Notes and Queries

I had an interesting little task today: answering a question by a friend of one of Mrs Ray's friends, who suspected anachronism in Andrew Davies' use of the phrase "You're cramping my style" in the current BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit. The author of the Assorted Ramblings blog had the same concern - see The language of the classics (02 November 2008 @ 06:44 pm post). It turned out to be pretty easy to debunk this as an example of "recency illusion"; the OED alone cites it back to 1819

c. Phr. to cramp one's style: to restrict one's natural actions or behaviour.

[1819 LAMB Let. 7 June (1935) II. 250, I will never write another letter with alternate inks. You cannot imagine how it cramps the flow of the style.] 1917 A. WOOLLCOTT Let. 2 Sept. (1944) 26, I think the very fact of a censorship cramps one's style. 1919 Punch 9 Apr. 283 (caption) Cramping his style. 1923 Saucy Stories 1 Nov. 124/1, I always go out with Edith... Edith never cramps my style.

but Google Books finds many more examples, showing it to be well established in the fully modern sense pre-1920, and even earlier (e.g. 1800-1900) applied to handwriting, physical or literary style ("cramp", then as now, means "constrain" in this sense) such as

"freed from that dry severity of ratiocination which never fails to cramp the style of ordinary mathematicians, when writing on theological subjects."
- Horsley's sermons, The Quarterly Review, William Gifford, John Taylor Coleridge, John Gibson Lockhart, William Macpherson, William Smith, John Murray. Published by J. Murray, 1813

and even down to the early 1700s, in an anonymous poem congratulating John Dryden on his translation of Virgil and taking a dig at earlier Dutch translators, particularly Joost van den Vondel:

The heavy Dutchmen, with laborious toil, Wrested his sense, and cramp'd his vig'rous style.
- To Mr Dryden on his Excellent translation of Virgil, The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis By Virgil, John Dryden, Knightly Chetwood. Translated by John Dryden. Published by Printed for J. Tonson, 1721

It's probably even pre-1700, since Dryden's The Works of Virgil came out in 1697, and the anon poet wouldn't have waited 20+ years to write a fan letter. Of course, this doesn't quite resolve the problem. If a usage grates with the audience because it's widely perceived as an anachronism (even though it isn't) should a writer risk using it? Difficult: I'm with historical precedent all the way, but it's a somewhat political decision if the writer isn't solely in charge of the choice. See the Comments for further discussion.

In a similar vein to the above excursion, I've enjoyed linguistics blog Language Log's etymological detective threads such as Did Plato say this? (tracking an apparent fake attribution of an epigram to Plato), Every little (bit?) helps (another back-tracking of an apparently modern expression), the previously mentioned Giveth and taketh, and Mumfordishness: an appeal (who was Mumford?).

Where did people go to get historical-etymological questions answered before Google Books and web forums like Yahoo Answers? Notes and Queries. This is not its modern relative in the Guardian (interesting though that is) but the far more venerable journal described in A Victorian virtual community (Patrick Leary, Victorian Review, Vol. 25: 2 (Winter 2000) 62-79. In comparison with Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet (which argues a convincing analogy, technologically and culturally, between the Internet and telegraph), Leary likens the 1849-founded Notes and Queries to the Internet forum ("N&Q provided access to an unparalleled flow of textual information within a community defined by the terms of that exchange" - and to be blunt, those terms were sheer geekiness of interest ("minutiae about old manuscripts, obscure incidents, forgotten customs, and local lore"). It's rather at the level of Cecil Torr's Small talk at Wreyland, and it's unsurprising that Torr's books were advertised in the journal and frequently cited.

It's wonderful stuff. The 1849-1869 editions are digitised here at the Internet Library of Early Journals; and some, in more convenient plaintext format, are at Project Gutenberg. The journal Notes and Queries, its flavour not much altered, does still exist as a subscription journal from Oxford University Press (home page here, from which you can access a full archive of contents lists).

- Ray

Giveth and taketh

A book-related search tip: how to use the advanced search options within Google Books.

At Language Log, in the post Giveth and taketh, Arnold Zwicky mentions current "snowclones" such as "Globalization giveth ... Globalization now taketh away" modelled on the well-known "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away". He also notes, with reference to Michael Macrone's Brush Up Your Bible, how this isn't actually in the Bible, but is a misquotation (or paraphrase) of Job 1: 20-21 in the 1611 King James Version.

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped,
And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

But when did it arise? This is a nice example of how it's possible to do a historical search with Google Books, using the following syntax to specify date range (e.g. "Lord giveth" "Lord taketh away" date:1700-1835).

This finds plenty of hits showing the long history. It turns up in a number of late 18th and early 19th century novels, such as John Galt's 1822 The Provost (here), the anonymous 1805 Belville-House (here), Mary Meeke's 1799 Ellesmere (here), and Horace Walpole's 1764 gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (here). The oldest direct uses in relation to Job I can find in general prose accounts are in the 1718 A Faithful Register of the Late Rebellion (here) and the 1714 The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (here). Older still is Thomas Marbury's 1650 A Commentarie Or Exposition Upon the Prophecie of Habakkuk: Together with Many Usefull and Very Seasonable Observations. While it doesn't feature the full quotation, it nevertheless uses the "Lord giveth ... Lord taketh away" construct (here). At this point, you need to start considering archaic spellings. To cut to the chase, as probably anyone more Christian could have done long since, it tracks down to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, in The Ordre for the Buriall of the Dead:

WE brought nothyng into this worlde, neyther may we carye any thyng out of this worlde. The Lord geveth, and the Lord taketh awaie. Even as it pleaseth the Lorde, so cummeth thynges to passe: blessed be the name of the Lorde.

This, the first English prayer book, is probably the main source. Who actually coined the paraphrase of Job is uncertain. As the Society of Archbishop Justus website says, Thomas Cranmer is assumed to be the main author, but as the work was done by committee and no records of the editorial process exist, we can't be sure. However, Michael Macrone is definitely off the mark with his "nice try with the Renaissance conjugations". It's not a "nice try"; it was coined when they were current. It took me a while to get there, not being religious, but it's surprising that the author of Brush Up Your Bible didn't spot it.

The "-eth" ending, by the way, is a Middle English and early Modern English construct that rapidly fizzled out in Modern English post-1600 except when people wanted a religious or poetic tone (see Early Modern English, Charles Laurence Barber, Edinburgh University Press, 1997, ISBN 0748608354, p.166 onward, for a good account of the decline of "-eth"). However, Bible translations of the 1500s-1600s - notably the KJV - tended to incorporate archaicisms of language that were already declining (in the KJV's case, partly because it drew on earlier translations, partly because of the perceived formal tone of "-eth"). Even so, "Lord giveth ... Lord taketh away" isn't in any of them, nor in the older Wyclif translation.

The strong factor for its survival over 500+ years appears to be its incorporation as a linguistic fossil in the standard Christian committal and burial service derived from the Book of Common Prayer. This seems a more likely reason for its continuing currency than it being, as Professor Zwicky suggests, a popular misquotation persisting because people see it as an "improvement" on the original wording of Job.

All that said, I think it is an improvement, in the sense of it being an inspired decision to introduce parallelism, which created a powerful and lasting epigram.
- Ray

Encyclopaedic thoughts

I very much like old encyclopedias of the 1800s to early 1900s. At home we have The Popular Educator, John Cassell's dour but massively influential 1850s instructional encyclopedia (the full text is online at Google Books); Cassell's Book of Knowledge; and Arthur's Mee's eclectic and rambling Children's Encyclopedia. At best, these make excellent reading for their broad and clear presentations of the knowledge of a particular period. However, as Imagination in Education points out, their considerable artistic and instructional flair often comes with a certain amount of dated moralising and even propaganda, as in this extract.

Before the German Empire was shorn by the Paris Peace Conference - east, north, and east - the map of Germany was not unlike the picture of a stupid helmeted giant, sprawling on all-fours, with a pygmy master on top. Prussia made up the body and head, with Berlin at the heart, and its ore and grain-bearing province of Silesia, stolen long ago from Austria, as creeping arms and hands. Schleswig, filched in 1864 from Denmark, pictured the Hohenzollern masters; while the South German States and Alsace-Lorraine formed an undefined but important lower part

This excruciatingly hostile description leads the Germany and its people article in Cassell's Book of Knowledge, an encyclopaedia for children, ed. Harold FB Wheeler, The Waverley Book Company, London (early 1920s).

The problem of bias and accuracy in encyclopedias is an ongoing issue. I was reminded of the above passage on reading this opinion piece, The Wisdom of Crowds, by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. He is, unsurprisingly, highly optimistic about its possibilities. This view has been challenged on various fronts. For instance, Wiki wars talks about the problems of vandalism. Or there was the fallout from the notorious "Seigenthaler incident" where an entry libelled John Seigenthaler Sr by falsely associating him with the Kennedy assassination (see his own account, A false Wikipedia 'biography'). The accuracy issue was, furthermore, highlighted in 2006 when, as described in A thirst for knowledge, Nature conducted a study comparing selected articles from Wikipedia with those on the same topics in Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Wikipedia itself has an extensive selection of quotes on its reliability).

My two cents on the matter (everyone has them so why not?): I'm not sure any of these tackles one of the more besetting problems with Wikipedia: active contributor bias. I very much doubt any regular good-faith contributor can have failed to run into articles that are either a permanent battleground, or completely gridlocked, because of "SPAs" (single-purpose accounts) - editors whose sole purpose on Wikipedia is to spin an article to their preferred view of the world, and argue at length with all comers in favour of that spin. It can happen anywhere, but it's particularly common in articles relating to controversial topics in religion, politics, medicine, science, biography, and so on. It's often associated with behaviours such as "wikilawyering" (nitpicking at length about the rules) and other obfuscation tactics. This, not general vandalism, I would say is the most serious and time-consuming irritation in editing Wikipedia, and probably the one most responsible for driving away good editors (in large part because Wikipedia's mechanisms for restricting or removing tendentious editors are slow and cumbersome). If there were one improvement I could make by waving a magic wand, it would be to install rapid procedures for banning troublemakers.

Part of the problem is Wikipedia's success. Nowadays, Google for a term - say "cat" - and Wikipedia will be one of the top hits. This privileged search placement means that it is a major vehicle for shaping worldwide what is known about a topic. Not unnaturally, this makes it inevitably a battleground, and Wikiscanner shows what's probably the tip of the iceberg.

If you enjoy "Wikidrama", the Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard makes for compelling reading; there's a steady stream of quite well-known people caught out in completely crass attempts to game the system. If you see people elsewhere on the Web whining about being ill-treated by Wikipedia, it's always worth checking out the Talk pages of relevant Wikipedia articles. Maybe they were wronged like John Seigenthaler Sr; or maybe they were rightly slapped down for self-promotion and for behaving disruptively on being found out.

Despite such issues, other encyclopedias are moving toward their own modifications of the Wikipedia format, primarily by introducing some form of editorial oversight. Even mainstream encyclopedias look likely to move into the territory: Wired recently reported Encyclopaedia Britannica To Follow Modified Wikipedia Model. However, Citizendium was probably the first, founded by Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's co-founder, who in 2007 described Wikipedia's organisational model as "broken beyond repair". Citizendium's differences from Wikipedia include a two-tier contributor system where "authors" are overseen by "editors", and all are required to identify themselves. Personally I like the idea; though Clay Shirky, in Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise, argues that Sanger's view of expertise is mistaken; also it's a matter of observation that the effort to spin is by no means removed by revelation of identity. It doesn't take much work to find articles where Wikipedia refugees - ones who left or were ejected because they couldn't/wouldn't work under its neutrality policies - are now editing Citizendium.

As to Wikipedia, I do find it useful (some articles are excellent) but I have some sympathy with the school librarian who put up a "Just Say No to Wikipedia" sign. It's good for a quick overview of a topic and getting an idea of what the basics are and where to look. But it also requires a strongly critical (paranoid even) attitude to the origins of an article, where you need to take a hard look at the article history, discussion page and even contributor histories to see if there are ongoing editorial disputes or contributors with known/likely bias.
-Ray

More on finding poetry ... and search tricks

I mentioned recently having been searching for a poem for years.  Googling "identify a poem" shows it's a common problem, one made difficult by the general tendency to remember (or misremember) poems as fragments without attribution. The trad advice used to be to write to the Poetry Society, but now the Internet is a good option. One of the best-looking forums for this purpose is at the @eMule.com Poetry Archives, which has a very busy Lost Poetry Quotations section (check out also the spinoff groups with the same format at MyPoetry.net).

By coincidence, at the Poetry Archives I ran into a post by Lily about an unidentified "poem that mentions St. Francis".

St. Francis...thou and all the saints are here...while one man knows that all creation is but a rose...smells (?) like a rose and has the rose's thorn...

This takes me to my other recommended option, Google Books. As I also mentioned previously, there is the impediment of fragmentary results in books only provided in snippet view. A guess at a few keywords - Francis creation "rose's thorn" - clearly takes us into the right territory but finds isolated snippets like this:

...
and while one man loves birds and flowers
St. Francis,
you and the company of saints are here,
while one man knows
...

With Belloc's Lord High-Bo I mentioned the strategy of jigsaw-style correlation. Another Google trick you can use is a more systematic 'sideways' search, looking for adjacent material by searching on distinctive strings at the edges of that already found. In this case, doing new searches on "and while one man loves" and "here, while one man knows". Proceeding in this wise rapidly recreates the otherwise inaccessible full text of the poem, which turns out to be The Saint by Humbert Wolfe - see the comments for the text.
- Ray

Belloc's Lord High-Bo

Bibliographic bliss. Three years ago, on my own blog, I posted a request about a mystery poem that my wife and I remembered, but which was proving unusually difficult to find. We were more or less certain it was a Belloc, in the flavour of his Peers series in Cautionary Verses. But there was no sign in anthologies. However, sources have come at last into the Google Books database, and it is indeed a Belloc poem, Lord High-Bo.

Lord High-Bo, getting tired of trains,
Would binge about in Aero-planes,
A habit which would not have got
Him into trouble, had he not
Neglected what we know to be
The rule of common courtesy.
Past bedroom windows he would sail,
And with a most offensive hail
Disturb the privacy of those
About to wash or change their clothes.

Google Books finds two sources: William Cole's 1959 The Fireside Book of Humorous Poetry, and Robert Speight's 1958 Letters from Hilaire Belloc. Neither of us recalls reading either of them. Still, it's great to know it's not a mutual figment of the imagination. It's certainly a little-known one though.

A search tip that may be useful: it's often quite feasible, as I had to with this example, to reconstruct text from search hits that are restricted. We remembered this much ...

[someone?] ... growing tired of trains
Would binge about in aeroplanes.
Past bedroom windows he would sail,
And with a most offensive hail
Disturb the privacy of those
About to wash or change their clothes.

... which turns out to have a couple of minor wording mistakes, lacks the identifying name, and misses out a central section. A search on a phrase we were most sure of, "most offensive hail", found two books giving only snippet view search (i.e. fragments of variable usefuless including the search phrase). Inside one, Letters from Hilaire Belloc, searching on some remembered phrases - "tired of trains", "binge about" and "would sail" returned some snippets- not enough to complete the poem but indicating that the title character to be Lord (High?-??). Passing "Lord High" to The Fireside Book of Humorous Poetry found it's "Lord High-Bo". Passing "Lord High-Bo" back to a general Google Books search got the whole intro to the poem, ending with the words "not neglected what we". And so on, a process of search refinement, correlating the snippets and the Google Books results until there was enough crossover to complete the text.

This kind of iterative search and "Dead Sea Scrolls" approach can be very useful in getting the gist of texts that show up on Google, but don't give full access. As well as books, this also works with journals in restricted-access archives such as JSTOR or Project MUSE, which contain a lot of interesting literature-related material. More on this later.
- Ray

Cambridge University Library Paperchase

Nostalgia. This takes me back: The Cambridge University Library Paperchase, a puzzlehunt that used to exist at the Cambridge University Library. As it appears to be defunct now, I suppose there's no problem in revealing its details. In the mid-1970s I ran by accident into an entry point - a slip of paper in a journal in the Metallurgy Department library. This then led to the main Library. Pre-computerisation, the Catalogue Hall, where you looked up locations of books, contained huge scrapbooks with typed labels and clippings pasted in.Then you had to traipse all over the Library to find the book physically.

I followed it for a few days, post-exams with nothing much to do, but never finished it. I recall getting as far as an obscure children's dictionary, Aa's Woordenboek, then getting stuck. From the descriptions I realise now that I failed entirely to realise that it was a branching tree of clues, not a single linear trail, nor grasp that some of the clues broke out of the general format. Pre-Internet, I'm not sure I could have solved

You need to find a biography published in London in 1968 about a man of whom it was said "He was close on to six feet tall, of military bearing and of such extraordinary vitality that young ladies asserted they could feel him ten feet away".

I never entirely believed it was finishable or sustainable: all it required was for one mean-spirited person to break the trail (see Marginalia and other crimes for evidence that moral responsibility and library use don't always coincide). But who had the time and energy to maintain it? Did the librarian in charge of 19th century Japanese journals never get tired, or suspicious, of students who obviously couldn't read Japanese asking for Kokubangaku kenkyu, vol.27?

-Ray

... and roads not taken

The Internet Archive, despite its usefulness, seems to be an under-used resource. For the curious or sneaky, its Wayback Machine is a handy tool for finding past versions of defunct or revised websites. But there's also a large collection of open source material, including out-of-copyright texts (which I've cited here before) and even feature films.
      Alexander Korda's Things to Come is one example. I admit I've never particularly liked it - the screenplay, written by HG Wells himself, is very preachy and stylised - but visually it's remarkable for its time. The source book, The Shape of Things to Come, is also online: not a novel but an imaginary historical account from the early 1900s to 2100. It's presented through the device of a diplomat using the then-fashionable techniques of JW Dunne - see An Experiment with Time - dreaming a history book written in 2106.
      The Shape of Things to Come is well worth reading, in parts (I personally find Well's idealistic final section about world recovery through a rational world state tedious and unlikely). But it's remarkable astute in its prediction for the 1930s; Wells was very nearly right in his date for the onset of WW2, and completely right in recognition of the importance of aerial warfare and the submarine missile deterrent.
      He is, however, very influenced by World War 1. His WW2 starts with a similar pivotal killing to that of Archduke Ferdinand: in this case a young Nazi shoots a Jewish rail passenger on the mistaken assumption that the latter is making faces at him (he is really struggling with stuck false teeth). Wells imagines gas warfare, important in WW1, as the most destructive aspect of WW2 (something that, partly through the Geneva Protocol and partly through fortunate circumstance 1, didn't happen in reality).
      Wells' WW2 continues until 1949, followed by a pandemic fever (akin to the post-WW1 influenza pandemic) peaking in the mid-1950s. The resultant Balkanized Europe and an America caught up in ritualistic denial of its collapse, described in the Europe in 1960 and America in Liquidation chapters, are a very dark and modern post-apocalyptic vision, unlike the somewhat idyllic post-civilisation England envisaged by the Victorian pastoralist Richard Jefferies in After London.
The Germans had G-series nerve agents, but didn't use them on the mistaken assumption that the Allies also did.
- Ray

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