Pectinated

Groping after self-improvement, I happened to read this:

To set cross leg'd, or with our fingers pectinated or shut together is accounted bad, and friends will perswade us from it. 

It's at times like this that you know who your friends are. I have none. For had I a true friend, they would have told me of my errors, and comforted me with the word pectination. It derives from the Latin for comb, for reasons that may be guessed. Indeed, Thomas Browne exported the term straight from the words of Pliny.

It's amazing to think that I have been pectinating all my life without ever knowing it: amazing and a trifle humbling. It's rather like the day that I discovered that I had a philtrum. I had always known that there was a little groove leading from my nose to my mouth, but had I been asked what it was called I would have panicked and answered "Snot-wadi?"

(A wadi, dear reader, is an Arabic term for a desert riverbed that is only filled when there's a storm).

Learning that that little groove above my lip was called a philtrum was therefore terribly reassuring. It's rather like finally discovering the name of the chap behind the counter in the grocery store (so long as he's not called Snot-Wadi).

Browne continues his discourse on pectination thuslyly (veneficious means poisonous):

The same conceit religiously possessed the Ancients, as is observable from Pliny. Poplites alternis genibus imponere nefas olim; and also from Athenæus, that it was an old veneficious practice, and Juno is made in this posture to hinder the delivery of Alcmæna. And therefore, as Pierius observeth, in the Medal of Julia Pia, the right hand of Venus was made extended with the inscription of Venus, Genetrix; for the complication or pectination of the fingers was an Hieroglyphick of impediment, as in that place he declareth.

Not like that.

By And Large

There are two ways that a sailing ship can sail. It can sail large, with the wind behind it and the sails bulging, bellying, billowing and ballooning. As Shakespeare put it:

...we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big bellied with the wanton wind.

Sailing large is, of course, the best way to sail. You shoot along fast and free, like an escaped man who is at large. Sailors would love to be large all the time, but they cannot. The exigencies of geography and meteorology occasionally force them to sail into the wind.

Well, not straight into the wind. You can't do that. No amount of nautical bluff and saltiness can defeat firm physics. But you can, with skillful sails, sail very close to the wind. Within about 45 degrees of it. Sailors call this sailing by the wind. (If they sail straight into the wind then the ship comes to a sudden and shuddering stop. Sailors call this being taken aback.)

So all the sailing ships upon the face and belly of the ocean are sailing either by or large. So the long and the short of it is that whichever way you look at it, considered from all points of view, by and large means considered from all points of view or whichever way you look at it.

Well, it used to. It is in the nature of words for certainty that they lose their assurance with overuse. Man is a certain creature in an dubious world. So though by and large once meant under all circumstances it now means mostly. Just as probably once meant provably and soon meant now.

The Inky Fool beats the tube strike

Now, if you have the time, I suggest you click on read more for the best passage about sailing ever written.

Paracelsus, Gnomes, Sylphs and the Rape of the Lock

Paracelsus was an alchemist, chemist, medic, and all-round egg-head of the sixteenth century. Paracelsus was not his real name of course: that would be ridiculous. His real name was Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim. Paracelsus was a moniker he acquired for being the equal of the Roman writer Celsus.

Why shed foolish ink for a chemist? Because, dear reader, Paracelsus invented words. Sometimes he invented words for things that existed: he named zinc zinc because it forms into jagged crystals and zinke is Old High German for sharp. Sometimes, though, he invented names for things that he had merely imagined. And, amazingly, they caught on.

Gnomes, for example, are the children of Herr Von Hohenheim's imagination. There were no gnomes until Paracelsus dreamed them. He wrote a (serious) book describing them as being about a foot tall. He contended that just as fish move through water, and we through air, so gnomes can move through solid earth.

It seems likely, therefore, that gnome would be a shortening of genomos (earth dweller) and the poor creatures have no etymological truck with gnomic utterances, which are wise.

Paracelsus also invented sylphs. As gnomes are earth dwellers, so sylphs are spirits that of the air, and, according to him, are mortal but soulless, like Frenchmen. Nobody's sure where he got the name. It might be something to do with sylvan nymphs, but it might not, and Paracelsus is far too dead to answer questions.

Both gnomes and sylphs arrived in our language through the absurd humour of the most quoted poet in history: Alexander Pope. The Rape of the Lock (aside from having a title that makes keys uncomfortable) is a mock epic about a pretty girl having a lock of her hair cut off. Like any good epic it needed a supernatural element, so Pope took up the absurd Paracelsian spirits and made them central to his story.

Pope explains that sylphs are the spirits of women so vacuous and vain that they could not properly go to Heaven. Gnomes, on the other hand, are the spirits of prudish women, descended into the earth. The two camps fight futilely and invisibly around the heroine as she suffers her sly tonsure.

Pope's work was so popular that the words gained currency in English. Sylphs had, occasionally, been mentioned before by Paracelsian fans, but the English language had never known a gnome before Pope wrote his poem.

So, if it weren't for the combined efforts of Pope and Paracelsus, journalists would have no cliché to describe slim girls, and garden gnomes would not exist.

Incidentally, garden gnomes commit suicide.

The Jobler Who Jobbled

A jobler is somebody who does small jobs. This means, I think, that one could jobble. One could spend Saturday afternoon jobbling, and not know where the time went. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a million and one things to avoid doing.

Exorable and Inexorable

Yesterday a distressed damsel asked me why so many things were inexorable, and so few, so terribly few, were exorable.

If you take inexorable and delicately unzip its compound clothing, you will find that there's nothing underneath except the little Latin word oro, which meant speak (as in orator).

When oro wore an ex on its head and became exoro, it meant plead or persuade.

When exoro put on its able trousers and became exorable, it meant pleadable, beggable, biddable or persuadable.

Exorable was an English word once, you know; but as with gormless, feckless, ruthless and reckless, the original was now gone to its long home bequeathing to us only a fossilized negative.

For inexorable fate decreed that exorable should die and inexorable, its ugly, negative brother should survive. Exorable pleaded for survival, but the gods of philology are inexorable, and said no.

I may start a solitary campaign to bring back exorable, like those Siberian scientists who are always attempting to make mammoths out of amber. If a fellow knows what inexorable is, he ought to be able to work out exorable, or at least he should after a couple of minutes' head-scratching and brow-furrowing. Anyway, I'm fond of futility, and it's fond of me.

The Inky Fool purchasing a new word

Snow

Eskimos have no more words for snow than we do. The notion that they do is a myth, a mirage, and a cold white lie. They certainly don't have fifty of the damned things.

We have a few words of our own: snow, blizzard, sleet, slush, powder and neve (a field of even snow). And if we feel this isn't enough, we simply invent compounds: snowstorm, snow-flake, snow-flurry, snow drift, snowfall and snowperson.

It is exactly the same in your average igloo. The Eskimo-Aleut languages (of which there are several) have a few bases and many compounds. So the next time somebody repeats this porkie to you, cudgel him.

The urban myth of the Eskimo's verbosity did give rise to the young and useful word snowclone. A snowclone is hackneyed sentence structure. X is the new rock'n'roll. What do you get if you cross an X with a Y?*

The reason it's called a snowclone is that so many hackneyed hacks have written something along the lines of:

If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.

Snowclone was invented by a language blog called Language Log, which goes to show something, but I don't know what.

The past tense of snow used to be snew, on the same pattern as grow and grew or know and knew. So it snew in the night.

*I imagine that the answer would be that you'd get back together with her.

The Fool's Quotation

In an idle moment, in an idle hour, during an idle life, I picked up a copy of Open Skies, Closed Minds. It's by a civil servant who believes in UFOs. He says:

Like Fox Mulder, I was the rebel, the man from the corridors of power who wouldn't play by the same 'establishment' rules as everyone else.

This blog is not concerned with aliens. I have nothing against aliens. Indeed, if our stony orb is under imminent threat of invasion, I want to be in with winning side. But this blog, and this blog-post, is concerned with the fatuous, imbecilic, snot-struck inverted commas that the author has put around the word 'establishment'.

You put quotation marks, dear reader, around quotations. Is that too bloody complicated? And if you're quoting, I want to know who you're quoting. 'Who', as Hamlet asks, 'calls me villain?' But I read that whole damned preface and there wasn't a sniff of a whiff of a citation.

Here are the 'possibilities':

A) He wants to refer to the idea of the establishment, but at the same time imply that he is too clever to believe in the idea.

B) He wants to refer to the establishment, but feels that the word itself is beneath him. His vocabulary is much better than that.

If A - if the the idea is too simplistic for him - then why the hell is he referring to it? If B - if the word is beneath him - then where's the better one?

If you are clever, be clever. If you are eloquent, be eloquent. Man cannot take a crap in inverted commas. You do, or you don't. If you have a better way of saying it, then say it better. If you have a more subtle understanding, demonstrate it. Do not send a bastard word to wander in this weary world and then deny its parentage.

Using spurious inverted commas is like telling guests that you can cook wonderfully, but you've chosen to serve them swill. It would be rude if it were true, but nobody believes you anyway.

Am I perhaps being too cruel to somebody whose aim was not linguistic felicity, but extra-terrestrial revelation? Okay. Here's the introduction to the Arden edition* of Othello:

The analysis of Shakespeare's 'characters' has become unfashionable....

Are they not characters? If they're not, and I'm prepared to believe that, what are they? If you know the secret, do bloody tell.

This introduction... cannot simply ignore 'character criticism'.

Is it not character criticism? If it's not, what is it? If you don't know the right word, stop writing until you do.

I cannot help feeling [Try harder] that such contrary impressions are meant to intimate Othello's 'otherness'...

Whose word is that? Yours? Why deny your own writing?

A comparison of two other admired Othellos prompted a 'racial' observation...

I read on (wearily), and it was racial. And here is the true fatuous, pretentious, aphasic imbecility of the whole introduction. Here is why it is unpardonable in academic writing:

Bradley and his followers located 'the real Othello' in the first half of the play....

Now I'm stuck, flummoxed and immerded. You see, this is an introduction to a Shakespeare play. It's full of quotations. But I can't tell whether the writer is quoting Bradley here, or simply resorting to his 'turd-brained', 'incoherent', 'semi-literate', 'lack-word' 'tic'.

For that which we would write about, we must find a word: of the rest we must not write.



*The Arden Second Series were the best editions of Shakespeare ever published. The Arden Third Series, or at least the ones I have read, are uniform tosh. Many of the annotations in this copy of Othello end in question marks. Some end in exclamation marks. I hang upon my altar, and I hoist my axe again.

P.S. There is a whole 'blog' devoted to unnecessary quotation marks. It can be found here.

P.P.S. This made me laugh.