Books Do Furnish A Room

First book of words

I recently received version 2 of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) in CD form – I have the last printed edition, from 1989, and very wonderful it is too.  But the CD version allows the mighty OED to be much more up to date, and it allows you to search and interrogate it intelligently.  This is the world’s greatest dictionary, in any language, and it was originally the work of a small team, led by one man, the erudite and dedicated Murray.  The history of the dictionary, and of one of its more unusual contributors, are well worth reading – Elisabeth Murray's biography of her grandfather, Caught In The Web of Words, and Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne.

This then is not a first book of words “apple, bun, cake”, but the first book of words, a wordbook non-pareil.  Come and explore – at the risk of getting lost, of temporary insanity, of being word drunk.

·  The OED contains 5,507 quotations from the year of my birth;

·  .. but only two of the entries were for words with a Gujarati etymology;

·  3,143 entries quote a Portuguese etymology, including anchovy and arrack, as well as zamorin and zerumbet;

·  .. of which only 14 are later than 1900; over 1100 are from the C14th and C15th; and the same number from the C16th and C17th;

·  lindsayite is a word! It is an altered version of anorthite, but I expect you knew that;

·  cornflower contains no surprising definitions, but one word – nitid – which is new to me; it means bright, shining, glossy;

·  dictionary was first used in English in 1552, but the Latin dictionarius dates back to c 1225;

·  the OED contains 426 entries quoting a Gaelic source in their etymologies, from abthain to wood; 

·  there are 18 entries where the earliest reference is 2000 or later, including podcast, hacky-sack, and bling;

·  a word – the thing that is defined - is a lemma.

There you are; I could go on, and probably will in some future time when I have mastered the search function more fully.  But in the meantime, hours and days of time wasted awaits!  What a treasure trove for a bookworm, though the CD is not so enticing for the bibliophilic maggots as the twenty printed volumes.  If you are interested in dictionaries, look here.

By the way, the picture shows my OED “back-to-front”, with the lower volumes on the right, rising to the left.  This is the old, true way; it accepts that the volumes are not different books, but parts of a single massive book.  So they are on the shelf as if they were one book, so the last page, for example, of volume V is next to the first of volume VI – follis is next to follow - a sensible and orderly dispensation.

Read, then, if you think you're hard enough

My eye recently caught George Steiner’s On Difficulty and other essays on the shelf recently, and I have had it out to remind myself of some of his ideas.  He is a wonderfully stimulating essayist and speaker but I have not picked up the Steiner at all readily, mainly because he is – in an irony he would both have appreciated and protested about – very “difficult”.

We often say that modern music, modern poetry, modern painting is “difficult”, and it’s not always easy to grasp what we mean.  Often, we may mean no more than that they make us think, rather than taking us on an automatic, semi-anaesthetised journey.  Nick Jenkins’ father famously objected to books which made him think, a precept from which his son, and his son’s creator, can have taken little comfort.  Sometimes, we mean that they touch on complex questions which have no clear answers, and are ambiguous or incomplete – or that we do not like facing certain morally or judicially ambiguous challenges.  Sometimes, we mean that we do not have the intellectual equipment to understand – that we are not clever enough, or more likely, that we do not speak the language well enough, or cannot understand all the author’s references – a common concern for the young reader, or for any modern reader, of books which demand a working knowledge of a certain (admittedly restricted) canon of western thought and literature, including most obviously the Bible, Shakespeare and the classical authors.

But some difficulty is temperamental: we find it difficult to accept that a poem or a painting operates abstractly, merely because we are used to them acting literally and descriptively.  We do not complain that music or architecture or textile design or a piece of ceramic is abstract, that there is no narrative or no representation of the world.  So why cannot a painting or a poem be like that too?

Steiner distinguishes several types of difficulty, some flowing from the world, some from the author, and some from the reader.  I was particularly interested in his suggestion that difficulty may arise because the writer is forging a new language, or forcing words to mean things they have not meant before.  I think this is frequent in modern authors, but if they are successful, it may become easier to later audiences.  Contrariwise, some concepts which are easy to one generation may be hard for another: can we really understand the chivalric code of love, for example, or the exaggerated sense of personal honour of the insult and the duel?

Eliot says somewhere that in the modern age, all poetry must be difficult.  This is clearly not true at one level -  easy poetry can still be written – but I think he meant that poetry ought to be tackling the hardest, most difficult questions, and that (as he thought) language and culture were being debased and near collapse: so the challenge is to capture ever more demanding ideas with language the writer finds increasingly inadequate.  He captured this, in his own writing, about his own writing, in East Coker:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

This is a long way from Steiner. But I do recommend the essays, especially On Difficulty itself, The Distribution of Discourse, and After the Book?  This last is particularly fascinating: written in 1972, it is worried not about the rise of digital media, as we would expect the same title to be now, but about a decline in the social and intellectual status of the book.  But he is always realistic:

... it is worth stressing that the book has been a significant phenomenon only in certain areas and cultures, and during a relatively short span of history.  Being bookmen, we tend to forget the extremely special locale and circumstances of our addiction.

Read Steiner: enjoy, be amazed, and wonder at his expertise and his insight.  But don’t expect it to be easy!

Of the mallygolder and the dumbledore

I am an enthusiastic collector of words of all kinds, and also a keen reader of the magazine British Wildlife, a serious publication, but one without serious academic pretensions.  So you can read quite learned articles about identifying a particular class of beetles, or about conservation techniques, or about the species affected by global warming.  Or, as in the last issue, you can read about "the folk-names of invertebrates"!

This is a wonderful treasure trove of ancient words, most obsolete or of at least extremely restricted usage, but some still common - and many deserving of resuscitation!  The 'mallygolder' for example is a Cornish word for a jellyfish, and the 'dumbledore' is a dialect word for a bumblebee.  And as you cross the country (England, I mean) from Devon to the Thames valley and up to the north, the woodlouse changes from ' zow-pig' to 'chisel-pig' and then to 'slater'; and if instead of travelling in space, we travelled in time, they would be called 'chisleps' or 'esselchans'.  Other names for the same creature include 'bibble bug', 'cheesy-bob' and 'pissibed'.  What a lexicon for a small and unregarded crustacean.

The earwig is another with many names - many of them stubbornly clinging to the ridiculous notion that they entered the human ear and casued serious damage, a belief reflected in medical textbooks for many years.  They are 'forkie-tails' in Scotland, or 'gallochs', which means the same in Gaelic.  And in Elizabethan England, it was dreaded under the name of 'twitch-ballock' from its predilection for the warmth and humidity of the codpiece.

I could go on - dragonflies are 'devil's darning needles', and the garden snail is the 'hodmandod', and starfish were 'cassock'cats' or 'devil's hands', but the last insect I want to focus on is the charming flying beetle we all known as ladybirds - 'Our Lady's Bird', the bird of the Virgin Mary.  The venereal term, or group name, is also wonderful - 'a loveliness' of ladybirds.  But they were also called 'clock-ladies' from the belief that they flew from your finger in the direction of the hour (with 12 at due north) - and no-one knows why they have to fly home, 'because your house is burning down and your children gone'.

words, sounds and meaning

A friend recently sent me a post card from Brittany, showing massive waves breaking right over a lighthouse - very impressive.  What struck me was the softness of part of the French phrase - Le combat titanesque de la vague and du phare.  Even the first part sounds unthreatening enough, but the mighty battlers are la vague and le phare - gentle, soft words, insubstantial and without force.

The English was neutral - and very un-English - A titanic combat between the lighthouse and the waves (note the plural).  An English postcard would have been much more prosaic - Waves breaking over the Sentinel lighthouse, built by G F Littlebourn, 1922.

But the German - listen to the force and the power: Der gigantische Kampf zwischen dem Leuchtturm und dem Meer.  Fanastic!

My friend asked whether the wave or the lighthouse would win?  Well, the lighthouse is winning, but in the end it must lose - because in spite of the vagueness of the French word, there is little more powerful in nature than the sea.

Goat Song

Brad Kessler and his wife leave New York for Vermont, and they raise goats.  From being complete beginners, they are soon breeding them successfully, collecting a lot of milk all through the summer, and making a range of cheeses.  These experiences are captured in Goat Song, published earlier this year.  (Not to be confused with several other books of the same or similar names, including Chantal Pelletier's Goat Song, a Montmatre Murder thriller!).  I enjoyed Kessler's book, and I would warmly recommend it, perhaps particularly to American readers, but also to anyone interested in cheese making (!) or, more generally, the ideas of moving to the country, producing food by hand and on a small, local scale, and the issues of quality and variety in a world used to uniformity and national scale.

The Kesslers fence an area of pasture and orchard in a newly acquired small farm, then buy a couple of young Nubian goats, and a couple of kids.  They are rather beautiful creatures, famous for their rich milk, and they quickly become used to their new home.  They establish a pecking order, and Brad and his wife Dona soon learn to recognise their individual voices.  They take them herding, effectively long slow walks in the woods – they are browsers not grazers – and each animal, individually belled tinkles or chimes slowly from the woods while Brad reads and dreams.  They come at his call, and are affectionate and pretty trouble free.

Kessler describes the joys of getting the hay in, of the different hays that result from different crops or even different times of year; he describes the threat from coyotes (which he deals with by tracking them and urinating on their faeces to let them know that he is challenging their mastery of the woods!); he describes the rituals of mating and the struggles of a difficult birth; of learning to milk; and of nursing a goat through a severe parasitic illness which affected the animal's nervous system.  He describes the seasonal joys of farming, the worry and the joy; the disappointment of having to sell some of the kids and the warm pleasure of passing on their enthusiasm and growing skill.

And he describes making cheese – the very young and almost immediate faisselles (named after the containers they're strained in), a range of chevres, a mozzarella, and a Pyrenean tomme of matured cheese.  He explains that the cheese has, like wine and olive oil, a distinctive taste which reflects the season, the geology and the fodder – a terroir all its own.  He describes the clean tastes and additive free milk he drinks daily, the perfect cheeses – and that he could be thrown in jail for selling either in the US, as they are unpasteurised.  This is not an ideal life, but it is a very rewarding one, and – while I would never go this route myself – one with which I feel great sympathy.

Goat language:

• ‘capricious’ refers to the goats' choosy browsing, picking preferred plants out of the hay and leaving others;
• from the descriptions of the adult billy goats, the expression ‘randy old goat’ has more than a hint of truth in it; 
• ‘kicking the bucket’ and ‘crying over spilled milk’ while not exclusively to do with goats, refer to the not uncommon accident where a irritated goat kicks over, or steps in, the bucket of milk she has just yielded, rendering it worthless;
• kidnapping;
• tragedy, from the Greek, 'cry of the goat'
• and (thanks for the reminder, Glo), scapegoat, the goat sacrificed to atone for the sins of the community.

Tailors

I love words, and I am always amused by the different meanings of a word, especially when they’re slightly out of the way.  So, today’s word is “tailor”.  Yes, it’s a man who makes clothes, originally mainly for men, and now for everybody; but now the word has an upmarket connotation, and few of us have a tailor to design and make our clothes to order (though I have just watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on DVD, Le Carré’s Smiley masterpiece, based on the game for divining your career from plum stones – "tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief”).  The tailor is, in folk tales, the man who cuts up the cloth - but in the trade, he's the cutter, and the tailor is the man who stitches them together.

 

But did you know, tailors are also small fish, and a kind of caterpillar?  And:

 

Nine tailors make a man – a contemptuous expression, suggesting that tailors were of such poor physique that nine of them would make a real man.  But also, the nine strokes of the funeral bell that announce the death of a man - "tailor" may be a corruption of "teller", a stroke on a bell.  See, in a a light hearted murder mystery, but one evoking the quiet desolation of the Fens, Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors.

 

It’s a tailor’s war – a World War II saying, meaning I know not what.

 

To tailor a shot – to bungle a shot at a bird or a deer, injuring but not killing it (I came across this in John Buchan's John McNab).

 

Any more?