you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

No good reason for dropping off the radar for so long -- just the usual anxiety-filled life of a dissertator. Well, and that a month ago I started a long post about Mozart's Clemenza di Tito, but it ballooned into a monstrosity, started to fall into the uncanny valley between scholarship and fanfic, and ultimately started to mutate into at least two posts. And I've been feeling guilty about posting anything until I finish it/them. I still haven't, but I will! (Maybe.)

In the meantime, here are 3 typos/slips of the tongue that I know I am going to make someday:

1. "Anals" or "analistic" or "analist" for annals, annalistic, annalist. (This one is pretty inevitable, I think; I still worry about it a lot)

2. "Carthak" instead of "Carthage." Thank you, Tamora Pierce! (I would add "Mithros" for "Mithras" because even just typing that I had to stop and think about it, but I'm not likely to have to say or write anything about that for a little while -- until I teach Roman History again, I'd guess.)

3. "Attolia" or "Attolians" for "Aetolia" and "Aetolian." (Of course, many people pronounce "Aetolia" with a schwah on the first syllable anyway. I say EE-tolian, because it's too confusing otherwise.)

[4. *imperio, *imperire for impero, imperare. I've sorted this one out, but I've had Latin students go all Harry Potter with this verb. For some reason, Harry Potter is more mentally subordinated than Tamora Pierce of Megan Whalen Turner: I may be slowly turning into the kind of person who is slightly bothered by "SEV--uh-rus" Snape... (but not really. Because that would be silly.)

My last load of library books included some really terrible ones. I'm not going to write about the sequel to this historical murder mystery because I have only gotten three chapters in, and I cannot read it rationally. At all. All I can think is: "WHAT GOOD DOES IT DO TO MAKE TACITUS A WILD-EYED EMPEROR-HATING IRRATIONAL INDIVIDUAL? ALSO: HAVE YOU READ ANY OF THE WORKS OF THESE PEOPLE AT ALL RECENTLY? YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!" (also: Tacitus unable to read critically? Tacitus?)

But I digress, because what I wanted to post was that I just finished Sarah McLean's The Season (ya, romance, regency), and it was terrible in an entirely different way. Or maybe in not such an entirely different way. I am not particularly a reader of romance, so I probably have an inherent bias against this kind of novel. Nevertheless. The characters were boring, the romance was contrived (by which I mean that it was contrived that they didn't just get together on page 1), and the "mystery" was not mysterious at all. So much not so that I don't feel any spoilery compunctions about complaining about the cliché of the Evil Uncle Who is Jealous That His Older Brother Got the Dukedom. Wouldn't it be nice if the younger brother were bitter and jealous and cranky but, in a twist, not evil and murderous? Or, if he were evil and murderous, but not because he was (*wah*) not loved as much as his brother?

And yet, that isn't even what I wanted to write about, because I ended up reading with my OED in hand, so to speak.

My first foray into worrying about words was while reading a series of mysteries set during the Wars of the Roses. One character described another as a "Puritan," and I thought, "Wait a minute. Does that even work?"(It doesn't.)

The line is hard to draw. In most historical fiction set more than a few hundred years back in an English-speaking place, there is an assumption that the characters are not really speaking the words that I am reading (or at least I read with that implicit understanding, and I hope the authors wrote with it!). In most fantasy, you assume that the characters are *actually* speaking some entirely different language; much futuristic sci-fi dialogue has to be *really* in, at the very least, some futuristic dialect of my language (and, obviously, they aren't really speaking English in Star Wars.)

So in one way, picking at anachronisms is crazy -- there may be an occasional historical novelist who can pull off "authentic" speech, but would a novel in the various dialects of 13th century England be readable by most people? A Lindsay Davis mystery in the painstakingly-reconstructed Hellenic-inflected vulgar Latin of the 1st century? So I try not to worry about it, just as I try not to get too antsy when one character in a heroic fantasy describes another as "Stoic" (really? Can you have Stoics without Seneca? Without Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus?)

But on the other hand, words do matter and do provide context. To a certain extent -- no, to a large extent what we read in dialogue is what we imagine the characters are saying. And so the intersection between our sense of words and their histories and their usage in a supposedly "historical" or "fantasy" novel does matter. I did an OH NO YOU DIDN'T double take and then giggled a lot when Tamora Pierce introduced "spintry" as lower-class slang for a male prostitute in her Provost's Dog novels. Because this is an exceedingly erudite word in the history of English: it has a few 17th and 18th century attestations, where it was clearly pulled straight from Tacitus and Suetonius (there might be a ref. in Juvenal and/or a later grammarian, too) as a highfalutin' literary term (it's not that relevant that we now think that the Latin word (spintria) probably referred not to a male prostitute or brothel but to (a female) one who specialized in exhibitionist group sex, but that's an interesting bit of information, so I'm including it anyway). Now obviously, none of this makes the word inappropriate for appropriation into Pierce's fantasy world. It's still funny, though.

The anachronism usually works the other direction, however. There were two really egregious slang usages in Sarah McLean's novel: "impact" as a conjugated transitive verb in a metaphorical sense. The OED doesn't give the verb "to impact" with any other examples than as a passive participle. We know that it is used differently now, but there are enough complaints from prescriptivists about it that surely someone would have flagged it! The other was "obscenely" in the hyperbolic meaning of "very." Obscene doesn't seem to have been used to mean anything other than, well, "obscene," until after the last print edition of the OED (obviously, print sources lag spoken usage, but I still really question a young noblewoman c. 1815 using it like this and it not sticking out).

Eponyms are obviously problematic, as are words taken from movements or particular historical events. (How would you describe Raglan sleeves in fantasyland? Could you describe some as a "Martinet" before Martinet?) But what about vaguer things? I got quite hung up when the main character of McLean's novel joked to her girlfriend that "they say women are more evolved than men." This seems to me like a very post-Darwininan kind of statement. On the other hand, evolution as a scientific term (having to do with developing and unfolding) was around from the 17th century, and there was probably some drift into metaphorical usage. I can see a conceivable meaning of "women are more cultivated than men," but I think that I'm bending over backwards for a sloppy author in doing so.

-I guess "presume" is the "correct" substitute for the evil "assume" because it acknowledges that the speaker's statement is 'presumptious'?

-Early Tamora Pierce is actually not nearly as bad either as I remember, or as her later stuff.

-Latin diplomas = win! (but don't bother congratulating me: I'm still in undergrad for one more semester, as I finish up my second major in spite of having graduated in the first one.)

-Why don't Naomi Novik's characters read any literature? All these scientific treatises don't actually seem to help at all, and Temeraire would probably learn more useful things, emotionally and socially, from things Aeschylus or Shakespeare or even Jane Austen. Also, it would be more fun if Laurence pulled out his Horace and Virgil to try to persuade his dragon that they need to sacrifice everything for king and country.

-Philosophers beating their slaves while maintaining perfect calm is a really weird and disturbing trope. But also rather fascinating.

An acquaintance from music camp, with whom I'm facebook friends, keeps posting "Obama is the most pro-abortion senator in the world" and "being "pro-choice" is like being pro-slavery" and "Obama wants 12 year olds to get abortions without telling their parents" notes (re: that last, I shall not of course point out that it's a little weird to claim that a fetus has rights over its body irrespective of it's mother's desires, but that a child doesn't), and it is getting ANNOYING.

So instead, I am going to post this bit of Quintilian (transl. D.A. Russell) complaining about people who point and giggle about *perfectly innocent* phrases:

...what is called cacephaton. This consists either in a phrase perverted by bad usage so as to give an obscene meaning, as by those who (if you can believe it) get a laugh out of ductare exercitus ["take the army home/to bed"] and patrare bellum ["finish off the war/pretty boy"], which are respectable but old-fashioned expressions in Sallust (this is not, in my judgement, the writers' fault but the readers', but it is none the less to be avoided, inasmuch as our moral decline has led to the lost of respectable words, and we have to yield even to vices if they are winning), or in a collocation of word which has an unfortunate sound: of we say cum hominibus notis loqui ("to speak with famous men") without the inserted hominibus [heh: inserted], we find ourselves falling into something objectionble, because the last letter of the first syllable (m), which cannot be pronounced without closing the lips either forces us to pause in a very unbecoming way, or, if joined to the next letter (n), is assimilated to it [sc: cum + notis = cunno... = like in English]... And it is not only in writing that this occurs: many people are keen to understand a sentence in an obscene sense, unless you take precautions (as Ovid says, "whatever's hiddne, they think best"), and to seize on indecency in words which are far from having any obscene meaning. Celsus, for instance, sees cacemphaton in Vergil's they are stirred and start to swell but if you take this iew, nothing is safe to say.

So, I've been reading through dear E. Vulgarius. I can't find his big theological works (figures), but I did get his letter to Theodora. Eleanor Duckett concludes that although Liutprand and Vulgarius are both probably exaggerating, "we may think that Vulgarius sinned more deeply against truth." To which I say: O RLY? I mean, to be sure, he is trying to get protection/money from her, and so a certain amount of flattery is going to be involved. And yet, he switches to "tu" for the middle part of the letter, and gives a lot of spiritual advice including a reference to proverbs 7, which could actually be a hint at the kind of shocking behavior Liutprand goes after. Hm.

There's a rather depressing letter to a bishop named Vitalis, in which he cringingy talks about being old and afraid and not able to cope, and please won't you help me make this all go away! (This = dispute over validity of his ordination by Formosus with current pope). He's so desperate and servile: it's a bit embarrassing to read.

And then there are bizarre little bits about etymology. Like this:

"Glisco gliscis" means "I grow strong." It comes from a certain little animal: a "glis" (dormouse). In the same way comes "congruent" from "gruis" (crane) and many others. For they say that a dormouse sleeps for a certain amount of time and afterward grows twice as strong; thus "glisco" means "grow strong." Cranes, moreover, fly in an orderly fashion, and so we call "congruent" what are in order with each-other.

Isn't that awesome?

Catholicon Anglicum. An English-Latin dictionary c.1483 (OMG Richard III's dictionary?).

I just typed quite blithely "whine-hall" when I meant "wine-hall." This is NOT a commentary either on Old English Lament-poetry or my own tendency to complain about papers, I swear.

But I have been having fun with words today. I compared modern attitudes toward criminals to laptop DVD players in my sociology "memo:" at some point they get stuck in the "wrong" region and there's no hope for their switching back.

And while I'm on the subject, I've been reading a fascinating paper on the Emperor Tiberius's neologisms. He's the one who was infamously told that, "You can confer citizenship on men, Emperor, but not on words." Someone should notify Bush, no? As a side benefit, I now know far more than I ever wanted to about Roman groupsex. Tacitus was not making it up about the depravity, it seems.

David Brooks was suitably horrible today. I'm not even going to bother putting the whole column up like I usually do. He summarized a book he has been reading about The Female Brain, and concluded that society needs to pay more attention to innate difference between men and women "that confirm traditional stereotypes."

I know that there are differences between the sexes. And I suppose we shouldn't ignore them. But this kind of talk REALLY bothers me. I cannot accept that a woman who is good at math or science is an anomaly, an outstanding and unusual member of her sex to whose standard the rest of us shouldn't be held. And, honestly, I'm sort of shocked that I even need to be making that last statement in this day and age. It's as though we're in the middle of a backlash -- at least an intellectual one -- against equal rights. Science shouldn't replace religion as the excuse for segregation of gender roles.

And really, I don't see how they can eliminate the effects of socialization from any of these studies. I found the article about stereotype threat. Take that, David Brooks.

One of the best "etymologies" I have come across yet:

...because ita, which means oui in French, is the strongest affirmation in Latin, they were not satisfied in calling this countriy the 'Latin Land,' but rather they wished that all the country beyond the mountains, which is quite large and contains many diverse countries and dominions, be called Italy.
(Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, I.33)

I do wish that the notes in my book were better, and actually gave sources regularly, because I want to know how much of this Christine compiled from other people and how much (if any) she just made up for the purposes of her book. That is, how much of what she relates about women throughout history would have been easily recognized by her contemporaries? Maybe I should actually read the introduction.