Heal the Scars

A headline from the Evening Standard:

Quite right. It won't heal the scars. That's because scars don't heal. Wounds heal, and, once they've healed, they leave a scar. Everybody knows this except subeditors.

A more accurate song about scars.

Counterfactual History (or Not-Sooth Tales)

English, as a language, is basically made up of a Germanic base with French icing. This is because England was settled by the Angles (hence Angle-Land or England) and Saxons, Jutes etc. Then, it was invaded by the Normans.

But what if it hadn't been? What if the Normans had lost the battle of Hastings. What would the English language look like?

Obviously, it's a bit of a silly question as all sorts of other things might have happened or not happened and so on and so forth. Nonetheless, it's a fun idea to muck around with, and somebody has been doing exactly that.

For reasons unknown to me, somebody appears to have been re-writing Wikipedia using only words of Anglo-Saxon origin. It's fantastic: not simply because it's a fascinating linguistic feat, but also because any writing that follows a strange rule ends up being a good read.

For example, in the article on the history of the USA (or Banded Folkdoms of Americksland) you have people moving westward in search of "thrivedom" and a war of "Lonestance". Anyway, I thoroughly recommend that you read it. Link here.

Incidentally, there was a movement in the nineteenth century called The New Philology that attempted to purify the English language in just this way, I'm glad to see that somebody has now carried it to doneness.

Never happened.

Musomastix

A musomastix is an enemy of the muses. Therefore, anyone or anything that distracts you while you're trying to write is a musomastix.

Mastix was the Ancient Greek word for whip, and, back in the sixteenth and seventeenth century inventing -mastix words seems to have been a popular sport. A select few plucked from the OED are:

Popomastic - Inimical to the Pope
Histriomastix - An enemy of actors
Infantomastix - Somebody who agrees with St Augustine that unbaptised infants go to Hell
Female-mastix - Somebody who writes denunciations of women

The great thing is that you can just make a up a mastix word of your own. All you need is a prefix. So you could be a twittermastix, or workomastic, or practice gymmastix.

Confusingly, mastix can occasionally be the other way round. A theomastix is God's appointed punisher, somebody who wields God's whip for Him, rather than somebody who tries to whip God.

Anybody who does carry a whip, whether for reasons theological, equestrian or voluptuous, is, by the same root, mastigophorous.

I shall now leave you with hospitality-management advice from Hamlet:

...use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

Leave them be

And for a word utterly unrelated to whips, have a look at this old post of mine on backlash.

Joyce and Particle Physics

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.

Quarks, the fundamental particles from which protons and neutrons and the like are made, have two very peculiar qualities. First, they're pronounced kworks. Second, they were invented by James Joyce. The two are connected.

As any fule kno, the word atom means unsplittable in Greek. It was then discovered, to the dismay of etymologists everywhere, that the atom could be split into neutrons, protons and electrons, and then these particles were themselves subdivided into quarks, courtesy of James Joyce.

The new fundamental particle was actually thought up in the sixties, two decades after Joyce's death. But Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who had the idea, was a James Joyce fan:

In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark", as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking-Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark", in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.

Long-serving readers of this blog will know that James Joyce also came up with Hogwarts.

You spoof of visibility in a freakfog.

Indians Entirely Responsible for the Looting!

Well, in the strictly etymological sense that loot comes from the Hindi word lut, meaning plunder.

There has been much argument in Britain over whether the naughty fellows of last week should be called protesters, rioters or looters. I object to all three terms. Looter is callow neologism dating from only 1858. The only acceptable name is the original eighteenth century term lootie-wallah.

I demand that lootie-wallah is brought back into the language Right Now, and if my demands are not met I shall unleash an apocalypse of violence and plunder the like of which has never even been conjectured.

Personally, I'm going to wait till it kicks off in Marylebone and then loot the hell out of Daunt Books. Get me some more Tennyson.

How could they?

Trepignemanpenillorifrizonoufresterfumbled

So we come to the Friday of our week of sesquipedalianism. We've had Hottentottenpotentatentantenattentat, floccinaucinihilipilification, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary.

But as you have probably noticed, the thing about long words is that you can just keep making them up for a laugh. In one short chapter of Urquhart's translation of Rabelais you can find the words disincornifistibulated, esperruquanchuzelubelouzerireliced, morrambouzevezengouzequoquemorgasacbaquevezinemaffreliding, morcrocastebezasteverestegrigeligoscopapopondrillated and morderegripippiatabirofreluchamburelurecaquelurintimpaniments. None of these words means anything much at all, except in context.

My favourite from that chapter (which you can read the whole of here) is this little beauty:

The bride crying laughed, and laughing cried, because the catchpole was not satisfied with drubbing her without choice or distinction of members, but had also rudely roused and toused her, pulled off her topping, and not having the fear of her husband before his eyes, treacherously trepignemanpenillorifrizonoufresterfumbled tumbled and squeezed her lower parts. [...] But, said his lady, why hath he been so very liberal of his manual kindness to me, without the least provocation?

Have a good weekend, dear reader, may it be filled with joy, trepignemanpenillorifrizonoufresterfumbling and manual kindness.

Osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous

The following is from an early nineteenth century comic novel called Headlong Hall by Thomas Love Peacock. The context is that a phrenologist called Dr Cranium is going to give an after-dinner lecture. I trust, dear reader, that you will notice the long words.

"I invite you, when you have sufficiently restored, replenished, refreshed, and exhilarated that osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous, or, to employ a more intelligible term, osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary, compages, or shell, the body, which at once envelopes and develops that mysterious and inestimable kernel, the desiderative, determinative, ratiocinative, imaginative, inquisitive, appetitive, comparative, reminiscent, congeries of ideas and notions, simple and compound, comprised in the comprehensive denomination of mind, to take a peep, with me, into the mechanical arcana of the anatomico-metaphysical universe. Being not in the least dubitative of your spontaneous compliance, I proceed," added he, suddenly changing his tone, " to get every thing ready in the library."

Both those long words mean roughly made of bone, flesh, blood, organs and marrow.  So both simply mean bodily. Therefore, if you're feeling a little bit under the weather you have an osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary problem.

Headlong Hall (from which that extract was extracted) is the companion piece to another novella called Nightmare Abbey. It therefore gives me an excuse to quote the greatest description of posture ever committed to paper. I read the following passage when I was an impressionable young man, and have sat thus ever since.

[He] threw himself into his arm-chair, crossed his left foot over his right knee, placed the hollow of his left hand on the interior ankle of his left leg, rested his right elbow on the elbow of the chair, placed the ball of his right thumb against his right temple, curved the forefinger along the upper part of his forehead, rested the point of the middle finger on the bridge of his nose, and the points of the two others on the lower part of the palm, fixed his eyes intently on the veins in the back of his left hand...

Try it, dear reader, you'll look wonderful.

A rough sketch of the Inky Fool