Independence

I've just discovered that Independence Day is not simply a Will Smith film. It is, in fact, the day on which nobody must be hanged.

The Latin pendere meant hang, and its past participle was pensum. In meant not, de meant from, sus meant down... anyway:

If you are independent you are not dependent because the only things that are dependent are pendulums and pendants which hang around your neck. Pendants are therefore pending, or indeed impending. They are, at least, suspended, and are therefore left hanging in suspense.

Weighing scales hang in the balance. Scales can weigh out gold for paying pensions, stipends and compensations in pesos (but not pence).

All such dispensations must, of course, be weighed up mentally. One must be pensive before being expensive. You must give equal weight to all arguments in order to have either equipoise or poise. If you don't your scales will hang too much to one side and you will end up with a preponderance and propensity towards your own penchants. Whether these penchants make you perpendicular, I am too polite to ask.

I hope that this post on the pendulous hung together. If it did, it was a compendium.

Right. If you frequently weigh things up you think (pensare) about them. You give people flowers to make them think about you. Florologically speaking, the traditional flower to make you pensive for a loved one is the flower in the picture which was therefore called a pensée, or, in Modern English, a pansy. (The gay sense didn't come in until a hundred years ago). By the way, I couldn't find any way to work pansies into the main post, so I had to append them in an appendix.

Oozing Collectables

I have before me the particulars of a flat (or, if you must, apartment) which, apparently, "oozes charm."

Is that possible. Could charm - lovely, fresh-faced, care-free charm - ooze?

Charm comes from carmen which is Latin for song. Ooze comes from wase which was Anglo Saxon for mud.

There's something quite blood-curdling about these forced marriages between unsuitable words. I cannot see the words "Intimate Wipes" without shuddering. A few weeks ago I was sidling around the London Print Fair with Mrs Malaprop, lusting cashlessly for this picture or that. Mrs Malaprop observed with that if I ever did make any money I would "only go and squander it on collectables."

I detest the word collectables. It is the most pointless, hideous piece of jargon in the English language. You can collect anything: stamps, jam jars, baboons or oak trees. Every concrete noun could be collected, and even some abstract ones (cool and calm). So to lock that predatory horror of a word into a dark sentence with the delightful squander seemed the apogee of linguistic cruelty.

Squander is a splendid word (of obscure etymology). It has just enough morality to have meaning, but not enough to remove its sense of fun. George Best once said:

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.

The River Ouse: not as muddy as you thought

P.S. First I should point out that Mrs Malaprop was aware of her linguistic antitheses. I would never wish to slight her language. Second, I think somebody else pointed out the intimate wipes before me, possibly Stephen Fry, but I'm not sure.

Bulwer-Lytton or: The Pen is Mightier than The Great Unwashed

The winners of the Bulwer-Lytton prize for the worst opening of a novel have been announced.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a nineteenth century novelist, poet, playwright, politician, philanderer, debauchee and wife-incarcerator who put four phrases into the English language. Here are the first three:

The pen is mightier than the sword
   - From the play Richelieu, since disproved by experiment.

The Great Unwashed
   - From Paul Clifford, of which more anon.

The Coming Race

   -And if that is an unfamiliar phrase then you don't know nearly enough about Nazi mysticism or the lyrics to David Bowie's Oh You Pretty Things. It comes from a novel Bulwer-Lytton wrote about super-people who live underground, obviously.

However, poor Bulwer-Lytton will be forever remembered not for those sublimities, but for the ridiculous opening lines of Paul Clifford, which was published in 1830:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Apparently those first few words were much quoted in the Peanuts cartoon strip (which I fear I have never read). Anyway, the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" have become a byword for bad opening lines.
Rightly so. That whole paragraph tells you nothing at all about the story that is to follow. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Rien.

Is this going to be a novel about a serial killer or about an amusing talking cat called Gerald? I don't know and that paragraph gives me not a hint of a whiff of a clue. It is a collection of clichéd images full of rain and darkness and signifying bugger all.

As with a proper cliché it could be cut out and prefixed to almost any novel set in London (and, with the alteration of a word, any city). That is what's wrong with it.

Which leads me inevitably on to the Bulwer-Lytton prize. Contestants have to write the first few lines of an imaginary terrible novel. This year's winner is a lady called Molly Ringle and her paragraph goes:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

But... but... that's not terrible. That's not terrible at all. So far as I'm concerned that's brilliant. I would read on. If I picked up a book in the bookshop and that was the first paragraph I would be leaping for the till, cash in hand and whooping joyously. It's surprising, it's funny, it is utterly different. It is everything that Bulwer Lytton's paragraph is not. There is the suggestion of Ricardo's desperation, of the unhealthiness of the relationship and yet of its comical contemptibility.

Molly Ringle's lines have none of the problems that scar Bulwer-Lytton's immortal drivel. They are original. They are amusing. They could not have been put at the start of any other book. I have a damned fine idea of the kind of (very odd) novel that I'm about to read. The story has already got itself going and I've been introduced to the main characters, their relationship and the animal to which they can best be compared. I care about Ricardo already.

But Felicity's horrid.

For all the winners and honourable mentions follow this link.

P.S. When he was old Kingsley Amis became so depressed with the tedium of contemporary literature that he vowed never to read another novel unless it began with the words "A shot rang out."

P.P.S. This whole post could, perhaps, have been better expressed in the words of a wildly successful screenwriter friend of mine who will tell you, at gun-point if necessary, that you should start a story as late as possible and finish as early as possible.

Such mysteries

How To Name A Secret Weapon

So you're designing a terribly secret weapon and you have to think of a name for it. If you give it a name that actually describes the weapon that would be something of a mistake. A dastardly foreign spy would hardly need to investigate a weapon called "Laser for shooting down carrier pigeons".

Yet you have to call it something, otherwise the workers in the factory will become curious. So you give it a misleading name: let's say "Water Carriers for Russia". You take the plan to Winston Churchill, who happens to be Lord of the Admiralty at the time (1915)* and you explain how very clever you've been with the name. Winston laughs in your face and points out that this would get shortened to "WCs for Russia" and suggest a Muscovite latrine.

'Um,' you say, scratching your head and knitting your furrowed brow. 'What about.... What about Water Tanks for Russia?'

The name is agreed on, but, being cumbersome, is soon shortened to tank.

The Inky Fool can and will defend himself

*You, by the way, are Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Swinton

On Tenterhooks in -Shire

This is what a tenterhook looks like. Don't pretend you knew.

You take some cloth. You wash it. You fasten it to a wooden frame called a tenter using tenter-hooks and that stops it shrinking as it dries.

Riveting, isn't it? I presume, gentle reader, that you are nailed to your seat. Otherwise you would leave.

My eyes were once caught, peeled and glued to the stage. I have required glasses ever since.

Incidentally, the first recorded use of the phrase to catch somebody's eye is in Pride and Prejudice at the moment when Mr Darcy first sees Elizabeth:

"Oh! She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."

"Which do you mean?" and turning round he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said: "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me."

Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings toward him.

Even more incidentally, Pride and Prejudice was originally called First Impressions, and it was under that title that it was rejected for publication (publishers were as brilliant then as they are now).

Sense and Sensibility did get published and was such a success that Miss Austen decided she'd better stick to the alliterative-abstract-noun formula. So she changed First Impressions to Pride and Prejudice and the book has since sold (roughly) twenty million copies.

In America the novel was first published as Elizabeth Bennet with P&P demoted to the position of subtitle.

Even more and more incidentally (and I promise I'll stop in after this) Pride and Prejudice is the origin of the phrase "my humble abode", which is how Mr Collins always describes his house.

The Inky Fool's humble abode

Filler Words: Part The First

I was once reading what I thought was an utterly awful novel. It was only when I got to page 14 and found the word "drugstore" that I realised that I wasn't reading stilted, rhythmless, English: I was reading very good American.

This, dear reader, is a problem. When you speak you have the advantage both of body and of accent. When you write you do not. Your words, which in your head were a ferocious rant or a bewitching drawl, on the page are lame, dull and denuded of voice.

This problem is also very easily solved. What you need are filler words. Every language has them.

I saw a good film last night.

I saw a jolly good film last night.

The first (although it might be informative and factual) is a dead sentence. The second tells you how to read it. It is as though the sentence came with an instruction booklet: the voice is British and posh. Moreover, having put that one word in the first sentence the reader will have got the idea and you may now continue ad infinitum and nauseam with your film review, safe and secure in the knowledge that your reader, whoever he, she or it happens to be, will be reading it in the voice that you intend.

Voice in literature is an infinitely complex and subtle business. Filler words cannot do the whole job, but they will do half of it and will do that work for No Effort Whatsoever on your part. If that American novel had simply used the word goddamned in the first sentence I would not have been tempted to throw it on the fire.

So, for your delight, instruction and edification here are some filler words, insertable almost anywhere, along with what I consider to be their implications:

[All English, unless otherwise stated. Most would go at the beginning of a sentence, especially those followed by a comma]

Jolly = Posh

Jolly well = Posher

I mean = Intense student

I believe = Slightly overintellectual and careful

Honestly, = Middle-aged female

Awfully = Posh

Achingly = Aesthete

Bleedin' = London

Believe me = Gossip

The thing is = Chronic debater

That's as maybe, but = Straight-talking common man

I think = Dull as ditchwater

I suspect = Clever

I imagine = Whimsical

I suppose = Amiable

I asseverate = Call the asylum

Let me tell you = No. I won't.

Indeed, = Academic

Indubitably, = Wooeeah

Utterly = Solidly built, middle-class male with obedient children

Hell, = American

Awesome = American

You know, = Probably American, but not the kind I like

Oh and = Female (for reasons I would find hard to explain)
Simply = Ditto. Aren't they simply lovely?

Therefore, necessarily, of course, obviously, you have to admit, so, it follows, logically = Male (because we love to delude ourselves by dressing in the clothes of logic)

Jesus mate, = Not an order to Our Lord that he should reproduce, but an Australianism

I would like to point out that = Prick

Frightfully = Posh

You know what? = ********in*

Anyway, = refreshing insofar as it does down everything you've just been saying. Infuriating for the same reason.

The interesting thing is = Then why didn't you cut the last bloody paragraph?

Intense(ly) = Passionate and (almost) intellectual

Rather = Chappish

Pretty = Middle-Class

Kind of = Hippy

, know what I mean? = Not necessarily

Now, dear reader, you may shudder at this requirement. You may feel that your voice is so godfuckdamned unique that no such filler word could ever do it justice. But remember that without them your voice may not be unique, it may simply be non-existent. Pick one. Go on.

Conversationally, I think. When writing Inky Fool I usually imagine. That's because someone I'm having a conversation with can tell by my demeanour that I'm a whimsical sort of fellow. A blog reader cannot, so I have to change my words. A voice can be infinitely modulated after you have set it up, but why not give your reader a clue as to what it is to be modulated from? Put a filler word in the first sentence. It is a courtesy. Then set to work on the fine tuning.

It's a jolly goddamned peach of a, like, idea.

Bonzer.

Of course these are just my own associations. Queries and contradictions in the comments, please. I think there will be further posts on exclamations and endearments, intensifiers and disapprobators. Suggestions welcome.

(This is also a far better way to denote accent than by just spelilng evrey wrogn.)

Hell, yeah.

P.S. Thanks to Moptop, who inspired this post, even if it horridly fails to answer her question.

Zwodder

Zwodder is a dialect word from Somerset and means a drowsy, foolish frame of mind. It's a fine word because I imagine that, with a smidgen of context, people would know exactly what you meant. It's hard to say zw- without sounding sleepy. There isn't really a zw- sound in English, but try saying Swinburne's swirling swans when you're drunk or drowsy and the Sw will be thickened to Zw.

The odder suggests (at least to me) doddery, plodder and Hodder & Stoughton.

"Sorry. I completely forgot to bring the antidote. I've been in a zwodder all day."

"It was Sunday morning and I was lying in bed zwoddering."

The Inky Fool in a moment of passionate intensity

P.S. For those searching for usages, it's listed in the OED as a variant of swother.