Ossian, Oscar, and Ocker

Back in the eighteenth century, European culture was obsessed with the idea of the noble savage, particularly the Celtic variety. They loved the idea of some kilt-clad warrior striding around a misty moor or foggy fen, playing lonely bagpipes and gazing down the glen.

There was a slight problem, though: no actual account of a noble Scotsmen had ever been found*. So a wily poet called James Macpherson decided to make one up. He claimed to have discovered and translated an ancient Scots epic about a chap called Ossian. It was a complete fraud, and those parts of it that I've read are terrible, but it was the fraud that the literary world wanted, and they lapped it up.

Goethe loved it and mentioned it in Werther. Napoleon was so obsessed with the poem that he carried a copy with him everywhere. He even insisted that his godson (who later became king of Sweden) be renamed after one of the characters in the poem, who had the then obsolete moniker of Oscar.

Thus did the name Oscar suddenly become popular all over Britain and Scandinavia.

A few decades later an Irish nationalist called Jane decided to give her son the silliest possible old Celtic name she could imagine to fit in with her political principles. So she called him Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

Oscar Wilde was convicted of Uranian lust in 1895 and the name Oscar took a bit of a hit in its popularity, but only in Britain. In Scandinavia Oscars thrived. And in Australia.

In fact, Oscar was such a common Australian name that when, in the sixties, a comedian called Ron Frazer wanted to create a character who would embody all the quintessential Australian virtues of boorishness and barflying, he called him Oscar, or more precisely he used the Australian shortening of the name: Ocker. Here is a video of Ocker in action.




As you can see Ocker isn't actually that bad a fellow. However, the word has moved on. Most Australians today are unaware of the original comedy sketches and use the word ocker (uncapitalised) as an adjective to refer to the most boorish, beer-swilling, prawn-barbying, becorked-hatted bush-whacker imaginable. It's the Australian equivalent of redneck.

It's therefore an immensely useful word if you wish to abuse Australians in words of their own invention, and who doesn't want to do that?

Ocker Oscar

*This is unchanged.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is a village in Wales. However, the name was only invented in 1860 as a publicity stunt to attract tourists. In Welsh it means St Mary's Church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool of Llantysilio of the red cave. Locals often just call it Llanfairpwll.

If you want to know how to pronounce it I have (with much technical wizardry) embedded an MP3 of a rather beautiful song by a chap I was at university with called Nick Kelley. At about the 1:45 mark he manages to not only sing the word, but also make it rhyme twice. The relevant lyrics are:

I'd take the low road to keep you
From the monsters of the loch.
Would you follow me if I got in trouble
all the way to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-
llantysilliogogogoch?




However, if you want a less artificial place name, you should pay a visit to Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya Hill in Australia, which apparently means, Place where the Devil Urinates.

The Infernal Urinal

The Two-Faced Janitors of January

Welcome, dear reader, to January. January is a time to look back upon the dunghill of a year that has passed, and to look forward to the miseries to come. However, it is impossible to look both backwards and forwards unless you have two faces and you only have one, I hope. Otherwise you suffer from the horrid genetic disorder known as diprosopus, or you are the Roman god Janus [see picture].

Because Janus had two faces and was able to look in two directions he was the god of boundaries. The first month of the year, being the boundary between the old and the new, was therefore sacred to him and was named Januarius or January.

Janus was also, of course, the god of gates and passages and doorways and portals of all sorts, and that is why doorkeepers are called janitors.

Leonato: You will never run mad, niece.
Beatrice: No, not till a hot January.

I am told that these lines from Much Ado About Nothing sound rather odd when performed in Australia.

Sacred to Janus

New Year's Evening

Another circle around the sun is complete, and nobody will tell me how many more we must do. The earth is back where it started and there is No Progress.

Australia is a terribly advanced country, and almost all of the world's marsupials are already facing up to the horrors of 2011, meanwhile beavers and bald eagles languish and linger in 2010. Under the old system, days started at sunset and the eve, even or evening was therefore part of the following day.

If you want a useful word, then an apophoret is a gift given on New Year's Eve. I recommend gin.

Anyway, for those like me who shudder at the pedicular Scottish doggerel that Burns so optimistically called poetry, here's a sober little something by Charles Lamb from his poem The New Year. My apophoret to you, dear poetic reader.

Why should we then suspect or fear 
The influences of a year, 
So smiles upon us the first morn, 
And speaks us good so soon as born?
Plague on't ! the last was ill enough, 
This cannot but make better proof; 
Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through 
The last, why so we may this too; 
And then the next in reason should 
Be superexcellently good; 
For the worst ills (we daily see) 
Have no more perpetuity, 
Than the best fortunes that do fall; 
Which also bring us wherewithal 
Longer their being to support. 
Than those do of the other sort; 
And who has one good year in three, 
And yet repines at destiny,
Appears ungrateful in the case,
And merits not the good he has.

And to all* readers, a superexcellently good New Year.

The Inky Fool composing tomorrow's post

*With a couple of exceptions.

To Gruel

Listening to a snatch of the cricket commentary last night, I was informed that the contest in Melbourne was gruelling. I confess that from my snowbound Cumbrian igloo I couldn't quite see how sunny Australia managed to gruel, but gruel it did.

Gruel is one of those odd words, like ailing, that exists only as a participle. This should be not be so. Too few conversations go:

Bill: How was the atmosphere at the party last night?
Ben: Oh it gruelled.
Bill: Really? Did it gruel an awful lot?
Ben: More than I can say, old boy, more than I can say.

Why is so much gruelling when so little gruels, and how does this all relate to broth?

When gruel began its career as an English word, back in the fourteenth century it was content to simply mean flour. From there it began to mean soup made with flour, which was probably a lot tastier than it sounds. Here's a 1688 definition:

Grewel, is a kind of Broth made only of Water, Grotes brused and Currans, some add Mace, sweet Herbs, Butter and Eggs and Sugar

Delicious. If the contest in Melbourne was so well spiced and so eggy, I am sure that the cricket would be wonderful. But this is not so, for gruel came to be part of a phrase, a phrase that can be best illustrated by this little snippet from the eleventh canto of Lord Byron's Don Juan. Juan has just been attacked by highwaymen on the way to London. He whips out a pistol and shoots the brigand and...

...Juan, who saw the moon's late minion bleed
As if his veins would pour out his existence,
Stood calling out for bandages and lint,
And wish'd he had been less hasty with his flint...


But ere they could perform this pious duty,
The dying man cried, "Hold! I've got my gruel!
Oh for a glass of max! We've miss'd our booty;
Let me die where I am!" And as the fuel
Of life shrunk in his heart, and thick and sooty
The drops fell from his death-wound, and he drew ill
His breath, -- he from his swelling throat untied
A kerchief, crying, "Give Sal that!" -- and died.

To get your gruel is to get your just deserts, to take what's coming to you or, like a feral gardener, to make your bed and lie in it. And from this sense of gruel as a punishment, came the modern sense of a gruelling contest. Though I still can't see how Melbourne in December can gruel that much.

Ricky Ponting asking for more referrals

The Duck-Billed Platypus

The platypus is a strange creature. When a specimen was first sent back to Europe from the eldritch antipodes it was widely thought to be a fake that had been stitched together from the parts of other animals. But the Inky Fool is interested only in words.

First, some irritating people insist upon latinising their plurals. I have deplored and condemned this habit already. But platypus is one of those lovely cases where latinising leaves the pedant with linguistic egg upon his face. The plural would not and could not be platypi. The word is Greek in origin and the plural would therefore be platypodes, or flatfoots.

Secondly, I have already written of how telegrammists paid by the word, and how this changed their prose style. Pennies sharpen the mind and the nib. Probably the most efficient telegram ever written was on the subject of the humble flatfoot. A platypus is a kind of monotreme. Monotremes are very odd mammals, if indeed they are mammals at all. The platypus is venomous (the poison comes out of a spur on its ankle) and can locate its dinner using electricity. They were also rumoured to lay eggs, but nobody was sure of this until 1884 when a naturalist called W.H.Caldwell found a platypus nest. He was terribly excited, but he was also in Australia and wanted to get the news back to a proper country as soon and as cheaply as possible so he sent a four word telegram:

Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic.

Which means: platypuses lay eggs and within those eggs the young is formed from only a part of the yolk.

Thirdly, one of the greatest poems in the English language was written about a platypus. It is by Lord Patrick Barrington and describes the dazzling career of a duck-billed platypus in the British Foreign Office. The first stanza runs thusly:

I had a duck-billed platypus when I was up at Trinity,
With whom I soon discovered a remarkable affinity.
He used to live in lodgings with myself and Arthur Pervis,
and we all went up together for the Diplomatic Service.
I had a certain confidence, I own, in his ability,
He mastered all the subjects with remarkable facility;
And Purvis, though more dubious, agreed that was clever,
But no one else imagined he had any chance whatever.

And you can read the rest here.

Finally, what do you get if you feed a mallard to a cat?

A duck-filled fatty-puss.

Batman, Batman, Batmania!

Batman is, of course, the name for a military officer's servant. The term derives from the old word bat meaning a packsaddle. In America, where they're far more logical about such things, the equivalent position is referred to as a dog-robber.

Batman is, of course, a unit of measurement found in Asia. Batman has varied wildly in value over the centuries and was finally redefined as 10kg when Turkey basted itself with the metric system.

Batmania is, of course, the original name of the Australian city of Melbourne. John Batman, a syphilitic farmer from Sydney, persuaded some of the natives to lease some land to him for an annual rent of two hundred handkerchiefs, a hundred knives, a hundred pounds of flour, fifty scissors,  forty blankets, thirty mirrors, thirty axes and six shirts. He then named the new settlement after himself: Batmania.

The rent was clearly exorbitant and the governor cancelled it a few years later, shot anyone who disagreed, and renamed the town Melbourne after the Viscount Melbourne who was prime minister at the time.

Batmania isn't as mad as it sounds to our surprised ears. After all, Tasmania is named after Abel Tasman.

There are no other known meanings of the word batman.

John Batman

Became a hat-man.

He said, "It's rainier

In Batmania."

Napa Happy Nappy Valley (and Dr Johnson)

There is an area of South London known to all, and even sundry, as Nappy Valley. It's basically Wandsworth. The reason for the name is that the area is positively teeming with fecund young professional couples whose constant rutting has given it the highest birth rate in Europe (or so saith Wikipedia without citation). [N.B. Nappy is English for diaper. In fact non-Londoners may want to skip this post].

I happened to be discussing the area with Mrs Malaprop yesterday and, of course, the conversation leapt, flea-like, to the Origin of the Name.

I asserted that it was to do with Napa Valley in California, where the wine comes from. I said that the name was obviously down to affluent, priapic couples changing nappies whilst sipping white wine.

Mrs Malaprop said that she had always assumed that it was to do with Happy Valley in Kenya, where the murders happen.

So today I set about investigating. It turns out that Mrs Malaprop was right and I was wrong, which I feel remains a moral victory for me.

The phrase, you see, is not English in origin. The first reference that I can find to London's Nappy Valley is from The Independent in 1997. But I discovered this in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1984:

Horror films soar in popularity during the school holidays. Children's films are most popular in Tuggeranong (known as Nappy Valley) and other far-flung suburbs which are the newest and have the youngest families.

Tuggeranong is a suburb of Canberra, so it would seem that Australia can claim the original Nappy Valley. However, in her riveting account of the 1984 general election campaign in New Zealand (not written till 1985) Josephine Grierson records her press officer warning her of victory:

"You'd better watch it you know or you may end up with three years of "Nappy Valley"! I've already heard you referred to as the "Pakuranga housewife".

Pakuranga is a suburb of Auckland. So parallel births of the name? Some strange antipodean synchronicity?

No. Just outside Auckland, a mere, 23 miles from the aforementioned Nappy Valley is a little place called Happy Valley. They make honey there. So it must be a pun on the name: the appy, not the nap.

In Australia it's a little farther, but the connection is still easy to make. You go from Canberra to Adelaide (both in the South East) and you have a well known suburb again called Happy Valley. So, though there may not be a Kenyan connection, I am satisfied that in both cases it's a pun on Happy Valley.

So where does Happy Valley come from? Perhaps it's just the twee imaginings of an optimistic settler. But I can get the phrase straight back to Dr Johnson, which makes me much happier.

Dr Johnson wrote Rasselas. It's about a prince (coincidentally called Rasselas) whose father decides to keep him away from the sins of society. So he is brought up in an impregnable valley where he is given all that he could possibly want other than knowledge of the world.

However... well here's the opening of the second chapter:

CHAPTER II--THE DISCONTENT OF RASSELAS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY.

Here the sons and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose...

I like to think that those distant settlers were thinking of Rasselas when they did their naming, if only because Rasselas has suffered an terrible, terrible fate. You see, it's a Very Good Book, but it's identical in concept and was published in the same year as Candide by Voltaire, which is an Absolutely Bloody Wonderful Book.

Candide is a book about a completely innocent young man who sets off on a world tour that allows for lots of satirical vignettes. Rasellas is a book about a completely innocent young man who sets off on a world tour that allows for lots of satirical vignettes. The result is that almost nobody bothers to read Rasselas. Even I have lost my copy and don't particularly care. I can't even recommend that you read it because Candide is better. A merely good book, like Rasellas, cannot compete.

Evelyn Waugh probably considered this. He once wrote a story called A House of Gentlefolks. It begins, like Rasselas and Candide, with a boy who has been kept completely away from the world until his eighteenth birthday being allowed out (with a guide) and setting off on a series of satirical vignettes. Except that he doesn't. They're about to set off on a world tour when, after only ten pages the narrator says:

It seems to me sometimes that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel.

And a lawyer arrives to take the boy back. For an ardent lover of early Waugh like me, that sentence is unutterably sad. I think that Waugh was thinking of the fate of Rasellas.

There was, though, a man called Isaac Brown Jr, who liked Johnson's book and called his son Rasselas Wilcox Brown, and Rasselas went to Pennsylvania and founded Rasselas PA.

Now you tell me.

Kangaroo Court

The Labour-dominated Commons Public Administration Committee will hold a one-day inquiry later this month into the whole affair. The three Conservative members of the committee have said they will not attend what the party regards as a "kangaroo court".

   - The Daily Telegraph

As a child I used to, quite literally, dream of kangaroo courts. As parrots can speak and beavers build, so I faithfully believed that kangaroos were the only mammals to have developed a fully working parallel legal system. It seemed the perfect place to try a cat burglar. In fact, though, it is a kangaroo court because it proceeds in leaps. Oddly, the phrase is not Australian but popped up in mid nineteenth century Texas. There's an important linguistic lesson to be learned from that, but I'm not sure what it is.

In [The] Hospital

Apparently something political has happened in America which will have some sort of effect on how Americans pay their hospital bills, a subject towards which I am passionately indifferent. The only important aspect of the debate, which nobody else seems to have touched on, is linguistic.

There is a tiny difference between the ways that we in Britain and they in America talk. If an Englishman is injured he ends up in hospital, the same goes for Canadians and Australians. If an American is injured he ends up in the hospital.

You can confirm this little tic with a few country-specific google searches for the specific phrase "the hospital". Here are Britain, USA, Canada, Australia. The USA does have some uses of "in hospital" but they're always in the headlines where definite articles can be omitted anyway.

This made me think about the other places you can be in without a definite article. As an Englishman I can be (and usually am) in the pub. I am at the shops. I spend an evening in the cinema. The only unarticled places are school and prison, both of which are paid for through taxes.

Americans also spend time in school and prison without a the and in America both of those are also provided by the government. The reason that I brought in Canada and Australia earlier on is that there seems to be a direct correlation between government funding and the definite article.

This is especially odd as Canadian English is usually dominated by their mutinous neighbours to the South. But all healthcare in Canada is public (except on Indian reservations, which is because of clauses about medicine men in ancient treaties that can now be splendidly profitable).

So here's my theory (and it is only a theory): if you usually pick and pay for your hospital (or anything else) you will tend to think of it as a far more specific thing than you would if it were a ubiquitous and remotely funded service. The definite article is part of the market system.

As I say, it's only a theory; but it fits facts, especially Canada. Howls of derision in the comments, please.

Canadian medical policy getting sorted out

The Abode of Snow

I've always been slightly amused by Australian place names. I find myself imagining the cartographic conference where questions were asked such as "So, Bruce, what shall we call this great sandy desert?" or "What about these northern territories, Bruce, they're going to need a name too. Not to mention these snowy mountains."

This is terribly amusing until you buy a book on the meaning of English place names, which are almost all just as dull. Most places are simply somewhere belonging to someone. Birmingham, for example, is the Beorma ingas ham meaning home of the sons of Beorma. Cambridge is the bridge over the Cam. I once spent a childhood car journey looking up every village we passed and would take a guess that 95% of places are like that.

And the same is true of the remote and exotic. If I started this post by laughing at the Australians calling some snowy mountains the Snowy Mountains, guess what Himalayas means? The abode of snow.

In fact I'm having trouble thinking of a single interesting place name at the moment. So instead I'll tell you that almost all western place names are written down phonetically in Chinese for obvious reasons. Oxford is the only one (I was once told by a sinologist) with its own pictogram. Just as dawn in Chinese is written as the symbol of the sun over the symbol for a tree, so Oxford is the symbol for a river with the symbol for an ox.

Oxford: niu-jin. Ox on the left, ford on the right.

Update: This from the sinologist who told me that in the first place, whom I e-mailed for confirmation:

Re: Oxford Pictogram It does, but I'm not sure if it is the only one. Cambridge I think half gets one (bridge is translated as the Chinese word for bridge, qiao). Basically, Oxford has been literally translated into the two characters ox (niu) and fording point (jin). 牛津 Most other places including London get translated into characters that sound like the English pronounciation (Lun Dun). If I think of another I'll let you know, otherwise some pedant might read the blog and beat me to it.

I doubt that any pedants read this blog (I've always imagined you to be a happy-go-luck, devil-may-care, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and generally hyphenated bunch), but if any do then please feel free to add your own.