Most scholarly texts don’t put the useful information up front like this.¹

What other information do you need?

Several things growing in my yard are useful against Elves, which I don’t doubt is why I see them so seldom.

Reference

Dan Stride has purchased a copy of The Bovadium Fragments by J.R.R. Tolkien, and saved me $26.99. I won’t be buying one, even though I love that kind of humor, which I now know is called “macaronic”. When I encountered Godley’s poem “The Motor Bus” about 50 years ago, I laughed my fool head off. But this poem will always be my favorite, not least because it proves that sort of erudition isn’t the sole possession of the English: Malum Opus. 
 

Occasionally I wonder how valuable computerized analysis of works of literature will ever be. To reassure me that I’m not wasting my time, Jan Christoph Meister tells me² what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe thought:

Goethe discusses the pros and cons of morphology as a science, and eventually concludes: “Its arrangement of phenomena calls upon activities of the mind so in harmony with human nature, and so pleasant, that even failures may prove both useful and charming.”

The citation is to a translation of Goethe’s collected works. ³ If we want the old man to be saying something about the study of literature, we’re making an analogy, because Goethe is talking about morphology as an essential predecessor to what we now call “biology” (because he was right). Literally, he’s talking about the study of form without regard to function, which is all my programs can do with poetry. I like even better the sentences just before Meister’s quotation.

The advantages of morphology are that it is made up of widely recognized elements, it does not conflict with any theory, it does not need to displace something else to make room for itself, and it deals with extremely significant phenomena.

That sounds like a feasible goal for a small project like mine. This connection across 220 years shows that once again it’s useful to be, as the philosopher Adam Ant phrased it, “an eighteenth-century brain, in a twenty-first-century head.”

This is the finest title of a scholarly volume that I have ever encountered, and I feel sure it has not since been surpassed:

Studies in Honor of Basil L. Gildersleeve.

Anything using the name “Gildersleeve” is going to be aesthetically pleasing, but putting it into dactylic tetrameter makes it a work of genius.

My copy of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond and Scull, eds., arrived today. So if you don’t see me for a while, you know where I’ll be.

Looking through the table of contents, I saw there were limericks on page 1365 . Naturally, I turned there first. Turns out, the old Professor wasn’t very good at them, and one of them is, shall we say, familiar.
Limerick [C] is

There was an old monk of Algeria
Who of fasting grew wearier and wearier,
Till at last with a yell
He jumped out of his cell
And ate up the Father Superior.

Google has been kind enough to provide me with a bound archive of Life Magazine, 1902, which contains this passage:

A NUMBER of our alleged literary journals, in their reminiscences of the late Mr. Stockton, have been ascribing to him the following “Limerick”:

“There was an old monk of Siberia
Whose life it grew drearier and drearier
Till he broke from his cell
With a hell of a yell
And eloped with the Mother Superior.”

This poem had its origin at Trinity College, Dublin, and has been well known in university circles here and abroad for generations. The Stockton version is simply an adaptation for the drawing-room.- Evening Sun.

Tolkien’s seems more of a bowdlerization than a composition.

That issue of Life also contained a Charles Dana Gibson cartoon I’d never seen before, voici:

“Where did you go on your honeymoon?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

Today I got to thinking about portraits of business executives. Whenever a magazine puts a CEO on its cover, they’re usually in the same position. They stand there rigid, with arms folded. It’s so common that an image search for “business executive standing” returns countless examples. Now, I understand. It’s hard to know what to do with your hands, and if you get it wrong, you look like a doofus. (Watch any political primary debate for details.) But the thing is, according to acting coaches and books about body language, that’s a defensive posture. People stand like this when they’re feeling attacked.

You’re not fooling anyone, you know.

That’s not the image you want to project when you’re a Lord of Capitalism. You want to show strength and confidence. You want to show you’re in charge. You want to show divine favor, if you can think of a way to pull that off.

Therefore, a modest proposal. Business executives need to adopt attributes, like saints. When you see a medieval painting of a bearded man holding a key, you know you’re looking at St. Peter. A woman holding a wheel is St. Catherine. A man writing a book with a lion at his feet is St. Mark. A woman with a cannon is Santa Barbara. (No, really!) None of these people has any trouble knowing what to do with their hands while their portrait is being taken. Better yet, it makes them immediately recognizable by the illiterate masses. This is useful, because frankly most CEOs kind of look alike.

Mostly the attributes are obvious: Tim Allen should hold an apple. Warren Buffet should hold one of those bags with a $ on it like the ones cartoon burglars carry. Sundar Pichai should hold a can of Spam, if the CEO of Hormel will let it go. The guy who first programs his 3D printer to crank out hand-sized, brightly-colored corporate logos for lesser captains of industry to hold when they’re photographed will make a fortune.

Coda

This post is my first foray into the art of clickbait titles. Idiosophy is linked to micro.blog, but the link only sends across the title of the post. That doesn’t go well with my usual preference for oblique, allusive titles that only make sense after you read the post. Let’s see how this new technique works!

On his desk, the Great Goblin kept the skull of a Sindarin Elf, as a memento moriquendi.

Aragorn: “Men are better than gates, and no gate will endure against our Enemy if men desert it.” ⁴

Christine de Pizan: “Even the strongest city will fall if there is no one to defend it.” ⁵

In the newspaper the other day I read that we know we’re getting enough sleep “if we’re able to problem solve.” I’d never seen this particular locution written down before. Managers have been talking like that for years, though. They’ll open a meeting by saying, “we need to level set,” or “first it would be good to goal set,” or even “we have an opportunity to game change.”

As one is promoted high enough in an organization, one gains affinity for Bovine Spongiform English (as The Economist memorably called it), so this is natural. When a manager said something like that, I’ve always just snickered inaudibly and moved on, confident that an editor would remove any such abomination before it hit print. But there it is, in The Washington Post. It looks like this one might be sticking.

Let’s take it apart.  The evolution goes like this:

1. A verb and a direct object go together so often that they become a single unit: It changed the game.
2. A gerundive form appears to describe whatever “it” was: A game-changing innovation.
3. The boss desires another such thing: Come up with a game-changer.
4. The belly-flop into neologism comes when the hyphen becomes a space: We need to game change. 

Step 4 isn’t guaranteed. Sometimes the two words get fused into one, the process stops, and no one is harmed: homemaker, firefighter, windbreaker, …. Nobody objects to that. What’s going on with these new things?

I think it’s an ancient, hoary beast coming to life. Germanic languages like to have the verb at the end of a sentence. Not in the simple cases, of course. In simple sentences where it’s important to get to the point (A bear ate Uncle Olaf) verbs sensibly go next to subjects.  But when matters get complicated, so complicated that we need managers and hierarchies and chains of command, the verb gets arrogant, making everybody wait upon it, until the last moment when it makes its appearance.

English dalliance with Romance languages has been a fact of life for a millenium, but the Old Ways are only sleeping, not dead. They could return at any time. I noticed a lot of modal auxiliary verbs in those examples. They’re the ones who give permission to the main verb to slouch off to the end.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Is this really the future we want to leave to our children?

Updates

Since this post was published, I’ve been afflicted with

• “We need you to role model,”
• “At that point we will need to risk mitigate.”
• “This is no time to hand wring.”

On March 13, 2024, in the Washington Post, “”Though only 12 bipartisan lawmakers signed onto the measure thus far, the group continues to temperature check with party leaders and colleagues.” We just need to move the party leaders and colleagues to follow continues.