No Tigers in the Tigris

I spent yesterday evening pottering about a beautiful exhibition on the tiger in Asian art, and wondering to myself whether the River Tigris in Iraq got its name because it was filled with aquatic tigers. I was miserable when I discovered that there is no connection whatsoever.

However, the Tigris (perhaps arrow) and the Euphrates (perhaps good ford) do mark the borders of Mesopotamia, which literally means between the rivers; just as a hippo-potamus is literally a horse-in-a-river; just as the name Philip or Philippos or Philos-Hippos literally means lover of horses; just as Phil-adelphia means brotherly love; just as the Adelphi in London was constructed by four brothers: John, Robert, James and William Adam.

None of which has anything to do with Delphi, which was named after dolphins.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears
Then imitate the action of a tiger.

The Inky Fool had let his garden get out of control.

Dysania

Dysania is, apparently, the state of finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning. I assume that this means that you are drowsy and dreamy, rather than that you still sleep in a cot. The OED doesn't list the word, but it does appear in a medical dictionary of 1958.

This is a terrible condition, especially when combined with uhtceare, an Anglo-Saxon word that meant sorrow before dawn. It also goes rather well with hypnopompic, and myoclonic jerks. In fact, the subject seems to occupy me more than is healthy.

A nap, I think.

And why would you?

The Barbers of Barbados

Once upon a time, in 568 AD, Italy was invaded by men with very long beards. The Italians called them langobards, from the Latin Longa Barba (long beards). This was shortened to Lombards, and so successful was the invasion that part of Italy is known to this day as Lombardy.

Invasions, incursions, revolutions and risorgimenti have terrible consequences for undefended minorities and small businessmen (by which I mean men who run small businesses, not entrepreneurial dwarfs). History is written by the victors, not the barbers; yet we may be sure that such universal hairiness destroyed the incomes of the North Italian barbers, whose business it was to cut off barbas.

The Italians probably deserved to be invaded, they had for centuries been invading others and spreading their Latin lexicon to the far corners of Europe. The conquered Iberians spent a thousand years licking their salted wounds and then set off across the Atlantic to continue the cycle of abuse*.

They discovered a little island whose name, in the native language was Red Land With White Teeth; and, realising that this was a ridiculous moniker, decided to call it Beardypeople, which was much more fitting and sombre.

Nobody is quite sure why they called it Beardypeople. Some say that the people had beards. Others say that this is ridiculous and that it was the trees that had beards (the Giant Bearded Fig grows there). Others again say that it was the reefs surrounding the island that had beards of foam. Whatever the truth is, Beardyones in Spanish is Barbados.

And, of course, barbed wire is, etymologically, bearded.

The logo of a Barbadian barbershop

*A cycle of abuse is like a normal bicycle, but it has a megaphone attached through which one can shriek obscenities at pedestrians.

The Gangs of Turl Street

Yesterday's Evening Standard had an article on "The Secret World of Gang Slang". It was full of the usual nonsense about the poetry of the street and asserted the spread of such slang was because "black street culture is still seen by white middle-class kids as the epitome of cool".

However, it then gave a list of 31 slang words. The list included Butters and Tekkers, meaning ugly and technique respectively. One doesn't need to be a wild linguistic speculator to realise that butters is a shortening of butt ugly, technique to tekkers works on the same system; and this system is neither street, nor jafaican, nor linked umbilically to the rule of the knife. It comes from late nineteenth century Oxford.

The Oxford -Er was identified by a linguist called Partridge in 1937. You take a word, shorten it, and add -er to the end. The Oxford -Er is the reason that we have rugger and soccer, which I have already written about here, the word having been invented by a degenerate poet.

The Oxford -Er was then made famous by Evelyn Waugh and by P.G. Wodehouse. The knife-wielding thugs of Hackney are belated arrivals at the linguistic party. They probably got the idea from Test Match Special, listening to Blowers and Aggers and sharpening their shanks.

If you want to know which way the language is heading, I should look to the lobby journalists of the House of Commons. Their names are all informally shortened to -ers, unless -ers doesn't fit, in which case they suffix -ington. So a name like Dawson, which can't be Oxfordised (Dawsers sounds odd) would become Dawsington.

The lobby is at the top of a vertiginous toboggan-run of downward social mobility, so I fear that it is only a matter of time before the first stabbington.

The Inky Fool pops to the shops

Infundibuliform

I worry about these posts on useful words, you know. Sometimes I wonder what the merry hell is the point of telling you, dear reader, about words that nobody understands. If you don't know the word, what are the chances that your reader, your interlocutor, your colleague or your parole officer will understand it?

I fret.

But then I see others using strange words, and I feel all right. Take infundibuliform, which means funnel-shaped. Some people would call that an obscure, and therefore a useless, word. They would confine it to texts like The Encyclopedia of British Fungi or The Anatomist's Vade Mecum. The world is simply teeming with such naysayers and lexical dietitians. However, I came across it yesterday in Catch 22:

...that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls...

Good enough? Or is Britain's eleventh most loved novel beneath you? Well, I already knew the word infundibuliform because I remembered it from the nineteenth century motivational work Les Chants De Maldoror:

Oh incomprehensible pederasts, I shall not heap insults upon your great degradation; I shall not be the one to pour scorn on your infundibuliform anus.

The word (with a little e on the end) is also in the French original. There is even a poem of 1910 by Charles Follen Adams, called My Infundibuliform Hat


The scenes of my childhood, how oft I recall!
The sports of my youth, with my kite, top, and ball;
And that happy day when, with spirits elate,
I took my first step towards manhood's estate,
With a new coat and vest, bosom shirt and cravat,
And début with my infundibuliform hat.


How I stooped beneath awnings full seven feet high,
To the no small delight of my friends passing by;
And the sport that I made for the boys at the store
When I "chalked" at the height of my "tile" on the door;
One foot and two inches - I think it was that
My guess on that infundibuliform hat.


Them my maiden attempt as a maiden's gallant
When I proffered my elbow, with glances aslant;
And the walk to her dwelling that evening so fair,
Not to speak of the tete-a-tete when we got there,
The forfeit I claimed, as together we sat,
When she tried on my infundibuliform hat.


Well! Boys will be boys, and we men, after all,
Would gladly be freed from Time's pitiless thrall,
And live those days over, when, single and free -
Zounds! Wife's looking over my shoulder to see
What I have been writing... Well, we've had a spat,
And she smashed my infundibuliform hat.

I admit it's an obscure poem, but I'm pretty sure that it must have been the model for this Bob Dylan song:

Puling Hallowmas

Once upon a time, people would go begging from door to door on All Hallows Day. Now they do it on All Hallows Eve, which is, I'm told, often shortened to Halloween. That this is a despicable and annoying custom is mentioned by Shakespeare, through the character of Speed in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Speed says that he knows his master to be in love...

...by these special marks: first, you have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms like a malcontent; to relish a love song, like a robin-redbreast; to walk along, like one that had the pestilence; to sigh, like a school-boy that had lost his ABC; to weep, like a young wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch like one that fears robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas. 

The idea was that, in exchange for food or money, the beggar would say prayers for the souls of your defunct and decomposing relatives, All Souls' Day being the appropriate festival. I particularly like the word puling, which means talking in a thin or weak voice.

The Inky Fool welcoming trick-or-treaters

The Chaucer Stone

If you want to know what Jesus looked like you need only inspect a drainpipe in Coventry where his face miraculously appeared. I've never been utterly certain how, upon inspection of a piece of toast or a puffy cloud, people manage to identify a historical figure. The omissions of ancient portraiture mean that any burnt piece of toast could be a holy likeness for a Christian, or a blasphemous one for a Muslim.

Those, like me, who worship at the shrine of verbiage and prostrate themselves before the blessed poets will be more interested in the Chaucer Stone, which is kept in the British museum and depicts, geologically, the face of the blessed Geoffrey.

And there's a real portrait to which we can compare it. Chaucer hovers over English literature with agonising influence. Even Chaucer found it hard to live up to Chaucer. In the Man of Law's Prologue he says:

I can right now no thrifty tale seyn [say]

That Chaucer, though he can but lewedly

On metres and on rhyming craftily,

Hath said hem in swich [such] English as he can

Of olde tyme, as knoweth many a man;

And if he have noght said hem, leve [dear] brother,

In o book, he hath said hem in another.

For he hath told of loveris up and doun
Mo than Ovid made of mencioun
In his Epistles, that been full old.
What shold I tellen hem, syn [since] they been tolde?