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

New Year's Evening

Another circle around the sun is complete, and nobody will tell me how many more we must do. The earth is back where it started and there is No Progress.

Australia is a terribly advanced country, and almost all of the world's marsupials are already facing up to the horrors of 2011, meanwhile beavers and bald eagles languish and linger in 2010. Under the old system, days started at sunset and the eve, even or evening was therefore part of the following day.

If you want a useful word, then an apophoret is a gift given on New Year's Eve. I recommend gin.

Anyway, for those like me who shudder at the pedicular Scottish doggerel that Burns so optimistically called poetry, here's a sober little something by Charles Lamb from his poem The New Year. My apophoret to you, dear poetic reader.

Why should we then suspect or fear 
The influences of a year, 
So smiles upon us the first morn, 
And speaks us good so soon as born?
Plague on't ! the last was ill enough, 
This cannot but make better proof; 
Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through 
The last, why so we may this too; 
And then the next in reason should 
Be superexcellently good; 
For the worst ills (we daily see) 
Have no more perpetuity, 
Than the best fortunes that do fall; 
Which also bring us wherewithal 
Longer their being to support. 
Than those do of the other sort; 
And who has one good year in three, 
And yet repines at destiny,
Appears ungrateful in the case,
And merits not the good he has.

And to all* readers, a superexcellently good New Year.

The Inky Fool composing tomorrow's post

*With a couple of exceptions.

Squiriferous

If you are squiriferous you are like a squire, which is to say that you are gentlemanly. It's a fun word, if only because it is redolent of squirrels. Also the squ sound is irresistible to any thoughtful speaker of English.

Incidentally, if you are both a squire and a parson, then you are a squarson. Squarsons were so ubiquitous in the Victorian age that there were also squishops and squebendaries.

If a squire decided to pass on
His title to some lowly parson,
Then the words would be one
And the priest would become
Not squire or parson, but squarson.

Some Shakespeare Criticism

The following comes from George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here. MacDonald Fraser, who would become famous for the Flashman books, was an officer of the Border Regiment and fought in Burma during the Second World War. Late in the campaign, just before the battle of Pyawbee, he records this little anecdote:

I got two paperbacks from home which I had requested: Henry V, which we had done in my last year at school and for which I had developed a deep affection, and Three Men in a Boat - not that I was a devotee of Jerome's, but I had felt that comedy and a reminder of the beauties of the English countryside wouldn't come amiss. I had also thought that it might be acceptable when passed round the section, but I didn't expect any takers for Shakespeare, intellectual snob that I was. The result was instructive. 


I was laying on my groundsheet, renewing acquaintance with Jerome and the tin of pineapple, when Sergeant Hutton squatted down beside me.


"W'at ye readin', then? W'at's this? 'Enry Vee - bloody 'ell, by William Shekspeer!" He gave me a withering look, and leafed over a page. "Enter Chorus. O for a muse of fire that wad... Fook me!" He riffled the pages. "Aye, well, we'll 'ev a look." And such is the way of sergeants, he removed it without by-your-leave; that's one that won't be away long, I thought.


I was wrong. Three days later it had not been returned, and having exhausted Jerome and the magazines, I was making do with the Fourteenth Army newspaper, SEAC, famous for its little cartoon character, Professor Flitt, a jungle infantryman who commented memorably on the passing scene. And I was reading a verse by the paper's film critic


I really do not care a heck
For handsome Mr Gregory Peck,
But I would knock off work at four
To see Miss Dorothy Lamour


when Hutton loafed up and tossed Henry V down beside me and seated himself on the section grub-box. A silence followed, and I asked if he had liked it. He indicated the book.


"Was Shekspeer ivver in th'Army?"


I said that most scholars thought not, but there were blanks in his life, so it was possible that, like his friend Ben Jonson, he had served in the Low Countries, or even in Italy. Hutton shook his head.


"If 'e wesn't in th'Army, Ah'll stand tappin' [I'm a Dutchman]. 'E knaws too bloody much aboot it, man."


This was fascinating. Hutton was a military hard case who had probably left school long before 14, and his speech and manner suggested that his normal and infrequent reading consisted of company orders and the sports headlines. But Shakespeare had talked to him across the centuries - admittedly on his own subject. I suggested hesitantly that the Bard might have picked up a good deal just from talking to military men; Hutton brushed the notion aside.


"Nivver! Ye knaw them three - Bates, an' them, talkin' afore the battle? Ye doan't get that frae lissenin' in pubs, son. Naw, 'e's bin theer." He gave me the hard, aggressive stare of the Cumbrian who is not to be contradicted. "That's my opinion, any roads. An' them oothers - the Frenchman, the nawblemen, tryin' to kid on that they couldn't care less, w'en they're shittin' blue lights? Girraway! An' the Constable tekkin' the piss oot o' watsisname -"


"The Dauphin."


"Aye." He shook his head in admiration. "Naw, ye've 'eerd it a' afore - in different wurrds, like. Them fower officers, the Englishman an' the Scotsman an' the Irishman an' the Welshman - Ah mean, 'e's got their chat off, 'esn't 'e? Ye could tell w'ich wez w'ich, widoot bein' told. That Welsh booger!" He laughed aloud, a thing he rarely did. "Talk till the bloody coos coom yam, the Taffies!" He frowned. "Naw, Ah nivver rid owt be Shekspeer afore - Ah mean, ye 'ear the name, like..." He shrugged eloquently. "Mind, there's times Ah doan't knaw w'at th' 'ell 'e's talkin' aboot -"


"You and me both," I said, wondering uneasily if there were more passages obscure to me than there were to him. He sat in for a moment and then misquoted (and I'm not sure that Shakespeare's version is better):


"There's nut many dies weel that dies in a battle. By Christ, 'e's reet theer. It's a good bit, that." He got up. "Thanks for the lend on't, Jock."


I said that if he'd liked it, he would like Henry IV, too. "Falstaff's bloody funny, and you'd like Hotspur -"


"'Ev ye got it?"


I apologised that I hadn't, and promised to write for it. By way of a trailer I told him as much as I remembered of Hotspur's "When the fight is done" speech, but I'm no Sean Connery, and although he nodded politely I could see I was a poor substitute for the written word.


He went off, leaving me to reflect that I had learned something more about Henry V, and Shakespeare. In his own way Hutton was as expert a commentator as Dover Wilson or Peter Alexander; he was a lot closer to Bates and Court and Williams (and Captains Jamy and Fluellen) than they could ever hope to be. And I still wonder if Shakespeare was in the Army.

Of course, by this rationale Shakespeare was also a king and, for that matter, an occasional woman. He would have been a prolific murderer and almost permanently suicidal. Some sort of allowance should, and never is, made for imagination. It's terribly unlikely that Shakespeare was in the army, or on the throne, or transgendered. However, his imagination was first rate.

In particular, his was an imagination not easily seduced. His wars are as horrid as they are heroic. Even in Henry V, which has its bellicose moments, he maintained terror among the valour and horror in the heroics.

I feel a trifle bad reproducing so much of a book, so run and buy it from Amazon here.

Another family Christmas turns sour

To Gruel

Listening to a snatch of the cricket commentary last night, I was informed that the contest in Melbourne was gruelling. I confess that from my snowbound Cumbrian igloo I couldn't quite see how sunny Australia managed to gruel, but gruel it did.

Gruel is one of those odd words, like ailing, that exists only as a participle. This should be not be so. Too few conversations go:

Bill: How was the atmosphere at the party last night?
Ben: Oh it gruelled.
Bill: Really? Did it gruel an awful lot?
Ben: More than I can say, old boy, more than I can say.

Why is so much gruelling when so little gruels, and how does this all relate to broth?

When gruel began its career as an English word, back in the fourteenth century it was content to simply mean flour. From there it began to mean soup made with flour, which was probably a lot tastier than it sounds. Here's a 1688 definition:

Grewel, is a kind of Broth made only of Water, Grotes brused and Currans, some add Mace, sweet Herbs, Butter and Eggs and Sugar

Delicious. If the contest in Melbourne was so well spiced and so eggy, I am sure that the cricket would be wonderful. But this is not so, for gruel came to be part of a phrase, a phrase that can be best illustrated by this little snippet from the eleventh canto of Lord Byron's Don Juan. Juan has just been attacked by highwaymen on the way to London. He whips out a pistol and shoots the brigand and...

...Juan, who saw the moon's late minion bleed
As if his veins would pour out his existence,
Stood calling out for bandages and lint,
And wish'd he had been less hasty with his flint...


But ere they could perform this pious duty,
The dying man cried, "Hold! I've got my gruel!
Oh for a glass of max! We've miss'd our booty;
Let me die where I am!" And as the fuel
Of life shrunk in his heart, and thick and sooty
The drops fell from his death-wound, and he drew ill
His breath, -- he from his swelling throat untied
A kerchief, crying, "Give Sal that!" -- and died.

To get your gruel is to get your just deserts, to take what's coming to you or, like a feral gardener, to make your bed and lie in it. And from this sense of gruel as a punishment, came the modern sense of a gruelling contest. Though I still can't see how Melbourne in December can gruel that much.

Ricky Ponting asking for more referrals

Boxing Day and the Perils of Poetry

Today is not boxing day.

Once upon a time, there was a thing called a Christmas box. A Christmas box was a box with a small hole cut in it, like a piggy bank, through which coins could be dropped. It was kept in a church and, like a piggy bank, it could not be opened, only smashed. The smashing was done at Christmas, hence the name: Christmas box.

Christmas boxes were used by servants, apprentices, bloggers and other impoverished fools to save up some money for the frosty and festive season. In gambling dens there would be a Christmas box of tips for the benefit of the butler. As one chap put it in 1634:

It is a shame, for a rich Christian to be like a Christmas boxe, that receives all, and nothing can be got out, till it be broken in peeces.

Anyway, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the idea of the Christmas box shifted. There were lots of chaps like postmen and milkmen and butchers' boys and bloggers who didn't have loose change to be stowing away all year. Yet they still felt they deserved a little something at Christmas. So generous Victorians would make a little box of presents which they would present to all the delivery boys on the first weekday after Christmas, thus insisteth the OED.

The first weekday after Christmas therefore became known as Boxing Day. And today?

Today is a Sunday.

All those pleading postmen, beggarly bloggers and other assorted lazzaroni will arrive at your door on Monday morning, their usual truculence usurped by a poor smile and rich words. As Mr Weller remarks of his son's attempt at a Valentine's card in The Pickwick Papers:

''Tain't in poetry, is it?' interposed his father.


'No, no,' replied Sam.


'Wery glad to hear it,' said Mr. Weller. 'Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin'-day, or Warren's blackin', or Rowland's oil, or some of them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.'

You have, dear poetic reader, been warned.

(A beadle, by the way, was a sort of policeman paid for by the parish).

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.