Lord and Lady Panivorous

Here's a splendidly useful word: panivorous.

It means "that eats or lives on bread" (Latin panus) and should therefore be wildly applicable. Yet it seems only ever to have been used once, in 1845, by Mrs Catherine Gore who wrote of a man that he was: "A boulanger in the panivorous kingdom of France."

We are all panivorous. Stand outside any office block at lunchtime and watch the panivorous staff scuttle back from the sandwich shop leaving, like Hansel and Gretel, a trail of crumbs.

There's the simple bread that we eat; there's the religious "daily bread"; and there are a hundred and one hidden etymologies for when we eat our words.

The Old English word for bread was hlaf, from which we get loaf; and the old English division of labour was that women made bread and men guarded it. The woman was therefore the hlaf-dige and the man was the hlaf-ward.

Hlafward and Hlafdige

Hlaford and Hlafdi

Lavord and Lavedi

Lord and Lady

And when the lord and lady finally sit down and devour the bread, they become companions; because a companion is someone you eat bread with in the same way that a mate is somebody who shares your meat.

Had enough? I don't care. The old word for beg was briber, and the way to get rid of a beggar was to palm him off with a morsel of bread called a bribe, hence bribe. Ciabatta is Italian for carpet slipper because that's what the bread resembles, just as baguette means stick. And gritty was not first applied either to dramas or to roads but to dear old, mere old bread.

'So cast your bread upon the waters,' as a friend mine likes to say. 'You never know, it might come back as smoked salmon sandwiches.'

These do not count as ciabattas

She Who Must Be The Grand Panjandrum (BA Oxon)

Last night, as the clock struck twelve, I was busily proof-reading when a chap asked me what exactly a Grand Panjandrum is.

There was an eighteenth century actor called Charles Macklin who boasted that he could memorise any speech after hearing it only once. Another eighteenth century actor called Samuel Foote, who had played Othello to Macklin's Iago, decided to write an unmemorisable speech for Macklin. He came up with this:

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. "What! No soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyalies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

Perhaps Foote wrote it down. History is mute. Though the speech was composed in the 1750s it wasn't published until 1825 and the authorities seem authoritatively confused as to how the challenge was put. The important thing is that it's a passage that Lewis Carroll would have been proud of. No decent human being could read the words "So he died" without at least smiling.

In conclusion, Grand Panjandrums may be recognised by the little round button at the top.

The Grand Panjandrum, though, should never be confused with the Great Panjandrum, which was a (slightly insane) explosive device invented during the Second World War and never used. It was called a panjandrum in reference to the gunpowder running out at the heels of the boots.

My conversation then turned to She Who Must Be Obeyed, which my interlocutor believed came from Rumpole. She comes from the novel She by H. Rider Haggard. (I always pictured Rider Haggard as a gaunt man on a horse. I was miserably disappointed to find he was a healthy looking fellow with a beard). She is a novel about a couple of jolly brave Victorian fellows who find a secret kingdom in Africa ruled by an immortal and intolerably beautiful lady whom the natives refer to as She Who Must Be Obeyed. She falls in love with one of them and it all ends in tears and wrinkles.

She is one of the most extraordinary books ever written. In essence it is the greatest myth composed in modern times: the sort of story that takes a seat in the reader's soul. In execution it is a rather silly ripping yarn: the sort of thing I loved when I was twelve. Imagine the myth of Oedipus with Biggles in the main part.

Like the Bellman and bad news, I like to work in groups of three. So I shall leave you with the opening paragraph of another African adventure: Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh.

'We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim...' Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. 'Rats,' he said; 'stinking curs. They are all running away.'

Not haggard

The Grosser Grocer

Grocers are gross, and there are one hundred and forty-four of them.

It all comes, of course, from the French word gros meaning large. A grocer buys his goods in bulk or en gros. 144 is a dozen dozens or, if you're a medieval Frenchman*, a grosse douzaine. In English the word shifted from big to thick and thence to coarse until it came to mean plain damned rude. Thus in Hamlet Gertrude says of the expired Ophelia:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:

Damn those liberal shepherds with their voting reform and their dirty names for flowers. (For those filthy-minded readers who were wondering, dead men's fingers are Orchis Mascula which were also called dogstones (Latin testiculus canis), dog's cods, cullions or fool's ballocks. See the bottom left of the illustration that I have so thoughtfully provided.)

 

All of which is a long way round of saying that gross already meant rude in Shakespeare's day. However, the modern sense of gross as a slang exclamation equivalent to yuk may simply be a shortening of the intensifier. Gross, or large, incompetence leads to gross stupidity, gross misconduct and then gets its second word chopped off.

 

If you are completely absorbed in something, you are engrossed. And a country that produces nothing other than gerontophile pornography has a Gross National Product.

 

Finally, by means of Admiral Vernon, gross is the ultimate origin of groggy, but I have explained that elsewhere.

 

 

Disgusting

 

*Are you?

The Academy of English

Sometimes I don't know why I continue with this whole breathing lark.

The Queen's English Society has formed an English Academy, along the lines of the Académie Française. There's nothing too wrong with that: I like hopeless eccentrics. But I would have hoped for just a tiny little something from the academy's first press release: not that it should be written as a perfect villanelle, nor even that it should be beautiful, but at least that it wouldn't be "moving with the times" or bemoaning "the tragic failure of the British education system" or rejecting "passing fads". How, in the name of all that's tautologous, could a fad not be passing?

Read this turd of a paragraph:

Other languages, French and Spanish for example, have supreme authorities that try, while moving with the times, to define what is good and acceptable usage and what is not. They do not stop the language from changing over the years, but they do provide a measure of linguistic discipline and try to retain valid and useful new terms, while rejecting passing fads.

For starters, let's see whether anything could be cut without affecting the meaning.

Other languages, French and Spanish for example, have supreme authorities that try, while moving with the times, to define what is good and acceptable usage and what is not. They do not stop the language from changing over the years, but they do provide a measure of linguistic discipline and try to retain valid and useful new terms, while rejecting passing fads.

Not of course that there's anything wrong with florid prose. Readers of this blog will know that I will never use one word where fifteen beautiful ones will suffice. But my circumlocutions, my verbosity, my periphrasis and sequipedalianism are all in the cause of entertainment, whereas that paragraph pisses in the face of poetry.

Moreover, they managed in two sentences to print two of the words I hate most: valid and acceptable. What exactly does valid mean in this context? Is the word a book token? Is it true? How can a word be true in and of itself? And acceptable. I have never accepted a word and therefore cannot see how I could not accept one. Food in a restaurant can be unacceptable because it can be sent back; but a word cannot be, unless you're very quick with the ear plugs.

Acceptable is one of those horrid, slithering words like cowardly that allow you to criticise something without saying what's wrong with it. His views are unacceptable. His actions were unacceptable. A usage may be stupid, ugly, or unnecessary; and so may an academy.

I'm not normally so cruel to the verbally incapable. But when you presume to regulate my language it's... unacceptable. And I feel that my ire is valid.

The muse contemplating the English Academy

Napa Happy Nappy Valley (and Dr Johnson)

There is an area of South London known to all, and even sundry, as Nappy Valley. It's basically Wandsworth. The reason for the name is that the area is positively teeming with fecund young professional couples whose constant rutting has given it the highest birth rate in Europe (or so saith Wikipedia without citation). [N.B. Nappy is English for diaper. In fact non-Londoners may want to skip this post].

I happened to be discussing the area with Mrs Malaprop yesterday and, of course, the conversation leapt, flea-like, to the Origin of the Name.

I asserted that it was to do with Napa Valley in California, where the wine comes from. I said that the name was obviously down to affluent, priapic couples changing nappies whilst sipping white wine.

Mrs Malaprop said that she had always assumed that it was to do with Happy Valley in Kenya, where the murders happen.

So today I set about investigating. It turns out that Mrs Malaprop was right and I was wrong, which I feel remains a moral victory for me.

The phrase, you see, is not English in origin. The first reference that I can find to London's Nappy Valley is from The Independent in 1997. But I discovered this in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1984:

Horror films soar in popularity during the school holidays. Children's films are most popular in Tuggeranong (known as Nappy Valley) and other far-flung suburbs which are the newest and have the youngest families.

Tuggeranong is a suburb of Canberra, so it would seem that Australia can claim the original Nappy Valley. However, in her riveting account of the 1984 general election campaign in New Zealand (not written till 1985) Josephine Grierson records her press officer warning her of victory:

"You'd better watch it you know or you may end up with three years of "Nappy Valley"! I've already heard you referred to as the "Pakuranga housewife".

Pakuranga is a suburb of Auckland. So parallel births of the name? Some strange antipodean synchronicity?

No. Just outside Auckland, a mere, 23 miles from the aforementioned Nappy Valley is a little place called Happy Valley. They make honey there. So it must be a pun on the name: the appy, not the nap.

In Australia it's a little farther, but the connection is still easy to make. You go from Canberra to Adelaide (both in the South East) and you have a well known suburb again called Happy Valley. So, though there may not be a Kenyan connection, I am satisfied that in both cases it's a pun on Happy Valley.

So where does Happy Valley come from? Perhaps it's just the twee imaginings of an optimistic settler. But I can get the phrase straight back to Dr Johnson, which makes me much happier.

Dr Johnson wrote Rasselas. It's about a prince (coincidentally called Rasselas) whose father decides to keep him away from the sins of society. So he is brought up in an impregnable valley where he is given all that he could possibly want other than knowledge of the world.

However... well here's the opening of the second chapter:

CHAPTER II--THE DISCONTENT OF RASSELAS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY.

Here the sons and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose...

I like to think that those distant settlers were thinking of Rasselas when they did their naming, if only because Rasselas has suffered an terrible, terrible fate. You see, it's a Very Good Book, but it's identical in concept and was published in the same year as Candide by Voltaire, which is an Absolutely Bloody Wonderful Book.

Candide is a book about a completely innocent young man who sets off on a world tour that allows for lots of satirical vignettes. Rasellas is a book about a completely innocent young man who sets off on a world tour that allows for lots of satirical vignettes. The result is that almost nobody bothers to read Rasselas. Even I have lost my copy and don't particularly care. I can't even recommend that you read it because Candide is better. A merely good book, like Rasellas, cannot compete.

Evelyn Waugh probably considered this. He once wrote a story called A House of Gentlefolks. It begins, like Rasselas and Candide, with a boy who has been kept completely away from the world until his eighteenth birthday being allowed out (with a guide) and setting off on a series of satirical vignettes. Except that he doesn't. They're about to set off on a world tour when, after only ten pages the narrator says:

It seems to me sometimes that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel.

And a lawyer arrives to take the boy back. For an ardent lover of early Waugh like me, that sentence is unutterably sad. I think that Waugh was thinking of the fate of Rasellas.

There was, though, a man called Isaac Brown Jr, who liked Johnson's book and called his son Rasselas Wilcox Brown, and Rasselas went to Pennsylvania and founded Rasselas PA.

Now you tell me.

Procrastination is the Thief of Meaning

People are liars, always have been always will be. They say they'll do something straight away and then they don't. I am no better than the rest. If I tell you that I'm going to do something Right now, you can be pretty much guaranteed to discover me half an hour later lying in a hammock with a glass of Pimms and a copy of Ulysses open at the first page.

This has linguistic consequences. Do you know what the Anglo-Saxon for immediately is?

Sóna

But so many people over the last millennium have promised to do something sóna that the word has become the modern English soon.

The same has happened to in a minute. Though there is a perfectly precise time mentioned in the phrase I would probably use it to mean anything up to... half an hour? Certainly no more than an hour.

I think I'm a little better with in a second. But it probably still means anything up to five minutes. In fact, I can't say in a second in a second, which means that the phrase is in itself untrue. I might as well say, "I cannot speak."

Listen to the radio or watch the gogglebox and you're as likely as not to hear a phrase like "In a moment we'll be talking to Lord Lucan, but first here's the weather/The Archers/The Ring Cycle."

We are so lazy, so indolent, so idle so incurably languorous that we cannot be trusted with words. Anon, as in I'll see you anon, also meant straightway or in one, now it wanders in unlimited futurity.

So what to do? We need a new and unsullied measurement of time. Where to find it? Why, in the notes to The Cloud of Unknowing of course, where else?

The Cloud of Unknowing is a medieval religious work that says, amongst other things that we should really pull our socks up. When we get to the Pearly Gates (incidentally the Pearly Gates are not up in the air, they are the gates of the New Jerusalem as mentioned in Revelations: the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl) when, as I say, we get to the Pearly Gates we will have to account to St Peter for our whole lives: not just every hour, not just every minute, but every athomus.

An athomus is the smallest unit of time there is, or so theologians reckoned, it is the indivisible moment, like an atom, which etymologically means unsplittable, a derivation that didn't help Hiroshima. The idea of the athomus was taken from St Paul, Corinthians 15v52, which is usually translated as the twinkling of an eye. But, medievals being medieval, it had of course been calculated, though I've never been able to work out how. An athomus is, officially, fifteen ninety-fourths of a second.

So there it is. Now I must be off. It's a lovely sunny day and there's a hammock, a bottle of Pimms and a copy of Ulysses waiting impatiently in the garden. I'll be there in an athomus.

This cloud may be unknowing.

P.S. If any medieval scholars out there can explain to me how the length of an athomus was calculated, I'd love to know.

Some Black-Clad Men

I was looking in a book on black clothing today, and instead of finding what I wanted I found this list in the index. (I can't be bothered to type up all the page numbers, but I'm sure you can imagine them).

black dress, men's, as worn by:
   architects
   artists
   bikers
   butlers
   Christ
   clergymen
   the condemned
   courtiers
   doctors
   Dracula
   executioners
   Fascists
        British
        German
        Greek
        Italian
   Jesuits
   lawyers
   lovers
   men of the world
   merchants
   ministers of governments
   Mods
   monarchs
   New Romantics
   parliamentarians
   the poor
   princes
   Punks
   Rockers
   soldiers
   teachers

The abecedarian nature of the index has, of course, provided alliteration, but by chance it has produced perfect juxtapositions and connections: Christ, Clergymen, the Condemned. Elsewhere in the index I noticed marriage, melancholy, the middle class. It reminded me of this bit from Waiting for Godot.
I may stop reading books and confine myself to indices.

The book, by the way, is Men in Black by John Harvey. I recommend it.