Current reading: Alan Delgado's Have you forgotten yet? Between the Two World Wars. While this covers major national issues such as the General Strike, the Abdication and the Mosleyites. But it has its share of the small peculiarities of the era. 1924, for instance, saw a peak in a long-running craze for "Put and take", a gambling game using a six-sided top (one not so different from a dreidl and any number of similar devices, such as the "teetotum", going back centuries). That it had been a gambling device explains a memory from my childhood: how my grandmother reacted quite angrily when I got a yellow plastic put-and-take top as the toy from a Christmas cracker.
Another innovation of the 1920s was the publication of the first crossword puzzles in Britain (they had existed in the USA since the Liverpool-born editor Arthur Wynne introduced them to New York World in 1913). The first Sunday Express one in 1924 was a 7x7 non-cryptic effort that seems rather feeble by current standards; early puzzles also tended to go for densely interlocked grids of checked letters (in the style of the current "smallest, hardest crossword" format) but the familiar modern format and cryptic puzzles rapidly developed, notably via the poet and scholar Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada).
I didn't realise until recently that there's a deal of philosophy behind crossword compilation. Torquemada is remembered as a great exponent and founder of the cryptic format, but many of his clues are imperfect by modern standards of clue-setting. Some were not even cryptic, in the crossword sense, just obscure general knowledge like completing literary quotations ("Chicken-skin, delicate, white, Painted by -- Vanloo").
A further problem relates to the logical basis, an idea codified by Torquemada's successor in 1939, Ximenes (Derrick Somerset Macnutt). Ximenes set the standard for the symmetric grid and the typical density of checked vs. unchecked letters (checked are the ones where words cross), as well as fairness of clues: no misdirection, guesswork, jumps of illogic, or breaching of the separation between the "definition" and "subsidiary indication" that comprise the clue. See Ximenean clueing and More thoughts on Ximenean clueing. Some puzzle setters such as the Guardian's Araucaria go against this convention; the rightness or wrongness of this is a matter of debate in crossword fandom.
If this kind of thing interests you, there's a lot more at Crosswords by Ximenes page (from which some of the above links come). The Fifteen squared weblog is a good stepping stone into the online crossword enthusiasts' circuit.
- Ray
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Monday, 9 July 2007
Nostalgia
Current reading: a very nice book of other kinds of British institutions consigned to the dustbin of history: ES Turner's An ABC of Nostalgia.
This compendium of bizarre and largely forgotten fixtures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries includes examples that show nothing much has changed. It tells, for instance, of John Bull magazine, run by the deeply crooked Horatio Bottomley, which ran a word competition called "Bullets" where strangely no-one ever won the top prize: a reminder that Lottery fraud and other competition scams are nothing new.
There was the Children's Newspaper run by the gung-ho and evangelising Arthur Mee. It mentions Crystal Sets (a doomed technology decades ago, but even more so now we're shifting to FM and digital radio, which crystal receivers won't pick up); the Jellygraph (aka hectograph), a still-usable technology for homebrew, maybe samizdat, printing; Lobby Lud (fictionalised as Kolley Kibber in Greene's Brighton Rock , and reinvented as the Daily Mirror's Chalky White); and the scary cautionary stories of Struwwelpeter, online at Project Gutenberg.
My favourite of the bunch is probably the Froth Blowers (AOFB), a charitable drinking organisation founded in 1924 by a grateful patient of the surgeon Sir Alfred Downing Fripp. This is the kind of uncontroversial topic where Wikipedia excels: its article Ancient Order of Froth Blowers is very good, even mentioning the Turner book, with links through to a couple of enthusiast sites, The Friends of the Froth Blowers and the Pub History Society's page. It may well have not been a terrifically healthy pursuit, but it must have a significant source of bonhomie in a period still reeling from World War 1.
- Ray
This compendium of bizarre and largely forgotten fixtures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries includes examples that show nothing much has changed. It tells, for instance, of John Bull magazine, run by the deeply crooked Horatio Bottomley, which ran a word competition called "Bullets" where strangely no-one ever won the top prize: a reminder that Lottery fraud and other competition scams are nothing new.
There was the Children's Newspaper run by the gung-ho and evangelising Arthur Mee. It mentions Crystal Sets (a doomed technology decades ago, but even more so now we're shifting to FM and digital radio, which crystal receivers won't pick up); the Jellygraph (aka hectograph), a still-usable technology for homebrew, maybe samizdat, printing; Lobby Lud (fictionalised as Kolley Kibber in Greene's Brighton Rock , and reinvented as the Daily Mirror's Chalky White); and the scary cautionary stories of Struwwelpeter, online at Project Gutenberg.
My favourite of the bunch is probably the Froth Blowers (AOFB), a charitable drinking organisation founded in 1924 by a grateful patient of the surgeon Sir Alfred Downing Fripp. This is the kind of uncontroversial topic where Wikipedia excels: its article Ancient Order of Froth Blowers is very good, even mentioning the Turner book, with links through to a couple of enthusiast sites, The Friends of the Froth Blowers and the Pub History Society's page. It may well have not been a terrifically healthy pursuit, but it must have a significant source of bonhomie in a period still reeling from World War 1.
- Ray
Sunday, 17 June 2007
The Winnowing Oar
I ran recently into the works of Conrad Shawcross, a British artist who produces sculptures inspired by scientific/philosophical themes: for instance, The Nervous System, a kinetic piece that weaves double-helix rope from coloured strands.
His Winnowing Oar, that appeared as part of his Continuum installation at the National Maritime Museum, is intriguing for its literary allusion. Homer's Odyssey, Books 11 and 23, report how the prophet Tiresias told Odysseus how to know when his journey is over. He's to carry an oar and keep walking inland, and when he's so far from the sea that people don't recognise it and think it's an αθηρηλοιγον (athereloigon, an instrument for separating grain from chaff) he'll have come to his journey's end. A variety of instruments fit that function. It's often translated as "winnowing fan" or "winnowing fork", neither of which resembles an oar. Did (the collective known as) Homer mean something like a winnowing shovel? Conrad Roth's Varieties of unreligious Experience blog has an excellent exploration of this question: see The Unknown Object: Part I and The Unknown Object: Part I.
While skimming surrounding links I found several approving references to Jamie Riger's vigorous commentary on the Odyssey. The site's defunct, but findable on the Internet Archive: Jamie Rieger reads the Odyssey. (I'd recommend it as a study guide; it's a funny but mostly accurate gloss that makes this complex and nonlinear narrative highly accessible - the style reminds me of John Barth's Chimera). Rieger has given the same treatment to the Iliad. A sample from the Odyssey, Book 23:
Eurycleia: Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! Wake up, Penelope!
Penelope: (Stretches, blinks.) What? Nurse, is that you? What are you-
Eurycleia: Ohmigod, Odysseus is here. He came back. He totally killed all the suitors. Ohmigod!
Penelope: Impossible. What you say is impossible. My husband is dead.
Eurycleia: He had a bow, and he shot Eumaios, and Eumaios was like "Aaaargh!" and he made a face like this, you see the face I'm making, like this, and the suitors were like, "Mercy!" and he was all "Eat this!" and he started shooting them.
Penelope: That does sound like my husband.
(As I said, mostly accurate: Eumaios was Odysseus' ally against the suitors. Still, if even Homer nods, Rieger can be forgiven the occasional lapse).
His Winnowing Oar, that appeared as part of his Continuum installation at the National Maritime Museum, is intriguing for its literary allusion. Homer's Odyssey, Books 11 and 23, report how the prophet Tiresias told Odysseus how to know when his journey is over. He's to carry an oar and keep walking inland, and when he's so far from the sea that people don't recognise it and think it's an αθηρηλοιγον (athereloigon, an instrument for separating grain from chaff) he'll have come to his journey's end. A variety of instruments fit that function. It's often translated as "winnowing fan" or "winnowing fork", neither of which resembles an oar. Did (the collective known as) Homer mean something like a winnowing shovel? Conrad Roth's Varieties of unreligious Experience blog has an excellent exploration of this question: see The Unknown Object: Part I and The Unknown Object: Part I.
While skimming surrounding links I found several approving references to Jamie Riger's vigorous commentary on the Odyssey. The site's defunct, but findable on the Internet Archive: Jamie Rieger reads the Odyssey. (I'd recommend it as a study guide; it's a funny but mostly accurate gloss that makes this complex and nonlinear narrative highly accessible - the style reminds me of John Barth's Chimera). Rieger has given the same treatment to the Iliad. A sample from the Odyssey, Book 23:
Eurycleia: Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! Wake up, Penelope!
Penelope: (Stretches, blinks.) What? Nurse, is that you? What are you-
Eurycleia: Ohmigod, Odysseus is here. He came back. He totally killed all the suitors. Ohmigod!
Penelope: Impossible. What you say is impossible. My husband is dead.
Eurycleia: He had a bow, and he shot Eumaios, and Eumaios was like "Aaaargh!" and he made a face like this, you see the face I'm making, like this, and the suitors were like, "Mercy!" and he was all "Eat this!" and he started shooting them.
Penelope: That does sound like my husband.
(As I said, mostly accurate: Eumaios was Odysseus' ally against the suitors. Still, if even Homer nods, Rieger can be forgiven the occasional lapse).
Saturday, 16 June 2007
Arsenical matters
I've just been re-reading The Poison Principle by Australian pharmacist and writer Gail Bell. It's an enjoyable cross-genre book starting from a family mystery - Bell's grandfather was accused of poisoning two of his young sons with strychnine - and she uses her investigation of this as the core of a wide-ranging exploration of the science, history, mythology and cultural impact of poisons and poisoners.
Another good book in this territory is Professor Andy Meharg's Venomous Earth, a "scientific, cultural and political history of arsenic", whose varied topics include the Madeleine Smith case, William Morris wallpapers, the Scottish prejudice against green sweets (down to 19th century Greenock traders' use of Scheele's Green - copper arsenite - as a food dye in confectionery "for the bairnies"), and arsenic's continuing significance in regions such as Bangladesh where tube well projects to provide cleaner water have exposed large populations to a different health risk, arsenic-contaminated groundwater.
Arsenic - 'the king of poisons' - is rich in historical interest. It's a well-trodden theory that Napoleon may have been a victim of 'Gosio gas' (the result of volatilisation of arsenical pigments in wallpaper by microbial methylation). But as "Was Napoleon a junkie?" mentions, arsenic was also taken deliberately for its stimulant properties, as famously used by Arsenic Eaters of Styria, 19th century Austrian peasants who habitually ate, as a tonic, normally lethal doses of arsenic. James Maybrick, Jack the Ripper suspect, was an arsenic addict, a fact that led to the almost certainly wrongful conviction of his wife for his murder by arsenic. Because of its ready availability, arsenic was popular with Victorian poisoners, and also caused some spectacular accidental mass poisonings, notably the Bradford Poisoning.
Another good book in this territory is Professor Andy Meharg's Venomous Earth, a "scientific, cultural and political history of arsenic", whose varied topics include the Madeleine Smith case, William Morris wallpapers, the Scottish prejudice against green sweets (down to 19th century Greenock traders' use of Scheele's Green - copper arsenite - as a food dye in confectionery "for the bairnies"), and arsenic's continuing significance in regions such as Bangladesh where tube well projects to provide cleaner water have exposed large populations to a different health risk, arsenic-contaminated groundwater.
Arsenic - 'the king of poisons' - is rich in historical interest. It's a well-trodden theory that Napoleon may have been a victim of 'Gosio gas' (the result of volatilisation of arsenical pigments in wallpaper by microbial methylation). But as "Was Napoleon a junkie?" mentions, arsenic was also taken deliberately for its stimulant properties, as famously used by Arsenic Eaters of Styria, 19th century Austrian peasants who habitually ate, as a tonic, normally lethal doses of arsenic. James Maybrick, Jack the Ripper suspect, was an arsenic addict, a fact that led to the almost certainly wrongful conviction of his wife for his murder by arsenic. Because of its ready availability, arsenic was popular with Victorian poisoners, and also caused some spectacular accidental mass poisonings, notably the Bradford Poisoning.
Thursday, 14 June 2007
Of academic interest
Current reading: The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner's classic concordance to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: a compilation of both books, with Gardner's detailed annotations on Carroll's contemporary references to mathematical, poetic and scientific topics.
The Annotated Alice is a fascinating insight into the books. This excerpt at Norton Books gives a taster of the annotations. The book is 47 years on from its first publication, and has seen continuing updates. A recent development has been the discovery of a lost chapter, The Wasp in the Wig that appears to have been deleted because Tenniel, the illustrator, wasn't keen on it. The Alice Project quotes this chapter along with theories about what Tenniel disliked. I especially like the explanations of the parodies. Carroll's nonsense verse in funny in itself, but more so when compared to the pious improving poetry that it quite viciously satirises (see The poems in Alice in Wonderland for comparisons such as How doth the little crocodile vs. How doth the little busy bee).
The Annotated Alice isn't to everyone's taste: Will Self's New Statesman review of the new Definitive Edition, Dirty old man, takes a hostile view of its avoidance of the always fraught question of Carroll's sexual orientation. This is by no means a clear issue. For instance, nowadays we are highly cautious, paranoid even, about the motives for child photography and tend to view Carroll's interest in this as automatically suspect; but it was a highly mainstream genre in Victorian times. Furthermore, the predominant view that Carroll was some flavour of repressed paedophile was heavily shaken in 1999 by Karoline Leach's book In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, which argued that much of the accepted view of Carroll is a stereotypical myth created in the vacuum left by his family's destruction and suppression of biographical material. Recently published letters and his diary (see "Lewis Carroll": A Myth in the Making) present a picture of a man who was neither shy nor reclusive, and whose female friends were mainly adult, these relationships in some cases skating on the edge of scandal. It's hard to assess whether this view will prevail, but the evidence coming from the increasing flow of primary sources looks at least likely to modify the traditional assessment. More on this evidence at Looking for Lewis Carroll and Contrariwise.
Not terribly related, except as an academic pursuit: this morning a customer asked - perhaps having seen the recent Times article, Nocturnal missions - about a book we didn't have, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, by the pseudonymous 'Whipplesnaith'. It's an underground classic in Cambridge, a book written in the 1930s about the illicit ascent of colleges and other buildings. I admit it rather takes me back. Many Cambridge undergraduates need to do at least some climbing due to the older colleges' archaic practice of locking the gates at night, and I remember those terrifying revolving spikes that topped some walls.
Night Climbers is online at InsectNation: interesting reading, akin to the accounts of present-day urban explorers. Andy Buckley, the site creator, admits that the copyright is a bit 'grey', but risked it given that all persons and companies related to the book are defunct.
Addendum: The Night Climbers of Cambridge was reprinted in 2007 by Oleander Press, Cambridge, to mark the 70th anniversary of the original edition.
- Ray
The Annotated Alice is a fascinating insight into the books. This excerpt at Norton Books gives a taster of the annotations. The book is 47 years on from its first publication, and has seen continuing updates. A recent development has been the discovery of a lost chapter, The Wasp in the Wig that appears to have been deleted because Tenniel, the illustrator, wasn't keen on it. The Alice Project quotes this chapter along with theories about what Tenniel disliked. I especially like the explanations of the parodies. Carroll's nonsense verse in funny in itself, but more so when compared to the pious improving poetry that it quite viciously satirises (see The poems in Alice in Wonderland for comparisons such as How doth the little crocodile vs. How doth the little busy bee).
The Annotated Alice isn't to everyone's taste: Will Self's New Statesman review of the new Definitive Edition, Dirty old man, takes a hostile view of its avoidance of the always fraught question of Carroll's sexual orientation. This is by no means a clear issue. For instance, nowadays we are highly cautious, paranoid even, about the motives for child photography and tend to view Carroll's interest in this as automatically suspect; but it was a highly mainstream genre in Victorian times. Furthermore, the predominant view that Carroll was some flavour of repressed paedophile was heavily shaken in 1999 by Karoline Leach's book In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, which argued that much of the accepted view of Carroll is a stereotypical myth created in the vacuum left by his family's destruction and suppression of biographical material. Recently published letters and his diary (see "Lewis Carroll": A Myth in the Making) present a picture of a man who was neither shy nor reclusive, and whose female friends were mainly adult, these relationships in some cases skating on the edge of scandal. It's hard to assess whether this view will prevail, but the evidence coming from the increasing flow of primary sources looks at least likely to modify the traditional assessment. More on this evidence at Looking for Lewis Carroll and Contrariwise.
Not terribly related, except as an academic pursuit: this morning a customer asked - perhaps having seen the recent Times article, Nocturnal missions - about a book we didn't have, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, by the pseudonymous 'Whipplesnaith'. It's an underground classic in Cambridge, a book written in the 1930s about the illicit ascent of colleges and other buildings. I admit it rather takes me back. Many Cambridge undergraduates need to do at least some climbing due to the older colleges' archaic practice of locking the gates at night, and I remember those terrifying revolving spikes that topped some walls.
Night Climbers is online at InsectNation: interesting reading, akin to the accounts of present-day urban explorers. Andy Buckley, the site creator, admits that the copyright is a bit 'grey', but risked it given that all persons and companies related to the book are defunct.
Addendum: The Night Climbers of Cambridge was reprinted in 2007 by Oleander Press, Cambridge, to mark the 70th anniversary of the original edition.
- Ray
Friday, 8 June 2007
Beckett oddments
In some circles, YouTube has a bit of a reputation as a video dustbin, but I think this is unmerited as long as you're selective. I just ran into this video for kd lang's Constant Craving, which contains a beautifully-filmed recreation of the first Paris performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Seaching YouTube for Samuel Beckett finds many more directly related Beckett-related clips, such as the classic Lucky speech (a tour de force in free-association).
Godot has been inspiration for a great many parodies. See, for instance, Godot Action Comics (from the excellent Book of Sequels written by National Lampoon alumni; or Francis Heaney's Holy Tango of Literature (a very clever collection of pastiches based on anagrams of the author's name; its concluding "Bake me Cutlets" takes Godot into a cookery show).
Beckett probably wouldn't have liked these. According to Colin Wilson's litcrit book The Strength to Dream, Beckett wasn't pleased (despite the subtitle "a tragicomedy") that Godot came across as so comical, an aspect that is so easily parodied. His work is, by the way, renowned for the strictness with which Beckett's estate enforces his stage directions posthumously (under current law, this situation will persists until 2029). According to this DVD Review, the origin of the kd lang video was that its director, Mark Romanek, wanted to film Godot but was refused permission. (A great loss, if it had the intensity and style of the video). In a 2003 article, Damned to fame: the moral rights of the Beckett estate, Dr Matthew Rimmer told how productions of Godot have been contested (and in many cases stopped) for reasons including unauthorised music, female actors and a mixed-race cast. "It is a sad fate", Dr Rimmer writes, "that Samuel Beckett, the most innovative of playwrights, should have his work preserved in aspic". These issues are explored in detail - some text NSFW - at Gregory Aharonian's Waiting for Opradot.
For material and links about Beckett himself, see The Samuel Beckett On-Line Resources and Links Pages site.
- Ray
Friday, 25 May 2007
Fathoming Dickens, and more
Via the collective weblog MetaFilter: I just ran into Charles Dickens: The Life of the Author, an extremely readable six-part seminar by Kenneth Benson of the New York Public Library. This is part of Fathom, a large archive of free content developed by various US and UK libraries and musuems; although the aim is educational, it's not in the least dumbed down or didactic.
Just skimming the start of the list, I found the following. American Film Institute: Modern Film Adaptations of Shakespeare and Movie scientists: before their time. The British Library: Patricia Lovett on Calligraphy, Heraldry and Illumination; Michael Twyman on The Encyclopedia of Ephemera; and the rise to fame and downfall of Oscar Wilde. Or the British Museum: Agath Christie and archaeology; and Early Collectors. Cambridge University Press: Shakespeare, Films and the Marketplace; How to read Joyce; and Committing Shakespeare to print.
You could spend hours reading this; I haven't even got started on the Victoria & Albert, Natural History and Science Museum lists. - Ray
Just skimming the start of the list, I found the following. American Film Institute: Modern Film Adaptations of Shakespeare and Movie scientists: before their time. The British Library: Patricia Lovett on Calligraphy, Heraldry and Illumination; Michael Twyman on The Encyclopedia of Ephemera; and the rise to fame and downfall of Oscar Wilde. Or the British Museum: Agath Christie and archaeology; and Early Collectors. Cambridge University Press: Shakespeare, Films and the Marketplace; How to read Joyce; and Committing Shakespeare to print.
You could spend hours reading this; I haven't even got started on the Victoria & Albert, Natural History and Science Museum lists. - Ray
Friday, 4 May 2007
Ansible ... and Anglish
Science fiction readers won't need an introduction, but this may also be of interest to a general fiction readership: Ansible, the archive site for Dave Langford's long-running SF newsletter. One of its general-interest topics is "As Others See Us", its coverage of the antagonism from the literary circuit, where authors and reviewers will bend over backwards to portray literary works set in, say, imaginary futures, as something other than SF. For instance, Margaret Atwood, author of two post-apocalyptic novels, The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, doesn't write SF, which she characterises as "talking squid in outer space". Other amusements include Thog's Masterclass, examples of bizarre or illogical writing (e.g. Neat Tricks Dept. "The animal ... opened two enormous lidless eyes") and Hazel's Language Lessons, interesting linguistic trivia.
The latter introduced me to the Dorset poet William Barnes who, apart from dialect poetry, conceived of a 'Pure English' expunged of Latin and French influences. Some of his coinages are very nice: Sunprint (photograph), bendsome (flexible), folkwain (omnibus), wortlore (botany), hairbane (depilatory), nipperlings (forceps) and welkinfire (meteor). There is a book with a glossary: The Rebirth of England and English, The Vision of William Barnes by Father Andrew Phillips.
Barnes wasn't alone in advocating this Saxonism: another enthusiast was the composer Percy Grainger, who used in his letters and musical scores a similar 'Blue-Eyed English', in this case springing from a fairly eccentric racial stereotyping. Although Grainger's coinages were often as pleasant as those of Barnes - for instance, traingarth (railway station) and tonewright (composer) - those for more abstract concepts were seriously cumbersome. See, for example, Grainger's Top Ten - PDF - which mentions his terms such as puzzle-them gift-fulness (complexity) and tween-realm-some skill-hoard-fulness (international tradition).
The author Poul Anderson and humorist Paul Jennings also played with the idea. The former wrote an 'Ander-Saxon' essay in atomic theory, Uncleftish Beholding in entirely Saxon-derived words. An atom is an uncleft, the word corresponding to its Latin root a-tomos, that which can't be divided. The latter wrote a series of articles in Punch in 1966, in a postulated 'Anglish' that might have developed if the Normans had lost the Battle of Hastings. - Ray
"In a foregoing piece (a week ago in this same mirthboke) I wrote anent the ninehundredth yearday of the Clash of Hastings; of how in that mightytussle, which othered our lore for coming hundredyears, indeed for all the following aftertide till Doomsday, the would-be imaginers from France were smitten hip and thigh; and of how not least our tongue remained selfthrough and strong, unbecluttered and unbedizened with outlandish Latin-born words of French offshoot. Our Anglish tongue, grown from many birth-ages of yeomen, working in field or threshing-floor, ringing-loft or shearing house, mead and thicket and ditch, under the thousand hues and scudding clouds of our ever-othering weather, has been emulched over the hundredyears with many sayings born from everyday life. It has an unbettered muchness of samenoiselike and again-clanger wordgroups, such as wind and water, horse and hound, block and tackle, sweet seventeen. The craft and insight of our Anglish tongue for the more cunning switchmeangroups, for unthingsome and overthingsome withtakings, gives a matchless tool to bards, deepthinkers and trypiecemen. If Angland had gone the way of the Betweensea Eyots there is every likelihood that our lot would have fallen forever in the Middlesea ringpath".
The latter introduced me to the Dorset poet William Barnes who, apart from dialect poetry, conceived of a 'Pure English' expunged of Latin and French influences. Some of his coinages are very nice: Sunprint (photograph), bendsome (flexible), folkwain (omnibus), wortlore (botany), hairbane (depilatory), nipperlings (forceps) and welkinfire (meteor). There is a book with a glossary: The Rebirth of England and English, The Vision of William Barnes by Father Andrew Phillips.
Barnes wasn't alone in advocating this Saxonism: another enthusiast was the composer Percy Grainger, who used in his letters and musical scores a similar 'Blue-Eyed English', in this case springing from a fairly eccentric racial stereotyping. Although Grainger's coinages were often as pleasant as those of Barnes - for instance, traingarth (railway station) and tonewright (composer) - those for more abstract concepts were seriously cumbersome. See, for example, Grainger's Top Ten - PDF - which mentions his terms such as puzzle-them gift-fulness (complexity) and tween-realm-some skill-hoard-fulness (international tradition).
The author Poul Anderson and humorist Paul Jennings also played with the idea. The former wrote an 'Ander-Saxon' essay in atomic theory, Uncleftish Beholding in entirely Saxon-derived words. An atom is an uncleft, the word corresponding to its Latin root a-tomos, that which can't be divided. The latter wrote a series of articles in Punch in 1966, in a postulated 'Anglish' that might have developed if the Normans had lost the Battle of Hastings. - Ray
"In a foregoing piece (a week ago in this same mirthboke) I wrote anent the ninehundredth yearday of the Clash of Hastings; of how in that mightytussle, which othered our lore for coming hundredyears, indeed for all the following aftertide till Doomsday, the would-be imaginers from France were smitten hip and thigh; and of how not least our tongue remained selfthrough and strong, unbecluttered and unbedizened with outlandish Latin-born words of French offshoot. Our Anglish tongue, grown from many birth-ages of yeomen, working in field or threshing-floor, ringing-loft or shearing house, mead and thicket and ditch, under the thousand hues and scudding clouds of our ever-othering weather, has been emulched over the hundredyears with many sayings born from everyday life. It has an unbettered muchness of samenoiselike and again-clanger wordgroups, such as wind and water, horse and hound, block and tackle, sweet seventeen. The craft and insight of our Anglish tongue for the more cunning switchmeangroups, for unthingsome and overthingsome withtakings, gives a matchless tool to bards, deepthinkers and trypiecemen. If Angland had gone the way of the Betweensea Eyots there is every likelihood that our lot would have fallen forever in the Middlesea ringpath".
Sunday, 29 April 2007
Bookworm Droppings
A small recommendation: The Book Guide, a very good resource on all aspects of secondhand books in the UK, has a page relating to Bookworm Droppings. Drawn from the book series of that name, it provides a few online examples of the strange interactions that take place between booksellers and customers. In the year or so I've been working in the bookshop in Topsham, I can't say I've had any spectacularly odd conversations, but a surprisngly large number of people do ask "do you sell books?" and similar.
- Ray
- Ray
Friday, 30 March 2007
Riddley Walker
I had an interesting e-mail from Frieda Ryan of the Red Kettle Theatre Company, Waterford,about a planned late 2007 production of the Russell Hoban novel Riddley Walker. It is to be "innovative and original ... very visual,full of movement, true to the language and staged in a specially adapted space", and she's seeking to contact fans who'd consider travelling to such a production.
This inspired me to re-read the book, a post-apocalypse novel set in Kent. It isn't, however, standard post-apocalpyse SF, but a cult literary novel written entirely in a worn-down future English, where myth and fable mix with garbled scientific phrases whose meaning has been forgotten. To get some of the flavour, you can visit Bloomsbury's Hoban microsite, which includes commentary by Hoban and the first two chapters.
Riddley Walker Annotations, Eli Bishop's collaborative resource unravelling the linguistic references, such as the corrupted Kent placenames, is also worth exploring. Hoban's particular skill in Riddley Walker is, in my view, the plausibility of his future English, which displays the same kind of garbling that has already turned "a napron" into "an apron". Many of the Riddleyisms, such as "setting the red cord straight" are similar to 'eggcorns', a term coined by linguist Geoff Pullum for a particular kind of malapropism involving a switch to a wrong, but logical, alternative that is rapidly and widely assimilated into general language.
- Ray
Addendum, Aug 2008: Red Kettle have a couple of YouTube videos of the production online here.
- Ray
This inspired me to re-read the book, a post-apocalypse novel set in Kent. It isn't, however, standard post-apocalpyse SF, but a cult literary novel written entirely in a worn-down future English, where myth and fable mix with garbled scientific phrases whose meaning has been forgotten. To get some of the flavour, you can visit Bloomsbury's Hoban microsite, which includes commentary by Hoban and the first two chapters.
Riddley Walker Annotations, Eli Bishop's collaborative resource unravelling the linguistic references, such as the corrupted Kent placenames, is also worth exploring. Hoban's particular skill in Riddley Walker is, in my view, the plausibility of his future English, which displays the same kind of garbling that has already turned "a napron" into "an apron". Many of the Riddleyisms, such as "setting the red cord straight" are similar to 'eggcorns', a term coined by linguist Geoff Pullum for a particular kind of malapropism involving a switch to a wrong, but logical, alternative that is rapidly and widely assimilated into general language.
- Ray
Addendum, Aug 2008: Red Kettle have a couple of YouTube videos of the production online here.
- Ray
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)