For six months, I’ve been trying to get a good picture of the fox. Finally:
stop and smell the flowers, too late
High-stepper
Three-quarter turn is my best angle, n’est-ce pas?
I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Attenborough!
Category: trivial Page 3 of 5
I have just subscribed to the Oxford English Dictionary (at a special discount rate, thanks to Sparrow). To inaugurate the subscription, I just read the entire definition of “what”. It took me an hour and a quarter.
In the midst of this, I discovered that I was completely wrong about the origins of my wife’s favorite English phrase. “What the x“, for various values of x, traces back to… Geoffrey Chaucer?! It looks like he brought it over from the French “que diable…”. I find this strangely disappointing.
Addressing a crucial question of language
Then it occurred to me that there might be something of interest in the choices we make about he noun we put at the end of the phrase. The pox is gone now, since we don’t have to worry about it any more (for the time being). “Hell” was my father’s preferred locution. Google ngrams don’t reach back very far, but they show hell is still going strong. In fact, it really took off about the time I was born. “Devil” and “deuce” have been fading since the Great Depression; there appears to be a transfer of authority from the central executive to the collective, coincident with the spread of popular democracy in the English-speaking world, but other than that tenuous connection I’ve found nothing.
Google Ngrams for the leader board
Apropos of which, I must salute the OED for the utility and delicacy of their phrase, “in polite colloq. usage…”
A brief list of things JRRT thought were too short:
- The Lord of the Rings. Reporting the opinion of fans
- Out of the Silent Planet, when he was trying to persuade a publisher to pick it up.
- A letter to Christopher. Who hasn’t closed a letter this way?
- “Farmer Giles of Ham”. I agree completely.
- Hobbit legs. No argument here, unless I were contracting with one to dig a hole.
- Time
That last one is by far the dominant use of the phrase in LotR. Everyone from Bilbo to Aragorn uses it. That’s consistent with a story about the end of the Third Age, just before all the faerie elements departed. It’s also how the phrase is used in “The Fall of Arthur”.
For verification, the phrase “too short” does not appear in The Silmarillion. Elves never think time is too short, unless a mortal is there to remind them. Smith of Wootton Major caught the attitude from them, so the phrase doesn’t appear in his story either.
Curiously, the phrase doesn’t seem to be in “Leaf by Niggle”. (I don’t have an electronic copy of that story so I can’t be sure.) Perhaps it’s because Niggle never knew how short his time was actually going to be.
The narrator of The Hobbit tells us
“Now, it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.”
Chapter 3, p.60
Is this true? We note that narrators of fiction are not universally applauded for their veracity, and subject the assertion to proper statistical verification.
Experimental Approach
Our team of Idiosophical researchers:
- Counted the number of pages in each chapter (a matter of reading the Table of Contents);
- Classified each chapter as to whether the events in it are Good or Uncomfortable, Palpitating, and Gruesome (a matter of arch opinion).
Results
Figure 1. Histogram of chapter lengths by type
A visual inspection of the histograms in Figure 1 shows them not to be obviously distinct. Statistically, Pearson’s χ2 test was applied to distinguish the two. The null hypothesis that the two histograms are the same is not rejected by the data: χ2 = 16.8 on 19 degrees of freedom; p=0.6.
The outlier at 35 pages is “The Council of Elrond”. Although listening to ancient blowhards relate the history of the world for five or six hours is uncomfortable, the specification was “uncomfortable, palpitating, and gruesome”, which the council was not. Especially for us, who can set the book down and go re-fill our glass any time we need to.
Conclusion
We infer from these data that the narrator was practicing upon our credulity.
Works Cited
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit. New York: Ballantine Books, 1965.
——— The Lord of the Rings. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002.
Tom Hillman has a nice essay about lameness and what it means in the Silmarillion, with particular attention to Melkor and the story of Turin. The piece begins, though, with Hephaestus’s lameness, and a quote from the Iliad.
From that snippet, I learn that the words Homer uses for “unquenchable laughter” are “ἄσβεστος … γέλως”, or in Roman letters, “asbestos gelos”. “Asbestos”, it turns out, is the Greek word for “unquenchable”.
This reminds me that in The Lord of the Rings, exactly one character is called “unquenchable”. If Pippin is the only hobbit who’s truly “ἄσβεστος”, shouldn’t he have been the one to take the Ring to the Fires of Doom?
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.
Amazon announced three months ago that they were going to make a TV series set in Middle-earth. I have now decided what I think about that. (Idiosophy is an exact science, but not a swift one.) Good.
In my dreams, Middle-earth becomes the setting for a hundred stories by different teams, with different points of view. King Arthur became immortal that way. I do have one request, though. Can we not have all the stories be about gigantic battles? That’s really not what the Legendarium is about.
According to the press release, “The series will be set before The Lord of the Rings“. Fine. Here are some examples of things I’d like to see:
- Elrond and Celebrian. There’s a tragedy there, with elements of love story, hostage rescue, valiant sons, medical drama, and a cameo appearance by Baby Arwen. You can save on production costs by re-using the Caradhras set from Fellowship of the Ring.
- Thorongil and Denethor. A buddy movie about the two young captains in the armies of Gondor. Lots of small-unit military engagements, with undercurrents of the tensions that would ultimately be the pivot of Book V.
- Raiders of the Barrow-downs. A horror movie about some Indiana-Jones-style treasure hunters from Bree who didn’t realize how far out of their depth they were going to get. Heroic rescue by Rangers at the end.
- The Adventures of Bullroarer Took. Comedy, bearing the same relationship to LotR that Rustler’s Rhapsody bears to Westerns. Use lots of tropes for cowboy movies.
Can I have one from the Fourth Age, too?
- Faramir and Eowyn in Morgul Vale. Post-apocalyptic science fiction. This can be the movie that Dune so totally failed to be. Cleaning up that toxic waste dump will involve fighting monsters, razing buildings, building gardens and forests. It ends with a stream of clean water flowing out of the valley to the Anduin.
Brenton Dickieson has been doing some meticulous numerical work on C.S. Lewis’s career and publishing updates on his blog. He’s identified seven distinct periods of Lewis’s writing career. He’s nailed down the times at which Lewis was actually writing each book, as opposed to when they were published.
I always read new posts on “A Pilgrim in Narnia” as they come out, so when I had to learn a new computer-graphics package today, those tables were at the back of my mind. Here’s a timeline of C.S. Lewis’s annual writing productivity. The vertical axis is the sum of the number of works Lewis had in progress that year, each divided by the number of years in which he was working on it.
Literary productivity metric, annual
World War II was a great thing for Lewis fans: a big spike upwards in writing, perhaps due to less time spent grading papers? I see certain resonances with the Pevensie children at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe here, but maybe that’s just me.
Of course, once we’ve defined a literary productivity metric, we can set production goals, optimize our schedules, create Gantt charts, and generally bring about a world that Lewis would not approve of at all.
Mea Culpa
If the ground in Holy Trinity Churchyard shows some unevenness tomorrow morning, blame neither frost-heave nor seismic activity. It’s my fault.
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.
| Unexpected | New to me |
|---|---|
| samoyed semiped seaweed seedbed sexiped sickbed soliped succeed sunweed | salited savoyed sweered sheered stonied |
| He could’ve meant | Ordinary Participles |
| sabered saboted scabbed scalded scalled scraped screwed scuffed scarred scorned scummed sewered shabbed shafted shagged shammed sharded shanked skinned sludged slugged smeared slashed slabbed snubbed | saddled sainted satined savored scarfed scarved scented scooped scoured sepaled serried settled sharded shawled sheaved shedded sheeted shelled shipped shotted sickled sighted sinewed singled siruped skeered skidded skilled skimmed skulled skirted slacked slatted sleaved sledded sleeved slipped slitted slopped slotted smelled smudged smutted snagged snapped snooded snouted sparked sparred spasmed spathed spatted spavied specked spiffed spitted splayed spoiled sponged spotted spurred squared staffed staired stalked stapled starred starved statued stealed stemmed stepped sterned sticked stilted stinted stooded stopped storied straked striped strived stubbed studied stuffed stunted subdued sugared sweated swelled swooned syruped |
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?
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.