Comprachico

According to the Daily Mail (which is always utterly reliable on such matters), immigrant gangs have been mutilating children before sending them to beg on the streets of Britain.

I have to say that I was extremely dissappointed by the Mail's reporting. Not because of any content, it was simply that there are so few opportunities to use the word comprachico in the world today that I really think they should have taken this one up.

A comprachico (from the Spanish child-buyer) is someone who mutilates children professionally. The idea was popularised by Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs. He's quite helpful on the subject, pointing out that "a dwarf must be started when he is small", which must, I suppose, be where Werner Herzog got the title for Even Dwarfs Started Small.

For any would-be comprachicos out there, the correct method for making a child a dwarf is to feed him a kind of moth called a knot grass. As Lysander says in Midsummer Night's Dream:

Get you gone, you dwarf,

You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;

You bead, you acorn!

Alternatively you can use dwarf elder. If you're wondering why anybody would want to turn a child into a dwarf, the answer is that they were apparently very popular as jesters.

Anyway, there was a lovely word pining away for lack of use, and the Daily Mail left it there unused. Frankly, it makes me sick.

They did, though, manage to refer to it as a "twisted version of Oliver Twist", which just about makes up.

Don Sebastián de Morra, Philip IV's court jester

Clipping

A taximeter cabriolet sped over the tar Macadam towards the zoological gardens where it swerved to avoid a perambulator and hit a mobile vulgus of musicians in periwigs who were unable to play their pianofortes and violoncellos for the next fourteen nights, much to the disappointment of their fanatics.

The cutting of a word is called clipping. An imaginary prize for the best sentence with forgotten topiary.

He never saw it coming

Update: It turns out that syncope is only the removal of a word's internal parts. Title changed.

The Lullaby Meter

My favourite poetic meter is the acephalous iambic tetrameter. If that opening sentence doesn't have you weeing in your intellectual nappies then click on read more. For the rest of you, here is a link to Topsy and Tim making a picnic.

Haywire Straw Polls And The Grass Roots

I find few things more embarrassing than making an unintentional pun. Yesterday, a journalist told me that she had been watching the wires and I said that they must have been going haywire. Then I tried to hang myself. Then I started to wonder what haywire meant.

Hay wire is (amazingly) wire that you use to bind a bail of hay. Apparently its not as strong as normal wire and should never be used for repairs to machinery. If it is, then your machine will become a "haywire outfit". That may or may not be the reason that things go haywire. There's also the possibility that hay wire, like coat hangers and headphone wires, tangle themselves up horribly and that if something has gone haywire it simply means that it has become inextricably interwoven and loopy like the Gordian Knot (which was an actual knot in a place called Gordium, a problem that Alexander the Great solved at a stroke).

Straw polls are similarly enigmatic. Auden once said* of the relationship of a poet's biography to his work that it was simultaneously too obvious to need comment (Catullus loved Lesbia) and too obscurely complex to endure analysis. The same goes for these words of grass.

You do not, as Bob Dylan correctly observed, need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Shakespeare agrees and adds in The Merchant of Venice that an amateur zephyrologist can manage by:

Plucking the grass to know where sits the wind,

You throw a straw in the air and see which way the wind takes it. Hence a straw vote. Hence a straw poll, which elephantine-memoried readers of this blog will remember is a headcount.

OR, it is simply a weak poll, a poll of straw. Straw has always been weak as in straw dogs and straw men and clutching at straws etc etc which is why you only need hay wire to bind it together.

Grass roots is the third of these frail etymologies. It popped up at the beginning of the twentieth century. The roots I can understand, but the grass seems unnecessary. Why not dandelion roots, which are considerably stronger? English seems to be a strangely graminivorous language. But perhaps that's a good thing: hay fever used to be called summer catarrh, which is just horrible.

Or perhaps it's that grass roots are destroyed by GOATs. Now I'm off to accuse my lawn of informing on me to the police.**

The Inky Fool's summer residence

*In his preface to Shakespeare's sonnets. I don't have a copy to hand.
** A grass hand was a jobbing printer who moved employers, hence the sense of disloyalty, probably. A grass widow is an unmarried woman with a child (although I can't for the life of me see how that could happen). All flesh is grassy, bring on the lawnmower.

Dissolving Parliament

Parliament has been dissolved. Its dissolution was announced this morning. This is probably a good thing as it was dissolute and the country is not solvent. Parliament can therefore pass no more resolutions to provide solutions to the unsolvable, insoluble probelms of national insolvency.

All of which is because solvere meant loosen. For some reason, when people talk of parliament dissolving I think of the Thames flooding, or maybe an acid bath.

My favourite line about parliament is in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and describes the Minister for Transport, Lord Metroland:

Besides, all this statesmanship and foreign policy had always bored him. In his years in the Commons he had always liked a good scrap, and often thought wistfully of those orgies of competitive dissimulation in which he had risen to eminence.

There's something lovely about "competitive dissimulation", and, as the preacher says, there is nothing new under the sun.

The Acronyms and Initialisms Database System

What the world needs is a new quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) to deal with acronyms and initialisms. The other day the front page of the BBC news website looked like this (note the bottom left and top right):

The other one, in case you were wondering, is Northern Ireland. The problem of ambiguous initialisms has been the central scandal of the news over the last few weeks. Proportional Representation has fought with Public Relations on the front page. The International Panel on Climate Change has been in as much trouble as the Independent Police Complaints Committee ever since PC Delroy Smellie hit a member of the PC brigade at a demo (something that I saw on youtube on my PC).

The web has the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which stops two people both registering the same domain name and a similar leap forward in initialisms is long over due. I suggest, indeed I demand, that it should be called the Acronyms and Initialisms Database System.

I shall write to my Military Police about it.

Incidentally, in a preposterously technical sense an acronym is something that's pronounced as as single word like Scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) while an initialism is one where the individual letters are pronounced as in DVD (Digital Versatile Disc). Or maybe not. It depends which dictionary you read.

Jesus, Bulgarian Revolutionaries and the Life and Death Nature of Commas

Commas can destroy or save cities and raise (or lower) the dead. According to Luke's Gospel, the following bit of banter occurred amongst the crucified 1,977 years ago.

And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.

And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

OR

Verily I say unto thee today, Thou shalt be with me in paradise

The difference is rather important. You see, there are two basic Christian ways of looking at eternal life. 1) You die and your soul pops up to Heaven 2) You die. You're put in the ground. You lie there until Jesus comes again and then your body is resurrected at the last day.

That comma, is the difference. Is Jesus saying today that etc etc, or is Jesus saying that Today etc etc?

Unfortunately the Greek of the time didn't have punctuation as we would understand it and so the entire question of the nature of eternal life is lost to us, because of a lack of commas.

134 years ago this April, the Bulgarians rose up against Ottoman rule. The rebellion was put down with horrid violence. In Bulgaria's second city of Plovdiv 15,000 civilians were massacred. An order was sent by the Ottoman high command to be even nastier to the citizens of Pazardzhik. The order read "Burn the town, not spare it", which would have left 25,000 people dead, or at least homeless. However, a sympathetic clerk who understood the tactical importance of commas changed the command to "Burn the town not, spare it." and thousands of lives were therefore saved from peremptory combustion.

All of which goes to show that a well placed comma can kill, save, or explain the mystery of eternal life.

Would have been burned

P.S. Sir John Harington, top poet and inventor of the first flushing lavatory (which he wrote a poem about), sent a present to James VI of Scotland, just before he became James I of England quoting that passage from Luke: "Remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom."