One of the pleasures of old age and fading memory¹ is that I can find new things to read that match my sense of humor perfectly.  I was cleaning up my disk today and came upon a file called “untitled.txt” dated 2013, which contained a short blues lyric:

I know a woman, she treats me so mean,
She’s the meanest damned woman that I’ve ever seen.

She’s bad to the bone, but she’s worse to the tendon.
Stay with this woman, the pain’s never endin’.

If I’d ever sung this song to my physical therapist, I’d have clear memories of the consequences, so I’m sure this is its first publication.

For my latest project, I’m re-reading Poul Anderson’s “Dominic Flandry” stories.  This observation is totally beside the point of the actual research, and what else is a blog for?

Imperfectly consistent with the feminist ideal

Ensign Flandry was published in 1966, when Alison Bechdel was in kindergarten. It’s an adventure story written for teenaged boys, so it’s no surprise that the book doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test.

But here’s the funny thing: if it were made into a movie, even in the 1960’s, the movie would have passed the test. The Tigeries of Starkad are ruled by females in a group they call “The Sisterhood”. The males are just foot soldiers and sailors. While Flandry is off on another planet, their military conflict with the sea people escalates to the point of full mobilization. Anderson describes the scene this way: “Banners snapped to the wind, shield bore monsters and thunderbolts luridly colored. It was no mob. It was the fighting force of Ujanka, summoned by the Sisterhood.”

The political machinations among the Sisterhood all take place off-screen in the novel, but a movie adaptation would unavoidably replace that exposition with a scene about the debate over wartime preparations in the Council, which would have featured a room full of women, several of whom are named, not talking about a man. Dominic Flandry is an outrageous womanizer (though he also has admirable qualities), so realizing this was quite a surprise.

Another line from Puck of Pook’s Hill that has no relevance to literary influence so it gets its own post:

“He sent for my second son, whom being unmarried he had ever looked upon as his own child…”

The speaker is Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a Norman knight who came over with William the Conqueror. He had become fond of the English and adopted their ways. I love that sentence for the way the reader grinds to a crawl on the eighth word. Word order won’t help us now; time for the Great English Verb Hunt we learned as the way to decipher what those old guys meant.

Kipling has done a beautiful job of recreating the feel of a modern English speaker trying to read Old English. There aren’t many inflections left these days, but the one we’ve got is effective.  That sentence might easily have come from someone who’s thinking in Old English, and therefore doesn’t think of word order as an important part of grammar.

And yes, it’s intentional. Later in the book, we’re told a character is educated because he knows “the Leech-Book of Bald”.

I read a tweet today that described a Russian politician as a “гопник”. I didn’t learn that word in school, so I looked it up in the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary app. It was happy to tell me that the word means “yob” or “yobbo”.

Great.

What does that mean? It’s some kind of Brit slang that autocorrect won’t even let me type.

Brain wave: there’s a Robert/Collins French-English dictionary on the shelf that annoys me with the same stunt. Look up “yob” in there and find out it means loubard.

You can’t hang around a Parisian train station for long without meeting a loubard, so I’m all set. The Russian guy was a thug. But this episode has made me understand why Americans don’t learn foreign languages.

An online survey today asked me an unexpected question: What are my values?  They gave me a window about the size of a tweet in which to answer.  That was a poser — I’d never thought about so concisely phrasing the things I care about  before.

I came up with a way, and since half the purpose of this blog is to replace my never-good long-term memory, here’s what I said:

Philosophia biou kubernetes. Be excellent to each other. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Some things are none of my business.

It’s entirely within my idiom to do this after bumper-stickers have gone out of style.

Megan Fontenot asks the question over on Twitter: What are some words you learned from reading Tolkien’s works?

That could be a large number. One easy way to find a bunch of them is to look in the list my pronouncing dictionary didn’t know. Throw out the proper names, the invented languages, and (as much as I wanted to leave them in) things like “tinbone” and “thinbone”. That gave me 37 words, which is plenty to start with:

belike
brock
bullroarer
cornel
corslet
deeping
darkling
dishevelled
draught
dwimmer
ent
etten
eyot
eyrie
fen
flet
footpads
habergeon
leechcraft
mark
mathom
surcoat
swart
hyrne
thrawn
trothplighted
garth
unlading
vambrace
weapontake
weregild
weskit
wang
whortle
withy
woses
writhen

Fun fact:  all but two of those words are currently underlined in red by the WordPress spell-checker.