As highlighted by Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian last year, Rosemary Sutcliff once wrote in her great historical novel and classic of children’s literature The Eagle of the Ninth about a ‘ battle fought through the grey drizzle of a west country dawn (which) is illuminated by “firebrands that gilded the falling mizzle and flashed on the blade of sword and heron-tufted war spear” ‘. I drew attention to this article once again with a post last week. Someone tweeted in response that they were surprised to come across ‘mizzle’ as a noun. Hence this set of tweets in the last 24 hours (read from the bottom):
Can mizzle be a noun as well as a verb? | Twitter debate!
26/02/20122012 by Anthony Lawton
Posted in Autobiography & Biography, The Eagle of the Ninth Book | 3 Comments
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rosemary sutcliff
"An impish ... irreverent writer of genius" (The Guardian)
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the guardian newspaper in praise of rosemary sutcliff
Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 children's classic The Eagle of the Ninth (still in print more than 50 years on) is the first of a series of novels in which Sutcliff, who died in 1992, explored the cultural borderlands between the Roman and the British worlds – "a place where two worlds met without mingling" as she describes the British town to which Marcus, the novel's central character, is posted.
Marcus is a typical Sutcliff hero, a dutiful Roman who is increasingly drawn to the British world of "other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling". This existential cultural conflict gets even stronger in later books like The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind, set after the fall of Rome, and has modern resonance. But Sutcliff was not just a one-trick writer.
The range of her novels spans from the Bronze Age and Norman England to the Napoleonic wars. Two of her best, The Rider of the White Horse and Simon, are set in the 17th century and are marked by Sutcliff's unusually sympathetic (for English historical novelists of her era) treatment of Cromwell and the parliamentary cause. Sutcliff's finest books find liberal-minded members of elites wrestling with uncomfortable epochal changes. From Marcus Aquila to Simon Carey, one senses, they might even have been Guardian readers.
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thanks as always!
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Language, particularly English, is a dynamic thing, and words have always jumped fences. All they need to become valid is constant and consistent usage. As can be seen from the OED on “mizzle”, its first recorded use is as a verb (1439) but it later turns up as a noun in 1490, indicating that the use as a verb came first.
This is ongoing – as a more recent example, when I was growing up the word “access” was only ever used as a noun. but come the computer age it suddenly started turning up as a verb, and is now commonly accepted as such.
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I’ve always used it as both verb and noun and believed that to be okay. It’s one of those old dialect words from northern England, kept from the original Middle English. And I couldn’t imagine Rosemary Sutcliff getting it wrong- she was very precise in her use of words :)
The authority – the OED – confirms that both verb and noun are accepted usage:
1. mizzle, n.1 1490
…Very fine misty rain; drizzle….
2. mizzle, n.2 1912
…A disappearance, a sudden or surreptitious departure. Esp. in to do a mizzle: to depart suddenly, to vanish. Cf. mizzle…
3. mizzle, v.1 1439
…intr. To rain in very fine droplets; to drizzle. Usu. impers. Also to mizzle of rain….
4. mizzle, v.2 1583
…trans. To confuse, muddle, mystify; to intoxicate, befuddle….
5. mizzle, v.3 1781
…intr. To go away suddenly; to vanish, disappear. Freq. with off. Also in imper.: ‘go away!’…
6. mizzle, v.4 a1935
…intr. Esp. of a child: to complain, grumble; to moan, whimper….
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