Thalatta! Tarsus!

My wandering walkabout, roaming like a dream between the spare beds of London, is over. In honour of my new address, we shall have a little post about Saint Paul. Saul of Tarsus is responsible for one of the greatest passages in the English language, 1 Corinthians 13, and of course he gave us a couple of sayings like as you sow, so shall you reap (Gal 6v7) and the wages of sin is death (Rom 6v23). This latter statement is not accurate.

Yet dear old Paul also gave us little linguistic morsels that we might never notice, because they aren't large enough to be a quotation at all. The first labour of love was that of the Thessalonians, for which Paul gave thanks in his letter. Paul was the first man to be all things to all men.

To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.
   Corinthians 9v22

Paul was the first man to see people fallen from grace (Gal 5v4), the first to fight the good fight (1Tim 6v12), and the first powers that be did their being in Tyndale's translation of Romans 13v2.

I'm not sure whether I'd get on with Paul. Wittgenstein said that the stream that had flowed so purely in the gospels seemed to have acquired froth in the epistles of the apostle. Somebody once told me that Paul had to be understood as a fallible and fallen man struggling to make a church out of a life. This may be so and I may be nothing more than Alexander the coppersmith. Paul's language may be chaotic and his grammar byzantine, as anybody who has tried to read him aloud will acknowledge. But when he was good he was divine, and he also gave the language a Damascene conversion.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept my faith... The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpas, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.
(2Tim 4)

The Inky Fool moves in

N.B. This post works on the basis that the King James Bible was divinely inspired, and that in Heaven everybody speaks archaic English. If Heaven is not like that, I shall refuse to go in, and join my friends in  Hell.

Hypnopompic

If something is hypnopompic, it happens when you are just beginning to wake up. Still half-conscious you imagine that the alarm clock is a fire engine, that the cockerel is your friend and that the bed is a warm womb from which you will never be induced.

It is the opposite of hypnogogic which applies to falling asleep and myoclonic jerks. Hypno is sleep and pomp is from the Greek word for send. A psychopomp is somebody who guides souls from one world to another: vide Charon, Papa Legba and Virgil.

Oh, and the immemorial reviser's belief that you'll remember a recording played to you while you're sleeping is hypnopædia.

I've got to stop doing this

Some Rags

I always thought that a toerag was a rag used for cleaning the toe-caps of your shoes. I was wrong. A toerag is a substitute for a shoe or sock. Unshod tramps would wrap a rag around their toes to keep them from falling off in the cold.

Nobody is quite sure where the word rag comes from. It could be related to rug. It could be a backformation from ragged. Anyway, it seems to have been the ragged nature of the syncopated rhythm that gave us ragtime, first recorded in the title of Mississippi Rag by W.H. Krell in 1897 (Krell followed it up the next year with Picaninny Rag or Shake Your Dusters).

Newspapers have been referred to as rags since 1734, when a fellow called Roger North wrote:

Would any one expect in Print, upon tolerable Paper, and a clear Character, such Malice and Knavery as lies here, scarce fit for Midnight Grubstreet Rags.

Rags To Riches was a play by E.E. Rose and came out in 1897. Rag-and-bone men wanted bones to make glue.

But nobody knows why you lose your rag when somebody gets your goat. I assume the two are attached.

The Inky Fool's career as a couturier

American Clothes

I've been staying in the flat of an American friend and found amongst his books an American-English dictionary. It is a slim volume, almost bulimic, and it was first published in 1971.

This antiquity makes it a curious book. It preserves the distinction between the American billion (a thousand million) and the British (a million million): a numerological nomenclature that we abandoned twenty or thirty years ago. I believe that in the City billions have been smaller since the sixties.

Other terms testify to their times. I had no idea what a blackleg was, but imagine that in 1971 it was vital information for the travelling strike-breaker.

Mainly, though, it shows the areas in which our languages have drifted apart. Every third word or so is to do with either cooking or clothes. Barrettes, bathrobes, bellpeppers, bobbie pins, broils, business suits, candy, cheesecloth, clothes pins, collar stays, cookies, corn starch, cream of wheat and so on and so forth are still absent from English English. I knew about three of them, but the rest are a complete surprise. Do Americans really call it a lima bean rather than a broad one? Astonishing. Do swedes really become rutabagas beyond the Atlantic storms?

I suppose it's natural that these words should have drifted. Cooking is more talked about than communicated. It doesn't pop up much in films (movies) and novels in the way that serial killers do. Families have their own names for favourite dishes, so it is natural that a nation should as well.

And all those clothes! It is permanently amusing to an Englishman that American men like to wear their pants, knickers, vests and suspenders on the outside. If I tried that I would be arrested. Again.

What interests me about the clothes is that clothes do appear in novels. People are always being introduced as wearing a derby and jockey shorts, yet American novels have not affected English English. Why? I would guess that it is because clothes are almost never mentioned in films. On screen we can see what somebody has on (trousers and a tweed jacket) and no character needs to speak the words.

It's an old streetwalker of a book: outdated but fun. I never knew that a robin was a different creature in America. However, the book misses my favourite difference. Few legal activities give me more pleasure than hearing an angry American telling me that he's really mad and really pissed, because in English that means that he's drunk and insane.

Ours is prettier

I Shall Demonstrate The Reality Of This Dessert

Words change their meanings: phrases survive. Prove once meant test as well as show to be true. The two meanings are so close that they could reasonably interchange. To be tried and tested is to be shown adequate. Nobody says, though I suppose they could, that he was tried and tested... and found wanting.

Proof as test died out. But the phrase The proof of the pudding is in the eating remains, almost incomprehensible to modern ears: cogito ergo tiramisu. Similarly, the exception is still said to prove the rule, which, with the modern meaning of prove, is a statement of delightful fatuity.

Proving grounds are not, of course, places for ambitious epistemologists, but places where you are tested. And so on and so forth until it all proves too much.

It's enough to drive a proof reader to gin, strong gin, maybe 80% proof, and that's not waterproof.

Bullet-proof

P.S. I'm now suffering from lapse of meaning.

Will, Shall and Mornington Crescent

Volumes, tomes and libraries have been written on the correct use of will and shall. So I shall keep this short (as the film archivist once said). I was in Mornington Crescent tube station yesterday, waiting for the lift (elevator, if you're American) to raise me to superterranean liberty.

A voice, one of those rather too clear female voices that machines always have, said:

Lift number two shall be the next lift.


And it didn't sound right at all. It's not that I was concentrating. I wasn't. I was guilelessly clutching my suitcase, my mind its habitual blank. But my first thought was that it was a spell. It sounded as though the voice were trying to make lift number two the next lift, as though it were an imperative, as though Harry Potter were pointing his wand and willing that lift to come and get me.

Lift number two shall be the next lift.

In grammar, as in buttoning, nothing reveals more than a mistake. I think that my misunderstanding reveals something of the distinction between will and shall. Shall suggests what should happen, it expresses a human hope or order. Thou shalt not kill. If a weatherman were to say 'It shall rain tomorrow', it would sound wrong, because will or going to are used for such predictions. Similarly 'You will not kill' does not sound like a command, merely a statement of fact or murderous inadequacy.

Anyway, Fortune smiles on the confused, because in speech we usually contract both words to 'll.


The confused should follow this link.

Thomas Derrick, Jack Robinson and Dr Guillotin

Once upon a time, hanging was the punishment for almost any crime. Even Ben Jonson, for the trivial offence of murder, was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted when he proved that he could read and thus got Benefit of the Clergy. He had a T branded on his thumb and was sent home with a warning.

The T stood for Tyburn, which is where the hangings used to take place. The man who would have executed Ben Jonson was called Thomas Derrick. Thomas Derrick was a nasty man. There hadn't been enough applicants for the role of executioner and so the Earl of Essex pardoned a rapist on condition that he would take on the job. That rapist was Derrick.

Modern recruitment companies could learn a thing or two from the Earl of Essex.

Which isn't to say that Derrick was technically bad. In fact, he was something of an innovator. Rather than just slinging the rope over the beam, he invented a complicated system of ropes and pulleys, and it was by this method that he, in 1601, executed the Earl of Essex.

There's a moral in that, but I haven't the foggiest notion what it is and this is an counterethical post because Derrick's name survives. The rope system he invented started to be used for loading and unloading goods at the dock and that is why modern cranes still have a derrick.

There are three main theories on why things happen before you can say Jack Robinson. The first is that Robinson used to be the French term for an umbrella (because of Robinson Crusoe), and that French servants were usually called Jaques. This meant that when rich Frenchmen visited England and were surprised by the inevitable rain they would shout "Jaques, robinson."

The second theory is that there was an eccentric fellow in early nineteenth century London who would walk out of parties without warning, often before you could even say his name, which was Jack Robinson. However, there is no contemporary evidence for his existence.

The third and most plausible theory is that it comes from Sir John Robinson who was constable of the Tower of London from 1660 to 1679. He was therefore in charge of executions and was a stickler for efficiency rather than solemnity. The prisoner was marched out, put on the block and shortened without any opportunity for famous last words. He did not even have the time to appeal to the overseer by crying 'Jack Robinson.'

So derricks and brief spans of time are both named after cruel and psychotic executioners. The guillotine, on the other hand, is named after a jolly nice chap.

Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of the Guillotine. In fact, so far as anybody can tell, he was against the death penalty. Nobody's sure who designed the first modern guillotine, but it was built by a German harpsichord-maker called Tobias Schmidt.

It was Guillotin's kindness that got the machine named after him. You see, in pre-revolution France poor people were hanged, whereas nobles had to the right to be executed, which was considered less painful (although I'm not sure how they worked that out). When the poor French were revolting, one of the key demands was the right to be beheaded. Dr Guillotin was on the committee for reforming executions. He decided that the mechanism with the blade was the least painful and most humane method available. He recommended it.

In the debate that followed, on the first of December 1789, he made one silly remark: "Avec ma machine, je vous fais sauter la tete d'un coup-doeil, et vous ne souffrez point." With my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.

It's a great line. People loved it. They composed a comic song about it. Here's an English translation:

   Guillotin,
   Politician,
And physician,
Bethought himself, 'tis plain,
That hanging's not humane
   Nor patriotic;
And straightway showed
A clever mode
   To kill - without a pang-men;
Which, void  of rope or stakes,
Suppression makes
   Of hangmen.


'Twas thought, and not in vain,
   That this slim
   Hippocrates limb
Was jealous to obtain
The exclusive right of killing
By quicker means than pilling.


   The patriot keen,
   Guillotin,
The best advice to have
   Before the next debate
   Consults Coupe-tete
Chapetier and Barnave;   
   And then off-hand
   His genius planned
   That machine
That 'simply' kills - that's all -
Which after him we call
   'Guillotin.'

So Thomas Derrick and Jack Robinson were both sadistic, heartless thugs, whose names live on in innocence, if not glory. Poor Dr Guillotin's family were so embarrassed that they had to change their name.

There is, as the fellow remarked in the empty magistrates court, no justice.

The Inky Fool catches forty winks