Submitted by SK as a comment

Spring has almost sprung in my corner of the Midwest. The dance is always two steps forward, one step back. Then spring actually does arrive, stays briefly and suddenly leaps forward into full summer.

With these longer days of spring and the sun warming the earth there comes the urge to clear and clean, dig and plant. My indomitable English mother was always bottom-up in flower beds and vegetable patches from the minute the clock jumped forward while we children were tasked with picking up sticks and collecting branches that litter the lawn after winter storms.

I never quite remember exactly how my garden was the year before. The first day out in the spring is therefore all about pottering around trying to remember what worked well and what was left undone, taking mental notes and preparing for more important decisions to come later on when frost is no longer a threat. Gardens teach us great patience. You can spend all winter making the best of plans only to have them thwarted because of weather or pests or blight or other unforseens.

The great thing about gardens is that you are never lonely. You are always in the company of bees, earth worms, beetles and birds, all of whom have something to tell you about the state of the things if you are quiet enough to listen.

The birds arriving from their winter places are always a joy. Skeins of geese honk overhead - it's a stirring, ancient sound that we on the ground have heard for eons. Usually the first song birds to arrive in my part of the world are the redwings. They stand on the tip of reeds at the edge of the marsh and sing their happy blackbird tunes.

One of the few Apps I have on my phone and use often is the Merlin Bird app. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the app permits you to record bird songs and then identifies for you, with names and photos, all the birds it hears. One late spring morning I set my phone on a table outside. The app identified 23 different birds in an 10 minute recording. I was astonished because I hadn't heard nearly that many. The result that morning on the app encouraged me to listen more carefully, beyond the songs of bluejays, cardinals, chickadees etc that one becomes accustomed to hearing as daily background noise in the garden.

The University of Texas, last May, published an interesting article on the subject of birdsong and the human voice. They conducted, as part of a study, high-resolution anatomical scans of syrinxes from hummingbirds and ostriches — the world’s smallest and largest bird species — and the discovered that the syrinx of birds and larynx, the vocal organ of reptiles and mammals, including humans, share the same developmental programming.

The genetic connection between the vocal organs, said one of the professors involved in the study, is a new example of “deep homology,” a term that describes how different tissues or organs can share a common genetic link. In short, birdsong and the human voice share the same genetic blueprint. Here is a link to the article:

www dot jsg dot utexas dot edu/news/2024/05/birdsong-and-human-voice-built-from-same-genetic-blueprint/

Looking for more information about this, I came upon a site about bird and animal music and the name of a Canadian composer and "zoomusicologist", Emily Doolittle (what a perfect surname), who creates music from bird song. She has a website (emilydoolittle dot com) where you can listen to examples of her music, some of which I have included below.

The music is unusual, evocative and quite beautiful. Seems at times similar to the dream like music of Claude Debussy. It struck me as something perhaps the music lovers on this site might enjoy and something Gérard might have considered for one of his "Something Wonderful" posts.

How dull would life be without birds!

youtube dot com/watch?v=-E1Kg4J41-c

youtube dot com/watch?v=KF7IlH03UwE

Submitted as a comment by SK

That was a word permitted when we were children (as opposed to many others that were not) as an expression of frustration at some ridiculous situation.

I looked up its origin because seeing it in print made me laugh. Hadn't heard it in ages. The only people I know who still use it are all English.

According to an etymological web site, he term seems to derive from the bows that are used to play violins. Those have been named in English since the 15th century – then as ‘fydylstyks’.

The word was appropriated to indicate absurdity in the 17th century.

Thomas Nashe used it that way in the play Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 1600:

"A fiddlesticke! ne’re tell me I am full of words."

There’s nothing inherently funny about a violin bow. It seems that ‘fiddlestick’ was chosen just because it sounds like a comedy word, like ‘scuttlebutt’ (a cask of drinking water), ‘lickspittle’ (a sycophant) and ‘snollygoster’ (an unprincipled person).

In the same way the ‘I don’t give a fig’ was originally ‘I don’t give a fig’s end’, that is, it referred to something insignificant, ‘fiddlesticks’ was originally ‘fiddlestick’s end’, that is, it was a reference to something paltry, trifling and absurd.