Non-expurgation

Surely this cannot be!

Antediluvian, charnel, eldritch

Possible source for a few sentences to add to the new and improved little book on style, which I will be coming back to after I get back from vacation. It is the project for April and May, and if it spills over into June that is fine too; The Bacchae on Morningside Heights can wait, and I think that revising that will be my main summer project after I do this (direct link here) on June 26.

(Yes, I am going on a vacation over spring break - to see monkeys, sloths and venomous frogs, plus a host of other creatures [the resplendent quetzal!], in Costa Rica! Blog hiatus during travels: I'm not bringing my computer, and I think it will be good to have some time well and truly offline, though I am sure I will check email sporadically when there is convenient access. I'm leaving Friday middle of the day, and have a ridiculous pile of work that must be done before I go!)

Monday miscellany

At the Guardian, Paul Theroux on living as an alien in England from 1971 to 1990:

Wank was a new word for me. I learned others in those years: pantechnicon, pastilles, salopettes, anorak, ginger wine, trifle, syllabub, riddling (the coal grate), gaiters, trug, secateurs, borstal, Boche, Gorbals, yobbos, scotia (a sort of household trim), valance, shandy, sent to Coventry, applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, chicane (as of a set of racing cars), gauntlets, whitebait, infra dig, subfusc, knackers, Christmas crackers, Dutch courage, Dutch cap, double Dutch, Screaming Lord Sutch.

'Dado' should surely be on this list also!

Other links: the Penguin archive, with every Penguin ever published in chronological order; an interview with Kristin Hersh (courtesy of Julie Park).

Controlling for Clever Hans

At the Times, Nicholas Wade on a border collie with a vocabulary of 1,022 nouns:

In three years, Chaser’s vocabulary included 800 cloth animals, 116 balls, 26 Frisbees and a medley of plastic items.

Postscript on preserves

The OED entry for 'marmalade' is unexpectedly poetic. (That link will only work if you are a Columbia affiliate.) The original marmalade: "a preserve consisting of a sweet, solid, quince jelly resembling chare de quince (see chare n.4) but with the spices replaced by flavourings of rose water and musk or ambergris, and cut into squares for eating"; and the figurative uses are lovely:

1592 G. Harvey New Let. in Wks. (1884) I. 280 Euery Periode of her stile carrieth marmalad and sucket in the mouth.

1607 T. Walkington Optick Glasse 53 The marmalade and sucket of the Muses.

And, on a different note:

1949 J. Steinbeck Russ. Jrnl. 179 A passage of clarinet marmalade played in unmistakable Benny Goodman style.

Bonus links: Orlando (The Marmalade Cat); and this post on The Frisky Housewife, which was the only one of the books we had, very much gives the flavor of it!

Light reading update

I have to say that I hugely enjoyed Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. I had heard very good things about it, but it is necessary to take epic fantasy recommendations with a grain of salt: however, it breathes new life into the old scarecrow of the genre with incredibly rewarding results. I will even go so far as to say that it strongly and pleasantly reminded me of David Copperfield, one of my top ten favorite novels of all time! My only regret is that I did not wait just a little longer to get to it, since my impulse on finishing it was to demand the next installment - but that's not out till March 1: however will I wait?!?

I had quite mixed feelings about Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book. There are a number of very good essays, but many of the others are on the short/shallow side (you get that bad magaziney feeling, cumulatively - there is no clear principle of selection for who is included, and people have spent quite evidently different amounts of time and thought in composing their pieces); there is also a genuinely distressing subtext of hostility towards electronic books! It is perplexing to me - I have seen it elsewhere recently too - why the sense of an opposition? It is surely not an either-or, a few of the writers here acknowledge this thoughtfully but more of them just lash out against the immateriality of the e-text.

Perversely, I read this book on my Kindle - I should have waited till I was back in the U.S. to order it, since I'm only reading it now anyway, but as soon as I heard about Ed Park's piece on "The Dungeon Masters Guide" I knew I had to get my hands on it at once, island living notwithstanding. That piece met or even exceeded expectations: it is a great little bit, and now I will have to get hold of a 'real' copy of the book so that I can xerox it and share it with others!

Other standouts: David Hadju on Ralph Ellison; Karen Joy Fowler on The Once and Future King.

Anyway, here's one of the bits I liked from Ed's essay - I too grew up on and loved those Wordly Wise vocab books! -- the whole pieces takes the form of 100 numbered points:

15. "In grade school, English class was divided between reading, grammar, and spelling. I liked the first, dreaded the second, looked forward to the last. The vocab book we used was called Wordly Wise. There was a whole sequence of them, with an owl on the cover."

16. "At school I loved vocabulary lessons. Discovering new words. I remember distinctly the time we learned the difference between metaphor and simile--the time we learned what these words even were. The words themselves were so interesting. They weren't shaped like other words I knew. Simile reminded me of smile and, in doing so, made me smile."

17. "Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the Dungeon Masters Guide, was like the phantasmagorical appendix to Wordly Wise. My supplementary, self-directed lessons."

When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I used to race through two or three of those Wordly Wise lessons each week, burning through increasingly 'advanced' workbooks like a fiend: at the end of the week, I would take a spelling test on the words I'd learned (really I knew them already!), there would be perhaps 45 of them because I would have done more than one lesson's worth, and I would have to write a sentence to show that I knew the meaning of the word: but laziness and frenetic energy combined made me make huge absurd portmanteau sentences that would fit three or four or five of these words into a single sentence. I fear it left its mark on my writing style...

(I think I have some of these in a box in my office, I will see if I can dig them out; I am overdue for a posting on more Davidsonian juvenilia! I loved those workbooks - I would strongly recommend them to home-schoolers with kids aged 8-12 or so, I think they are ideal.)

"A small hump around 1700"

At the LRB, Jenny Diski on Google's searchable book database (I know at least one person who will be dismayed if she reads this piece - sorry, Alice!):

Melancholy is virtually non-existent before 1570, but begins to rise and then falls until it drops off completely around 1625, about the time of the death of Dowland. It builds again to a great surge in 1650 (when, it says in Wikipedia, ‘the Age of Discovery ends’: reason enough), falls and then picks up, growing nicely and rising with the Romantics in 1800, and then declines gently before starting to increase again after 2000. Sting recorded a very terrible version of Dowland’s songs in 2006. Fuck is quite absent from books until about 1590 when it jolts up the chart for about eight years and then plummets, before returning in the 1630s, holding its own quite robustly until, of course, it disappears completely between 1820 and the mid to late 1950s when it surges once more (Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the Beat Poets) and remains ever on the up after that. Not as much as shit, however, which overtook fuck in the 1950s and has remained in the ascendant. Cunt is something of a rarity, hardly visible apart from a small hump around 1700, but then it starts to perk up and continues to rise until the latest available date. I imagine it will have made something of a spurt in 2010.

Jargon

On the genetics of dog breeding: "Dog coats come in three forms: smooth (ie, short), long and wiry. Some dogs also have what fanciers refer to as 'furniture', notably moustaches. Dr Ostrander found that 80% of the variation between breeds in coat form and furniture was explained by differences in just three genes."

On Bob Marley: "Marley, as Toynbee writes, was initially skeptical about Perkins's contribution, but came around on hearing the subtle color his work added; he signaled his approval by offering Perkins a draw on his personal marijuana cigar (or 'spliff')."

Darkling

Very strange to read this entry in Johnson's Dictionary and suddenly realize as though being hit with a baseball bat that Keats had not yet written the "Ode to a Nightingale".

Other examples of a writer who so strongly puts his or her mark on a particular word?