 1600
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Hebe, ambrosia and shrubs

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As far as I can see Greek mythology doesn't figure much in the education or interests of school children today. Yet when I was a child we were taught quite a bit about the subject, including some of the best known stories, and this made us (well, certainly me) want to know more. Alexander Pope said that "a little learning is a dangerous thing", and it certainly can be. However, in the case of me and Greek mythology it proved to be one of the catalysts that inspired a love of words and their origins.

It all started with "Ambrosia" creamed rice, a tinned rice pudding from Devon that first came on the market just before the second world war and was a family staple in the 1950s and 1960s. I discovered that the Greek gods fed on ambrosia and that Zeus and Hera received it (with nectar) from their daughter. It didn't take much research to discover that their ambrosia was unlikely to be the kind with which I was familiar, but the derivation of the rice pudding's name was something I found very interesting.

What has all this to do with a shallow depth of field photograph of a sprig of the plant, Hebe "Red Edge", I hear you ask. Well, the name of the daughter of Zeus and Hera was Hebe. She was the goddess of youth and cup-bearer to the gods until she married Heracles (Hercules to the Romans). When, later in life, I again came across the name Hebe it wasn't in connection with mythology but rather as a very useful, usually hardy, evergreen shrub that originated in New Zealand and South America, one that usually did well in the sort of coastal environment where I was living at the time. It's a plant I've always liked, and a variety that I particularly appreciate is the one shown in today's photograph. The blue-green of the leaf sits well with the red-purple of the leaf edges and makes it an attractive plant all year round. I was photographing our wych hazel when the very structured branches of opposing leaves caught my eye. I composed this shot to hint at the structure and clearly reveal the tip. Incidentally, I have no idea why this particular name was applied to this genus of plant!

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/100 sec
ISO: 200 Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Avenues

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The word "avenue" in English originally comes from the French avenir and Latin advenire, to come to or to approach. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the word was often spelt, "advenue", and in the eighteenth century "a'venue" was used. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records the first use of "avenue" meaning "approach" in a piece dating from 1639. However, by the eighteenth century the definition of the word that we use today - an approach or road lined with trees - was widely accepted. The United States seems to have modified its usage of the word to mean any fine, wide street, but in Britain trees are usually implied by "avenue".

The habit of lining a street, road or entrance driveway with trees to give it an enhanced status is a practise of long standing. It is a feature seen in the grounds of most large English country houses. Towns and cities with streets of eighteenth and and nineteenth century foundation often have such trees and feature the word "avenue" in their name. Municipal parks of the Victorian and Edwardian period usually have avenues, and the rare park of eighteenth century date, such as that at King's Lynn, frequently have them too. Go to the municipal cemetery- usually a nineteenth century creation - and here too you will find a tree lined road leading from the main entrance or to the chapel.

We recently, for the first time, walked into the cemetery at Boston, Lincolnshire, and found here a fine, imposing avenue leading from the entrance gatehouse to the chapel. Unusually it had a mixture of trees rather than being restricted to one or two species. Pines stood alongside beech and lime, with the deciduous trees shedding their leaves on the tarmac and gravestones below. we didn't venture far into the cemetery - that exploration can wait for a later date - but I lingered long enough to see two men come into view at the bottom of the avenue, figures to give some scale to my symmetrical shot down the roadway.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 105mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 1000
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Chandeliers, electroliers and names

 click photo to enlarge
On a couple of occasions I've reflected on the way that words pass out of daily use and acquire the status of "archaic" in the dictionary. Today's photograph prompted me to wander down that path again.

I took the shot near the west door of the church of St Wulfram at Grantham, Lincolnshire. The faceted glass or perspex is the top of the new internal porch which, on the dull day of our visit had its light turned on. Above is the Victorian glass of the west window. Appearing to float in the darkness nearby, like a spaceship in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", is a ... well, what shall I call it? Like many such examples of branched church lighting this one dates from the early 1800s and started life as a chandelier - a hanging ornamental light fitting that held candles. It would have been lit and replenished by someone standing on steps or by the whole light being lowered using a chain or rope. Both these methods of servicing this kind of light were inconvenient. Consequently it is no surprise that when electricity became widely available churches frequently converted their chandeliers from candles to light bulbs. The flick of a wall switch was much easier than struggling to light 18 or so candles with a flickering taper. But with this change-over came the problem of nomenclature.

The first "chandeliers" that were purposely made for electric light bulbs were named, quite sensibly, "electroliers" (the first instance of use cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is 1882). It was a good marketing tactic and it better described the new take on an old idea. Moreover, the gas versions that preceded them were called "gaseliers". But immediately a problem arose: what do you call an old chandelier that is converted from candles to electric light bulbs? Do you stick with the name that indicates what it was originally or do you use the newfangled "electrolier" to show how progressive you are and to more accurately describe the updated light? There was no great debate on this matter, usage alone determined the course of what happened. The newly made electric chandeliers, for a few decades, often (though not always) were described as electroliers. Conversions generally (though not always) stuck with chandelier. Then, over time, the use of the word electrolier declined and chandelier re-asserted itself to describe the electric versions, which had become the dominant type, as well as those versions continuing to use candles. Today the word "electrolier" is mainly restricted to describing the early "electric chandeliers" that would have had that name applied when they were first made. The OED doesn't yet describe "electrolier" as archaic, but it can only be a matter of time.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/20
ISO: 1250
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Ovum for Poultry

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When, in the nineteenth century and first seventy five years or so of the twentieth century, manufacturers came to name a new product they frequently delved into Latin or Greek for their inspiration. From these ancient languages they would take a whole word, a part word or a combination of these and from them coin a new word that had a bearing on what it was that they wanted to name. Examples are many:

• automobile - from Greek autos (self) and Latin mobilis (to move)
• submarine - from Latin sub meaning "under" and marinus meaning "of the sea"
• Volvo - from Latin volvere (I roll) - the parent SFK company also made ball-bearings
• Sony - based on the Latin sonus (sound)
• Nike - from the name of the Greek goddess of victory
• Xerox - from xerography which uses the Greek xeros (dry) and graphos (writing)

One occasionally comes across odd hybrids such as Bovril, a British yeast extract and beef stock. This is a combination of the Latin bos (ox or cow) and vril, an invented word that comes from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1870 novel, "The Coming Race". The Vril-ya were a superior race whose power derived from a substance called "Vril"!

Today's photograph shows an enamelled metal advertisement that probably dates from the first half of the last century. It is fixed to an old agricultural building and advertises Joseph Thorley's feed for hens. This was called, appropriately, "Ovum", from the Latin for "egg". Knowing that, what do you imagine the company called the food they sold for rabbits? Here's a clue: the Latin name for the common rabbit is Oryctolagus cuniculus. Bearing that in mind they very sensibly called their rabbit food "Rabbitum"!

These days, of course, names are plucked from the fevered imagination of a twenty something advertising or marketing executive. You want to name a bookseller? Call it Amazon. How about a bank? Goldfish or Egg will do. A telecoms company? What about Everything Everywhere, surely one of the most ludicrous formulations of recent years, or perhaps any year! Today it sometimes seems that it's a virtue to make the company name have absolutely nothing to do with the organisation that it stands for. That being the case one wonders why brand names aren't chosen by opening the dictionary at random and selecting the first noun on the page. But then again, perhaps they are.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 8.8mm (41mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.5
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Lady's Mantle

click photo to enlarge

Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla mollis) is one of those plants that, once you have it, you need never be without it. It readily spreads from the original clump and is soon spotted, spreading itself around the garden. But it's also one of those plants that people either strongly like or equally strongly dislike. Those who have an aversion to it see only a low growing, leafy, green plant with relatively unspectacular, weed-like, yellow flowers, a perennial that multiplies where it isn't wanted and which becomes somewhat straggly at the end of the season. However, people who favour it admire the palmate shape of the leaves that were once thought to resemble the scalloped mantle once worn around the neck and over the shoulders of women (the Lady is the Virgin Mary). They also appreciate the effective ground cover that it provides and its hardiness. But lovers of the plant most especially like the way that multiple water droplets, looking like liquid mercury, bead on the leaves after rain or a heavy dew.

This latter characteristic happens because of the small, soft hairs that cover the leaves. These beautiful drops of water caught the eye of the medieval alchemists (hence the Latin name) who, it is reputed, judged it the purest form of water and employed it in their attempts to turn base metal into gold. The plant in today's photograph has frequently been dotted with these jewel-like spots of water due to the frequency of rain in Britain this spring and summer. I took my hand-held shot after a particularly heavy downpour, just as the sky brightened for a short period before the onset of the next deluge.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

What's in a name?

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I've always found the sources of personal names interesting, particularly those chosen for girls. Flowers have produced Rose, Violet, Heather (and Erica), Daisy, Briony, Iris and many more. Biblical names like Rachel, Rebecca and Sharon have proved popular. So too have three consecutive months of the year - April, May and June - though none of the others are favoured: I wonder why? Jewels and semi-precious stones have been pressed into service - Pearl, Ruby, Beryl, Coral, Amber, Jade etc - though they don't appear to be in fashion at the moment. Colours have sometimes made an appearance as in Blanche (white), Electra and Amber (amber), Flavia (yellow), Aurelia (gold) and Melanie (black).

Names that derive from stars (the outer space variety - Hollywood's effect is too well-known) include Estelle, Stella, Astra and Esther. However, only one time of day is widely used for a girl's name, and that, strangely, is Dawn (and its variations - Aurora, Oriana and Roxana). Now there's nothing wrong with naming a girl after the dawn: it's a fine and special time of day. But is it really better than sunrise and sunset, neither of which get a look in as far as names go despite being the most spectacular times of day? And what about midday (or noon), midnight and twilight? What precludes them from being used for this purpose? And if dawn is OK, why isn't dusk?

All these questions bounced around my head as I processed this shot taken from the bottom of the garden the other morning. Should I caption it "dawn" or "sunrise" I wondered? It was cold and frosty when I took the photograph, but the not-quite-yet-revealed sun's fiery colours gave an illusion of warmth. I was tempted to leave the sky clear to show off the rose-tinted clouds, but eventually decided that I preferred the shot with the silhouette of the branch at the top of the frame. And, as you see, I settled on "sunrise"!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On