The Pope is Dead

Alexander Pope is, as this blog has established, the most quoted English poet. He died 266 years ago today and two people wrote poems on the subject. Here they are:

On the Death of Mr. Pope

Seal up the book, all vision's at an end,
For who durst now to poetry pretend?
Since Pope is dead, it must be sure confessed
The Muse's sacred inspiration's ceased;
And we may only what is writ rehearse:
His works are the apocalypse of verse.

And, as Pope was such a satirist:

Spoken Extempore on the Death of Mr. Pope

Vice now may lift aloft her speckled head,
And front the sun undaunted: Pope is dead!

Astro Turf and Radicals

On Monday I was chatting with some political types (or rather they were chatting and I was sternly drinking my wine) when they all started to use the verb astroturfing. It should be noted that I'm not quite sure how to spell this. Astro Turf is, officially, two words and a registered trade mark. The conversation went something like:


"Oh, he's only astroturfing."

"I know he's only astroturfing. Obviously it's Astro Turf."

"But the papers can see that he's astroturfing too. They won't buy it."

Often you hear a new word, but it kind of doesn't work because people sound that little bit smug while they're saying it and then explain it afterwards to make themselves sound clever. Not here. This was clearly a standard part of their vocabulary that they used as freely as I would use the word drinking. So I asked what it meant.

They all looked at me as though I were some kind of hick, which of course I am, and one of them, descending briefly from the higher realm of politics explained quickly that Astro Turf is meant to look like grass but is in fact manufactured, and that astroturfing is therefore when a politician carefully organises and controls a campaign, but tries to make it look as though it's all coming up from the grass roots.

Incidentally, the root of radical is radix which is the Latin word for root (you may need to read that twice). Thus a radish is a root, to eradicate is to pull up by the roots, and grass roots politics is etymologically just the same as radical politics.

I'd vote for that.

Bashful Bah

Bashful is one of those wonderful words without an opposite. Try as you might, nobody will ever call you bashless. Which poses the question: what the devil is bash and how did you get so full of it?

To answer that question one can turn to the Old Curiosity Shop where Dickens mentions that Dick Swiveller "spends all his money on his friends and is Bah!'d for his pains."

By this Dickens means that Swiveller's friends say Bah to him, Bah being an exclamation of contempt. Dickens looks terribly original, but in fact bah has (probably - this is all merely the best theory) been verbed before, by the French and Normans a thousand years ago.

First, you should note that bah comes straight from the French. But the Normans had a verb ebahir, which meant to be astonished, or more literally to be reduced to saying 'bah' in amazement. This got altered to abaïr, and that got altered to abaissir and that got altered to abash.

These days it's easy to be abashed in the passive; but once upon a time it was just as common to go around abashing people until they were abashed, or just bashed, at which point they became bashful.

Thus, by a preposterously serpentine route, Dick Swiveller is abashed.

None of which has anything to do with a bash on the head, which appears to come from the Old Norse who had a deplorable habit of doing a lot of such bashing.

Ouch.

Sun-Bathing and Philosophy

There's a rather strange work by Thomas Nashe called Summer's Last Will and Testament. It is about the handover of seasons in the changing year. In it, Winter describes how writing was invented for the warmer seasons, and that writing is a Bad Thing. Its first evil result was poetry.

There grew up certain drunken parasites, 
Termed Poets, which for a meal's meat or two 
Would promise monarchs immortality;
They vomited in verse all that they knew, 
Found causes and beginnings of the world...

But even worse than that poets were the resulting philosophers:

Next them, a company of ragged knaves,
Sun-bathing beggars, lazy hedge-creepers,
Sleeping face upwards in the fields all night,
Dreamed strange devices of the Sun and Moon;
And they, like Gypsies, wand'ring up and down,
Told fortunes, juggled, nicknamed all the stars,
And were of idiots termed Philosophers:


And that is the first ever recorded reference in English to sun-bathing. It beats the posher aprication by 31 years.


Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a hedge into which I must lazily creep.

Jubilee and the Horn

The jubilee approacheth, and millions of patriotic British etymologists are trying to turn sheep into musical instruments.

When God and Moses are up on Mount Sinai having a chat, God tells Moses that he should work hard six days a week and then take a break (most people know about this commandment). But he then tells Moses to do the same thing every seven years:

Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the land.

This sounds rather lovely, and is, of course, the origin of the sabbatical. But what happens every seven seven years? Well at that point God just declares a holiday multiplied by a holiday.

And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed. For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field.

And what (I hear you shriek) is the trumpet of the jubile. Well, a jubile is a Hebrew yōbēl or ram, and so the trumpet of the jubile is a ram's horn trumpet that gets blown every fifty years.

Of course, this year the Queen is Diamond Jubilarian. So maybe we shouldn't use a ram, and instead make a trumpet out of a pigeon.

I must also remember to free my slaves.

Tootle tootle.

Donning and Doffing

As you step out in the cold misery of a British May, you don your hat. Then you see a lady of your acquaintance and you doff your hat. Then you don it again. Doff. Don. Doff. Don. And suddenly you realise, in a moment of etymological ecstasy, that the verb don is merely a contraction of do on, and that doff is merely a contraction of do off. And you're so excited that you kiss that poor lady and run off howling and hatless.

Crickets and Stool-Ball

Stool at bottom right

I spent yesterday lounging around at Lord's watching a game of stool-ball. This is a sport in which a chap throws a ball at a stool and another chap attempts to bat it away. Stool-ball is the subject of a lovely little C17th poem by Robert Herrick:

At stool-ball, Lucia, let us play 
 For sugar-cakes and wine : 
Or for a tansy let us pay, 
 The loss, or thine, or mine. 


 If thou, my dear, a winner be 
 At trundling of the ball, 
The wager thou shalt have, and me, 
 And my misfortunes all. 


 But if, my sweetest, I shall get, 
 Then I desire but this : 
That likewise I may pay the bet 
 And for all a kiss.

Where a tansy is a kind of cake. I don't know if any arrangement like Herrick's had been made between Andrew Strauss and Darren Sammy, but I did notice that the game seems now to be commonly referred to as cricket, and that nobody seems to be utterly sure why. The OED has a veritable essay on the subject, but the best theory seems to be that a cricket is a stool. You see, there's a kind of little foot-stool called a cricket-stool which is recorded from 1559 (Item 2 old chaires‥. Item one litill crekett stole.), and therefore if stool-ball were played with a cricket stool it would become cricket. And so, in 1575 you have the first record of the noble game:

Ther are made likewyse, many-kynde of Balles, Tut-staues or Kricket-staues, Rackets, and Dyce, for that the foolish People, shoulde waste or spende their tyme ther-with, in Foolishnes.

This is utterly true, but I like foolishness. I should also mention that the reason I was at the cricket in the first place was the release of a lovely book called Third Man In Havana that you should go and buy instantly etc etc if you have any interest in stool-ball.

Four slips and tonsure