My copy of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond and Scull, eds., arrived today. So if you don’t see me for a while, you know where I’ll be.

Looking through the table of contents, I saw there were limericks on page 1365 . Naturally, I turned there first. Turns out, the old Professor wasn’t very good at them, and one of them is, shall we say, familiar.
Limerick [C] is

There was an old monk of Algeria
Who of fasting grew wearier and wearier,
Till at last with a yell
He jumped out of his cell
And ate up the Father Superior.

Google has been kind enough to provide me with a bound archive of Life Magazine, 1902, which contains this passage:

A NUMBER of our alleged literary journals, in their reminiscences of the late Mr. Stockton, have been ascribing to him the following “Limerick”:

“There was an old monk of Siberia
Whose life it grew drearier and drearier
Till he broke from his cell
With a hell of a yell
And eloped with the Mother Superior.”

This poem had its origin at Trinity College, Dublin, and has been well known in university circles here and abroad for generations. The Stockton version is simply an adaptation for the drawing-room.- Evening Sun.

Tolkien’s seems more of a bowdlerization than a composition.

That issue of Life also contained a Charles Dana Gibson cartoon I’d never seen before, voici:

“Where did you go on your honeymoon?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

Today I got to thinking about portraits of business executives. Whenever a magazine puts a CEO on its cover, they’re usually in the same position. They stand there rigid, with arms folded. It’s so common that an image search for “business executive standing” returns countless examples. Now, I understand. It’s hard to know what to do with your hands, and if you get it wrong, you look like a doofus. (Watch any political primary debate for details.) But the thing is, according to acting coaches and books about body language, that’s a defensive posture. People stand like this when they’re feeling attacked.

You’re not fooling anyone, you know.

That’s not the image you want to project when you’re a Lord of Capitalism. You want to show strength and confidence. You want to show you’re in charge. You want to show divine favor, if you can think of a way to pull that off.

Therefore, a modest proposal. Business executives need to adopt attributes, like saints. When you see a medieval painting of a bearded man holding a key, you know you’re looking at St. Peter. A woman holding a wheel is St. Catherine. A man writing a book with a lion at his feet is St. Mark. A woman with a cannon is Santa Barbara. (No, really!) None of these people has any trouble knowing what to do with their hands while their portrait is being taken. Better yet, it makes them immediately recognizable by the illiterate masses. This is useful, because frankly most CEOs kind of look alike.

Mostly the attributes are obvious: Tim Allen should hold an apple. Warren Buffet should hold one of those bags with a $ on it like the ones cartoon burglars carry. Sundar Pichai should hold a can of Spam, if the CEO of Hormel will let it go. The guy who first programs his 3D printer to crank out hand-sized, brightly-colored corporate logos for lesser captains of industry to hold when they’re photographed will make a fortune.

Coda

This post is my first foray into the art of clickbait titles. Idiosophy is linked to micro.blog, but the link only sends across the title of the post. That doesn’t go well with my usual preference for oblique, allusive titles that only make sense after you read the post. Let’s see how this new technique works!

On his desk, the Great Goblin kept the skull of a Sindarin Elf, as a memento moriquendi.

Aragorn: “Men are better than gates, and no gate will endure against our Enemy if men desert it.” ¹

Christine de Pizan: “Even the strongest city will fall if there is no one to defend it.” ²

In the newspaper the other day I read that we know we’re getting enough sleep “if we’re able to problem solve.” I’d never seen this particular locution written down before. Managers have been talking like that for years, though. They’ll open a meeting by saying, “we need to level set,” or “first it would be good to goal set,” or even “we have an opportunity to game change.”

As one is promoted high enough in an organization, one gains affinity for Bovine Spongiform English (as The Economist memorably called it), so this is natural. When a manager said something like that, I’ve always just snickered inaudibly and moved on, confident that an editor would remove any such abomination before it hit print. But there it is, in The Washington Post. It looks like this one might be sticking.

Let’s take it apart.  The evolution goes like this:

1. A verb and a direct object go together so often that they become a single unit: It changed the game.
2. A gerundive form appears to describe whatever “it” was: A game-changing innovation.
3. The boss desires another such thing: Come up with a game-changer.
4. The belly-flop into neologism comes when the hyphen becomes a space: We need to game change. 

Step 4 isn’t guaranteed. Sometimes the two words get fused into one, the process stops, and no one is harmed: homemaker, firefighter, windbreaker, …. Nobody objects to that. What’s going on with these new things?

I think it’s an ancient, hoary beast coming to life. Germanic languages like to have the verb at the end of a sentence. Not in the simple cases, of course. In simple sentences where it’s important to get to the point (A bear ate Uncle Olaf) verbs sensibly go next to subjects.  But when matters get complicated, so complicated that we need managers and hierarchies and chains of command, the verb gets arrogant, making everybody wait upon it, until the last moment when it makes its appearance.

English dalliance with Romance languages has been a fact of life for a millenium, but the Old Ways are only sleeping, not dead. They could return at any time. I noticed a lot of modal auxiliary verbs in those examples. They’re the ones who give permission to the main verb to slouch off to the end.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Is this really the future we want to leave to our children?

Updates

Since this post was published, I’ve been afflicted with

• “We need you to role model,”
• “At that point we will need to risk mitigate.”
• “This is no time to hand wring.”

On March 13, 2024, in the Washington Post, “”Though only 12 bipartisan lawmakers signed onto the measure thus far, the group continues to temperature check with party leaders and colleagues.” We just need to move the party leaders and colleagues to follow continues.

One of the pleasures of old age and fading memory³ is that I can find new things to read that match my sense of humor perfectly.  I was cleaning up my disk today and came upon a file called “untitled.txt” dated 2013, which contained a short blues lyric:

I know a woman, she treats me so mean,
She’s the meanest damned woman that I’ve ever seen.

She’s bad to the bone, but she’s worse to the tendon.
Stay with this woman, the pain’s never endin’.

If I’d ever sung this song to my physical therapist, I’d have clear memories of the consequences, so I’m sure this is its first publication.

For my latest project, I’m re-reading Poul Anderson’s “Dominic Flandry” stories.  This observation is totally beside the point of the actual research, and what else is a blog for?

Imperfectly consistent with the feminist ideal

Ensign Flandry was published in 1966, when Alison Bechdel was in kindergarten. It’s an adventure story written for teenaged boys, so it’s no surprise that the book doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test.

But here’s the funny thing: if it were made into a movie, even in the 1960’s, the movie would have passed the test. The Tigeries of Starkad are ruled by females in a group they call “The Sisterhood”. The males are just foot soldiers and sailors. While Flandry is off on another planet, their military conflict with the sea people escalates to the point of full mobilization. Anderson describes the scene this way: “Banners snapped to the wind, shield bore monsters and thunderbolts luridly colored. It was no mob. It was the fighting force of Ujanka, summoned by the Sisterhood.”

The political machinations among the Sisterhood all take place off-screen in the novel, but a movie adaptation would unavoidably replace that exposition with a scene about the debate over wartime preparations in the Council, which would have featured a room full of women, several of whom are named, not talking about a man. Dominic Flandry is an outrageous womanizer (though he also has admirable qualities), so realizing this was quite a surprise.

Another line from Puck of Pook’s Hill that has no relevance to literary influence so it gets its own post:

“He sent for my second son, whom being unmarried he had ever looked upon as his own child…”

The speaker is Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a Norman knight who came over with William the Conqueror. He had become fond of the English and adopted their ways. I love that sentence for the way the reader grinds to a crawl on the eighth word. Word order won’t help us now; time for the Great English Verb Hunt we learned as the way to decipher what those old guys meant.

Kipling has done a beautiful job of recreating the feel of a modern English speaker trying to read Old English. There aren’t many inflections left these days, but the one we’ve got is effective.  That sentence might easily have come from someone who’s thinking in Old English, and therefore doesn’t think of word order as an important part of grammar.

And yes, it’s intentional. Later in the book, we’re told a character is educated because he knows “the Leech-Book of Bald”.