Whatever you call it, it's warm and woolly
It's the kind of question to prompt knitted brows, and the answers are just a bit woolly.
Civis fears the creeping invasion of the United States and Canadian sweater, although internet searching suggested jersey is holding its own in New Zealand. For Civis, jersey remains the go-to.
Sweater is also a broader term, pulling in cardigans (open at the front), pullovers and sweater vests (sleeveless). According to one blog, sweaters can be casual or dressy, and span sporty styles to luxury contexts.
Pullover is said to be a globally recognised term, especially common in European fashion.
Jumper sounds more British, and it's a term Civis thought was losing its bounce in New Zealand, until The Warehouse site was checked.
There, 14 different men's "jumpers" were displayed — and not a single jersey in sight. There are also plenty of women's "jumpers", plus a handful of sweatshirts.
It being July, let's not sweat over that last term, or over hoodies, for that matter.
The blog identified jumper as the standard word in the United Kingdom and Ireland, evoking cosy knitwear for cooler seasons. Disconcertingly, jumper was also listed as the primary word for Australia and New Zealand.
Adding to the confusion: in American English, a "jumper" is a sleeveless dress worn over a blouse. Civis had no idea.
Jersey is thought to originate from Jersey in the Channel Islands. Jersey was renowned for high-quality knitted wool garments, and the name became associated first with the fabric, then with the garments themselves.
In the 19th century, woollen jerseys were a natural choice for sport. The word "jersey" soon shifted to describe the entire garment.
Regulations at the 1908 London Olympics even required competitors to wear a "sleeved jersey". Thus, jersey embedded itself in the sporting lexicon.
Today, the leader of the Tour de France wears the yellow jersey. The All Blacks "play for the jersey", even if it's made from some fancy synthetic material.
The garment called a guernsey emerged from another Channel Island, Guernsey. It was a tightly knitted, rugged top worn by fishermen, later adopted by the British Navy. Guernsey is now often considered a particular style of woollen jersey.
In the 1870s, Australian rules footballers began wearing guernseys — robust, navy woollen tops. These evolved into today's sleeveless AFL guernseys.
The Collins Dictionary notes that jersey, as a knitted upper-body garment, is "old-fashioned". How dare it!
★★★
Language acquisition and the integration of grammar rules into mother tongues are fascinating.
Pre-schoolers, through repetition, begin to understand that "-ed" turns verbs into the past tense. That works fine for climb/climbed and kick/kicked. But English is riddled with irregular verbs, so you'll often hear little ones say eated, sleeped or fighted.
Or perhaps even "I runned so fast my shoes flyed off".
However, what really caught Civis' ear was a girl of nearly 3 using both forms together: she not just "seed" something — she "sawed" it.
And what about this gem from a pre-teen? She's just learned that the small pieces in chess are called pawns and not prawns.
civis@odt.co.nz
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Otago Daily Times
3 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
A gathered history of occupation
In this extract from a new edition of archaeologist Atholl Anderson's book The Welcome of Strangers, A History of Southern Māori, he details the vast extent of māhika kai, food production areas in the South. Except in the northern part of the Ngāi Tahu takiwā (territory), where gardening was to some extent possible, hunting, fishing and gathering were the exclusive means of pre-European food production. Information on the range and relative significance of foods and other resources comes partly from archaeological analysis of discarded remains in middens, partly from direct historical observation, and largely from later recollections. Most of the thousands of archaeological sites dispersed through the Ngāi Tahu takiwā are remains of wāhi mahinga kai (places where food was made; usually shortened to ''mahinga kai'' or ''mahika kai''). Many were quite specialised: shellfishing places, fishing camps, fowling camps, ovens for cooking kāuru, places where argillite, porcellanite, silcrete, flint or other types of rock were quarried and made into tools. But these are only the activities represented by durable remains of shell, bone, and stone or of cooking and fireplaces. To appreciate that these places were also where families lived, generally seasonally, and carried out a wide range of domestic activities, it is worth describing just one mahinga kai where, unusually, much of the otherwise perishable material that was deposited has been preserved. The site is in a dry rock shelter at Lake Te Ana-au and dates to the late seventeenth century. Excavation of several areas in the shelter shows that it had been a summer fowling camp focused upon parrots (kākā, kākāpō, kākāriki, kea) and pigeon (kererū), with minor catches of tūī, weka, mottled petrel and ducks. There were also bones of dogs, eels and the giant kōkopu (native ''trout''), along with freshwater mussel shells. The pattern of discarded bone indicates that parrot and pigeon carcasses were preserved for later consumption and that their feathers were also valued; 324 kākāpō tail feathers were tied in bundles and many kākā tail feathers had about 40mm of the feather tip sliced off, probably for use in decorating woven items. In fact, a new kākahu (cloak) may have been made at the site: there were signs that an old kiwi-feather kākahu had been burnt in a fire there, with the dogskin neckband and an adjacent, heavily-worn part of the kākahu remaining. Amongst other artefacts was a large fish drying rack (part of it still standing), a section of netting, areas of bracken bedding, five fireplaces, two firesticks (a two-piece implement consisting of a stick which was rubbed briskly in a groove on a wooden plate to produce fire), bird spear points, adzes and chisels of various types and material (including pounamu), a hammerstone and grinder for adze-making, many pieces of adzed wood and chips, part of a tōtara plank (possibly from a waka), a large tōtara-bark container and numerous pieces of knotted cordage. Most wāhi mahinga kai would probably have been similarly busy places where making food for future consumption was an important objective alongside all the other necessary tasks of family life. Amongst the other kinds of evidence about mahinga kai the most important were recollections compiled in 1879–80 for a royal commission of inquiry into Ngāi Tahu land claims, known commonly as the Smith–Nairn Commission. Kaumātua from around the takiwā entered on a map of the South Island the places where they had lived in seasonal settlements (kāinga nohoanga) and gathered resources during the earlier 19th century. The map, compiled by H. K. Taiaroa, MP for Southern Maori, was confined very largely to the area of Kemp's Purchase (North Otago and Canterbury), and it was accompanied by two notebooks containing information about the food-gathering activities that took place at each location. These wahi mahinga kai, of which nearly 1400 were recorded, belonged to particular whānau and hapū, and they formed the foundation of the subsistence economy. ANALYSIS OF THE 1880 MAHINGA KAI LISTS Analysis of the mahinga kai lists shows that 62 resources were named, 57 of them foods. Mahinga kai for eels, fernroot and tī kōuka are most frequently listed, but there is also a strong emphasis upon a group of small riverine or estuarine fish (waharoa, pipiki, patete, paraki, panako, grayling, smelt, whitebait and minnows), together with native ''trout'' (kōkopu and koukoupara, species of Galaxiidae). Kāuru (sugary porridge, syrup or toffee according to how it was cooked) was produced from tī kōuka, or tī (Cordyline australis). Tutu juice, raupō root and flax honey were other important plant foods, and the weka, tūī and rat were also prominent resources. The most common wahi mahinga kai recorded in the lists was a stretch of flax-bordered stream where eels and other fish were procured, ducks caught, and fernroot or tī kōuka obtained. Next most frequent were sea-fishing localities, and then fowling camps, notably for weka and tītī. There are significant geographical differences across the lists. In the coastal Otago list, fernroot, eels and tūī are prominent, but in South Canterbury the emphasis is on eels, estuarine and riverine fish, tī kōuka and fernroot. The inland list dealing with the upper Waimakariri shows a strong emphasis on birds, notably weka, and the native rat. The variation might reflect several influences, including vagaries in the data sampling, but one that can be surmised as cultural is the local availability of gardening. If kumara cultivation in North Canterbury allowed mahinga kai there to focus upon protein sources, then an absence of kūmara gardening in South Canterbury and Otago might have meant that people turned to alternative carbohydrate sources, such as fernroot and kāuru. These data demonstrate that there was a greater variety of exploited resources than is apparent in the journals of early European observers and reveal the density of mahinga kai in the landscape. Leaving aside the possibility that the lists include abandoned mahinga kai of earlier times, the density distribution of mahinga kai in the list recorded by Rāwiri Te Maire is about three places per kilometre of coastline, excluding the shoreline of lagoons. The first South Canterbury list covers an area of about 2500sq km, giving a mahinga kai density of one per 15sq km. In the second list the density is about one per 9sq km. In the Waimakariri list the area is about 900sq km, giving a density of one per 24sq km. These figures cannot be precise, but they do indicate the approximate frequency of mahinga kai in the landscape. Based on these figures, it can be estimated broadly that for the approximately 50,000sqkm of the eastern South Island lying below 1000m in altitude and inside Ngāi Tahu territory, a full list at 1880 could have contained 2000–3000 places of mahinga kai. Other research projects have amplified the evidence recorded in 1879–80. During the 1920s, Elsdon Best collected descriptions of traditional food gathering activities from Ngāi Tahu, amongst other tribal
NZ Herald
3 days ago
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Two takes - one fact, one fiction - on life of Roman aristocrat Fulvia
Demonised: Roman woman Fulvia is remembered in this 1819 drawing by Bartolomeo Pinelli of her piercing the tongue of Cicero's severed head. Photo / Getty Images Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Book of the day: Two takes - one fact, one fiction - on life of Roman aristocrat Fulvia Demonised: Roman woman Fulvia is remembered in this 1819 drawing by Bartolomeo Pinelli of her piercing the tongue of Cicero's severed head. Photo / Getty Images In a forthright introduction to her excellent biography of Fulvia, British classicist Jane Draycott points out that 'we have more literary, documentary and archaeological evidence' for her than for 'almost any other Roman woman during the Late Republic'. These were the chaotic decades leading up to Octavian being installed as Emperor Augustus in 27 BCE. Draycott writes that much of the evidence for Fulvia is negative in the extreme. 'Nearly all of the authors writing during her life or immediately after her death were enormously hostile towards her … Later authors took those portrayals and doubled down on them, adding spicy details that may be true or may simply be exaggerated falsehoods, designed to infuriate as well as titillate.' The cover of Fulvia: The woman who broke all the rules in Ancient Rome shows a shocking scene imagined by a 19th-century Italian painter. That's not a lover in bed with Fulvia – it's the severed head of her and her husband Mark Antony's sworn enemy, the proscribed orator Cicero, with her hairpins piercing his tongue. She is recorded as having done this (though definitely not in her bed) after his assassination, when his hands and head were cut off and publicly displayed in Rome. His ceaseless, lurid attacks had included calling her 'a thoroughly rapacious female' and 'a woman as cruel as she is greedy'. Many others, particularly Octavian, joined in. She was 'repeatedly publicly pilloried in front of the entire Roman Senate and wider Roman society for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere'. This 'deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation ensured that the allegations made against her have survived for two millennia, while most attempts at defence have faded from view'. Portrayals of her were also 'heavily influenced by the author's feelings about her husband' at the time. The Late Republic featured incessant battles of every kind, from elections and trials to gang clashes and outright war, between constantly shifting sets of rival candidates for the most powerful positions in the ruling Roman hierarchy. Elite Roman women were not supposed to play any part in these contests, despite being drastically affected by them. As soon as they started menstruating, they were expected to marry men chosen by their male elders, in a market dominated by considerations of status, wealth and alliance. They were then to suffer dutifully through the exile or death of husbands or their frequent divorces and remarriages, often to far younger women, prompted by perceived political or material advantage, when ex-wives might lose all access to their children. Yet Draycott shows a surprising number of elite women are known to have become politically involved, exerting their influence to improve the fortunes of their husbands and relatives. They included Fulvia's aunt and her future sister-in-law. Fulvia's first marriage, probably when she was 15 or 16, was unusual: her husband, Publius Clodius Pulcher, was not markedly older than her, and his acquired last name meant 'beautiful' (with golden curly hair). His family, the Claudii, was far more prestigious than hers, but he had a dodgy reputation and high debts. As an only child, Fulvia had an enormous inheritance from both sides of her family. During roughly 12 years they had a son and daughter and spent a remarkable amount of time together, in public as well as in private. After she helped Clodius fight an election, he was murdered by the henchmen of his plebeian rival Milo. Instead of holding his funeral with all due ceremony, Fulvia ensured that mobs of rioting supporters carried his bloody corpse to the Forum, where they built his funeral pyre. Two takes on the life of Roman aristocrat Fulvia. Photos / Supplied New Zealand author Kaarina Parker's stunning first novel, Fulvia: Power. At any cost, with its elegant classical cover, culminates in this scene, but she shows Fulvia herself leading the procession. As Parker frankly explains, she has deliberately varied some known details for the sake of the story: Fulvia is 18 when she meets Clodius, has sex with him before the wedding, and gives birth to her daughter before her son. Clodius's murder takes place close to Rome; after Milo is found guilty, Fulvia permits her devoted servants to slaughter him, too. Parker's writing deftly avoids the distracting pitfalls that can beset historical novels. She brings Fulvia and those closest to her vividly to life, as she convincingly invents a sequence of significant scenes that are known to have taken place but left no recorded details – especially when only women were present. Though Parker was able to consult a wide range of scholarship, Draycott's book came out too late for her novel. But it's likely to prove useful for her sequel, due next year, covering the later part of Fulvia's life from her marriage to Mark Antony around 48 BCE to her death less than a decade later. As Draycott notes, Antony's 'presence and prominence' ensured Fulvia was much more visible in contemporary sources during this period – but again, mainly through ongoing attacks because, for example, she toured the legions with him and watched rebellious soldiers being beaten to death. When Antony was declared a public enemy in 43 BCE, Fulvia and his mother Julia successfully lobbied on his behalf. In his absence, she helped build and lead an army to support his faltering cause. The year it was defeated, Antony met Cleopatra in Egypt. Fulvia, who had fled to Greece, became ill and died there alone. Draycott's account of these dramatic years is brilliantly assembled. She concludes that Fulvia's 'most serious transgression, and the one used against her again and again by her enemies, was her desire to provide for herself and her family'. All the determined attempts to 'demonise and marginalise her ultimately succeeded in transforming her into one of the most enigmatic and fascinating women of the Roman Republic'. The best way to encounter and understand Fulvia is to read both these books. And Parker's sequel is likely to be eagerly awaited. Fulvia: The woman who broke all the rules in Ancient Rome, by Jane Draycott (Atlantic, $37.99), and Fulvia: Power. At any cost, by Kaarina Parker (Echo Publishing, $36.99), are out now.
Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Nuclear test participants' stories spotlighted
A photography exhibition documenting the stories of sailors who took part in British nuclear tests in the 1950s held its opening night at Central Stories Museum and Art Gallery in Alexandra on Friday. "Operation Grapple — We Were There", by photographer Denise Baynham, tells the stories of the men aboard the ships HMNZS Pukaki and HMNZS Rotoiti who took part in the tests and their lives afterwards. Both ships were deployed to support the nine nuclear detonations around Kiribati during 1957 and 1958. The crews of the ships would witness the blast and collect weather data from as close as 37km from the blast site. One of the speakers at the opening was Alexandra woman Sue Douglas, who told the story of her brother, Peter Wright, an officer in the Royal New Zealand Navy who participated in Operation Grapple. "He was dressed in a special suit and was told to turn his back to the bomb that hangs over his eyes. He could see his bones light up through the skin in the blast." After 10 years of miscarriages, Mr Wright and his wife were gifted with two girls, she said. Mr Wright would go on to have a successful career in the navy where he rose to the rank of commander and commanded the HMNZS Taranaki. In the late 1960s, Mr Wright was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and his health began to deteriorate. "[Peter] shrank from a handsome 6-foot man with his bones like hokey pokey in terrible pain." Mr Wright would die in 1982, four years after his father. His wife Jan would die by suicide in 1984. "Life was just too much without him, the girls were perilous and still in high school." One of the daughters would go on to become a lawyer and worked with another Grapple veteran to fight for recognition from the government. "The government were hoping they would all die before they made that decision. Read the truth of their stories of the few who are still alive. "I'm honoured to open this exhibition," Mrs Douglas said. Central Stories manager Paula Stephenson said Mr Wright's portrait and his story would be put up on display alongside the portraits of the exhibit. The first-of-its-kind exhibit was powerful and about a subject unknown to most New Zealanders, Ms Stephenson said. "It's important to ensure that people do know about it." The photographer decided to create the exhibit in an effort to raise awareness of the effects the Grapple tests had on the men and their families, who had been fighting for an apology and compensation from the government for decades, Ms Stephenson said. The exhibition will run until August 31.
