Flotsam and Jetsam

I just looked up that heading in my Oxford Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. It is cited as follows: flotsam. The wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating in or washed up by the sea (as distinguished from - JETSAM goods or material thrown overboard and washed ashore). Flotsam and jetsam is used generally for useless or discarded objects. The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is a very useful little book, or it used to be before Google.

Here is what Google gave me for the same phrase.” Flotsam and jetsam. In maritime lingo, flotsam is wreckage or cargo that remains afloat after a ship has sunk, and jetsam is cargo or equipment thrown overboard from a ship in distress. The precise meanings are lost in the common phrase flotsam and jetsam, which describes useless or discarded objects.”  There is also a Wikipedia definition on the same search result that says, in part, “In maritime law, flotsam, jetsam, lagan, and derelict are specific kinds of shipwreck. The words have specific nautical meanings, with legal consequences in the law of admiralty and marine salvage.” If I had not looked it up, I would have misspelled ‘jetsam’.

All this is simply in aid of illustrating that my mind is full of useless facts and bits and pieces. Flotsam and jetsam, in fact. When I was a child and teen, I had close to an eidetic memory, and in consequence I remember, if the recollection is jogged by something, verses to hymns and pop songs from those years. Once started off, words with the melody play over and over in my head. I believe this is often called an ‘earworm’ or ‘Mondegreen’. (See comment below for info on these terms. ) At present there is a verse of a hymn cycling over and over between my too large ears. I hear:

Stand up, stand up for Jesus ye bearers of the cross,

Bring forth his royal banner, we will not suffer loss.

From victory onto victory, his banner it will wave,

Till every foe is vanquished and Christ is lord indeed.

So, now to see how close this is to the actual verse. I do love Google. Here is the verse as written. 

Stand up, stand up for Jesus,

Ye soldiers of the cross;

Lift high his royal banner,

It must not suffer loss.

From victory unto victory

His army shall he lead,

Till every foe is vanquished,

And Christ is Lord indeed.

Since it is unlikely that I have heard this sung since about 1959, I don’t think that is too bad for recall. 

(I will only add that militant Christianity annoys me greatly, contradicting, as it does, the doctrine of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that I believe is much to be preferred. And, yes, I do recall the story of the money changers in the temple.)

As is not uncommon, I have now strayed far from my original aim in this post. Given all the stuff floating around in my head, it should not be surprising that there is no currant current. Or current currant. What I wanted to comment about was triggered by a post that a blogger I follow with delight put up this morning. He makes a good point, that there is increasing disuse of the simple future in speaking.

Last winter I was coaching a young man, a newly arrived refugee from Syria, in English. I quickly found that introducing him to grammatical English was not as helpful as it would seem it should be. He needed to be able to understand what he heard, as well as to make himself understood, and what he was hearing could be extremely mangled. I could teach simple future tense – I will ride my bicycle to work tomorrow – but what he was likely to hear would be -I’m going to bike to work tomorrow. He said to me plaintively that he could understand what people said directly to him but not what they were saying to one another. It seems that people were taking some care to speak simply to him but were not using the same rules in general among themselves.

Language mutates. Accents shift. Vowels float and twist. New words and expressions are generated by new experience. As in, I googled it. As in our spelling of ‘sweet’ next to Chaucer’s spelling as ‘suete’. To stop this is to emulate the king who tried to command the tide.

Here is another bit of floating nonsense that thinking about this topic just brought to shore.

The grizzly bear whose mighty hug

Was feared by all, is now a rug.

The sword of Charlemagne the just

Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf

And I don’t feel so well myself.

I must now go and tackle the laundry, to see what use and wearing has inflicted on the garments in the hamper. I hope that writing this has excorcised that damn hymn. But something else will take its place.