Salient Salmon and Somersaults

The word salient originally meant leaping. It comes from the Latin word salire, which meant leap, and it is one of the many words that were invented by this blog's favourite essayist Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

Salient animalls, and such as move by leaping

But from these bestial beginnings, salient was then taken up by mathematicians, who decided to use it for a discontinuous leap in a graph. If the value of an equation changes suddenly then it leaps from one position on the graph to another. Thus is it salient.

From that you got the idea of anything that sticks out, and from there to today's meaning of important. However, many of salient's cousins are still jumping about. Salmon, for example, probably also derives from the Latin salire because salmon are always jumping out of the water. And so do the words assault (to jump at) insult (to jump in) and exult (to jump out). Moreover, there is a supersault, although we don't spell it that way anymore, because somewhere on the journey from Latin to English it got corrupted to sobersault and from there to somersault.

The Inky Fool inspecting his ceiling

Fangast

This is a repost from last year, but it's strangely appropriate.

Fangast means fit for marriage. It's an utterly obsolete bit of Norfolk dialect whose origins are chronically befogged. Nobody knows the word any more and for that reason it could be terribly useful. Suppose that your girlfriend* were to discover that you had drawn up a table of all your female acquaintances and next to each name had written "marriage material" or "not marriage material", she'd flip her proverbial lid. But "fangast" and "not fangast" - unless she's a time-traveller from ancient Norfolk you're in the clear.

If just one other friend knows the word then the two of you can discuss whether somebody is fangast in front of their face with no danger of discovery: "Have you met my new girlfriend? She's so pretty, and not at all fangast."
"What?"
"Nothing, darling, nothing."

Incidentally, the earliest reference to the word fangast is by the Inky Fool's favourite essayist, Thomas Browne.

Fangast

*Or boyfriend, mistress, sugar-daddy, insignificant other, bearded-lady etc et bloody c.

The Feast of the Uncarnation

On matters spiritual, as on all others, the Inky Fool defers to Thomas Browne, and in particular to Pseudodoxia Epidemica [Popular Misconceptions, or Epidemic Wrong-Teaching]. For example, on the blazing question of Did Jesus Ever Laugh? Browne has this to say:

The same conceit there passeth concerning our blessed Saviour, and is sometimes urged as an high example of gravity. And this is opinioned, because in holy Scripture it is recorded he sometimes wept, but never that he laughed. Which howsoever granted, it will be hard to conceive how he passed his yonger yeares and childhood without a smile; if as Divinity affirmeth, for the assurance of his humanity unto men, and the concealment of his Divinity from the devil, he passed this age like other children, and so proceeded until he evidenced the same. And surely herein no danger there is to affirm the act or performance of that, whereof we acknowledge the power and essential property; and whereby indeed he most nearly convinced the doubt of his humanity. Nor need we be afraid to ascribe that unto the incarnate Son, which sometimes is attributed unto the uncarnate Father; of whom it is said, He that dwelleth in the heavens shall laugh the wicked to scorn.

Not only did Browne answer the question, but in doing so he invented the word uncarnate. This is a lesson to us all, dear reader. You can see how Browne worked. Browne wrote the incarnate son and then wanted to balance that with an adjective father. No fitting adjective existed that would balance incarnate both antithetically and syllabically, so he made one up.

Just as carnal sins are sins of the flesh and carnivores are flesh-eaters so incarnate simply means made flesh and uncarnate means not made flesh. It's thus a terribly useful word that can refer to anything metaphysical and whose meaning is clear after an athomus of thought.

So incarnations and uncarnations are expounded and explained, but what of flowery and petalled carnations?


Carnation was originally just another word for incarnation: a fleshing out. But what colour is flesh? It's pink. (Well, for some of us it's pink. In my case it's a sallower shade of pale, and for others, I am reliably informed, it can be brown, yellow, red, or, in the case of daytime TV presenters, orange.)

But let's stick to pink for a moment. Pink is the colour of flesh and therefore carnation came to mean pink, as in the death of Falstaff so sorrowfully described in Henry V:

Hostess
Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's
bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom. A' made
a finer end and went away an it had been any
christom child; a' parted even just between twelve
and one, even at the turning o' the tide: for after
I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with
flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew
there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as
a pen, and a' babbled of green fields. 'How now,
sir John!' quoth I 'what, man! be o' good
cheer.' So a' cried out 'God, God, God!' three or
four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a'
should not think of God; I hoped there was no need
to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So
a' bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my
hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as
cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and
they were as cold as any stone, and so upward and
upward, and all was as cold as any stone.


Nym
They say he cried out of sack.


Hostess
Ay, that a' did.


Bardolph
And of women.


Hostess
Nay, that a' did not.


Boy
Yes, that a' did; and said they were devils incarnate.


Hostess
A' could never abide carnation; 'twas a colour he never liked.

And so from flesh to colour and from colour to flower, and that is why you may now wear a pink carnation.

Mary showing Jesus a carnation

For an older post upon matters carnal click here.

Pectinated

Groping after self-improvement, I happened to read this:

To set cross leg'd, or with our fingers pectinated or shut together is accounted bad, and friends will perswade us from it. 

It's at times like this that you know who your friends are. I have none. For had I a true friend, they would have told me of my errors, and comforted me with the word pectination. It derives from the Latin for comb, for reasons that may be guessed. Indeed, Thomas Browne exported the term straight from the words of Pliny.

It's amazing to think that I have been pectinating all my life without ever knowing it: amazing and a trifle humbling. It's rather like the day that I discovered that I had a philtrum. I had always known that there was a little groove leading from my nose to my mouth, but had I been asked what it was called I would have panicked and answered "Snot-wadi?"

(A wadi, dear reader, is an Arabic term for a desert riverbed that is only filled when there's a storm).

Learning that that little groove above my lip was called a philtrum was therefore terribly reassuring. It's rather like finally discovering the name of the chap behind the counter in the grocery store (so long as he's not called Snot-Wadi).

Browne continues his discourse on pectination thuslyly (veneficious means poisonous):

The same conceit religiously possessed the Ancients, as is observable from Pliny. Poplites alternis genibus imponere nefas olim; and also from Athenæus, that it was an old veneficious practice, and Juno is made in this posture to hinder the delivery of Alcmæna. And therefore, as Pierius observeth, in the Medal of Julia Pia, the right hand of Venus was made extended with the inscription of Venus, Genetrix; for the complication or pectination of the fingers was an Hieroglyphick of impediment, as in that place he declareth.

Not like that.

Funambulatory

I'm not sure, dear reader (I never am), but the following may be the most beautiful paragraph to which the English language has ever given birth, or ever will.

Tread softly and circumspectly in this funambulatory Track and narrow Path of Goodness: Pursue Virtue virtuously: Leven not good Actions nor render Virtues disputable. Stain not fair Acts with foul Intentions: Maim not Uprightness by halting Concomitances, nor circumstantially deprave substantial Goodness.

   - Thomas Browne, Christian Morals

And when I formed that opinion I didn't even know what funambulatory meant. I didn't care either. Sense can often mar the wonder of a word and meaning murders beauty. It turns out that funambulatory means "like a tightrope walker". So you, ambitious reader, can use it yourself in phrases such as "That finance meeting was a bitch: trying to play off the CEO and the CFO and that guy from HR... I tell you, my morning's been bloody funambulatory. Fancy a pint?"

But you will never write a sentence as sweet as Browne's.

I still haven't worked out what concomitances are.

Mrs Malaprop commuting to work

Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain was the mnemonic that I was taught as a child in order to remember the colours of the rainbow. Why anybody thought that I needed to remember the colours of the rainbow, I don't know. Nobody, in all my long and weary years, has ever asked me "Hey, Dogberry, what are the colours of the rainbow in the correct order?" But such was I taught, and as an aftershock to yesterday's post on synaesthesia here is a post on the colours of the rainbow.

Red: Red letter days are so called because in old church calenders feast days were written in red ink. In American banking ledgers of the early twentieth century debts were written in red ink and credits in black. An Italian debtor is said to be in the green. Either way one is in the soup.

Orange: Oranges were originally a fruit and didn't become a colour until 1542. For this reason in the Nun's Priest's Tale Chauntecleer the Cockerel describes his nightmare about a fox thus:

Me mette [dreamed] how that I romed up and doun
Withinne our yeerd, wheer as I saugh a beest
Was lyk an hound, and wolde han maad areest
Upon my body, and wolde han had me deed.
His colour was bitwixe yelow and reed
And tipped was his tayl and both his eeris

He then goes on to defy laxatives.

Yellow: Has always stood for cowardice, it was believed that a lack of blood made the liver yellow. It's odd that nobody seems to like to mention this colour. I can think of no yellow political party and even yellow hair is called blond/blonde (the only adjective in English that agrees with its noun) or golden. The yellow jersey of the Tour De France is the one exception that I can think of.

As Bob Dylan wrote in Tombstone Blues:

Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief
Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief
Saying, “Tell me great hero, but please make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?”

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly
Saying, “Death to all those who would whimper and cry”
And dropping a barbell he points to the sky
Saying, “The sun’s not yellow it’s chicken”

Green: The sixth stanza of Anderw Marvell's The Garden runs thuslyly:

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness
The mind, that ocean where each kind,
Does straight its own resemblance find.
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

The second couplet, by the way, is based on the idea of contemporary biology that each land animal had an equivalent in the sea. However, even at the time Thomas Browne (the Inky Fool's favourite essayist) was inclined to disbelief:

THAT all Animals of the Land, are in their kind in the Sea, although received as a principle, is a tenent very questionable, and will admit of restraint. For some in the Sea are not to be matcht by any enquiry at Land, and hold those shapes which terrestrious forms approach not; as may be observed in the Moon fish, or Orthragoriscus, the several sorts of Raia's, Torpedo's, Oysters, and many more, and some there are in the Land which were never maintained to be in the Sea, as Panthers, Hyæna's, Camels, Sheep, Molls, and others, which carry no name in Ichthyology,

Blue: Blue murder is not a rather saucy form of homicide: it is a translation of the French exclamation mort bleu, which is a corruption of mort dieu, meaning death of God. Blue murders are likely to be carried out by blue-rinse blue stockings.

Indigo: is one beyond blue, it is therefore a very sad colour. Blues musicians have nothing on their indigo colleagues:

For there's nobody who cares about me
I'm just a poor fool that's bluer than blue can be

Is therefore a lyric from Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo*.

Violet:

"Roses are red
Violets are blue":
That's what the song said,
But it cannot be true.
"I have seen roses
Damasked red and white"
Shakespeare discloses,
And he's always right.
And a blind man could see
That violets are violet
Linguistically:
Such truths are inviolate.

And after that we drift into the invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is mostly white noise.

Violet in colour, I think you'll agree.

*Duke Ellington wrote neither the melody, the title nor the lyric; but the matter is so vexed that I shan't go into it here.

Carnified

I told you that there would be another post on Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. It has been slow in coming but I read at the speed of a retarded six-year-old. This from page 55:

All flesh is grass, is not only metaphorically, but literally, true ; for all those creatures we behold are but the herbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves.

Is it me, or does the word carnified somehow suggest employment in a travelling circus? Of course it means turned into meat, as in carnivorous or the carnal embrace discussed in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.

THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?

SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.

THOMASINA: Is that all?

SEPTIMUS: No......a shoulder of mutton, a haunch of venison well-hugged, an embrace of grouse....caro, carnis; feminine; flesh.

THOMASINA: Is it a sin?

SEPTIMUS: Not necessarily, my lady, but when carnal embrace is sinful it is a sin of the flesh, QED.


Also in the Browne, observe the early modern plague of commas.

Gastroporn

Tropical Thomas Browne

It is dark. I sat down with Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and in the preface I found these words:

There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein meerly Tropical, and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there are many things to be taken in soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of Reason.

Tropical, I confess, threw me. I vaguely imagined that some of the opinions in Religio Medici were fit only for a sunny beach. I pictured Browne dancing in a lei while pronouncing on matters reasonable and religious. Perhaps the intense cold had paralysed my deductive faculties for, falling from this airy reverie to the frosty fields of reason, I realised that Tropical meant relating to rhetorical tropes.

The connection is turning. The earth tilts upon its axis. For six months the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the sun and this I call summer. For the other six months it is the turn of my anitscian to don a shirt of many colours and loll around on the shores of Bouvet Island. The extent of this turn is 23 degrees both ways. Even as I sullenly type the sun (from our point of view) appears to be hovering at noon over those who are 23 degrees South of the Equator. Then it turns back northward. The Greek for turn is tropos hence tropic.

So the tropics, cancerous and capricious, are the latitudes at which the sun turns. The Greeks, it would appear, used a direct translation of our expression turn of phrase, they called it a rhetorical trope, because a word was being turned to something other than its normal use. So if you use tropes, your prose is tropical.

My prophetic soul tells me there will be more posts on Browne before advent is out. Mrs Malaprop is on holiday. She like Browne is "oft-times fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of truth."

Sir Thomas Browne's stolen skull resting on a copy of Religio Medici