Doggerel and Dog Mess

I was once stomping about, feeling proud and tragic and misunderstood, when my stern and heroic shoe was cushioned by something soft and forgiving, donated to the pavement by the generosity of a dog's bottom. It is the nature of tragedy that Hamlet never treads on a turd, and in the nature of life that he would. As Auden put it:

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life

In the end, our heroic autobiographies are all written in doggerel, which means little dog. Nobody is quite sure why. Perhaps doggerel is the sort of writing that would appeal to a puppy. But perhaps there is a better explanation deducible from the words first* recorded use in The Canterbury Tales. When it finally comes round to Chaucer's turn to entertain the pilgrims with a story, the narrator starts to tell the Tale of Sir Thopas. It's a truly terribly story about a knight and a not very frightening monster, and nobody wants to hear the end, for, as the landlord says:

Mine ears achen of thy drasty [shitty] speech.
Now swich a rhyme the devil I biteche!
This may well be rhyme doggerel," quod he.


"Why so?" quod I, "why wilt thou lette me
More of my tale than another man
Syn that it is the best tale I can?"


"By God," quod he, "for plainly at a word
Thy drasty rhyming is not worth a turd."

So I humbly submit, dear reader, that doggerel is the little bit of dog that is left behind on the pavement, and that rhyme doggerel was originally dog-turd rhyme.

*There are earlier records of doggerel as a name, but they don't appear to have anything to do with poetry.

Call in the Augurs

Sometimes an etymology is so obvious that you can't believe you've never noticed it before. This was true of cappuccinos and Capuchin monks, and is just as true of inauguration.

When you begin something new, it is a good idea to call in a soothsayer, or augur, to see how it will turn out. They can tell you whether today is a good day to start, and whether you should start at all. This is the inauguration.

Augur itself may come from avis, meaning bird, because Roman augurs used to chop up our feathered friends in order to find the future in the belly of a pigeon. Augur may, though, be the cousin of augment because the purpose of an augur was to predict an increase (or augmentation) in crops.

If augur does come from augment, then it relates to author, as an author is somebody who increases and augments the number of a books in the world. Authors have authority, and writers have rights; but bards sit in bars buying dramatists drams.

The Inky Fool thinks it may rain this afternoon.

Thomas Paine, Confucius and the Three Monkeys

A pleasant detail about Confucius: Confucius is a Latinization of the Chinese Kong-zi, which means Master Kong, or...

Oh, yeah.

Confucius is King Kong.

What's the relevance of this?


Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

This phrase is usually (and understandably) taken to refer to a seventeenth century Japanese sculpture that sits over the door of a shrine at Toshogu. Here's a picture.

Why monkeys? Because the Japanese phrase for hearing, seeing and speaking no evil is mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru, and zaru is pronounced the same as saru, which means monkey. Hence the sculpture. This is the explanation given in all the dictionaries as the origin of the phrase Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

It's all very well, but what about this passage from a letter of Thomas Paine in 1802?

As to the hypocritical abuse thrown out by the federalists on other subjects, I recommend to them the observance of a commandment that existed before either Christian or Jew existed.

"Thou shalt make a covenant with thy senses,
"With thine eye, that it beholds no evil.
"With thine ear, that it hear no evil.
"With thy tongue, that it speak no evil.
"With thy hands that they cemmit no evils.


If the Federalists will follow this commandment, they will leave off lying.
THOMAS PAINE.
Federal City, Lovett's Hotel,
Nov. 20, 1802.

So what? I hear you cry. Thomas Paine must have been to Japan. But Japan, at the time, was under Sakoku, a policy of splendid isolation whereby nobody was allowed in and nobody was allowed out*. Sakoku lasted from 1633 to 1853 so Thomas Paine cannot possibly have known about the three monkeys in the shrine at Toshogu.

So where did he get it from?

That's where Confucius comes in. Section Twelve of the Analects has this:

"Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety."

Thomas Paine was rather keen on Confucius and he must have imported the phrase directly from the Analects, and not from the three Japanese monkeys. This leads us to the vital question of whether Paine is right to assert that the phrase is older than "Christian or Jew".

Confucius' birth is usually given as 551 BC, which I reckon is pre-Christian. The word Jew is a shortening of Judaean, meaning the fellows from the Kingdom of Judaea. Israel was united (probably) by Saul in the eleventh century BC. In the tenth century there was a civil war and it split into two halves: one half in the north called the Northern Kingdom and one in the south called Judaea. This situation continued until around 720 BC when the Assyrians came and wiped the Northern Kingdom out, leaving only the Judaeans.

So the usual system of nomenclature is that prior to 720 they were Israelites and after that they were Jews. By my calculation this means that Thomas Paine was out in his dating by a minimum of 169 years.

*There were limited exceptions to Sakoku, but the prospect of somebody making notes about one sculpture at one shrine is pretty damned unlikely. 

Another Reason to Love De Quincey

You've got to love De Quincey; and, if you haven't read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, you've denied yourself one of the central luxuries of life. The following from the second edition.

At present, after exchanging a few parting words, and a few final or farewell farewells with my faithful female agent...

But there's a footnote to this half-sentence. The footnote reads:

Some people are irritated, or even fancy themselves insulted, by overt acts of alliteration, as many people are by puns. On their account, let me say, that, although there are here eight separate f's in less that half a sentence, this is to be held as pure accident. In fact, at one time there were nine f's in the original cast of the sentence, until I, in pity of the affronted people, substituted female agent for female friend.


I always attempt to add as many alliterations as I am able to without awkwardness. For example, the luxuries of life above was originally the pleasures of life. Mind you, nine in a row is pushing it. Alliteration is like picking pockets: very profitable so long as it's not noticed. Have a look at the Fs and Ss in this bit of Keats.

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.


But I wager that you wouldn't have noticed them, had I not warned you.

For further effy alliteration, see this ancient post.

Eyes suspiciously unfocused.

Glory-Hole

I was relieved to read the Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable definition of Glory-Hole


A small room, cupboard or the like, where all sorts of odds and ends and junk are dumped.

The OED says that a glory hole can also be a sailor's cabin, or a glass-blower's kiln. I really wouldn't check the Urban Dictionary' s definition unless you have a mind inured to all depravity.

This shows approximately the same lewd development as peep show and felch.

Keats and Starbucks

So what does the opening of La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats have to do with the world's largest chain of coffee shops?

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake.
And no birds sing.

Give up? I thought so. You never were one for hard work, were you, dear reader? The connection is in the sedge.

Sedge is any kind of plant that grows on the banks of a lake or stream. More recently its meaning has dwindled to refer to plants of the cyperaceae family; and, really, unless you're a water-vole, the only place that you'll have heard of it is in the Keats poem.

This takes us to a suburb of Harrogate in Yorkshire with a small stream flowing through it. Here is a picture of that stream*:

You will notice the depressing lack of sedge. It must have wither'd, for there was sedge there once, as the suburb's name is Sedge-stream, except it's not. Yorkshire was, a thousand and bit years ago, overrun by Vikings, so most of their place names are Scandinavian, and the Viking word for Sedge-stream is Star-beck.

Starbeck is only recorded from 1817 but it must have been around before because a) It has a Viking name and b) there were people there who had sex as early as 1379. This sex produced families, and those families were called, by a slight alteration in the name, Starbuck. Since 1379 two things have happened: the Quaker movement was founded and America was discovered.

The result of this double-catastrophe was that among the first settlers on Nantucket Island was a Quaker family called Starbuck. Nantucket was a centre of the whaling industry and the Starbucks took up their harpoons and set off to seek their oily fortunes at sea. Valentine Starbuck met the King and Queen of Hawaii and took them to London where they got measles and died. Obed Starbuck sighted a coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific which was later named Starbuck Island in Valentine's honour. The point is that the Starbucks were famous whalers, which brings us to Moby Dick.

Moby Dick is about a bunch of sailors having a whale of a time (whale, in case you were wondering, was early C20th American slang for a lot - whale of a job etc). The first mate of the whaling ship Pequod is called Starbuck, because the Starbucks were such prominent whalers. Moby Dick, aside from having a vaguely amusing name, is a favourite with American schoolteachers, which brings us to Jerry Baldwin.

Jerry Baldwin was an English teacher from Seattle, who in 1971, along with a couple of friends, decided to start a coffee shop. He wanted to name it Pequod, after the ship in Moby Dick but was shouted down by his partners who pointed out that Pee is not a good syllable to have in a shop selling liquids.

So the others cast around for a local name and found that there was an abandoned mining town near Mount Ranier called Camp Starbo. At this point Jerry Baldwin piped up and suggested a compromise. If he couldn't have Pequod, what about Starbucks,which sounds a little like Starbo and is a character in Moby Dick. They decided that this was a good name, and the rest is bad coffee.

And it all goes back to a sedge-covered stream in Yorkshire.

Gone fishin'

*Stolen from Flickr without a flicker of conscience.

Nympholepsy

Nympholepsy is, according to the OED:

Passion supposedly inspired in men by nymphs; an ecstasy or yearning, esp. that caused by desire for something unattainable.

It's therefore a rather similar word to pisgah, and equally useful. So far as one can tell from the literature, ancient Greece was overrun with shepherds who were forever pining after vanishing arboreal nymphs.

A couple of nymphs have made it into the language where they can at last be possessed by pastoral poets, if not pastoral farmers. These are Echo, who pined away for love of Narcissus until she was just a voice; and Calypso, an island nymph who somehow gave her name to Caribbean island music, but nobody's sure how.

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in the orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

When Internet dating works