This tweet

Everywhere there's a saxophone, let's take it out and put in a clarinet instead.

— Sørina Higgins, PhD (@SorinaHiggins) May 2, 2022

the other day got me thinking about Jacques Offenbach. Long ago I heard a musicologist lamenting, not very seriously, that Offenbach didn’t know about the saxophone: what wonderful craziness might he have composed for it?  That lament, I now know, is historically incorrect. The saxophone was invented in the 1840s and Offenbach was still writing in the 1870s.  But the old man was kind of right. Why isn’t there a saxophone solo in, for example, the overture to Orpheus in the Underworld?

This is my favorite performance of that overture.  Apart from the musicianship, there are lots of reasons to love it.  One is the oboe player’s look of relief when she finishes her solo (1:40 in).¹ Another is the manic grin on the violinist’s face at 7:42 when the galop starts. But the biggest reason is how the conductor carefully sets it all up, but once the galop gets going, he just lets the orchestra run wild. Exactly what old Jacques would have wanted.

Everyone thinks of the galop infernal as the “cancan music”.² But any nerdy child also knew the story of Orpheus, and I couldn’t put them together. What the devil, I wondered, was supposed to be happening on stage while the orchestra was playing that?  No way to find out. Nobody I knew had ever seen a performance. The #1 reason to love the World Wide Web is that it can settle those questions I had in my childhood, which can lie dormant for half a century. Now I know:

In Mitchell and Robinson’s A Guide to Old English¹, section 182 on Parataxis, as they’re refuting the notion that short, simple, declarative statements are a sign of a primitive language, we find this sentence:

Today, when the long and complicated sentence is losing favour in English, we will perhaps be more in sympathy with the constructions described in the following paragraphs, more able to appreciate the effect they produced, and less likely to believe that the juxtaposition of two simple sentences was necessarily less dramatic or effective than one complex sentence.

What I love about this is that they pulled this off in a textbook, where dramatic impact is not even wanted.

Thanks to Hana Videen of the Old English Wordhord (whose book is coming out soon in the UK, not so soon in the US), I learn about Alcuin’s commentary on the Book of Genesis in the form of a FAQ. It was long, bloated, and Latin, so my man Ælfric of Eynsham translated it into Englisc and cut it down to match Anglo-Saxon attention spans. 

His answer to the question, “Why did God make a rainbow after the Great Flood?” contains a line that jumped out at me: Forþan þe he wiste gif he swa ne dyde þæt men woldan forhtigan þæt he mid flode eft fornumene wurdon þonne hy gesawon swiðlice renas. In Modern English, “because he knew that if he didn’t do that, every time it rained heavily men would think they were going to be destroyed by a flood.” God used the rainbow much the same way we now use an emoji to soften a harsh-sounding tweet.

“By a flood” hasn’t changed much in a thousand years; “mid flode” is still kind of readable. The word that did the jumping was “destroyed”: fornúmene.  I wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien consciously took that as the source of the word “Númenor”, or if it was just one reason that the root “numen” sounded right to him, given the context.

A poem by Joy Harjo came into my inbox the other day. I’m sure she’s not thinking of Ents, but the poem has this bit in it:

The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway—
To the edge of the river of life, and drink—
I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:

“Speaking Tree”, lines 15-18

A tree by the doorway? That reminded me of the scene at the ruined gates of Isengard, and Legolas saying, “Yes, a tall grey Ent is there, but his arms are at his sides and he stands as still as a door-tree. (LotR, III, viii)

Harjo and Tolkien are clearly talking about different things, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to look up that word since the 1970s. A “door-tree”, the OED informs us, is one of the vertical posts that frame a door. To give a sense of how up-to-date the word is, their most recent citation is to Piers Plowman: “as ded as a dore-tree”. I’m sure Legolas doesn’t want us to think Quickbeam is playing dead, but I’m otherwise mystified. I don’t know what connotations Tolkien might have wanted us readers to pick up.

However, now I do know the answer to Charles Dickens’s puzzlement:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

A Christmas Carol, stave I

It looks like “door-nail” has replaced “door-tree” in the quote from Langland, since everyone has forgotten what door-trees were. Even though I have no more clue about current attitudes toward Ents than when I started, it’s fun to see a stone skipping across seven centuries of literature like that.

It often happens while I’m doing manual labor that I get to wondering about a  word. Today the word was “hitch-hike”. I remembered a story about its origin, and decided to check it out during my next break. The story was not true. But then I found this citation in the Oxford English Dictionary:

We may charge this wicked hitch-hiker the ten cents extra that she deserves for asking for a bath towel.

It’s from Barbara Starke, Touch and Go: the story of a girl’s escape. 1931.  I can’t find this book online — neither the Internet Archive nor Google Books has it. You can buy a used copy from Amazon for $847, if you like. The references I’ve been able to find make it sound interesting — it was banned in Ireland.

Some humorists think of jokes from reading the newspaper, some from advertisements, some from pop culture. I think I now know where Douglas Adams got his.

I feel much hoopier