Category: trivial Page 2 of 4

The Beards of Middle-earth

On September 4, 2021

Something is missing…

The box-hauling guy just delivered my copy of The Nature of Middle-earth. Curiously, the dust jacket of my copy bears no hint of the title of the book. I guess the publishers have decided the author’s name is sufficient, just this once.

When I get a new book of nonfiction my ritual begins by protecting the spine the way my mother taught me: set the spine on the table; take about 20 leaves of each end and press them down flat; repeat until the book lies open in front of me. It hasn’t been necessary in years, but we know what happens to those who forsake the mos maiorum. Then I look in the table of contents for anything amusingly weird (this is the mos mei). What do you know — there’s a chapter on “Beards”!

We all know about elves, hobbits, and dwarves, but this chapter tells us what we need to know about Numenoreans. Namely, that elvish blood in the noble houses meant that the really high-ranking Gondorians and Arnorians didn’t have beards. Though neither Tolkien nor Hostetter says it, it’s clear that a part of the ennoblement of Men, given to them by the Elves, was the suppression of facial hair. Hirsute scruffiness is the antithesis of ennoblement.

Pace a certain influential Kiwi, Boromir, Faramir, and Aragorn didn’t even need to shave. Come to think of it, neither do most Native Americans. Those proto-trolls who raised such a stink about Aragorn looking like an Native American in Ralph Bakshi’s film have been proven wrong again.

Nota bene

The fact that your Idiosopher couldn’t grow a beard to save his life has absolutely no bearing on the content of this post.

Funny Names for Bureaucrats

By Joe

On July 10, 2021

In Digital Humanities, trivial

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?

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.

Values Added

By Joe

On November 15, 2019

In trivial

An online survey today asked me an unexpected question: What are my values? They gave me a window about the size of a tweet in which to answer. That was a poser — I’d never thought about so concisely phrasing the things I care about before.

I came up with a way, and since half the purpose of this blog is to replace my never-good long-term memory, here’s what I said:

Philosophia biou kubernetes. Be excellent to each other. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Some things are none of my business.

It’s entirely within my idiom to do this after bumper-stickers have gone out of style.

Modern English subjunctives

By Joe

On October 10, 2019

In mythgard academy, trivial

In Old English class last winter, the teacher introduced the subjunctive mood by saying, “We don’t have it in modern English, but …” Well, I still use the subjunctive. I’ve noticed that the BBC doesn’t use it much any more, but here in the States it’s not gone. Since then, I’ve been keeping track. Here are subjunctives I’ve collected in six months:

that an Internet image search for “subjunctive” is deeply disappointing?

I wouldn’t do that if I were you
Be that as it may
God save the Queen
Let there be light
The powers that be
Let the chips fall where they may
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be…

Musical Interlude

Defying the BBC ban, this song by Eric Clapton points out that the subjunctive in modern English can be indicated by word order, too. I like the way we’ve adopted a good old-English modal-infinitive structure to convey a Continental verb mood, using “let” or “may” to change the mood to subjunctive.

Poetry Corner

A double dactyl by George Starbuck where the subjunctive forms the rhyme:

SAID

Dame Edith Evans to

Margaret Rutherford,

“Seance? Oh really, my

Dear, if there be

Nonhypothetical

Extraterrestrial

Parapsychologists,

THEY can call ME.”

Words I learned from Tolkien

By Joe

On September 14, 2019

In trivial

Megan Fontenot asks the question over on Twitter: What are some words you learned from reading Tolkien’s works?

That could be a large number. One easy way to find a bunch of them is to look in the list my pronouncing dictionary didn’t know. Throw out the proper names, the invented languages, and (as much as I wanted to leave them in) things like “tinbone” and “thinbone”. That gave me 37 words, which is plenty to start with:

belike
brock
bullroarer
cornel
corslet
deeping
darkling
dishevelled
draught
dwimmer
ent
etten
eyot
eyrie
fen
flet
footpads
habergeon
leechcraft
mark
mathom
surcoat
swart
hyrne
thrawn
trothplighted
garth
unlading
vambrace
weapontake
weregild
weskit
wang
whortle
withy
woses
writhen

Fun fact: all but two of those words are currently underlined in red by the WordPress spell-checker.

On business of his own

By Joe

On April 28, 2019

In trivial

For six months, I’ve been trying to get a good picture of the fox. Finally:

stop and smell the flowers, too late

High-stepper

Three-quarter turn is my best angle, n’est-ce pas?

I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Attenborough!

WTF?

By Joe

On October 6, 2018

In trivial

I have just subscribed to the Oxford English Dictionary (at a special discount rate, thanks to Sparrow). To inaugurate the subscription, I just read the entire definition of “what”. It took me an hour and a quarter.

In the midst of this, I discovered that I was completely wrong about the origins of my wife’s favorite English phrase. “What the x“, for various values of x, traces back to… Geoffrey Chaucer?! It looks like he brought it over from the French “que diable…”. I find this strangely disappointing.

Addressing a crucial question of language

Then it occurred to me that there might be something of interest in the choices we make about he noun we put at the end of the phrase. The pox is gone now, since we don’t have to worry about it any more (for the time being). “Hell” was my father’s preferred locution. Google ngrams don’t reach back very far, but they show hell is still going strong. In fact, it really took off about the time I was born. “Devil” and “deuce” have been fading since the Great Depression; there appears to be a transfer of authority from the central executive to the collective, coincident with the spread of popular democracy in the English-speaking world, but other than that tenuous connection I’ve found nothing.

Google Ngrams for the leader board

Apropos of which, I must salute the OED for the utility and delicacy of their phrase, “in polite colloq. usage…”

Too Short

By Joe

On September 21, 2018

In trivial

A brief list of things JRRT thought were too short:

The Lord of the Rings. Reporting the opinion of fans
Out of the Silent Planet, when he was trying to persuade a publisher to pick it up.
A letter to Christopher. Who hasn’t closed a letter this way?
“Farmer Giles of Ham”. I agree completely.
Hobbit legs. No argument here, unless I were contracting with one to dig a hole.
Time

That last one is by far the dominant use of the phrase in LotR. Everyone from Bilbo to Aragorn uses it. That’s consistent with a story about the end of the Third Age, just before all the faerie elements departed. It’s also how the phrase is used in “The Fall of Arthur”.

For verification, the phrase “too short” does not appear in The Silmarillion. Elves never think time is too short, unless a mortal is there to remind them. Smith of Wootton Major caught the attitude from them, so the phrase doesn’t appear in his story either.

Curiously, the phrase doesn’t seem to be in “Leaf by Niggle”. (I don’t have an electronic copy of that story so I can’t be sure.) Perhaps it’s because Niggle never knew how short his time was actually going to be.

Testing the Narrator’s Assertion

By Joe

On August 10, 2018

In fantasy, trivial

The narrator of The Hobbit tells us

“Now, it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.”

Chapter 3, p.60

Is this true? We note that narrators of fiction are not universally applauded for their veracity, and subject the assertion to proper statistical verification.

Experimental Approach

Our team of Idiosophical researchers:

Counted the number of pages in each chapter (a matter of reading the Table of Contents);
Classified each chapter as to whether the events in it are Good or Uncomfortable, Palpitating, and Gruesome (a matter of arch opinion).

Results

Figure 1. Histogram of chapter lengths by type

A visual inspection of the histograms in Figure 1 shows them not to be obviously distinct. Statistically, Pearson’s χ² test was applied to distinguish the two. The null hypothesis that the two histograms are the same is not rejected by the data: χ² = 16.8 on 19 degrees of freedom; p=0.6.

The outlier at 35 pages is “The Council of Elrond”. Although listening to ancient blowhards relate the history of the world for five or six hours is uncomfortable, the specification was “uncomfortable, palpitating, and gruesome”, which the council was not. Especially for us, who can set the book down and go re-fill our glass any time we need to.