Music teaching and outcomes in schools

[ardcarp]

The thread, or at least the thrums, get/s curiouser and curiouser.
Magus, magi.
Octopuses, octopodes, but not octopi.
From nemo let me never say
Neninis or nemime.
Domi!!! At home, laddie, it's the ******* locative.

... Lewis Carroll, Salman Rushdie, Eric Linklater, and fond memories of Slash Slater, a fierce but brilliant Latin master.

(All this is just to confuse people who thought they were going to read about music in schools or choir competitions.)

[DracoM]

Slash Slater wasn't David Slater by any chance? Organist as well?

[ardcarp]

No. I don't think we used or even thought of masters' Christian names in those days. They all had monikas such as Flogger, Piggy, Isaiah (he has crooked eyes) Patch (he was bald) and so on.

[MrGongGong]

Did you stand up when Piggy entered the room ?

[muticus]

Geniata?

[jean]

But always with a slightly different meaning? OED says of 'genius' as describing a highly gifted individual: 'Now only geniuses in pl.'

I think you're right. I was anxious to absolve the speaker from the charge of having made the terrible mistake of supposing that every Latin word in -us is second declension and must make its plural in -i.

That one is, and does, even if we've decided not to use the Latin plural any more.

[jean]

The thread, or at least the thrums, get/s curiouser and curiouser.
Magus, magi.
Octopuses, octopodes, but not octopi.
From nemo let me never say
Neninis or nemime.
Domi!!! At home, laddie, it's the ******* locative.

... Lewis Carroll, Salman Rushdie, Eric Linklater, and fond memories of Slash Slater, a fierce but brilliant Latin master.

(All this is just to confuse people who thought they were going to read about music in schools or choir competitions.)

To confuse them a bit more:

When I saw the Globe's production of Henry Vth the other week, I was horrified to hear them singing 'Non nobis, Domine, sed nomine tuo da gloriam...'

I suppose this comes from the easy assumption that nomine should rhyme with Domine, even though they are completely different.

However, the mistake has been around for a while. Maybe its origin is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FrLGB_oK8

[Wolsey]

It's their abbreviation of "synchronising" to "syncing". Whenever a "c" is followed by "e" or "i", the pronunciation is "ss", not "k" - even in the United States of America.

If they have to abbreviate it, then the word's Greek root should be acknowledged, and the 'h' should be included so that it reads 'synch-ing'.

[ardcarp]

Years ago at a party I met a very drunk Scots lady of indeterminate age who declared she had leraned all her Latin in church and all her French in bed. Avoiding any attempt at conversation in French for obvious reasons, we began to talk about Latin...and she (very engagingly) talked about her Latin teacher (who I think must have been a monk in an RC school or convent) and she referred to him as her Domini. This was obviously a patois word for teacher, but one wonders why that part of speech?

[Mary Chambers]

I first came across the word 'dominie' (sic), meaning teacher, in a Walter Scott novel I was being forced to read for either O-level or A-level English, and which I loathed. I think it was Guy Mannering. It's a dialect word, and I don't think the form of it reflects the part of speech. I found this explanation via Google.

http://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/words/615

[french frank]

Dominie, possibly, rather than domini.

Ah. Mary

[Mary Chambers]

The Wiki article is bit more concise than the one I found.

[french frank]

The Wiki article is bit more concise than the one I found.

Maybe, but yours looks like a fascinating site.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A S Neill, founder of Summerhill School published five sets of memoirs of his time as a Scottish dominie between 1916 and 1924.

A Dominie’s Log
A Dominie Dismissed
A Dominie in Doubt
A Dominie Abroad
A Dominie's Five

... all now, alas, out-of-print (last available in the mid-'80s).

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

If they have to abbreviate it, then the word's Greek root should be acknowledged, and the 'h' should be included so that it reads 'synch-ing'.

Exactly.