Parliament has been dissolved. Its dissolution was announced this morning. This is probably a good thing as it was dissolute and the country is not solvent. Parliament can therefore pass no more resolutions to provide solutions to the unsolvable, insoluble probelms of national insolvency.
All of which is because solvere meant loosen. For some reason, when people talk of parliament dissolving I think of the Thames flooding, or maybe an acid bath.
My favourite line about parliament is in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and describes the Minister for Transport, Lord Metroland:
Besides, all this statesmanship and foreign policy had always bored him. In his years in the Commons he had always liked a good scrap, and often thought wistfully of those orgies of competitive dissimulation in which he had risen to eminence.
There's something lovely about "competitive dissimulation", and, as the preacher says, there is nothing new under the sun.
What the world needs is a new quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) to deal with acronyms and initialisms. The other day the front page of the BBC news website looked like this (note the bottom left and top right):
The other one, in case you were wondering, is Northern Ireland. The problem of ambiguous initialisms has been the central scandal of the news over the last few weeks. Proportional Representation has fought with Public Relations on the front page. The International Panel on Climate Change has been in as much trouble as the Independent Police Complaints Committee ever since PC Delroy Smellie hit a member of the PC brigade at a demo (something that I saw on youtube on my PC).
The web has the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which stops two people both registering the same domain name and a similar leap forward in initialisms is long over due. I suggest, indeed I demand, that it should be called the Acronyms and Initialisms Database System.
I shall write to my Military Police about it.
Incidentally, in a preposterously technical sense an acronym is something that's pronounced as as single word like Scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) while an initialism is one where the individual letters are pronounced as in DVD (Digital Versatile Disc). Or maybe not. It depends which dictionary you read.
Commas can destroy or save cities and raise (or lower) the dead. According to Luke's Gospel, the following bit of banter occurred amongst the crucified 1,977 years ago.
And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.
And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
OR
Verily I say unto thee today, Thou shalt be with me in paradise
The difference is rather important. You see, there are two basic Christian ways of looking at eternal life. 1) You die and your soul pops up to Heaven 2) You die. You're put in the ground. You lie there until Jesus comes again and then your body is resurrected at the last day.
That comma, is the difference. Is Jesus saying today that etc etc, or is Jesus saying that Today etc etc?
Unfortunately the Greek of the time didn't have punctuation as we would understand it and so the entire question of the nature of eternal life is lost to us, because of a lack of commas.
134 years ago this April, the Bulgarians rose up against Ottoman rule. The rebellion was put down with horrid violence. In Bulgaria's second city of Plovdiv 15,000 civilians were massacred. An order was sent by the Ottoman high command to be even nastier to the citizens of Pazardzhik. The order read "Burn the town, not spare it", which would have left 25,000 people dead, or at least homeless. However, a sympathetic clerk who understood the tactical importance of commas changed the command to "Burn the town not, spare it." and thousands of lives were therefore saved from peremptory combustion.
All of which goes to show that a well placed comma can kill, save, or explain the mystery of eternal life.
Would have been burned
P.S. Sir John Harington, top poet and inventor of the first flushing lavatory (which he wrote a poem about), sent a present to James VI of Scotland, just before he became James I of England quoting that passage from Luke: "Remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom."
The Right Rev Richard Chartres, the Anglican Bishop of London, lamented the blight of the abuse scandal and its impact on Christian witness in his sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral yesterday.
Scandals, though, really ought to happen in the church and really ought to be a stumbling block to faith, that's what scandal means, etymologically.
Greek skandalon meaning trap became Latin scandalum meaning stumbling block. The idea was that when a Christian priest was caught doing something naughty that was a stumbling block in bringing people to the faith.
Oddly, the Koine Greek skandalizein could mean to be offended or to fall away, which is exactly what Jesus predicts the twelve disciples will do over Easter in Mark 14v27. When the Last Supper has been eaten:
And Jesus said to them, 'You will all fall away [skandalizein]; for it is written, "I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered."
So it is meet and right and our bounden duty to be religiously scandalised in this holy season, it is a way of displaying our discipleship.
Going on dates is an awkward thing if you're a man, [don't worry, this blog is not about to turn into a whining, mewling narrative of my wayward lusts] especially when it comes to payment [don't worry, I'm not talking about prostitution]. When the waiter brings the bill to the candlelit table it is a given that the man will try to pay for the whole thing - both burgers - but it is also a given that the woman will make some sort of frail offer to go halves, that's what feminism is. It must have been far easier for Casanova, whose birthday it would have been today.
The man now starts insisting that he will pay. And the woman? She will probably feel that she should insist a bit too, if only for show, or perhaps she means it. Perhaps she really wants to pay. Perhaps my target for the evening doesn't want to feel in hock to this strange man with the scrupulously waxed moustache, the riding crop and the plus fours.
One is therefore likely to be caught up in a back and forth of "No really" "No I insist" "I insist" "But I had a pudding". And you don't know when to stop and say "All right. We'll go Dutch."
After the first offer? The second? The seventeenth?
You don't know, but I do. For I long ago adopted the Rule of the Bellman. If she offers to pay three times, she's paying. [I should make clear 1) That this only includes direct offers of payment, "But it's so expensive" does not count 2) That this is not necessarily good advice. I have seen a fair few young ladies, aghast at my acquiesence, reaching reluctantly for their purses before spitting at me and stalking out.]
I call it the Rule of the Bellman because everything I learnt about romance I learnt from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll*
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, just not in the way Shelley thought. It is because ofr the Bellman's Rule that three offers means a split bill.
Great men other than myself have used the Rule of the Bellman. Theodore Roosevelt told Edith Wharton:
'I am glad to welcome to the White House someone to whom I can quote The Hunting of the Snark without being asked what I mean! ... Would you believe it, no one in the administration has ever heard of Alice, much less of the Snark, and the other day, when I said to the Secretary of the Navy: "Mr Secretary, What I say three times is true", he did not recognize the allusion, and answered with an aggrieved air: "Mr President, it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity"!'
There's also a short story called Chaos, Co-Ordinated published in Astounding Science Fiction (1946) in which the humans manage to feed The Hunting of the Snark into the alien supercomputer as a field report and thus save the earth, largely because the computer now runs on the Rule of the Bellman and wipes its own memory of everything that it has heard only once.
But then I discovered that the rule of three was not invented by Lewis Carroll. It is far older and used to be called nolo episcopari: I don't want to be a bishop. The idea was that when somebody was appointed bishop it was a given that they would be too humble to accept the post: that's what Christian humility means. So they would say nolo episcopari meaning "I don't want to be a bishop". They were meant to say this twice as a matter of etiquette. On the third request they were meant to surrender and take the mitre. If they did not, if they said nolo episcopari a third time, it was assumed that they were telling the truth and a new candidate was sought. To say something twice may be mere manners, Truth speaks thrice.
This custom was recorded by Edward Chamberlayne (not to be confused with Charlemagne (I only mention Charlemagne because today would have been his birthday)).
Anyway, that's my rule. The rule of three, because three is beautiful. For example, observe this goal from Euro '96 where three people, including Teddy Sheringham, pass the ball across the face of the goal before making the score three nil (I only mention Teddy Sheringham only because today would have been his birthday).
Incidentally, there's a splendid blog devoted to The Hunting of the Snark which can be found here. At least I think it's splendid (I only mention me because it would have been my birthday today).
*It should perhaps be noted that Lewis Carroll never married and was probably a pederast.
Incidentally, an April Fool used to be called an April Gowk and gowk meant cuckoo. Because cuckoos inveigle their way into the nests of other birds they gave us the word cuckold. This is the wrong way round as it is the cuckoo that takes advantage of the other bird's family, but cuckoos have always been considered mad as in Aristophanes play The Birds in which he invented Cloud Cuckoo Land or Nephelokokkygia as he called it. That was in 414 BC, but in 1918 AD Americans started to use the word cuckoo to mean mad. That got shortened to kooky, which has nothing to do with cookie which is the American term for a biscuit which is so called because it is cooked twice ( bi-cuit ). The difference between a biscuit and a cake is that a biscuit goes soft when it's stale whereas a cake goes hard. This was an important argument in the court case surrounding Jaffa Cakes and their tax status. Jaffa Cakes are made with seedles Jaffa Oranges which are named after Jaffa in Israel from which they are exported. Jaffa is now part of the conurbation of Tel Aviv which is currently, indeed perpetually, at loggerheads with the Iranian Republic whose national day is April the First which is April Fool's Day which used to be called April Gowk and gowk meant...
I am feeling idle and working frantically at tomorrow's post: so a mere medley on April as we are now entering the months of women's names: April, May, June, Julia and Augusta.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
- 1984 by George Orwell
'But tell me, now, which season do you like best, Kay?' 'I like them all,' he said. 'I suppose I like April best, on the whole.'
- The Box of Delights by John Masefield
April is in my mistress' face,
And July in her eyes hath place; Within her bosom is September, But in her heart a cold December.
- Thomas Morley
Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England - now!
- Home Thoughts From Abroad by Robert Browning
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote [sweet showers] The droghte of March hath perced to the roote [drought] And bathed every veyne in swich licour, [liquid] Of which vertu engendred is the flower; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sun Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, [Sun's in Aries] And smale foweles maken melodye, [fowls: birds] That slepen al the nyght with open eye- (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages); Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
- Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond, Watching traffic of magnificent cloud Moving without anxiety on open sky– Season when lovers and writers find An altering speech for altering things, - Auden It was Easter...
April brings the sweet spring showers: On and on for hours and hours.
- A Song of the Weather by Flanders and Swann
Parliament has been dissolved. Its dissolution was announced this morning. This is probably a good thing as it was dissolute and the country is not solvent. Parliament can therefore pass no more resolutions to provide solutions to the unsolvable, insoluble probelms of national insolvency.
Posts
