Stephen King on Harry Potter

When a magician watches a magic show he* sees something utterly different from the rest of the audience. While most of us are wondering how the conjurer made that elephant disappear, the magician is appreciating how the elephant appeared to be there in the first place. The same principle applies to an actor who goes to the theatre. He* will see the lighting, the smoothness of the entrances and exeunts, the clarity of the delivery, and the blocking. A show always looks different from backstage, and, once you have seen the greenroom, the set will never be the same again.

All of which is a long way round of recommending that you read this article by Stephen King on the Harry Potter novels. It's thoughtful and clever, and, most of all, it is one craftsman's take on the work of a fellow craftperson. Just click this link.

Another way of looking at it, is to say that it's the third highest earning author writing about the first.

Incidentally, I heard that somebody once asked Stephen King where he got his ideas. King replied "I have the heart of a small boy. And I keep it in a jar on my desk."

I have work to do.

*or she, or it.

Currants, Sportsmen and Brothels

In Greece there's a little city called Corinth which lies on the narrow isthmus (Greek for neck) that connects the Peloponnese with the mainland. They used to make raisins there.

These raisins were known in Medieval England as raysyn of Curans. And then people got lazy and just called them currants. As a chap pointed out in 1578:

The smal Raysens which are commonly called Corantes, but more rightly Raysens of Corinthe.

Oddly, the S was on the end to make it sound like the Greek Corinth; but then people got the mistaken idea that it was there because the word was plural. So a singular word currant was mistakenly invented.

Corinth was known for its wealth and decadence. From the wealth we get the word Corinthian meaning a rich, amateur sportsman. From the decadence we get the fact that Corinth used to be a slang term for a brothel.

The Etymologicon

Ladies and gentlemen, I give unto you Inky Fool - The Book! The Etymologicon!

Yes, our little blog will finally be available in bookshops all over the English speaking world so that you, dear reader, so that you can brandish it and cherish it and use to intimidate your friends or prop up an unstable table. We shall emerge from our furtive Internet cave into the bright sunshine of ink and paper.

For months I have been beavering away on The Etymologicon - A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language. All my finest fancies and most recondite research has been held back and stored up in a beautiful, beautiful book.

So, though I say that the blog's become a book, it's almost all new stuff with occasional posts woven into the weft and woof.
Basically, it's about the links between words and phrases that you never knew about: the etymological connection between the Rolling Stones and Elizabethan horticulture or between California and the Caliphate. It's like this blog, but you can give it as a Christmas present.

It will be coming out in Britain from Icon Books, in North America from Corinthian and from somebody else in Australasia, and I think even India (although I must do some more research). Moreover, it has a beautiful red cloth cover and the title is in gold and it is, in short, the most beautiful thing that has ever been devised by man, beast or deity.

It's released on November the third just in time for all your Christmas shopping, but you can (and will) pre-order it now. It's on Amazon. Just click this link.

And, in case you were wondering, an etymologicon is a book that contains etymologies, as in Milton's line:

So that they who are so exact for the letter shall be dealt with by the Lexicon, and the Etymologicon too if they please...

Just because it's so damned beautiful.

Awumbuk

Awumbuk means the feeling of heaviness and sorrow you feel after your guests have departed. It's a word from the Baining people who live in the mountains in Papua New Guinea. But it's so eminently useful that I feel it should be imported into English at once.

Self-diagnosis is a dangerous business, but symptoms of awumbuk include sleeping in and feeling bored. According to the Baining, awumbuk lasts for exactly three days, during which you will be no good at either gardening or hunting. However, if you leave a coconut shell full of water out around the house, that will soak up the awumbuk which can then be disposed of safely.

Pot Shots

I was watching the telly yesterday and there was a man in a blue flak jacket talking about snipers taking pot shots. He was concerned about this because he might be killed; I was concerned because I didn't know why pot shots were called that. I suspected that it had something to do with snooker. How wrong I was.

The term goes back to hunting. There are two kinds of hunter: the sportsman who kills merely for the pleasure of ending another animal's life, and the hungry hunter who kills things for the thoroughly base reason that he wants to put them in his cooking pot and eat them. In the eighteenth century this latter was called a pot hunter.

As somebody anonymous put it in an 1825 tract on bull baiting:

There's nothing a regular Shot would be sooner chafed at than being called a Pot-hunter.

What makes pot hunters so despicable is that they kill things at the wrong time of year. They are so hungry that they can't even wait for the glorious twelfth until they start shooting. Instead, they potter around firing pot shots at animals that they intend to eat, this new term popped up in 1839.

From there it was a trifling step to start using the term for any opportunistic bit of gunfire, and then to capricious insult or heckle. And that's how you get to the snipers of Tripoli taking pot shots, presumably with the intention of cannibalism.

Jerry Leiber

Weep. Weep. Weep. For Jerry Leiber is dead. The man who wrote the lyrics to Jailhouse Rock, Hound Dog, Yaketty Yak, Stand by Me, Kansas City, Don't, Young Blood etc etc is dead.

I'm much too mournful to have much to say, except to comment upon Leiber's clever extension of metaphors.

The band was jumping and the joint began to swing.
You should have heard those knocked out jailbirds sing.

The phrase jailbird seems to have originally been coined in reference to a caged bird singing. The first known use is in a poem by John Davies about Penelope Rich* who in the course of her unhappy marriage:

...didst express what Art could never show,
The Soul's true grief for loss of her Love's soul;
Thine Action speaking-passion made, but O!
It made thee subject to a jail's control.
But, such a jail-bird heavenly Nightingale,
For such a cause, sings best in greatest bale.

But in the 350 years since that poem was written the idea of an actual bird had been lost. Leiber saw it and revived it. The same sort of idea was at work when, not content with calling a chap a hound dog, Leiber then extended the metaphor to other aspects of a canine life:

You ain't nothing but a hound dog
Hanging round my door.
Well you can wag your tail,
But I ain't going to feed you no more.

That was in the original Big Mama Thornton version, and when Mr Presley covered the song, it was changed to catching rabbits.

And I shall leave you with a lesser known example of Mr Leiber's genius.


I've tried this. It's delicious. But you must follow the recipe to the letter.


*Who was also Stella, as in Astrophel and Stella.

Tripolis

Just to keep up a faint miasma of relevance: you should know that Tripoli comes from the Greek Tri-Polis meaning Three Cities.

Once upon a time there was Sabratha, and then forty miles east of that was Oea, and a hundred miles east of that was Leptis Magna. The Romans called this tripolitic region the Regia Tripolitana. The name stuck but gradually it came to refer only to the middle city of Oea, which is the one through which the rebels are now revolting.

And as a bonus fact, the Greek for in the city was eis tan polin, a phrase that slowly got corrupted until it was pronounced Is-Tan-Bul.

The Inky Fool brings you up to the minute reportage