An Unbridled Tongue

The precise origin of the expression 'as happy as Larry', like those of almost all modern colloquialisms, not to say colloquialisms dead to the present, has been swallowed in the fogs of time. The OED, for one, cops out with 'Etym. uncertain', its earliest citation coming from the Australian writer Joseph Furphy, aka. Tom Collins, writing in the newspaper Barrier Truth, local to the marvelously-named Broken Hill, New South Wales, on the 29th of December, 1905. One website devoted to this variety of philological speculation manages to get it back further, remarking confidently:

Larry—certainly the best known character in the world of similes. The expression he instigated is most likely to be of Australian or New Zealand origin. The earliest printed reference currently known is from the New Zealand writer G. L. Meredith, dating from around 1875:

"We would be as happy as Larry if it were not for the rats".

The Antipodean origin looks clear, then, even if nobody is really sure who that Larry was. So imagine my surprise, when, perusing a little treatise entitled, The vain religion of the formal hypocrite, and the mischief of an unbridled tongue, penned by the Puritan theologian Richard Baxter in 1660, I came across this:

Immediately was paid put to the Antipodean theory; the expression must have been current already in seventeenth-century England, even if it reached print only seldom. My initial response to this discovery, naturally, was to enquire, with everybody else: Who was Larry? But the question seemed impossible to answer. Even if it was indeed Baxter who coined the happy Larry—obviously an unlikely scenario—we would have precious little way of knowing to which Larry or Lawrence, or even Laurens or Lorenzo, he was referring. But I was suspicious: the lone hit in Baxter was not enough to be sure, and would never lead to an answer. A cursory search of the printed text database on EEBO, indeed, turned up two or three more happie Larries; but it was a 'happy as Laurentius', in one of many anonymous broadsides of the 1640s, that got my nose twitching, for in the margin was the little note, Vid. Erigena his Division of Nature.

I turned, therefore, to the Periphyseon, also known as De divisione naturae, of the Irish philosopher Johannes Scotus Erigena—or Eriugena, as we now more correctly have him. Eriugena, pretty much the only serious philosophical mind between Augustine and Anselm, is best known for re-translating, for Charles the Bald, the mystical treatises ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite into good Latin. He thus played the same sort of function for Charles that Marsilio Ficino would play for Lorenzo de' Medici six hundred years later, and was favoured accordingly. One story, so often repeated in books about mediaeval philosophy that it even turns up on the Wiki page, is that Charles, teasing Johannes across supper with the question, Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?, that is, What is the difference between a drunk and an Irishman, was met with the Wildean reply, Mensa tantum: 'only a table'. Books about mediaeval philosophy, I trust you will take my word, need every amusing anecdote they can get.

Scotus's other work of note is the aforementioned Periphyseon, written in the 860s, and the first major introduction of Neoplatonism into Latin philosophy. It was condemned by the Church, like all good books, in 1210 and 1225, though it remained one of the most influential treatises in Western history: Henry Bett lists Hugh of St. Victor, Abelard, the Jewish Zohar, Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and even Hegel as its intellectual debtors. And it is here, in Book Three, that we find our happy Laurentius:


To translate: 'Therefore, [if it hadn't been for that pesky Original Sin] all human society would have been as happy as Saints Lawrence and Stephen, who were troubled by no perturbations in their souls.' In the case of the martyr saints, their spiritual felicity or happiness was brought into greater relief by their physical torments. St Lawrence, you will recall, was that carefree fellow who, when he was griddled alive under Valerian in 258 AD, managed to mutter 'This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite,' thus displaying equanimity in the face of torture. Eriugena, it seems, took a popular attribution of felicity to Lawrence (and Stephen, the first martyr), and expressed it in such a way that later writers could make it proverbial. Here, undoubtedly, and ironically, was the Larry of 'happy as Larry' fame.

The Place's Name

Dullest of days, most brutally grey and dark and overcast. The rain relents, and then lents again. I take the opportunity for a walk in north London, to Highbury, to find, if I can, or even if not, the home of a childhood friend—long past, say twenty years—the interior of which I remember with apparent exactness, down to the sculpture on the kitchen table, of a carton pouring milk into a bowl: real bowl, real carton, disc and frozen column of milk in plaster. I remembered it to be near a park or green; I remembered the green to be immense, and rather fantastical. But when I arrived in Highbury Fields, I discovered the green to be rather small, though admittedly picturesque in its autumnal finery. The disappointment of age: a tableau.


It was still raining when I found the house, or what might have been, and so I continued my interrogation of the area. Highbury, it seems, is a place of architecture beset by vegetation. A dull block in the private enclave of Aberdeen Park, just to the east, is vandalised by a rather aggressive and brightly-fledged gang of creepers:


A nearby wall, meanwhile, has been shamelessly defaced by some reckless local greenfinger, tired of small canvases:


Just across the street from here is one Baalbec Road, the sudden apparition of whose name is so extraordinary to me that I am compelled to reproduce the signage as documentary evidence:


The street itself is very fine, a series of variations in terracotta and brick, each a slight shade different from the last, nothing supercelestial, but beautifully proportioned. 'Here is a raucous Cockney answer to the Georgian good manners of the [Highbury] Fields,' writes Simon Jenkins: 'an 1880s essay in what a firm chisel could do with red bricks, terracotta and a builder's pattern book. The small houses are covered in carved leaves, swags, dentils, every conceivable stylistic gimmick.' I can enjoy the description of a street as an 'essay': let us literarify our built environment, and let us do it without blue plaques. Jenkins adds, inexplicably: 'This is the London which tourists will want to see in a hundred years' time.'

The terracotta stone in the centre of this wall bears the letters 'AD', to match another bearing the date, 1889. But look at the stone: is its monogram not almost the same as that forming the signature of Albrecht Dürer?

The street is fine, but what of the name? Baalbec? The ancient city of Syria, now Lebanon, was built over centuries under the Roman yoke, and long considered the great ruin of the Near East—so great, in fact, that it was reputed to have been built by Solomon himself. After all, I Kings 9.17-18 tells us, 'Solomon built Gezer, and Bethhoron the nether, / And Baalath, and Tadmor in the wilderness, in the land'. Tadmor, we know, is Palmyra, which was usually twinned with Baalbek—and the name was, for some, too close to Baalath for chance. (Even as late as 1964 we find the identification accepted, by Ruth Nagle Watkins in an article on Baalbek for Art Journal.) Furthermore, Solomon invoked demons to lift and arrange the cyclopaean stones used in the city's temples. Thus in the 1425 History of Timur by Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi, we read:

This town is very famous, as well for the beauty of the walls, as for the height of its buildings; and it is believed to have been built by Solomon's order, by daemons and genii, over whom he had an absolute command.

This sort of folklore was soon common currency among the explorers of later centuries. When John Ray visited in the late seventeenth century, he described the same huge stones as Sharafuddin, noting one in particular that measured 66 feet long (28 cubits in the History). Daniel Fenning, who, in his New System of Geography (1778), calls Baalbek 'the boldest plan that appears to have been ever attempted in architecture', notes also that 'All the inhabitants of this country, both Christians, Jews, and Mahometans, confidently maintain, that both Balbec and Palmyra were built by Solomon.' A slightly later article in The Britannic Magazine labels the site ruins 'some of the most beautiful and best preserved of any in Asia', and remarks:

By what means could the ancients remove these enormous masses? This is doubtless a problem in mechanics difficult to resolve. The inhabitants of Balbec, however, have a very easy manner of explaining it, by supposing these edifices to have been constructed by djenoun, or genii, who obeyed the orders of King Solomon; adding, that the motives of such immense works was to conceal in subterraneous caverns vast treasures, which still remain there.

In good Enlightenment fashion, the moral is spelled out:

All tradition relative to high antiquity is as false among the Orientals as the Europeans. With them, as with us, facts which happened even 100 years before, when not preserved in writing, are altered, mutilated, or forgotten.

But a more modern use of the name, European rather than Oriental, even though preserved in writing, is shrouded in as great a mystery. It was chosen by Proust to designate an important location in his Recherche, contracted a little for delicate Parisian tastes, as Balbec. Most modern scholars, if not all, identify this with Proust's own beloved Cabourg, on the Normandy coast, although not too far from the resort, just east of Le Havre, is a town called Bolbec. Indeed, in an anonymous English novel of 1796, entitled Elvira; or, the World as it Goes, we find a reference or two to 'Balbec' near Le Havre:
I'm going to leave you in suspense about that head dress. Anyway, Proust's Balbec is just too spicy a comfit for the slavering critics waiting to get their teeth into the myriads of words in the Recherche. Let us listen to some plaintive and poignant voices. Here's David Ellison:

What is this strange split city of Balbec? What happens if we, like the young Marcel, pronounce its syllables and allow them to resonate with associations? Balbec sounds a lot like BAALBEK, the ancient city, now in Lebanon, whose name derives from the god Baal, the Phoenician sun god. The congruence of names is so obvious as to be blinding.

And here's Allan Pasco (truncatedly):

Proust's 'Balbec' comprises several of the interlocking patterns of allusive support. The homonymous Persian city, now in Lebanon, was named after the false god Baal, mentioned in the Bible, and thus joins the two biblical cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, found along the protagonist's way. Brichot, the author's pedantic professor who corrects many of the Curé de Combray's false etymologies, points out that –bec means stream in the Norman dialect. Brichot is not sure about Bal-. He suggests it is a corruption of 'Dalbec'. Proust may have chosen the first syllable of Balbec because of a belief that the Baal of the Persian city Baalbek meant 'sun'. It is also possible that he was aware that Bel- in many French place names derives from the Celtic sun god Belenus. His love of puns attests to an interest in the phonic texture. With this in mind, it is difficult to ignore the associations of the French word bal ('dancing, youth, mating,') and of the ornithological bec ('beak').

The phrasing is remarkable: 'What happens if we pronounce its syllables?', 'it is difficult to ignore the associations of—'. Let's just kick back and muck about with words. After all, Proust did. Is this any different from the practices of mediaevals, who identified Baalbek with Baalath? In a somewhat embarrassed footnote, Pasco winds up ransacking a bunch of dusty German philological lexicons, and tracing bal- to PIE *bhel ('white, shining'), which he can then affix to Albertine, whose name clearly derives from Latin albus, 'white'. (He even quotes the delightful kook Harold Bayley, whose linguistic speculations we last encountered here, also in Islington, and not too far from Baalbec Road.)

Best of all, though, is Marie-Magdeleine Chirol's L'Imaginaire de la Ruine. Nobody can do spiel like the French. After discussing a few references to antiquities in an early description of Balbec from Recherche ('De Balbec surtout, où déjà des hôtels se construisent, superposés au sol antique et charmant qu'ils n'alterènt pas, quel délice d'excursionner à deux pas dans ces régions primitives et si belles!'), she concludes:

One last sign points towards a Norman Balbec that is reminiscent of the ancient Baalbek: the presence 'of hotels' (in the modern sense) which, in an ancient context, may seem displaced, even anachronistic. However, if one should replace hotel with 'Temple-Palais' or with 'palais'—terms which the narrator uses to evoke the Grand-Hotel at Balbec—the desired spatio-temporal link seems to be re-established. The substitution would appear reasonable since, after all, when the narrator talks of the hotel at Balbec, he is surely always referring to the Grand-Hotel.

Here is a voice pleading for acceptance, especially in that last sentence. In all these works is the same exegesis of the world we find among the mediaevals, only made secular, and transferred to a world of words only. The study of literature is, as we have long known, the last refuge of the theologian.

*

But what about Baalbec Road? Why Baalbec? Perhaps in lieu of asking, 'Why was the road called Baalbec?', we might ask, 'What has it done to deserve the name?' Or even, What do we see in the road, and in its environs, that we should not see if it had a different name? Would it smell as sweet?

Baalbek itself, once magnificent, was taken over by nature, and became a ruin. Highbury, as we have seen, is also under threat from its flora, real, painted or carved in terracotta. The name itself becomes that bit more pregnant. Perhaps that is what Jenkins meant about the tourists of a hundred years hence. Before the creation of the road in 1889, London had a single nod to the Baalbek of antiquity. This was in the Temple of the Sun at Kew Gardens, built in 1761, in a Corinthian style inspired by the ornate columns of the ruinated Syrian city. Eighteenth-century letters and notices are full of proud and admiring references to this elegant structure, which has none of the sublimity of the original, preserving only a few flourishes and proportions. In 1916, a tree fell on the temple and it was demolished, not even leaving a ruin. For shame! Still, we have the ruins of Baalbec Road, Highbury. If they are not ruins yet, they contain all the omens of such. The city is like the mind: it never forgets. My old friend's kitchen, with its ridiculous sculpture, is still with me, perhaps altered and mutilated, but not forgotten. I did not want to mention the splendid effusion of autumn in Highbury Fields.

Update: Language Hat on H. W. Bailey, not to be confused with Harold Bayley.

The Weeping Philosopher

Scholars do like to spout off. The subject of the Delphic oracle is no exception: it has attracted the usual charivari of feminists and postpostposts. What else would you expect? The oracle is given by the Pythia—a woman—who is 'played like an instrument' or else sexually violated by Apollo, whose words she is made to speak, from a dark cave, in a state of hysterical frenzy—can you conceive any image more inevitably bound for the chair and drill of the derridista?

Giulia Sissa, in a 1987 book on Greek Virginity, tells us in her preface that by the end of the work she will have 'woven around [the Pythia], mysterious in the middle of the world, a web of analogies, similes, and suggestions'. Is this all we want from a scholarly tome? Is it enough? Such a line as this is typical:

Given that the concepts of enthusiasm and inspiration are indispensable for thinking about divination, the unique sense of Pythian utterance needs to be looked at with alertness to what was always unspoken, and perhaps indecent, in the image of a woman who opened her mouth to speak the truth while her body was penetrated by currents and vapors.

Similarly, Page duBois, a singularly pious and irritating writer, whose footnotes consist largely of references to her own books, writes in 1991:

The Apollonian truth, pure and uncontaminated, after passing through the material body of earth and woman, takes on a distorting residue of corporeality that separates and distances the divine word from the mortal seeker.

Again: 'These images of interiority [oracle, temple, etc.] are associated in ancient culture with female space, with the containment and potentiality of the female body.' The reasoning is that because we, with our hyper-associative modernist mentality, can make the analogy between cunt and cave, so the two objects (titivated up, of course, in hackneyed spatial metaphors) must have been 'associated'—whatever that might mean—by the ancient Greeks. It is sort of a magical realism, the most flaccid of modern literary modes, that has pervaded the academy: a sickly obsession with analogies and similarities.

*

And if scholars love the oracle, so they love Heraclitus on the oracle even more. Heraclitus, quoted in Plutarch, writes, '^cο αναξ, ^cου το μαντειον εστι το εν Δελφοις, ουτε λεγει ουτε κρυπτει αλλα σημαινει' (H93). The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither legei nor kryptei, but semainei. You see I have not translated the key words. Legei is usually 'speaks', kryptei 'conceals', and semainei 'indicates' or 'gives a sign'. Philemon Holland in 1603 had 'doth neither speake, nor conceale, but signifie onely and give signe'. Frank Babbitt's Loeb has 'neither tells nor conceals, but indicates'. G. S. Kirk, in the standard English guide to the pre-Socratic philosophers (1957), explains the line:

The method adopted by Apollo in his Delphic pronouncements is praised, because a sign may accord better than a misleadingly explicit statement with the nature of the underlying truth, that of the Logos.

Similarly, Charles Kahn in 1979: 'There is no doubt that Heraclitus is referring to the Delphic practice of giving advice in indirect form, by imagery, riddle, and ambiguity, so that it was obvious to a man of sense than an oracle required an interpretation. . . The Delphic mode of utterance presents a plurality or complexity of meaning, so that reflection is required, and unusual insight, if the proper interpretation is to be discovered.'

For Kirk, 'Probably Heraclitus intended by this kind of parallel to justify his own oracular and obscure style.' For Kahn, 'This parallel between Heraclitus' style and the obscurity of the nature of things, between the difficulty of understanding him and the difficulty in human perception, is not arbitrary: to speak plainly about such a subject would be to falsify it in the telling, for no genuine understanding would be communicated. The only hope of 'getting through' to the audience is to puzzle and provoke them into reflection. Hence the only appropriate mode of explanation is allusive and indirect: Heraclitus is consciously and unavoidably 'obscure'.' For Jonathan Barnes, in the same year, 'Heraclitus the Obscure, the Riddler, the oracular prophet, stands dark and majestic in the early history of philosophy. He set out to imitate 'the king whose is the oracle at Delphi', who, in Heraclitus' own words, 'neither states nor conceals, but gives signs'.'

Robert Lamberton, generally an excellent scholar, gets a little over-excited by this charming maxim; in his 2001 Plutarch he gushes, 'It is no exaggeration to say that semiotics, in the tradition of European thought, starts here, with this notorious, sententious claim'. But it is an exaggeration.

Still, this maxim on meaning and interpretation was clearly ripe for the greedy fingers of the Continentals, and, sure enough, we find the wrangling begins with Heidegger. In his 1939 essay on the concept of physis (nature) in Aristotle, he observes that legei is best translated by contrast to kryptei, 'conceals'—he opts for 'reveals' or even 'unconceals'. Thus:

The oracle does not directly unconceal nor does it simply conceal, but it points out. This means: it unconceals while it conceals, and it conceals while it unconceals.

As my new friend would be quick to remind me, the notion of 'unconcealment' is central to Heidegger's reading of the pre-Socratics—and, indeed, to his entire philosophical project—for as he delights to observe, the Greek word for truth, aletheia, means 'not-hidden'. Legein, 'to speak', is given etymologically as 'to gather', identical to Latin legere, which also means 'to read, choose', whence select and lecture. Legein is thus to gather together and make manifest, a Heideggerian description of the function of language. As some guy called Brian Bard has put it,

This making manifest is the unconcealing of physis which for humans occurs in discourse and language; legein comes to mean 'to say' because language provides the collected space in which beings arise and become manifest.

There is no little joy to be had in playing these etymological games with Greek. No doubt Heidegger also noticed associations between phōnē (voice), phanai (to speak), on the one hand, and phōs (light), phainein (to reveal, appear, bring to light), on the other. The connection is a distinguished one: it is found, just to give three examples, in August Schlegel's 1820 Indische Bibliothek, John Donaldson's 1839 New Cratylus, and Georg Curtius' 1858 Grundzüge. Watkins, on the other hand, lists two distinct but identical roots.

It is hardly surprising that Heidegger, with his own notoriously oracular style, should be fascinated by the oracular Heraclitus, just as Heraclitus praised the oracle itself. (Between Heraclitus and Heidegger stretches a long line of great oracular philosophers whose names begin with 'H'—Hamann, Humboldt, Hegel and Husserl, not to mention Hierkegaard himself.) Hence the pronounced tone of mystical nostalgia for the oral, pre-Socratic mind:

If the Greeks conceive of saying as legein, then this implies an interpretation of the essence of word and of saying so unique that no later 'philosophy of language' can ever begin to imagine its as yet unplumbed depths. Only when language has been debased to a means of commerce and organization, as is the case with us, does thought rooted in language appear to be a mere 'philosophy of words,' no longer adequate to the 'pressing realities of life'.

Paradoxically, Heidegger's friend and interlocutor, Eugen Fink, insists in their published conversation that 'In his fragments, Heraclitus does not speak in any veiled manner like the god in Delphi'. Nonetheless, the weeping philosopher has always attracted, since Heidegger, scholars with a penchant for the oracular style; one of the most recent examples being the gorgeous and monumental Sunbowl or Symbol (1998) by G. L. J. Schönbeck. More well-known and more influential, on the other hand, is a book by Jean Bollack and his student Heinz Wismann, Héraclite ou la séparation (1972), based on Bollack's lectures of the late 60s. Unlike Heidegger, Kirk, Kahn or Barnes, Bollack sees no consistent philosophy, cosmology or metaphysics in Heraclitus, all that being the product of the Stoics or Platonists (such as Plutarch) who transmitted his fragments. A priori the thesis attracts me, but alas, its exposition is pure turgid bullshit in the French style. Here is a sample of their two pages on H93:

Applying to the oracle's ambiguity the categories of their own discourse, men would interpret it as true (speaking) or false (concealing), so that it accords or not with the outcome which they await or have experienced. The equivocal oracular word seems here to remain a determinate affirmation, whether truthful or mendacious. In fact, it transcends the opposition and escapes the dilemma. Divine discourse neither speaks nor conceals because it speaks-and-conceals, indicating by what it says that which it does not say.

Bollack has clearly inherited Heidegger's taste for concluding a paragraph of over-inflated and jargonistic waffle with an over-compressed koan—as if hoping to compensate Scylla with Charybdis. He succeeds in sounding profound without actually making any contribution to the fragment's interpretation.

And what of the feminists?

Sissa: the god does not speak; he does not press his seal into a totally impressionable and malleable substance. Nor does the god conceal, as if he wished to deceive in the manner of a distorting mirror. Rather, using the soul as an instrument, Apollo reveals his truth in a "mixed," confused, pallid form. The Pythia's psyche, though not false to the truth, inevitably diminishes its brilliance.

And duBois: The word semainei demands our attention here because it is sometimes used synonymously with sphragizo, 'to stamp with a sign or mark, to seal'. This metaphor for the relationship between the god, the medium, and the consultant of the oracle bears echoes of the earlier discussion of inscription on the body as a marker of truth, of the contents, the nature of the thing marked. Here the body of the woman is stamped, sealed, with the god's truth: the body itself becomes a sign, with its acoustic rendition of the ineffable divine truth.

So the one says the Pythia is stamped and sealed, the other says she isn't. One describes the soul (psyche), the other the body. Both are equally meaningless: 'not even wrong'. Of the two, duBois is the worse simply because she is the more hackneyed. Her pathological but wholly typical obsession with the body is just not warranted by the material, nor is the fact that a given word can be used in other senses. Sissa's reading, while inarticulate, is at least rooted in Plutarch's text, which continues, '[Apollo] makes known and reveals his own thoughts, but he makes them known through the associated medium of a mortal body and a soul that is unable to keep quiet'. Lamberton, likewise, writes that 'if Heraclitus pointed to a tertium quid for the pair 'speak—conceal', he must have meant this projection of meaning down the hierarchy, with the attendant necessary distortion introduced by the medium'. Is that a pun on 'medium'?

We seem to have wound up with a very pretty modern allegory for the mouth betraying the brain, or else for the différance of the sign. Heraclitus weeps.

Decameron 8.9: pun and pumpkin

Gourds have always been important in human culture. In the late Middle Ages, schoolteachers would cut Latin words onto the surface of squashes and gourds as an aide-memoire for young children. This is, in fact, where we get the very word 'word', via the earlier Anglo-French guord (cf. Guillaume > William, guard > ward), which in turn is simply a variant of gourde or coorde (Latin cucurbita), and from which we have gourd and courgette.

*

Boccaccio was well aware of the symbolic significance of gourds, as we discover in Decameron 8.9, one of the work's pithiest novelle. In this story, two painters named Bruno and Buffalmalco—a recurrent duo—play a trick on Simone, a greedy and foolish physician from out of town. They convince him that they are secretly wealthy, thanks to the machinations of a cabal of necromancers; they encourage him to come along to a meeting, then push him in a ditch at night. So far, so mediaeval. But it is the imagery that here interests us.

Maestro Simone arrives back in Florence from Bologna (the university for law and medicine par excellence), where he settles in a street named Via del Cocomero—'Watermelon Road'. When Bruno addresses him early on, he calls him zucca mia da sale, 'my salt squash', and praises vostra qualitativa mellonaggine da Legnaia. Legnaia is a region of Florence then noted for its large pumpkins, and 'mellonaggine', which connotes stupidity, comes from the mellone or melon. Later on, Buffalmalco addresses Simone as Pinca mia da seme. Pinca, the etymological dictionary of Pianigiani (online here) tells us, is an archaic word for a species of cetriuolo or cucumber, and da seme means 'full of seed'. Finally, Buffalmalco mocks Simone: it is evident that the physician 'non apparaste miga l'abicí in su la mela, come molti sciocconi voglion fare, anzi l'apparaste bene in sul mellone, ch'è cosí lungo'—'did not learn the ABC on an apple, as so many idiots do, but instead learned it well on a melon, which is rather longer'. (J. M. Rigg's 1903 translation perhaps renders the pun best: 'twas on no pippin, as many a dolt does, but on the good long pumpkin that you learned your A B C'.)

So, what's with all the squashes? Wikitalia's article on the melon claims that it was originally considered a symbol of fecundity because of its large quantities of seed, later coming to symbolize a wild, generative capacity, opposed to intelligent reason—a fool. 'Uno stolto veniva chiamato mellone e una scemenza, mellonaggine'. But it is not just the melon—the entire family of Cucurbitaceae recurs through the novella as an unstated leitmotive, tying Simone's foolishness to his environs (cocomero), his education (mellone), and his interpersonal relations (zucca and pinca). He cannot escape it.

On Etymology, Part 3

Everybody is trying to demystify everything. We're trying to do the opposite, to mystify again. We're in a constant battle against medicine, science and religion. — Ed Clontz, editor of the Weekly World News.

The third and final part of our history rests with the mystics. It is hoped that readers who found Part Two a little colourless will find more to enjoy here. This post is intended less as a lecture, and more as a wandering, into the unknown, and perhaps—if we were to trust our subjects—into the unknowable.

*

Fulcanelli, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1922)

I bought this book online, several years ago. I do not remember what possessed me to order it; but I do remember that it arrived in the post just before lunchtime, when my parents and I took off for a disappointing meal at Chutney Mary on the Kings Road—and that Fulcanelli was thus first perused as I walked to the restaurant—and that he lay dormantly beside me as I chowed down on overpriced Indian delicacies. The book is not beautiful—a cheap American paperback, with an unusual vellum-white cover and gilt titles, the card of the flaps glazed and grained:


As Michael, commentateur extraordinaire, remarks below, I should have invested in a French copy. After all, I can read French. But I did not—and so the Truth must remain at an even greater remove for me. Perhaps it is for the best. I notice that editions of occult books will magnify and mythify the authorial persona by paratext; accordingly, we find inside the present volume a hagiographical preface to the first edition by Eugene Canseliet, a preface to the second edition also by Canseliet, a bibliobolical preface to the American edition by Roy Thompson ('a unique and never-to-be-forgoten experience in the universe of word and letter'), a wide-eyed introduction by Walter Lang, and finally, at long last, the text itself, which begins with—dear God—an expository introduction by Fulcanelli himself.

Le Mystère des Cathédrales argues, or rather asserts, that the elaborate stoneworks of French cathedrals—Notre Dame de Paris, Amiens, Bourges—are coded representations of alchemy and apocalyptic prophecy, texts in stone for adepts of all eras to decipher. Its author, an unknown French occultist of the early twentieth century, goes by the name of Fulcanelli—and just as Epictetus had his Arrian, and Plotinus his Porphyry, so our author must have his own disciple, Eugene Canseliet, through whom his works are published.

Now, alchemy is one of the dullest subjects known to the historian. So what can the hunter of marvels find in the Mystère? Presently we are after the 'phonetic cabala', a 1920s sort of expression for Isidorean etymologics through an occult lens. In his second preface Canseliet distinguishes between cabala, which discovers the 'voice of nature' behind a screen of words, and the Jewish Kabbala, 'full of transpositions, inversions, substitutions and calculations, as arbitrary as there are abstruse'. The former word is derived by Canseliet from 'καδάλλης [sic] or the Latin caballus, a horse', recalling Giordano Bruno's play on the two words in his title, Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo.

One might think that the phonetic cabala should be done in some ancient, mystical language, like Hebrew or Greek. But Fulcanelli disagrees—for French itself derives directly from Greek, even in its slang (argot); as he writes in his second book, Les Demeures des Philosophes, 'We resolutely assert, without denying the introduction of Latin elements into our idiom since the Roman conquest, that our language is Greek, that we are Hellenes, or more exactly, Pelagians'. He cites an impressive list of authorities for this view, none of whom I have come across before: J. L. Dartois, Granier de Cassagnac, J. Lefebvre.

So here is what the phonetic cabala looks like—and it should look familiar:

For me, gothic art (art gothique) is simply a corruption of the word argotique (cant), which sounds exactly the same. This is in conformity with the phonetic law, which governs the traditional cabala in every language and does not pay any attention to spelling. The cathedral is a work of art goth (gothic art) or of argot, cant or slang. Moreover, dictionaries define argot as 'a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders'. Thus it is certainly a spoken cabala. The argotiers, those who use this language, are the hermetic descendants of the argonauts, who manned the ship Argo.

This passage is a very stylish example of the sort of etymologising we have seen from Isidore through to Tooke and Whiter. It plays variants on the same note, proteanesque, transforming Gothic architecture—the book's overt subject—into occult cant, and then into an allegorised Argo, searching for the Golden Fleece as a symbol of hermetic truth. Thus the themes of the work—the principles of the world—are bound together in an elegant linguistic arabesque.


But beyond Fulcanelli's introduction, we start to lose our self-satisfied command of the material. My role, therefore, cannot be that of a guide, let alone that of a seigneur, able to course around his domains in a carriage of books, with wheels of well-oiled and effortless erudition. I have become a tourist, like you, and a cynical one at that. Pococurante, I grow bored quickly. Thus I find Fulcanelli's disquisition on the 'Cyclic Cross at Hendaye', appended to the 1957 edition of the work (according to this website), to be greatly unsatisfying, especially in comparison to the passage quoted above. The church cross (above, in the photograph from the Mystère), contains this legend, transcribed by Fulcanelli:

OCRUXAVES
PESUNICA

'Certainly', writes Fulcanelli, 'it is easy to recognize the well-known phrase, O crux ave spes unica (Hail o cross, the only hope).' But our guide thinks that the shifting of the 'S' to the first line was no accident, for the workman must have 'traced [the letters] first in chalk or charcoal'. It is obvious to Fulcanelli that

The letter S, which takes on the curving shape of a snake, corresponds to the Greek khi (X) and takes over its esoteric meaning. It is the helicoidal track of the sun, having arrived at the zenith of its curve across space, at the time of the cyclic catastrophe.

The displacement of the letter is a clue that we are to read the inscription according to the esoteric phonetic cabala—and here Grasset d'Orcet's name is mentioned. The involves re-reading the apparent Latin in French, the 'language of the diplomats', 'by making use of the permutation of vowels'. Thus the new 'strange' sentence runs as follows: 'Il est écrit que la vie se réfugie en un seul éspace'—It is written that life takes refuge in a singe space.

Now, if you're thinking that this is utter bullshit, then, well, I'm with you. This announcement might surprise my readers, given the tenor of these posts in favour of the implausible but creative etymology. But the thing is this—in wordplay, as in all else, we have nothing if we have no standards of taste.

The stretch here is just too far. The exegesis has no elegance, is too random, too arbitrary. Can we see 'Il est écrit. . .' in the inscription? Well, if we change the vowels from OCRU to ECRI, and VE becomes VIE, and SPES becomes SPACE, then—oh, now we're stuck. Shouldn't it have been unique, rather than seul? And why should S correspond to chi? The whole thing lacks conviction. It lacks the sublimity of imagining art gothique as argotique. But you see that we are reduced to making bland pronouncements of taste. I cannot tell you anything of interest. I can only point. My analytical powers are lying dormant, and so, I suspect, are yours. This is not what we want from our texts. Fulcanelli's words have become like the walls of London, almost unable to speak. Or else Panurge's wall of contrapunctums ('Beware, in the name of the devils, and hold off'). It is a most upsetting state of affairs. Thus I take the old shortcut, out of weariness—I pray you will forgive me—and look towards context, history.

*

Intellectually, Fulcanelli could not have been more rooted in the currents of his time. With the rise of Bopp and his friends in the 1810s and 20s, etymological speculation of the Isidorean variety, uninformed by historical scholarship and phonological theory, could no longer be seen as a science, and so became instead the province of the arcanist. Whiter and Murray were the last throes of Isidoreanism in the English-speaking world; the locus of innovation shifted to France. The first great hero of this movement was Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, who published his masterpiece, The Hebraic Tongue Restored, in 1815, a year before Bopp's first foray into comparative philology.

I discovered the existence of HTR, of all places, in John Carroll's introduction to his edition of Benjamin Whorf's Language and Reality—in which Carroll notes Whorf's interest in the theories of Fabre d'Olivet and James Byrne (1820-1897), which is not too surprising, given Whorf's vaguely mystical proclivities. HTR is a really fun book, and weaves the sound-symbolism of de Brosses (via his successor Antoine Court de Gébelin) into a translation of, and commentary on, Genesis 1.1—9.29. The translation is prefaced with a Cratylean dictionary of Hebrew 'roots', ie. sound-clusters, with notes on Arabic; a typical example is—

אץ ATZ. Every idea of bounds, limits; of repressing force, term, end. The Arabic اص expresses in general, that which is closed and restricted; the central point of things. The Chaldaic אץ contains every idea of pressure and compression.

This reads very much like an early version of Pokorny or Watkins; the essential difference is revealed by the prefatory note, which admits that 'it is only in the third place and in an indirect manner that [the list of 'roots'] can be of use in establishing the etymologies of Greek or Latin, because these two tongues having received their first roots from the ancient Celtic, have with Hebrew only coincidental relations given them by the universal principle of speech'. In other words, Fabre d'Olivet still essentially believes, as did de Brosses, that the root sounds possess natural ('universal') symbolism. He notes at the beginning that he might easily have written on the other two Oriental tongues of significance, namely Chinese and Sanskrit—and I wonder if he is one of the earliest Western arcanists interested in, and knowledgeable about, Sanskrit. (No doubt Michael will have something to say on this subject.)

Fabre d'Olivet's translation, meanwhile, reads like a pastiche of Heidegger:

At-first-in-principle, he created, AElohim (he caused to be, he brought forth in principle, HE-the-Gods, the-Being-of-beings), the-selfsameness-of-heavens, and-the-selfsameness-of-earth.

In other words, 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth'. The idea is that each syllable in the original Hebrew, having a compressed mystical significance, is spelled out in its full range of meaning, producing something more like a gloss than a translation. Fabre d'Olivet engages in Isidorean analysis and etymological play, as well, such as this, from his footnote to Hebrew thebah, 'ark' (also the boat of rushes in which Moses was placed by his mother):

It has so many significations that it is difficult to assign a definite one. It is, on the one hand, the symbolic name given by the Egyptians to their sacred city, Theba, considered as the shelter, the refuge, the abode of the gods. . . The name of Paris, I say, is only the name of the Thebes of Egypt and of Greece, that of ancient Syparis, of the Babel of Assyria, translated into the tongue of the Celts. It is the vessel of Isis, (Bar-Isis) that mysterious ark, which, in one way or another, carries over the destinies of the world, of which it is the symbol.

(Note: the connection of Paris to Sybaris would be repeated in Hugo's 1862 Les Misérables: I do not know if he had it from Fabre d'Olivet, or from an intermediary source, or from a tradition antedating the arcanist, or if he simply arrived at it independently.)

Fabre d'Olivet's innovation, as far as I can tell, was to translate the Isidorean idiom into the burgeoning culture of arcanism. I am not aware of an earlier work, and certainly not in the modern world—with a growing knowledge of Oriental languages and their history—that so thoroughly applies a (spurious) analysis of etymological roots to the mystical study of a text. I am reminded somewhat of mediaeval commentaries on Vergil, but the etymologising in those texts (sibyllus from Greek sios (= 'theos') boulos, 'divine counsel') is still primitively Isidorean and piecemeal. Fabre d'Olivet is Chateaubriand bullshit.

And The Hebrew Tongue Revealed must have been a beacon for the arcanists of the later nineteenth century—for Grasset d'Orcet on Rabelais, for Henri Boudet on Celtic and Rennes-les-Bains, for Jean-Pierre Brisset on the origin of language, and for Fulcanelli on French cathedrals and alchemy. I own all these books (except Grasset d'Orcet), so I know whereof I speak when I say that it's all much the same, with variations. I regret to have led you thus far and offer you in the end only a melancholy aporia. But there it is. Fin de siècle.

*

In his Grasset d'Orcet piece, Raminagrobis writes:

Lacan was an inveterate punster in the best Rabelaisian tradition: consider his 'le nom du père'/'le non du père'/'les non-dupes errent'. Same thing. Grasset d’Orcet’s madness is not so far removed from the post-structuralist manias of the late twentieth century.

When I met Raminagrobis a fortnight ago—and I was stunned to discover that it is in fact his real name—I said, over drinks in a Cambridge pub, a fine bright day, and over my copy of Fulcanelli, which I had brought to read on the bus, that I thought one could make a bolder statement than 'not so far removed'. I speculated that there was a direct lineage from Grasset d'Orcet and Fulcanelli (and therefore from Fabre d'Olivet, de Brosses, and so on) to Lacan, Derrida and the postmoderns. Lacan, after all, was an affiliate of the Surrealists in the 1930s and 40s. He married Bataille's widow Sylvia in 1963—Bataille, who was a prime source of pseudo-arcanist punning among the Surrealists. Lacan knew Bréton, who knew Canseliet, and who had included Brisset in his Anthology of Black Humour. Duchamp was another link in the chain, as were Freud and Jung—the one fascinated by puns and antiphrasis, the other by arcanism. Many more such connections could easily be established. But we have lost our way—we are groping with black words in fields increasingly white, opaqued. Now and then we see a sign, comme dans un steppe de Russie, un feu de voyageurs abandonné sur la neige, and it is, perhaps, Theodore Thass-Thienemann's The Subconcious Language, which accompanies Freud and Jung into the wastelands, a shaman dowsing amid innumerable sastrugi.

Was it Lacan, first among equals, who carried the arcanist-Surrealist etymologics across the border, into the academy? For now I see it, all the time. The noble art of Plato, Varro, Isidore, of de Brosses, Whiter, Horne Tooke, of Fabre d'Olivet, Grasset d'Orcet, Fulcanelli—has become in the hands of academic zealots a coin debased, a joke worthy only of groans.

Perhaps you will rejoin: It has only ever been worthy of groans.

Ah, but not to me.

On Etymology, Part 2

The child likes to play, but he likes also to break his toys so as to see what is inside them. —Antoine Thomas, Coup d’œil sur l’histoire et la méthode de la science étymologique (1904).

Isidore stands in a tradition. Nutnut etymologies had been interrogated in Plato's Cratylus—a sceptical, beautiful, and very funny dialogue about the origin of language and the relation of word to world. In around 45 BC, Varro wrote a treatise on the Latin language, of whose 25 books we possess six, full to the 10/6 hatbrim of precarious etymologies, much like Isidore's. The early Fathers indulged in the same sort of thing. But Isidore was the limit. Where could one go after the Origines? No further on the same road, certainly. So Isidore's material would be subsumed into the whelm of mediaeval lore, surfacing when needed in the course of an argument.

For Howard Bloch, Isidore embodies the pre-modern attempt to establish place, firmness, solidity: 'Like Cicero’s notion of topos or Varro’s concept of locus, Isidore seeks the places where language comes to a standstill, where meaning becomes intrinsic'. Bloch is referring to this etymology in Varro: 'Loqui (to talk), comes from locus (place), because. . . he talks, who with understanding puts each word in its own place'. Isidore constructs a system of language around his 'uncompromising reverence for etymology', such that the explicatory words have no need of further explanation. Lucus needs to be analysed; lucere does not. (Isidore had evidently learnt nothing from the work of Jacques Derrida.) But the decision to stop at lucere is arbitrary, or at least there is no reason given for it. The foundation was not yet firm; and so it had been in Varro, and so it would remain through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

*

It wasn't until the late eighteenth century that a new wave of Isidoreans appeared, announcing a firm foundation of 'first principles'—the start of a great age of etymology-cranks. Rather than just repeating Varro and Isidore, they had something new to offer. They all sought to reduce, in the way that science reduces the chaos of the world to a system of regular relations. The material in this post is urbane, rather than sublime; it may seem dry, but I hope that it will stand in contrast with what came before—Isidore—as well as with what follows.

The great object of the etymological art is not to give an account of the origin of all words without exception—and I daresay this would be a frivolous aim—rather, the art is principally valuable for the materials and observations with which it can furnish philosophy, so as to raise the great edifice of a general theory of Languages.

So writes (in my translation) the statesman Anne-Robert Turgot, in his article on etymology for the 1751 Encyclopédie. An attempt to explain all words without exception would be quixotic, for so many words are impossible to analyse, being arbitrary in origin, or having origins too far lost in the dusts of time. No etymological analysis should be an end in itself, as it had been for Isidore—who had begun anew with each word—but rather should contribute a single fragment towards the 'great edifice' of a linguistic theory. Turgot's article is thus a guide to the critical and cautious use of etymology as a philological tool, and it very much embodies the Lockean empiricism of its period:

It results from all that we have said in this article, that an etymology is a supposition; that it receives its character of truth and certitude only by comparison with the known facts; from the number of circumstances of these facts that it explains; from the probabilities of its results, as the critic appreciates them.

I first came across the first quotation used as an epigraph for The Diversions of Purley, an eccentric work on etymology written in two parts (1786, 1805) by the English politician John Horne Tooke. Only here it is attributed to one 'de Brosses'—ie. Charles de Brosses (1709-1777), a man with an oar in every pie, and well-known for various literary endeavours throughout the second half of the century. (Wikipedia is not bad on him.) De Brosses' masterpiece is his 1765 Traité de la formation méchanique des langues et des principes physiques de l'étymologie, which I read in its 1801 edition, its colophon dated 'An IX'.

This Traité, very much in the same tone as the 1751 Turgot article, and full of calm, rational thinking on the development of languages, is also the first great modern monument of bambashka etymology. This apparent disparity is due to a simple fact: while Turgot's strictures are very sensible, both for science in general and for etymology in particular, they are not enough. The sober etymologists of the next century demanded more than plausibility and coherence: they demanded evidence from the regularity of historically-determined laws of language evolution. De Brosses did not. Instead, he returned to the sort of quasi-empirical speculation found in the Cratylus. Near the end of that dialogue Socrates progs at the waspnest of sound-symbolism—the notion that each vowel and consonant has a basic significance, and that words are fadged up from clusters of these sound-meanings:

Now the letter rho [ρ], as I was saying, appeared to the imposer of names an excellent instrument for the expression of motion; and he frequently uses the letter for this purpose: for example, in the actual words ρειν [to flow] and ροη [torrent] he represents motion by rho.

Thus did the legislator, reducing all things into letters and syllables, and impressing on them names and signs, and out of them by imitation compounding other signs.

Plato's concept is a primitive version of what we now call the linguistic root; this latter notion, in a good approximation of its modern form, would be imported from classical Sanskrit grammars into Western linguistics in the 19th century. But de Brosses and his successors, like Plato, could only gesture towards this. De Brosses' hunt for the symbolism of sound was a hunt for fundamental causes. Where Isidore had been concerned merely with transforming the structure of the world into a structure of words, and with ascribing an aetiology to each word, de Brosses goes further: he wants to derive all words from a much smaller group of meanings embodied in discrete sounds. In this way his interests parallel the rise of atomism and naturalist classification in the science of his century. Physics had become explicitly empiricist, and so de Brosses advocates an empirical survey of language to determine the meanings of its underlying sounds. Early on in his book he claims

That the system of the first fabric of human language, and of the imposition of names on things, is therefore not arbitrary and conventional, as we have been accustomed to picture it, but rather a true system of necessity, determined by two causes. The first is the construction of the vocal organs, which can only produce certain sounds, analogous to their structure; the other is the nature and propriety of the real things that one would name—this obliges one to apply to their names the sounds that depict them, establishing between thing and word a connection by which the word can excite an idea of the thing.

Lockean epistemology is evident in the last sentence: if, as Locke had said, words exist so as to communicate the ideas of things between men, the linguist had to explain the mechanism by which a word 'excited' an idea. It was natural to assume some sort of actual similarity or homology between the idea and its verbal sound. Thus the root FR is said to denote breaking or cutting—Hebrew PHouR, Latin FRango and FRio, French BRiser and BRoyer, Latin FuRFuR, FaRina—'After the farine (wheat) is cooked in a FuRnace, the bread, necessary aliment, is the principal foodstuff with which one FuRnishes (fournir) one's house; but we have since generalised the word fournir'—FRustrum, FRaus, FRagmenta, FRuctus, FuRor, FRigo, French eFFRoyable, FeRveur, FoRt, and so on. It is hardly surprising that de Brosses would be praised by his 1801 editor for his 'facility for grasping the very real connections between objects that seemed the most opposed'.

But de Brosses goes further than sound-symbolism, and he is not averse to traditional Isidorean speculation: for example, this digression on the celestial origins of the words for many abstract concepts—

To admire is to observe the Sun; mirari, from Mihr, ie. sol. To contemplate is to observe the Sky; contempleri, from Templum, ie. coelum [sky], aether. To consider is to observe the stars, and to desire is to lose them from view; considerare, desiderare, from Sidera [stars]. Admonition is the view of the moon; Moneo, from moun, ie. Luna.

The corollary to this type of investigation is a pronounced scepticism towards the enquiry, so common in the previous century, into the first language among men, specifically that spoken at Babel before the confusion of tongues. (Most, naturally, had said Hebrew. Becanus, notoriously, had said Brabantic.) De Brosses argues, in almost a modern tone, that even the language at the origin of several modern languages could be 'a mixture derived from many even more ancient'—for no language 'is formed all in one go'.

The results of de Brosses' theories are not so different from the results of Isidore's, but their attitudes and aims are poles apart. De Brosses still 'seeks the places where language comes to a standstill', but he seeks this in pure sound, which in turn can be mapped onomatopoeically onto the sounds of natural phenomena. Language thus evolves directly out of the natural world. Isidore's text acts as a poetic exploration of the possibilities inherent in language, and as a mnemotechnic for humanists learning about their world. De Brosses, like Turgot, regards his own activity as scientific—as seeking first causes by empirical enquiry and rational abstraction. He unlike Isidore, is thus after the 'one true hidden meaning', only he sees the pursuit in terms not of hermeneutics, but rather of mechanics and physiognomy.

*

When Tooke quotes Turgot, it is entirely appropriate, for he too wants to use etymology as the means to a 'general theory of Language'. For Hans Aarsleff—the only scholar to have written seriously about English linguistics at the turn of the century—John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) is the man who ruined English linguistics at the turn of the century. (The Aarsleff story is that good linguistics left England when Condillac brought Lockeanism to France, stayed there until the Germans nabbed it, and finally came back to England with its tail between its legs.) Tooke's Diversions of Purley, a strange quasi-political treatise on the origin of English words, in the form of two long dialogues at a gentleman's country home, did not participate in the Lockean ideals still motivating the French linguists of the period.

Locke had argued that words come from ideas, which in turn come from things. Language was at the bottom of the hierarchy, neither fully public nor fully private, and the most susceptible of the three strata to confusion. For Tooke, on the contrary, words come directly from things, and thoughts from words. Language is thus an active process of the soul, shaping the mind as it evolves—a Romantic way of thinking, later revived by Heidegger and his postmodern epigones, as well as by Sapir-Whorf. The history of words, for Tooke, is the history of thought: and hence we can discover the true essence of a thought by learning the original meaning of its word. We are, of course, back with Isidore. And in the second volume of the Diversions, matters get distinctly political—Tooke, the progressive, wants to deny the natural or rational basis for English law, and so he remarks that law is only that which has been laid down by men, and that what is right (rectus) is that which is ordered.

Tooke's methods were considerably more elaborate than his predecessors, with an unusual use of historical English—he quotes Chaucer and Gower, and the great prototype etymological dictionaries of Minsheu (1627) and Skinner (1678)—as well as its supposed antecedents, notably Gothic, which he cites in Wulfila's alphabet, much to my amusement. But without scientific constraints, even the insufficient dicta of Turgot, Tooke's serious ideas and linguistic gymnastics produce fanciful results; and my readers will be aware that I use the word impejoratively. Tooke reduces the parts of speech to two—the noun and the verb—and proceeds to reveal a noun or a verb in all conjunctions and prepositions. If, for instance, is traced to give(n): 'if you go to town' is made equivalent to 'given that you go to town'.

Tooke's Diversions were hugely popular in England and America, and his imitators and followers were legion. (He also spawned a number of critics, one of whom went so far as to produce a book-length rebuttal, the Anti-Tooke, full of etymologies contradicting Tooke but no more plausible.) The most notable of these was Walter Whiter (1758-1832), the author of at least three literary curiosities: a dissertation on suspended animation, a fragment-commentary on Shakespeare's verbal free-associations, and a huge tome (in two versions) on etymological metaphysics. The first version of this last is the Etymologicon Magnum: or Universal Etymological Dictionary, on a new plan (1800); it was revised in 1822 as the Etymologicon Universale, with a subtitle of truly Elizabethan length. He writes in the 1822 introduction:

Among the Etymologists, no idea of submitting a race of words to a general law had ever been adopted. One word was supposed to be derived from another single word; not was there any attempt to discover an abstract or Universal Principle, to which these various separate instances might be referred, and by which they might all be connected with each other.

And this is Whiter's great plan, and great contribution to the science of nutty etymology. The structure of etymology is for him like the structure of a monist metaphysics: a search not just for first causes, but for the first cause—a construction of the manifold out of variations on one basic principle. Thus he starts by seeking the underlying unity of those linguistic elements that seem most diverse, which he identifies with those 'most familiarly employed' and therefore 'so perpetually liable to change from frequent use'. It is, we might now say, like looking for connections between asmi, sum, eimi, am. But Whiter's big idea is that every word in every language has an original sense relating to the earth—or as he prefers it, THE EARTH—and its cultivation. (Thoreau would be a keen reader, in fact.) His reasoning?

Where can we find, or where can we expect to find an agent sufficiently potent and predominating for a purpose like this, but in that great object, which is ever present with us, at all times, and on all occasions, on which all other objects, capable of being seen or felt, either actually exist, or exhibit their force and influence?

He adds, rather wishfully, that there is no one 'who will not instantly grant' the self-evidence of such a proposition. In the 1800 work, lacking the grand projet, he had already connected EARTH to g-EARTH or GARDEN, and to HARD, Latin DUR-us and TER-ra, Greek STER-eos [solid], ORCHARD, GUARD, WARD, YARD, Hebrew ARETZ [earth], and Greek ARATOS [plough]. Now, in 1822, he identifies soil, clod, chalk, slate, sludge, silex, calx, clay, heel, clear and clean (ie. that from which clay has been removed—the old antiphrasis again). He connects write with verto, which was originally 'to turn the earth'. And he goes further with patronyms: the Celts were originally 'workers in Clay', ie. those who made bricks; they are the 'illustrious nation, I had almost said, the only nation of the Globe', and their name is cognate with those of the Gaels, Gauls, Welsh, Waldenses, Belgae, Scoloti (Scythians), Scots, Goths, Chaldaeans, Galileans, Gaetuli, Atlantidae, Itali, Latins, Lusitanians, Cilicians, Kalmucks, Moguls, Sclavonians, Caledonians, Castilians, Catalonians, Andalusians, Angles, Lacones, Albanians and Albioni, Hellenes, Pelasgi, Philistines, Poles, Pehlevi and Volsci.

Whiter thought that 'consonants are alone to be regarded in discovering the affinities between words, and the vowels are to be wholly rejected', which puts us in mind of the famous bon mot ascribed to Voltaire, that 'etymology is a study in which consonants count for very little, and vowels for nothing at all'. (This discussion thinks not Voltaire, but at least Max Müller.) But Whiter's dictum of course made it very easy for him to spin etymologies as he pleases, and for that we are grateful. He also disregards spelling conventions, pointing out that Greek γγ corresponds to Latin ng, Greek σ to Latin ns, and so on—and therefore that the letter-groups can be substituted willy-nilly. It is a 'ghoti' logic.

*

Took up Plato's Cratylus. Full of comic and absurd etymologies of the kind that raged till about a century ago. But also half-conscious essays about semantics of a very interesting kind. The miracle is that soon after 400 B.C. there was a community with disinterested mental leisure to ponder over such nonutilitarian matters.

— Bernard Berenson's diary, 21 March, 1942.

I have, I confess, gone on too long. And I have not even mentioned the most bizarre of all the speculators—Alexander Murray, whose 1823 History of the European Languages begins with the assertion that all words in all languages derive from nine basic roots denoting movement (ag, bag, dwag, gwag, lag, mag, nag, rag, swag), and goes on to trace the development of these roots with the most fantastical elaboration over a thousand-odd pages. (This work, unlike the others mentioned here, can happily be bought in an Elibron reprint.) There are countless more.

The new Isidoreans had similar (albeit more sophisticated) results, different self-presentations, and ultimately the same overall goal as Isidore himself. All of them, to a man, were creating their world with words, as if the hierarchy were not thing—idea—word but idea—word—thing; as if language, guided by an overarching theory, were recreating the real world. But there was no mysticism among this group, as there would be for the occultists of the later nineteenth century; De Brosses, Tooke and Whiter were all staunch materialists, and all understood their own project to be a naturalist one—pure common sense—however silly, or however magical, it might seem to us.

On Etymology, Part 1

In this week's TLS, Emily Wilson reviews a new translation of Isidore of Seville's Origines, popularly called the Etymologiae. I was glad to learn about this, because I've been looking forward to the volume for almost two years now. Isidore, a Visigothic bishop of the seventh century, is the sort of writer snubbed by classicists (too late), mediaevalists (too early) and other scholars (too unreliable). And yet, as even Wikipedia attests, he is the first serious encyclopaedist after Pliny, and one of the few important lights of the early Middle Ages. In the Origines, Isidore compiled a summary of European knowledge in twenty books, organised according to a scheme of explanation by etymology—defined as 'origo vocabulorum, cum vis verbi vel nominis per interpretationem colligitur', or 'the origin of words, when the force of a verb or a noun is gathered by interpretation'. For Isidore, finding the etymon (truth) behind a word was paramount to understanding its significance:

Nam dum videris unde ortum est nomen, citius vim eius intellegis. Omnis enim rei inspectio etymologia cognita planior est.

For when you have seen whence a word comes, you will soon be able to understand its force. Indeed, the enquiry into anything is clearer when its etymology is known.

Wilson correctly remarks, 'This notion of the pedagogical value of etymologies guides Isidore’s magnum opus, the Etymologies, which offers an encyclopedic account of just about everything, from grammar to God, and from Nero to newts—all expounded through the underlying truth of the Latin language.' The problem with this, in Wilson's eyes, is that Isidore's etymological analysis is so deeply primitive:

Most of Isidore’s supposed etymologies are—by the standards of modern academic philology—complete twaddle. About a quarter of them are made up out of his own head. The Etymologies often reads like a series of bad puns: "Horses (equus) are so called because when they were yoked in a team of four they were balanced (aequare)". . .

We hear the same thing in Dot Wordsworth's Spectator review:

The problem with Isidore is that almost half his etymologies are incorrect, and his success rate is not helped by a compulsion to preserve ancient authorities even when he knows they must be awry.

Wordsworth agrees that true etymology is 'the work of the 19th century', and that even Johnson's 1755 propositions are 'hopeless'—an overstatement. As well as an indictment of Isidore's scholarship, this 'twaddle' makes translation difficult, and in Wilson's opinion the present edition plays it a little too safe, using bracketed Latin rather than converting Isidore's analysis into English:

Mostly this is fine, if unexciting, though there are inevitably moments when the committee nods. For instance, we are told that "health (salus) is thought to take its name from salt (sal), for nothing is better for us than salt (sal) and sun—in fact, we see that the bodies of sailors are well-hardened". It is pleasing to be reminded that people once thought that lying out in the UV rays and eating olives was a kind of health cure. But the translators miss a trick here, since the Latin word for sun—sol—also sounds similar to salt (sal) and health (salus). Isidore’s language puts all three together.

We might think that Wilson herself has missed a trick here: after all, the translators have introduced a play, converting Latin nautae into English sailors, which 'also sounds similar' to sal and salus. But notice also Wilson's sentence 'It is pleasing to be reminded. . .' Her tone is arch and dismissive: those delightful little fools. The tone is heard again here:

There are some wonderful comic moments, when the pure play of language results in extreme banality. It is somehow deeply comforting to be told that "A sheep (ovis) is a mild livestock animal, with wool, a defenceless body, and a peaceful temperament".

Wilson treats Isidore's text as something resolutely of the past—as a book of merely historical interest, like the crude daubings of savages in Lascaux. It is a volume to be 'dipped into', 'a perfect lavatory book'—sort of a quaint version of Buck's Dictionary of Selected Synonyms. For Wilson, the only benefit of Isidore is his 'pure play of language'—a very modernist (or postmodernist) idea—as if there were no bounds, rules, limits, or decorum to his analyses. When she comes to review, in the same article, a new book on Isidore, she says of the author's 'crazy' translations of certain etymologies that 'the little samples he offers are a helpful reminder of Isidore’s playfulness—even his jouissance'. Fashion creeps in. And when she writes, towards the end of her review, that 'Etymology can be a way of showing our debt to tradition: ancient cultures are preserved in the words we write', I hear not so much Isidore's project as the clarion call of today's academian multiculturalist.

*

Emily Wilson refers to Isidore's etymological analyses as 'truly silly'. I propose a moratorium on the use of this word, 'silly', to describe intellectual efforts of past ages. It betokens a mind closed to the difficulties of history—closed to those aspects of the past that are genuinely strange to us. As Wilson remarks, 'As the new translators remark, the Etymologies was "arguably the most influential book, after the Bible, in the learned world of the Latin West for nearly a thousand years".' If you are happy to call the contents of such a book 'silly', you're probably missing something. Wilson's concession to Isidore's seriousness and significance is this, after a mention of some loaded political etymologies at the end of her review:

As Isidore well knew, etymology is not a value-neutral science. The search for a "truth in words" is cultural, moral and philosophical, as well as philological. . . The writers of etymologies—from Isidore in the seventh century to politicians in modern times—choose how we should define our world.

This is absolutely correct; but in the context of this review the statement feels grudging, a grand proposition lacking in conviction and vitality. We need to take this idea more seriously, and not merely pay lip-service to it; we need, in other words, to take Isidore more seriously.

Wilson collapses the Isidorean etymology onto the pun: 'The Etymologies often reads like a series of bad puns', ' Isidore’s puns and wordplay may go beyond the strict boundaries of the etymological definition', ' Isidore’s cringe-inducing pun'. Isidore's analyses are not true etymologies—because a true etymology looks like the sort of thing in the OED, ie. 'modern academic philology'—so they must be mere puns, or else 'twaddle', or both. Why make the distinction?

Daniel Fried ('Of Boars, Rhapsodes, and the Uses of Culturalist Error' in Comparative Literature 57.4), thinks etymology more dangerous than the pun. He distinguishes between good and bad etymology, making explicit what remains implicit in Wilson's review:

Good etymology is correct and responsible etymology, and it tells us about language itself, its structures and developments; it is only a key to literary locks when employed with the utmost expertise. But bad etymology is worse than useless: it is the province of modern cranks and well-meaning ancients who were in way over their heads. Bad etymology is essentialist and polemical (in addition to being wrong): it asserts that the one true hidden meaning of a given word or name is disclosed by whatever word seems to make the closest phonic match.

(For David Dawson, by contrast, the ancient etymologists were not so much well-meaning as canny manipulators of textual authority: 'the etymologist could counter charges of hermeneutic willfulness with the claim to have uncovered the original foundation of meaning [of a word]'.)

But Fried's passage is a remarkable bit of moralising. Fried and Wilson have much in common—Fried's 'well-meaning ancients' might as well be Isidore, and both note that older etymologies are both polemical and factually wrong. Fried, like Wilson, is a multiculturalist, a Bakhtinian heteroglot, as is so common among the denizens of today's academy—and this is his agenda in attacking the 'essentialism' or absolutism of the 'bad etymology'. It is much the same as Popper's feelings towards Plato and Hegel. However,

Puns are more amenable to intelligent analysis because they are less grand in their claims. Puns, like etymology, are prestidigitations of the phoneme or grapheme, and a quick-switch assertion that this is that, a given word or usage is a stand-in for another. But the punster plays the game for low stakes. . . The punster does not discover meaning buried within words, but rather expropriates the serendipities of language and works them into an assertive creation of meaning.

The truth is that Fried's last sentence presents a false dichotomy. Isidore says that he is discovering meaning buried in words; but let us remove the word 'buried', and say that he is discovering meaning in words. Let us say that he has found a device for retrieving unsuspected meaning from words—a device that makes full use of the 'serendipities of language'. Is he not, then, creating meaning? Is the creation of meaning not at the heart of Isidore's project?

Fried is afraid of the totalising impulse, the totalitarian impulse—but it is the mark of a great character and intellect to impose its shape upon all the materials that it encounters. We value the coherence, scope and power of a man's vision: and to the extent that he can bend the meaning of words to his will, we can only admire him.

Beckett saw Joyce as a magician who could do anything with language: he could turn a word into its opposite, or discover its relation to any other, by altering a couple of letters. And so with Isidore—he can disclose the relation between a man (homo) and the dirt (humus) of which he is made. And he can turn a word into its opposite, too: in Origines I.29, on etymology itself, he mentions the class of etymologies 'ex contrariis [datae]', ie. those traditionally called 'antiphrastic'. The most famous of these analyses is the traditional 'lucus a non lucendo', which derives lucus (grove) from lucere (to shine), because groves are so dark that no light can shine through. As Isidore has it, ''lucus', quia umbra opacus parum luceat'. Although apparently ludicrous ('silly'), this type of etymology exhibits the logic of the negative, exploited by magical thinkers throughout history; compare, for instance, Freud on the 'antithetical meaning of primal words'.

The concept of 'lucus a non lucendo' had been the object of scepticism from the start—it is first mentioned by Quintilian who quotes it mockingly. It was later put into its canonical form by Servius, and recycled throughout the Middle Ages. (I once jotted an idea for a story called Lucas Anon Lucinda.) In the Renaissance, according to Dilwyn Knox (Ironia, 1989) came a reaction against mediaeval antiphrastic etymologies:

Now it was suggested instead that lucus derived from lux straight-forwardly: sacred groves were often illuminated by religious fires.

Knox goes on to discuss the even more recondite theory of Annius:

The Latin word lucus, he explained, was not derived per antiphrasin, but was a straightforward derivation from the Aramaic and hence Etruscan [!] word luca meaning 'old man' or 'council of elders'.

Similarly, in Sanctius' 1587 Minerva (I translate from my French edition):

For my part, I think lucus comes from an Etruscan word. In effect Varro, in the Origines [V.55], affirms that Luceres and Lucumones are Etruscan names. Furthermore, Luca, with the accent on the latter syllable, as the Talmudists pronounce it, is the same thing in Etruscan as senex or senator. And since antiquity the books of poets have been full of Luci and of rites religione parentum. . .

This new anti-antiphrastic movement, represented also by Agostino Dati and J. C. Scaliger, found its precursor in none other than Isidore of Seville. In Origines 14.8.30 he provides an alternative etymology for lucus:

Lucus est locus densis arboribus septus, solo lucem detrahens. Potest et a conlucendo crebris luminibus dici, quae ibi propter religionem gentilium cultumque fiebant.

The grove is a place set off with thick trees, keeping light away from the ground. The word could also derive from the resplendence of frequent lights, which occur there on account of the pagan religion and worship.

What's interesting is that Isidore gives both etymologies—hardly a 'one true hidden meaning', more a jouissance with the 'serendipities of language'—just what Wilson and Fried approve of. In fact Isidore is not the powerful force imposing his metaphysics on language—for these characters we have to wait for the nineteenth century, for Walter Whiter, James Byrne and John Horne Tooke—near-contemporary with the holy founders of scientific philology—and even successors to it, especially in France, as can be seen from Raminagrobis's excellent post on Grasset d'Orcet, and from my own post on Fulcanelli, coming soon. But if Isidore is not a great intellect, he may at least be a magician with words, not quite at Joyce's level, but like Joyce trying to forge his own world with language, discovering significance in unlikely connections, but never content to rest on a single interpretation. As a tool of explanation, Isidore's method is not closed, but an open work. Isidore invites in his student an apophenia—he encourages his reader to see behind every word new words, new thoughts. The Origines thus resembles the kabbalah, although it lacks the profound theology of that art. It is not full of puns. It is full of truths—but truths of a different order to those found in the OED.

Which is to say, 'The writers of etymologies. . . choose how we should define our world', and moreover to say it with conviction. I go further than Emily Wilson: I say it is a shame that we do not have our own origines.

A health to the company

Otia Imperialia, Book II, chapter 17:

It was Hengist's daughter who introduced the well-known custom of extending a solemn invitation to drink by saying, 'wes hāl', which means 'be merry'; to this the guest in turn replies: 'drink hāl', that is, 'drink merrily'. In the British tongue the corresponding words are cantinoch and boduit.

Nowadays we write, 'wassail' and 'drink hail'—and that's 'hail' as in hale, ie. whole or healthy, rather than merry. According to the OED, the words are not attested as toasts in either Old English or Old Norse, but were probably first used as such by the Danes in England; the earliest reference is from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in English from Lawman's translation of Wace's Brut, itself based largely on Geoffrey. The first time I toasted a health with Mrs. Roth—it was a small glass of port, my favourite drink, which she was happy to essay, and relieved to enjoy, on the occasion of her 30th birthday, spent in the City of Love; we were not yet married, but on our way—I softly called 'wassail', and was disappointed not to receive the correct response. (You say I have unreasonable standards? This I expected purely because she counts herself a mediaevalist, and an Anglo-Saxonist to boot. Still, she knew for next time.)

Gervase's editors footnote thus:

Professor Patrick Sims-Williams and Dr Marged Haycock suggest that cantinoch could be Old Welsh (or Cornish or Breton) can(t) tin uch, meaning 'with bottom up', while boduit could be Old Welsh (or Breton) bod (d)it, meaning 'goodwill to you' or 'thanks to you', influenced by Middle Irish is buide duit, 'it is well for you', or else equivalent to Modern Welsh boddwyd, 'it/he has been drowned', which is used metaphorically to mean 'celebrate'. The word can is attested in Welsh from the beginning of the seventeenth century with the meaning 'tankard'; it is quite conceivable that this loanword from English can was in the language for centuries before its first attestation, in which case the phrase would mean 'tankard bottom up!'

I was surprised to discover that the OED reliably attests 'can' as far back as 1375, from John Barbour's The Bruce—surprised because I'd assumed the word to be an abbreviation of 'canister', which, however, only appears in English in the late 17th century, and then as a learned classicism. 'Canister', it turns out, has a Semitic root, by way of Greek, while the ulterior origins of 'can' are unknown.

I approve of toasts. Not enough are drunk these days; the joy of tradition has given way to a flaccidity of least resistance. I make it a point of honour to toast when drinking in company. I approve of the call-and-response, too—it seems especially appropriate for a toast, as a means of encouraging participation among drinkers, or more generally, as an impediment to carelessness. To drink with a man must be to test his credentials as a man. How delightful, then, that the toast prescribed by the Royal Navy for Saturdays should be:

To sweethearts and wives—

and that one's compotators should respond, whether audibly or not,

. . . pray they never meet!

In two weeks Gawain is coming to visit. He has promised to bring port—real port, bought in Portugal—and I shall insist, of course, on a toast. No doubt I shall learn a Polish tradition or two; but I trust, in the meantime, that when I say 'wassail' he will be able to respond with assurance.

Saltbox and skimmington, marrowbone and cleavers

Seven etymologies for the word charivari:

A. From the Trésor:

1. Perhaps from Latin caribaria, attested in a translation from Oribasius, the Greek καρηβαρία, 'heaviness of the head', because a deafening charivari can cause headaches.

2. The hypothesis of a Semitic origin, Hebrew haverim, collective plural of haver, "person belonging to an Israelite community" (whose members celebrated certain occasions with a great tumult), needs more detail, especially from a historical point of view.

3. A connection to the French hunting-term harer, "to rouse dogs", has the difficulty that no form of the type *harivari is atttested; however, hari, a cry to get animals going, and hari-hari expressing mockery, could have helped to preserve the first i in charivari.

4. A purely onomatopoeic formation seems untenable, although the phonetic form of the word and the reduplication of its vowels could, again, explain the retention of the first i. A tautological composition is difficult to establish on account of the first element.

B. From Littré's Dictionnaire:

5. Scaliger derives the word from chalybaria, kettles.

6. Du Cange derives it from Vulgar Latin caria, nut, κάρυον, because nuts are thrown and a great din is kicked up on a wedding-day.

7. Diez wonders if the first element of the word represents calix, glass, pot, noise of glasses and pots.

More speculations at Languagehat.

Further hypotheses welcomed here also: the elaborater the better!