Kangaroo Court

The Labour-dominated Commons Public Administration Committee will hold a one-day inquiry later this month into the whole affair. The three Conservative members of the committee have said they will not attend what the party regards as a "kangaroo court".

   - The Daily Telegraph

As a child I used to, quite literally, dream of kangaroo courts. As parrots can speak and beavers build, so I faithfully believed that kangaroos were the only mammals to have developed a fully working parallel legal system. It seemed the perfect place to try a cat burglar. In fact, though, it is a kangaroo court because it proceeds in leaps. Oddly, the phrase is not Australian but popped up in mid nineteenth century Texas. There's an important linguistic lesson to be learned from that, but I'm not sure what it is.

Little Venice and Venezuela

I said yesterday that there would be more on Venezuela and I am, occassionally, good for my promises. It's even topical for me, and Inky Fool will go to any lengths to maintain the illusion of relevancy.

I'm off to a birthday party tonight in a pub in West London. More specifically, it's in an area between Maida Vale and Paddington called Little Venice. This preposterously ambitious name is based on the fact that two canals meet. There is no Rialto, no St Mark's Square and no campanile, but there is a small island with ducks on it.

Look!

Anyway, calling it Little Venice is a bit ridiculous and there was once a man called Amerigo Vespucci who had a distant cousin who married a preposterously good looking girl called Simonetta who looked like this:

I mean, seriously, imagine going to bed with Venus. I know I do. Anyway, Amerigo, rather than trying to seduce his cousin's wife, had a cold shower and sailed off to discover things. He came to a place where there were lots of palafitos, which is to say huts built on stilts in the water. Like this:

It was, he thought, just like Venice, only littler. So he decided to call it Little Venice, or in Italian Venezuela.

Which means that I am going to a party in Venezuela this evening, and Hugo Chavez rules a small part of West London with an iron fist.

Incidentally, in order to name the whole continent in which Venezuela was found, a far simpler course was followed: Amerigo was latinized to Americus. All other continents are feminine and end with an A, so it was called America. Which means that Native Americans (like Mrs Malaprop) are just as neocoloniolinguistically subjugated as Red Indians.

Now watch this:

Peter, Petrels, Parrots and No Farting

Once upon a time there was a fisherman called Simon. He fell in with a chap called Jesus who nicknamed him The Rock (presumably in preparation for a career in professional wrestling).

And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

So Simon was - quite technically - petrified. Anyway, this Jesus chap, not content with renaming his friend then decided to walk on water and, in contravention of every health and safety rule I can think of, encouraged Peter to do the same. This did not work out well.

During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. "It's a ghost," they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: "Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid." "Lord, if it's you," Peter replied, "tell me to come to you on the water." "Come," he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, "Lord, save me!"

With that story in mind what do you call sea birds that squawk and flutter and gather their plankton prey by dipping their feet in the water like this?

You call it a storm peter. And then you muck about with the letters a bit - a cock is a cockerel - until it's called a storm petrel. (Alternatively you can call them Mother Carey's chickens, but only if you're an extremely salty sailor and even then Mother Carey (a sort of sea goddess) comes from Mater Cara and Mater Cara is the Virgin Mary so it all goes back to Jesus).

Peter went into French as Pierre. Little Peters are called Pierrots and in Franch sparrows are, for some obscure beret-wearing reason, therefore called perots. For reasons even more obscure but at least blessedly British, we then imported this word as parrot. The word first pops up in the alliterative claptrap that John Skelton called poetry. He wrote an attack on Cardinal Wolsely called Speke, Parrot. Some fragments of the poem survive, which is a pity.

Parrot got verbed by Thomas Nashe at the end of the century in the equally pointless but fantastically titled Have With You To Saffron Walden, an inexplicable work of incomprehensible invective.

Parrots are very important linguistically because they preserve the words of the dead. There was an explorer at the beginning of the nineteenth century called Alexander Von Humboldt. He was in Venezuela (of which more some other time) and found an old parrot that still repeated words from the language of the Ature tribe. Nobody else did, because the Atures had been wiped out a few years before.

I don't know if you have ever, in a rage against mortality, called a dead friend's answerphone, but there is something terrible in a people, a culture, a civilisation surviving only in the uncomprehending imitation of a bird.

None of which has anything to do with the Medieval French word péter, meaning to fart. So this post must, obscurely, peter out.

St Peter: The Missing Years

Appealing

I was reading this week's copy of The Week and was astonished to discover that:

  Brown appealed to voters last weekend

I felt that I had missed something, and not just any little thing but a huge upheaval in the British political landscape (I love the idea of the political landscape: I imagine moral highgrounds, clear blue water, emotional hiterlands and disputed centre-grounds all overhung by mountains of debt). However, reading onward I found:

to "take a second look at Labour"

Ambiguities are bound to infiltrate even the most careful prose and I suppose this one could only have been avoided by resorting to that obscure and arcane word "asked".

Who could resist that puppy-dog smile?

Three Equine Etymologies

A few weeks ago I was playing poker. My opponent raised, I saw, he put his hand down on the table. I put my (better) hand down on the table and announced that I had won hands down. And at that moment a little lightbulb flashed on above my head, although it would only have been visible to a trained cartoonist. Also, the idea I was having was utterly wrong.

Winning hands down has nothing to do with poker and everything to do with horses; for though horses have no hands, jockeys do. In the final sprint of a close-run race a jockey forces his horse to run faster and faster by raising his hands and whipping his steed. If, though, there is no final sprint, if one horse is so far ahead that he can win at a canter, then the jockey is able to win hands down.

Another etymology I once thought that I knew was that of a dead ringer. There was (really) a craze in eighteenth century England for bells in gravestones. The bell would be attached to a rope the other end of which would be in the coffin beneath. This meant that if you had been buried alive accidentally (or even deliberately) you could simply ring for assistance. From this developed the idea that a dead ringer was someone who so resembled a deceased acquaintance that one would believe that rope and bell had been put to use. This etymology is beautiful and bollocks.

The term dead ringer emerged in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. It's to do with horses. It does, I admit, have an etymological connection to bells. Bell ringers in churches like to ring out a series of patterns each one of which is called a "change". Therefore you got the phrase "ring the changes" and from that you got the false idea that ringing was to do with changing and from that you got the term ringer for something that had been swapped for something else. You then go down to the bookies, place a bet on a slow horse, sneak into the stable at night and substitute a fast horse as a ringer. Then your collect you winnings and squander it all on etymological dictionaries. Dead just means accurate, as in dead centre.

Yet if those two origins seem disappointing, if you think me a joy-killing sport-spoiler for debunking such lovely myths, then I have a wonderful wonderful treat for you. Do you know what a flying fuck is? Have you ever wondered or considered what this rarely donated thing could be?

Although I once nearly convinced my brother that this was to do with swifts mating in mid-air, a flying fuck has nothing to do with birds and everything to do with having sex with somebody whilst riding a horse. This may sound difficult and indeed it probably is, although I suspect that the bouncing motion of a horse may help in some ways. The phrase was first recorded in around 1800 as part of a poem by Thomas Rowlandson called New Feats Of Horsemanship:

Well mounted on a mettled steed

Famed for his strength as well as speed

Corinna and her favorite buck

Are pleas’d to have a flying fuck.

Luckily for us, Thomas Rowlandson was a cartoonist and so this earliest citation comes complete with an illustration. The illustration is, of course, pornographic so I have decided to place it discreetly after the jump break. If you have a coarse and depraved soul, click on "Read More".

WARNING TO CHILDREN: Don't click on "Read More" or you'll go blind.
WARNING TO THE BLIND: No point clicking on "Read More", it's a damn picture.

First Lines

First lines are overrated things. There's a lovely character in Camus' The Plague who's trying to write a novel but is so obsessed with getting the opening line right that he dies (of plague) without having finished the first page.

Imagine a joke writer who begins by saying "An Irishman a rabbi and a flamingo walk into a bar" and then paces about his room trying to think of a punchline. Mickey Spillane, a pulp writer, put it best:

The biggest part of the joke is the punch line, so the biggest part of a book should be the punch line, the ending. People don't read a book to get to the middle, they read a book to get to the end and hope that the ending justifies all the time they spent reading it. So what I do is, I get my ending and, knowing what my ending is going to be, then I write to the end and have the fun of knowing where I'm going but not how I'm going to get there.

Once you have decided that Othello kills his wife and then himself, the rest of the play is getting to that point by the most efficient and convincing route.

Yet first lines can be fun, and fun is more important than importance. Here are my two favourites that I doubt you know.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
   - Murphy by Samuel Beckett

I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.
   - My Cousin My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner

You are invited, dear reader, to post the best first line that I haven't heard of in the comments below. But no universally acknowledged truths called Ishmael striking thirteen.

Oh, and: An Irishman, a rabbi and a flamingo walk into a bar and the barman asks "Is this some kind of bloody joke?"

Revisionist Alice

There's a film of Alice In Wonderland out and the papers are filled with articles about "the eternal magic of Alice" and that sort of tripe. The odd thing about Alice is an utterly technical feature of the prose. It may help to explain this in principle with a clear and invented example:

The fat man went out into the garden. He then took off all his clothes, but only after he had gone back inside and upstairs to his bedroom.

Reading the above you would have pictured, I assume, a fat man walking out into the garden. You then pictured him taking his clothes off in the garden. You then discovered that you had pictured the wrong thing. You had to go back and delete your mental image and form a new one.

This is usually considered to be Bad Writing.

Now, opening my Alice at random:

THE next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in twos and threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such crowds that they seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a tree, for fear of being run over, and watched them go by.

She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so uncertain on their feet: they were always tripping over something or other, and whenever one went down, several more always fell over him, so that the ground was soon covered with little heaps of men.

There is a crowd of running soldiers but it is only after they have filled the whole forest and we have formed a clear a picture of them in our imagination that we discover that they are all falling down and the picture must be repainted. The same thing in the next paragraph: (so click on "Read more" below):