Periphrasis and Paraphrase

Samuel Johnson's great poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, which is a sort of reworking of Juvenal's 10th Satire, opens with the lines:

Let Observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (rather unkindly) rewrote this as:

Let Observation with extensive observation
Observe mankind extensively.

But just before doing so, Coleridge made some interesting points about poetry. Here's the context:

As we walked up Mr. Cambridge's meadows towards Twickenham, he [Coleridge] criticized Johnson and Gray as poets, and did not seem to allow them high merit. [That's Gray who wrote Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard] The excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words without detriment to the beauty of the passage; — the position of a single word could not be altered in Milton without injury. Gray's personifications, he said, were mere printer's devils' personifications — persons with a capital letter, abstract qualities with a small one. He thought Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination. He contrasted Dryden's opening of the 10th satire of Juvenal with Johnson's: -

"'Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from Ganges to Peru.'

which was as much as to say, -

"'Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind.'

"After dinner he told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for
Quakerism, when he was at Cambridge, and his attending one of their
meetings, which had entirely cured him. "

And in case you were wondering how Dryden did it, he managed the same couplet in five words:

Look round the habitable world, how few
Know their own good; or knowing it, pursue.
How void of reason are our hopes and fears!
What in the conduct of our life appears
So well design'd, so luckily begun,
But, when we have our wish, we wish undone?

But I prefer Johnson's.

Observation, you have your task.

Pendle Hill and East Timor

What does Pendle Hill in Lancashire have to do with East Timor and the Gobi Desert and Bredon Hill in Worcestershire?

Though Pendle Hill is teeming with witches, this is not a supernatural question. Pendle used to be called Penhul, from Pen in the Cumbric language meaning hill, and hul in Old English meaning hill. Once we moderns had added the Hill onto Pendle, we got Pendle Hill, or Hill-Hill Hill.

Timor comes from timur in Malay, and guess what timur means? You're damned right, dear reader, it means East, because Timor lies at the Eastern end of a chain of islands. So East Timor is East East.

The Mongolian for desert is Gobi, thus the Desert Desert; and the same thing applies to the Sahara Desert (from Arabic çaḥrā, meaning exactly what you guessed).

And so on and so forth round and round this sad and repetitious globe. People, of course, name things for what they are. Then new people arrive, don't understand the name and think that they are clarifying things, when in fact they are building an unnecessary yet delightful heap of verbiage.

Yet I only know of two places that have achieved the hat trick: Pendle Hill and Bredon Hill in Worcestershire, which comes from Bre (Celtic) Don (Old English) Hill, and therefore also means Hill Hill Hill.

Which leads me to a not-that-good A.E. Housman poem:

In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.

The remainder, if you want it, is here.

To be fair, you can see why they called it a desert.

Progressive

The Miliband brothers seem to get disproportionate coverage on this blog. Here's an article from Ed:

There is a big fight on for Britain's future. The tide isn't running out on progressive ideas. People don't live in the politics of an electoral pendulum, they live in changed times where progressive values are more, not less, powerful. If we go out and make the case, we should be confident we can succeed.

The word progressive is one of my pet hates*. Everybody is progressive, we differ only on definitions of the word. Every so often I hear a politician say that he wants what's best for Britain, but they never follow this up with free whiskey for all or the humane destruction of the Cornish. It's always healthcare or further education and other ideas that wouldn't make my top forty.
 
Every policy progresses somewhere. Theocracy, communism, genocide and compulsory nudity might all be progress in somebody's estimation, though I support only two of them. Mr Miliband is right, though trite, that the "tide" can never "run out" on progressive ideas (which I suppose form the beach in which the unpendulous case-makers are fighting). Progress can never stop, but to what strange utopias it may lead, nobody knows.
 
There are three exceptions to this rule. First, progressive and regressive taxation have both become technical economic terms. The former means taking from the rich and giving to the poor, the latter the reverse.

Second, progressive tenses, of which I shall blog some other time.
 
The third is a progressive disease: the stately progress of dementia, gangrene, cancer and the like. I had a friend who went for a test for a very serious disease. He was a trifle nervous so the nurse reassured him that it would "all be positive".
 

David Miliband searching for a pendulum

 
 
* I love the idea of a pet hate. I dream of a menagerie of malevolences and I would feed them and stroke them and take them for walks and they would be the happiest hatreds in the whole wide world. They'd wake me up every morning by licking my face with their vindictive tongues.