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Funny Names for Bureaucrats

On July 10, 2021

Brenton Dickieson posted the other day about a comic-book adaptation of The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. I haven’t read that book in decades, but I did remember the wonderful names of demons. We’re in a digital world now, so I pulled out every such name from the text. The algorithm is nothing special: any word that begins with a capital letter and flunks spell-check is a candidate; delete a few dozen stragglers by hand.

Results: Scabtree, Screwtape, Slubgob, Slumtrimpet, Toadpipe, Wormwood.

What do we see here? They all come from the latter third of the alphabet. Lots of “s” words. (The Screwtape Letters is dedicated to Tolkien, who thought “s” was a sound for bad guys, too. Saruman, Sauron, Shelob, Sackville…). They’re mostly made from jamming two short English words together.

There’s another author who did that, at a much less elevated level. Keith Laumer wrote a ton of science-fiction stories about Jame Retief, a muscular, norm-busting diplomat in the “Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne” a gender-busting arm of Earth’s hegemony over the galaxy. Wikipedia says they’re satirical, but I’d describe them more like broad, sophomoric humor. 21st-Century intellects will find them a bit crass. (Naturally, I love them.) Laumer was a diplomat himself before he became a writer. These stories seem to be settling scores with his old bosses. The bosses in these stories get names like:

Barnshingle, Clawhammer, Clayfoot, Crodfoller, Dimplick, Grossblunder, Hidebinder, Hipstinker, Lackluster, Longspoon, Nitworth, Otherday, Passwyn, Pennyfool, Proudfoot, Rumpwhistle, Shortfall, Sidesaddle, Sitzfleisch, Spradley, Sternwheeler, Straphanger, Thrashwelt, Thunderstroke, Underthrust, Whaffle, Wrothwax

Of course, my favorite of these come from proverbs: he who sups with the devil must use a long spoon”; “he who runs away lives to fight another day”. We see the same pattern — fully a quarter of the names begin with “S”. Almost half come from the last third of the alphabet. If we remove the names that explicitly come from such proverbs, the pattern gets more pronounced.

What is it that makes funny names bend that way alphabetically?

An early hint of Numenor

By Joe

On June 30, 2021

In squibs & crackers

Thanks to Hana Videen of the Old English Wordhord (whose book is coming out soon in the UK, not so soon in the US), I learn about Alcuin’s commentary on the Book of Genesis in the form of a FAQ. It was long, bloated, and Latin, so my man Ælfric of Eynsham translated it into Englisc and cut it down to match Anglo-Saxon attention spans.

His answer to the question, “Why did God make a rainbow after the Great Flood?” contains a line that jumped out at me: Forþan þe he wiste gif he swa ne dyde þæt men woldan forhtigan þæt he mid flode eft fornumene wurdon þonne hy gesawon swiðlice renas. In Modern English, “because he knew that if he didn’t do that, every time it rained heavily men would think they were going to be destroyed by a flood.” God used the rainbow much the same way we now use an emoji to soften a harsh-sounding tweet.

“By a flood” hasn’t changed much in a thousand years; “mid flode” is still kind of readable. The word that did the jumping was “destroyed”: fornúmene. I wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien consciously took that as the source of the word “Númenor”, or if it was just one reason that the root “numen” sounded right to him, given the context.

The Relaxing Condition of Monoglottony

By Joe

On May 20, 2021

In trivial

I read a tweet today that described a Russian politician as a “гопник”. I didn’t learn that word in school, so I looked it up in the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary app. It was happy to tell me that the word means “yob” or “yobbo”.

Great.

What does that mean? It’s some kind of Brit slang that autocorrect won’t even let me type.

Brain wave: there’s a Robert/Collins French-English dictionary on the shelf that annoys me with the same stunt. Look up “yob” in there and find out it means loubard.

You can’t hang around a Parisian train station for long without meeting a loubard, so I’m all set. The Russian guy was a thug. But this episode has made me understand why Americans don’t learn foreign languages.

Door-trees

By Joe

On April 29, 2021

In squibs & crackers

A poem by Joy Harjo came into my inbox the other day. I’m sure she’s not thinking of Ents, but the poem has this bit in it:

The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway—
To the edge of the river of life, and drink—
I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:
“Speaking Tree”, lines 15-18

A tree by the doorway? That reminded me of the scene at the ruined gates of Isengard, and Legolas saying, “Yes, a tall grey Ent is there, but his arms are at his sides and he stands as still as a door-tree. (LotR, III, viii)

Harjo and Tolkien are clearly talking about different things, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to look up that word since the 1970s. A “door-tree”, the OED informs us, is one of the vertical posts that frame a door. To give a sense of how up-to-date the word is, their most recent citation is to Piers Plowman: “as ded as a dore-tree”. I’m sure Legolas doesn’t want us to think Quickbeam is playing dead, but I’m otherwise mystified. I don’t know what connotations Tolkien might have wanted us readers to pick up.

However, now I do know the answer to Charles Dickens’s puzzlement:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
A Christmas Carol, stave I

It looks like “door-nail” has replaced “door-tree” in the quote from Langland, since everyone has forgotten what door-trees were. Even though I have no more clue about current attitudes toward Ents than when I started, it’s fun to see a stone skipping across seven centuries of literature like that.

Literary Circles

By Joe

On March 16, 2021

In graphs

Today is another expedition into Distributed Collaboration. Not the kind your boss means, but the truly internetted kind of research in which Idiosophers specialize. This time, all the work was done by Martin Paul Eve, who has assembled a database of all the review essays in the London Review of Books. He has put the raw data on line, so all I have to do is type some commands in R. In his conception, reviews form a network where a node is a writer and a link in the network is an arrow pointing from the writer of the review to its subject. The LRB has been running since 1979, so the database has tens of thousands of entries.

Eve showed some graphs in a blog post where he had fun finding closed loops in the graph: A reviews B’s book, B reviews C’s book, C reviews A’s book. I’ve loved this kind of analysis ever since I read The Devil’s Dictionary. I went another direction, though.

This blog has been graphing the Inklings for a while. The LRB is too late historically to help out with understanding their direct interactions, but its network is useful for understanding their reception. So here’s the question: It’s clear that J.R.R. Tolkien was not welcomed into the sacred grove of Literature until we barbarians smashed the gates. The other Inklings weren’t mentioned in my college catalogue, either. Is that also true of the literary world across the pond?

One great thing you can do with a network graph is extract the subgraph around any point you ask for. I asked for the Inklings. I used Appendix A of Diana Glyer’s book The Company They Keep to decide who is an Inkling. None of them ever wrote a review, naturally, but six reviews of them appear in the network:

Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien
C.S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper
J.R.R. Tolkien, editor Christopher Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien, editor Alan Bliss
David Cecil
John Wain

That’s a respectable number of the group to be reviewed, considering how few of them were alive in 1979. I’m looking for how broad a reach they have with two degrees of separation. J.R.R. Tolkien has only a small network. Both of his entries in the database are due to reviews by Peter Godman. Peter Godman also reviewed a book by Tom Shippey, who wrote lots of things for LRB.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s network

C.S. Lewis’s network is larger, with 32 points, but that’s entirely due to J.I.M. Stewart. I’ve turned off the labels for anyone who was involved in fewer than 25 reviews (e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle) so we can read the graph. 32 connections would be kind of impressive, but I can’t help noticing that the graph they form is the same as the graph for Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien. Out of the 33 nodes, there are seven writers here who are connected tightly enough to the LRB establishment to be labeled. (If I recall That Hideous Strength correctly, Lewis would shed no tears at being in a small backwater of the network.)

C.S. Lewis’s network

That’s it for the people we usually think of as the Inklings. No Barfield. A couple of minor members have much more connection. Lord David Cecil (as one might suppose from his title) is extremely connected, but only because he’s reviewed by Frank Kermode:

David Cecil’s neighborhood (click to embiggen)

John Wain is in Cecil’s neighborhood; if we re-center it on him, the graph is just slightly different. Charles Williams is a well-connected name in Eve’s database, but the name is attached to the biographer, not the Inkling.

Conclusion

It’s safe to say that the Inklings are still out of the British literary mainstream by this measure. Were it not for three reviewers taking a brief interest, none of them would have appeared in the LRB.

Better Conclusion

If you want to see a truly amazing list of people, check out the archive of Tom Shippey’s LRB reviews. Where else can you find Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nichelle Nichols next to each other?

I made one tweak to the original database: T.A. Shippey and Tom Shippey are the same person, so I consolidated those two nodes.

Gloin’s Rank

By Joe

On January 31, 2021

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

Over at “Wisdom from the Lord of the Rings” last week, we heard about Frodo’s conversation with Glóin. It begins with Frodo’s polite, “Am I right in guessing that you are the Glóin, one of the twelve companions of the great Thorin Oakenshield?”

The word companion sounded different to me this time. Before, I’d taken it to mean that Glóin held the rank of Count under King Dáin. But there’s another way to read it. There was another king called “the great” who had twelve companions. That’s Charlemagne, or in Anglo-Norman, …li reis Charle, ki poesté fud grant Par les dudze cumpaignuns…. (“King Charles, whose power was great through his twelve companions…”) If modern French helps (it’s not impossible) there’s a translation of the Song of Roland on line that carries the word “companion” in this sense into the modern era.

So it seems likely that we’re supposed to get echoes of Charlemagne’s companions here. Maybe Glóin is the Dwarvish version of a Paladin. He’s dressed all in white, I can’t help noticing.

Seven Centuries

By Joe

On January 24, 2021

In mythgard academy

Catching up with the Mythgard Academy class on Dante’s Inferno, when one of Prof. Olsen’s glosses sounded suddenly familiar.

Dante Alighieri, 1320:

Can those who lie within the sepulchers
be seen? The lids—in fact—have all been lifted;
no guardian is watching over them.”

Corey Olsen, 2021:

Why don’t they get away? I mean, like, the door’s open.

Pete Townshend, 1969:

But you’ve been told many times before
Messiahs pointed to the door —
No one had the guts to leave the temple!

https://youtu.be/rGa70tVYVKo?t=62

Gollum le Grand? Le Gollum!

By Joe

On December 30, 2020

In Digital Humanities, fantasy

This is another episode in my exploration of what we can see when we look at The Lord of the Rings through the lens of the frequency of French-derived words. Earlier posts are here and here, and the Silmarillion here. As always, kudos to the programmers of the OED Text Visualizer for providing the microscope.

We’ve seen that regular characters and situations use Germanic words. Like nuclear radiation, a low background level of French is unavoidable (viz., the louver on Meduseld), but as pomposity increases and sanity diminishes, the level of French in the text rises to double-digit percentages. This raises a question: does the craziest character use the most French words? The answer appears to be yes.

Gollum/Smeagol is almost certainly the least sane character in LotR. His dialogue needs quite a bit of editing before it can go to a computerized text analyser. The number of “s”s in a word needs to be standardized, sometimes “gollum” is an onomatopoeic punctuation mark not a proper noun, and so on. Also, his speech tends to be broken up in the text. The following computations are done on the closest dictionary-entry to Gollum’s words, aloud or internal.

There are seven blocks of dialogue long enough to support statistics between “The Taming of Smeagol” and “Shelob’s Lair”. One is a debate between Gollum’s two personalities; I’ve split that into its component parts. Depending on which of his personalities is dominant, the frequency of French words varies widely.

Frequency of French-derived words in Gollum’s speech

Tolkien gives us a brief flash of close reading from Sam that we can use as a guide: “[Sam] noted that Gollum used I, and that seemed usually to be a sign, on its rare appearances, that some remnants of old truth and sincerity were for the moment on top.” On each bar I’ve superposed the number of first-person singular pronouns in the passage. It correlates well, with the exception of one outlier.

The ring-maddened Gollum, as he talks to himself before he meets Frodo and Sam, reaches a level of French I’ve seen nowhere else in the text. If we recall our earlier estimate that something like 7% French is as far as a character can go without risking his health, Gollum’s 15.3% score is alarming. (Since much of that is his repetition of precious, maybe the computer isn’t telling us anything new.)

When Frodo uses his will, and the Ring, to dominate Gollum, Gollum’s word choices turn relatively normal for a chapter or two. Whether terrified or helpful, Smeagol’s French-level is healthy. But then, as the Gollum side recovers from the blow and he plots his revenge, he quickly blows past Feanorian levels into his record-level madness.

There’s one exception to this general rule. When Smeagol/Gollum gives us a short lecture on the history of Harad and Gondor, he briefly turns as normal as anyone in the book. He doesn’t use I, but he doesn’t sound much like himself either. And that’s a good thing. Later Frodo would say in another context, “his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.” There was no cure for Saruman, but Gollum could have been saved by an adjunct-lecturer position at the community college.

Case Study, Re-visualized

By Joe

On December 22, 2020

In Digital Humanities

Sara Waldorf’s master’s thesis at Signum University was built on a painstaking log of every use of the dative case in 2,000 lines of Beowulf. It’s entitled a “Case Study”, which is a joke so bad that Idiosophers have to salute. She gave a talk about this research in a “Thesis Theater” webcast at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRhQHjIHSRQ.

Her thesis (available through the Signum U Library) contains the line, “The spreadsheet of dative categories could provide raw data for loading into a more sophisticated database.” Let’s take her up on that and see what we can do. Note: this post will contain no pie charts. They’re just empty calories.

It’s infuriating for the student but interesting for the philologist that grammatical cases are decaying during the Early Middle Ages. The obscure cases like locative and ablative were all collapsing into the dative case. The core of Sara’s work is unpacking these, leading to a classification of every dative into one of the 22 ways Old English used that case. Here’s what she found in these 2000 lines. Locative is on a line by itself because it’s by far the dominant function. The vestigial instrumental case, explicitly taught in the intro class, is almost completely gone from this sample.

		Locative	142
Dative of Means	68	State	20	Purpose	8
Object	53	Ablative	18	Impersonal	6
Dative of Reference	48	Reflexive	17	Measure	5
Indirect Object	47	Adverbial	13	Agency	3
Temporal	45	Cause	11	Inflected Infinitive	2
Possessive	32	Dative with Adjective	9	Modal	2
Accompaniment	26	Manner	9	Instrumental	1

Before and after the scribal change (click to embiggen).

Figures 4 & 5 in the thesis use pie charts to look at use of the dative in the 50 lines before and after the change of scribe. Here’s how I see them. As the thesis notes, there’s a huge difference. I’ve added the overall frequency chart for comparison. This enables us to see that the extraordinary case is the first scribe, who uses a lot of locatives. The second is much closer to the average for the whole selection.

The thing I liked best about Sara’s work (apart from the staggering labor of counting nouns and pronouns already being done for me) is how she split the selection up into separate stories. Beowulf is episodic. The way the poet talks changes with the material he’s talking about. This shows up in the dative-case usage. The stories in this sample are: the fight with Grendel’s Mother, the feast afterward, Beowulf’s departure from Heorot, Beowulf’s recap and prophecy about Freawaru’s marriage, presentation of gifts to Hygelac, the fight with the dragon, and Beowulf’s life in review. As good followers of Michael Drout, we should begin with a dendrogram: if we look at the fraction of all the datives in each episode that are of each type and cluster the episodes accordingly, they look like this. (complete-link cluster in 22 dimensions, four of which are boring)

Relationships of episodes by dative use

Among the seven episodes, there are three closely-related pairs. The gift-giving passage stands alone. Unlike the others, it’s loaded with indirect objects (without whom gift-giving is pointless).

The next step is to look at the density of various kinds of usage. Locatives are heavily concentrated in the first half of Beowulf’s departure. The scribal change is marked with a little orange dash in the middle of the departure episode. This is what we saw in the bar graphs above. The change appears to be due to the needs of the narrative more than the style of the scribe. The second scribe quickly returns to a locative pattern familiar from earlier episodes. Besides, had we used 100-line chunks instead of 50, the differences would have been minimal.

The dendrogram tells us that the Feast and Prophecy episodes are similar, but it doesn’t say how. Here we can see that they both start with some locative scene-setting, after which the need for locatives drops off. Grendel’s mother and Beowulf’s life in review trend the opposite way: few locatives at the beginning, but a double hump of them at the end. The gift section looks nothing like the others.

Density of locative datives

Indirect Object density

The deepest troughs of locatives correspond with peaks of two other common usages. (Naturally — you can’t have more than one or two datives per line, so when one type increases, the others must decrease.)

As we mentioned, the Gift-giving episode has lots of indirect objects. They fill in the trough around line 2175. The Departure and Dragon episodes, which didn’t look alike in the Locative graph, seem much more similar here.

The other low-locative part of the poem is at the beginning of the disagreement with Grendel’s mother. Those lines are full of Datives of Means. (A dative of means is like herebyrne hondum gebróden,”byrnie braided by hands” in line 1443.)

Density of means

There is a moderate surge in datives of means toward the end. I was expecting that to be inflated by pairs of nouns: wigum ond waépnum in line 2395, for example. (He supported the son of Ohtere with warriors and weapons.) But Sara knew that was coming, and only counted such doublets once. These peaks indicate many successive sentences using datives of means.

The densities of the other 19 uses of the Old English dative are less obvious in their meaning, but are available for consultation here: DativeDensity

Conclusion

I shall not pretend that the motivation of this study is anything other than, “Someone made a database — let’s look and see what’s in it!” Sara’s conclusion relates to the transition during the Anglo-Saxon period from inflection to preposition as a way to indicate the dative functions in an English sentence. My interests lie rather in seeing the ebb and flow of grammatical structures in response to the narrative. I would have expected each of the episodes to begin with a burst of locatives. (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”) It’s interesting that most of these don’t. Though the poem as a whole begins with a burst of datives, they’re temporal and accompaniment; none are locative.

The “agglomerated dative” offers one way to quantify the presence of grammatical structures in the poem. Whether it can be expanded to yield new insights into the perennial questions about Beowulf remains to be seen.

References

Drout, Michael. Tradition and influence in Anglo-Saxon literature: An evolutionary, cognitivist approach. Springer, 2013.

Waldorf, Sara J. “A ‘Case-Study’: Functions of the dative in Beowulf lines 1439-2439”. Signum University, 2019.

On the sentience of the Ring

By Joe

On December 17, 2020

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

Tom weighs in on the question, “is the One Ring sentient?” with some evidence that the answer is “no”. The nerds on Reddit had an interesting discussion about the post. (Sturgeon’s Law applies, of course.) The gang raised a good question about the wheel of fire talking to Gollum, for instance.

It’s tricky, because the word “sentient” isn’t often used according to its dictionary meaning. It means “sensing the world around it”, but people generally use it to mean “thinking”. Until we get to Mordor and the hallucinations start, only the former seems relevant.

A good lens through which to look at Tolkien is to look for real-world analogues of what we see the Ring doing. Fact: It changes size, to get away from its current bearer. Tolkien is careful to say “seems to” all the time, but the physical evidence seems clear. The Ring came off Isildur’s hand, and Gollum’s hand, and it tried to escape from Bilbo several times, and boy did it hate being anywhere near Bombadil! It grew as big as it could in a vain attempt to get out of his palm.

So in some way the Ring knows when it’s not going to get anywhere with its current bearer. It knows when an opportunity for something more congenial comes around. And it can change its shape accordingly. Is there a real-world analogue for this?

Seeds have one. They can sense moisture, temperature, and gravitational potential as gradients around them. When they get the combination of moisture decreasing, temperature increasing, and gravitational potential increasing all in the same direction, they sprout, and send a shoot that direction to get out of the dirt and into the sunshine. This is parallel to what the Ring is doing, if we can find some field around it that relates to Sauron’s power instead of earth and water. Some kind of luminiferous aether, except for the power of the Ainur. Ilmen, perhaps? Could Sauron or the Nazgul be distorting the density of ilmen as part of their attempts to draw the Ring to them? (Of course, the palantir can do something similar, so maybe it’s something more down-to-arda than that.)

Anyway, the gradient of the whatever-field affects the Ring’s size. When it’s near a person more congenial to Sauron’s goals, which could be someone more powerful and closer to evil, or someone less powerful but less good, it expands. This ties in with the complexity of Gollum’s character — he’s neither good nor evil, not really anything except lust for the Ring, so any random goblin would be a better host, and off the Ring fell.

P.S. Anyone who doesn’t like the idea of Sauron creating a thing with the power of a seed (as I’m sure JRRT wouldn’t) is invited to use a slime mold as the model instead.