Daily Archives: 14th May 2020

More traffic than before

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It is another coolish day – 12°C (53° F) – and breezy too. The sun is shining, though, leading to contrasting conditions: warm in sunny but sheltered corners and chilly in exposed areas.

The new rules allowing people to go out and to go to work, using public transport if necessary, has increased traffic flows noticeably. How people are supposed to maintain “social distancing” on crowded buses, I don’t know. They can’t, of course: it’s impossible.

Traffic on Pentonville Road
Traffic on Pentonville Road

It was Jusaka’s turn to supply the coffee today and so we headed that way but took a turn around St Mark’s Church before heading to St John Street and the Angel crossroads.

Georgian style houses
Georgian style houses, Myddelton Square

I photographed these Georgian style houses because (a) I like them and (b) they looked cheeful in the sunshine. (Inexcusable anthropomorphism, I know 🙂 ) They are classics of the style with graded window-size, “area” giving access and daylight to the basement, and elegantly styled ironwork in front of the ground-floor windows.

Arlington Way
Arlington Way

This is Arlington Way, which I mentioned in a previous post. What’s special about it? Nothing much, really, though it does contain several Grade II listed houses and the Shakespeare’s Head pub (also mentioned previously) which was described in a document of 1742 as offering refreshments and harpsichord music! It has been rebuilt since then but I don’t know what happened to the harpsichord 🙂

If you are interested in historical associations, the street was named after Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington (1618-85) who was, among other things, a Secretary of State between 1662 and 1674.

We reached St John Street and then passed along a narrow passage leading to Owen Street and thence to Goswell Road – a diversion to prolong our stroll. On the way we passed this building: do you know, or can you guess, what it is?

Old Angel Station entrance

I haven’t put a caption in case you want a couple of minutes to think about it.

It is in fact the old entrance to the Angel Underground Station.

The station, which opened in 1901, had a central “island” platform between the two tracks. It was still like this when I first visited Islington. I remember feeling slightly nervous because the large numbers of people waiting for trains filled the platform and I could easily imagine being jostled and falling in front of a train!

In 1992, the station was enlarged with separate platforms for the two directions. The new entrance is round the corner in the High Street. Most maps have caught up with the change but Apple Maps hasn’t: it still shows the entrance here in City Road.

There were already two customers in Jusaka and as only three are allowed at one time, Tigger went in and I waited outside, rather like those dogs you see tied up outside the supermarket!

Then we made our way home, washed our hands and enjoyed our coffee. Tomorrow, we can do it all over again!

Thursday and jeudi

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Having passed the middle of the week with Wednesday or mercredi, we arrive at Thursday.

Here is a reminder of the names of this day in the five languages under discussion:

  • English
  • Thursday
  • Babylonian
  • Marduk
  • Anglo-Saxon
  • Ðunresdæg
  • Latin
  • dies Iovis
  • French
  • jeudi

The Babylonians dedicated this day to the god Marduk. Originally the god of thunder who conquered the monster of primeval chaos, Tiamat , he became the patron god of the city of Babylon. This honourable role enhanced his reputation and he rose in importance until he became the chief of the Babylonian gods. For more details, see the Encyclopædia Britannica’s article Marduk.

To the Romans, the chief of the gods was he who was known variously as Iuppiter or Iovis, names that were transliterated into Engish as Jupiter and Jove. To the Greeks he was Zeus. Originally a sky god, he could be petitioned to produce rain in the midst of drought but he also stood for morality and duty. He presided over war and treaties but his many roles are too numerous to list here. For more details, see the Encyclopædia Britannica’s article Jupiter.

The genitive of Iovis is also Iovis and so his day was called dies Iovis or Iovis dies.

Although it is now customary to spell the Latin word for Jove with a ‘v’, we should remember that that letter (and sound) did not exist in Classical Latin and represents an original ‘u’, although this was often represented as a ‘v’, because this was easier to cut when carving in stone.. The name of this god would have been written IOUIS (or IOVIS) and pronounced something like “yowiss”. The consonantal ‘i’ (pronounced like consonantal ‘y’ in English words like “yes”) became a fricative ‘j’ sound in French and other Romance languages. Simplification of the words in popular speech caused the loss of the ‘s’ sounds and a mutation of the vowel sounds, leading eventually to modern jeudi.

The statement that the English word Thursday derives from the Anglo-Saxon Ðunresdæg might seem counter-intuitive at first glance. The first letter, ‘Ð’, is an upper case version of the letter the Anglo-Saxons called þorn (“thorn”) which was replaced in later English with the letter-pair ‘th’. The day name was therefore pronounced something like “Thunresda(g)”.

Ðunres is the genitive of the name Ðunor, or Thunor, in modern spelling. This god is more familiar to us these days in the Norse version of his name, Ðórr or Thor. He was probably the most important of the old Germanic gods. His name is cognate with words for thunder and he was associated with the forces of nature, including the weather. His favourite weapon was the hammer but this was not used only in fighting: Thunor was also the god of the forge and patron of blacksmiths. It was believed that the thunder was the sound of Thunor hammering on the celestial anvil and the lightning, the sparks given off as he struck the object he was working on. For more details, see the Wikipedia article Thor.

You may be tempted to think that modern Thursday derives from Ðorr (“Thor”) rather than from Ðunor (“Thunor”) but in fact, Ðunresdæg gradually mutated into Ðurresdæg, from which an evolution into “Thursday” can easily be imagined.