Undermine

Sometimes I just like to sit around and contemplate a word's original meaning. Undermining, for example, is an old military technique used in sieges. One way of getting through the castle walls was to tunnel underneath them until the collapsed. Thus all this talk about David Miliband undermining his brother gives me the image of a bunch of Blairite politicians with pick-axes and miner's helmets chipping away in the dark beneath Labour HQ.

Incidentally, the idea was not that the tunnel would collapse upon the diggers, although I'm sure this often happened. The attackers would dig a little mine under the walls, then they would put an explosive in there, light the fuse and run. That's why explosives are to this day called mines, because that's where they were left. Thus a connection between miners and minefields.

The Inky Fool was interrupted mid-attack

Quomodocunquizing

Quomodocunquizing is an adjective that means, according to the OED, "That makes money in any possible way". It is therefore a Terribly Useful Word.

It's also nearly new, having been used only once in 1652 by Thomas Urquhart, who wrote:

Those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets.

Of course, if you toss quomodocunquizing nonchalantly into a conversation about, say, sponsorship deals in association football, nobody will know what you mean. They will take guesses, and fancies are more fun than facts. Quomodocunquizing sounds something like Quasimodo and has enough K sounds to be hurled from the throat like a German endearment. So if you add on the word clusterfists you will arrive by the back alleys of obscurity at the wide avenues of comprehensibility.

The Inky Fool after a hard day's blogging

The Twist In The Tail That Wagged The Dog

Anton Chekhov once said:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

It's a fine rule: a rule of efficiency, a rule that says don't waste a detail and don't introduce a detail for no reason. However, it's a tricky rule to do well.

Chekhov, on the whole, wrote serious and inevitable works. The gun that hangs upon the wall works well in such situations. It is a portent, a threat, a sword of Damocles and other clichés. The audience see the gun and guess that it will be fired. They are filled with fearful foreboding and that is just the sort of feeling that Chekhov liked to fill his audiences with.

However, if, as a writer, you want the element of surprise, then the rule of Chekhov's gun is terribly frustrating. You have to have it there. You can't whip a gun out of nowhere in the last act. But tragic inevitability is only the alias of dull predictability. Of course the bloody gun is going to go off. No tension there.

The writer of the story with a twist is caught between two failings. He must set up the twist: he must give the audience all the information that they need: he must indeed make the twist appear retrospectively inevitable. Yet he must make sure that the audience do not see the twist coming.

A gunless first act would make the shooting of the second unsatisfying. A gunfilled first act must make it predictable.

There are, so far as I can tell, three ways around this.

First, you can introduce the gun and then stick it in a drawer. You pray to all the gods of narrative that people will forget about it until the drawer is reopened in the final scene, at which point they say 'Oh, of course!'.

This can be done, but it's unlikely. The only way, I believe, that it can be carried off is if you then add in a bunch of unnecessary detail into the remainder of the first act in order to confuse them. There is a gun. It is put into a drawer. Then out come the dancing girls, the sword swallower, the talking elephant and the perpetual motion machine. When the gun is removed from the drawer the audience remember that they had forgotten it.

However, this system breaks the Chekhov rule insofar as it requires unnecessary detail. Otherwise don't put it there. What are you now going to do with the dancing girls?

The other method, and the neatest, is the double usage. Suppose that the story is about somebody facing bankruptcy. In the first act the blunderbuss is on the wall. In the second we discover that it is a valuable antique blunderbuss and that in its barrel is hidden a treasure map (if I were writing this we would only realise that after he'd shot himself. But that's because I'm a horrid person).

The gun must fire. That much is inevitable and predictable, but guns can do so much else besides and that, dear tortuous reader, can provide the twist.

N.B. You will no doubt have noticed that I have not provided a single example in this little essay. That's because I don't want to ruin anybody else's twists. I think, I hope, I forlornly pray, that my theory stands up on its own.

The Inky Fool commits suicide

Gamut

About two thousand years ago a perfectly respectable lady called Elizabeth became pregnant and her husband lost his voice. He stayed silent as a silo until the child was born. The child was called John and when John grew up he began telling people that they were naughty and chucking them in a river. Now, if you or I tried a stunt like that we'd be brought up by the police pretty sharpish. But John got away with it and, if you can believe it, was considered rather holy for all his attempted drownings. Chaps at the time called him John the Baptist.

Seven hundred years later somebody else lost his voice, or at least had a terribly sore throat. He was an Italian chap who went by the cumbersome moniker of Paul the Deacon so he wrote a verse prayer to John the Baptist that went thuslyly:

Ut queant laxis
   resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
  famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
   labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.


[O let your sevants sing your wonders on,
With loosened voice and sinless lips, St John.]

Four hundred years later, somebody set this little poem to music. He wrote a pretty, climbing melody, in which each line started a note higher than the last, until with the words Sancte Iohannes it dropped again to the bottom.

So the first note was on the syllable Ut, the one above was on the Re in Resonare, then Mi in Mira, Fa, So, La...

The problem with Ut, though, is that it's a rather short syllable and difficult for a singer to hold. Try it. So it got changed to Do (perhaps for Dominus, but nobody's sure), and that gave do, re, mi, fa, so, la and, by extension, Si for Sancte Iohannes. Then somebody pointed out that there was already a So beginning with S and you couldn't rightly have two of them beginning with the same letter. So Si was changed it to Ti.

Do re mi fa so la ti do


Which is just a shortening of a hymn to John the Baptist. The shortening technique was invented by a fellow called Guido of Arezzo.

So poor Ut was consigned to history, or nearly. It sort of survives. You see the lowest note was also known as gamma, after the Greek letter. So the lowest note of the scale was once known as gamma or ut. Then a whole scale came to be known as gamma-ut. And that is why when you go through the whole scale, you still run through the gamut.

Which means that this explanatory video is a damned lie.



Julie Andrews singing the praise of John the Baptist

Slogan

Once upon a time a slogan was a battle-cry. When ancient Gaelic warriors raised their kilts and ran into battle they would shout the name of their tribe or their capital before rushing like wolves to the slaughter. If you imagine the modern football hooligan screaming the name of his club, you probably have some idea.

Their army-shouts or sluagh-gairms did not have the desired effect and the English language spread by spear-point and sword into all but the boggiest parts of these rainy islands. Sluagh-gairm was anglicised to slogan and taken up by politicians and plutocrats, cabinet ministers and corporations. Yet, I still like to think of the advertising executives and PR girls girding up their kilts, shrieking their slogans, and running to their brave and selfless deaths.

Which John Milton?

According to the news, a dirty poem has been discovered with John Milton's name attached. The poem runs:

Have you not in a Chimney seen
A Faggot which is moist and green
How coyly it receives the Heat
And at both ends do's weep and sweat?
So fares it with a tender Maid
When first upon her Back she's laid
But like dry wood th'experienced Dame
Cracks and rejoices in the Flame.

Though it comes from a 1709 collection of verses, not even Dr Batt, who found the poem, believes that it's by Milton. The working theory is that somebody attributed it to Milton in order to sully, smear and besmirch his reputation. That seems a trifle unlikely to me. By the standards of the late sixteenth century this isn't a particularly dirty rhyme. Certainly if your main aim was to traduce Milton by writing the muckiest rhyme you could imagine, you could have done something an awful lot saucier.

It might be worth noting that John has always been one of the commonest Christian names in England, and Milton one of the commonest surnames. Any medieval chap from a town with a mill could acquire the moniker. Wikipedia has four John Miltons, Facebook two thousand.

Faggot, of course, used to be a pejorative term for a woman, until in the early twentieth century the baton was passed to homosexuals. The poem is also quite neat in its misapplied words: in the first half the wood is, improbably, coy; and this is answered in the second half by the experienced dame's cracking (although at the time a fallen woman could be referred to as a crack).

Milton was rather keen on rumpy-pumpy, but I don't think he would have made a joke about it. The beast with two backs was to him a sacred animal. There was solemnity in his sexuality, if not grandeur in his groin.

They're also a kind of food

Lapse of Meaning

Often, as I write this blog, I lose all sense of meaning. There I am, blogging away about one particular word until I've written it so many times that it stops being a word and becomes instead just a jumble of letters. As in "The word dog was first used for dogs in the dog days and dog became the common word for dog when dogs were first introduced to dog land. Dogs are dogged and so they dog other dogs until dogb..."

Then I throw myself down upon the divan with my smelling salts and linger there, panting, until the word dog has regained significance.

There is a term for this. In fact there are several:

Inhibition
Refractory phase and mental fatigue
Lapse of meaning
Word decrement
Cortical inhibition
Adaptation
Extinction
Satiation
Reactive inhibition
Stimulus satiation
Verbal transformation

My favourite of these is lapse of meaning. I am now going to repeat the phrase until I go mad.

The Inky Fool reads the dictionary