A Needle in a Substack

 I am moving to Substack. 

When blogs were a thing, I blogged. Now that Substack is a thing, I shall stack my subs. 

Those who wish to read my writing, whether motivated by pity, morbid fascination or nostalgie de la boue, can simply click, or press with your despairing finger upon this link.

The Inky Fool advances confidently into the future

Princess Elizabeth Never Giggled at T.S. Eliot

While I was researching Rhyme & Reason (available in all good and goodish bookshops), I came across a little anecdote that tells us something Terribly Important (I think) about history. 

It's a anecdote about T.S. Eliot and the young - indeed future - Queen Elizabeth the Second. There is a story, which is recounted as history in several perfectly respectable books, about a reading of The Waste Land at Windsor Castle during the Second World War. T.S. Eliot, so the tale is told, recited his great poem, but the young princesses got the giggles, as did their mother, and then the king. Here is a link to one book, among many, that tell the tale. 

It's interesting because you can, or at least I did, trace the source, see everything that's wrong with it, and then discover the truth. 

Let's start with the false account.

In 1990 the writer A.N. Wilson wrote an article in The Spectator recounting, verbatim, a conversation that he had had with the Queen Mother in 1980. Notice the ten year gap. Here is the conversation as it has gone into history: 

Queen Elizabeth [the Queen Mother]: I thought the girls . . . you see, they were marooned in Windsor Castle for most of the war, and I was not sure that they were having a very good education and kind Sachie and Osbert [Sitwell] said they would arrange a poetry evening for us. Such an embarrassment. Osbert was wonderful, as you would expect, and Edith, of course, but then we had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem . . . I think it was called 'The Desert'. And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did and then even the King. 

Self: 'The Desert', ma'am? Are you sure it wasn't called The Waste Land? 

Queen Elizabeth: That's it. I'm afraid we all giggled. Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn't understand a word. 

Self: I believe he did once work in a bank. 

It may well be that Mr Wilson writes everything down immediately afterwards, but for the sake of kindness, we should remember that there was a decade between his conversation with the Queen Mother and his writing it up. As the story she told took place during WWII, she was remembering something from forty years previously.

Fifty years in total, and two levels of remove. But it is an eyewitness account.

Let's look at the problems.

Assuming that A.N. Wilson is being word perfect, there are a few things in the Queen Mother's account that don't ring true. The first is misremembering the name "The Waste Land" as "The Desert". 

People rarely confuse synonyms when they misremember. If you can't quite remember the name of Kingsley Amis' first novel Lucky Jim, you might call it Lucky Him, or maybe Plucky Jim. But you wouldn't think it was called Fortuitous David. 

Here are some plausible, and implausible, misrememberings of names (I've just invented this list, but you'll see what I mean) 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 

Plausible: 

Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Gallows 

Implausible: 

Harry Potter and the Morbid Praises 

Sons and Lovers 

Plausible: 

Sons are Lovers 

Implausible: 

Offspring and Enthusiasts

Casablanca

Plausible: 

Casabianca

Implausible:

Rabat

Even though Rabat is another town in Morocco. 

Then you have the idea that a chap giving a performance to the Queen, the King and two princesses didn't look at them once. It would be extraordinary for T.S. Eliot to care so little about his audience. This seems suspicious.

It would also be quite odd for a couple of teenage girls of the 1940s to be laughing at a poem with a rather obvious reference to abortion, among other things. I've personally sat through some terribly boring and pretentious art events and I've certainly laughed about them afterwards, in the pub with a pint, but I can't recall a time that I've laughed the whole way through. The Waste Land is a long poem.

And then there's the question of why she thought he looked like a banker. T.S. Eliot had worked in a bank. That's a famous fact about a famous poet. But it would be hard to deduce from his face, or merely from his suit. 

But then there is the biggest problem of all. How did the Queen Mother remember all these little details, and not remember the central fact that she had had a private reading of The Waste Land from the most famous poet of the C20th? And, even more importantly, if this event had really meant so little to her WHY WAS SHE STILL TALKING ABOUT IT FORTY YEARS LATER?

If these were the words that the Queen Mother used, every one of them smells wrong.

Now, let's turn to the second problem. 

Why don't we have T.S. Eliot's version of the story? T.S. Eliot wrote letters about everything. He couldn't sneeze without writing to somebody about it. And yet... 

He's meant to have given a command performance to the Royal Family at Windsor Castle, and then forgotten about it. The story doesn't pop up in his letters, and it doesn't pop up in any of the biographies of him. 

Omission isn't a perfect historical guide. But that's a level of omission that should make you wonder. 

And now let's turn to the third point. (I feel there should be some drum roll here): the event was very well recorded by several eye-witnesses at the time. It occurred on the 14th of April, 1943. 

It just didn't happen how the Queen Mother said it did. In fact, it was almost the opposite.

T.S. Eliot did read to the Queen Mother and the princesses, but it wasn't at Windsor Castle, it was at the Aeolian Hall, a theatre near Bond Street. There twelve poets gave a recital to a packed audience. Let's start with the letter that Eliot did write about it (because Eliot couldn't sneeze without writing a letter about it). The letter is dated 26 April 1943.

The poetry recital consisted of twelve poets, all of us of the 'older generation', beginning with Masefield, each reading from our own works for six minutes. Most of them, I thought read rather badly; De la Mare, who read extremely well, yet did so in a voice which could hardly have penetrated beyond the first six rows. (Incidentally, I got high mark from the reporter of the 'Evening Standard'). It is very difficult to read for that length of time - one needs about that to get warmed to the task - but the last section of 'The Waste Land' just fitted the time well. It would not have done to give that audience anything at all new: they came to look at us and to hear how we recited, rather that from love of poetry; and it was a more or less fashionable audience, what with have the Queen there and all. We were presented during the interval; and in the second half of the programme I had to sit next to Princess Elizabeth. Bu there was no conversation; she didn't say anything, and I thought that perhaps she was getting too old to be addressed first. I wanted to say that I was as bored as she was: but that might not have been quite the right thing. I must say they were attentive; and as the Queen didn't have to make a speech, it was perhaps preferable from her point of view to opening a bazaar. I escaped the parties afterwards by having my fire watching duties....

So the Queen Mother had got the location wrong and the attendees wrong. No King. But might she have been right about she and the princesses getting the giggles during Eliot's performance?

Luckily we have four further eyewitness accounts. First, as Eliot said, the event was written up in the Evening Standard the next day. The article said that Eliot was the joint-best reader. But that wasn't the only newspaper report. A journalist from the Picture Post was there (who noted that "T.S. Eliot, too, can read poetry as well as recite it") but was much more interested in the watching the royals in the audience:

The Queen and the two Princesses listened intently right through the two-hour programme, and the audience sat in solemn reverence. 

The poet Edith Sitwell was also watching the royals. Afterwards she said that the princesses "sat very still in the front row and stared at one".

Harold Nicolson was there and watching. He was "impressed by Eliot's reading", but again no record of giggles. 

You can read the full texts of these accounts here.

If the princesses had been giggling in the front row, you can be sure that somebody would have noticed.

You can learn some important things about history here. A.N. Wilson's 1990 article was an eyewitness account of an eyewitness account. That's why it's repeated in lots of history books. But it's incorrect.

You wouldn't think it was incorrect, until you start sniffing. If you sniff, everything smells wrong. 

If you then check up, and - as I did - search every biography of T.S. Eliot for references to Windsor Castle, you get nothing. A strange omission.

If you check further... bingo.

And now, it is very important that you go and buy Rhyme & Reason: A Short History of Poetry and People (for People Who Don't Usually Read Poetry).

Banker

I Am Engaged

 

A fortnight ago, in a little break from launching Rhyme and Reason, I took a young lady for a walk in a woods, and returned with a muddy left knee and a fiancée. 

I have been told that it is important that I understand the meaning of this engagement. So I have checked up. Engagement is closely related to a mortgage (note the gage in both), and to a wager, which I would have suspected. The original sense was to pawn something, or offer it as a guarantee. 

By the 1600s it had become an obligation or an "encumbrance" according to the OED and referred to any debt or oath legal, moral or financial. Debts and duties get you tangled up in things, and so by 1642 an engagement could be defined as the fact of being entangled, and by 1665 two armies could get together in a military engagement and try to shoot each other.

In 1811 an engagement could mean a social appointment, as in otherwise engaged, or it could be a promise to pay (1849) or an appointment to a salaried post (1884). 

But to me, and to that young lady, engagement means all of these things at once.

I then discovered that an engagement can also be a formal promise to get married. I hadn't noticed this at first, as the meaning only really separated itself in the early nineteenth century. The lady then informed me of the existence of "engagement rings", which I hadn't heard of as the OED only records the term from 1861, and I'm bad at keeping up with the news. 

I tracked down their first citation for the word engagement ring, just to get myself up-to-date. It reads thus:

If a gentleman wants a wife, he wears a diamond ring on the first finger of the left hand; if he is engaged, he wears it on the second finger; if married, on the third; and on the fourth, if he never intends to be married. When a lady is not engaged, she wears a hoop or diamond on the first finger; if engaged, on the second finger; if married, on the third; and on the fourth, if she intends to live single. 

This paragraph has caused me much confusion, as I've noticed that my fiancée is already married and that I am no gentleman at all. 

I also suspect that, somehow, I'm owed a diamond ring. 

Releasing, Relaxing and Relishing Rhyme and Reason

 

People like to release animals. They release lions onto the savannah, or orcas into the ocean, or beavers into the wild, or organ-grinders' monkeys onto the street, or bulls into china-shops. 

But I like to release books. I like to think of them creeping, taking their first little steps, sniffing the air of the market place, and then galloping off into the wild, neighing proudly. This is why I have just released a new book: Rhyme and Reason: A Short History of Poetry and People (for People who don't Usually Read Poetry). It's the best book I've written, and it is even now crawling timidly around the bookshops of Britain.

The English word release comes from the French relasser, which meant something like relinquish, abandon, leave behind. This seems strangely appropriate, as it really is what we do with tigers and orcas and books about the history of English poetry. It is mine no more. It is gone. The writing is done. The bull belongs to the china-shop now, and not to me any more. 

Relasser comes from the Latin verb relaxare which meant, unsurprisingly, to relax, to loosen, to stretch out, which is what I am doing now, because relaxing and releasing are, etymologically, the same thing.

All that is left is a taste, a scent of what I have done. And relaxare gave us a word for that too. The French took the word twice, and the second time they made it into relais, which is in the name of various restaurants like Le Relais de Venise, which means the taste of Venice. But relais sounded too French, so we changed it to relish. Then we made it a verb. So that Shakespeare could have this lovely bit in Two Gentlemen of Verona, when one character asks another how he knows that he's been secretly in love:

Marry, by these special marks: first, you have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms, like a malecontent; to relish a love-song, like a robin-redbreast; to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence; to sigh, like a school-boy that had lost his A B C; to weep, like a young wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch like one that fears robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas.

Then in around 1800 we began to call sauces relishes, and then I decided to relish a relaxing release of my new book (Did I mention it? I forget) and it all relates, etymologically, to the word laxative.

Not that I'm relaxing entirely. In fact, I shall be hot-footing it up to Glasgow on the 15th of November to talk at the Aye Write Festival. If you'd like to come along, there's a link here.

And on the 17th of November I shall be at Serenity Booksellers in Stockport, tickets are available here. 

And anybody can of course purchase Rhyme and Reason. It is, I hear, the perfect Christmas present, pre-Christmas present, birthday present, and generally, it's very presentable. 

You can buy it at your local bookshop, or you can get it online here. 

The Inky Fool attempts a book-signing

Countries Named After People

 

Distinctly tropical

I recently discovered that the Seychelles were named after Jean Moreau de Séchelles, a Frenchman, who never set his gallic, garlicky, eyes upon the islands that bear his name. 

The Seychelles were named in his honour because he happened to be the minister of finance when the islands were acquired by France in 1756. He had been in the post for a whole two years, and then he had a stroke and was replaced. His life was not extraordinary or eminent and yet he is on the map. He is a sovereign state. He has a seat at the UN. 

Anyway, I thought I'd make a list of countries that are named after people. 

There needs to be a caveat that there are a fair few countries that are sort of reverse-named. For example, the Czechs invented a mythical chieftain to explain their name. It's not the mythicism that I object to, only that that's not the origin. Similarly, everybody agrees that Ireland comes from a word meaning fertile, it was much later that as fertility goddess was invented as an origin myth.

All of the following were deliberately named after somebody, even if that somebody might not have existed. For example, the biblical King Solomon may not have existed, but the Solomon Islands are definitely named after him. 

I'll group them by the nationality of the person after whom they are named:

Spaniards:

The Dominican Republic is named after Dominic de Guzman, better known as Saint Dominic. He was born in Caleruega in Northern Spain in 1170 and founded the Dominican Order of monks. The capital, Santo Domingo is also named after him. Dominic moved to Bologna in 1218 and died there a few years later. His bones are in a church in Italy, his name is in the Caribbean.

The Philippines were named in 1542 after Philip II of Spain. He enjoyed a bloody mary, who was Queen of England at the time. But they didn't have any children. 

St Vincent and the Grenadines is (are?) named after Saint Vincent of Saragossa, whose feast day it happened to be when Columbus found the place. St Vincent was born in Huesca in Northern Spain in the third century AD and gruesomely martyred. If you enjoy ogling left arms, his is on display in Lisbon Cathedral. If you enjoy throwing live goats out of church towers (and who doesn't, secretly?), then that used to be the way they celebrated St Vincent's day in the town of Manganeses de la Polvorosa. 

Israel/Palestine/Judea

El Salvador is named after the saviour of us all, Jesus of Nazareth. There's a whole book full of amusing facts about him that you can get in bookshops and churches. So I shall move on.

Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidad is Spanish for Trinity, which is the composed of God the Father, the Holy Spirit (both of whom are of No Fixed Abode), and Jesus of Nazareth (see above). Tobago is probably named after tobacco, which was smoked there. So the name is really Trinity and Tobacco, which makes it sounds rather like a church that sells cigarettes on the side.

Antigua just means 'old' in Spanish. Columbus named it after the chapel of Santa Maria de la Antigua (Old Saint Mary) in Seville Cathedral, or possibly after the mural there of the same name. Mary was the mother of Jesus and terribly popular, I wrote about her here. 

St Kitts and Nevis. We'll start with Nevis, which sounds like an English surname, but is in fact a church in Rome. It's a corruption of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves meaning Our Lady of the Snows. There's a very iffy legend that the church of Santa Maria Maggiore was founded in the fourth century after an August snowfall on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. Why you'd name an island after a church named after a meteorological oddity, I do not know. But we'll chalk it up as another one for the Virgin Mary. 

St Kitts was named San Cristobal by Columbus, and it would have stayed that way, but the English took it over and translated San Cristobal to Saint Christopher. They then got very familiar and called it St Kitts. St Christopher was an early Christian martyr and lived with the burden of probably not existing. His name just means Christ-carrier, so you could almost chalk him up as another score for Jesus. According to legend, he was a Canaanite, which is why he's in this section.

São Tomé and Príncipe was named by the Portuguese after St Thomas the apostle, of doubtful reputation. The Principe bit was after Afonso, Prince of Portugal, who died aged 16 in a horsey accident. 

The Solomon Islands were named that by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. It is unclear why, but it seems certain that they are named after the Israelite king who probably flourished in the early tenth century. 

Italians

St Lucia is named after Saint Lucy of Syracuse, which is in Sicily. If she existed, she was a virgin and martyr under the Diocletian persecution, just like St Vincent. By coincidence, her body, for a while, was, allegedly, kept in the church of St Vincent in Metz. It's like a get-together. The island was named by Spanish sailors, nobody's sure when.

The United States of America are named after Amerigo Vespucci. Well the 'America' bit is, and that's good enough for me. Amerigo Vespucci was an early Italian explorer, who himself named Venezuela after Venice, because of the obvious similarities. I wrote about him here. 

Colombia is named after Christopher Columbus. It didn't get that name till the C19th, and Christopher Columbus never visited the place. So the namer of so many islands, has become the name of the mainland.

Bolivia is named after Simon Bolivar, the revolutionary leader. In fact, it was originally the Republic of Bolivar, but they changed their minds a couple of months later. Bolivar was still alive and had visited the place. 

British

The Marshall Islands are named after Captain John Marshall from Ramsgate in Kent. He and his friend Captain Thomas Gilbert were part of the First Fleet taking convicts to the brand new penal colony of Australia in 1788. Afterwards they decided to do a little exploring on the way to China. John Marshall tried to name some islands Lord Mulgrove's Range, but somehow they ended up being named after him. 

Kiribati. Meanwhile Thomas Gilbert named the Gilbert islands. The Gilbert islands have inhabitants who's language is called Gilbertese, and the way you pronounce Gilbert in Gilbertese is Kiribass, and you spell it (for some reason) Kiribati. So the nation is named after Gilbert, you just wouldn't know it. 

Dutch/Deutsch

Mauritius was an uninhabited (if not undiscovered) island that was grabbed by the Dutch in 1598 and named after their king: Maurice, Prince of Orange. I'm going to put him down as German because he was born in Dillenburg, which is firmly inside Germany. He did, though, drive the Spanish out of the Netherlands, which makes him rather cosmopolitan. Ultimately, his name derives from Morocco and Mauritania, which I explained in detail here. 

He never visited Mauritius.

Croatian

Once upon a Roman time there was a stonemason called Marinus who lived on the island of Rab in what's now Croatia. Like St Vincent and Saint Lucy he fled the Diocletian persecution in the late 3rd century, but for some reason he decided to flee to Italy and found a monastery, which seems a trifle foolhardy.

Many historians doubt his existence. But the site of his monastery is now the microstate of San Marino.

Omani

There's a tiny little island off Mozambique called Mozambique. The Portuguese liked it so much that they named the mainland after it. But the island itself was called that because, when Vasco de Gama arrived there in 1498, it was ruled by an Omani merchant called Mussa Bin Bique. 

Eswatini

King Mswati II (1820ish to 1865) did an awful lot of military stuff against neighbouring tribes. The country he created was called Swaziland, and is now called Eswatini. 

Peruvian

Peru was named after a chap called Biru, who may have been a regional king. However, one version of the story was that he was a perfectly ordinary local chap whom the Spanish conquistadors mistakenly thought was a king when they arrived in 1522. I prefer the latter version of the story.

And there we have it. The least controversial blog post to mention Israel and Palestine this week. Only two people were natives of the country named after them. Jesus and his mum are tied as most influential with two countries each. And Biru, or whoever he was, lives on.

And of course, Rhyme and Reason, my BRAND NEW BOOK comes out on Thursday. You can order it here. 

It's a Bloody Mary morning

Wilfred Owen and Jessie Pope: A Much Maligned Lady

 

More maligned than malignant

I've been writing a new book: a short, simple, light-hearted history of English poetry. And I've nearly finished. It ought to be out by Christmas and will probably be called Rhyme and Reason, although things are still to be finally decided.

While writing, I've found several things that won't fit in the book, but which, having done all the research I thought I'd put on record; and this neglected blog seems just the place to do that.

Today, for example, I've been chasing down something that I thought I knew about Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. 

I remember being taught this poem at prep school, where Mr Wincott told the class that there was a lady poet in London who was writing verses telling people that it's "sweet and good to die for your country", or to use Horace's original Latin: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. 

Wilfred Owen's poem, we were told, was a brutal riposte from the actual soldiers - those who had fought and suffered - against the jingoistic women of London who were handing out white feathers and saying that war was lovely. 

I had a brief glance at Wikipedia, which told me that this was completely true, that the poet's name was Jessie Pope, and that the first draft of the poem was explicitly dedicated to her. The dedication was then changed to "a certain poetess", and finally dropped. 

So I thought that it would be jolly good for my book to print one of her poems next to his. Some of Jessie Pope's verses are available on the Internet, but they're all light-hearted rhymes and none of them fitted the bill. So I strolled over to the British Library this morning and got out Jessie Pope's War Poems (1915).

I've just finished reading the whole thing (it's not long) and there's absolutely nothing about it being sweet and good to die for your country. The rhymes are patriotic and encouraging: yes. They're very anti-German, but in a light-hearted sort of way, and there's actually one poem praising the a particularly honourable German naval captain called Karl Von Muller, in limerick form. 

But sweet and good to die for your country? Or anything like that? It's not there.

The last poem in the book is the most serious, and the closest I could find to anything like dulce etc. But it doesn't say that death is sweet. It simply mourns a soldier dead. Here it is [click to enlarge]:

Perhaps, I thought, it was another lady poet, and Wilfred Owen had got confused. So then I started trying to track the phrase in any poem from the relevant period. I found it. Twice. 

There are two poems praising dying for your country both titled Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori. And they both fit the bill perfectly.

The first is from 1916 and can be read here. 

The second is from 1917 and can be read here. 

But here's the thing. Both of those poems are by actual soldiers: Major Sydney Oswald and Corporal Harold John Jarvis. They're not by jingoistic women back home who Don't Understand War. They're by serving men who definitely do. 

What happened to the idea of the soldiers all being disgusted by Jessie Pope?

Jessie Pope's War Poems actually starts with a fan letter from a soldier reprinted in facsimile. Or it says it does. Here is the frontispiece:

The writing is pretty hard to decipher; but, after close inspection:

Dear Sir,

Some days ago I saw in your Continental edition some verses by Jessie Pope entitled "NO"

I would be very glad if you could send a marked copy of your English edition with those verses in it to 

Mrs Knight

3 Horsleigh Villa's

Star Lane 

Ash. Surrey

The verses were much admired by us all out here & I want you to send them to my wife for me, as they will be such a "buck up" for her, and bucking up means so much to those at home as well as for us. Really, they need it more, as after all, theirs is the most wearying suspense. 

I enclose you a couple of stamps I bought from home in payment, and at last find them useful. 

If you will do this for me I shall be very grateful

Yours faithfully

Syd G Knight [illegible]

I was immediately suspicious. It all looked too good for Jessie Pope. Was this just a sales ploy on the part of the publisher? Did a Syd G Knight of Surrey even exist? 

I decided to check up.

He did exist. And he made it to the rank of major. What's more he won the Military Cross. He survived the war and died in 1950. He was cremated in Woking (as mentioned in the Aldershot News). 

So what happens to the idea of Wilfred Owen speaking for all the Tommies against the women of London?

Well, he thought he was doing so. But he seems to have been entirely mistaken. The tommies liked Jessie Pope, and though there were poems claiming it was sweet and good to die for your country, they were written by soldiers. 

Why Wilfred Owen thought that about Jessie Pope, I don't know. But he was wrong.

My chapter on War Poetry just got a bit shorter, which is probably a good thing.

Here, by the way, is that poem that Sydney G Knight wanted his wife to read.

A Riddle for a King

 

I've a written a new book. It's a children's book and it's called A Riddle for a King. It's suitable for those aged between about eight and twelve, although it has been rigorously tested on children from six to thirteen (I test all my products on children and animals). The six-year-old had to have it read to him, but he loved it. 

The story is about a boy called Philo, who goes to a magical land filled with logical paradoxes because I've always loved paradoxes. For millennia philosophers have been inventing hypothetical situations in which logic would break down; I pocketed them all and put them in a story. 

A Riddle for a King was The Times Children's Book of the Week, and, though I say it myself but shouldn't, it's wonderfully wonderful.

There isn't much etymology in it. But there is one little titbit. 

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias often contain fake words and entries. This means that if somebody just copies your reference work wholesale, you can catch them at it. These traps are called Mountweazels, named after a famous fictitious entry in New Columbia Encyclopaedia of 1975. The entry described a lady photographer called Lillian Mountweazel who had died in an explosion while on an assignment for Combustibles magazine. 

One such Mountweazel was the word esquivalience, which was included in the New Oxford American Dictionary. They defined the word as "the wilful avoidance of one's official duties". 

Then they waited.

Beautifully, the word then turned up on dictionary.com and in Google Dictionary. 

So esquivalience was a fictional word. But there is no such thing as fiction, there are only facts that aren't true yet; which is why, at the climax of my novel, at the great moment of emotional redemption and revelation, there's the line:

From this day forth I shall do what I’m meant to do. I shall perform my kingly tasks. I shall stop shirking my duties. I shall stop my . . . esquivalience!’

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

So, buy the book instantly by following this link. It also appeals to childish adults.

I don't want to make you tense, but in the future this will be the perfect present.

The Gift of Thrift

 

Start with something simple. We've got the verb give, which we all know, and the thing that you give is a gift. They're quite obviously related. This is Not Interesting.

Then you've got people who use the word gift as a verb, as in "I gifted it to him." That's a bit odd because it's verb to noun to verb again. But it's still pretty obvious.

Then you have the verb drive. And when the wind drives the snow into a pile that is a snowdrift, because the thing you drive is a drift. And when the wind and the waves drive a ship from its course, that movement is called the drift.

And then the noun drift can get turned into a verb and the boat starts drifting. It is the gift that keeps gifting.

And then you've got the verb thrive, meaning to prosper, flourish and generally quomodocunquize. And from that you get the noun thrift, but only because thrift used to mean wealth. Then its meaning wandered until it meant savings, and then the foolish habit of saving money, which is thrifty.

(I should point out that I always save all my money for a rainy day, but I live in England, so my savings don't last long.)

But that's why we still have spendthrift meaning someone who spends all their fortune.

And then you have sieve and sift, which has also been re-verbed to mean exactly the same thing. And just as gift relates to given and drift to driven, so rift relates to riven (although the connection there is much further back in the Norse). And even swift is related to swivel. The verb in between was swive/swifan which just meant to move. But then it became the standard medieval term for to have sex with, as in:

'For John,' said he, 'als ever moot I thrive, 

If that I may, yon wenche will I swive.

Swive was a bit rude, even then, and has since vanished, but swift and swivel remain. 

It's a bit like how true relates to truth, just as rue relates to ruth. Ruth is the opposite of ruthless. But we don't use ruth anymore, largely because Milton used it in the line:

Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth

And that's so beautiful that nobody will ever better it; even though, to modern ears, it sounds like an invitation from a woman with a raclette*. 

That's it. That's what I was driving at, if you catch my drift.

A bit rude

*Ruth's cooking is very interesting, partially because she uses alien corn.

Today is Mayday

 

Today is the first of May, or that's what Shakespeare thought, as did all proper Englishmen. May, for him, ran from May 11th to June 10th. 

The reason for this is reasonably simple. 

Ancient folk noticed that there were 365 days in a year. This allowed for calendars etc. Life was simple.

Then Ancient Romans noticed that this wasn't quite right. In fact, there were 365 and a quarter days in a year. That's how long it takes for the earth to go round the sun once.

So Julius Caesar decreed that everyone should have a new calendar with an extra day every four years. This is pretty familiar stuff: it's February 29th, a leap year.

Because the calendar was decreed by Julius, it got called the Julian Calendar. Life was simple again for a millennium and a half.

Then Renaissance Italians noticed that, in fact, a year was 365 and just less than a quarter days. This upset them terribly. 

The reason they were so terribly upset was that religious festivals. Christmas is meant to happen on the exact anniversary of Christ's birth. The same went Epiphany and Assumption and Annunciation, not to mention all the Saints' Days. Th dating of Easter was also terribly complicated, but terribly important.

The Renaissance Italians realised that they had been celebrating everything on the Wrong Day. That's because the day-calendar had been slipping out of sync with the solar-calendar. Not by much, mind you. Only by one day every century and a half. But as this had been going on for a millennium and a half, it meant that everything was wrong by ten days. 

So Pope Gregory decreed a new calendar where a leap day is missed out every century or so. And he also decreed that we had to get everything back to it's proper anniversary. So on October the 4th 1582, he announced that tomorrow would be October the 15th.

Thus all of Catholic Europe moved forward ten days, and called the new system the Gregorian Calendar.

But England was Protestant, and we were very suspicious. We decided that all this looked very like a dastardly Catholic plot and that we weren't going to fall for it, and Brexit meant Brexit, and we were quite happy with the old system, thank you very much.

So you had the odd situation of a ten day gap between England and Europe. When, it was May 1st in Dover, it was May 11th in Calais, even though France is (alas) only 26 miles away. 

This had all sorts of odd effects. One is the belief that Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day. In a way they did. They both died on April 23rd 1616. It's just that that wasn't the same day. April 23rd was really May 3rd, or perhaps the other way around.

It does mean, though that Shakespeare's May was a lot merrier than ours. It skipped out early May, which is cold, and added in early June. If you are in England now, you'll notice that trees are much leafier than that they were ten days ago. So all his references to sun and flowers and darling buds of May, are a little bit off.

It also means that Chaucer's April was a lot more springlike that our is, and that December was a lot colder, because it contained what we'd call early January (which is when Christmas was).

This whole amusing situation lasted until 1752, when Britain finally capitulated and joined the Gregorian Catholics. That in turn really pissed off our colonists in North America, and caused the American revolution.

Well, not quite. But it was a small contributing factor. America was a lot more puritan and anti-catholic that Britain was. So if you were a Puritan farmer in Massachusetts, and you were already annoyed about being ruled by people thousands of miles away, forcing silly laws on you without so much as a 'by your leave', then it didn't help. And it was, for years, a contentious bone.

And the Russian Orthodox Church is still on the Julian calendar, which is why they have their Christmas in what we call January. This even caused some kerfuffle in Ukraine, with people undecided about whether to use the Western date or the Russian (boo!) one.

Midsummer Night's Dream actually takes place on the night of April 30/May 1st. When Theseus finds the young lovers he says:

No doubt they rose up early to observe

The rite of May, and hearing our intent,

Came here in grace of our solemnity.

And today is the day. Today is Mayday. And the distress call MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! is just the French way of saying 'Help me!'

M'AIDEZ! M'AIDEZ! M'AIDEZ!

The Inky Fool responds to the fuel crisis.

P.S. Obviously this could all have been solved if we'd just used Stone Henge, which marks the solar year. So, really, the English were right all along.

The Illustrated Etymologicon

 

It is of immense importance to absolutely everyone that The Illustrated Etymologicon is now published, out, in the shops, for sale, and begging to be bought. 

It's the same text as the original Etymologicon, but now filled, on each and every page, with delicious illustrations. 

Is is therefore illustrious.

Illustrious and illustration both come from the Latin illustratus which meant lit up. In English the word illustration came first, and it meant to teach by means of examples, shedding light upon an abstract subject. 

The Illustrated Etymologicon is therefore both illuminating and illuminated, enlightening and enlightened. It is, if you like, an illuminated manuscript. 

The book is available in most English speaking territories, and in the lost former colony of the USA it can still be obtained by ordering it from The Book Depository.

Incidentally, the mini in miniature has nothing whatsoever to do with the mini in minute or minimum or miniskirt. In Medieval illuminated manuscripts there were little pictures painted by little monks. These pictures were often painted using red lead or minium. Because of that the verb for painting little pictures was miniare. And because of that the little pictures were called miniatures. The word then got applied to anything small. 

Anyhow, all your Christmas presents are going to be this:

Epistrophe

 I've done another little video essay with the splendid people at Little White Lies. It's about the rhetorical trope of epistrophe. 

And, just to end every blogpost with the same words, The Illustrated Etymologicon is coming out in November. 

Pancallistic

 

Pancallism is the belief that everything is beautiful, or at least everything that exists, which is quite a lot of things. 

The idea, occurred to some medieval scholastic philosophers. Their reasoning went roughly like this. 

God exists. 

Existence is one of the features of God. 

All the features of God are beautiful. 

Hence existence is a kind of beauty.

I exist. 

Therefore, I must be beautiful. 

This is the sort of positive thinking that makes Medieval philosophy such fun; I expect it's also an extremely effective argument to put on your internet dating profile. 

I came across the word pancallistic (the adjective) while reading Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages by Umberto Eco. The book's a little dry, but it's beautifully short. 

The etymology, by the way is Greek. Pan means everything, as in a pandemic which is a disease that has spread to all the people. The demic there is the same as democracy, which is government by the people. 

The callism bit comes from kalos, which meant beautiful and is the same root that you get when looking a pretty things in a kaleidoscope, or admiring somebody who is callipygian.

Since you ask, callipygian means possessing a beautiful bottom, and is also a very useful word to use on your internet dating profile, I expect.

The Inky Fool discussing Medieval aesthetics.

 P.S. Another thing that exists and is beautiful is The Illustrated Etymologicon, which will be released on November the fourth. 

Flying Saucers, Pelicans, Prisons and Albatrosses

 

Today is, of course, the 74th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting. The event is celebrated by lexicographers everywhere because it gave the English language two new terms: flying saucer and pelicanist.

Kenneth Arnold was a businessman and aviator who, on June 24th 1947, saw nine thingummybobs flying past Mount Ranier in Washington State at over a thousand miles an hour. Or, he says he saw them. This blog post will not answer the great question as to whether extraterrestrial life visits earth, because, though I know the answer, I'm not telling.

The question as to who first called these thingummybobs flying saucers is rather vexed. Kenneth Arnold says that he didn't use the term, that he only said that the motion of their flight resembled a saucer being skipped across the surface of a lake. However, there was a journalist who insisted that Arnold said the objects looked like saucers, and the term could have been invented by any of a hundred headline writers who wrote about the Great Event.

(Incidentally, I have skipped a lot of stones across lakes, but never a saucer. I've never even heard of somebody skipping a saucer across a lake, and can only dream of having that much redundant crockery. We all need a dream.)

However it happened, and whoever said what, the term flying saucer came into being as a result of this event 74 years ago today. 

Of course, there were naysayers. There were those who said that the flying saucers were, in fact, clouds, or very distant mountain tops, or very near drops of water on the windows of Mr Arnold's own aircraft, or pelicans.

The pelican theory is curious. Pelicans are large birds. Their wingspans can be over three metres (ten feet). But they don't really resemble saucers and they don't fly at over a thousand miles an hour unless they're in the most terrible hurry.

The pelican theory is a bit silly. It attempts to explain away a not-that-believable story with an even less likely one. It would be a lot simpler to suggest that Mr Arnold imagined the whole thing. The pelicans are unlikely, and if I have learned anything in this life, it is that one should never rely on an unlikely pelican.

So silly is the pelican idea, that flying saucer enthusiasts coined the term pelicanist for those who would explain away all sightings with unlikely substitutes. By extension the word can be used for anybody who proposes a preposterous but naturalistic explanation for an inexplicable event.

(Incidentally, and without wanting to sidetrack myself, there's a lot of pelicanism when it comes to Shakespeare. The (idiotic) theory that William Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare often runs something along the lines of "no man could never have written something so wonderful, that's simply not believable; so it must have been written by someone else").

Anyway, there are a lot of pelicans on the west coast of America. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the bay of St Francis they found an island absolutely covered with them. So they named it Pelican Island. Except being Spaniards they did it all in Spanish. And that's why San Francisco bay contains the island of Alcatraz, because alcatraz is just Spanish for pelican. It comes from the Arabic al ghattas meaning sea-eagle.

The English used to use the word alcatras, largely because pelicans aren't native to Britain so we might as well use the Spanish word. However, we never seemed to be entirely sure what an alcatras was. The OED lists alcatras as an English word, or at least a word used by the English, but one of the definitions is "Perhaps: an albatross".

This makes perfect sense because albatross is simply an alternative way of pronouncing alcatraz. Pelicans and albatrosses are both huge nautical birds, and could quite forgivably be mistaken for each other. This means that they are unidentified flying objects.

Of course, the albatross/alcatraz/alcatras has earned an immortal place in English literature:

A gorgeous bird is the pelican,

Whose beak will hold more than his bellican.

He can put in his beak

Food enough for a week.

But I’m damned if I see how in hellecan.

The Inky Fool was in a terrible hurry

P.S. The proximate cause of this post was The Times Crossword on Tuesday. The clue for 1 across was:

1 Pelican that's not more, unfortunately right after feline enters (8)

right after feline = cat r

that enters the word alas, which means unfortunately.

You get al-catr-as

Which is an obsolete synonym for pelican.

The Etymological Week

 

The week is a curious thing: the division of our lives into a revolving, unfinishing cycles of seven days. Especially as seven days bears no relation to anything at all. 

Some people, rather foolishly, think that seven days is a quarter of the lunar cycle: seven days from new moon to half full, another week to full, another week waning to half, and another week until it disappears. But there's a problem. This system is two days out. Four weeks is 28 days, and a lunar cycle lasts 30 days.

This means that the two systems go out of sync very quickly, and after only seven months they are as far as could possibly be. Time is a useful thing, because we use it. If I lend you some money and want it back after seven moons, we need to both agree on what that means. If one of us is counting 28 weeks and the other is watching the sky, there is liable to be a fight. 

Anyhow, I've been reading The Week: An essay on the origin and development of the seven-day cycle by F.H. Colson. It has been something of a revelation.

The week began with the Jews. Efforts to backdate it to Babylon are implausible, largely for the reasons given above. Whatever you may think of the first chapter of the book of Genesis (and opinions, I'm told, vary), the Jews had been resting every seventh day since at least the first half of the first millennium BC. And the Romans thought this was amazing, and weird and crazy.

The Romans looked at the Jews rather in the way that some modern Westerners look at Tibet or India. The Jews were eastern and mysterious and they had this mysterious ancient religion, which was really ancient, and probably contained some really profound kind of ancient wisdom that was really ancient.

So just as rich bored Londoners can suddenly get really keen on some ancient Tibetan practice as a bit of a fad, so the rich bored Roman could bore everybody at the dinner party about how he had taken up resting on the seventh day, and it had really grounded him, and you should try it yourself, because those Jews are just so, so ancient. And did you know they don't have statues of their god because it's a really spiritual religion?

Juvenal made fun of such people in his 14th Satire, although his main target was idle people who do things just because they're fashionable, and then get Much Too Into It. You start with the faddish Sabbath and the new-fangled seven-day week, and the you get carried away, and so do your children.

Some who have had a father who reveres the Sabbath, worship nothing but the clouds, and the divinity of the heavens, and see no difference between eating swine's flesh, from which their father abstained, and that of man; and in time they take to circumcision. Having been wont to flout the laws of Rome, they learn and practise and revere the Jewish law, and all that Moses committed to his secret tome, forbidding to point out the way to any not worshipping the same rites, and conducting none but the circumcised to the desired fountain. For all which the father was to blame, who gave up every seventh day to idleness, keeping it apart from all the concerns of life.

Resting every seven days is a gateway drug.

The important thing here is that the seven-day week spread through the Roman Empire before Christianity did. The Christians existed at the time, but they were still a tiny little sect. The Romans were still basically interested in pagan gods and astrology.

The Romans loved astrology and did everything according to the Seven Planets, which wandered across the sky. So far as the Roman were concerned there were the Fixed Stars (all those ones in the background that never move in relation to each other), and then there were seven things visible with the naked eye that wandered around. They were the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These were wandering stars and in Latin each one was a stella errans, but the Greeks were still around and still speaking Greek and the Greek for wanderers is planetes. Hence planet, which just means wanderer.

Pluto may not be a planet, but the sun is. 

So you've got the seven day week and seven planets so of course you put them together. Saturnday, Sunday, Moonday etc. That way you could have an Astrological Week, and if you were planning to start a war or fall in love you could find the Right Day To Do It. The full Latin week went like this:

Sunday = dies Solis = Sun/solar = Apollo

Monday = dies Lunae = Moon/lunar = changeable 

Tuesday = dies Martis = Mars/Martian = God of War = martial as in court martial

Wednesday = dies Mercurii = Mercury = mercurial, ephemeral

Thursday = dies Iovis = Jove/Jupiter = jovial

Friday = dies Veneris = Venus goddess of love = to venerate of love something/venereal disease

Saturday = dies Saturni = Saturn = unlucky/miserable/saturnine

The Romans loved their astrological week and even tried to apply it retrospectively to the Jews, who obviously didn't do anything on Saturday because Saturn was unlucky. You can still see the Tuesday to Friday gods in French and Spanish

Mardi Martes Mars

Mercredi Miercoles Mercury

Jeudi Jueves Jove

Vendredi Viernes Venus

And, weirdly enough, all the Roman names survive in Welsh: Dydd-sull, -llun, -marwth, -mercher, -iou, -gwener, -sadwrn.

When the Christians came along they obviously tried to Christianise things. Saturday was the sabbath and Sunday was the Lord's Day, thus the Spanish Sabado and Domingo. But the week spread much faster than Christianity did. It arrived in Northern Europe while they were still pagan. That's why in English (and German) the days were passed over to equivalent pagan gods. 

Mars was identified with the Germanic god Tyw (who's actually etymologically related to Zeus and Jove), hence Tuesday.

Mercury was identified with Wodin (whom you've heard of from the Vikings) hence Wednesday.

Thor and Jupiter were both Thunder-Gods, so Jove's Day became Thor's Day/Thursday in English. But in German they're more direct and just call it Donnerstag, which literally means Thunder Day. 

(That's the same Donner that you get in the reindeer names Donner and Blitzen, which mean thunder and lightning, which is why the German army's tactic of lightning warfare, was called the blitzkrieg, or just the blitz, which I like to think of as London being attacked by flying reindeer.)

Venus was identified with the female goddess Frigg, hence Friday.

The Northern Europeans didn't use the planets because they weren't into astrology, because it's much too cloudy round these parts. In England you can detect the sun occasionally, in Wales never. The other planets might as well not exist.

But the week was just popular. It spread northward even without planets to pull it there. It is strange to think that there is no seven-day week in Homer, nor in any of the Greek dramatists; and strange to think that this arbitrary seven day cycle has been running without pause for at least two and half thousand years, probably much longer. 

It is also strange to think that two thousand years ago people thought that there was a correct day of the week to be in love, as though from Saturday to Thursday you might be quite icy and indifferent and then suddenly perk up on the day of Venus. We moderns would never, ever have such a silly idea. 

Shires, Counties, Counts and Sheriffs

 

The nomenclature of England is a foggy thing, cunningly designed to confuse foreigners, who will wonder, in their simple foreign way, why they're consuming a Devonshire cream tea in Devon, why an earl's wife is a countess, why Nottingham had a sheriff, and why the Welsh Marches rather than march.

Thank God that I'm an Englishman, and was therefore born confused, rather than having to become so, like a mere Frenchman.

The explanation though is reasonably simple. 

Once upon an Old English time there were shires: Hampshire, Wiltshire, Nottinghamshire etc. The Anglo-Saxons lived in these and kept the Hobbit population under control. 

Each shire was ruled for the king by a shire-official, or shire-reeve, or scir-gerefa, or sheriff. That's why there was a Sheriff of Nottingham. He would, in fact, have been sheriff of Nottinghamshire. 

The Sheriff was therefore an Important Chap, and the Old English word for an Important Chap was an Eorl, or Earl. 

Then, in 1066, the Normans invaded and Frenchified everything. The Normans like their faluting to be high and their pants to be fancy, so they decided to call Shires by the Latinate word county. 

The head of a county should of course have been called a Count, but he was already being called an Earl and it was hard to change. 

Therefore a Norman might consider himself to be the Count of the County around Oxford, but the peasants all called him the Earl of Oxfordshire. The peasants won in the end, because they were speaking English, which is a much better language than all the others.

So that's why England has counties but not counts; the counts became earls, because that's what the peasants called them. But the wives of the counts never went near the peasants at all, and that's why they're still called countesses.

The wonderful English language had, of course, to be protected from its natural enemies like the Scots who wanted to pronounce every vowel as "ae", and the Welsh, who had a language based entirely on cheating at Scrabble. To do this there were particularly militant border counties called Marches. 

An earl in one of these shires could have called himself the count of the county, but he preferred to sound all military and tough and point out that he ran a march. So he called himself a Marquis and he called his wife a marchioness. 

A March, by the way, has nothing to do with marching, but it is vaguely related to a bookmark as they both mark your place. Moreover, counts don't count. 

Earl Dracula

N.B. I have slightly simplified history so that it conforms more perfectly to etymology. Truth is far preferable to fact. The facts are rarely elegant, and should therefore be ignored.

Apple M[a]cIntosh

 

The original logo

There's a website where you can buy an Apple Macintosh for 40p. Well, in fact, you can buy three for £1.20. That amounts to the same thing. Also, it's not really an Apple Macintosh, it's a McIntosh Apple; but the one is named after the other.

Back in 1811 a Canadian fellow called John McIntosh started selling a new cultivar of apple, which became known as the McIntosh apple. It is, apparently, a tasty apple. I'm not sure I've ever eaten one but it's one of the top fifteen apple varieties in the United States, so it's got to be all right.

Many years later, there was a man called Steve Jobs who ate a lot of fruit. One day, whilst on a fruitarian diet, he visited an apple farm (presumably he was hungry), and decided that "apple" would be a good name for the new electonic gizmo and fizzbang company that he was starting. 

(N.B. There's a myth that it's named after that apple that was found at the scene of the [alleged] suicide of Alan Turing, but that's not true.)

Anyway, there was now a company called Apple, named after apples, and it had employees, including a chap called Jef Raskin. Jef Rasking liked apples as well as working for Apple, and his absolute favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh Apple, so he picked it as the name for the new computer they were working on.

Unfortunately for Jef there was already a tech company called McIntosh Laboratory Inc, and so they had to alter the spelling, and that is how Mr McIntosh's apple became the Apple Macintosh.

Grows on trees.

The Meaning of Pasta

 

The Italian for a butterfly is a farfalla, and so the pasta that looks like a butterfly is called farfalle. One can think of this as beautiful, or one can think of a plate heaped high with dead butterflies. The choice is yours.

It's a lot better than thinking of linguine as a plateful of little tongues, which is rather horrid. Linguine is a diminutive, as is spaghetti. The Italian for string is spago; the diminutive form, the little string, is a spaghetto; and the plural is spaghetti. 

Vermicelli are little worms. Orrecchiette are severed ears (well, I assume they're severed, as otherwise there'd be a head on the plate). Fettuccine are pleasanter, they're little ribbons. 

Pasta, of course, is just a paste, a dough. It's the same paste that your find in pastels and pasties and impasto paintings. If you mash up a genre into a paste, you get a pastiche.

It can be rather fun to think of linguine al'arrabiata as little tongues in angry sauce, or it can put you right off your meal. As an Englishman, I feel that these Italian secrets should be kept in Italy; they might give me nightmares; so I shall stick to eating good British toad-in-the-hole. 

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears because I'm hungry.

Omega and Big Charlie

 

Tall?

Sometimes an etymology is so obvious that I can't believe that I've never noticed it, and I marvel at my own duncedom.

The Greek letter omega, as in alpha and omega, was just the big O, the mega-O, O-mega. The shorter O in the Greek alphabet is called called omicron, or small O. 

I am/was able to recite the whole Greek alphabet, and I had never noticed.

Another hidden big is Charlemagne, who wasn't really called Charlemagne. He was just a big Charlie. Well, to be precise he was Carl the Great, that was written in Latin as Carolus Magnus and that ended up as Charlemagne. 

Big Charlie was the son of Pepin the Short, who is still just known as Pepin the Short. Oddly enough Pepin the Short wasn't actually short; he just had short hair. But that will never change the way I think of him, just as I shall always think of John of Gaunt as a pale, bony man. 

Pepin the Short's dad was Charles Martel, except he wasn't really. He was called Charles, and he was nicknamed The Hammer, which, in French, is martel. His influence lives on in the work of the modern poet Stanley Kirk Burrell, who is almost universally known as MC Hammer. 

MC is short for Master of Ceremonies. As as shortening it's first recorded in 1790:

It was Tyson's Benefit, and as he is my acquaintance, independent of being M:C:, it was but decent that at least one of us should appear there.

Master is a much older word. It goes back to the Old English maegester, which goes back to the Latin magister (literally meaning bigger one), which is cognate with the Greek mega, which is why omega just means Big O.

Defeated the Umayyad invasion of Aquitaine

N.B. Some people say that MC stands for Mic Controller. They are silly people.