Bashful Bah

Bashful is one of those wonderful words without an opposite. Try as you might, nobody will ever call you bashless. Which poses the question: what the devil is bash and how did you get so full of it?

To answer that question one can turn to the Old Curiosity Shop where Dickens mentions that Dick Swiveller "spends all his money on his friends and is Bah!'d for his pains."

By this Dickens means that Swiveller's friends say Bah to him, Bah being an exclamation of contempt. Dickens looks terribly original, but in fact bah has (probably - this is all merely the best theory) been verbed before, by the French and Normans a thousand years ago.

First, you should note that bah comes straight from the French. But the Normans had a verb ebahir, which meant to be astonished, or more literally to be reduced to saying 'bah' in amazement. This got altered to abaïr, and that got altered to abaissir and that got altered to abash.

These days it's easy to be abashed in the passive; but once upon a time it was just as common to go around abashing people until they were abashed, or just bashed, at which point they became bashful.

Thus, by a preposterously serpentine route, Dick Swiveller is abashed.

None of which has anything to do with a bash on the head, which appears to come from the Old Norse who had a deplorable habit of doing a lot of such bashing.

Ouch.

Hanging Out with Pickwick

There's a strange feeling that you get when you're reading an old novel and find what you thought was a new phrase. Take, for example, hanging out. It's a phrase that I would have imagined was invented by surfers in the 1960s. So when you come across it in Dickens' Pickwick Papers from 1837 it feels decidedly odd:

Mr. Bob Sawyer, thrusting his forefinger between two of Mr. Pickwick's ribs, and thereby displaying his native drollery, and his knowledge of the anatomy of the human frame, at one and the same time, inquired—


'I say, old boy, where do you hang out?' Mr. Pickwick replied that he was at present suspended at the George and Vulture.

Not only was the phrase around, but it was familiar and annoying enough to be parodied. In fact, hang out comes from the idea of hanging out a sign to show that you're there for business. The same thing once struck me when I was reading Great Expectations. Wemmick is miserable and tells Pip:

"It's a bad job," said Wemmick, scratching his head, "and I assure you I haven't been so cut up for a long time."

Pickwick Papers also contains a character called Mr Phunky, which may be a forerunner of our more modern term. It was only eight years later, in 1845, that a writer called Samuel Naylor was able to pen the immortal line:

I do feel somewhat funky.

Anyway, here's a recording of an interview with Mr Pickwick.

A Dildo For A Song

Last night I went to see All's Well That Ends Well at the Globe. A line in the play made me think of the Beatles and Our Mutual Friend.


Clown: By my troth, I take my young lord to be a very melancholy man.


Countess: By what observance, I pray you?


Clown: Why, he will look upon his boot and sing; mend the ruff and sing; ask questions and sing; pick his teeth and sing. I know a man that had this trick of melancholy sold a goodly manor for a song.

What is the connection to the Beatles? Well, it's an obscure aspect of the song Your Mother Should Know (video beneath), the lyrics of which run:

Let's all get up and dance to a song
That was a hit before your mother was born
And though she was born a long, long time ago,
Your mother should know,
Your mother should know.

You see, Paul McCartney's mother was born in 1909, which means that the song was probably a hit in 1908 or earlier, in which case its hittiness would not have been measured in record sales, but in sales of sheet music.

Do you remember Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend? No? Oh well. He's a poor street vendor who develops a rather weird obsession with the occupants of the house outside of which he sells ballads and sheet music.

Sheet music used to be everywhere. Before the gramophone existed it was the only way of obtaining a song for keeps. Hearing a song was no more than hearing a recitation of a poem. If you liked it, you bought it on paper. So selling music was an essential part of everyday life, and the salesmen were (often) the lowest of the low.

The same character, essentially, pops up in A Winter's Tale. Autolycus, who describes himself as "a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles", is an itinerant ballad-seller who:

...hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes; no
milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he
has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without
bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate
burthens of dildos and fadings...

I fear an aside on dildoes is required. The word is first recorded in 1598 meaning exactly what it does today, but it also appeared in lots of ballads as a meaningless refrain. Just as our songs have sha-la-las and yeah-yeah-yeahs, so Elizabethan ballads had fa-la-las, hey-nonny-noes, and dildoes.

All of which brings us full circle to that line from All's Well That Ends Well which is the very first recorded example of selling something for a song. When the melancholy man of whom the clown speaks sold a goodly manor for a song, he was exchanging his real estate for a piece of sheet music because he needed something new to sing.

Perhaps, for the price of his land he got hold of the Roxburghe Ballads, which contain the beautiful lines:

She prov'd herself a Duke's daughter, and he but a Squire's son.
Sing trang dildo lee

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sing trang dildo lee all over London until I get arrested.

The Literary Boot

I said a few weeks ago that I'd be putting up poems that were hung on the walls of pubs, and I found a bit of verse in the Boot in Bloomsbury. The Boot has already achieved literary immortality as Dickens put it into Barnaby Rudge:

This Boot was a lone house of public entertainment, situated in the fields at the back of the Foundling Hospital; a very solitary spot at that period, and quite deserted after dark. The tavern stood at some distance from any high road, and was approachable only by a dark and narrow lane; so that Hugh was much surprised to find several people drinking there, and great merriment going on. He was still more surprised to find among them almost every face that had caught his attention in the crowd; but his companion having whispered him outside the door, that it was not considered good manners at The Boot to appear at all curious about the company, he kept his own counsel, and made no show of recognition.

Nothing whatsoever has changed, although there are now many more buildings around and about, and what the pub lacks in salubriousness it makes up for in proximity to the British Library*. Anyway, up on the wall they had a framed poem by a chap called Herbert Wilkes, of whom I can find no trace on the Internet. As it's a little hard to read from my photograph, I've copied out the poem. Essentially, he's just trying to work lots of pub names into rhyme. It's not a good poem, exactly, but it is fun. Incidentally, pub names are always things that you can paint pictures of, because in preliterate England people would meet at the sign of the red lion/unicorn/mitre et cetera, and recognise it by the picture hanging outside.

A Run Across the Signs

There's my Black horse he'll face the Lion
And make the Bay horse fly
He'll turn the Wheat Sheaf upside down
And drink the Fountain dry


He'll leave a mark upon the Fleece
Take shine out of the Star
And make King William sue for peace
Before the Castle bar


He'll crush the Midland on his tour
And make the Shepherd scream
Despatch Commercials any hour
To Devonshire for cream


He'll twist the Cross Keys out of shape
And fill the Nag with dread
The Albion shall not escape
The Hart must lose it's head


He'll make the New Ship spring a leak
Give Craven Arms a jerk
And make the Kings afraid to speak
When Joiners are at work


He'll straighten up the Rose and Crown
The Royal Oak must fall
He'll knock the Cock and Bottle down
And close the Hole in t'Wall


He'll slip the Thanet's down a nick
And make the Heifer grin
Then cater off and throw the Brick
Beyond the Railway Inn


He'll make the Craven look forlorn
And strain Old George's hip
Destroy the boasting Unicorn
And the upset the Ship


He'll make the White Horse scrape and bow
The Jolly Sailors fight
The Mason's Arms will strike a blow
Before the Sun is bright


He'll trample on the Woodman's scone
T'Black Bull will turn away
And flight alone will save the Swan
Before he meets his day

*Down Judd Street and off to the left.

Infant Tongues

Here's the opening line of Great Expectations:

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.

The odd thing is that infant means unable to speak. In means not, and fans was the present participle of the Latin fari, which meant speak. So infans was not speaking.

Incidentally, being tongue-tied is a proper medical condition. It's a congenital disorder whereby the tongue is fastened to the bottom of mouth. If you go to a mirror and make a horrid face you'll see an anchoring bit of flesh at the back middle of your tongue's underside. With those who are tongue tied that bit of skin comes out all the way.

Medical types call it ankyloglossia, because medical types are all frustrated scholars of Greek.

I know a chap who was born tongue-tied, but the doctors snipped his licker free and he has been making up for it ever since.

In the North of England they used to call tongues lollies, which may be the source of lollipop.

Tongue-tied no more

Boxing Day and the Perils of Poetry

Today is not boxing day.

Once upon a time, there was a thing called a Christmas box. A Christmas box was a box with a small hole cut in it, like a piggy bank, through which coins could be dropped. It was kept in a church and, like a piggy bank, it could not be opened, only smashed. The smashing was done at Christmas, hence the name: Christmas box.

Christmas boxes were used by servants, apprentices, bloggers and other impoverished fools to save up some money for the frosty and festive season. In gambling dens there would be a Christmas box of tips for the benefit of the butler. As one chap put it in 1634:

It is a shame, for a rich Christian to be like a Christmas boxe, that receives all, and nothing can be got out, till it be broken in peeces.

Anyway, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the idea of the Christmas box shifted. There were lots of chaps like postmen and milkmen and butchers' boys and bloggers who didn't have loose change to be stowing away all year. Yet they still felt they deserved a little something at Christmas. So generous Victorians would make a little box of presents which they would present to all the delivery boys on the first weekday after Christmas, thus insisteth the OED.

The first weekday after Christmas therefore became known as Boxing Day. And today?

Today is a Sunday.

All those pleading postmen, beggarly bloggers and other assorted lazzaroni will arrive at your door on Monday morning, their usual truculence usurped by a poor smile and rich words. As Mr Weller remarks of his son's attempt at a Valentine's card in The Pickwick Papers:

''Tain't in poetry, is it?' interposed his father.


'No, no,' replied Sam.


'Wery glad to hear it,' said Mr. Weller. 'Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin'-day, or Warren's blackin', or Rowland's oil, or some of them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.'

You have, dear poetic reader, been warned.

(A beadle, by the way, was a sort of policeman paid for by the parish).

Christmas Trees and Peep-Shows in New Zealand

Christmas trees, like Boney M. and spray-on condoms, were a German idea. Prince Albert brought the festive fir over to Victorian Britain. But as the OED puts it, it remains:

a famous feature of Christmas celebration in Germany, frequently but imperfectly imitated in England

Prince Albert arrived in 1840 and by 1850 the Christmas tree was so well known that Charles Dickens could write a whole essay on the subject that began thus:

I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men--and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, "There was everything, and more."

What lovely lists! A teetotum, since you ask, is a spinning top with letters on its sides. And a peep-show box in that more innocent age was a box with a magnifying glass in the side through which you could see little painted wonders. In the twentieth century some bright and drooling spark had the idea of putting dirty pictures inside, and eventually somebody decided to shove a whole girl in there. This is called Progress.

I'm not sure, but that child may, according to my dated Google Book search, have been the first person ever to utter the words everything and more*.

In New Zealand a Christmas Tree is the English name for the pohutukawa, which flowers at this time of year and looks like this:

*I'm excluding sentences like "I hate everything, and more precisely I hate...". Also, you need to be careful on Google-book-searches about periodicals, which are dated according to the first one in the collection.

Summer in London

London has passed out from the heat. She is lying flat on her back, sweating horridly, with a handkerchief tied around her head. Occasionally she thinks about buying an ice cream. Her skin is as red as a pepper. Dickens put it much better than I. Here is a little something from the nineteenth chapter of Bleak House.

It is the hottest long vacation known for many years. All the young clerks are madly in love, and according to their various degrees, pine for bliss with the beloved object, at Margate, Ramsgate, or Gravesend. All the middle-aged clerks think their families too large. All the unowned dogs who stray into the Inns of Court and pant about staircases and other dry places seeking water give short howls of aggravation. All the blind men's dogs in the streets draw their masters against pumps or trip them over buckets. A shop with a sun-blind, and a watered pavement, and a bowl of gold and silver fish in the window, is a sanctuary. Temple Bar gets so hot that it is, to the adjacent Strand and Fleet Street, what a heater is in an urn, and keeps them simmering all night.

There are offices about the Inns of Court in which a man might be cool, if any coolness were worth purchasing at such a price in dullness; but the little thoroughfares immediately outside those retirements seem to blaze. In Mr. Krook's court, it is so hot that the people turn their houses inside out and sit in chairs upon the pavement—Mr. Krook included, who there pursues his studies, with his cat (who never is too hot) by his side. The Sol's Arms has discontinued the Harmonic Meetings for the season, and Little Swills is engaged at the Pastoral Gardens down the river, where he comes out in quite an innocent manner and sings comic ditties of a juvenile complexion calculated (as the bill says) not to wound the feelings of the most fastidious mind.

I am sure that my readers in warmer climes will scoff at this post, but that is merely because they don't understand. London is not designed to be hot. We have no air-conditioning. I own two pairs of shorts and one of those is so little worn that it still has a school name-tape sewn inside.

Nobody has ever thought to put a bench in the shade. The best a Londoner can do is to shelter from the sun under awnings that usually protect him from the rain and hail. It is for this reason that the Bible reads so strangely to an Englishman: heat and sun are curses, rain and shade God's promises. Only on days like this can an Englishman's heart pant for cooling streams.

I am now off to sit in a square in Bloomsbury in direct and perfect imitation of Dickens. I would follow the clerks to Margate, but all I seem to do there is sandily connect nothing with nothing.

The Inky Fool's method for keeping cool got rather out of control

Indiana Jones and Stephen Dedalus

I am convinced that a fictional character should have one dull name and one extraordinary name. It doesn't matter which way around.

David Copperfield

Sherlock Holmes

Keith Talent

Indiana Jones

Oliver Twist

Winston Smith

Stephen Dedalus

Luke Skywalker

There are exceptions. A deliberate dullness may pay, and if the book is fascinating the name will be coloured like the dyer's hand. Try to guess the name blanked out in the following interview. I guarantee that you've heard it a thousand times.

I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, 'BLANK BLANK' was much better than something more interesting, like 'Peregrine Carruthers.' Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure — an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.

The answer will be beneath the line break, so you'll have to click on read more.

There are never any real rules in the world, even the rules of physics break down as you get back before the big bang (gravity was reversed, matter outran light). There are none in writing. The only true laws are those of cricket and those of the Medes and the Persians which did not change. But most real names don't work in realist novels. They seem too studiedly normal: too realistic to be true. I mean... well here's what I mean. I just tried to think up normal first name - thought Geoffrey - normal second name - thought Robinson and then realised that there is a Geoffrey Robinson, he's an MP and he was involved in a scandal and he used to own something-or-another and his name just wouldn't work in a novel. Reality rarely convinces.

But Jeremiah Johnson or Mary Poppins?

Incidentally, Dickens was of course the greatest namer that literature has ever known I have some Dickens names that I doubt you know. You see, the cause of Polish independence was terribly fashionable in Victorian London and Dickens was a member of The Literary Association of the Friends of Poland. He used to go to meetings. But, as he complained in a letter, the meetings were often preposterous with people pretending a knowledge of Polish politics that none of them actually had, the speaker would be

talking about celebrated Polish Women, and saying “but when I mention the hallowed name of Titchibowski – or of Lobski – or of Pastocrontik – or of Sploshock – or of Screweyzlunskifi, that wife and mother” – and everybody professing to roar with enthusiasm at every name, as if they knew all about it!



Have you guessed the name yet? Then click on read more.

Mooreeffoc

I was reading about Yemen this morning and I thought of the immensely useful word mooreeffoc. My train of thought went something like this.

The Yemeni economy is not superb. The ultimate reason for this (unmentioned in the "so-called" newspaper) was a pilgrim. Once upon a time Yemen had a near monopoly on coffee. So valuable was this export that the king or somesuch forbade anyone to take a live plant out of the country. They kept the monopoly until a pilgrim called Baba Budan managed to smuggle some seeds out to India.

Now if Yemen still controlled the entire world's coffee production, they wouldn't be so poor and might never have developed such an unhealthy fascination with exploding underpants. But unfortunately for the Yemenis there's now an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.

Anyway, that took me on to coffee-related words like Mocha, which is the name of a port in Yemen, and kaffeeklatsch, which is a chat over a cup of coffee.

But the greatest, the most exalted, the king of caffeinated words is mooreeffoc. It was invented by Charles Dickens himself, which is a good thing for any word. Here is the word at the moment of its birth in Dickens' autobiography describing a coffee shop in St Martin's Lane:

In the door there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock goes through my blood.

A lesser word than mooreeffoc might have died there in that weakened condition like a Spartan baby. But mooreeffoc was taken in by a kindly shepherd called G.K. Chesterton. In his biography of Dickens Chesterton took up mooreeffoc to mean a vivifying defamiliarisation. As he put it:

That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc," is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate object. The date on the door danced over Mr. Grewgious's, the knocker grinned at Mr. Scrooge, the Roman on the ceiling pointed down at Mr. Tukinghorn, the elderly armchair leered at Tom Smart - these are all moor eeffocish things. A man sees them because he does not look at them.

J.R.R.Tolkein took up the word (or "Chestertonian fantasy" as he called it) in his essay On Fairy Stories, where he defined it as "the queerness of things that have become trite when they are seen suddenly from a new angle".

The word Mooreeffoc may cause you to realise that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits.

So, dear reader, throw away your exploding underwear. Go out into the world and try to see its strangeness and its beauty. Try to see the world with a sense of mooreeffoc.

Novels of Misspelling

Gentle reader, I should warn you that there may be some coarse language in this post. In fact, I'm sure there will be.

The first line of the deliciously delicate novel Londonstani goes like this:

Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck’d, shudn’t b callin me a Paki, innit.

You see, what the author is doing, which is very clever, is to tell us the accent in which the character is speaking. That’s why he spells mother as mutha. That’s how they pronounce it in Hounslow.

Etonians, Oxonians and indeed all those who don’t live in Hounslow pronounce mother as mow-thear. We also pronounce the e in fucked, which we write as fuckèd. A typical conversation at my boarding school would run something like this:

- Is your mow-thear coming to visit you this weekend?

- I’m afraid not; she’s too busy being fuckèd by my faither.

- Noi.

That’s how it was. As for the b – well I’m not going to tell you how we pronounce b because then you would be able to move among us undetected and it would be worse than the worst excesses of the French revolution.

What really gets my goat about all this, though, is that he spells right with a ght. I can only deduce from this that the ght is always pronounced in full around the farther reaches of the Piccadilly Line.

In the pubs near me (North West London, far from Hounslow) people employ a strange rhetorical device whereby a noun is immediately followed by a superfluous pronoun. The conversations are hard to punctuate but they go something like this:

Mike, he reckons that Arsenal, they’re going to win the league this year. Me, I reckon that Chelsea, they’ve got the strength and depth for a long and bitter campaign.

That really is how they speak, like the bits of newspaper at the bottom of an old lady's drawer. Yet the funny thing in the gritty novels of misspelling like Londonstani is that after throwing in a bunch of oaths and curses the author almost always forgets to do anything so extended as to make a line of dialogue sound structurally convincing.

In Carl Hiaasen’s novel Skinny Dip, which is set in Florida, one word is misspelled throughout. Son of bitch is consistently rendered sumbitch, which is perfect because that is how they pronounce it in the Profound South. The word only pops up every ten pages or so, but that one eccentricity of spelling combines with Hiaasen’s excellent ear for the structures of speech to keep the accent in the reader’s mind.

But those writers who misspell more than once a page are almost always cloth-eared when it comes to patterns of speech.

The only exception I can think of to this rule is Dickens who, of course, rendered speech perfectly but still made poor people reveal their lack of education by saying woz instead of was.

It shouldn’t really be me writing this post. Mrs Malaprop – a former Miss Hounslow finalist with relations in Florida – could have knocked it together better than I have done, but I fear the swearing would have made her take fright, which she would pronounce friggahut.

Sir John Suckling from Hounslow

UPDATE: Mrs Malaprop informs me that nobody in Hounslow would ever pronounce the t in innit.

What the Dickens?

The only reason T.S. Eliot insisted on his middle initial was that he was morbidly aware of what his name would have spelled backwards without it. Auden (whose H was idiopathic) wrote a palindrome on the subject:

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot-toilet.

S was a real name, though, it stood (appropriately) for Stearns, a name by which he briefly tried to be known as a student: i.e. T. Stearns Eliot. This is, incidentally, the reason that it's the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The debilitating fear of the cloacal also produced, through inversion, the completely superfluous reference to the Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, in the author's notes on The Waste Land.


Meanwhile the phrase What the Dickens has nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Dickens (unless Shakespeare was blessed with the gift of prognostication). It pops up in The Merry Wives of Windsor and is derived (like almost every other renaissance expletive) from Devil.

Just a little follow-up to my post on the grammar of Dickens and Eliot.

The original Dickens

The T.S. Eliot Defence

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

Is without doubt one of the finest couplets in English poetry (by "without doubt" I mean that if you doubt it I will track you down and punch you on the jaw); the only problem with it is that the grammar is wrong - irrefutably and indubitably wrong.

"You and I" is apposite to "us", so it should be "you and me". Put another way: "let you and I go" is as wrong as "let I go". It should be "me".

Me, me, me, me, me.

Let us go then, you and me,
When the evening is a tumpty-tee...

No.

This is a problem for a pedant. What, really, is the point of all this grammatical, syntactical, linguistic brou-ha-ha if you can ignore it all and still write some of the finest lines in English?

What, indeed, about Our Mutual Friend? When two things are mutual each stands in the same relation to the other. There can be mutual love and mutual hate but there can be no third party in a mutual relationship. It should, were the rules obeyed, be called Our Shared Friend.

A Dickens-loving pedant would probably proffer the excuse that the line is attributed in the book to Silas Wegg and that the whole joke is that Wegg is illiterate yet pretentious. They would then return to altering the punctuation in Shakespeare, muttering that dear old Charles do the police in different voices.

Such defenders of Dickens would, I am afraid, be no more convincing than Mr Curdle. Dickens got it wrong. Eliot got it wrong. I do not even believe that he sacrificed "me" for the rhyme.

Yet their wrongness did not detract from their genius because the beauty of the lines and the clearness of thought were not impaired. I would not alter a jot or even a tittle of Eliot's lines any more than I would point out to Botticelli how wrong the anatomy is in the Birth of Venus. Beauty cannot be wrong, nor can the deliberate be mistaken.

So, it's probably worth saying something about the subject of this blog. I am not here to assert by force of arms the hegemony of grammar over sense or by dint of pandiculation the rule of dictionary definitions over perfectly good new uses. Oblivious may be defined in the dictionary as forgetting, but everybody now uses it to mean never having noticed and that is, quite simply, that.

It is only the lazy uses, the meaningless swathes, the casual use of casual, ubiquitous axes and vacuous vibrancies to which we take (odd phrase when you think about it) exception.

Note her left shoulder and arm