More Seldom

Here's a little bit of poetry by E.E. Cummings (corrected for punctuation and missing capitals)

Love is more thicker than forget,
More thinner than recall,
More seldom than a wave is wet,
More frequent than to fail.

i quote it only because there was a question on the Dear Dogberry page as to whether anything could happen more seldom.

Seldom is usually an adverb, like often. So let's have a look:

I often wash.

I wash more often.

Compared to:

I seldom wash.


I wash more seldom.

Oooh no! Can't do that. However, in America seldom is often used as an adjective. In fact, Shakespeare adjectivised it in the sonnets:

Blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.

That's how Cummings seems to be using seldom in the poem above, as a straight synonym for rare, not rarely. The line means something like "Waves are very wet, and love is very rare; indeed the rareness of love is greater in extent than the wetness of waves".

However, more still feels awkward when applied to adjectives of diminution. As in:

Alice was more small now.


The pile is more little.

All of which leaves you with two options: you can be very simple, reasonably simple, or extraordinary.

The very simple solution is to replace more seldom with less. So "I washed less".

The reasonably simple is replace more seldom with more rarely. This still has echoes of awkwardness because it sounds like "more small" etc. So if you don't want to be extraordinary, you should just add -er and -est. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did this back in 1748 when she wrote:

Complainers are seldom pity'd, and boasters yet seldomer beleiv'd.

And Mark Twain kicked all common usage out of the door when he wrote that:

The seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile.

And what Montagu, Cummings and Twain have done is seldomly utterly wrong. Here's that poem in full:

Love is more thicker than forget,
More thinner than recall,
More seldom than a wave is wet,
More frequent than to fail.


It is most mad and moonly
And less it shall unbe
Than all the sea which only
Is deeper than the sea.


Love is less always than to win,
Less never than alive,
Less bigger than the least begin,
Less littler than forgive.


It is most sane and sunly,
And more it cannot die
Than all the sky which only
Is higher than the sky.


The only pop song I can think of that contains the word seldom.



P.S. I've written about seldom before here.

Poop-Noddy

A poop-noddy is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as:

Sexual intercourse (rare)

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I'm planning never to have sex again, it's pure poop-noddies from here on in. However, the origin of the word is rather curious. The OED refers you to noddypoop and noddypoop is simply a synonym for noddypoll.

Now a noddy is a fool and a poll is a head. That's why you have poll tax (a tax per head) poleaxe (an axe used for chopping heads) and tadpole (toad-head). So what has any of this got to do with sex?

Well, there's a sort of clue in Shakespeare's Pericles. There's a scene where two people who run a brothel are discussing how drab and diseased their prostitutes are:

Pandar: Thou sayest true; they're too unwholesome, o' conscience. The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the little baggage.


BOULT: Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat for worms. But I'll go search the market.

You've definitely got a sexual context here, but poop seems to mean gave him syphilis, rather than sex. So I'm going to take a guess that poop-noddy isn't sex exactly, that it is, in fact, the act of cuckolding somebody. So if you have sex with somebody's wife you are pooping her noddy of a husband.

I could be wrong though. It could be to do with poop decks, which are owned by bad DJs.

Supply your own caption.

P.S. Why do elephants have big ears?
Because Noddy won't pay the ransom.

The Pitying Printer

Right. A post about a bodhisattva called Avalokiteśvara, and his relationship to my godawful printer.

Avalokiteśvara embodies the compassion of all the Buddhas, which, I'm told, is one hell of a lot of compassion. At least a metric ton of the stuff.

Ava means down; lokite means looking; and vara means lord. So Avalokiteśvara is the Lord Who Looks Down, and the thing that he usually looks down upon is human suffering and lamentation. That's why*, when the Chinese took up Buddhism they rendered his name as Guanshiyin which means He who perceives the lamentations of the world.

This brings us to the utter and delightful insanity of the Chinese name taboos. There was, of late, a popular bumper sticker in America that said "The only Bush I trust is my own". There were other such witty variants. The idea was that by using the president's name in some amusing context you make the president himself look silly. What George W. Bush should have done (and would have done had he come to me for advice) would be to make it illegal on pain of decapitation for anyone ever to use the syllable bush.

That would include ambush, bushells of wheat and, of course, bushwhacking. That way nobody can make a rude pun about you.

This policy was pursued by the Chinese emperors of old. There was an absurdly liberal emperor called Shimin who said that you only needed to avoid saying shimin, and that Shi and Min on their own were all right. He even went so far as to employ a chancellor called Li Shiji, which shares a whole syllable with his name.

Fortunately for the dignity of the imperial office, his son repealed the law, had it include the last seven generations of emperor, and made the chancellor change his name to Li Ji.

Nobody in China was allowed to write the syallable Shi. This had obvious consequences for our bodhisattva Guanshiyin, or Guanyin as he was called from then on.

It should perhaps be noted at this point that Guanyin is rather androgynous. Though Avalokiteśvara is usually a he, Guanyin is usually a she. And it was in this feminised form that Guanyin arrived in Japan, where her name was altered slightly to Kwanon, which sounds similar if you think about it.

This brings us inevitably to the invention of the camera. In 1934 a Japanese fellow by the name of Goro Yoshida started manufacturing 35mm cameras. He decided to call his company after the all-compassionate bodhisattva, and so the Kwanon camera began. Here's an original logo.

Kwanon started to do rather well. They cornered the Japanese market and then started trying to sell their products in the West. However, we westerners find Kwanon a bit of an odd-looking mouthful. So the poor bodhisattva (who, you will remember, had already lost a shi to an emperor) was stripped of her W, and had her K changed to a C.

That is why you can still buy Canon cameras to this day. You can also buy Canon printers that break down and run out of toner and jam their paper and take hours to print or cancel.  However, once you know that, ultimately, Canon means Hearing the Screams of Humanity, this suddenly seems rather appropriate.

So why is my printer not handy to use?

*Although there are some rather dull complications to this.

Qualm

Somebody mentioned having "no qualms" about something on Saturday night, and it made me wonder what a qualm actually was. A quick check in the dictionary told me that a qualm could be the cry of a raven. But the qualm of conscience turned out to be one of those weakening words, like naughty.

Back in Old English qualm meant violent death, pestilence and plague. In fact, a qualm was anything that was monstrously and bloodily horrific. A qualm-house was a torture chamber, a qualm-stow was a place of execution.

Then, in the sixteenth century, it started to mean a period of suffering, like a bout of fever. Then it began to mean a brief illness, and then a faint feeling of discomfort. And it's from that last meaning that we get the modern ever-so-delicate qualm of conscience.

This means, that you can have no qualms about committing qualms.

Now, I'm off to a qualm-house to feel qualmish.

Many qualms and none

Unsteadily

I was reading a bestseller the other day, or rather I was trying to. But I couldn't. I'm going to try to explain why I couldn't by studying only one word of the whole book. This doesn't mean that the word (which came on page 39) was the novel's only fault, but it was a representative fault. So here goes. Here's why I couldn't read the novel. The narrator is on a boat and...

I jammed my hands in my pockets, hunched my shoulders up around my neck and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

The word that made me wince was unsteadily. Not that I have anything against unsteadily per se. Fine word. It was the placing of unsteadily within the sentence that I couldn't stomach. You see, try as I might, I can't read that sentence aloud.

By that I mean, quite specifically, that if I were chatting in the pub and (for some weird reason) trying to pass off the words of the novel as my own, it wouldn't work. It would sound odd.

When I was learning to drive, my driving instructor had this irritating way of talking. He would say:

I would like you to proceed to the junction where you will turn to the left.

Of course, nobody speaks like that naturally. So when you hear the words coming out of somebody's mouth it sounds odd. You get the same thing when you phone up customer service lines and the chap says "In order to redirect your call more efficiently I'd like to ask you three questions." It's hard to identify what's wrong with that sentence, but you know that he's reading from a script, which is infuriating because, when you start to make your complaint, instead of helping he just keeps reading from the damned script until you want to strangle the little waste of skin and bury his body at sea.

The same thing happens with novelists.

... and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

I could say:

And crossed to the starboard side unsteadily.

I would be happier with:

And crossed to the starboard side - unsteadily.

You see, an adverb like that needs to be set off. In spoken English it never just qualifies a verb in the way that a standard adjective does (I saw a brown dog). If you use an adverb like unsteadily at all you put emphasis on it. So I would be happy as Larry with:

And crossed (unsteadily) to the starboard side.

I wouldn't have to use parentheses, commas might do, but parentheses give you a far firmer idea of how, in the middle of the sentence, I pause for a split second and then raise my eyebrows as I say unsteadily. There's a change in the tone of my voice, and in the pitch. Try it.

And crossed [pull face, look up, make hand gesture] unsteadily [resume normal tone of voice] to the starboard side.

That works.

In the end, though, I'd be much more likely to say staggered.

Some writers say that they never use adverbs. However, never is an adverb. I'm not objecting to adverbs by themselves. Just this one right here.

Nor am I merely being snobby about a bestseller. I read all seven Harry Potter novels without ever coming across an unnatural sentence like this. You see, it's very easy to avoid writing unnatural English: just say the words quietly as you type them. That's what I'm doing right now, and though I probably look a trifle insane, it keeps my prose natural and therefore convincing. This is how I talk. This is my voice.

(Incidentally, Raymond Chandler once said: "I'm caught talking to myself quite a lot lately. They say that is not too bad unless you answer back. I not only answer back, I argue and get mad.")

Now, there's a premise underlying all this that you may object to: does all prose have to correspond to spoken English? No. But it has to correspond to something. You might, for example, want to sound biblical. In that case you can write:

I did cross the boat: yea even unto the starboard side did I cross unsteadily.

Or you could do Shakespeare, or romantic poetry, or Dickensian/Brownian intricacy:

I attempted to cross to the starboard side of the craft, an exericse which, due to the obstinate periconfluctuations of the ocean, could be accomplished only in a manner that, had it been witnessed by the Leaning Tower of Pisa itself, would have been scorned for the wild and omnidirectional tiltings of my gait.

I'm fine with that. There's a voice there. It's not a voice in which anybody on earth has ever spoken, but it's a fully conceived and consistent voice that I can hear in my head, but...

And crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

Who? What? The narrator is an Englishman, so this isn't some twist of the American or Australian English that I don't get. It's just unnatural. It's like saying:

Proceed to the crossroads and, when instructed, take the second turning to the right.

Me, writing this post.

Leptorhine

If you are leptorhine you have a long thin nose. Like this.

It's the same rhine that you find in rhinoceros and rhinoplasty. The opposite of leptorhine is platyrhine, although I confess that I err toward the former.

Shakespeare Sounding Funny

I'm always a little suspicious of these things, but here is a scene from Shakespeare in what is supposed to be the pronunciation that would actually have been used in Elizabethan England. My suspicions are based on the fact that no two of these versions ever sound alike. In fact, why don't I demonstrate that by putting in two videos. Compare and, if you must, contrast.



And this:



They're both rather fascinating.