Let's Get Terpsichoreal

As a group, the Nine Muses get a lot of words: museum (a shrine to the Muses), mosaic (a work of the Muses), music, bemused (devoted to the Muses); although weirdly they seem to have no etymological connection to the verb muse.

The individual muses tend to get less attention, largely because you'd have to remember which was which. The only one that ever sticks in my mind is Terpsichore, the muse of dance. This is largely because whenever I invite a hapless wallflower to skip the heavy fandango with me, whether at rave or discotheque, I usually phrase it "Would you like to pay homage to Terpsichore?"*

I thought that I was alone in such recondite invitations, until I found this 1960 film in which a very young Oliver Reed propositions a girl by saying:

Say, baby, you feel terpsichorical? Let's go downstairs and fly.

Well, now I know how to phrase it.

Begin then, sisters of the sacred well.

*N.B. This line is unsuccessful, but it is amusing.

Ghoulish Cats

 

 

Ghoulish is a word much beloved of the tabloid press. Anything can be ghoulish, from serial killers to a bad round of golf, or as the Daily Express would put it: "one of the most ghoulish Masters bloodbaths in history."

Ghoul, or ghul, is an Arabic word and was a beast that hung around in graveyards and was meant to devour or seize corpses, and ghul meant seize. So what was this strange cadaver-devouring creature, this chewer of corpses, as Joyce would have called it? Was it a thing of myth? A kink in the Middle Eastern imagination?

No. A ghoul is just a cat. Apparently*, they're rather problematic in graveyards. So ghoulish is simply feline.

Ghoulish

*I was told this by an ethnographic friend of mine, but he's got a PHD so I believe every word he says.

Montivagant and Abominable

Montivagant means wandering over the mountains, it's therefore a terribly useful word for describing weekends in Snowdonia, the commute of a yeti, or the possible location of Osama Bin Laden.

Hmm. That, dear reader, has made me go and look up yeti to see what it actually means. Apparently, it's Tibetan yeh-teh meaning little manlike animal. I know that sounds like a lot to get into two syllables but it's probably something like mannikin. I don't know. I don't speak Tibetan, and the way things are going I probably never will.

What really surprised me was that they were little, but the OED insists on it and quotes Sherpa Tensing:

He describes it as half man half beast, about five feet six inches tall, covered with reddish-brown hair but with a hairless face.

Which is rather less impressive than I had imagined. I was at school with someone like that. The Tibetans also call them Meetoh Kangmi, which means Abominable Snowmen. This is a much older and much better name than the badly transliterated yeti. Abominable is such a lovely word: a bit religious and a bit old fashioned: like a communion wafer dipped in gentleman's relish.

Montivagant is obviously the cousin of noctivagant, omnivagant and extravagant, on all of which I have posted before.

The Inky Fool ascending to Humanities 2

Nympholepsy

Nympholepsy is, according to the OED:

Passion supposedly inspired in men by nymphs; an ecstasy or yearning, esp. that caused by desire for something unattainable.

It's therefore a rather similar word to pisgah, and equally useful. So far as one can tell from the literature, ancient Greece was overrun with shepherds who were forever pining after vanishing arboreal nymphs.

A couple of nymphs have made it into the language where they can at last be possessed by pastoral poets, if not pastoral farmers. These are Echo, who pined away for love of Narcissus until she was just a voice; and Calypso, an island nymph who somehow gave her name to Caribbean island music, but nobody's sure how.

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in the orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

When Internet dating works

Echolalia

There was a chap at school with me who, whenever a crowd was gathered at a sporting event or somesuch, would shout 'Give us a G!' And the crowd would chorus 'G'. Then 'Give us an I!' 'I.' 'Give us an R!'

It was usually halfway through that the crowd realised he was trying to make them shout Giraffe.

Anyway, the technical term for the meaningless repetition of sounds is echolalia. Echolalia is what babies do when they're learning to speak and simply repeating the words that their parents say. Echolalia is what backing singers do when they repeat the last word of the line. Echolalia is the practice of parrots.


Echo was the nymph who loved Narcissus and, on rejection, pined away until she was only a sound. Lalia was the Ancient Greek for talk.

On the same principle you have glossolalia - speaking in tongues - and coprolalia, which is the compulsive desire to shout obscenities. It's a more beautiful, and therefore less appropriate, way of saying Tourette's Syndrome.

The Inky Fool counts his fishes

Amazing Clues

How vainly men themselves amaze...

Old meanings are confusing enough without shoving two into a line, yet that is what Andrew Marvell did without a flicker of compunction in the opening line of The Garden. The modern reader would be almost excused for thinking that narcissistic men are going about impressing themselves. Though that may be so, Marvell is writing about men who futilely consign themselves to a labyrinth, or maze.

Labyrinths are terrible places, teeming with minotaurs and littered with lost threads, or at least that's how I imagine them. Hampton Court was a disappointment. The reason, of course, is that I was exposed to the myth of Theseus as an infant, though the really dirty bits were thoughtfully concealed from me until I was six.

Anyway, Theseus had to run into the labyrinth, kill the Minotaur and dash out again, all in time for tea. Ariadne, fearing that the tea would go cold, suggested the preposterously obvious idea that he take some thread with him, unwind it on the way in, and follow it on the way out. That way he would not be amazed.

What with the Trojan horse and Ariadne's thread, one can see the Attic genius for the bleeding obvious. To stop himself getting lost he had a thread. And what was the medieval term for a ball of yarn? It was, dear threadbare reader, a clue.

It was a clue that Theseus laid for himself in the labyrinth, it was a clue that led him back and dismazed him. If he had not had a clue of thread he would not have had a clue about how to escape. As John Pomfret wrote of the ideal woman:

She knows the best, and does the best pursue,
And treads the maze of life without a clue,
That the weak only and the wavering lack,
When they're mistaken, to conduct them back.
She does, amidst ten thousand ways, prefer
The right, as if not capable to err.

Slowly, of course, the clue that leads you through the labyrinth became the key that solves the puzzle, and then became the hint that helps you to solve the puzzle, and then, in 1914, received its apotheosis when it was attached to crosswords.

Incidentally, the original labyrinth (etymology uncertain) in which the Minotaur resided was designed by Daedalus, and has therefore been called a Daedal.

Now read this lovely poem by Auden. It's called The Labyrinth.


Anthropos apteros for days
Walked whistling round and round the Maze,
Relying happily upon
His temperament for getting on.


The hundreth time he sighted, though,
A bush he left an hour ago,
He halted where four alleys crossed,
And recognized that he was lost.


"Where am I?" Metaphysics says
No question can be asked unless
It has an answer, so I can
Assume this maze has got a plan.


If theologians are correct,
A Plan implies an Architect:
A God-built maze would be, I'm sure,
The Universe in minature.


Are data from the world of Sense,
In that case, valid evidence?
What in the universe I know
Can give directions how to go?


All Mathematics would suggest
A steady straight line as the best,
But left and right alternately
Is consonant with History.


Aesthetics, though, believes all Art
Intends to gratify the heart:
Rejecting disciplines like these,
Must I, then, go which way I please?


Such reasoning is only true
If we accept the classic view,
Which we have no right to assert,
According to the Introvert.


His absolute pre-supposition
Is - Man creates his own condition:
This maze was not divinely built,
But is secreted by my guilt.


The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my unconscious Mind;
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.


My problem is how not to will;
They move most quickly who stand still;
I'm only lost until I see
I'm lost because I want to be.


If this should fail, perhaps I should,
As certain educators would,
Content myself with the conclusion;
In theory there is no solution.


All statements about what I feel,
Like I-am-lost, are quite unreal:
My knowledge ends where it began;
A hedge is taller than a man."


Anthropos apteros, perplexed
To know which turning to take next,
Looked up and wished he were a bird
To whom such doubts must seem absurd.


And buy the Complete Auden here.

The Inky Fool visits Hampton Court

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

Paracelsus, Gnomes, Sylphs and the Rape of the Lock

Paracelsus was an alchemist, chemist, medic, and all-round egg-head of the sixteenth century. Paracelsus was not his real name of course: that would be ridiculous. His real name was Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim. Paracelsus was a moniker he acquired for being the equal of the Roman writer Celsus.

Why shed foolish ink for a chemist? Because, dear reader, Paracelsus invented words. Sometimes he invented words for things that existed: he named zinc zinc because it forms into jagged crystals and zinke is Old High German for sharp. Sometimes, though, he invented names for things that he had merely imagined. And, amazingly, they caught on.

Gnomes, for example, are the children of Herr Von Hohenheim's imagination. There were no gnomes until Paracelsus dreamed them. He wrote a (serious) book describing them as being about a foot tall. He contended that just as fish move through water, and we through air, so gnomes can move through solid earth.

It seems likely, therefore, that gnome would be a shortening of genomos (earth dweller) and the poor creatures have no etymological truck with gnomic utterances, which are wise.

Paracelsus also invented sylphs. As gnomes are earth dwellers, so sylphs are spirits that of the air, and, according to him, are mortal but soulless, like Frenchmen. Nobody's sure where he got the name. It might be something to do with sylvan nymphs, but it might not, and Paracelsus is far too dead to answer questions.

Both gnomes and sylphs arrived in our language through the absurd humour of the most quoted poet in history: Alexander Pope. The Rape of the Lock (aside from having a title that makes keys uncomfortable) is a mock epic about a pretty girl having a lock of her hair cut off. Like any good epic it needed a supernatural element, so Pope took up the absurd Paracelsian spirits and made them central to his story.

Pope explains that sylphs are the spirits of women so vacuous and vain that they could not properly go to Heaven. Gnomes, on the other hand, are the spirits of prudish women, descended into the earth. The two camps fight futilely and invisibly around the heroine as she suffers her sly tonsure.

Pope's work was so popular that the words gained currency in English. Sylphs had, occasionally, been mentioned before by Paracelsian fans, but the English language had never known a gnome before Pope wrote his poem.

So, if it weren't for the combined efforts of Pope and Paracelsus, journalists would have no cliché to describe slim girls, and garden gnomes would not exist.

Incidentally, garden gnomes commit suicide.

Hypnopompic

If something is hypnopompic, it happens when you are just beginning to wake up. Still half-conscious you imagine that the alarm clock is a fire engine, that the cockerel is your friend and that the bed is a warm womb from which you will never be induced.

It is the opposite of hypnogogic which applies to falling asleep and myoclonic jerks. Hypno is sleep and pomp is from the Greek word for send. A psychopomp is somebody who guides souls from one world to another: vide Charon, Papa Legba and Virgil.

Oh, and the immemorial reviser's belief that you'll remember a recording played to you while you're sleeping is hypnopædia.

I've got to stop doing this

Venus

No reasonable person can look at the word Venus without trying to rhyme it with something. It's like wombat: it's impossible. This is a mite unfair on the poor old lady. Venus has got a terrible press. From her do we get venal, venom, venial and venereal disease.

Vener is the Latin genitive. One early science fiction writer, W.A. Lach-Szyrma (of whom much much more later), wrote:

I must also apologise for the word "Venusian". I know well that compounds ought to be derived from the genitive Veneris; but these are already connected with ideas opposed to those I wish to convey.

Having a planet named after you is small compensation for such indignity. Even Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis makes her out as a slightly dotty and unwanted nymphomaniac.

Her Greek equivalent Aphrodite rhymes with nightie and gave us aphrodisiac.

I have already blogged about Venus of the Beautiful Bottom, and know nothing about fly-traps.

The Inky Fool was in a hurry and couldn't chat

Mercury

For the next few days we shall devote ourselves, dear star-crossed reader, to the study of the wandering stars, or stellae errantes, vulgarly known as planets. The first of these and the closest to the sun is Mercury.

Once upon a time the Romans traded stuff, which they called merx. From this we get merchandise, merchant, market, mercenary and mercer. Merx also meant that the god of trade was called Mercury.

To each planet was assigned a metal: Saturn had lead, Jupiter tin, Mars iron, and Venus copper. However, the only planetary-metallic name to have survived is mercury, the stuff you find in thermometers and tuna.

Also, those born when the planet Mercury is ascendant are liable to be fast-moving and energetic and, in a word, mercurial.






P.S. To amalgamate something is to combine it with mercury. It's an old alchemical term that seems to derive from malagma in Latin, which meant bandage.

A Parade of Perversity

Fie on impure Ganymedes, Hermaphrodites, Neronists, Messalinists, Dodecomechanists, Capricians, Inventors of new, or Revivers of old lecheries, and the whole brood of venereous libertines, that know no reason but appetite, no law but lust, no humanity but villany, no divinity but atheism.

The list is one of the greatest tools of the author, and is seldom used today. Modern writers have an ascetic tendency to search for the right word. Shakespeare was quite happy to let a mob of nouns run across the page whooping and screaming. Not that the list above is from Shakespeare. It's from Gabriel Harvey's Third Letter on Robert Greene, which makes up in fun for what it lacks in up-to-the-minute relevance.

I quote it here, not simply to demonstrate what a good list looks like, but also because of all the lovely and obscure words. So:

Ganymede was the cupbearer of the gods, and Zeus' bugger-boy. So by Ganymedes Harvey means catamites. This is a trifle counter-etymological as Ganymede's name seems to have originally come from ganyesthai medea, meaning rejoicing in virility.

Ganymede had been born mortal but was granted immortality and eternal youth by Zeus (in exchange for rights of his passage). Ganymede's brother Tithonus was also granted immortality, but not eternal youth, which is all the excuse I need to quote a bit of Tennyson's Tithonus:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Hermaphrodite in Harvey's time simply meant homosexual. It was someone who, as a contemporary put it, was "in sexe a man, & in heart a woman".

A Neronist is anybody who imitates the depravity of Nero. This takes in a fair amount of depravity and Neronists deserve top marks for effort. Nero was a transvestite, a ganymede, a hermaphrodite, a mother-killer and a Bad Singer. In the context, Harvey probably meant transvestite as that is the perversion that Nero had and other emperors didn't.

Nero had a cousin called Messalina who was the wife of the Emperor Claudius. However, she also screwed almost everybody in Rome. According to Juvenal, she set up her own brothel where she worked as an enthusiastic amateur (with "gilded nipples"). According to Pliny the Elder she challenged Rome's most notorious prostitute to see who could have sex the most times in 24 hours. Messalina won with a score of twenty five. Given all that, I'm sure you can work out what Messalinists might be.

Dodecomechanists are... well it should be obvious. Dodeco means twelve. Mechanist means either someone who makes things, or someone who believes in a mechanical theory of the universe. The OED has no entry for dodecomechanist or any similar word, so I have had to work it out myself.

I can't for the life of me see how twelve could have anything to do with sex. So I think that Harvey was referring to astrologers, more precisely to those astrologers who discount both God and free will, and attribute everything to the mechanism of the stars. You see there are twelve houses in Heaven. That is to say, the sky is divided into twelve parts in which influential stars can be ascendant or descendant.

The renaissance astrologer William Lilly said:

There is nothing appertaining to the life of man in this world, which in one way or other hath not relation to one of the twelve Houses of Heaven, and as the twelve signs are appropriate to the particular members of mans body; so also doe the twelve houses represent not onely the severall parts of man, but his actions, quality of life and living.


So Lilly saw the twelve houses as the mechanism that drives the universe. So he was a dodecomechanist. That attributes to the stars the powers that are properly God's, so it's a tad atheist.


Capricians are not in the OED. They may be people who follow their caprices too much, but that seems rather weak in such a strong, bawdy, lecherous and ensemened list. Capricious simply means like a goat (as in capricorn) because goats are so whimsical. Given the context - the ganymedes and messalinists - I shall take a guess that capricians are those who like goats rather too vigorously.

So the whole list reads: Catamites, homosexuals, transvestites, sexually confident women, star-gazing atheists, and goat-shaggers.

Fie on them all indeed. Now I'm off to invent some new and revive some old lecheries.

This is the strangest Budweiser advert I've ever seen

Chocolate and Heavenly Bodies

There is a kind of chocolate bar called a Galaxy. There is also a kind of chocolate bar called a Milky Way. I'm not sure on what basis these names were chosen. Tabloid newspapers also pilfer the nomenclature of astronomy. I suppose the Milky Way suggests milk chocolate.


Pretty much every European language refers to the Milky Way as the Milky Way. In France it is la voie lactée, in German the Milchstraße, and in Welsh it is the Llwybr Laethog, because the Welsh language was invented by somebody playing a bad hand at Scrabble.


The milk comes from the myth that the pale strip of night sky was created when Hera was breast-feeding Hercules and overlactated.


In ancient Greek it was also called milk. The Greek for milk was gala, but the genitive of gala was galaktos. This means two things: first galactic is the etymological brother of lactating; and, second, the only difference between the two chocolate bars is that one of them is Greek.

That's how it happened

Horrid Cowardly Stupid Ostriches

There was a letter in yesterday's Times about ostriches. A comment article had accused EU leaders of hiding their heads in the sand like a bunch of ostriches. The letter claims the myth began because sound travels faster through the earth than through air so ostriches cleverly rest their heads against the earth so that they can hear things coming from farther off (see picture). It's the equivalent to a human having his ear to the ground, his finger on the pulse and his nose to the grindstone.

There's a startling moment in the Lamentations of Jeremiah where he says:

Even the sea monsters draw out the breast, they give suck to their young ones: the daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness.

Just as ostriches are now a byword for foolish cowardice, so they were once a byword for cruelty as they were believed to abandon their young. Either way, there must be something about those birds that we just don't trust.

There are lots of lovely bestial myths in the language like suicidal lemmings, disembarking rats (hence traitorous) and pacifist doves (as opposed to hawks). The sea monsters in that Biblical passage are pelicans*, which were believed to bite their own breasts when there was no food and let their young drink their blood. My favourite is that chameleons don't require food at all and survive on air, a belief that crops up in Hamlet:

Claudius: How fares our cousin Hamlet?

Hamlet: Excellent, i' faith; of the chameleon's dish: I eat the air, promise-crammed: you cannot feed capons so.

Claudius: I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet; these words are not mine

Hamlet: No, nor mine now.

The Inky Fool commuting to work

*As somebody is bound to point out, this seems to be a mistranslation in the King James Version and should really be jackals. However, the myth is true (if you see what I mean) nonetheless.

UPDATE: I queried the exorbitantly learned Joel Hoffman over at God Didn't Say That and he has given a wonderfully erudite and interesting answer which you can read here.

Halcyon Days

Today (or possibly yesterday, but I forgot) is the first of the Halcyon Days which will last until just before the end of December. The Halcyon Days are the fortnight of supposedly calm weather in midwinter during which the halcyon, or kingfisher, lays her eggs.

The eminent biologist/meteorologist Ovid explains that Ceyx and Alcyone were lovers. Ceyx had to go to sea for some reason and every day Alcyone (the girl) would go down to the shore to look for his returning vessel. She continued this vigil until she was informed by the utterly reliable medium of a dream that the ship had sunk and Ceyx had drowned. At this news, as Chaucer so movingly put it,

"Allas!" quod she for sorwe
And deyede within the thridde morwe.

[quod=said sorwe=sorrow deyede=died thridde=third morwe=day]

Anyway, everybody was terribly upset including the gods who decided on their tried and tested fall-back plan of turning both the lovers into birds (avification was only just behind stellafication in the Attic list of divine mercies).

The gods then went further and decided to make the sea calm and the weather bright for one fortnight a year starting on the 14th/15th of December so that the Alcyon could explore and develop her newfound egg-laying capabilities, for which I'm sure the young lady was profoundly grateful.

Anyway, the usual modern sense of the halcyon days as being the happy days before all the trouble started is a figurative extension of this precise ornithometeorlogical usage.

Note the wings forming