Mizzle

Family connections in the Lake District mean that I know a ridiculous number of words for rain. It's rather like the fifty alleged eskimo words for snow. (For those of you who have never visited the Lake District, shovelling some mud into the bottom of the shower is a fair substitute). Indeed, I have identified a psychological condition called Lake District Affected Weather Disorder (LAWD), that allows people to say that it's not raining, it's drizzling; or that it's not drizzling, it's simply mizzling.

Mizzle is a fine word, because despite being dialect and obscure it's meaning is obvious to absolutely anybody. It means that it's half way between drizzle and mist, which by coincidence is precisely what it's doing in London now. There's also a slight suggestion of misery and snivel.

Mist also has the lovely linguistic property that it goes all the way back to Proto-Germanic *mikhstaz and then to Proto-Indo-European *migh from which the ancient Indians got the Sanskrit megha, meaning mist.

LAWD sufferers would start hanging the washing out to dry

Parenthetical Codpieces

I don't know if you've ever noticed the two pictures of codpieces on your computer keyboard.

Once upon a time there were Gauls who spoke Gaulish until Caesar came and cut them all into three parts. One of the Gaulish words that the Gauls used to speak was braca meaning trousers, the Gauls being far more troused than the toga-ed Romans.

Anyway, from this came the early French brague meaning trousers, and when they wanted a word for a codpiece they decided to call it a braguette or little trousers, which is not to be confused with baguette meaning stick. In fact a Frenchman might brag that his baguette was too big for his braguette, but then Frenchmen will claim anything. They're braggarts (literally one who shows off his codpiece).

Braguettes were important back then, especially as part of a suit of armour. Henry VIII (who was rather concerned about his reproductive abilities) had armour like this:

So everyone carried on being happily Medieval and building cathedrals and that sort of thing. And then people started wondering what to call the big structural supports in these big supported structures. There was (I imagine) an emergency meeting of builders and linguists and they decided that these new-fangled architectural supports looked like nothing so much as big stone codpieces.

Compare, contrast, and try not to think about the dog.

Anyway, in the 1570s they decided to call them braggets. However, a fellow called Captain John Smith sailed to America, shagged a native girl called Pocahontas, came back to England, and wrote a dictionary. (Back then men were men and lexicographers diddled princesses.) More precisely, he wrote a book called A Sea-Man's Grammar and Dictionary. Captain Smith didn't call it a bragget. He called it a bracket, and the name and spelling stuck.

"I'm sorry, Pocahontas, but I've got to go back to England and write a nautical dictionary."

So now you've got an architectural thing called a bracket. But if you want to be really secure, you should use a double bracket. A double bracket looks like this:

So what are you going to call this ] bit of punctuation?

That, my child, is correct. You're going to call it a bracket, because it looks like something that looks like a codpiece. My etymological dictionary says that this happened in 1750, but I just found a usage from 1711 in William Whiston's racy classic Primitive Christianity Revived.

This earlier citation makes me a clever, clever, clever little boy.

Now look at your computer keyboard.

Top right.

Y U I O P [ ].

Yeah.

They're codpieces.

And so bracket can be traced back to Asterix.

[ ] -> *

Codpieces have nothing to do with cod

A Word Cloud of The Four Quartets

I wish they'd had word clouds back when I was at university sniffing dictionaries. For those of you innocent and ignorant of such things, the more times a word appears in the original text the bigger it is in the cloud. Here, for example, is Eliot's Four Quartets.

You can make your own at Wordle, although I should warn you that some are decidedly less interesting than others. The full text of Four Quartets can be found here. And a final oddness: there is on British television a programme that I have never watched called Wire In The Blood. I've no idea what it's about, but as the title is a quotation from Four Quartets -

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.

- I assume that the programme is mostly about TIME.

The actual rose garden at Burnt Norton, where you can apparently now get married.

Oh, and "Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality" is the 32nd most quoted line of poetry.

Horripilation

London is in the grip of unending winter and every brass monkey is bereft. Shelley once asked "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" and the answer to his question is Abso-bloody-lutely. It is permanently and perpetually parky, which is tramps' slang because parks are colder than doorways. This arctic chill means that I am often afflicted, especially in the early mornings, by horripilation. I horripilate.

I horripilate horribly.

Horripilation is the rising of the hairs on the skin caused by cold, or sometimes fear. It is the bristling that accompanies goosebumps. Horreo in Latin meant to bristle or stand on end. So horripilation is the direct descendant whilst horrible is a changeling child that, like petrified, refers merely to the effects of fear.

Incidentally, the creeps, as in "That picture gives me the creeps", was first recorded, and perhaps invented by, Dickens, along with mooreeffoc.

P.S. There's an excellent piece on the etymology of brass monkeys here.

When Did You Stop Beating Your Choirboy?

Spot the connection between these two:

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

   - Eliot's Waste Land

POPE'S BROTHER: I HIT CHOIRBOYS

  - Today's Times

You can't work out the tense in either. The "read" in Eliot and the "hit" in The Times could both be past or present.

The English verb has three principle parts: I write, I wrote, I have written. Some verbs make do with two: I walk, I walked, I have walked. And some lazy, idle, good-for-nothing verbs make do with one: I hit, I hit, I have hit; burst, burst, burst; read, read, read.

There's a particular problem with read as, though the parts are all written identically, the first is pronounced as reed and the others as red. This awkwardness often pops up on the Letters Page:

Dear Sir,
I read this paper every day.

Dear Sir,
I read this paper every day until 1947 when your journalism went to the bloody dogs.

And the reader has to jump back to the beginning of the sentence and repronounce the word in his head. T.S. Eliot, I suspect, intended this ambiguity of sound and tense in The Waste Land. It is the last line of a section whose grammar and subject have become increasingly confusing until, with this line, it breaks up like a bad telephone connection. The advantage of being a Top Poet is that all your mistakes are assumed to be intentional.

Given that hitting children became illegal under German law in 1980, The Times' ambiguity is commendably reckless.

"Me again. How about a nice Emperor's Crown?"

The Emperor's Crown and Other Enigmatic Perversions

N.B. This post was originally written about a mystery, but the mystery is now solved. See the wonderfully worldly description in the comments section.

 

The problem with the Internet is that there's not nearly enough information on obscure sexual practices. It's really quite maddening. For example, I was re-reading Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt when I came across this line:

There was a brothel in Havana where the Emperor's Crown was admirably performed by three nice girls.

Now, I'm proud to say that I have a depraved and horrible mind. I know what felch means, I know what changing at Baker Street is, and I know at least 5,636,336 synonyms for the word perineum. But I have no idea what the Emperor's Crown might be. So I googled it. And what did I find? Nothing nil zero zilch rien.

It's actually a rather important point in the novel, now lost to understanding.

There are several competing problems with understanding the language of filth. The first is that obscenities are not written down enough, except on the walls of lavatories, which are then demolished or repainted. The second is that those places where they are written down tend to be terribly dubious. There is, for example, a splendid book called Roger's Profanisaurus that lists rude words and their meanings. It is revised each year in time for Christmas and then appears on the tables in Waterstones. Yet ten years of revisions have not got rid of the fact that a chap I know spuriously entered the name of another chap I know with an obscene definition. It's still there. I check every year.

The Urban Dictionary, which is in some ways terribly useful, is the same. There's an Auden poem that opens:

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle

I happened to mention this aspect of doom to Mrs Malaprop and she didn't know what a sea dingle was. I reached for a dictionary, she for a computer. I found that a dingle was another word for a dell (hence Dingly Dell in Pickwick Papers is a tautology). She found this definition from the Urban Dictionary:

A sex act involving two people in which salmon roe is used as lubrication

Now, that ain't true. I know that ain't true. That's somebody who's read a little too much Auden (if that's possible) and is having a laugh. The problem is that the two best resources for the investigation of obscene English are tainted, infected. They have informational herpes.

And where does that leave the Emperor's Crown? What were the three nice girls doing so admirably? Perhaps Graham Greene was making it up. Almost any words in the right context can sound obscene. Have you ever done a flick Geoffrey? A koala gherkin? A Dutch steamboat?

If you have any idea what the Emperor's Crown is, do leave it in the comments. Otherwise the details may be lost to future annotators of this great novel. All that the prudish, priggish web would tell me was that the Emperor's Crown is usually bestowed by the Pope.

Yes, please.

Apostrophes and 'Bus[es]

I used to have a teacher who apostrophised everything. That's not to say that he talked to inanimate objects, at least to not to my knowledge. It was not the rhetorical apostrophisation, turning from the audience to address a city or a table or somesuch (London, can you wait?). No, it was turning away part of a word and replacing it with an apostrophe. He wrote a lot of notices that would refer to the 'phone and the 'papers, the punctuation point standing in for the missing tele and news. The habit was at the same time wondrously fastidious and gloriously silly. It would be fun to continue it to its logical conclusion: lunch' as a shortening of luncheon, fo'rt'night as a shortening of fourteen nights and 'bus as shortening for the macaronic voiture omnibus introduced by Monsieur Laffitte to the weary streets of Paris in 1820.

Technically, if you did consider 'bus to be an abbreviation, the plural would be bus as well as omnibus is simply the dative plural of the Latin omnus, meaning everybody. It was a car for everybody. So it wouldn't pluralize to bi as it was already plural.

Mind you, I used to know a jentacular chap who insisted that porridge was a plural as it was a shortening of porridge oats. So "How are your porridge?" "My porridge are delicious, thank you."

Speaking of macaronic buses:

WHAT is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo--
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!
   - A.D. Godley 1914

That was terribly funny if you know a little Latin. If you don't and it wasn't, then I shall tell you what I used to tell my teacher: that I'm terribly sorry and will do better Next Time. Though I never did.

Next Time used to be such an important idea: a gleaming and better othertime, like an old man's memories.