Digital Information and Flipping the Finger

The fingers are the digits and are therefore used for counting. Thus did digits become numbers and when information is stored in numbers it becomes digital.

The Old English names for the fingers are much more fun than those which have been more recently fangled.

The index finger was once the towcher, or toucher, because it was used for touching things. We non-tactile moderns no longer use this finger for touching things and instead only point at, or indicate them. Hence index finger.

Though you may, dear reader, run your inky index finger down the index of a book, that's not where the name comes from. Like a co-owned onion, they merely share a root.

The index of a book indicates where a passage may be found (and the index expurgatorius indicates where the good, dirty stuff is). From this idea of indicating come all the other dull and dreary stock market and scientific indices.

The dully-named middle finger was, to our forbears the fool's finger, but not, alas, because it was covered in ink. Instead we got the name from the Romans who called it the digitus infamis (infamous), obscenus (obscene), and impudicus (rude). Nobody is sure why the Romans bore such a grudge against the middle finger, but it seems that it was they who invented the habit of sticking it up at those they did not like.

As Martial so delicately put it:

Rideto multum qui te, Sextille, cinaedum
dixerit et digitum porrigito medium

Which translates extraordinarily loosely as:

If you are called a poof don't pause or linger
But laugh and show the chap your middle finger.

What do leeches have to do with love? A leech is an old metonym for a doctor, and doctors are interested in the heart. Because it was believed that there was a nerve that ran from the fourth finger to the heart, doctors thought that they could influence the one through the other. Lovers believe that by putting a ring around the fourth finger they had, so to speak, lassoed the loved one's heart. And that's how the leech finger became the ring finger.

And the little finger? It was called the ear-finger. Why? Because it's just the right size for digging wax from your shell-like.

The Inky Fool consults the future

Capuchin Cappuccinos and Libidinous Monkey-Monks

To some is revealed the secret truth, to others is revealed the utterly obvious. I am in the latter camp. Somehow I managed to get through three decades of life without noticing that cappuccinos - those caffeinated concoctions covered with froth and chocolate - must have something to do with Capuchin monks.

They do. That light, creamy brown of a well-stirred cappuccino is the same as the light creamy brown of a well-hooded Capuchin's. Hence the name of the coffee.

Capuchin itself is merely the diminutive of the Italian capuccio, which means hood. The Capuchins originally wore hoods to hide from the Pope; and by the time the Pope got bored and stopped searching for them, the monks had grown too attached to their little hoods to let them go. It had become, so to speak, a habit.

Monks used to be the butt and target of medieval satire. People would write poems about them. You get some idea of their reputation from the fact that the first definite record of the word fuck comes from a fourteenth century poem about East-Anglian monks.

Non sunt in celi
quia fuccant uuiuys of heli

Which is a Latin-English mish-mash meaning:

They are not in heaven
Who fuck the wives of Ely

Monks also wore brown and black. They were therefore sometimes compared to apes. And that is probably* where we get the word monkey. So what do you call a monkey that looks like it's wearing a hood?

That's right, dear reader, that's right. You call him a capuchin monkey.

P.S. Incidentally, the idea for this post came to me when I was wandering around the Capuchin crypt in Rome, which is decorated entirely with the bones of dead monks [see picture]. It is without doubt the most screwed-up place I have ever been to, with the possible exception of Stranraer.

*The OED says this is the most likely derivation.

Tatterdemalion

A tatterdemalion is a chap (or chappess) whose clothes are tattered and torn. It is the same as a tatter-wallop, a ragabash, or a flabergudgion; and, given the threadbare state of modern fashion, it is an eminently useful word.

Tatterdemalion should even be immediately comprehensible to the uninitiated because everybody knows what tatter means, and the demalion bit was never anything more than a linguistic fascinator.

Tatterdemalion is a lovely word with a suggestion of dandelions towards the end (although it is pronounced with all the stress on the may of malion).

More wonderfully still, there are spin off words: tatterdemalionism and tatterdemalionry. This latter word means all tatterdemalions. So, for example:

The tatterdemalionry of Shoreditch cannot endure the glory of my silk scarf.

Tell me that's not a useful phrase.

Dress-down Friday at Inky Fool Mansions

British Libraries

Those who dwell beyond the seas will find nothing of worth in this post. I fear the same for those who wander in these windswept isles, but I shall persevere.

Did you know that if you have a library card you get remote access to the Oxford English Dictionary Online? I didn't. I'd been paying my subscription fees (or cajoling Mrs Malaprop into paying them for me). But all I needed to do was pop around to the gaily coloured ruin that the council so whimsically refers to as a library and get myself a card with a number on the back. Off to the OED website and Bob's your uncle and Stan's your gran.

(Incidentally, Bob (your uncle) was probably Lord Frederick Roberts, a Victorian general, known to his men as Uncle Bob.)

Anyway, you then get free access to the full OED, the biggy, the behemoth, the 30 volume monstrosity that takes up several shelves in the British Library with every date, every etymology... indeed it renders Inky Fool quite redundant.

So don't do it.

More particularly for Londoners: did you know that there's a poetry library above the Royal Festival Hall? I didn't, and I used to work in the damned building. I knew about the bar downstairs. I knew about the other bar round the corner that's so terribly hip until you notice the mice. But I had no idea that there was a free library of 20th Century poetry at the top, all stocked up and without any late fees (the chap apologetically told me that if I was several months late they might telephone).

So, my British bookworms, turn up, sign in, and take out.

Top floor, on the left.

Hell Hath No Fury Like A Lily Gilded

A couple of originals whom time hath much abused:

Some people like to re-swear their vows of marriage. King John wanted to renew his coronation, to which the Duke of Salisbury objected:

Therefore, to be possess'd with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

And by a strange, forgetful laziness, that line has been contracted to the phrase "gild the lily", which is not at all what Shakespeare meant.

Lily-gilding might sound silly, but it would make a difference. Your lily would end up covered with gold, and might be rather pretty. Shakespeare talked of gilding gold, which wouldn't make any difference at all. Just as perfuming violets or smoothing ice is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

The same objection might also be made to unnecessary nuptials.

Jump forward a hundred years to 1697 and a tragedy by William Congreve was all, or at least most of the rage in London. It was called The Mourning Bride and opened with the line "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast". It doesn't quite keep up that standard, but it's really Not Too Bad.

There's a character in The Mourning Bride called Zara who's a bit of a bunny-boiler. She's in love with Osmyn, and doesn't realise that not only is Osmyn secretly married to a princess, but that he's not called Osmyn at all. Anyway, she discovers that he and the princess are all sighs and cuddles and decides to work their downfall, or more precisely to have Osmyn (not his real name) executed. She tells him in his prison cell:

Vile and ingrate! too late thou shalt repent
The base injustice thou hast done my love:
Yes, thou shalt know, spite of thy past distress,
And all those ills which thou so long hast mourned;
Heav'n has no rage, like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.

There isn't a hath in sight.

So now you know. But in order that you should know I just had to sprint pell-mell through The Mourning Bride, which doesn't seem to have been printed since they turned f to s. Usually I can cope with such typographical antiquity, but these lines, from a couple of scenes before the female furies, brought me up short:

The Inky Fool was behind the curtain

Organic, Organised Organs

Organic food is food grown in a church organ. Organised crime is crime committed by organists.

Well, etymologically speaking.

Once upon a time, the ancient Greeks had the word organon which meant something you work with. An organon could be a tool, an implement, a musical instrument or a part of the body.

Originally, an organ was any musical instrument, but in the ninth century people decided that every church should have a pipe organ in it for, as Dryden put it, "What human voice can reach the sacred organ's praise?"

Slowly the pipe part got dropped and other instruments ceased to be organs (except the mouth organ, which, if you think about it, sounds a bit rude).

Organ continued to mean part of the body, hence the old joke:

Why did Bach have twenty children?


Because he had no stops on his organ.

Anyway, the body is beautifully and efficiently arranged (at least my body is). Each organ has a particular function. I have a hand to hold a glass, a mouth to drink with, a belly to fill, a liver to deal with the poison and so on and so forth. Heart, head, lungs, liver, kidney and colon each performs a particular task; and the result, dear reader, is the glory that is I.

So if you arrange a group of people and give each one a particular job, you are making them act together like the organs of a body. You are organising them.

Thus an organisation: something in which each person, like each organ of the body, has a particular task. And though that shift happened in the sixteenth century when everybody liked metaphors about the body politic, crime didn't get organised until 1929 in Chicago, which shows how lackadaisical most malefactors are.

A bunch of organs put together make up an organism, and things that are produced by organisms are therefore organic. In the twentieth century, when artificial fertilisers were strewn upon our not-green-enough fields, we started to refer to organic farming and thus organic food.

However, the church organ survives. If you add pipes to an instrument, you are organising it; and organ music can still be referred to as organic.

A reluctant organ donor

Christmas Trees and Peep-Shows in New Zealand

Christmas trees, like Boney M. and spray-on condoms, were a German idea. Prince Albert brought the festive fir over to Victorian Britain. But as the OED puts it, it remains:

a famous feature of Christmas celebration in Germany, frequently but imperfectly imitated in England

Prince Albert arrived in 1840 and by 1850 the Christmas tree was so well known that Charles Dickens could write a whole essay on the subject that began thus:

I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men--and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, "There was everything, and more."

What lovely lists! A teetotum, since you ask, is a spinning top with letters on its sides. And a peep-show box in that more innocent age was a box with a magnifying glass in the side through which you could see little painted wonders. In the twentieth century some bright and drooling spark had the idea of putting dirty pictures inside, and eventually somebody decided to shove a whole girl in there. This is called Progress.

I'm not sure, but that child may, according to my dated Google Book search, have been the first person ever to utter the words everything and more*.

In New Zealand a Christmas Tree is the English name for the pohutukawa, which flowers at this time of year and looks like this:

*I'm excluding sentences like "I hate everything, and more precisely I hate...". Also, you need to be careful on Google-book-searches about periodicals, which are dated according to the first one in the collection.