Tuesday, 30 November 2010

The Etymology of Ranks

The Antipodean wrote to ask why the army contains many majors and no minors. This ignores child soldiers, but is a good excuse for running from the bottom brass through to the top.

The modern ranks were only arranged a few hundred years ago. This means that many of the etymologies make no sense at all. Heads outrank horse-servants, and biggers are smaller.

A corporal has nothing to do with corporal punishment. He comes, via caporale and capo, from caput, the Latin for head*. This is odd as a corporal is the lowest and least of non-commissioned officers.

A sergeant is simply a servant, and is therefore superior to the head.

A lieu-tenant is simply French for a place-holder, or a substitute. The idea is that if I can't be present in person I can send a somebody to take my place and to act with my authority. American lieutenants are loo-tenants, because they're incontinent. English lieutenants are left-tenants, because they're all socialist. French lieutenants have women.

A captain, like corporal, derives from the Latin caput, meaning head.

Major is Latin for bigger. A major was originally a shortening of sergeant-major or bigger servant and his rank has been steadily rising. In Catch-22 a chap whose name is Major Major Major is promoted to the rank of major through an administrative error: thus becoming Major Major Major Major.

A colonel is, literally, a colonnade. A colonnade is a line of columns and a colonel is the chap marching at the head of a column. In a nutshell, colonels have nothing to do with kernels, and there is no truth in them.

Generals are, in general, the general head of the army. It is a shortening of captain general, which was formed along the same lines as attorney general and Estates General and other post-positive adjectives. Generals are therefore generic and genetic, ruling over a genus of soldiers.

I have always wilfully misunderstood Hamlet's line about a play being "caviar to the general" as referring to a gourmandising soldier. The phrase actually means that, just as caviar is disliked by the general public, but loved by gourmets, so the play he refers to is unpopular with the hoi polloi, but appreciated by those who know about such things. I am certain that Shakespeare must have used the phrase himself, before giving it to Hamlet.

Fields Marshals are not, etymologically, martial. Martial comes from Mars, the god of war and relates to martians. Marshals, on the other hand, are mare-skalkaz or horse-servants. Thus putting them, etymologically, below corporals, which shows how logical the army is. It also makes Marshall Ney's name even more amusing.

And soldiers themselves: the word derives, as I have already mentioned, from salt. This means that, if you're an officer, you have salty privates.

Incidentally, what do you get if you drop a grand piano on a barracks?

A flat major.

Now repeat with a pit-shaft.

*Although some say that the reverse is true.

Monday, 29 November 2010

Smarting Phones

I recently bought a smart phone, and when it was delivered I seemed to hear the voice of Cleopatra shrieking at me:

Horrible villain! or I'll spurn thine eyes
Like balls before me; I'll unhair thy head:
Thou shalt be whipp'd with wire, and stew'd in brine,
Smarting in lingering pickle.

People still do smart from their wounds, especially those wounds inflicted by a smart bomb, and it occurred to me, smart Alec that I am, to wonder whether there was a connection. There is.

Smart, as an adjective, originally meant painful and had everything to do with the verb smart, which meant hurt. However, we've always had a soft spot for stabbing. We think knives are clever. Sharp, cutting and incisive are all synonyms for intelligent, and the same thing happened, in the seventeenth century, to smart.

Smart Alec's surname was Hoag and he was a pimp and a pickpocket in nineteenth century New York. Smart phones were first mentioned in 1978. And Smarties, everybody's favourite oblate spheroid, have nothing to do with anything.

The Inky Fool trying to look smart

N.B. If you look at the Inky Fool on your iPhone, then press the + in the bottom middle and click "Add to Home Screen" - Hey Presto! You have an Inky Fool app.

Sort of.

Sunday, 28 November 2010








Then you celebrate by pouring yourself a xeric martini.

The Inky Fool had been map-reading

Friday, 26 November 2010

St Peter Out

Here, dear reader, for your instruction and edification are two passages from the Acts of the Apostles.

   - Acts 5v18-23

   - Acts 12v4-10

The phrase peter out goes back to Michigan in 1854 and a book called Puddleford Papers or Humors of the West, which contains the line:

He hoped this 'spectable meeting warn't going to Peter-out.

Without the out you can get back another nine years to the Wild West of Wisconsin. An old prospector is complaining of how his luck has disappeared:

When my mineral petered why they all Petered me. Now it is dig, dig, dig, drill, drill for nothing. My luck is clean gone - tapered down to nothing.

Nobody knows why the phrase peter out should mean mysteriously disappear. There are four speculative theories.

1) It's to do with St Peter denying Jesus three times.
2) It's to do with a seam of rock in mining having been exhausted, because St Peter was the rock upon which Jesus would build his church.
3) It's to do with the French word péter meaning fart, because péter dans la main is a French phrase meaning fart in the hand or come to nothing.
4) It's to do with a seam of rock in mining having been exhausted, because it's all been blown away with explosive saltpeter, otherwise known as potassium nitrate.

I don't think any of these work. Peter's denials seem irrelevant and his rockiness doesn't have anything to do with disappearance. The French word is pronounce pay-tay and is an odd intrusion into Midwestern English. Saltpetre, which is usually considered the most convincing, doesn't work because it implies explosion, whereas petering is always about quiet and inexplicable disappearance.

However, anybody who knows the New Testament knows that St Peter is forever mysteriously disappearing. In a faintly Christian country, the twelfth chapter of Acts is all you need to explain Peter as a slang term for enigmatic escape, or silently slipping away.

UPDATE I've just come across the verb to peter in a dictionary of London slang from 1860 where it means "to run short, to give out". As the earliest American version is only 1846, that means that well... I'm no longer convinced of the US origin.

Can't a chap get some sleep?

Thursday, 25 November 2010

Loving St Catherine's Butterfly


She is therefore commemorated to this day as a firework.



For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at.

Daws are, of course, jackdaws.


Let Sporus tremble — "What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?"
Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,
This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys,
Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys,
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite.
Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray,
As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid Impotence he speaks,
And, as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet squeaks;
Half Froth, half Venom, spits himself abroad,
In Puns, or Politicks, or Tales, or Lyes,
Or Spite, or Smut, or Rymes, or Blasphemies.
His Wit all see-saw between that and this,
And he himself one vile Antithesis.
Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,
The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart!
Fop at the Toilet, Flatt'rer at the Board,
Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord.
Eve's Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest,
Beauty that shocks you, Parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and Pride that licks the dust.


Call a dog Hervey and I shall love him.

N.B. Hervey is pronounced Harvey.

Wednesday, 24 November 2010

Miserable Biscuit-Whores








A typical day at Magdalene College

*This is disputed, and the OED doubts her existence.

Tuesday, 23 November 2010

Saint Pants









I've always liked the lines from Kubla Khan:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:




Monday, 22 November 2010

A Hymn To Sheila





Till, by degrees, remote and small,
The strains decay,
And melt away,
In a dying, dying fall.

Or these from Auden:

O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,


So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.



Sunday, 21 November 2010

Sonnet 21 and the Lost Original

Imagine, dear reader, that five hundred years from now all the James Bond films have been lost, but people are still watching Austin Powers.

Sonnet 21 is not a good sonnet. In fact, it's a bad sonnet. I doubt you've ever noticed it. If you have read it, you probably moved straight on to Sonnet 22 without giving it another thought, and I wouldn't blame you if you did.

But Sonnet 21 is quite peculiarly bad and it gets worse the more you look at it. Here it is in full. Afterwards I shall explain what's wrong with it. Then I shall give you my fantastic theory on why it's like that.

So is it not with me as with that Muse,
 Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
 And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
 With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare,
 That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.
 And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother's child, though not so bright
 As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air:
  Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
  I will not praise that purpose not to sell.

Many things are wrong with this sonnet: duplication of rhyme, inelegant repetition, tautology, faulty imagery, stupid words, pointless ambiguity and ill-matched lists. Let's take them one by one.

Duplication of rhyme

The second quatrain goes air-ems-air-ems, and the third goes ite-air-ite-air. You can't do that. Shakespeare doesn't do that. In no other sonnet does he allow himself to repeat a rhyme, because it's awkward and it's lazy and it doesn't work.

Inelegant Repetition

Shakespeare repeats the phrase Heaven's air to no rhetorical purpose. It's fine to repeat a phrase for effect (We will fight them on the beaches. We will fight them in the fields.). But to do that you need to organise your repetitions; to repeat something without reason or structure is just sloppy.


Heaven's air is a tautology. Where else would the air be? What else is heaven? Shakespeare was stupidly repeating a phrase that was already stupid.

Faulty Imagery

Both lines involving Heaven's air have ill-formed metaphors. How can the air hem something? The image of a hem is taken from needlework. Heaven's tapestry might hem in a huge rondure, but heaven's tautologous air cannot.

Nor is air a suitable material for fixing gold candles. The walls of creation might hold many candelabra, but heaven's air can't. Imagine trying to get the wall-plugs to stay in place.

Contrary to popular belief, Shakespeare did not mix his metaphors: taking arms against a sea  is not a confusion, but a deliberate image of futility.

Stupid Words

Couplement and rondure are both silly, latinate words. The word couplement does crop up in Love's Labours Lost, where it used by Don Adriano De Armado whose language is so hifalutin that he "speaks not like a man of God's making". Shakespeare knew couplement was ridiculous, rondure he just made up.

Pointless Ambiguity

Painted in the second line is odd. Does it refer to make-up, as is usual in Shakespeare? If so, the idea isn't taken any further. One would expect Shakespeare to go on about how his love is naturally beautiful, and the other's love is all cosmetics. Or is it to do with painting, as in art? It's ambiguous, but it's an ambiguity that adds nothing to the poem.

Ill-Matched Lists

"With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems" is not a proper group.

Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best -
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow -

That's a proper group: five parts of the body. Sun, moon, earth and stars would make a proper group: but in this line you switch from heavenly bodies to gems. Moreover, you do so awkwardly because the earth looks as though it fits with sun and moon, before you realise that it's the earth's gems that he's talking about. This one is really puzzling. It would be so easy for Shakespeare to have pulled out earth, air, fire, water or any other conventional group. Why this mismatched gallimaufry?

So much for the problems. Here's one solution. Shakespeare was not writing about bad poetry in general. He was writing about one particular bad poem.

That original poem would have these faults:

1) Duplication of rhyme.
2) The phrase heaven's air
3) A misplaced needlework metaphor
4) References to sun, moon, earth and sea's rich gems, April flowers etc.
5) Preposterous praise
6) Endless comparisons
7) Long, fatuous, Latinate words
8) Something to do with painting
9) General awfulness

How did this poem actually go? We don't know. It is lost, gone and vanished like an old oak table. But it is possible to reconstruct it. And, just for you, dear reader, I have done exactly that. Aren't I kind? Here is my (deliberately awful) original.

I saw a portrait of my love today
 Yet, though the painter failed not in his art,
A brush and human hand could not portray
 The image tapestried upon my heart.
The sun itself cannot her brightness feign
 The pulchrous moon, beside her, is not fair.
Sea-sapphires counterfeit her eyes in vain,
 Red rubies to her lips shall not compare.
Frail Nature must within her confines keep
 And Art, unpotented, must mutely stare.
The jealous stars must gaze on her and weep
 Those golden candles fixed in heaven’s air!
  All tellings fade, like April’s first-born flowers;
  Her beauty is beyond all earthly powers.

Mr W.H. tells Will that he admires this monstrosity. Shakespeare, miffed, points out all of the faults and then, just to prove his point, writes this response:

So is it not with me as with that Muse,
 Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
 And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
 With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare,
 That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.
 And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother's child, though not so bright
 As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air:
  Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
  I will not praise that purpose not to sell.

It makes a lot more sense now, doesn't it? They are not faults, but parodies: not accidents but allusions. Nor am I merely being kind to dear old Will. You may have noticed that the standard against which I found fault was Shakespeare himself, and Shakespeare is unlikely to be worse than Shakespeare.

As I say, imagine a future where James Bond has been forgotten, but Austin Powers survives.

Could have been worse

Saturday, 20 November 2010

The Waters Of Life





*Not to be confused with a gay lick.

Friday, 19 November 2010


A mugwump is a derogatory word for somebody in charge, or for somebody who affects to be above petty squabbles and faction. The plodding boss and the pompous peacemaker are both mugwumps.

Mugwump is therefore an eminently useful word. It has a preposterous sound: the ug and the ump get across the idea of plodding stupidity, and context can give it meaning.

The origin of the word is extraordinary and involves the first American Bible.

There was a seventeenth century chap called John Eliot who was a protestant, a puritan and a colonist in America. He wanted to convert the local natives - the Wampanoags - to Christianity and to do so he needed a Bible in their language. He learnt Massachusett, the language of the Wampanoags, and then had to invent a writing system to get it down on paper. The result was Eliot's Massachusett Bible of 1663: the first Bible ever printed in America.

Eliot had the perennial translator's problem of finding words for concepts that don't exist in a language. The Algonquians had no centurions, no captains, no generals and so what was he to do when such fellows cropped up in the Bible? He decided to translate all of them using the Wampanoag word for war leader: mugquomp.

Mugwump then disappeared for a hundred and fifty years. There is neither citation nor quotation until the early nineteenth century when it pops up again as a comical and derisive term for a boss.

So long is the silence, that some say that John Eliot's mugquomp has nothing to do with the nineteenth century mugwump. The OED avers that there is no reason to connect the two.

I might believe the OED, were it not that the first modern mugwump it cites is from Vermont in 1828. Vermont is only just to the North of the Wampanoag homeland. This alone would test coincidence to the limit. The second citation is from Rhode Island in 1832 and Rhode Island is slap bang in the middle of Wampanoag territory. Had mugwump reappeared in California or Dorset, I might credit it as an independent coinage. But geography being what it is I am as certain as certain can be that mugwump is mugquomp, and that the first American Bible produced a fine American insult.

We also know that the Wampanoag population of Martha's Vineyard were still using Eliot's Bible in the mid-eighteenth century. All of which means that the OED seems to be rather too exucontian in its derivations.

So bring on the mugwumpery! Insult your boss and when a petty peacemaker belittles your battle, smack the mugwump in the face.

And with that our tribal hebdomadary comes to end. As John Eliot said just before he died: "Welcome joy!"

An editorial meeting at the Inky Fool offices

P.S. I'm sure there's a Sgt Bilko episode where he bets on a horse called Mugwump, but I can't find it.

Thursday, 18 November 2010

Christmas Solved By A Snark

If, and the thing is wildly possible, you are even now, dear reader, trembling at the thought of all the horrible gifts that you will have to hand out to sundry and all to mark the celebration of the birth of Our Lord; weep no more, for your confusion about presents for young and old have softly and suddenly vanished away.

I don't know how many of you have been following The Hunting of the Snark blog, but, dammit, you should have been.

Essentially, there's a fellow in Montreal called Mahendra Singh who has been lovingly illustrating Lewis Carroll's poem and providing an erudite commentary on each picture. His is a combination of art and interest that cannot be commended to too high an altitude.

I remember once seeing a copy of Moby Dick, on the cover of which the illustrator had put a picture of a blue whale. It is a sad truth of illustrations that they are often drawn by people who care not a jot or tittle for the content of the book. Not so here. The chap, obviously, cares. Indeed his care may border on lunacy, but that's none of my business. The point is that this is not some fly-by-night illustrator knocking out a job in a week: it is a labour of love, a work of whimsy, and an opus of obsession.

The relation of all this to December 25th?

His work is now being published by Melville. It will be, I don't doubt, one of the finest editions of our times. Moreover, it can be given as a present to both children and adults: from cradle to care-home. Moreover, you don't even need to worry that the receptor of the gift might already have a copy: the point is that he doesn't have a copy with those lovely illustrations. I already own four editions of Snark, but am rabid for this one.

Thus the problems of Christmas are solved with one fell swoop and swooping fall.

Amazon UK link

Amazon US link

And the blog itself is here.

Others, I'm sure can find it by going to Amazon and searching.

Since you ask, dear reader, my favourite lines from the Snark are the following:

He had brought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!"

But we've got our Captain to thank:"
A perfect and absolute blank!"

Christmas with the Inky Fool

N.B. I need hardly mention that I have never met the illustrator in question and that this advice aims to profit only you, dear reader.

N.Better. I shall return to tribes tomorrow.

Artesian Stella Behind The Arras





Such Artesian wells became known as Artesian Wells.



Hamlet steals the Inky Fools duvet

Wednesday, 17 November 2010

Hooch and Moonshine





Yeah. That kind of whisky. The good kind.





Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of my brother?

Things the Inky Fool does when drunk


Tuesday, 16 November 2010

Pariah States and Pariah Poets








Call him but 'chaff of humankind.'


The fool's intrusion in th'assembly of the wise
Is like one placing dirty feet upon a lovely couch.

I'm not sure that Tiruvallar and I would get along.

Well, I'd never do a thing like that.

*Cockney rhyming slang: cobblers' awls = balls.

Monday, 15 November 2010

Carib Cannibals

We shall now have a week of posts on tribes and the tremendous words that they have given to language. (Tribes are probably tribes because there were three (tri) tribes in ancient Rome).

When Christopher Columbus arrived in Cuba he discovered that the natives called themselves Los de Caniba, he then sailed on to Haiti where they told him that they were called Caribes. This is because in the old Caribbean languages Ls, Ns and Rs were pretty much interchangeable (which must have been confusing if you were called Rory and ate lollies).

One word - Caribs - survived as the name of a sea. Canib, with a bal on the end, survived as the designation of the culinary eccentricities found in those tropical climes; for the Caribs were anthropophagi.

So that's the Ns and the Rs dealt with. But what (I hear you cry) of the Ls? Well, dear reader, that was a good question and well asked. Now can you think of a writer who set a play on an island? Can you? Can you think of the name of the savage character in that play? Can you? Well you damned well should, you bookless freak. Caliban in The Tempest.

Ban! Ban! Ca-Caliban!
Got a new master, get a new man.

Yeah, him. So far as anybody can tell Shakespeare took the name from his reading on shipwrecks and exploration that formed the basis of the his last play.

So Caribbean, Cannibal and Caliban all come from one word with an ambiguous consonant in the middle.

Columbus was terribly pleased to hear that they were Canibs, because he assumed that the Canibs were subjects of the Great Khan, and therefore that he had succeeded in reaching Asia through the West. In this the poor chap was mistaken, but it shows the hope and foolishness that etymological speculation may engender.

Now, like Othello, I have spoken...

...of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

Just on the offchance that you're interested, Othello is here alluding to the greatest travel book ever written: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which is a delightful filigree of fibs from the late fourteenth century. What's interesting about the Othello line is that Mandeville had been completely debunked a few years before Othello was written.

Mandeville's Travels was a wonderful medieval fantasy that could not stand up to the cruel siege of truth. There was even a satirical play put on in London about how foolish Mandeville's stories were, just before Othello came out. So Shakespeare is deliberately associating Othello with a foolish, mythical and laughable past.

Mandeville itself was partly based upon the Anglo Saxon Wonders of the East which contains this piece of information, which, like me, is more beautiful than true:

Then there is a certain island in the Red Sea where there is a race of men called by us Donestre. they are shaped like soothsayers from the head down to the navel, and the other part is similar to a man's body. And they know all human languages. When they see a man of a foreign race, they call him and his fellows with the names of known men, and with lying words they deceive him and seize him. and then, after that, they devour all of him, except the head, and then they sit and weep over the head.

The Donestre in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript

Sunday, 14 November 2010


Methinks, does not have anything to do with thinking.

The Old English had two verbs that sounded alike: thenkan and thinken. Here's the rub: thinken didn't mean think, but thenkan did, indeed that's where our word comes from.

Thinken meant seem. This word has just about died out. It survives only in the phrase it seems to me or me thinken, now contracted to a single word: methinks.

So the thirtieth most quoted line of poetry is: "The lady doth protest too much, it seems to me", as Shakespeare said of the suffragette.

It's an odd little rule of English that we don't like the sound enk. You cannot wenk, lenk or senk, but you can wink, link and sink (and I often do). Such words may have existed, we always turn the E to an I.

English grudgingly admits the enk sound occasionally, in such words as enclosure. Yet even there we confine enk to the unstressed syllable, and tend to pronounce it inklosure, as in Inky Fool.

The Inky Fool was, of course, once known as Enki, and was worshipped by the Sumerians as their god of wisdom. How are the mighty fallen!

The Enki Fool in happier times, talking to a fish.

Saturday, 13 November 2010



The word was, by the way, coined by Erasmus.

The Inky Fool in a hurry

Friday, 12 November 2010

Paradoxical Workers

The first two words of the Daily Telegraph the other day were "Unemployed workers". The article then went on about the root and branch (but not trunk) reforms of the benefits system.

I liked unemployed workers. I liked it for a lot of reasons. First, it is an oxymoron in the proper rhetorical sense. Like Shakespeare's:

O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well seeming forms!

Or Bart Simpson's "This sucks and blows at the same time." Or "She's hot and she's cool" or "Military Intelligence". In that sense it fits happily into the language of dating and love that I wrote about the other day.

Second, there is the distant ancient voice of Marxism calling from the front page of the Telegraph. Workers of the world unite! To a convinced communist there are only workers and the bourgeoisie, just as in the eyes of God there are only sinners and saints. The notion that a worker is a worker whether he works or no has a long linguistic pedigree.

And in a related sense, there is the idea of the working class: from the great triumvirate of upper, middle and... working. It is the euphemism denied by context: rather like tourist or economy class on an aeroplane.

Finally, unemployed workers recalls that great paradox of identity. Is doing being, or being doing? Or, as Frank Sinatra put it: do-be-do-be-do-be-do.

The famous French tosspot, Jean-Paul Sartre, observed that if you spend all day every day waiting tables, then it's no use claiming that you are, in reality, an artist. In reality you are a waiter. He denied an interior truth that might, like a potent dream, outdo the mere existence.

And all that in two words. The Daily, Shakespearean, Marxist, airborne, anti-Sartrian Telegraph is one hell of a read.

N.B. The phrase was confined to the print edition, which just goes to show that you should fork out hard cash if you want the gems.

Thursday, 11 November 2010

Wagering the Wages of War







The Inky Fool solving a wage dispute

Wednesday, 10 November 2010

Taliban Classes

Taliban means students, but class means called to battle.

Taliban means students. There's an Arabic word tālib, meaning student, and, if you make that into a Pashtun plural, you get taliban. This is because the Taliban were, originally, just a small group of religious students who wanted to clean up Kandahar. They then got carried away, as capering students often do, and invaded Kabul.

Class, on the other hand, means those called to fight. There was a Proto Indo European word *kele, that meant, shout. From that the Romans got the verb calare, meaning call to arms. The early Roman population were always getting called to arms. When there were calared, the male population would form up as a c[a]lassis, and set off to find some Sabine women to rape.

The Roman king Servius Tullius divided the Romans into six classes so that he could tax them more efficiently, and so classis then came to mean a group. A classis could still be a military group like an army or a fleet, in the same way that an English division can still be military. But class could just be a part of a whole. Thus a school or a society could be broken up into classes, and the animal kingdom could be classified.

Incidentally, the reason that they are classified ads, is that they are arranged by subject, just as the Roman subjects were arranged for battle.

The Inky Fool found cross-dressing was much less fun in Kabul

Tuesday, 9 November 2010

Save The Words

I can do nothing better today than to recommend to you this article in The Guardian, about the website savethewords.org. Essentially, it's a site where they will give you an obscure and moribund word and encourage you to slip it into conversations, letters, ransom notes and the like. The idea is that words like mingent and sparsile will thus live again.

Mingent means urinating, and sparsile describes a star that is not in any constellation. Though mingent amuses, I think sparsile is more sad and more slipinable. I am a sad and sparsile wanderer, or The Defence Secretary is not part of any of the powerful groups within the party and his sparsile position has left him vulnerable in a reshuffle.

So toddle over to savethewords.org. It may be quixotic, but I hate windmills.

"Come forth, Lazarus!" But he came fifth and lost the job.

Monday, 8 November 2010

Wikipedia, Cyclopses and Fastchild













Sunday, 7 November 2010


A gundy-gut is a fatso, a porker and a lard-arse. But you had guessed that already, hadn't you? It's like a greedy-guts, but a little more fun, and a little more Eighteenth Century.

The Inky Fool contemplating elevenses

Saturday, 6 November 2010


To be fashionable nowadays we must 'brunch'. Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, last year by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter's Weekly, and indicating a combined breakfast and lunch.

I had always thought this strange, hermaphroditic meal was invented by twentieth century Americans. But that quotation is from the Punch magazine of August 1896. Lunch, by the way, is simply a shortening of luncheon, which comes from none-chenche, or noon drink*.

However, the brunch to which I must now flee, doesn't start till one.

Maybe I shall have a noon drink now.

*Though there is much disagreement and disputation upon this point.

Friday, 5 November 2010

No Tigers in the Tigris

I spent yesterday evening pottering about a beautiful exhibition on the tiger in Asian art, and wondering to myself whether the River Tigris in Iraq got its name because it was filled with aquatic tigers. I was miserable when I discovered that there is no connection whatsoever.

However, the Tigris (perhaps arrow) and the Euphrates (perhaps good ford) do mark the borders of Mesopotamia, which literally means between the rivers; just as a hippo-potamus is literally a horse-in-a-river; just as the name Philip or Philippos or Philos-Hippos literally means lover of horses; just as Phil-adelphia means brotherly love; just as the Adelphi in London was constructed by four brothers: John, Robert, James and William Adam.

None of which has anything to do with Delphi, which was named after dolphins.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears
Then imitate the action of a tiger.

The Inky Fool had let his garden get out of control.