Category Archives: Language

Samuel Johnson’s favouritest superlatives

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It’s been the longest time since I posted here about language rather than literature. There’s a selection of some of my linguistic and lexicographical efforts in the link HERE.

During my period of recuperation since knee surgery I’ve dipped back into an ebook edition (from Project Gutenberg) of Samuel Johnson’s most famous (famousest – see below) lexicographical work: Dictionary of the English Language. First published in 1755, this version is ‘abstracted from the folio edition’ and dated 1812.

What some people may be unaware of is that there’s a supplement to this (supposedly) etymological dictionary: a ‘Grammar of the English Tongue’. Here’s his definition of ‘grammar’ right at the start: ‘…the art of using words properly’ – contentious. He divides this work into four parts: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody (note the Oxford comma, and the 18C predilection for capitalising nouns – I’ll revert to modern practice from now on).

As I browsed through the section on adjectives, my attention was drawn to the notes on comparison of adjectives. As he says, and this still applies, comparatives ‘are formed by adding er, the superlative by adding est, to the positive; as, fair, fairer, fairest.’

He concedes: ‘The comparison of adjectives is very uncertain; and being much regulated by commodiousness of utterance, or agreeableness of sound, is not easily reduced to rules’. He does like his polysyllabic vocabulary – ‘agreeableness’ and ‘commodiousness’ shows his fondness for ness suffixes. The fact that this aspect of grammar is resistant to ‘rules’ (whoever imposed them is not explained) must have caused him to despair. Those Augustans did like orderliness.

Here’s his attempt to provide some order. He explains that monosyllables are ‘commonly compared’ (ie they can take a suffix), but polysyllables ‘are seldom compared’, and these adjectives are generally preceded by more or most, as in more deplorable, most deplorable.

It was the next bit that really made me sit up. As is his practice in the main dictionary section, he illustrates each main point with quotations from his favourite authors. So he begins with an example of a standard superlative from Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘She in shadiest covert hid’. Ok so far.

Next he tackles virtuous. Here’s his quotation from the same poem:

What she wills to say or do, /Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetist, best.

It’s as if Milton was anticipating Johnson’s need to find good examples of this grammatical feature. And who’d have thought he’d endorse ‘virtuousest’. Yet he seems quite happy with ‘discreetist’; am I right in thinking nowadays we’d prefer ‘most discreet’?

Also from Milton, this time Samson Agonistes, is this:

I shall be nam’d among the famousest / Of women, sung at solemn festivals.

Both of these examples sound strange to my modern ear. But Johnson’s usual method is that if one of his literary idols used it, it’s ok as standard English. Fair enough. It’s the nearest he can get, I suppose, to a ‘rule’ in our unruliest of languages.

Other examples follow:

‘inventivest heads’ (from what Johnson cites as Ascham’s Schoolmaster)

‘mortalest poisons’ (this from what he cites as just Bacon)

‘naturalest considerations’ (Wotton’s Architecture)

I’d also recommend the site Johnson’s Dictionary Online, which can be searched/browsed by printed pages, front matter, letter, quoted authors or random word. It’s well worth visiting the Preface, with its famous, deprecatory description of the lexicographer as, among other things, a ‘humble drudge’ (repeated in paraphrase in his dictionary entry for that word). In true Augustan fashion he deplores the way the Engish language has been ‘neglected’ and spread into:

wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.

So his attempts to introduce some sober, logical, incorrupt, and learned system to counteract these new-fangled ‘caprices’ are illustrated by the examples quoted above. And there’s more. When he started this (doomed?) enterprise, he found our language:

copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.

He really didn’t like the way our language had gone, as he saw it, to the dogs. It’s a prescriptive attitude that was taken up by the Victorians, and still persists today. I prefer to think that language is resistant to the imposition of such prescriptions and rules – although there’s obviously an underpinning tendency to regularity. When I was studying linguistics the tendency was to favour a descriptive approach, one which acknowledged that ours is probably the amorphousest (if I can be permitted a bit of unruliness) in the western world.

Squirrels as you’ve probably never thought of them

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I was reading a review the other day in the online version of the UK newspaper The Guardian. The book reviewed was about the grey squirrel, and raised the problem of determining what is meant by ‘invasive’ or alien species. Once introduced to the British Isles, are such plants or animals a useful addition to the ecosystem, or a threat? And the grey squirrel is perhaps one of the most common and controversial of such introductions (from the USA – like many of our language features – but that’s another story).

At the end of the piece was a word the meaning of which was obvious, but which I’d not come across before:

SCIURINE

OED online defines it like this:

adj. and noun, Of or relating to squirrels or to the squirrel family; resembling or characteristic of a squirrel; (Zoology) of or relating to the tribe Sciurini… (earliest citation, 1838).

Zoology. A sciurine rodent; a squirrel (1841).

Further down the list of citations is this figurative one I rather liked: His sciurine hoarding of books and papers. [Vita] Sackville-West, Flame in Sunlight.

In a similar vein is this: Acknowledgements… Pam Wheeler, whose uncommonly sciurine memories at the Britten-Pears Library, Bridcut, Faber Pocket Guide to Britten

All the previous ones were zoological and literal. Does this mean that for the most part the word in the modern era has shifted into use in a metaphorical sense – as in ‘squirrelling something away’ – to suggest someone hoarding or hiding something they value in a manner similar to the squirrel’s habit of burying nuts and other foodstuffs for food in the barren months of winter?

The word derives from the Latin Sciurus, squirrel (and its genus), itself derived from the Greek skiouros, from skia, shade, and oura, tail.

A little further digging online revealed that a male squirrel is known as a boar. A group of squirrels – the collective noun, I suppose –  is a scurry, or a drey – which can also refer to a mother squirrel and her young, according to one website (I didn’t record which one). But this term is to my mind better known for signifying the squirrel’s nest.

As I live in Cornwall I decided to look up the Cornish word; it’s gwiwer.

According to the excellent website Jeanne de Montbaston, by the medievalist and scholar Lucy Allen, the slang term in medieval England for what she delicately refers to as ‘male genitalia’ was ‘squirrel’ – because it was ‘delightfully cute and cuddly’ and a ‘furry little pet’…Hm.

She goes on to place all this in the context of one of her central research interests: the cultural understanding of male and female bodies and sexuality.

So there you are. Who’d have thought that the furry little rascals who regularly empty my birdfeeders have such raunchy connotations…

Snakes, T. Hardy, flâneuses and disobedience – recent reading

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Work and other commitments have kept me from posting much lately. Time to start catching up on recent reading – and some other things that have interested me lately.

First, before the books, a word that popped up in my OED word of the day email a while back:

OPHIOLATRY: the worship or reverence of snakes. From the Greek ophios – serpent, plus the usual suffix meaning, well, worship. I consulted the OED online (as always, thanks to them for allowing free access via library card number): the first citation is from Cotton Mather in 1723.

Other dictionary sites provide related words, including ophiolite – serpentine, but sadly that’s obsolete. I don’t suppose we use ‘serpentine’ too often, either – apart from the name of the lake in a London park. Also ophidian – having the nature or character of snakes. Ophidiophobia dates from 1914, and seems a much more sensible word: why would anyone want to worship snakes? Much more likely, surely, to fear them.

There are so many examples in the English language of two different words denoting the same thing, often deriving from Latin (considered the elegant variant) and Old English (less prestigious). Isn’t it great that we can refer to snakes or serpents? Both have that wonderful hissing sibilant, appropriately. Serpent was originally used for any ‘creeping thing’; OED says it’s from the Latin, and had that meaning (examples include ‘louse’). Snake comes from earthier Old English, and therefore has a longer history. OED’s first citations are from the 11C. But the two seem to have been used interchangeably. Then there’s this 15C quotation from Lydgate: Whos vertu is al venym to distroye,..Of dragoun, serpent, adder & of snake. He seems to consider these as different kinds of dangerous crawling reptiles (or ‘limbless vertebrates’ as the OED calls them) – or it’s just the typical ‘elegant variation’ that was popular with contemporary authors.

Now for the books.

Elizabeth Lowry: The Chosen. Riverrun, 296 pp. Published 2022. A competent fictional account of Thomas Hardy’s explosion of grief when his wife of over thirty years, Emma (Gifford), died in 1912. They were both in their seventies. They’d been estranged for twenty years, living mostly in different parts of the ugly house that Hardy designed himself (Max Gate, Dorchester – that was Emma’s view, anyway; I’ve seen it, and it’s not handsome), and hardly talking to each other.

Lowry evokes well the chilly atmosphere of this forbidding house, and the marriage that atrophied inside it. When TH discovers Emma’s diaries and reads what she’d been going through, married to a man totally preoccupied with his writing, he’s horrified and stricken with guilt at how cruel and cold he’d been. Remorse overwhelms him. This prepares the scene for the outpouring of the great elegiac poems he then wrote about her. In them he restored her to life, reimagined as the young girl she was when they met at St Juliot in north Cornwall.

I can’t say I was deeply moved by this novel, despite the interesting story. It was overwritten, the style too mannered. Colm Toibin does a much better job with his novels about the writers Henry James (I read The Master pre-blog) and Thomas Mann (link to my recent post on this HERE). Paula McLain’s boisterous novel about Hemingway’s life with his first wife Hadley in Paris in the 1920s is undemanding but good fun. I wrote one of my earliest posts about it (link HERE). This reminds me: that was in 2013, so my tenth blogging anniversary will be in April this year!

Lauren Elkin: Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (Vintage, 2017; 20161). The title says it all: this is a scholarly, lucidly written study and history of the literature of women who haunted the streets of those cities and wrote about their experience of them. Of course, it’s a deliberate challenge to the well-known 19C literary figure, the flâneur (usual examples include Baudelaire, Poe and Dickens) – almost always male and middle-class. The sections on Paris and London are the best: Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys figure largely here.

But this book is partly an irritatingly self-regarding autobiography. There’s too much intrusive gush about the author’s love life. This is a shame, because there’s some really interesting, well-researched stuff in here, good literary analysis and author profiles. I could have done without all the navel-gazing, though.

There’s a link HERE to some of my previous posts on the subject (Walter Benjamin, Iain Sinclair, etc.)

Naomi Alderman, Disobedience (Penguin, 2018; 20161). This was an early example of what has become something of a literary (and filmed) genre: the woman who flees an ultra-orthodox Jewish community and struggles to find herself in the outside, secular world. It raises interesting and tricky questions about female rebellion against a male-dominated culture, and what it really takes to be…disobedient.

Still got a few more titles. More on them next time.

Some words and creeks

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I’ve just finished a book of short stories by Elizabeth Jane Howard; some of them were quite nasty. I need to think about them some more before posting on them.

So another of my occasional asides into language today. I’ve been collecting words for as long as I can remember; I like to note down new ones (to me), or others that I just like. Here’s one I came across in a nature column in The Times recently: petrichor. It’s funny isn’t it how a word you were unfamiliar with seems to keep popping up once you’ve clocked it. It was used soon afterwards on a not particularly memorable Netflix programme, ‘The Wilds’. It was a sort of Lord of the Flies/’Lost’ mashup with teenage girls on an island. One, a studious type, used petrichor in a flashback scene of a family game of Scrabble.

It means the pungent smell of earth after it’s made damp by rain. From Greek petros, rock, and ichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in mythology.

One word leads to another. My online dictionary pointed me to related words: argillaceous: of, or containing, clay (Latin argilla; Greek argos, white).

The word minaudière appeared in an auctioneer’s ad in our local paper last month. It was an item that featured in a recent sale. According to Wikipedia the word was a French term for a coquettish woman or flirt, from the verb “minauder” (to flirt or simper – so not very politically correct. I rather like that word “simper” btw).  It’s a (luxury) women’s fashion accessory, a kind of decorative or jewelled evening bag with cases or compartments for cosmetics or other small items. It was first used in the 1930s and attributed to Charles Arpels of Van Cleef & Arpels. Minaudières were usually metal plated, oblong, sometimes made of gold or silver, lacquered or covered in stones or mother-of-pearl. Some were fabric – brocade, silk. Some had a lanyard or chain to place over the wrist.

A linked article describes an étui: a woman’s ornamental case, usually carried in the pocket or purse, for holding small items like folding scissors, hairpins, bodkins (another fine word), etc. The word derives from the French for prison – a place for being shut up or confined. They were usually another expensive accessory and made of ivory, precious metal, tortoiseshell, or…shagreen. But I’ll not go down that linguistic rabbit-hole.

I went for my first bike ride in months today. It was a beautiful day: crisp but clear, with mostly blue skies and plenty of sunshine. I’ll end with some pictures of another tidal creek, not far from the ones I posted last time. Even when the tide is low and there’s lots of mud on show, it’s still a lovely sight. Curlews call and add to the sense of tranquillity.

Malpas creek confluence

The same creek at its confluence with another river. Didn’t have my glasses on, so these are a bit blurred, I’m afraid

Anemones

Here’s a gratuitous picture of some anemones that have just flowered in a pot by my front door

“Text” or “texted”?

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In family conversation recently someone said, “I hate it when people say ‘I texted her yesterday. It should be text”.

As a former teacher of various linguistics courses I had to resist the temptation to go into lecturer mode – prescriptive v. descriptive attitudes, misguided notions of “correctness” in language and grammar, etc. (This is not a temptation I’m noted for resisting, but hey, this was family.)

I always say “texted”, on the grounds that the simple past tense in regular verbs (if there is such a thing) is usually (but not always!) formed by adding –ed. The nearest equivalent I can think of is “test, tested” and all those other verbs that end –est in the present tense form.

English language is so inconsistent and full of exceptions, however, that it’s not a clincher to point to parallels with which to assimilate (compare ‘live/lived’, ‘give/gave’ and ‘dive/dived’ – or should that be ‘dove’?!)

What if “next” were used as a verb (which it isn’t, but all English syntax is more flexible, especially in informal, conversational use, than pedants like to believe – put that in your clay pipe and smoke it, Jacob Rees-Mogg, in your monocle and plus-fours)? I think I’d say “I nexted her” – ok, not impossible, if one thinks of the innovative ‘verbing’ and nominalisation of the conjunction “but” in ‘but me not buts’ – as first used in an obscure text of 1709, but made popular by Scott in The Antiquary (1816) – not Shakespeare, as is often asserted; so one could imagine ‘next me no nexts’ (imperative). Just a short step from there to: ‘I nexted her’, ie I used “next” as a verb to her some time in the past. I don’t think I’d say ‘I next her’.

I would have turned to David Crystal for insight into or clarification of this problem; I’m sure his book on the language of the internet/IT would have covered it (he’s a big fan of the playful inventiveness of text message language, for example, though this is largely outdated now by the ubiquity of smartphones), but I donated my copy to my college English dept when I finished teaching there this summer – I’m now officially retired (well, made redundant, but that’s another story).

A quick online search found that this “text” v. “texted” is a common language question.

Chicago Manual of Style Online:

Texted is correct. Adding ed is the standard way to make a verb past tense, so with a new verb like text, that’s the default. With increased usage, a nonstandard past tense could eventually establish itself, but until then, use the standard verb form.

At OED online (edited) entry on ‘text’ as a verb:

Now rare.

†1.  A.  transitive. To inscribe, write, or print in a text-hand or in capital or large letters. Also figurative. Obsolete.

1600    Shakespeare Much Ado about Nothing  v. i. 179 [this is Claudio speaking]   Yea and text vnder-neath, here dwells Benedick the married man.

1607    T. Dekker Whore of Babylon sig. I4   Vowes haue I writ so deepe,..So texted them in characters capitall, I cannot race them.

1621    J. Fletcher et al.  Trag. of Thierry & Theodoret  ii. i. sig. D1   Condemne me, for A most malicions [sic] slanderer: nay, texdeit Vpon my forehead.

1624    T. Heywood Γυναικεῖον  vii. 315   That such as..past.. might read them as perfectly and distinctly, as if they had beene textedin Capitall Letters.

[My note: That Shakespearean usage is interesting; it looks to me, in context, that it’s the future form, for Claudio characteristically continues the chaffing at Benedick’s expense, started in the previous speech by Don Pedro: ‘But when shall we set the savage bull’s horns on the sensible Benedick’s head?’ i.e. ‘[when shall we] text underneath…’; so, not the past tense. Interestingly, those citations from Dekker, Fletcher and Heywood all have the –ted ending. But this is a different semantic sense from the modern ‘messaging’, so not really comparable. But it does at least establish that the –ted ending was considered acceptable at that time.]

 [OED] Draft additions March 2004 to ‘text’ as verb: transitive. Telecommunications. To send (a text message) to a person, mobile phone, etc.; to send a text message to. Also intransitive: to communicate by sending text messages…

2001    Leicester Mercury (Electronic ed.) 31 July   I texted my mother and my friends when I got my results.

Hardly a canonical citation, but worthy of note.

OED also has:

texted, adj.

Obsolete.

  1. Skilled or learned in ‘texts’ or authors. rare.(In this sense texted wel (v.r. text wel) appears in one group of Chaucer MSS., where another has textuel. The latter was probably the original reading, but the change in some MSS. perhaps implies that texted was known.)

14..    Chaucer’s Manciple’s T. (Harl.) 131   But for I am a man not texted wel [so Corp.; Lansd. texed, Petworth text; 3 MSS. textuel] I wil not telle of textes neuer a del.

14..    Chaucer’s Manciple’s T. 212   But as I sayd, I am nought tixted wel [Corp., Petworth, Lansd. text; 3 MSS. textuel, -eel, tixt-].

2. Written in text-hand or text-letters; engrossed.

1620    T. Dekker Dreame sig. A2   They beg nothing, the Texted Past-bord talkes all; and if nothing be giuen, nothing is spoken.

1695    London Gaz. No. 3125/4   Texted Indentures for Attorneys.

To sum up: most people defend their usage of one or other of these forms, “text” or “texted”, by saying: ‘it just sounds right’. Each to his (or her) own, I say. Let’s just not be prescriptive or pedantic about it.

Very like a whale: pareidolia

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Granddaughter (E, aged 10) has returned home after her week’s holiday alone with us here in Cornwall. On her last full day we sat in the garden, enjoying a beautiful sunny day. A few cotton-wool clouds drifted sleepily across the bright blue sky, and we amused ourselves deciding what we could see in their shapes.

Where I saw a donkey, she saw a bunny. Me: a sad horse; her: a squeaky mouse. Well, she is ten, and loves unicorns and fluffy things.

I got to thinking of Polonius and his devious humouring of Hamlet in a similar situation, agreeing with his prince with feigned servility that the cloud they saw was indeed backed very like a whale, if not a weasel. I remembered a while back coming across a word for this phenomenon – seeing faces and other real-world objects in inanimate, random patterns like lichen-covered walls, carpets…or clouds. I flicked through some notebooks and found it:

PAREIDOLIA.

This is the OED definition (psychology):

The perception of recognizable patterns or images, in random or vague arrangements of shapes, lines, colours, etc.

It’s from the German via Greek ‘para’ – alongside, instead of (i.e. wrong); ‘eidolon’ – image, form, shape, likeness (from which we take our word ‘idol’).

According to Wikipedia’s account of the term, our brains are wired to identify human faces in particular in all kinds of unlikely situations: two fried eggs and a sausage in a cooked breakfast, or smiley faces in emojis consisting of a colon and a bracket. We even attribute emotions to these images – hence the smiley face; it seems it’s probably something to do with our cognitive processing of human emotion in others – or possibly for distinguishing friendly from potentially hostile approaching shapes at the subconscious or pre-conscious level.

Hence we see a ‘man in the moon’ formed of craters in the full moon’s sphere, or old men’s faces in rock formations. Many astronomical groups are named as a consequence of their resemblance to terrestrial objects like horses’ heads, ploughs or great bears. I’ve seen Don Quixote’s gaunt features in the abstract shapes on the tiles in my bathroom.

Stories abound of religious imagery like faces of the Virgin Mary or Jesus in foods or vegetables; Mother Teresa’s likeness was said to be found in a cinnamon bun in Nashville in 1996. I seem to recall that such items sell for large sums on eBay.

Arcimboldo, The Librarian

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, ‘The Librarian’, c. 1566, now in Skokloster Castle, Sweden.
(Wikimedia Commons, public domain.) Here the use of books, not fruit or veg, is particularly appropriate

Arcimboldo specialised in paintings which looked like human figures but which were made up, on closer examination, of configurations of vegetables, plants, flowers and other non-human objects.

The Rorshach inkblot test works on similar principles as a means of the analyst’s determining a person’s psychological state – we tend to project on to such shapes images we’re inclined to see.

Even ghost imagery may owe something to the way shadows cast by harmless objects can resemble more sinister entities which are taken by the frightened human as some supernatural emanation (though winding sheets on corpses play a role here, too).

Pareidolia is said to be a sub-set of APOPHENIA: a tendency to see connections between unrelated things –  a condition commonly found, apparently, in conditions like schizophrenia, or to account for gamblers believing they detect patterns in random sequences. The ‘phrenia’ element there comes from the Greek for mind or cognitive faculties; the -phenia element may come from ‘phainein’ – Greek for ‘make appear’ – though it appears there’s some confusion over the etymology of ‘apophenia’. It’s sort of an antonym of ‘epiphany’ – which signifies an illuminating insight into to the innate reality of something.

I decided not to share any of this with E: she is only ten. Happy with her bunnies and unicorns, untroubled by apophenia. She’s heavily into slime at the moment.

Asides: ex-votos, curse tablets and voces mysticae

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I was given a copy of the Complete Stories of Elizabeth Taylor for Christmas, and was hoping to post about them today. I’m about 3/4 through (it’s over 600 pp) and would prefer to wait until I’ve finished, so this will be an interim post.

Defoe, Tour of BritainI’ve been reading a lot of material for a course I’m teaching about literature and sense of place. My elderly copy of Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the whole island of Great Britain (1727), in its ‘Suggestions for further reading’, cites an essay on the text by Edmund Blunden in Votive Tablets (1931) – which I’ve not managed to find a copy of yet. It’s a collection of his unsigned pieces on English authors published in the TLS, where he was assistant editor in the late 40s.

I vaguely knew what ‘votive tablets’ were, but looked up the term to be sure. Wikipedia defines thus:

A votive deposit or votive offering is one or more objects displayed or deposited, without the intention of recovery or use, in a sacred place for broadly religious purposes.

These ‘ex-votos’, as they’re also known, are made in the anticipation or hope of supernatural assistance, such as cure of an illness, or as an offering of thanks when such a wish has been fulfilled. In the Catholic church (and many Anglican ones) the practice of lighting votive candles serves a similar purpose. There are also votive paintings, statues, crowns and so on.

I remember seeing near Paphos in Cyprus a tree by a sacred site that was festooned with ribbons and handkerchiefs left as votive offerings. I used to live near Holywell in N. Wales, and the eponymous well was surrounded by votive offerings, often in the shape of body parts that afflicted the supplicant, or items symbolic of affliction, such as crutches. It was a mini Lourdes.

A related object is the defixio or curse tablet. These were common in the Graeco-Roman world. They were usually tin sheets on which an inscription was scratched wishing misfortune on someone. They could also be used in the hope of restoring stolen property or punishing a thief, as a means of facilitating litigation favourably, or as love spells to speed erotic ambitions. (It’s worth checking the related term ‘anathema’, if you’re interested.)

In pagan use they were addressed to infernal or liminal gods like Hecate, Charon or Pluto.

Voces Mysticae were often found on curse tablets. These were meaningless words from no known language, like Bazagra, Bescu, or Berebescu, seemingly in order to lend them a kind of supernatural efficacy. They came from no known language, and were thought to be the language that only demons could understand. Wikipedia again:

Scholars from antiquity, like Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200 CE), believed that human language was not appropriate for addressing the gods. Therefore, some of the inscriptions of these curse tablets are not easily translatable, because they were “invocations and secret names” which would only be understood by the spirits themselves. Another possibility is that curse tablets were produced by professionals who wished to lend their art a degree of mystique through the use of an apparently secret language that only they could understand.

This was thought to be a way to control the natural world.

The very early Ephesia Grammata were similar magic formulae or mantras, possibly originally inscribed on cult images of Artemis at Ephesus.

Their power was believed to reside in their sound rather than meaning. If uttered by people possessed by demons, it was believed they would be exorcised.

Spells, invocations, prayers: the magic power of language. Who says ‘words will never hurt’ like sticks and stones?

Some time ago I posted on apotropaic magic – not verbal, but visual.

Asides: aumbry, chrism, laver, accolade

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Bottomley Abbeys cover Frank Bottomley’s The Explorer’s Guide to the Abbeys, Monasteries and Churches of Great Britain (Avenel Books, New York, 1984) was bought by me, according to an inscription on the flyleaf, in Windsor in 1987. It’s an alphabetical glossary of terms related to eccclesiastical and monastic terminology, especially architectural and liturgical. It’s fascinating, full of arcane stuff that appeals to the ex-medievalist in me, and has delightful, rather crude, line drawings. Weirdly the front cover has the author’s name spelt wrongly, as my picture shows.

I pulled it off the shelves this morning and found at random this entry, a term I’d forgotten (definition, etc., abridged from online OED):

aumbry, n.

Mid-13C aumbry, St Matthew's church, Langford, Oxon

Mid-13C aumbry, St Matthew’s church, Langford, Oxon

Etymology (abridged): < (i) Anglo-Norman almarie … (also OF, MF armaire, MF, French armoire) niche, cabinet, cupboard, closet, bookcase, library, chest (12th cent.), and its etymon (ii) classical Latin armārium cabinet, cupboard, bookcase, in post-classical Latin also recess in a wall (12th cent. in a British source), shelf (1440 in a British glossarial source) < arma gear, tools, arms + -ārium

Perhaps sometimes associated by folk etymology with ALMONRY n., as if a place for alms…

1. A container for storing books, a bookcase; (occas.) a room where books or other documents are stored, a library, an archive. Formerly also: †a repository or compendium of knowledge, such as a chronicle or commentary (obs.). Now hist. (chiefly in the form almery) and rare.
2. More generally.
a. A place for storing things, as a cupboard, locker, safe, press, etc.; a repository; (in later use) esp. a niche or recess in a wall used for storage. Formerly also (occas.): †a storeroom or storehouse (obs.).
Earliest recorded in attrib. use.

1886 R. L. STEVENSON Kidnapped iv. 37 ‘The blue phial,’ said he—‘in the aumry—the blue phial.’..I ran to the cupboard.
1972 B. MOORE Catholics ii. 77 The Abbot crossed the cloister to a bay where there was an ambry used for storing wood.

b. Christian Church. A cupboard, locker, or recess in the wall of a church or church building, to hold books, communion vessels, vestments, etc. This is the sense in which Bottomley uses it; he gives several examples of churches where they survive. They might have also been used for storage of ‘towels for laver’ (source of my surname? French ‘laverie’):

LAVER: monastic place for washing hands before meals ‘and for performing the morning toilet’. It would also be used in the ‘maundy’ – ritual footwashing (a symbol of fraternity and humility).

Chrismatory

A chrismatory, German,1636, now in the V & A Museum, London

1555 W. WATERMAN tr. J. Boemus Fardle of Facions II. xii. 301 Upon the right hande of the highe aulter, that ther should be an almorie, either cutte into the walle, or framed vpon it: in the whiche thei would haue the Sacrament of the Lordes bodye, the holy oyle for the sicke, and the Chrismatorie, alwaie to be locked.

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Glass ambry for oil (chrism) of catechumens (candidates for baptism) and the sick

Glass ambry for oil (chrism) of catechumens (candidates for baptism) and the sick

Wikipedia points out (s.v. ‘ambry’) that it stored elements used in the Eucharistic ceremony; the pyx would also serve this purpose. In Catholic usage it is where the various holy oils are stored, including the splendidly named chrism (from the Greek for ‘anointing’ or ‘unction’). It us used in the ceremonies of Confirmation or chrismation, and the sacraments of baptism and Holy Orders; also for consecration of altars and churches. It’s made from olive oil infused with sweet perfume such as balsam.

These holy oils are stored in receptacles called chrismaria and they’re kept in…yes, an aumbry.

In the Confirmation ceremony, associated with the renewal of baptismal vows when a person has reached an age of sufficient maturity to choose to make the renewal, the bishop would accompany the final ‘pax tecum’ blessing with a touch on the cheek. The Roman Pontifical interpreted this as a ‘slap’ – a physical reminder to the recipient to be brave in the defence of the faith.

This is a concept related to the medieval chivalric accolade (from ‘col’, French for neck, Latin ‘collum’), originally a rite of passage ceremony to signify a young man’s achieving the formal status of mature knight, later coming to signify ‘embrace’ or ‘honour’. Today we’re most familiar with the gesture of ‘adoubement’ or dubbing the recipient with a tap on each shoulder with the flat blade of a sword (the English queen does this still when knighting people). There is some dispute about the earlier forms of this ritual; it seems a kiss or light blow (‘colée’) on the cheek or ear might have been originally used, and the dubbing with the sword replaced the gesture.

Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, colportage and flâneurs

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A divagation away from book reviews today, inspired by my leafing through an old notebook and seeing an item from 6 years ago: notes on a review of Beatrice Hanssen’s study (published by Bloomsbury now) of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (my copy of the text in English, trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass and London, 1999). This is the fascinating proto-postmodern montage of notes and essays started in 1927 and left unfinished at Benjamin’s mysterious death (suicide to escape Nazi arrest as he tried to cross the Pyrenees into Spain) in 1940, representing his musings on the 19C ‘passages’ or arcades of Haussmannised Paris, ranging from ‘physiognomy of a flâneur’ to peregrinations through the city’s streets, with Marxist aphorisms and quotations from a huge range of obscure texts interspersed.Benjamin Arcades cover

Some time ago I wrote a post about Leopardi’s similar project of collected texts, Zibaldone (link HERE), likening it to other florilegia such as that by Chamfort.

There are some striking phrases in the review, arising from the text of The Arcades: ‘The Historian as Chiffonier’; ‘Politics of Loitering’; ‘Peregrinations through Paris’; ‘anamnestic intoxication’. This adjective sent me to the online OED (thank you, Cornwall Library Service, for making it available to cardholders for free; it’s a magnificent resource): ‘the recalling of things past; recollection; reminiscence < Greek ἀνάμνησις remembrance, n. of action < ἀναμνα– stem of ἀναμιμνήσκειν to remember, < ἀνά back + μνα– call to mind, < μένος mind.

Then there’s ‘The Colportage Phenomenon of Space’; a ‘colporteur’, says OED, is

A hawker of books, newspapers, etc. esp. (in English use) one employed by a society to travel about and sell or distribute Bibles and religious writings.

 The etymology is curious: ‘French agent-noun < colporter, apparently < col neck + porter to carry’, referring to the practice of carrying a tray or box (of books) held by a strap round the neck.

When I first looked this up in a print dictionary, probably Chambers, I noted this entry nearby: colpopoiesis: surgical construction of an artificial vagina. There’s no entry for this word in OED, but a quick Google search took me to an online medical definition, derived from the Greek for vagina plus ‘poeisis’ – making (as in poet as ‘makar’ (Scots) or maker.

 Strange how one word leads to another.

Umbrella words and Buridan’s Ass: a bibliomantic foray

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I began drafting a piece the other day on Alfred Hayes’ excellent novel My Face for the World to See, but my wife has taken my copy away with her on a working trip, so I can’t continue with it. Instead I’ve done one of my occasional bibliomantic forays into old notebooks.

Back in August 2012 I was reading Will Self’s neo-modernist Umbrella. I enjoyed it immensely; its sequel published last year, Shark, has been sitting on my TBR shelf (which doesn’t actually exist, it’s just randomly shelved with books read and unread) looking accusingly at me whenever I catch sight of it.

It’s so long since I read Umbrella, however, that I feel ill-equipped to review it here: I’d need to re-read it, and don’t have time to do so. I’ve already got the recently-purchased Patrick Modiano ‘Occupation’ trilogy lined up for my next read. Instead here’s what I was noting about the novel in my notebook back then: samples of Mr Self’s notoriously arcane vocabulary that I had to look up. Many of them reflect the novel’s location in what was then, early in the twentieth century, called a lunatic asylum, and its central theme of the treatment of people with mental health problems.

 

KYPHOTIC The OED online prefers the spelling cyphosis-cyphotic. It signifies the medical condition in which spinal curving causes the sufferer to bend over severely. It derives from the Greek for ‘hunchbacked’. First recorded 1847.

TACHYPNOEA The first element of the word derives from the Greek for ‘rapid’, the last from ‘to breathe’; it means unusually rapid respiration. From 1898.

VERBIGERATE To repeat the same words or phrases obsessively, often as a symptom of mental disease. First recorded in Blount’s Glossographia (1656) meaning ‘to speak, to talk, to noise abroad’; its clinical sense was first recorded in D. Hack Tuke (splendid name), A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892). In my notebook I see I’d written this as ‘vergiberate’ – a slip of the pen (or eye – if the eye can legitimately be said to slip) that was perhaps a result of an unconscious association of the word with ‘gibber’.

[I’ll omit here opisthotonos and hypotonic]

APHERISIS Its medical meaning is either ‘amputation’ or, as Self seems to use it, the removal of a quantity of blood, eg to extract specific useful or undesirable components before returning it to the donor (which sense originates from 1880). It derives from the Greek for ‘take’ or ‘snatch’ (from which ‘heresy’ also, oddly, derives). In linguistics it means the loss of an unstressed syllable at the start of a word, as in ‘round’ for ‘around’. It was first glossed as such in 1550 with the Latin equivalent term ‘ablatio’. The introduction of an additional first syllable is called ‘prosthesis’ (hence prosthetic limbs). Omitting the final syllable(s) of a word is ‘apocope’.

BURGOO was a thick gruel or porridge served to soldiers in WWI; sailors called it ‘loblolly’ (first recorded 1750) – Capt. Marryat referred to it in Peter Simple (1834). It derives from Arabic ‘burgul’ which in turn was ‘bulgur’ in Turkish, hence bulgur wheat.

I initially searched for this word in my Encarta dictionary. It wasn’t there, but I found this lovely entry instead:

BURIDAN’S ASS: a situation used to demonstrate the impracticality of making choices

Buridan's ass

Political cartoon c.1900 depicting the US Congress in terms of this paradox, with the 2 piles of hay version, hesitating between a Panama route and a Nicaragua route for an Atlantic-Pacific canal – via Wikipedia

according to a formal system of reasoning (after Jean Buridan, 1300-1358, a French philosopher). Wikipedia defines it as an illustration of a paradox in the conception of free will:

 It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water [or in some versions two piles of hay]. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other.

 There are plenty more Selfian terms, including: ‘hebephrenic’, ‘anhedonia’ (lack of pleasure) and this one, which I thought I knew but didn’t –

CRAPULENT The adj. from ‘crapulence’: sickness or indisposition arising from excessive drinking or eating. It’s found in Nathan Bailey’s dictionary of 1727, and Dr Johnson’s of 1755. In Greek the word signified a drunken nauseous headache; the Romans adopted it (‘crapula’, a word first used in English c. 1687) to mean ‘excessive drinking’ as well as ‘intoxication’.

And that’s probably enough verbigeration for one post. Keep hitting the dictionary, Mr Self.