I'm the plain and simple kind

In 2004 I posted a note about Eartha Kitt, saying that I first saw her dancing in London a very long time ago and including a photo of her in a 1956 film which I saw three times.

I now have an excuse to feature her with a more recent (2005) photo: this week she is in London again, at the Shaw Theatre, where at eighty years old she is, according to a reviewer, purring and snarling with undiminished grace.

In 1950, Orson Welles gave her her first starring role as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr. Faustus and according to rumour she was duly grateful.

These clips are unfortunately lip-synched but illustrate her extraordinary talent and the perfection of her consonants:
Just An Old-Fashioned Girl
I Want to Be Evil
See What the Boys In the Back Room Will Have

In the first two she demonstrates how she can switch from sweet to vicious (sometimes within a single phrase). The third is from a show allegedly in homage to Dietrich, but she parodies her and does it much better.[Sadly, YouTube have now cravenly closed down this one: "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation"]

A new Great Leader of All Turkmen

I and those of my friends who follow closely the changing political scene in the gas-rich central Asian states were dismayed to learn the result of the recent elections in Turkmenistan. Most of us, in the course of our late-night pub discussions over the years, had mastered the correct pronunciation of the president’s name: Saparmurat Niyazov (though sometimes we referred to him as Sapper). He was a brutal megalomaniac; the cult of his personality—he ran the country like a private Disney World—made Kim Jong-Il look like Clement Attlee.

The lovable old fellow died, full of years and fine cognac, a couple of months ago. So far so good, but this week 98.5% of the five million Turkmenis turned out to elect a successor. And whom have they chosen? The acting president, one Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov.

Clearly, dramatic changes are afoot. It will take us a while to catch up with that one, and he’ll have to be just Gurbers—or possibly Berdy—to us until we’ve got it right. We're playing the video of the swearing-in ceremony over and over again; the commentator pronounces his full name beautifully.

Valentine

And thou—what needest with thy tribe's black tents
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?

Two of the most beautiful last lines of any poem, but if you read the rest of Francis Thompson's Arab Love Song you will find that it is actually a sly way of saying "Do we have to go to your mother's every weekend?"

Hold the front page

This week our media have been enthusiastically covering what is perhaps the least interesting story of the decade: Tory leader David Cameron refuses to say whether or not he was punished as a schoolboy at Eton for smoking cannabis.

His response to questions on this trivial nonsense was: “I did things when I was young that I regret … but politicians are entitled to a past that is private”.

Leaving aside his apparent preposterous belief that admitting to having smoked cannabis at school would upset the voters (the reverse is probably true), this remark needs to be questioned. No-one would suggest that the public has a right—or would want—to know all about such things as, say, his decade-long childhood resistance to proper use of the potty, but to assert that anything a politician, especially a potential prime minister, did in his youth should never become public knowledge is fatuous even by the standards of Tory leaders' pronouncements. Suppose he had been convicted of fraud, or grievous bodily harm, when he was 17, but had done his bird and thus paid his debt to society, would we nevertheless not feel that we ought to know about it before voting to put him in charge of the country? Politicians’ right to refuse to comment on everything they did when young? Aw phooey!





But wasn't he an absolute poppet at 21?

A disease of one’s own

I posted a note last May describing the delight to be had in finding something wrong with you which baffles your doctor (and by the way whatever it was I had has now stopped hurting), but this is a small pleasure compared with the fun to be got by having some nasty affliction actually named after you. Best if you don’t actually suffer from it, of course, but merely devote several decades of your life to discovering it.

There is a splendid website called Whonamedit which is devoted to eponymous diseases, or syndromes, or obscure body parts, or procedures. Work on it is still in progress—it now lists a mere 7,829 eponyms but eventually it will include more than 15,000 eponyms and 6,000 persons.

As one does on a dull Sunday afternoon, I was browsing through it today and found some fascinating and little-known byways to explore. How many people, for example, know that a Morand’s Foot has eight toes, and that it is named after Sauveur François Morand, an eighteenth-century pioneer in urology and the first to devise the Trendelenburg position? And who would not want to learn exactly what the prognosis is if they acquire Espildora Luque's syndrome, or Ledderhose's contracture, or even, God forbid, Kaposi's varicelliform eruption?

But the one which I found the most interesting was not really a medical condition at all. It is called Yentl’s syndrome and is named after the heroine of a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer called Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, in which Yentl had to disguise herself as a man to attend school and study the Talmud at an all-male Jewish school in 19th century Poland; it was made into a 1983 film directed and starred in by Barbra Streisand. The syndrome describes the phenomenon that women are treated less optimally in the management of coronary heart disease than men.

How, exactly? Is it prevalent today? And was the problem first identified by cardiac specialists, or feminists, or, most likely, feminist cardiac specialists? I suppose one could find out, for Google brings up seventy other websites that refer to it, but I shall leave it there, for I think I've got a slight touch of Zenker's diverticulum coming on.

Writer’s block

One can’t chew one’s pen now, of course, and drumming one’s fingers on the keyboard doesn’t help. A writer friend of mine called Hugo Jennings, trying to get himself started on a novel for which he had already had the advance, once turned in desperation to an ancient method of stimulating creativity, which Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary defines as follows:

Taghairm, ta’garm. n. In the Scottish Highlands, divination; esp. inspiration sought by lying in a bullock’s hide behind a waterfall. (Gael.)

He told me later that it was a dismal failure. Exhausted after lugging his hired bullock’s skin halfway up the Scottish mountain to the waterfall, he found that the little ledge above which the water tumbled was crowded with an extraordinary bunch of people: a couple of crazy old shepherds, some palmists (who had come for the divination) and several Americans with waterproof laptops. He managed to find a space to lie down and wrap himself up in the skin, but what with the cold and the wet and the constant background hum of Texan chatter it was quite clear that inspiration was not going to come to him, and after a miserable hour or so he gave up and stumbled back down the rocky path.

Happily, he later managed to finish his book, which was a moderate success, and was able to get a good price for the bullock’s hide after he had dried it out.

Solangism

Nicolas Chauvin was a devoted follower of Napoleon in spite of being wounded 17 times, disfigured and maimed, in his service. In post-Napoleonic France this earned the poor fellow ridicule and derision, and after he had been mocked in several plays the word chauvinisme was coined as a term for excessive nationalistic fervour (we dropped the "e", of course). In recent years, prefixed by “male”, it also denotes misogynistic contempt.

I have not been able to establish whether Nicolas ever married. Let us assume that he did, and that his wife was called Solange, which for all I know she might have been. Then we could coin a new word to describe the misandrist equivalent of a male chauvinist.

A solangist friend of mine—let us call her Vespertilia, for that is not her name—holds firmly to the belief that women would be perfectly well able to follow any occupation or sport had they not been oppressed by men for many millennia and prevented from engaging in most of them by men’s selfishness. If there were no discrimination and the right training was on offer, she says, women could equal or surpass men’s achievements in every field. and she rejects any suggestion that few women would have the desire to excel as, say, coal-miners, serial killers, caber-tossers, Royal Marine Commandos, hangpersons, front row forwards, bass-baritones, waste disposal operatives and so on. “Ah, but with encouragement they might”, she says firmly.

She is also very hot on gender-specific words and feels strongly about actress. If acting is acting, and there should be no distinction by gender between practitioners, of course they can all be called actors, but then logically we should demand that they compete together for awards, and there can be no “Best Actress” any more. This would probably be OK for your Denches and your Mirrens and your Blanchetts, and bully for the little dears, but in a bad year for male actors even the finest among them might have to be content with lesser trinkets such as Best Supporting Actor in a Foreign-Language Wildlife Film, which seems a bit hard.

“So what?”, says Vespertilia, “Awards are a load of silly rubbish anyway.”

Well, it’s a point of view.

And it goes marching on

About 1856 William Steffe wrote a camp-meeting song with the traditional "Glory Hallelujah" refrain; it started with the words "Say, brothers, will you meet us on Canaan's happy shore?" and the tune had such an infectious swing that it became widely known.

Early in the Civil War, a regiment stationed in Boston, using Steffe's tune, sang a marching song about John Brown of Kansas who was the first white American abolitionist to advocate and to practice insurrection as a means to the abolition of slavery and had been hanged for treason (against the state of Virginia) shortly before, but directed it as a jest towards a contemporary in their ranks also called John Brown. This version, John Brown's Body, soon became popular among the Union troops.

In 1861, after a visit to a Union Army camp, Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) wrote the poem set to it that came to be called The Battle Hymn of the Republic, in response to a challenge from a preacher who thought that that there should be more uplifting words to the tune. Her words are certainly pious, and, like those of most hymns, utter drivel (you don’t store grapes in a vintage), but have a fire to match the spirit of the authoress, who said on her ninetieth birthday “I march to the brave music still”.

[As a footnote to this story, a man who taught music at my school, a moderately distinguished organist called George Oldroyd, had the perfectly idiotic idea of writing a different tune to these words and making us sing it. On these occasions I and a bunch of rather louche friends sitting at the back used to stick to the original; this gave rise to a somewhat confused rendering, but sadly there weren’t enough of us to make it a real contest.]

Like the two I mentioned the other day, Cwm Rhondda and Eventide, JWH’s words with Steffe’s tune can be counted among the top Christian holy numbers. Another might be the tremendously jolly oom-pa Whosoever Will much favoured by non-conformists. These are personal choices, of course; others will have their own favourites which will often include the dreary Onward Christian Soldiers or Immortal, Invisible.

But why am I, as hairy an atheist as you could wish to meet (or to avoid), writing about hymn tunes for the second time in two weeks? Because some of them are rather good; they are mostly just strophic ditties but very satisfying to give out with in the bath. And anyway, do I have to be a Freemason to enjoy The Magic Flute, or a Muslim to be awed by the Blue Mosque?

Talking proper

When in the United States, the cuteness of my accent was sometimes remarked upon, always in a friendly manner. But that was some time ago; nowadays, when so many of the roles in big Hollywood movies go to British or antipodean actors (no longer playing mainly villains as they used to), perhaps the American ear has become more attuned to the way non-Americans speak; I doubt if the likes of Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, Jude Law, Bill Nighy, Michael Sheen, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Nicole Kidman sound in the least cute to anyone.

I don’t think I speak like any of them; if pressed, I suppose I would say that I use a sort of debased RP, though I arrived at this not naturally, from birth, but more by assiduous imitation of my betters in my early years, for it is foreign to my social background: the only thing I have in common with the traditional users of the Received Pronunciation is that I was born in south-eastern England.

The Anthropology Department of the University of Arizona has much of interest to say about RP, as does Wikipedia and The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language. All agree that it no longer has its former elitist connotation or is considered “standard” English, though it is still—more or less—the pronunciation taught to non-native speakers. For an authoritative note on Estuary English from the BBC look here (the BBC), and on the Queens English look here (the University of Arizona again!).

It is no longer true (if it ever was) that, as Henry Higgins said, “no Englishman can open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him”. (Scotsmen are another matter, but let’s not go into all that here.) But then Shaw was a silly old Irishman who greatly admired American English and preferred it to RP English; my guess is that this was not a matter of pronunciation but only because he was nutty about simplified spelling, and was impressed by the Americans’ half-hearted attempt at it with labor, dialog, traveler and so on.

A better kind of hat

No. 187 in Notable Hats, soon to be a major new TV series

Having said all that there is to be said about Napoleon’s hat, it is now time to turn our attention to something much jollier. Several hundred soldiers were wearing these with brio, not to mention panache, at the Republic Day Parade in New Delhi last week. It must have been a sight to stir the blood.

Looking ahead

Two days ago I mentioned a remarkable guess made by Hal Draper in 1961 in the form of a fantasy about a problem that future generations of mankind might face.

More than fifty years earlier a more famous writer had made a similarly inspired guess. E M Forster wrote a short story call The Machine Stops which he said was “a reaction to one of H G Wells’ earlier heavens”. It describes a society in which two twentieth-century technological advances have progressed in a way that few could have foreseen.

The first is automation: machines run everything in Forster’s future world, maintaining and repairing themselves and leaving nothing for humans to do except be entertained and indulge their intellectual and artistic interests. It has long been forgotten that machines were designed and built by men, and The Machine, beneficent and all-providing, has become a sort of deity.

Second, in that world people live in individual cells and rarely meet face to face—and indeed prefer not to. The automatic transport systems continue to work but are hardly ever used, for no-one needs to go anywhere. They obtain whatever they need by pressing buttons and are in constant communication with each other irrespective of distance.

Thus Forster in 1909, in an extraordinary feat of imagination , brings into being television, videoconferencing and the internet.

As you might gather from the title, it all ends in tears. But there is a glimmer of hope left, so you will not be too depressed if you read the story here.

The misnudged quanta

The Microsoft Corporation has applied for a patent on a new idea which Martin Gardiner of Really Magazine looks at here. As he says, it is very difficult to see how it will work, or indeed what it actually is, but the concept appears to relate to the problem of storing the huge amounts of data which are accumulating, of accessing it, and of ensuring that it will be “immortal”.

Forty-six years ago, the socialist activist and author Hal Draper (1914-1990) wrote a witty and uncannily prescient short story called MS Fnd in a Lbry. It takes the form of a report written by an anthropologist from an alien civilization who investigates the remains of our civilization several billion years into the future. It turns out that mankind's fall was brought about by information overload and the inability to catalogue and retrieve knowledge properly.

The report chronicles the technological advances by which mankind found ways in which to cope with the increasing volume of data. When it was taking up an entire artificial planet new technologies enabled it to be condensed progressively into smaller spaces, until the sum of human knowledge, stored round the galaxy in a virtual sort of way, could be accessed from one drawer. Then they lost the drawer…

A footnote to the report suggests that the alien civilization, as yet unsuspecting, may be about to suffer a similar catastrophe. You can read the story here.

It is frightening to think that we may one day tackle the problem by means of techniques devised by the Microsoft Corporation, whose use in their patent application of the phrase “…during the lifespan of the immortalized data…” suggests that their grasp on these matters, not to mention the English language, is at best tenuous.

Bush spells it out

Get the full SOTU speech and the Democratic response on video HERE.

The darkness deepens

Last Sunday my eye was caught by an announcement about a TV programme in the series Songs of Praise. This would not normally have caused me to switch on, for few entertainments excite me less than church services, but this one promised massed choirs, handbell ringers, something called the Boghall and Bathgate Caledonia Pipe Band and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, so was obviously going to be a bit special. Even the fact that it was called, depressingly, a Scottish Big Sing for Burns Night did not put me off, for one of the items to be performed was Abide with Me.

This is one of the top half-dozen Christian holy numbers*. Its best setting is called Eventide which, given anything like a half-decent rendering, cannot fail to make you want to join in**. Though not much of a hymn-singer myself, having sung them very rarely since my schooldays, I could certainly be counted on in a sinking ship situation (when other helpers fail and comforts flee...) to support my doomed fellow passengers with Abide with Me in a lusty if inaccurate baritone, perhaps even with a bit of descant.

However, the announcement also spoke of “spectacular orchestral arrangements” which should have warned me, and the scene when I tuned in was not encouraging; the general impression was of a late night show at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, though actually the colourful throng were in the Glasgow City Halls.

And the way they did Abide with Me suited this ambiance. I had a vision of the cloth-eared arranger, one David Pringle, settling down to his task: “Now, I think I’ll begin with a bit of the Moonlight Sonata, then bring in some tubular bells and one of those instruments that you hit with a little stick and it goes blingdingdiddleyding, then a few bars of Eventide sung VERY SLOWLY. A few trumpets, they’re always good, then a bit more Beethoven and back to Eventide, then…”

I switched off sadly disappointed but consoled to think that I am missing very little nowadays by not going to church. Change and decay, indeed.


*Another, of course, is Cwm Rhondda. I mentioned this tremendous tune once before, in the footnote to an earlier post about Jehovah and his supporters.

**Especially if sung using the Hungarian words by Áprily Lajos: Maradj velem, mert mindjárt este van/ Nő a sötét, ó el ne hagyj, Uram/ Nincs senkim és a vigaszt nem lelem/ Gyámoltalannal, ó maradj velem.

Er, probably

The letters 'our' within a word generally make the sound 'aw', 'or', 'ow-er', 'ow' or 'oor', and are pronounced in other ways too for all I know.

Is it possible that there is only one English word of one syllable in which these letters* are pronounced 'er'? I can think of only one, but I cannot be sure because, sadly, the advanced OED search engine cannot search by number of syllables and there are 5,802 words in it containing 'our'.



“Try it again, General:
‘This urgent surge will purge the insurgent scourge’”



If you think this sort of discussion is boring, look HERE for a joke which is a source of much hilarity wherever top linguists foregather.


[*There must be a technical term in linguistics for a group of letters within a word; I thought it might be morpheme, but that's something else.]

Here they come

Reproducing a cartoon from a magazine in your blog is a fairly contemptible thing to do, so I must make it clear that it is only in order to let American readers know of the fun in store for them in a few months' time that I offer the following, which appeared this week in Private Eye:

WASHED-UP ENGLAND STAR
LATEST

Dan Brown’s Body

When I last wrote a post mentioning The Da Vinci Code I had not read the book or seen the film. I still haven’t, so remain unqualified to express any opinion about either. But I did enjoy reading in the magisterial Language Log some notes by Geoffrey K Pullum on Brown’s prose style, from which I extract:

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, 'Prologue') is the Louvre, late at night:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day: Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs these details into the first two words of an action sequence—details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre...

…Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that's why.

… "Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest, and most accomplished writers in the country", said Nelson DeMille, a bestselling author who has himself hit the #1 spot in the New York Times list… And there are four other similar pieces of praise on the back cover. Together those blurbs convinced me to put this piece of garbage on the CostCo cart along with the the 72-pack of toilet rolls. Thriller writers must have a code of honor that requires that they all praise each other's new novels, a kind of omerta that enjoins them to silence about the fact that some fellow member of the guild has given evidence of total stylistic cluelessness. A fraternal code of silence. We could call it... the Da Vinci code; or the Dan Brown code.

The whole piece is well worth reading as a fund of lessons in how not to write; it also provides links to some other articles about Brown’s genius.

The mystery of Napoleon’s hat (Part 2)

Many famous men have been distinguished by idiosyncrasies of appearance. Both Solomon and Louis Quatorze were known for the glory of their apparel; Charlemagne was renowned for the length of his beard (it is said he could kneel on it, though it is not recorded why this was necessary). Lloyd George had his hair bobbed; Cromwell had warts; and Keir Hardie wore a tweed cap. But a tweed cap, even though a contemporary photograph shows it to have had a retractable undercarriage which fastened on top with a piece of string, is not, for sheer étalage, in the same class as Napoleon’s hat.

The principle on which this singular headpiece was designed is said to be a mystery even to experienced hatters. It is not known, for example, whether the back could be let down to facilitate the heaving of coal, or whether the front could be folded up to form the thing into a watering can. Its possibilities as a muffin dish, a font and an umbrella stand have also been canvassed from time to time by interested parties.

Those who have seen in a museum the hat which is treasured as a genuine Napoleonic relic have been impressed not only by its shape but by its size: it is enormous, and it is hard to imagine what went on inside the part of it that was not filled by the imperial cranium. Was it stuffed with despatches from the battlefield. Or with old newspapers? Did it perhaps contain a secret drawer for Josephine’s letters? Or was there a packet of sandwiches there and a flask of cognac for sudden emergencies?

That there must have been more in it than meets the eye seems certain, or how else could the little chap have kept the thing aloft? For on anyone with a head of even medium size it must have fallen about the shoulders like a cape.

The mystery of Napoleon’s hat (Part 1)

I wouldn’t call it a fetish, perish the thought, or even an obsession, but I do find hats fascinating and often write about them, sometimes speculating on the wearers’ motives. What prompted Zoran Acimov, for example, the director of the Retezat National Park in Romania, to put this on his head?

What we have here is clearly just a personal fancy, but in other contexts spectacular hats can have great historical significance. The writer and cartoonist Nicolas Bentley well understood this:

Many reasons have been put forward to account for Napoleon’s fame, apart from those put forward by Napoleon himself. Historians, politicians, novelists and film directors never seem to tire of airing their theories about the small corporal. But I know of no theory that takes into account the importance of the Emperor’s hat.

Imagine, for instance, how different things might have been at Jena or Marengo with Napoleon in a white topper such as was fashionable at the time, the crown being rather larger at the top than at the base. Imagine the effect, especially on Josephine, of a small sugar-loaf hat surmounting that dumpy imperial figure. Imagine the Emperor at Austerlitz with the plumed casque of a French dragoon coming down well over his ears. Imagine a flat tricorne precariously balanced on that rounded pate, so that a sharp turn of the head must have left the hat facing towards the front.

The fate of nations cannot be sealed by a man whose hat causes the bystanders to grin, and Napoleon knew this.

His genius showed itself in an astonishing variety of ways. It was apparent not only in war and in diplomacy, but also in the art of good government, in his judgement of men, and still more in his judgement of moments. Above all, it was shown in his choice of a hat....

Part 2 follows...

Don’t try this at home

Given my total lack of interest in the tedious activities which are called sport, it is surprising that I seem to have written, so far, around twenty posts with this tag, but this is because I use the word very loosely*, applying it to any pastime which can be indulged in competitively (like growing a beard) or which involves physical exertion or danger without any real point (like sewer exploration).

Here is another, which is certainly dangerous but does have a real point, or several.

This may look like Ricky Gervais, but it is not; it is a man called Brad Byers, who claims to be the current holder of the World Record for Sword Swallowing; he is also a top man at Hammering a Nail Into One’s Face. However, it should be noted that, according to The British Medical Journal, Matty "Blade" Henshaw swallowed a total of 3,782 swords in 2003 (not, I suppose, all at once), 50 swords were swallowed simultaneously by 19 individuals at a swallowers' convention in 2002, and a belly dancer has swallowed 11 swords at the same time.

Really Magazine has further notes on all this and tells us that the BMJ’s December edition carried a study on Sword swallowing and its side effects.


* Probably none of the sports I have mentioned here is highly esteemed among sports people. For a note on which sport has the highest status, see HERE.