incongruous (adj.) from Latin incongruus, inconsistent, not agreeing, misfit, unsuitable.
Call me sad if you like but I’ve always liked puns, Christmas cracker riddles and dad jokes, however groanworthy they indubitably are. For instance, ‘What do you get when you cross a policeman with a skunk?’ – ‘Law and odour.’
Okay, I’ll accept the inevitable sigh that must’ve followed. But what about the unintended puns or confusing messages that come from public notices, the ones that result from carelessness, a lack of proofreading, or simple ignorance of grammar?
I’ll talk about how such unintentional wordplay may work, but how about we first look at some examples.
Normally in this ‘Wandering among Words’ feature I explore a group of words or phrases related through meaning, sense and/or etymology. This time, however, I’m going to resort to a gimmick, by examining words and phrases which first appeared in print seventy-five years ago – in 1948. (Not without coincidence this was the year I was born.)
Incidentally, the word gimmick has an American origin, appearing in the first decade of the 20th century. Meaning a trick or device to attract attention, it could be derived from gimcrack (a trifle or knick-knack) – though apparently there’s a faint possibility it’s an anagram of magic.
And as it so happens the first appearance in print of a derived word, gimmickry, does indeed date from 1948 – according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary time-traveler webpage, whence I’ve selected the terms that have most tickled my fancy … and maybe yours too!
2nd-century CE funeral portrait of a Roman Egyptian officer wearing a gold wreath (detail). Faiyum, Egypt.
Wandering among Words 10: Pupil
What’s the link between a celebrity and a chrysalis, between a student and a pet, and between a marionette and a metaphorical apple? And, indeed, what are the links between them all?
Let’s take a closer look at this; and for looking we need an eye, and something to look at. So I shall start with the notion of the icon, and then range widely between observers and the observed. And where better to start than with one of the funerary portraits from Faiyum in Egypt, a painting done from life to be placed with the mummified body after death?
Here then is an exemplar of the Greek word eikon, meaning a likeness, image, or portrait; and like many portrait icons from later Christian traditions the subject gazes frankly out at the viewer with dark, dilated pupils. The look is almost mesmerising, reminding one of the proverb that the eyes are the window to one’s soul. Or, as Charlotte Bronte wrote in Jane Eyre, “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter – often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter – in the eye.”
We try to judge character from such icons, don’t we; but even though these days ‘icon’ usually has one of two popular meanings — a digital symbol used on social media, or an object or indeed celebrity judged to have ‘iconic status’ — both of course are visually presented, requiring the eye of the observer to appreciate them.
Obscured view looking northeast to the Black Mountains in Wales, beyond which lies England.
Wandering among Words8: March
No, this is not a post about the month marking the start of spring in the northern hemisphere. Nor is it about walking determinedly from A to B. So what am I referring to?
I’m talking about a liminal space. ‘March’ in this sense is related to the Latin margo, “edge”, giving us the words “margin”, “marginal”, and so on: it can be a buffer, a No Man’s Land or Demilitarised Zone between two states; rulers of such spaces were typically termed margrave, marchese, marqués, marquis or marquess in medieval Europe.
Marches fascinate me. It helps that I live in the Welsh Marches, the lands that straddle the centuries-old fluctuating border between Wales and its bigger neighbour, England. Just like Scotland with its Borders and Ireland with The Pale the Welsh Marches have a long history of disputed control, first between the Britons and the incomers of Anglo-Saxon Mercia (“the land of the border people”) and later with powerful Norman lords asserting themselves against both the king of England and independent Welsh princes.
Here was built the mighty earthwork of Offa’s Dyke to demarcate Mercian territory from Wales; here briefly flourished the heroes who fought against English rule, historic figures like Owain Llawgoch and Owain Glyndŵr, here nestle sites traditionally associated with the legendary King Arthur.
What links a popular American TV series set in the 1930s, the 2016 UK referendum, and the End of the World?
There will be a bit of wandering in this post while I follow words migrating around Europe (and further afield), all in an attempt to demonstrate those links.
But first, I shall start at the end. Land’s End in fact.
The Credo as plainchant in neum notation; the C on the second line down represents the position of note C, and the lower case ‘b’s or flats indicate that the Credo is in what we’d call the key of F.
Wandering among Words 3: Time
Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment, Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie. — Words by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1784), music by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini
In the dim and distant past I sang plainchant. When Latin was the lingua franca for the Catholic Church my school would congregate on high days and holidays to massacre Gregorian chant. Then along came the Vatican Council in the 1960s, vernacular tongues were after nearly two millennia now allowed in Catholic rituals — and plainchant went out the stained glass window. Protestant hymns became more acceptable in services, and in time songs which some call happy-clappy (‘happy-crappy’ according to cynics) came creeping in.
I must admit as a schoolboy I was never much an admirer of plainchant: throughout practices and services I usually had to stifle yawns. Though musically literate I found the old notational conventions bizarre by modern standards, particularly over how long notes needed to be held for – however did any one know how long to hold a note? One of the few conventions seemed to be that a note with a dot after it had to be held a little bit longer.
I knew where I was with modern notation. Semibreves, minims, crotchets — they all made sense to me, having had them drummed into my head from the age of five. It wasn’t till I began to teach music as an adult that I realised that these words made as much sense as calling them Fred or Mary or Voldemort. (Maybe not the latter.) So here’s what I pieced together after some research and the application of guesswork masquerading as logic.
You will often find them if you glance above you in a medieval church, high up on nave or chancel walls. Corbels are those stone brackets that project from the wall; they were designed to support a cornice, or more often the springing of an arch that rises like a slender tree trunk, curving and sprouting liernes to join other stone ribs so as to form a tracery of slender branches, supporting in their turn the distant vault.
They’re the counterpart of the capitals on freestanding pillars, those stone approximations of mighty trees; the capitals are sometimes plain (like Doric capitals) or abstract (like the ‘eyes’ on Ionic capitals) or even representational (as with the foliage on Corinthian capitals). Romanesque masons had fun carving shapes out of them: amongst them we might observe a grotesque face or an acrobatic exhibitionist, a shiela-na-gig or an angel, maybe even a foliate head or Green Man.
The name however comes via French (corbeau means crow) from the Latin corvellus, a little raven. Supposedly the corbel’s shape resembles a crow, raven or even a beak, but I don’t see it myself; and in a quick scan of my books on Romanesque sculpture and online I’ve come across precious few beaked carvings (Kilpeck church in Herefordshire has one such, a splendid beaked monster).
Be that as it may, the Latin corvus has supplied the collective term for the crow family: corvid. In Britain this family is represented by the raven, the carrion crow, the rook, the chough and the jackdaw — all predominantly black — while the magpie and the jay each have a more motley plumage. All have fascinating stories to tell.
* A post from May 2021 which, weirdly, still mirrors what continues to this day.
Rarely has a review of mine generated so much commentary or so many viewings; and even more rarely has so much bile been directed to it and, by extension, to me. That review I entitled ‘Unreadable nonsense‘, and it was a critique of a pseudohistorical publication pretending to have identified not just one but two candidates for King Arthur.
It provoked a range of responses, from readers agreeing with my assessments through to commentators prepared to politely disagree, and on to fanatical supporters of the book’s authors, many of whom share a common inability to answer criticism with any degree of logic. It is the comments from this third cohort I want to discuss here because they seem to me to exemplify the irrational side of some individuals, the type who believe that being contrary indicates a valid antiestablishment position, regardless of how nonsensical the taking that position is.
Note, roughly half of the sixty-plus comments on that post are my answers, and the antagonistic comments number just a handful.
In terms of this Calmgrove blog this last post for 2024 doesn’t completely echo the famous quote from Catullus – Ave atque vale – though in truth it does say ‘Hail and farewell’ to yet another tumultuous year of this 21st century.
So, to end on a positive note I intend instead to talk about my bookish year by way of bald statistics and highlights, much as many of you have already been doing.
And with regard to resolutions I won’t be announcing any (except for the perennial one, ‘Read more books‘) but I will remind you of what you can expect from me in 2025.
Back in 2016, while skimming through Zoe Brooks’ now defunct online feed of articles about the genre of magic realism (or magical realism) – in which Zoe had kindly referenced my post on Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop – I came across an interesting if perhaps contentious article.
Colleen Gillard dared to tell us ‘Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories’ (in The Atlantic for 6th January 2016) by claiming that British history has encouraged fantastical myths and legends while American tales, coming from a Protestant tradition which saw itself as escaping from insular superstition, tended to focus on moral realism.
The article lines up an impressive array of examples from both sides of the divide. On the one hand you have The Wind in the Willows,Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; and on the other you have classics like The Call of the Wild, Charlotte’s Web, Little Women, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Pollyanna, The Little Engine That Could, even The Wizard of Oz and The Cat in the Hat.
From my point of view I can see exceptions, especially in British children’s fiction.
I enjoy reading reviews, especially book reviews of course, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be something I’ve already read or even intend to read. And most of you will know I also enjoy writing reviews, and therefore have always tried to keep a few pointers in mind as advice for myself.
A query in Quora, the question-and-answer platform, got me trying to fill out the details of those pointers, for my own sake as well as for other interested folk. The question was, What are the things to keep in mind when reviewing?
Here’s my edited answer for what it’s worth, mostly as I first posted here on 14th February 2016 but now with a few additional thoughts.
An essay first published 45 years ago in Pendragon, the journal of the Pendragon Society, Vol 12 No 2, December 1978, and here revised, updated and expanded for this New Year’s Day. All line drawings by Chris Lovegrove.
In 1978 I was searching in my local library for books specifically on the symbolism of the head in order to follow up some thoughts on the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The search was unsuccessful so I settled instead for a work ostensibly in a different subject area – Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence.¹
However, even the title itself was significant as I found on later reading the book, for one of the chapters was entitled Janus.
I’ve already looked at Dido Twite and other characters (here and here) who feature in Joan Aiken’s alternative history fantasy The Witch of Clatteringshaws(2004). In this decidedly curious tale with unexpected twists, the posthumously published final fiction composed by Joan Aiken, there is however much more the assiduous reader can point to as worthy of attention.
So, the last of the Wolves Chronicles is set in a version of Scotland, here mostly called Caledonia but also occasionally Scotland or the North Country. The action happens in the first half of the 19th century but, rather alarmingly, increasingly Time Wobbles In This Era – as per my previously expounded TWITE theory (‘Twisted timelines‘).
To that we can add the corollary Terrain Warps In This Earth. In this post I begin looking at the geography and the places mentioned, with some surprises in store who feel they know Scotland pretty well — though I confess I can’t include myself in that privileged number! Apologies if this investigation is a bit long and involved but even though it’s one of the briefest of the Wolves Chronicles TWoC is also one of the densest, requiring a bit of untangling; for this reason I shall split my discussion into two posts.
You must doubtless, surely, have noticed that today marks Easter in many countries, a day of hope for the future, a date to celebrate the delights of spring in the northern hemisphere, and 24 hours for many to indulge in the sugar rush that comes with gorging on chocolate eggs.
But 9th April is also a date that marks the annual National Unicorn Day – or perhaps it should be called International Unicorn Day because, regardless of where it was first conceived back in 2015, it has now spread around the globe.
The unicorn’s origins are many and various, with many a culture across the world and over the centuries claiming the creature as its own. But what they all agree on is that it’s distinguished by having a single, unique horn on its head (preferably on the forehead), giving rise to the name ‘unicorn’ or ‘monoceros’. Not all beasts with a single horn are the same, however.
I have a confession to make. I’m a scribbler, and always have been. Not on any old surface though, oh no – just on paper. And not just on any old scrap of paper but in notebooks.
I’m not at all fussy. Not for me beautifully presented Moleskine journals which I’d be reluctant to touch, let alone mark with anything but a fountain pen or a goose quill trimmed with a penknife and dipped in oak gall ink.
No, cheap notebooks with rough surfaced pages, ruled and margined, are my stock in trade. French cahiers, packs of exercise books purchased from high street stationers or corner shops, old school jotters surplus to requirements – I’ve treasured them all. And I’ve happily scribbled in all of them.
Anita Loughrey's blog. This is my journal about my experiences and thoughts on writing. As well as news about me and my books, it includes writing tips, book reviews, author interviews and blog tours.
For more information about me and my books see my website: www.anitaloughrey.com. Follow me on Twitter @amloughrey, Facebook @anitaloughrey.author and on Instagram @anitaloughrey
Because life is better served with a good book and a cup of tea. Book reviews and general bookish writings. I love many genres, so all manner of books may appear on my blog.
Calmgrove 