A Parade of Perversity

Fie on impure Ganymedes, Hermaphrodites, Neronists, Messalinists, Dodecomechanists, Capricians, Inventors of new, or Revivers of old lecheries, and the whole brood of venereous libertines, that know no reason but appetite, no law but lust, no humanity but villany, no divinity but atheism.

The list is one of the greatest tools of the author, and is seldom used today. Modern writers have an ascetic tendency to search for the right word. Shakespeare was quite happy to let a mob of nouns run across the page whooping and screaming. Not that the list above is from Shakespeare. It's from Gabriel Harvey's Third Letter on Robert Greene, which makes up in fun for what it lacks in up-to-the-minute relevance.

I quote it here, not simply to demonstrate what a good list looks like, but also because of all the lovely and obscure words. So:

Ganymede was the cupbearer of the gods, and Zeus' bugger-boy. So by Ganymedes Harvey means catamites. This is a trifle counter-etymological as Ganymede's name seems to have originally come from ganyesthai medea, meaning rejoicing in virility.

Ganymede had been born mortal but was granted immortality and eternal youth by Zeus (in exchange for rights of his passage). Ganymede's brother Tithonus was also granted immortality, but not eternal youth, which is all the excuse I need to quote a bit of Tennyson's Tithonus:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Hermaphrodite in Harvey's time simply meant homosexual. It was someone who, as a contemporary put it, was "in sexe a man, & in heart a woman".

A Neronist is anybody who imitates the depravity of Nero. This takes in a fair amount of depravity and Neronists deserve top marks for effort. Nero was a transvestite, a ganymede, a hermaphrodite, a mother-killer and a Bad Singer. In the context, Harvey probably meant transvestite as that is the perversion that Nero had and other emperors didn't.

Nero had a cousin called Messalina who was the wife of the Emperor Claudius. However, she also screwed almost everybody in Rome. According to Juvenal, she set up her own brothel where she worked as an enthusiastic amateur (with "gilded nipples"). According to Pliny the Elder she challenged Rome's most notorious prostitute to see who could have sex the most times in 24 hours. Messalina won with a score of twenty five. Given all that, I'm sure you can work out what Messalinists might be.

Dodecomechanists are... well it should be obvious. Dodeco means twelve. Mechanist means either someone who makes things, or someone who believes in a mechanical theory of the universe. The OED has no entry for dodecomechanist or any similar word, so I have had to work it out myself.

I can't for the life of me see how twelve could have anything to do with sex. So I think that Harvey was referring to astrologers, more precisely to those astrologers who discount both God and free will, and attribute everything to the mechanism of the stars. You see there are twelve houses in Heaven. That is to say, the sky is divided into twelve parts in which influential stars can be ascendant or descendant.

The renaissance astrologer William Lilly said:

There is nothing appertaining to the life of man in this world, which in one way or other hath not relation to one of the twelve Houses of Heaven, and as the twelve signs are appropriate to the particular members of mans body; so also doe the twelve houses represent not onely the severall parts of man, but his actions, quality of life and living.


So Lilly saw the twelve houses as the mechanism that drives the universe. So he was a dodecomechanist. That attributes to the stars the powers that are properly God's, so it's a tad atheist.


Capricians are not in the OED. They may be people who follow their caprices too much, but that seems rather weak in such a strong, bawdy, lecherous and ensemened list. Capricious simply means like a goat (as in capricorn) because goats are so whimsical. Given the context - the ganymedes and messalinists - I shall take a guess that capricians are those who like goats rather too vigorously.

So the whole list reads: Catamites, homosexuals, transvestites, sexually confident women, star-gazing atheists, and goat-shaggers.

Fie on them all indeed. Now I'm off to invent some new and revive some old lecheries.

This is the strangest Budweiser advert I've ever seen

Dunandunate

There's a fun little article in today's Telegraph about words that have been rejected by the OED and now skulk miserably in a vast oubliette somewhere among the dreaming spires. You can read the article here. The failed candidates are mainly portmanteau words. My favourite was dunandunate, which is to learn a new word and then use it incessantly.

Playing Little Roll

All the world, as some minor poet once observed, is a stage and all the men and women merely players. To act upon this stage you need, of course, a script, and that script was once given to you not as a book but as a rolled up sheet of parchment. You were given a roll and thus you were given a role.

The shift from concrete noun to abstract happened in Medieval French before the word had even arrived on these chilly shores and the first role-player in English was John the Baptist* who "from God hath receiued such a rowle, it being inioyned him, to prepare the way of the Lord."

This means that the 98,200 references on the Internet to playing little role rather than a little role read rather awkwardly. Role-play has become a zombie metaphor. If we could forget actors, playing little role would seem fine. But as an actor would only play a little role or a little part, the omission of the indefinite article is liable to raise the thoughtful reader's hackles. Indeed, this whole post comes from a question on the Dear Dogberry page.

The problem is, though, that the "a" suggests importance. Compare and, if you must, contrast:

Elephants play little role in British politics


Elephants play a little role in British politics

The first sentence suggests "little or no" and is final. Are elephants irrelevance...s? Yes. The second sentence suggests that pachyderms do something, probably more than you think, and that the writer is now going to explain exactly what small role they play.

So, what to do? Should one stay true to the moribund metaphor or stride callously onwards into the waste land of contemporary usage? I can't say I'm sure. I would only write of playing a little role, and when I want to dismiss something as an irrelevant elephant I shall use another phrase entirely.

While we're on the subject of actors and their parts, I should inform you that winging it has nothing to do with flying, it is rather instead what an actor does when called in to play a role at short notice and is forced to learn his lines in the wings of the theatre. He can only reasonably do this if he has been given a small roll.

Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road on one huge roll of paper.

That is the only interesting thing about the book.

*So far as I can tell.

Chocolate and Heavenly Bodies

There is a kind of chocolate bar called a Galaxy. There is also a kind of chocolate bar called a Milky Way. I'm not sure on what basis these names were chosen. Tabloid newspapers also pilfer the nomenclature of astronomy. I suppose the Milky Way suggests milk chocolate.


Pretty much every European language refers to the Milky Way as the Milky Way. In France it is la voie lactée, in German the Milchstraße, and in Welsh it is the Llwybr Laethog, because the Welsh language was invented by somebody playing a bad hand at Scrabble.


The milk comes from the myth that the pale strip of night sky was created when Hera was breast-feeding Hercules and overlactated.


In ancient Greek it was also called milk. The Greek for milk was gala, but the genitive of gala was galaktos. This means two things: first galactic is the etymological brother of lactating; and, second, the only difference between the two chocolate bars is that one of them is Greek.

That's how it happened

Otherwhere the Burning Globe

I toddled down to the Globe last night to see Henry VIII or All Is True. It's an odd little play that Shakespeare wrote in collaboration with John Fletcher. However, for me, Henry VIII has two melancholy and sobful associations.

When I was a young and hopeful boy I coined a brand new word: otherwhere. I put it in a petrarchan sonnet and for a few days I was happy. Then I looked in a dictionary and all joy fled. It turned out that otherwhere had been around since 1400 and had already been employed by such poets as Wyatt, Milton and Keats; and by such non-poets as Burns. My coinage was devalued and I have never smiled since. So these lines from Henry VIII are like a mallet to my balls:


Excuse me;
The king has sent me otherwhere: besides,
You'll find a most unfit time to disturb him:
Health to your lordships


Much less importantly for the history of English literature, All Is True destroyed the original Globe Theatre. Here is a letter from Henry Wotton written on the second of July 1613 explaining:


I will entertain you at the present with what happened this week at the Banks side. The King's players had a new play called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry the Eighth, which set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty even to the matting of the stage; the knights of the order with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within awhile to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very ground. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabrick, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with a bottle of ale.

I kept a pint of London Pride beside me, just in case, because I always wear incendiary breeches.

Torpedoes and Turtles

The Latin word for being tired or numb was torpere. From this verb they got the adjective torpid, which is still with us today. And that would be the end of the story were it not for electrical fish.

That there are electric eels is commonly known (and therein, if anybody would listen to me, lies the solution to the world's energy problems. All electrical devices from mobile phones to aeroplanes would have a small fish tank attached and... but I digress). There are kinds of ray that can produce electricity, in fact they can produce 220 volts of the stuff, which is quite enough to knock you out, and therefore make you torpid.

In English they were once called numb-fish or cramp-fish, but the educated Latin name is torpediniformes, with the major family being the torpedoes. As Lawrens Andrewe put it in his snappily titled The noble lyfe & nature of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles & fisshes y be moste knowen (1520):


Torpido is a fisshe, but who-so handeleth hym shalbe lame & defe of lymmes that he shall fele no thyng.

Marlowe refers to a chap as a "vile torpedo". There was an eighteenth century dandy called Beau Nash who was awfully witty but had trouble writing well. "He used to call a pen his torpedo for whenever he grasped it, it numbed all his faculties." This is a shame as Nash was very charming. When he died his wife went to live in a hollow tree near Warminster.

Anyway, in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour. The Americans did not like this and there was a fellow called Bushnell who invented a submarine with which to attack the blockading British boats in the most unsporting manner.

Bushnell couldn't decide what to call his submarine: he seems to have been in two minds between the American Turtle and the Torpedo. In shape it resembled both.

It should be noted at this point that the OED, Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica are all wrong. I checked. There is a lovely contemporary account of Bushnell's machine to be found here and here. The idea of the submarine, called the Torpedo, was that it had a "magazine or powder" attached to it that it would screw to the hull of the British flagship. The revolting Americans were foiled by the ship's hull, which was copper-bottomed.

The torpedo trying to attach a mine

But the Americans were not to be deterred. Another inventor called Fulton took up where Bushnell left off (Bushnell for some reason ran away to the South and took on a new identity). It was Fulton who decided to call the explosive device a torpedo. He also decided to change it a bit. Rather than the submarine getting right up to the ship it didn't like, it would instead fire a harpoon at it. The explosive device, now called a torpedo, would be attached to the harpoon by a rope and contain within it a timer. So the submarine would pop up, harpoon the ship, and disappear before the charge went off. Full account from 1809 here.

Fulton's torpedoes didn't work either. Decades passed during which the torpedo was fitted with a motor and other such improvements, but nothing was sunk with a vile torpedo until 1878 when a Russian ship sank an Ottoman one.

And that, dear underwater reader, is how tired and numb came to mean fast and explosive.

The Inky Fool in the bath

Irresistible Eggs

On Julia's Legs


Fain would I kiss my Julia's dainty leg,
Which is as white and hairless as an egg.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

What I like about that poem, I think, is that it implies that Robert Herrick was helplessly enamoured of eggs.

I am too

P.S. The original lyrics to Yesterday ran "Scrambled eggs, Oh you've got such lovely legs."