Unsteadily

I was reading a bestseller the other day, or rather I was trying to. But I couldn't. I'm going to try to explain why I couldn't by studying only one word of the whole book. This doesn't mean that the word (which came on page 39) was the novel's only fault, but it was a representative fault. So here goes. Here's why I couldn't read the novel. The narrator is on a boat and...

I jammed my hands in my pockets, hunched my shoulders up around my neck and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

The word that made me wince was unsteadily. Not that I have anything against unsteadily per se. Fine word. It was the placing of unsteadily within the sentence that I couldn't stomach. You see, try as I might, I can't read that sentence aloud.

By that I mean, quite specifically, that if I were chatting in the pub and (for some weird reason) trying to pass off the words of the novel as my own, it wouldn't work. It would sound odd.

When I was learning to drive, my driving instructor had this irritating way of talking. He would say:

I would like you to proceed to the junction where you will turn to the left.

Of course, nobody speaks like that naturally. So when you hear the words coming out of somebody's mouth it sounds odd. You get the same thing when you phone up customer service lines and the chap says "In order to redirect your call more efficiently I'd like to ask you three questions." It's hard to identify what's wrong with that sentence, but you know that he's reading from a script, which is infuriating because, when you start to make your complaint, instead of helping he just keeps reading from the damned script until you want to strangle the little waste of skin and bury his body at sea.

The same thing happens with novelists.

... and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

I could say:

And crossed to the starboard side unsteadily.

I would be happier with:

And crossed to the starboard side - unsteadily.

You see, an adverb like that needs to be set off. In spoken English it never just qualifies a verb in the way that a standard adjective does (I saw a brown dog). If you use an adverb like unsteadily at all you put emphasis on it. So I would be happy as Larry with:

And crossed (unsteadily) to the starboard side.

I wouldn't have to use parentheses, commas might do, but parentheses give you a far firmer idea of how, in the middle of the sentence, I pause for a split second and then raise my eyebrows as I say unsteadily. There's a change in the tone of my voice, and in the pitch. Try it.

And crossed [pull face, look up, make hand gesture] unsteadily [resume normal tone of voice] to the starboard side.

That works.

In the end, though, I'd be much more likely to say staggered.

Some writers say that they never use adverbs. However, never is an adverb. I'm not objecting to adverbs by themselves. Just this one right here.

Nor am I merely being snobby about a bestseller. I read all seven Harry Potter novels without ever coming across an unnatural sentence like this. You see, it's very easy to avoid writing unnatural English: just say the words quietly as you type them. That's what I'm doing right now, and though I probably look a trifle insane, it keeps my prose natural and therefore convincing. This is how I talk. This is my voice.

(Incidentally, Raymond Chandler once said: "I'm caught talking to myself quite a lot lately. They say that is not too bad unless you answer back. I not only answer back, I argue and get mad.")

Now, there's a premise underlying all this that you may object to: does all prose have to correspond to spoken English? No. But it has to correspond to something. You might, for example, want to sound biblical. In that case you can write:

I did cross the boat: yea even unto the starboard side did I cross unsteadily.

Or you could do Shakespeare, or romantic poetry, or Dickensian/Brownian intricacy:

I attempted to cross to the starboard side of the craft, an exericse which, due to the obstinate periconfluctuations of the ocean, could be accomplished only in a manner that, had it been witnessed by the Leaning Tower of Pisa itself, would have been scorned for the wild and omnidirectional tiltings of my gait.

I'm fine with that. There's a voice there. It's not a voice in which anybody on earth has ever spoken, but it's a fully conceived and consistent voice that I can hear in my head, but...

And crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

Who? What? The narrator is an Englishman, so this isn't some twist of the American or Australian English that I don't get. It's just unnatural. It's like saying:

Proceed to the crossroads and, when instructed, take the second turning to the right.

Me, writing this post.

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.

Fluke

A Word A Day, has just put up the word fluke. Fluke has several meanings: it can be a funny little fish, the point of an anchor, or a stroke of luck. This latter is put down by AWAD as "of uncertain etymology" (1857).

The OED is a little more helpful. It says that fluke was originally a lucky shot in billiards, and suggests that it might have something to do with the Whitby dialect word fluke, meaning guess, although that wasn't recorded until 1876, so it's probably the other way round.

This all made me curious.

I chased up the OED's first citation of fluke. It's from Notes and Queries and is actually about the origin of the word fluke:

Billiards. — In playing at billiards, if a player makes a hazard, & c. which he did not play for, it is often said that he made a crow. It may be derived from the expression of " Shot at a pigeon and killed a crow". Another term is, " He made a flook (or fluke)." It seems to me that, as there are two flooks to the anchor of a ship, and as when the anchor shall be dropped either flook may take hold of the ground (as both do not, so that it is accidental which takes hold), the flook, at playing at billiards, may have reference to the same cause (accident). The favour of an answer will oblige.


A Billiard Player.


Oriental Club.

Good, but not good enough for the OED.

So I did some sniffling around of my own. It turns out that the billiard player at the Oriental Club and the OED have both missed an easy pot: namely a comic novel of 1853, four years before Notes and Queries. It's called The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, An Oxford Freshman by Cuthbert Bede (well, in truth, it's not by Cuthbert Bede, that was just the pen-name of Edward Bradley, but we'll let that pass); and the relevant passage is herefollowing:

Besides these out-of-door sports, our hero also devoted a good deal of his time to acquiring in-door games, being quickly initiated into the mysteries of billiards, and plunging headlong into pool. It was in the billiard-room that Verdant first formed his acquaintance with Mr. Fluke of Christ Church, well known to be the best player in the University, and who, if report spoke truly, always made his five hundred a year by his skill in the game. Mr. Fluke kindly put our hero "into the way to become a player;" and Verdant soon found the apprenticeship was attended with rather heavy fees.

Now, there are two possibilities here: the first is that the slang word fluke was already around in 1853 and the author wanted to give his character a funny name. This seems unlikely. It's hardly a good joke to use a word so obscure that it had never appeared in print before.

The other possibility is that the word came from the novel. But is this possible? Was it an influential tome? You need to sell a lot of copies to get a word into the language. Did anyone read Verdant Green?

Yes!

According to the DNB:

The first edition of The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green sold out in Oxford on the first day and the continuing success of the three narratives was affirmed when the outright copyright was acquired by James Blackwood in 1858 and a collected cloth-bound edition was issued. (By 1870 it had sold 100,000 copies.)

So fluke, meaning a lucky shot at billiards, could have come from the once-famous, now-forgotten novel. Or was it just a coincidence?

Then I thought of a simple test. If it was a comedy name derived from billiards slang, there wouldn't be any real Mr Flukes (reality tends to elude me rather a lot, like a bitter ex-girlfriend). The name would be like Gradgrind or Micawber or Doasyouwouldbedoneby.

But if it was a real surname then it would be probable to the point of persuasion that the flukey chance derives from a pre-existent surname.

With quivering fingers I Googled the words Fluke surname.

Millions of the damn fellows. So far as I can tell from the Internet you can't move for real people called Fluke. My absolute favourite Fluke is John M. Fluke Jr. who runs the family financial business.

Now, I'm sure that John Fluke is a good and competent man, in fact he must be super-competent to get anybody on earth to invest in a company called Fluke Capital Management.

All of which convinces me that fluke, the chance, comes from Mr Fluke of Christ Church.

Mr Fluke is back right, smoking and chalking.

Minimal or Maximal

I have been having fun today. I have been rewriting, improving and cutting. Here are the first ten pages of Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P.G. Wodehouse, but I've altered them slightly. I've cut out the unnecessary verbiage and rewritten them in the style of Ernest Hemingway. It is, I think you'll agree, a great improvement. I've also retitled it.

A Farewell to the Old Man without Women 


Chapter One

I was in the bath. My Aunt had written asking me to meet some people called Trotter. I didn't want to go, but I would. It was business. 


I heard footsteps and sat up, alert. My valet was back. He told me that another letter had arrived by special courier asking me to invest a thousand pounds in a play. I refused. I had the money, and the play was written by my cousin. But I didn't care.

Here, on the other hand, is the first paragraph of L'Etranger by Camus, rewritten in the style of P.G. Wodehouse. I've also retitled it.

Hang It All!


Chapter One

Usually, you know, I like to begin these memoirs of mine with something cheery. A good book, in my opinion, should brighten up the world, put a spring in the reader's step and a merry song on his lips. Some fellows love to be sombre and I suppose that they've got a right to it. There are those who don't consider a book worth reading unless they're sobbing their eyes out by the end of the first page. I've never understood that line myself and have always tried to start with something to rouse the sagging spirit and bend the corners of the mouth in an upward direction; but today I really can't. You see, I've had a bit of a blow. Today my dear old mother, the lady to whose tender dandling I owe my all, has kicked the proverbial bucket. 


I mean, I say today, but it could have been yesterday. All I got was a bare and bleak telegram with one sentence on it. Wallop! Well, you can imagine that I didn't take it too well. Really, these telegram chaps have all the compassion of an angry tigress. You'd think, wouldn't you, that when you're telling a fellow news like that you would at least give the chap some warning? Blows should be softened and pills sugared. They could begin:


Dear Meursault, Poor yourself a triple snifter and sit down somewhere where you won't fall off, we've got some dark and drearies to impart.


Then they could slip in some stuff about splendid innings and God gathering up his sunbeams and I wouldn't be sitting here foisting all this unpleasantness on you like a whining willow. 


I suppose I ought to catch the bus to Marengo.

Why have I been making these improvements? Well, it's all to do with George Orwell.

You see, I used to have a link up on the right of the blog to Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language. It's one of the classic essays on English prose and its general drift is that the words you use tend to fuddle your thoughts and those of the reader. Therefore, says Orwell, you ought to prune, prune, prune until you are left with the bare minimum needed to convey meaning.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I noticed that there were far too many links up on the right and it was all getting rather cluttered. I had to take something down. I looked at the links and felt rather like the chap operating the lifeboat concession on the Titanic. But in the end I decided that Orwell could go. He'd had his spot for ages and it was time to make way for new blood etc etc.

Then, last week, I posted a link to an article on prose that suggested the exact opposite. This other article had the idea that you should use as many words as you possibly could.

It has been pointed out that this seems to be an inconsistency. I post one link and then I post another and you dear reader are left dizzy and disappointed by my traitorous tergiversations.

Whose side am I on? Minimalist or maximalist? Am I a prosaic and prosodic Vicar of Bray? Do I have no loyalty, no constancy, no honour?

Well, the truth is that I'm not on either side. I just thought that both arguments were interesting and carefully thought out. Being well dressed for a funeral is quite a different thing to being well dressed for the beach. The occasion is all and you're going to look a bit silly emerging from the sea in a black suit and tie or weeping over the coffin in your speedoes and flip-flops. It's the same with prose. Prose has a place and purpose and though I thought that I was improving Wodehouse and Camus, helping them out of their stylistic rut, sometimes I'm not so sure.

Horses for courses, dear reader, and each to his own.

Re-Hearsing

This from Wilt by Tom Sharpe. Mr Wilt is being questioned about the disappearance of his wife.

'Interesting word "rehearsal",' he said. 'It comes from the old French, rehercer, meaning...'


'To hell with where it comes from,' said the Inspector, 'I want to know where it ends up.'


'Sounds a bit like a funeral too when you come think of it,' said Wilt, continuing his campaign of semantic attrition.


Inspector Flint hurled himself into the trap. 'Funeral? Whose funeral?'


'Anyone's,' said Wilt blithely. 'Hearse, rehearse. You could say that's what happens when you exhume a body. You rehearse it though I don't suppose you fellows use hearses.'

Well, if a passage like that won't send you scurrying to the dictionary, nothing will; and the connection to hearses is more than coincidental, it is rakish.

Once upon a terribly long time ago there was a French word hercer, which meant to rake. This gave us three words: the first was herse, meaning rake which is now forgotten and mouldering in the garden shed of language.

In modern English we still have the phrase to rake over something and that's exactly what rehearse meant. By Shakespeare's time rehearsal had already come to mean the preparation for a play, but you can, and I often do, rehearse old arguments and doctrines.

Hercer gave us a candlestick, but to explain why I shall have to briefly explain Tenebrae. Tenebrae is a morning service performed over Easter. You have a great, big, fifteen-branched candlestick with fifteen lit candles. You say fourteen psalms and after each one you extinguish a candle, until there is only one flame left. At that point the priest slams his Bible shut with a strepitus, or great noise, and the last candle is then hidden under the altar to symbolise the death of Christ.

Now, the first thing you'll notice is that strepitus is a fantastic word for the final, satisfying slamming shut of a long book that you've been reading for the last year. The second is that a fifteen branched candelabra is going to be huge. It is; and just for you I've added a picture on the right.

Looks a bit a rake, doesn't it? It does. And that is why Tenebrae candlesticks are called hearses.

Then people started putting candles over coffins: not directly on coffins, but on a framework just above, and that framework was called a hearse. And from that, in 1650, you got the carriage that carries a chap's last, wooden, bijou residence.

All of which casts a glimmering light on the word rehearse in this Shakespeare sonnet:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sudden bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that write it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

The Inky Fool's taxi had arrived

No Buts

Have a look at this paragraph from the opening chapter of the 1939 novel Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, and see if you can tell what's odd about it.

Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy individuality that Youth is drawn to him as is a fly to a sugar bowl. It is a story about a small town. It is not a gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry, monotonous account, full of such customary “fill-ins” as “romantic moonlight casting murky shadows down a long, winding country road.” Nor will it say anything about tinklings lulling distant folds; robins carolling at twilight, nor any “warm glow of lamplight” from a cabin window. No. It is an account of up-and-doing activity; a vivid portrayal of Youth as it is today; and a practical discarding of that worn-out notion that “a child don’t know anything.”

Any guesses? I'll give you a clue. It's not about what's there, but what isn't. Still no idea? Another clue: the idea was repeated thirty years later by Georges Perec. Yes? No? All right, I'll tell you.

There are no Es. Not one. Gadsby is 50,000 words long and the fifth letter of the alphabet makes not a single, solitary appearance. He even went so far as to not allow himself Mr because it is a shortening of mistEr. You can read the introduction, and indeed the whole of Gadsby here. Its skill of composition is matched only by its insanity of purpose.

The word for such a work is, incidentally, a lipogram.

I was having a drink the other night with a girl who used to work for Bloomberg, the famous mayor manufacturer. Apparently, Bloomberg's style guide absolutely forbids the use of the word but. Nor can you replace it with however, yet, nonetheless or albeit. Each fact is an island, and they must remain in Gradgrindian lines and not use connectors to cancel each other out.

Moreover, at Bloomberg you can't use adjectives of value. Profits can be neither good nor bad, large nor minor. They certainly can't be unexpected.

It's good to know that the torch that Mr Wright lit has not gone out.

N.B. The reason the for the picture. This post is about things that aren't there, which makes illustration tricky. This picture is of Dickens' study and was painted just after his death. It is called The Empty Chair because the chair implies the man who is not sitting in it. The picture was wildly popular and thousands of copies were made. My tutor at Oxford had a copy in his study. Van Gogh, who was a big Dickens fan and moved to London a few years after the novelist's death, loved the picture. That's why Van Gogh did all those paintings of empty chairs and empty beds, because the furniture implies the absent person.

For Those Reading Historical Novels (Or Mr Darcy Was Loaded)

I'm reading Wilt by Thomas Sharpe at the moment. It's terribly good fun so far but I have been troubled, dear reader, sorely troubled by prices. Money is terribly important in Wilt. The novel is all about class and budgets and careers. Henry Wilt himself earns £3,500 a year and his wife secretly spends seventy pounds on clothes and the starter in a restaurant costs 95p.

Trouble is, I've no idea what that means in today's green and folding. It's only thirty-five years since Wilt was published, but inflation is such that I can make neither tail nor head of these (terribly important) details.

I get the same thing reading Pride and Prejudice. People are always described as having an income of so many hundred or thousand a year, and the girls go wild (or don't); but the modern reader is left scratching his head and furrowing his brow and wondering whether to go down to the library with a slide-rule and work everything out in compound inflation.

Nevermore, dear calculating reader, nevermore. Use this:



It's so damned handy that I've installed it as a permanent widget on the right of the blog. I'm afraid that I couldn't find one that would go straight to dollars and all those other funny foreign currencies that don't have a picture of the Queen on them and are therefore worthless. But if you're American (are you, dear reader? I'd so like to know), you can continue on to a site like this and find out that Mr Darcy's £10,000 a year in 1813 is:

£520,000 in modern Britain

$831,869.95 in the USA

$827,134.49 in Canada

$841,250.62 Down Under

€612,635.63 in those amusing countries beyond the English Channel

And the rest of you can work it out for yourselves. The general point is that Mr Darcy is even richer than I am, and it's no surprise that Miss Bennett fell in love with him.

The Inky Fool returns from the cash point

I Long For Short

There was a splendid article in The Independent the other day. Well, like most people who praise newspaper articles, I simply mean that I agree with it. The tenor of the article was...

Right, tenor meaning general sense, comes from the Latin tenorem meaning contents or direction. That comes from tenere meaning to hold (as in a tenacious tenant in an untenable tenement). Meanwhile a singer holds a note and that's the reason that the tenor of an article is not necessarily Pavarotti.

...where was I? Oh yes, modern novels. Too long.

I am the slowest reader I have ever met. Years ago I did some involuntary voluntary* work in a homeless shelter. There was a chap there who called himself Animal. He told me that he had left school aged ten or thereabouts. He needed glasses and didn't have any. He was drunk. He still read more quickly than I did.

To be fair, I make up for it by remembering everything I read, but it still means that I look at the printed breeze-blocks...

Right, breeze is an old word for ash, which is why breeze-blocks are called cinder-blocks in America. Basically, there's ash in the concrete.

...I look, as I say, at the cinder-blocks that pass for novels these days and I think to myself that life is too short, and if The Blind Assassin is really that good, then they ought to have a copy in Heaven. Freedom, Wolf Hall, Infinite Jest: that would be three years of my life. And are they really that much better than Macbeth, Death in Venice and the Great Gatsby? Does the author really have that much more to say?

When I go into a bookshop the first thing I look for is not the title, the cover or the blurb: it's the spine. I like my books like I like my women: slim, beautiful and inexpensive.

Am I alone in this? Does nobody else quail and quake at the sight of those obese tomes that win all the prizes? People like me are probably a forgotten and unexploited market. The publisher even saves on paper and ink: it's win-win.

What's depressing is that if Camus sent L'Etranger or The Fall to the a publishers today he would be told that books ought to be more than 70,000 words and that 60,000 is the absolute minimum. And his manuscript would be thrown into the bin of unpublishables, along with Notes From Underground and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The Inky Fool reads the next big thing

*Voluntary in the sense that my school had made voluntary work compulsory.

Infundibuliform

I worry about these posts on useful words, you know. Sometimes I wonder what the merry hell is the point of telling you, dear reader, about words that nobody understands. If you don't know the word, what are the chances that your reader, your interlocutor, your colleague or your parole officer will understand it?

I fret.

But then I see others using strange words, and I feel all right. Take infundibuliform, which means funnel-shaped. Some people would call that an obscure, and therefore a useless, word. They would confine it to texts like The Encyclopedia of British Fungi or The Anatomist's Vade Mecum. The world is simply teeming with such naysayers and lexical dietitians. However, I came across it yesterday in Catch 22:

...that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls...

Good enough? Or is Britain's eleventh most loved novel beneath you? Well, I already knew the word infundibuliform because I remembered it from the nineteenth century motivational work Les Chants De Maldoror:

Oh incomprehensible pederasts, I shall not heap insults upon your great degradation; I shall not be the one to pour scorn on your infundibuliform anus.

The word (with a little e on the end) is also in the French original. There is even a poem of 1910 by Charles Follen Adams, called My Infundibuliform Hat


The scenes of my childhood, how oft I recall!
The sports of my youth, with my kite, top, and ball;
And that happy day when, with spirits elate,
I took my first step towards manhood's estate,
With a new coat and vest, bosom shirt and cravat,
And début with my infundibuliform hat.


How I stooped beneath awnings full seven feet high,
To the no small delight of my friends passing by;
And the sport that I made for the boys at the store
When I "chalked" at the height of my "tile" on the door;
One foot and two inches - I think it was that
My guess on that infundibuliform hat.


Them my maiden attempt as a maiden's gallant
When I proffered my elbow, with glances aslant;
And the walk to her dwelling that evening so fair,
Not to speak of the tete-a-tete when we got there,
The forfeit I claimed, as together we sat,
When she tried on my infundibuliform hat.


Well! Boys will be boys, and we men, after all,
Would gladly be freed from Time's pitiless thrall,
And live those days over, when, single and free -
Zounds! Wife's looking over my shoulder to see
What I have been writing... Well, we've had a spat,
And she smashed my infundibuliform hat.

I admit it's an obscure poem, but I'm pretty sure that it must have been the model for this Bob Dylan song:

Jane Austen and Latin

Professor Kathryn Sutherland, who, through no fault of her own, is an academic at St Anne's College at the University of Oxford in the county of Oxfordshire, has, in a paper much reported in the national press, suggested, to the surprise and consternation of many, that Jane Austen, who has for so long been regarded as the mistress of English prose, may have relied more than a little upon the corrections of William Gifford, a classical scholar in the employment of John Murray who was her publisher, a translator of Juvenal, and an imitator of Persius.

Christ, it's hard to write like Austen. Take the fourth sentence of Sense and Sensibility:

But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it.

Now let's cut away the subordinated stuff:

Her death....produced a great alteration...for...he invited... the family 

The last seventeen words are apposite clauses relating to the possessor of the object of the second main clause. The extraordinary thing is that the prose is so readable, so lucid, despite being grammatically so distant from spoken English.

English doesn't like to be complicated. It's a bluff, crude language that likes to stride around in a series of main clauses. The spoken equivalent of that sentence would be something like:

She died ten years before he did. That changed things. He needed someone to replace her. So he invited Henry Dashwood's family to come and live with him. Dashwood was the legal inheritor...

In fact, spoken English isn't quite like that because the sentences of spoken English rarely end. But if you replace all the full stops with and then you'll end up with something approaching normal conversation.

As I say, it doesn't make sense in English, but it would in Latin. English likes to be simple because English has so few inflections. Unlike Latin (or German for that matter), you can't pin a suffix to the end of the word family to show how it relates to the main verb. This means that, in English, your grammar's complexity is your reader's confusion; unless you're very, very careful.

However, as Latin prose was thought the model of good writing, and Latin language the palace of good thinking, its grammar crept into our literature, if not our language. Milton read all the classics, and wrote poetry that Ezra Pound denied was English at all. Thomas Browne knocked out jormungandrian sentences that nonetheless delight. Over breakfast, De Quincey used to improvise translations of the newspapers into Greek. Dr Johnson wrote a Latinate English that nobody ever spoke, but which was, when Austen began writing, considered the peak, pinnacle and pineapple of prose perfection.

I always thought that that was where Miss Austen got her prose style. She imitated Dr Johnson and Dr Johnson imitated the Ancients and thus... well, thus that fourth sentence of Sense and Sensibility. But now I have a new suspect: William Gifford, possessor of a classical education, and the man to whom Austen's prose was entrusted.

I have, though, not read Professor Sutherland's paper and can't find it online, so this must be taken as nothing more than the suspicions of a suspicious suspecter.



N.B. I'm working on the basis that Jane Austen herself didn't know Latin. This is reasonably safe, as she once wrote in a letter that she didn't know Latin. However, some scholars think that she only pretended not to know Latin in order to avoid getting a job.

Red Pens And Acceleration

People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at the rate of sixteen feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.
   - Catch-22, Joseph Heller

I was a proof reader once. Perhaps, dear reader, you have noticed all the typos that wriggle their way into this blog and think that I can't have been much of a proof reader. However, it is a truth universally acknowledged that it is impossible to proof your own writing. The writer remembers what he meant to write, and therefore sees what he meant to write. That's why people need proofers: proofers are other people.

Anyway, I know how a proofer's mind works. I know the mistakes he is looking out for: the missing prepositions, the incorrect numbers, the words the words written twice. This last error is terribly common with writers who were distracted for a second and then continued to type.

That's why I'm pretty sure that the mistake in the paragraph above is the fault not of Joseph Heller, but of some poor proofer who doesn't remember his physics.

...accelerating at the rate of sixteen feet per second....

Your speed is measured in distance per time (e.g. 5 miles per hour). Your acceleration is measured in speed gained over a period of time (e.g. 20 mph per hour). If, dear suicidal, you jump out of a hotel window you will accelerate at sixteen feet per second per second.

And the chap who proofs the coroner's report will tut and tush and take out his red pen and strike out the last two words.

The proofer who adds a mistake to his text is, of course, going straight to hell, where he will be scribbled over in red by a hundred demons who will pluck missing commas from his nether-regions.

A friend of mine once tipped his chair too far back, keeled over, and fell on his arse. Rather than looking foolish, though, he picked himself up, smiled and nodded sagely and muttered, almost to himself, as though recording the result of a successful experiment "9.8 metres per second per second."

Whenever you drop something, dear clumsy reader, it is an infinitely reusable line.

About suffering they were never wrogn

Wladyslaw Lach-Szyrma and the First Martian

According to Brewers the idea of Martians living on Mars was invented by H.G. Wells in 1898. According to Wikipedia the idea was popularised by Percival Lowell from 1893. However, both of these fellows are trumped, beaten and knocked into a cocked chronological hat by the Vicar of Newlyn St. Peter, Reverend Wladyslaw Lach Szyrma. He was, after all, the first person to use the noun Martian in Aleriel or A Voyage to Other Worlds published in 1883.

Aleriel is a novel about an English vicar who meets a Venusian, who's on an incognito tour of the Solar System. The Venusian, Aleriel, describes Venus to him (it's rather like a long matins), and later sends him a letter describing the farther planets and a few of their moons. Aleriel lands his ether-car on Mars and:

buried it in the snows, so that it might not be disturbed by any Martian who might come across it.

And bam! The noun was in our language, as familiar to us now as those other great fictional creatures: the Australian and the American. Martians were originally like this:

Under the forest shade, as we descended, we saw a figure half-human in aspect - erect and dignified - but gigantic in figure. His face was very like a man's and like ourselves, but yet he had a sort of lion look also in his limbs.

We should be very scared of Martians. According to Rev. Lach-Szyrma, they are nine-foot tall, they're vegetarians, they're communists, and they speak Esperanto (or a Martian equivalent). I don't like them one little bit, though Lach-Szyrma thought they were super.

They also live in triangular stone houses with conical metal roofs and have a lot of canals.

Lach-Szyrma seems to have had terribly raw deal in the history of science fiction. There is almost nothing about him on the web*, and I had to go to the Rare Books department of the British Library to read Aleriel. This is odd because science fiction types tend to be a trifle fanatical about noting and archiving every detail of their genre.

Though I disagree with Aleriel's politics and vegetarianism, the book is very pleasantly written and is such a turning point in the history of literature and of our conception of extraterrestrials that it should be in print in some sort of scholarly edition. Its prequel is now completely lost.

It's strange to see a work that predates, essentially*, its own genre. Take this apologetic paragraph from the introduction:

I have endeavoured to avoid as much as possible any conflict with established scientific discoveries; and, indeed, have based my speculations on the known facts of astronomy, only allowing the fancy to have free play where science is, and must be, unable, in its present state, to answer the questions here considered.

Which is pretty much what science fiction is. Most of all, though, I like Lach-Szyrma. There's something cuddly about him, something so wildly hopeful yet politely apologetic. His imagination sailed the solar system in an ether-car, yet his body remained in the vicarage of Newlyn St Peter. When the Venusian describes the capital of Venus he says that it is beyond earthly comparison, but a bit like Edinburgh. The volcanoes of the moon are huge, terrifying and lifeless; but remind him of the Malvern Hills. The Venusian, who is of superhuman intelligence, believes that the strangest thing on earth is that so few people come to weekday services at the parish church.

Poor Wladyslaw. His book is a voice from another world.

I can't find a picture of Wladyslaw, so here is his father Krystyn, who was, of course, a Polish emigré. He was also a soldier, a philosopher and occasional author.

*Somebody has started typing out a brief biography of him here, and then given up. I'd watch out, though, as the page looks hacked and may be virus-ridden.

**I shall not be entering in to huge discussions of what the first science fiction novel is. The point about genre is that it is a form that the public understands and which therefore requires no explanation or apology. A book does not a genre make.

Cruel and Unusual

The Inky Fool doesn't usually get involved in politics. Why fall into a camp when you can stay in a hotel? However, the guards at Guantanamo have finally overstepped all bounds of human (or inhuman) decency. They are giving the inmates Dan Brown novels to read. It's true. There's an article about it in Time if you follow this link.

Oh the humanity.

Take this sample torture sentence from the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code:

These were the gardens in which Claude Monet had experimented with form and colour, and literally inspired the birth of the impressionist movement.

Now, aside from the fact that Claude Monet was part of the impressionist movement not an inspirer of it (as, say, Turner was); if you literally inspired a birth you would need to inhale a foetus.

The Da Vinci Code is also such a one trick pony of a novel: there's somebody chasing them so the traffic jam is meant to be exciting. There's somebody chasing them so visiting the library is meant to be exciting. There's somebody chasing them so...

Let them die.

To be fair to The Da Vinci Code, I didn't even make it halfway through. Perhaps somewhere midway it morphs into a better version of Shakespeare. I was forced to give up my reading by the demented tripe that passed for New Testament textual analysis. The only thing I learnt from the novel was that Dan Brown should probably be sent to Guantanamo.

Odd little thing, but did you know the song Guantanamera was originally about a girl from Guantanamo? You did? Oh well.

Moreover, I have just invented the greatest* cryptic crossword clue the world has ever known:

Darn Clue! (5,3,7)

A typical scene at Inky Fool Mansions

*Actual quality may vary. The manufacturer cannot accept responsibility for words uttered in whimsical excitement.

Publishers

I never take much notice of publishers. I don't go into a bookshop, stride up to the counter and ask, 'Do you have anything published by Penguin?' They've always seemed to be ghost brands, like film studios or record companies. Of course there are occasional exceptions - Arden Shakespeares and Longman editions of poetry - and there's a certain kudos to making it onto the Penguin Classics list. But on the whole I neither know nor care.

However, I am moving house, and in order to move house I have to pack all my books (it turns out I have several), and in order to pack my books I thought it would be efficient to arrange them in order of size, and in order to do that I have just begun pulling them off the shelves by publisher.

I was working on the basis that publishers would print all their books in a standard size which isn't quite true, but almost is. And thus I have discovered that there is a difference between brands. Picadors are all high-brow and foreign. Routledge is a scholarly fellow and Vintage seem to do the bestsellers. But the great discovery is Flamingo. I own only six Flamingos but they include Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley and Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner which are just about my two favourite novels. They've even got The Third Policeman, which is pretty damned high up the list.

That's rather impressive, I thought. Maybe I ought to go into a bookshop, stride up to the counter and ask, 'Do you have anything published by Flamingo?'

In fact, I thought, why don't I just Google them and order the entire bloody back catalogue?

Turns out Flamingo was an imprint of HarperCollins and is now, so far as I can descry, defunct.

Oh well.

Pretty, isn't it? Unfortunately that's only the tip of the cliché.

Shakespeare on Greene

There's a good little article by Nicholas Shakespeare on Graham Greene's voice and technique here.

Without wishing to pick too many recondite nits, Shakespeare makes two mistakes. First, in the list of influences it misses out Eric Ambler who pretty much created Greene's world, or at least presented it to the bookish public. The Third Man is essentially a (brilliant) reworking of The Mask of Dimitrios. Greene once said that Ambler was the writer to whom all spy novelists are indebted*.

Second, Greene is eminently parodiable. You need a skeletal style, a sense of physical inferiority, loneliness and an eye for decay.

It was autumn in the late Antibes. I was staying at the second shabbiest hotel at the eastward end of the bay. The green curtains were worn thin and the wind drew chilblains from both my toes.


All the other tourists had left the resort. The Place Des Etrangers was empty and several of the bars had taken the opportunity to close up for the winter. I remained. 


And that's without mentioning Catholics, brothels, diplomats or South America. To prove my point, in May 1980 The Spectator set a competition for parodies of Graham Greene. It was won by Graham's brother, Hugh. Graham's sister, Elisabeth Dennys, came third. Both were writing under pseudonyms. Graham's own entry failed to place, but eight years later he used it as the opening of his last novel, The Captain and the Enemy.

Here it is:

I am a man approaching middle-age, but the only birthday I can distinguish among all the others was my twelfth. It was on that damp misty day in October that I met the Captain for the first time. I remember the wetness of the gravel in the school quad and the blown leaves which made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to a halt and my pursuers went whistling away, for there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat who carried his walking stick over his shoulder at the slope like a rifle. I had no idea of course who he was or that he had won me the previous night at backgammon from my father.


Oh, and Greene's best book was Travels With My Aunt.

*I can't find the exact quotation right now. I may fill it in later.

Coming, I Saw and Conquered

Contemplate the title of this post. It is less natural than the original. It is less clear than the original. It is less snappy than the original. In short, it is worse.

Over on the Dear Dogberry page, Moptop has been complaining about a novel filled with sentences like this:

Doing something, he did something else.

That structure is extraordinarily common in written English, and rare in spoken. Sometimes the order is reversed and you get:

He did something, doing something else.

Puffing meditatively on his pipe, Aloric shot an elephant. "I'll give you £100 pounds for the trunk," cried the Inky Fool, flicking frantically through a dog-eared book of recipes.

There are two problems with sentences like this. The first is well known, indeed it's one of the few bits of grammar that still get taught in schools: the dangling modifier.

In the sentence "Puffing meditatively on his pipe, Aloric shot an elephant" we understand that it is Aloric who is doing the puffing. The participle belongs to the first noun after the comma.

Therefore, in the sentence "Walking up the street, my mobile phone began to ring" it is technically my mobile phone that is walking up the street.

That sentence is on the cusp of alrightness. Grammatically it's wrong, but it would be hard to misunderstand. Indeed it would require a small effort of will. Some dangling modifiers are so much part of the language that they cannot be faulted.

Speaking of which, the weather's nice today.

You would have to be a pedant of Himalayan proportions to ask how the weather could speak. Indeed, if you asked me that, your body might never be found*. The problem with danglers is not one of Absolute Grammar, the problem is that they can be unintentionally comic or offensive.

Beautiful yet simple, the Inky Fool will perform Fur Elise in the bakery at midnight.

Is, to be honest, correct however you read it. Bill Bryson cites this lovely line from Time magazine.

In addition to being cheap and easily obtainable, Crotti claims that the bags have several advantages over other methods.

Which makes poor Crotti a cheap slut.

The second problem with such sentences was rather nimbly pointed out in a comment on yesterday's post. The Antipodean was correcting one of my myriad typos.

"Prophecy?" she says, sipping from her chipped fine bone china coffee-mug. Actually I probably wouldn't talk and sip at the same time, but you get the gist.

The participle implies synchronicity. This means that you have to be dreadfully careful about what actions you yoke together. Sloppy novels are filled with lines like: "Skidding to a halt, he leaped out of his car", which is simply a dangerous and irresponsible way of parking, especially on the school run. One of the sentences Moptop cited on Dear Dogberry ran:

Opening his eyes, he watched Lazar.

The frustrating thing about that sentence is that it could so easily be recast.

He opened his eyes and watched Lazar.

Is that so hard? Is that so odd? As I said at the beginning of this post, these participle sentences are pretty rare in spoken English. People tend to chat in short simple sentences connected by conjunctions (speech, if you listen carefully, has very few full stops)**. It is only when a fellow sits down to write that he suddenly starts converting every other verb into a participle. As well as sounding slightly unnatural, this exposes him to the dangers described above and is Utterly Unnecessary.

It is so easy to avoid these dangers. It is so much more natural to have two verbs connected by and. Here are the other sentences Moptop cited along with the natural alternative:

Standing over him, Zoya raised the knife.
Zoya stood over him and raised the knife.

Hearing the guards at the window, Malysh picked up a slate.
Malysh heard the guards at the window and picked up a slate.

Standing up, she glanced into the hallway.
She stood up and glanced into the hallway.

That's how you'd say it, so why not write it that way?
 
Of course there are times when the actions are simultaneous. More specifically, there are times when one continuous action acts as the background for a shorter one. "Reading Hamlet, I came across this line" should not be recast, because the actions are not consecutive. One occurs during the other and so the participle is dandy and fine. I am not attempting to outlaw the practice, merely to observe the overuse and the risk.
 
I once read (and cannot now find) an essay by Clive James on writing for the radio. He observed that English is a basically linear language. Perhaps a more inflected language like Latin or German would allow for more grammatical complexity, but it is unnatural for English. Though we can subordinate our clauses we tend not to. This, he said, counts doubly for the radio. The reader of a book can always check back to the beginning of a sentence to work out who or what is doing the verb, a listener cannot. So sos, ands and buts beat commas.


Sell participles and buy conjunctions. Or: selling participles, buy conjunctions.

However, I should conclude by saying that the rules of English are neither hard nor fast. Consider the following from Paradise Lost. Brave young grammarians, intent on making a name for themselves, have set off into this sentence hoping to find a main verb and never been heard of again. But it's wonderful. This is a fallen angel addressing Satan in Hell.

"If thou beest he--but O how fallen! how changed
From him who, in the happy realms of light
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright!--if he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin; into what pit thou seest
From what height fallen: so much the stronger proved
He with his thunder; and till then who knew
The force of those dire arms?"

The Inky Fool contemplating a typo

*Although I might post it back, piece by piece, to your nearest and dearest.
** Far commoner is "I was walking down the street when my mobile began to ring". However, neither of the dangers described in this post can apply to such sentences.

She Who Must Be The Grand Panjandrum (BA Oxon)

Last night, as the clock struck twelve, I was busily proof-reading when a chap asked me what exactly a Grand Panjandrum is.

There was an eighteenth century actor called Charles Macklin who boasted that he could memorise any speech after hearing it only once. Another eighteenth century actor called Samuel Foote, who had played Othello to Macklin's Iago, decided to write an unmemorisable speech for Macklin. He came up with this:

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. "What! No soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyalies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

Perhaps Foote wrote it down. History is mute. Though the speech was composed in the 1750s it wasn't published until 1825 and the authorities seem authoritatively confused as to how the challenge was put. The important thing is that it's a passage that Lewis Carroll would have been proud of. No decent human being could read the words "So he died" without at least smiling.

In conclusion, Grand Panjandrums may be recognised by the little round button at the top.

The Grand Panjandrum, though, should never be confused with the Great Panjandrum, which was a (slightly insane) explosive device invented during the Second World War and never used. It was called a panjandrum in reference to the gunpowder running out at the heels of the boots.

My conversation then turned to She Who Must Be Obeyed, which my interlocutor believed came from Rumpole. She comes from the novel She by H. Rider Haggard. (I always pictured Rider Haggard as a gaunt man on a horse. I was miserably disappointed to find he was a healthy looking fellow with a beard). She is a novel about a couple of jolly brave Victorian fellows who find a secret kingdom in Africa ruled by an immortal and intolerably beautiful lady whom the natives refer to as She Who Must Be Obeyed. She falls in love with one of them and it all ends in tears and wrinkles.

She is one of the most extraordinary books ever written. In essence it is the greatest myth composed in modern times: the sort of story that takes a seat in the reader's soul. In execution it is a rather silly ripping yarn: the sort of thing I loved when I was twelve. Imagine the myth of Oedipus with Biggles in the main part.

Like the Bellman and bad news, I like to work in groups of three. So I shall leave you with the opening paragraph of another African adventure: Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh.

'We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim...' Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. 'Rats,' he said; 'stinking curs. They are all running away.'

Not haggard

Hangover Square

I am as hungover as an avenue of willow trees. So all you're getting today are three descriptions of wages of gin. This from Lucky Jim:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by the secret police. He felt bad.

This from the Second Canto of Don Juan by Byron:

Few things surpass old wine; and they may preach

Who please - the more because they preach in vain -
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.

(Although it wasn't old wine that did for me, but a pantagruelian dry martini that ambushed me at midnight near Hyde Park Corner.) And here is the original screenplay of Withnail & I.

WITHNAIL emits an accelerating groan. Something to do with a headache. He looks across. Eyes like a pair of decayed clams.

WITHNAIL: Where's the whisky?

MARWOOD: What for?

WITHNAIL: I got a bastard behind the eyes. I can't take aspirins without a drink...

The bottle is discovered. The cork popped. And back to MARWOOD.
Where's the aspirins?

MARWOOD: Probably in the bathroom.

WITHNAIL: You mean we've come out here in the middle of fucking nowhere without aspirins?

This appears to be the case. WITHNAIL is becoming emotional.

MARWOOD: Where are we?

WITHNAIL: How should I know where we are? I feel like a pig shat in my head.

And for those of you who are fond of Withnail, here is a piece of trivia that not even Paul McGann knew until I told him in a moment of drunken sincerity. The character referred to as Marwood in the script is never named in the film, hence the title. However, when I finally saw Withnail & I in a cinema I noticed the name written on the envelope containing the telegram. You can't see it on a television because (like an unfinished whodunit or invader of Iraq) it doesn't have the resolution. So Marwood is named, and the film's title must and shall be changed.

From Hell's black heart I curse thee

Deeply Profound and Profoundly Deep at Mach 49.3

Why use one syllable, gentle reader, when you could use six? Why use words that other people will understand when you could be incomprehensible and ever-so-slightly impressive? Why talk of deep voices when you could talk of bathypelagic tones? Why be a profound thinker when you could be an abyssopelagic one? And why not trump both with the extreme of hadopelagic which derives from Hades and refers to those strange canyons that loiter beneath the abyss, filled with Krakens, cabinet ministers and cast off ideas for Inky Fool posts?

Which is all the excuse I need to quote The Kraken by Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep;

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

About his shadowy sides: above him swell

Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

And far away into the sickly light,

From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi

Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by man and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Which is how I feel when I have to get up early in the morning. (I must do something about the unnumbered and enormous polypi in my bedroom. I'll begin by numbering them).

Incidentally, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea does not refer to depth. A French league is about four kilometers, so that would be 80,000 km or 50,000 miles. As the earth's diameter is a bit under 8,000 miles, that would mean that Captain Nemo et al would be out the other side and floating around in space. But Jules Verne was not talking about depth, he was still harping on about travelling around the world. The point of the book is that the Nautilus can travel long distances (about twice round the earth) without rising to the surface.

Even more abstrusely (and I promise I'll stop after this), in A Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon sends puck to fetch an ingredient for a love potion and adds:

Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league

To which Puck replies:

I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.

This tell us two things. First, as the English league is three miles and Puck understands this to be forty minutes we can calculate the leviathan's top speed as being four and half miles per hours, which is about jogging pace and Not Very Impressive. However, as the circumference of the earth is just under 25,000 miles Puck has a top speed of about 37,000 mph, which is more than forty-nine times the speed of sound.

The Inky Fool takes a cruise