At the fencing club last night, one of the other coaches came up to the strip where I was giving a lesson. He was holding an old, well-used foil. “The lady at the desk said she found this in the equipment room. Who uses a left-handed Vniti blade with a Prieur socket?” Well, that would be me. I had lent such a weapon (one of my favorites) to a visitor last year, and when it vanished I assumed I’d never see it again.

So I expressed my gratitude and tossed the cheap Chinese weapon I’d been using into a corner. The student said, “Here, my lord, is your ancient blade. It was found in his chest.”

I hadn’t known he was one of our Fellowship. Meeting a new friend is always a pleasure.

A blog post I read was lamenting the current state of the world. The author discreetly summed up, “We are totally s—-ed.” The dictionary built into my Unix operating system informs me that there are 130 English words that fit that pattern.

Soliped

Some of the words were unexpected; they were familiar words that I didn’t think of as fitting that pattern.  Some of the words I’d never heard before (“savoy” is a verb?!). There was an impressive list of 25 words the author might have actually meant (some more probably than others). Most of them, of course, are just past participles of ordinary verbs.

I have just listened to two podcasts by people whom I know only from Twitter.

Elaine Treharne spoke with a Stanford University podcast on Anglo-Saxon literature, as I mentioned the other day. Sarah E. Bond talked to the New Books Network about Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean, her study of professions that were excluded from polite society in Ancient Rome. (Seriously, U.Mich. Press? $80?)

Prof Treharne’s voice sounded just like I expected. Prof. Bond’s was a surprise. She sounded like my sister. In retrospect this makes sense; she grew up just a bit down the road. But why my different reaction? Why do I have an expectation of the sound of someone’s voice from reading their tweets?

Fan Art by Morticia the Cat

After careful examination (the unexamined Twitter feed is not worth following), I have come to the conclusion that I hear all tweets by women as if they were read by Kathleen Turner.

Prof. Treharne’s voice is similarly pitched, with allowances made for her outre-Atlantique accent, and therefore sounded right to me.

This post is of no importance to anyone.

There was an Old-Testament-grade thunderstorm this week. My shingles are apparently not among the righteous; the roof sprang a leak. We caught it before it could do any serious damage but I’ve been up in the attic this weekend, carrying boxes out to sit in the sunshine and replacing damp insulation.

One of the boxes contained a first edition of Unfinished Tales, purchased at the remainder price of $2.98. The glue on the fold-out map has come loose, but it’s otherwise in good condition. I’ve never seen it before. It must be part of my first wife’s estate, purchased before I met her. (That price is compatible with our net worth in those days.)

I was debating whether to purchase a copy of the book. Now I have my answer.

Brenton Dickieson (whose name my autocorrect fights with all its strength) made his way through John Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion.  A formidable accomplishment (944 pages!), but such are the labors of the theologian.  It’s the best way to teach them perseverance and humility, since they never have to collimate optics in the laboratory.

At one point, Brent vouchsafed that next time through, he will read a modern translation that is free from “all those obscure -ate verbs we lost long ago in verb form (like arrogate, abominate, irradiate, obviate, vitiate, actuate, inculcate, supplicate, promulgate, propitiate, intimate, abrogate, expiate, execrate, extenuate, expostulate, derogate, vacillate, and, of course, predestinate).”

These verbs are far from lost!  Nuclear physicists irradiate many things. (Only doing it unintentionally is frowned upon.)  In engineering documents I have frequently used “actuate”, “abrogate”, “inculcate”, “extenuate”, and “promulgate” and none of my reviewers has raised an eyebrow.  To abominate, execrate, or derogate things is frowned upon (deprecated?) in the modern, hyper-polite workplace, so I always have to change those.

My status as a liberal artisan is known and indulged so I can use “obviate” and “vitiate” with only a remark en passant from the editor about not using too many “Joe-words”. “Vacillate” is the mot juste for dealing with recalcitrant bureaucrats. And of course I challenge anyone to spend an hour among engineers without observing any behavior for which “arrogate” is the only possible verb.

All told, of Brent’s 19 lost verbs, I use 12 regularly and get away with 9.  I hope that this effort to enumerate them may mitigate his dismay, in part.

Thomas Cahill relates (p. 160) that the account of the “Cattle Raid of Cooley“ in the Book of Leinster is followed by a scribal addition in Latin, which is one of the finest texts it has been my privilege to encounter.

I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some are poetical figments; some seem possible and others not; some are for the delectation of idiots.

My boss won’t let me put that on any of my technical reports, so I am adopting it here as the official disclaimer of Idiosophy.

Works Consulted

Cahill, Thomas. How the Irish Saved Civilization. Anchor Books, 1995.

Elaine Treharne from Stanford is tweeting The Dream of the Rood, because that is the kind of thing she does.  I thought I’d better find out something about the poem, so I headed over to the Fount of All Knowledge to read up.

There, at the beginning of the poem, is the familiar “hwæt”, and with the the clarity that comes from being at the bottom of my first mug of tea, I suddenly knew how to translate that word.  It means:

<!DOCTYPE html-ms>
<HTML lang="ang">

This seems like an obvious web-nerd concept, but the three biggest search engines agree that they can’t find it out there, so I’m writing it down here. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that  there’s an ISO-639 language code for Old English. (Middle English is “enm”.) No one has established an SGML document type definition for parchment manuscripts, perhaps due to the shortage of monks, so I had to invent that one.

Lots of people have been talking about the poems in Tolkien’s works lately.  I think Olga started it, with a characteristically delightful discussion of elf-song in The Hobbit.  Alan of The Prancing Pony Podcast has posted a pondering about “The Road Goes Ever On”.  On Twitter, Olga and I discovered that we both sing the poems, though not out loud if anyone else can hear.

Here are some of the tunes I use, for the sake of provoking argument.  They’re arranged in order of increasing embarrassment at my congenital lack of solemnity.

Hymn to Elbereth: Princess Leia’s Theme

The tempo fits. It doesn’t feel wrong to stretch the name “Elbereth” over half a measure. And I love the idea of elf-voices as french horns.

Bombadil’s Song against the Barrow Wights: Estuans interius

From Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.  Of course everything Tom says can be sung to the same tune, and I love Peter Hall’s composition for when he’s in a good mood.  But when Bombadil is out to destroy, he needs something darker.  Strangely enough, the 12th-Century satirist Walter of Châtillon who wrote “Estuans Interius” was like old Tom, in that he used the same meter for almost everything.

Errantry: Sir Arthur Sullivan’s The Major General’s Aria

from Pirates of Penzance, of course. You can use this for “Earendil was a Mariner” too, with a little twisting, but it doesn’t work so well.

Legolas’s song of Nimrodel: “Nadine”

Corey Olsen likes to take a line from Legolas’s song as an example of a perfect line of iambic meter:

Amroth beheld the fading shore / Now low beyond the swell,
And cursed the faithless ship that bore / Him far from Nimrodel.

Against which I’d put Chuck Berry’s heptameters:

I saw her from the corner when she turned and doubled back
And started walkin’ toward a coffee-colored Cadillac

The worst of all: Namárië

Donald Swann did this as a chant straight out of a medieval cathedral, but my mind runs down different channels.

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen (singin’ ooh wah diddy, diddy dum diddy do)
yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron! (ooh wah diddy, diddy dum diddy do)
Yéni ve (yéni ve)
Lintë (lintë)
Yéni ve lintë yuldar avanier…

and that’s when the paramedics arrived.