Dear Tesco,

     I do hope you’ll excuse the impertinence of my writing to you. I have, alas, frivolously wasted time in gaining a PhD in theoretical physics, investigating the mysteries of the universe, and co-founding a biomedical charity to address the suffering caused by the diseases of aging. Regretfully, I have spent woefully little time in the kitchen. If only you had been there, in my early days, to guide me in my life choices: then, perhaps, things would have been very different.

     Thank heavens you have such an effective comeback to those who complain about your labelling of toys along gender lines: “Toy signage is currently based on research and how our customers tell us they like to shop in our stores”.

     I do wonder what that research shows. Perhaps you ask a group of customers about every toy, to assign gender-appropriateness to it. Surely you care more than that, though? Surely, you see it as your own role to allocate each of your toys to boys or girls? I bet your research simply asks “Do you want toys grouped by gender?” so you can selflessly keep the important responsibility of ensuring girls are kept away from that awful, boy-ridden science ‘thing’.

     I take such consolation from knowing that, somewhere, Tesco employees are helping to perpetuate gender stereotypes for the rest of us. I bet it’s a crack team of sociologists and behavioural psychologists, and not just a few, bored administrators mindlessly allocating science to boys and anything pink or kitchen-related to girls.

     Or perhaps I’m wrong and you’re just a simple-minded corporate behemoth without the institutional intelligence or social sensibilities to do what’s right in this situation and follow the lead of Boots, for example. But hey! I’m just a girl. What do I know?

Yours,

Sarah Marr

     The following updates were made whilst tweets were coming thick and fast, on the days around my original post:

     Update 9.30pm BST. Since this letter is getting quite a lot of traffic I just want to be clear that I’m also with everyone who thinks it’s appalling that the kitchen is tagged for girls. My strongest voice is as a scientist, but this is really about dropping the boy/girl categories altogether.

     Update 7 March, 4.30pm BST. That’s why this tweet from Tesco is a good start, but doesn’t go far enough: “@SciDoll Hi Sarah, we’ve looked into this, it is a mistake, the set should have been labelled as unisex. We’ll update the page.” There are still 38 others ‘for boys’ only, and 49 others ‘for girls’ only. Luckily, most Lego seems to be ‘unisex’ – I feel stupid even typing that – but at least one is for ‘boys’.

     Update 5.15pm BST. Tesco say, “This is being updated and we’re sorry for any inconvenience caused,” so I’m taking a breath and waiting to see what that means.

     Update 9 March, 8.00pm BST From what I can tell, Tesco have removed gender filters from their site, but not yet changed item descriptions. Hopefully that will be the next step.

     I updated the TARDIS lockscreen I previously posted, so it is correctly sized for the iPhone 5′s larger screen.

     If you’re using an iPhone 4S or older, you should head over to this post. (And if you’re still on iOS4 then head to the original post.) Otherwise, grab this version: just right-click and ‘save as’, then transfer to your iPhone using email (or do whatever your inner nerd tells you is necessary). Once again, the colours look odd, but that’s to compensate for the lockscreen overlay, and the ‘Police Box’ text is missing because the time and date go there.

     There’s also a home screen, which is darker, so that it doesn’t interfere with your icons.

     Post a comment if you use them. Thanks. Enjoy.

     Lock screen:

     Home screen:

Easy is good

Easy is beautiful beneath your eyelids
As a gathering of pleasure
Dance and what follows

I have spoken of the fever

The best of all arguments for fire
That you be pale and luminous

A thousand winning poses
A thousand losing embraces
Repeated as they forget themselves
You fall dark you raise your veil
A mask you soften
It resembles you vividly
And you never look better than nude

Nude in shadow and dazzlingly nude
As a sky shivering with lightning
You give yourself up to your own self
To give yourself up to others.

Paul Éluard (trans. Sarah Marr)

And the original:

Facile est bien

Facile est beau sous tes paupières
Comme l’assemblée du plaisir
Danse et la suite

J’ai dit la fièvre

Le meilleur argument du feu
Que tu sois pâle et lumineuse

Mille attitudes profitables
Mille étreintes défaites
Répétées vont s’effaçant
Tu t’obscurcis tu te dévoiles
Un masque tu l’apprivoises
Il te ressemble vivement
Et tu n’en parais que mieux nue

Nue dans l’ombre et nue éblouie
Comme un ciel frissonnant d’éclairs
Tu te livres à toi-même
Pour te livrer aux autres.

Paul Éluard

I forget who said:

The true measure of friendship lies not in the orthodoxy of the consequential, but in the unbidden kindness of the moment.

Actually, I remember now: I said it, a few minutes ago. I just put it in quotes because there’s far more gravitas in the found quotation than in the “Hey! I just thought of this!” discourse of the internet. Sorry about that.

In the past couple of days, two of my friends sent me emails, as unbidden kindnesses of the moment. I can’t help but feel that there are other people who will appreciate their contents, so…

Here’s a photograph taken on the streets of New York a couple of days ago. When I click the home-button to wake my iPhone, this is now the exhortation from my lock-screen. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s being brave or writing which is hardest. I suspect the two are irreversibly intertwined.

Secondly, a poem.

I’ve always considered the intrinsic subjectivity of poems to render them far from ideal for sharing: one person’s self-defining vade mecum is another’s trite greeting-card. And then there is the matter of breathlessly announcing the discovery of something marvellous to a group of readers for whom a lack of familiarity with the ‘discovery’ is tantamount to literary heresy. If this seems a greeting card to you, or is a long-standing component of your personal canon, feel free to click away: I shouldn’t dream of imposing. Otherwise, this:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
         love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

It’s by Mary Oliver, and available in this collection.

Anyway, there it is: an unbidden kindness of the moment, from me to you.

On this Sunday’s “The Newsroom” one of the characters quoted Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”:

Gather ye rosebuds whilst ye may,
Old time is still a flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.

I am, by nature, driven by curiosity, and I started to wonder about that innocuous little ye between Gather and rosebuds.

Sure, the second ye is easily understood as an archaic form of you, but that first ye teases with a certain ambiguity. It could mean you, in the same way that the carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful” uses it in the issuance of an instruction to the listener: O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem. On the other hand, it could be a remnant of a long-lost letter…

The thorn character, þ, no longer finds a home in the English alphabet but, when it did, it was pronounced like the th in the. The shape of the letter itself was corrupted over time, until it came to resemble a lower-case y (partly because sets of English typeface came with a y but not a þ). That’s what you’re seeing in faux-Elizabethan store signs such as “Ye Olde Muffler and Lube Shacke”.

(As an aside, there’s an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” in which Sheldon berates the organizers of a ‘Ren Fair’ for thinking they can stick “Ye Olde” in front of everything to make it seem authentic. He pronounces it ye. I can’t help but feel that the ‘real’ Sheldon would pronounce it the, leading to one of the other characters commenting that he meant ye, thus earning a diatribe from Sheldon on the history of thorn. And don’t get me started on Leslie Winkle’s claim that string theory has nothing to say about black holes. Anyway…)

All of this – well, perhaps not the parenthetical “Big Bang” ramblings – means that the poem could have been intended to talk of þe rosebuds, was printed as ye rosebuds, and is correctly pronounced as the rosebuds.

Over at Take Our Word for It they take the ‘you’ approach: “[It] is quite correct that sometimes ‘ye’ is shorthand for ‘the’, but that is not the case here.” They opt for ye as a reflection of the imperative mood of the verb (having discounted the possibility of its being the “ethical dative”, meaning “for yourselves”).

Travelanguist takes the opposite view (on this page, which talks about thorn and other lost letters quite extensively, and on this page about stress patterns and meter): “[T]his brings us back to the first line of Herrick’s poem… [which] is pronounced, for reasons just explained, “Gather the rosebuds while ye may”…”

(That first linked page on the Travelanguist site also explains how the loss of both thorn, þ, and edh, ð, means we can no longer distinguish the pronunciation of north and northern from their written forms, as we could from norþ and norðern. Incidentally, if you’re reading this in a public space, look up now and see if anyone’s been watching you sticking your tongue in and out as you subconsciously mouth all these th words.)

To conclude our story, we need to look at early printings of the poem. It appears in “Hesperides: or, the Works, Both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herricks Esq.” published in London in 1648. Despite my best efforts I’ve been unable to find an online image of that printing of the poem, however…

Christie’s sold a copy of the book for just under $10,000 in 2001, and their online catalogue contains the following image (click for a full-size version):

Since you, dear reader, are youthful, keen-eyed, perspicacious (and, frankly, downright attractive, if I may be so bold), you’ll have noticed that every instance of the uses the modern spelling: at the Crown and Marygold, The wound, all the while, and so on. So, it’s not unreasonable to think that had our poet intended to use the rosebuds that’s precisely how it would have appeared in 1648.

Here’s a link to the text of that same page from an 1823 edition by W & C Tait, printed in Edinburgh, courtesy of Google books. The spellings remain unchanged from the original. And here’s our poem in that same edition:

The suggestion is that in the 1648 edition, which uses the in preference to ye, our poem starts, Gather ye rosebuds…, and it does so because Herrick did, indeed, mean ye rather than þe.

Furthermore, the Gutenberg Project version of Hesperides is taken from an 1898 Lawrence & Bullen edition, which includes as a footnote to the poem, “Printed in Witts Recreations, 1654, with the variants: “Gather your Rosebuds” in 1.1…”

This was only six years after the original printing, and would seem to be an unlikely variant if the original were not printed ye.

So, on the balance of the available evidence I’d say that Herrick intended his ye to be ye and not þe. I prefer the imperative interpretation (Hey, you! Gather…) rather than the possessive (Gather your…), not least because in other poems Herrick himself uses both ye and your in a single line: That ye could your thoughts remove, for example.

I suppose the only way to be absolutely sure of the 1648 version is to look at a physical copy. There’s one in the British Library. Even then, there’s no absolute guarantee that the printer didn’t misinterpret Herrick’s original manuscript.

Besides, I have other rosebuds to gather, and Old Time is still a-flying. So, to sidestep the confusion, perhaps it’s best that we close here and simply return to the source, De Rosis Nascentibus, from Ausonius’s Epigramata de Diversis Rebus:

Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum.

     A TARDIS lockscreen for your iPhone: now iOS5 compatible and less Thal-friendly!

     I updated the TARDIS lockscreen I previously posted, so that it was integrated with the camera icon which has been added in iOS5. My original intention was just to redo the shading to accommodate the shortened slide-bar, but there was something about that camera lens, staring out at me, unblinking, uncaring…

     So, here it is. If you’re still on iOS4 then head to the original post. Otherwise, grab this version: just right-click and ‘save as’, then transfer to your iPhone using email (or do whatever your inner nerd tells you is necessary). Once again, the colours look odd, but that’s to compensate for the lockscreen overlay, and the ‘Police Box’ text is missing because the time and date go there.

     There’s also a home screen, which is darker, so that it doesn’t interfere with your icons.

     Post a comment if you use them. Thanks. Enjoy.

     Lock screen:

     Home screen:

     As I Tweeted earlier today, now I’m worried I’ll have to give my PhD back as it’s titled “Black Hole Entropy from Causal Sets” and not “Cupcake Entropy from Rainbows”.

     More worthy commentators than I have, er, commented, and so here are a few links, many of which do include the video. (I am not responsible for feelings of nausea and anger arising from the viewing of said video.)

     Olga Khazan in the “Washington Post” blog: E.U.’s ‘Science, it’s a girl thing’ campaign sparks a backlash

     Carin Bondar in “Scientific American”: Science – It’s a Girl Thing (Insert Facepalm Here)

     Frank Swain in “SciencePunk” on “ScienceBlogs”: Science: It’s a girl thing. Excuse me while I die inside.

     PZ Myers in “Pharnygula” on “ScienceBlogs”: Science: It’s a Girl Thing!

     BakingBiologist’s blog (which, in addition, shows an early draft of the associated Facebook page, using language more closely reflecting the video): Science: It’s a girl thing (or “How to patronise women and alienate your audience”)

     Update 1, 23rd June, 2012: Well, I’ll be: they swapped out the video.

     Update 2, 23rd June, 2012: Some more things worth reading.
          Sophia Collins on her blog: Some facts on getting girls into science
          Sylvia McLain on “Girl, Interrupting”: Science it’s a *&%$ thing.

     and…
          The European Commission created a Twitter list of real women in science (which I’m on, apparently. No, it’s too much. Really. I’d like to thank my mother for being such a role model to me, and…).

     Homeopathic post begins.
     Homeopathic post ends.

     Thank you for reading. You may also like this piece by Martin Robbins in The Guardian.

     *delete as appropriate

     If you have an iPhone 4S or older, you’re probably running iOS5 or 6, with a camera icon on the lockscreen. So, head over to the iOS5 or 6 version: click here.

     If you have an iPhone 5, you need a larger version for the new screen, which you can find in this post: click here.

     If you are still on iOS4, however, then feel free to click here to download a version which works without the camera icon.

     And here’s the original post:

     Yes, this is a bit random. No, it doesn’t really fit into the overall goals of the blog. But, yesterday I went to a Doctor Who exhibition in London and I figured it might be fun to have a Tardis-themed lock screen on my iPhone. I couldn’t find one that fitted my criteria: had to work with messages I received, had to show the time and date clearly, should be as ‘full-screen’ as possible. Anyway, I spent a productive breakfast editing images, and came up with the following. I thought I’d share it, in case anyone else wanted to use it. The colours look odd, but that’s to compensate for the iPhone’s lock-screen shading. The ‘Police Box’ text is missing, but that’s because the date sits there.

     Post a comment if you use it. Thanks.

     (I stupidly deleted the original Tardis image file, and can’t remember where I found it. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. If you’re the rights holder and want it taken down, or credited, then please accept my apologies: contact me through comments and I’ll oblige. It just seemed like a harmless thing to share with people, in a derivative-work-kind-of-way.)