Lethologica

There is, dear reader, a precise word for not being able to remember the precise word: lethologica. This was sometime a paradox, but next time you misplace the mot juste, comfort yourself with the fact that you are simply having a lethological moment.

Lethologica was invented by Carl Jung and is simply a combination of lethe - forgetfulness - and logica- wordy. In Greek mythology there was a river of forgetfulness in the underworld called Lethe. When you bathed in Lethe you forgot everything and were washed in sweet oblivion. That's why Keats opens Ode to a Nightingale with:

My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My senses, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past and Lethewards had sunk.

Similarly, when Hamlet's dead daddy reveals that he's been murdered, he's pleased to see that Hamlet gets antsy:

...duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this.

There's also some poem where Time sits on the banks of Lethe throwing people's names in to the water, but I can't remember what it is. Perhaps it's Dante. It sounds like Dante. Anybody know? I just can't remember.

Jung tries to remember that splendid word he thought up.

The Passionate Poet

This is Byron writing about his life of intense and never-ending poetic passion:

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

By this rationale, we should be able to recognise the most passionate of persons by their state of disrepair. And, while we're quoting Byron, here he is describing John Keats:

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - he is always frigging his imagination. - I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam of vision produced by raw pork and opium. 

I've just worked out what I'm having for lunch.

Bring on the bacon!

Another Reason to Love De Quincey

You've got to love De Quincey; and, if you haven't read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, you've denied yourself one of the central luxuries of life. The following from the second edition.

At present, after exchanging a few parting words, and a few final or farewell farewells with my faithful female agent...

But there's a footnote to this half-sentence. The footnote reads:

Some people are irritated, or even fancy themselves insulted, by overt acts of alliteration, as many people are by puns. On their account, let me say, that, although there are here eight separate f's in less that half a sentence, this is to be held as pure accident. In fact, at one time there were nine f's in the original cast of the sentence, until I, in pity of the affronted people, substituted female agent for female friend.


I always attempt to add as many alliterations as I am able to without awkwardness. For example, the luxuries of life above was originally the pleasures of life. Mind you, nine in a row is pushing it. Alliteration is like picking pockets: very profitable so long as it's not noticed. Have a look at the Fs and Ss in this bit of Keats.

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.


But I wager that you wouldn't have noticed them, had I not warned you.

For further effy alliteration, see this ancient post.

Eyes suspiciously unfocused.

Keats and Starbucks

So what does the opening of La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats have to do with the world's largest chain of coffee shops?

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake.
And no birds sing.

Give up? I thought so. You never were one for hard work, were you, dear reader? The connection is in the sedge.

Sedge is any kind of plant that grows on the banks of a lake or stream. More recently its meaning has dwindled to refer to plants of the cyperaceae family; and, really, unless you're a water-vole, the only place that you'll have heard of it is in the Keats poem.

This takes us to a suburb of Harrogate in Yorkshire with a small stream flowing through it. Here is a picture of that stream*:

You will notice the depressing lack of sedge. It must have wither'd, for there was sedge there once, as the suburb's name is Sedge-stream, except it's not. Yorkshire was, a thousand and bit years ago, overrun by Vikings, so most of their place names are Scandinavian, and the Viking word for Sedge-stream is Star-beck.

Starbeck is only recorded from 1817 but it must have been around before because a) It has a Viking name and b) there were people there who had sex as early as 1379. This sex produced families, and those families were called, by a slight alteration in the name, Starbuck. Since 1379 two things have happened: the Quaker movement was founded and America was discovered.

The result of this double-catastrophe was that among the first settlers on Nantucket Island was a Quaker family called Starbuck. Nantucket was a centre of the whaling industry and the Starbucks took up their harpoons and set off to seek their oily fortunes at sea. Valentine Starbuck met the King and Queen of Hawaii and took them to London where they got measles and died. Obed Starbuck sighted a coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific which was later named Starbuck Island in Valentine's honour. The point is that the Starbucks were famous whalers, which brings us to Moby Dick.

Moby Dick is about a bunch of sailors having a whale of a time (whale, in case you were wondering, was early C20th American slang for a lot - whale of a job etc). The first mate of the whaling ship Pequod is called Starbuck, because the Starbucks were such prominent whalers. Moby Dick, aside from having a vaguely amusing name, is a favourite with American schoolteachers, which brings us to Jerry Baldwin.

Jerry Baldwin was an English teacher from Seattle, who in 1971, along with a couple of friends, decided to start a coffee shop. He wanted to name it Pequod, after the ship in Moby Dick but was shouted down by his partners who pointed out that Pee is not a good syllable to have in a shop selling liquids.

So the others cast around for a local name and found that there was an abandoned mining town near Mount Ranier called Camp Starbo. At this point Jerry Baldwin piped up and suggested a compromise. If he couldn't have Pequod, what about Starbucks,which sounds a little like Starbo and is a character in Moby Dick. They decided that this was a good name, and the rest is bad coffee.

And it all goes back to a sedge-covered stream in Yorkshire.

Gone fishin'

*Stolen from Flickr without a flicker of conscience.

The Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

Here is the updated list of the fifty most quoted lines of poetry on the internet, including all the readers' suggestions. We started with a long list of over 400 lines taken from dictionaries of quotations, collections of favourite poems and our own knowledge. We put each one into google and google told us how many pages contained that exact line. The number of search results is shown on the right. It should be stated before you begin that google is, for a computer program, often strangely illogical and inconsistent. Click on the author's name for the full poem. Counting down from number fifty...

50. The mind is its own place, and in itself/[Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n] 403,000 Milton
49. Full fathom five thy father lies 438,000 Shakespeare
48. If you can keep your head what all about you 447,000 Kipling
47. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways 467,000 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
46. If music be the food of love, play on 507,000 Shakespeare
45. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers 521,000 Shakespeare
44. What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare 528,000 W.H. Davies
43. The moving finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves on 571,000 Edward Fitzgerald
42. They also serve who only stand and wait 584,000 Milton
41. The quality of mercy is not strained 589,000 Shakespeare
40. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 594,000 Coleridge

Euthanase

This morning I offered to euthanase a sickly and diseased young lady whom I discovered floccillating on my way to breakfast. The brave girl's only objection, uttered in a quavering voice, was that she wasn't sure that euthanase was really a verb.

So I fled to a dictionary and found that indeed euthanase is not the right word, nor does it even pop up on google. The Americans say euthanize, but according to the word of The Almighty OED we English make do with euthanatize. However, the only citation is from a Spectator of  1873:

I saw a crab euthanatising a sickly fish, doubtless from the highest motives

I also didn't realise that euthanasia meant a peaceful or happy death long before it meant deliberately bringing about such an expiration, an idea that didn't pop up until 1869. Moreover it was originally anglicized to euthanasy. The root, since you ask, is simply eu for good as in eugenics or The Eurhythmics, and thanatos meaning death, as in Aimée Thanatogenos (the heroine of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One) whose name means death-born beloved — or as in thanatologist which is a euphemism for undertaker — or as in thanatorium which is a place people go to be killed.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

And the Iron Entered into Coverdale's Soul

Myles Coverdale is my hero. He is the patron saint of inadequate optimists.

Coverdale was an early protestant and like all protestants he believed that the Bible should be translated into the vernacular. Thus the ownership of the Bible would be taken from the priests and prelates of the Roman Church. To do this, you of course needed to go back to the original Hebrew and Greek. So Coverdale set out to make his translation bravely ignoring the fact that he didn't know any Hebrew and was utterly innocent of Greek.

Coverdale did know a bit of German and the Germans had already started translating the Bible from its original languages. So armed with a dash of Deutsche and the belief that he was doing God's Work he settled down to translate.

The result was a carnival of inaccuracy. The most fabulous of his mistakes is in Psalm 105 and it goes like this:

But he had sent a man before them: even Joseph, who was sold to be a bond-servant
Whose feet they hurt in the stocks : the iron entered into his soul

The iron entered into his soul and the phrase entered into the language. It is beautiful, and like most beauty it is utterly wrong. It should be his neck was put in irons.

How this came about is reasonably explicable. The Hebrew word nefesh means breath. Metonymically it can mean neck, because that's where you do most of your breathing. Metaphorically it can mean soul because your breath is your soul (the same as spirit, which comes from the latin to breathe).

Once you've got his soul was put in irons, all you need to do is mistake the subject for the object, which Coverdale could do with ease, and you have The iron entered into his soul.

There are too many Coverdale mistakes to list them all. My second favourite, which I came across in church one Sunday, is in Psalm 18:

As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me : but the strange children shall dissemble with me.

The strange children shall fail : and be afraid out of their prisons.

Who are the strange children, and why were they in prison in the first place? To what abominable crimes has infantile strangeness led them? Why will fear release them? What the hell is going on, God?
 
Coverdale's strange children are the ben necker or foreign-born. Coverdale's prison should be a stronghold or fortress. The literal translation is:
 
As soon as they hear me, they obey me;
foreigners cringe before me.
They all lose heart;
they come trembling from their strongholds.

Which isn't nearly as good. It's just another of those dull, dull, dull gentiles-shall-be-driven-before-me bits of the Old Testament. That is the paradox of the Coverdale psalter. It may be inaccurate, it may not be what God or David or a series of writers over several centuries meant, but it is one of the finest works in the English language.
 
The Book of Common Prayer, which is used on Sunday evenings in my parish church, still contains the Coverdale Psalter. Shakespeare, I once read*, alludes to the psalms more than any other book. Coverdale, though no linguist, was a poetic genius. Had he let his utter inadequacy deter him from his task, posterity would have been impoverished. Keats was wrong: error is beauty, beauty error.
 
 

Well done, my son.

 
*I can't remember the reference.