Dare-Nots May 29, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
***A Pietro***
Beach fluttered around the edges of an Italian project a few years ago that affected him profoundly. A series of interviews were collected from families who had suffered violence at the hands of the partisans at the end of the Second World War. The vast majority of these partisans, particularly in Emiglia-Romagna and Tuscany, had been Communist and in 1944 they were acting under the (thankfully mistaken) belief that the revolution was a sure thing. As the Germans retreated, some Communist groups, particularly in the Apennines and immediately to the north in the ‘Triangle of Death’ took to liquidating any enemies of the proletariat that they could lay their hands on. Priests, shopkeepers, those who attended mass… There was a long list and many had had either nothing to do with Fascism or had had only (like most Italian adults) nominal membership.
The great curiosity was that the interviews were, again and again, with children. This being the 2000s not actual children, of course, but men and women who had been children or at best teens at the time. Those others in the family who had lived through those events – typically a knock on the door in the early evening and ten men outside with firearms – had tried to speak but had been ignored in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond and had died before their memories became interesting. Post-war Italy had been just too delicate a place to air anti-communist, let alone anti-partisan sentiments. It is only in the last fifteen years that the media and popular books have begun to cover partisan atrocities; atrocities that by some (controversial) estimates claimed the lives of more Italians in Italy than the Germans. (If you include Italian deaths outside Italy – Cephalonia, Auschwitz etc - then Germany rushes into first place.)
All this got Beach thinking about ‘history-that-dare-not-speak-its-name’. Two readers (thanks to Invisible and James W) sent in this extraordinary article on another twentieth-century dare-not (to coin a phrase), the Great Famine in China (1958-1962) when perhaps forty million (the population of Spain or Poland) died of hunger due to the failures of collective agriculture. The USSR had Khrushchev who spoke out against Stalin and criticisms of Uncle Joe became possible already in the 1950s; in fact, they became, this being the Soviet Union, practically de rigeur. But in China there was never a convincing break with the Maoist past and hunger and death stayed out of textbooks and out of bar talk. The problem is that if evidence is not collected now – the link details one attempt - it will very soon be too late. Those adults who survived are elderly and their memory is already tottering. As in Italy, we’ll be relying on ‘children’…
There, of course, must be dozens of dare-nots in our modern history books: horrific events that cannot be discussed until years later (if at all). Any notable examples? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The three characteristics: (i) trauma, (ii) a political climate that does not allow discussion of said trauma and (iii) a lack of easy methods to publicise that trauma. On this subject will dare-nots even be possible in the internet age? As to the pre-modern period there is a case to be made that pretty much every unpleasant event was a dare not. It is depressing to think of the suffering and of what has been lost.
Cellini and the Salamander May 26, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern
***Dedicated to Michael F who sent this in***
We last saw Benvenuto Cellini (obit 1571) imprinted on a French/Spanish/Scottish canon. Fourteen months on, here is a little doodle from Cellini’s infancy, judging by his autobiography the happiest years of his chaotic life.
When I was about five years old [c. 1505] my father happened to be in a basement-chamber of our house [in Florence], where they had been working, and where a good fire of oak-logs was still burning; he had an instrument in his hand and was playing and singing alone before the fire. The weather was very cold. Happening to look into the fire he spied in the middle of those most burning flames a little creature like a lizard, that was sporting in the core of intensest coals. Becoming instantly aware of what the thing was, he had my sister and me called, and pointing it out to us children, gave me a great box on the ears which caused me to howl and weep with all my might. Then he pacified me good-humouredly and spoke as follows. ‘My dear little boy, I am not striking you for any wrong that you have done, but only to make you remember that that lizard which you see in the fire is a salamander, a creature which has never been seen by anyone of whom we have credible information.’ So saying he kissed me and gave me some pieces of money.
Innella età di cinque anni in circa, essendo mio padre in una nostra celletta, innella quale si era fatto bucato ed era rimasto un buon fuoco di querciuoli, Giovanni con una viola in braccio sonava e cantava soletto intorno a quel fuoco. Era molto freddo: guardando innel fuoco, accaso vidde in mezzo a quelle piú ardente fiamme uno animaletto come una lucertola, il quale si gioiva in quelle piú vigorose fiamme. Subito avedutosi di quel che gli era, fece chiamare la mia sorella e me, e mostratolo a noi bambini, a me diede una gran ceffata, per la quali io molto dirottamente mi missi a piagnere. Lui piacevolmente rachetatomi, mi disse cosí: – Figliolin mio caro, io non ti do per male che tu abbia fatto, ma solo perché tu ti ricordi che quella lucertola che tu vedi innel fuoco, si è una salamandra, quali non s’è veduta mai piú per altri, di chi ci sia notizia vera – e cosí mi baciò e mi dette certi quattrini.
It is a cute story and one with perhaps special significance for our author. Cellini, after all, would become famous through fire, he was first and foremost a goldsmith: was this creature even his totem? As to the identity of the salamander, the renaissance saw growing belief in elementals and salamandre were the spirits of flame. Almost as curious is the strange parental technique of causing pain to induce pleasant memories.
Any other historical pre-theosophy reports of salamanders: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The Postures: A Missing Erotic Classic May 22, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Beachcombing has often celebrated in this place lost books and burning libraries. Today he wants to celebrate a book that while not lost (it can be found in a modern edition on the top shelves of academic institutions around the world) got through to us by the skin of its erotic teeth. Beach refers, of course, to I modi (the postures): an opusculus best avoided by those with back problems.
I modi included a series of sixteen possible and borderline impossible positions in coitus: dressed up, this was the renaissance, in the rags of classical myths. (‘Yes, that’s Pandora giving head” etc). These images had been originally drawn by Giulio Romano who was, legend claims, so frustrated that the Vatican had not paid his bills that he drew them on the walls of the Hall of Constantine. From there Marcantonio Raimondi engraved the ‘positions’ and, in 1524, an edition was brought out. This edition may have been limited but one copy fell into the grubby little hands of the Italian poet Pietro Aretino who wrote a number of sonnets around the theme. A second edition then appeared in 1527 that included Aretino’s non-too gentle works.
The Pope, Clement VII (obit 1534), struck back. The Papal police rushed through the capital confiscating every copy and while Aretino’s poems survived the book disappeared from view: full credit to the papal security forces, getting rid of two editions is quite an achievement. A very few fragments survive in the British museum: where there are only the faces divorced of sexual activity (see the image above). There are rumours too that an edition was brought out at All Souls (Oxford) in the seventeenth century where it almost got several dons expelled: might this have come from the same book, later ripped up as it travelled archive-wards?
Apart from these BM fragments not a single copy of the original survives but by good fortune a pirated copy was brought out in Venice (Europe’s publishing capital at this date) in 1527. The fine original engravings were reproduced with blurred or missed details and, horrors!, one of the postures was missing. The lovers of Europe gnashed their collective teeth. But at least a shadow of the original survives and it was that which was brought to the university presses in 1988 with a commentary by Lynne Lawner. In the stacks of academic libraries ‘bald heads forgetful of their sins’ breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Beach is always on the look out for lost or almost lost books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
23 May 2012: Angel W from robertstephenhawker writes ‘Hope this isn’t too lowbrow but I’m rather fond of Sarah Dunant’s novel In the Company of the Courtesan and the name Aretino rang a bell. Dunant structures her story (which begins in 1527) around a surviving copy of ‘Giulio’s Positions’ with Marcantonio’s original engravings and with ‘The Licentious Sonnets’ attached. If you haven’t come across it already and like that kind of thing it’s an entertaining romp, better than The Birth of Venus which I seem to remember receiving more attention.’ Thanks Angela!
Marco Polo and Pasta May 21, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern
***Dedicated to Zach Nowak and Beach’s good friends over at FoodinItaly***
The lunatic idea that Marco Polo brought back spaghetti from China to grateful Italians is a modern food myth. There is no proof for this in MP’s writing: though there is an interpolated passage that might have started the confusion. In fact, the idea of MP hauling kilos of Barilla can be disproved by external sources that show pasta was already around in Italy before MP’s birth. When did this myth begin? We don’t know, but it was certainly running up steam in 1926 when it became the subject of an American advertising campaign. Enjoy this.
Accordingly [Marco Polo] steered his ship as close to the shore as safety would permit, and sent several of his men off in a small boat in quest of fresh water. One of the sailors in the party was a Venetian named Spaghetti, and it is around this man that the legend centers. When the small boat reached the beach the 3 or 4 sailors comprising the party separated, each striking out in a different direction. They knew there would be fresh water close by, but of course did not know its exact location. Spaghetti in his search, soon came to a little patch of huts. He realised that water must be close but before advancing into the village his attention was drawn to a native man and woman working over a crude mixing bowl. The woman appeared to be mixing a dough of some kind, particles of which had overflowed the mixing bowl and extended to the ground. The warm, dry air characteristic of the country, had in a short time hardened these slender strings of dough, and had made them extremely brittle. Spaghetti observed the ingredients used, the simple method of mixing, and it immediately occurred to him that a dry food of this kind would be a welcome addition to their ship’s menu. His curiosity prompted him to approach the couple and make known his wants as best he could. Through signs and gestures he managed to obtain a quantity of the grains used in making this strange dough, also a batch of the ready mixed dough and several strings which had dried. After relating his experience, upon returning to the ship, Spaghetti ‘worked’ the entire quantity of dough into long slender ribbons. As they dried he broke them into shorter and more convenient lengths. The problem of preparing the food had not been given much thought and it was one which would have to be experimented upon. The sticks were not palatable if eaten dry, and when cooked in fresh water were not much better. Thereupon Spaghetti conceived the idea of boiling strips in sea water, which, as every one knows, is intensely salt [sic]. This method seemed to produce the best result, and to bring out the flavour of the food. Before returning to Venice Spaghetti learned much of this new and appetising food. He discovered its energy providing qualities, its ability to remain fresh [? copy not clear] and wholesome for long periods to time and noted the acclaim with which it was received by his shipmates and other Europeans to whom he introduced it. Upon Spaghetti’s arrival home the popularity of this new delicacy spread among the villagers and before long a similar food made of home grown wheat was to be found on every table.
John Dickie in his history of Italian food claims that this campaign marks the origin of Marco Polo pasta-myth: note, incidentally, the way that the advertisers don’t entirely give the credit to the Chinese. It was from there, then, that we surmise that the myth was picked up by the 1938 film The Adventures of Marco Polo, in which there is a memorable scene showing some Chinese Christians eating spaghetti with MP and his imbecile sidekick. Beach can’t find the videoclip on line, sorry… It is well worth seeing.
However, as an extract that we, long ago, passed on to FoodinItaly has shown the legend dates back to at least 1900 when this appeared in an English language cookbook.
And why, so far, no word of pasta, that ever present, ubiquitous Italian dish? For the reason that Pasta, whatever it may be to-day, is said not originally to have been a native of the country, but is alleged to be one of the many wonders brought home by the 13th century explorer, Marco Polo, from his travels in China. Nevertheless, although Pasta, in its many shapes and forms, may not have started off as a true native of Italy, to-day it seems as much a part of the country as an operatic tenor, and anyone wanting to present a truly Italian meal must perforce learn a few of the ways of preparing and cooking Pasta…
The myth seems to have already been around when this was written. So where does the myth come from and when does it begin? Can anyone help Beach and FoodinItaly track the myth down? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
23 May 2012 John G writes in with this link that contains the Marco Polo link at about twelve minutes. Beach does not have a media player on this computer so he has not been able to check the exact seconds. Thanks John!
The Discovery of Nero’s Rotating Dining Room? May 17, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient
Beach’s reading today comes from Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, Nero (31)
There was nothing however in which [Nero] was more ruinously prodigal than in building. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House. Its size and splendour will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor •a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities, besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of-pearl. There were dining-rooms [note the plural] with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. He had baths supplied with sea water and sulphur water. When the edifice was finished in this style and he dedicated it, he deigned to say nothing more in the way of approval than that he was at last beginning to be housed like a human being.
Non in alia re tamen damnosior quam in aedificando domum a Palatio Esquilias usque fecit, quam primo Transitoriam, mox incendio absumptam restitutamque Auream nominauit. De cuius spatio atque cultu suffecerit haec rettulisse. Uestibulum eius fuit, in quo colossus CXX pedum staret ipsius effigie; tanta laxitas, ut porticus triplices miliarias haberet; item stagnum maris instar, circumsaeptum aedificiis ad urbium speciem; rura insuper aruis atque uinetis et pascuis siluisque uaria, cum multitudine omnis generis pecudum ac ferarum. In ceteris partibus cuncta auro lita, distincta gemmis unionumque conchis erant; cenationes laqueatae tabulis eburneis uersatilibus, ut flores, fistulatis, ut unguenta desuper spargerentur; praecipua cenationum rotunda, quae perpetuo diebus ac noctibus uice mundi circumageretur; balineae marinis et albulis fluentes aquis. Eius modi domum cum absolutam dedicaret, hactenus comprobauit, ut se diceret quasi hominem tandem habitare coepisse.
‘And constantly revolved like the heavens…’? So those impressive Roman architects actually managed to create a rotating room: memories of a folding ampitheatre in Pliny. Certainly, this is what Suetonius claims and Suetonius is demonstrably right about many details from Nero’s catastrophic reign. (He’s also wrong about a few but let’s not go there yet…) The Roman historian was, after all, writing a mere generation after Nero had been kebbabed and rotating dining rooms are difficult to forget.
But there is more. In the fall of 2009 French archaeologists working in Rome announced that they had discovered the missing dining room. The news had its star burst through the media, getting on to the first or second pages of many of the world’s most important papers. But it is, let’s face it, relatively easy to convince some unshaven journalists from the New York Times and Spiegel that you’ve struck gold. If it later transpires that you’ve done nothing of the sort don’t count on the same to publish a retraction: unless, of course, you’ve convinced them to serialize Hitler’s diaries…
So what was discovered in Rome? The archaeologists first found a massive circular pillar that was about four metres in diameter and about ten metres high encased in bricks: the ‘pillar’ is buttressed by strong arches. Above there was a platform (picture at head of post) that was sixteen metres across and there are three quarter metre cavities in the floor of this platform which could conceivably have held a rotating surface. It has been suggested that the pillar was moved by hydro-power and that a tower made of wood was built on the rotating structure. Or were there one hundred and fifty human hamsters jerking Nero and his diners round? Beachcombing is not very good at engineering: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Well, Beach, sceptic that he is, took for granted that this structure was not actually the rotating dining room. But after combing through the arguments for and against this morning, he started to get excited. The structure clearly had an unusual function. The pillar was supposedly built after the fire of Rome, so the date synchs. The site offers a panorama of Rome, just right for a rotating room. And it would, likely, have been in the area once covered by the Golden House, the Domus Aurea. There have even been attempts to ‘spot’ the tower on a Neronian coin!
The only striking argument against is the relatively small size of any rotating superstructure: after all, how many diners can you get in a room with no more than a sixteen-metre diameter? Perhaps though this was just a case of Roman technology not being able to do more.
Interestingly, the sovrintendenza is presently allowing guided tours to the ‘dining room’ and the description (in Italian) while sensibly cautious is still, three years on, pushing Nero and his clouds of rose petals for all they are worth.
***
18 May 2012: First up is Mark who bats away the coin theory: Doc, I’m very curious about the origin of a speculation voiced in today’s blog entry and what it might have been based upon. Specifically this would be the inference that the central portion of the reverse of Nero’s Macellum Magnum Dupondius might be portraying something related to revolving dining room(s) in the Domus Aurea. It has been accepted for centuries that this coin’s reverse shows a frontal elevation of the Macellum on the Caelian Hill. The Romans’ tentative grasp of perspective would have to be at fault if the column supporting the front of the central dome of this building is being seen, somehow, as a vertical hub. Any interpretation of this feature as a portrayal of a rotating structure would certainly be revolutionary. It is definitely not a theory for which any support is currently widely held. To the best of my knowledge, this theory is not one about which anyone known to me sho studies coins or the history of the era has ever heard.’ For what it is worth Beach shares the scepticism and here is the (Italian language) reference to that coin and the rotating tower. And the relevant passage ‘ La Villedieu [the leader of the excavation] mette sul tavolo anche una moneta d’età neroriana in cui appare un edificio particolare. «Le lettere MAC secondo alcuni vogliono dire Macellum ma per altri Machina. E Machina Augusti potrebbe essere la “nostra” coenatio. Nella moneta si vede un corpo centrale ed è possibile che sopra ci fosse il piano rotante». Villedieu [the excavation head] has also brought up a Neronian coin on which a peculiar building appears. ‘The letters MAC mean, according to some, Macellum, but for others mean Machina and Machina Augusti could be ‘our’ dining room. On the coin you see a central body and it is possible that above that there is the rotating plane.’ SY meanwhile offers this site and its excellent photographs for anyone who wants to get down and dirty with the engineering. Thanks Mark and SY
SY meanwhile offers this site and its excellent photographs. http://ilfattostorico.com/2009/09/29/la-coenatio-rotunda-di-nerone/
The Ash Wednesday Supper May 12, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern
Giordano Bruno (pictured badly) was a sixteenth-century philosopher with a thing about infinity. Giordano also had an infinite capacity to create irritation. Indeed, his travels around Europe have a fascinating pattern of greeting, slighting and sprinting. Typically, GB is obliged to leave his last home in a hurry because of offence caused to the church or/and secular authorities. Giordano then turns up in his new home, is greeted as a major European thinker. Then six months later the pattern reasserts itself and Giordano is running for his life once more.
Among GB’s very many unfortunate habits were those of throwing out images of saints and that of telling anyone who cared to listen that God had created endless inhabited worlds, making Giordano a kind of patron secular saint of the UFO community. This pattern, in any case, finally went up the chimney when 17 February, 1600, Bruno was burnt as a heretic in a Roman piazza. His ashes were then scattered in the Tiber and Giordano Bruno became his ideas: all that survived of him.
Now on the subject of ashes… In 1584 Bruno had one of those legendary dinners – the Ash Wednesday Supper – that, on previous occasions, Beach has referred to as Immortal Meals. Moments when the Olympians of the human race meet over bread and wine. We know about this meal because GB wrote a pseudo-Platonic dialogue based around it that he published in the same year under the title Cena de le Ceneri. It was by any standards, perhaps particularly though by the standards of a razor-sharp Italian bon vivant, a catastrophic repast.
First GB had been invited to the house of the poet Fulke Greville, an over serious Elizabethan sonnet writer who served both Elizabeth I and James I and who was a great friend of Philip Sydney. GB had been called in to debate philosophy with some Aristotelians down from Oxford for the evening. Bruno, it goes without saying, was a Platonist.
GB probably saw this as an opportunity to educate the ‘mad barbarians’ as he called the English. But the evening turned into a sorry comedy of errors. Bruno misunderstood the time of the meal and this caused confusion with his hosts who came to pick him up but found him out. Then, when they finally met up, he and his hosts crossed the Thames on a boat and ended up lost on the wrong side of the river (don’t do this in London). We cannot be certain how much of this account is ‘allegorical’ (those damn Platonists) and even basic details may have been invented: it is argued that the meal took place, for example, in a house other than Greville’s.
However, we can probably trust the account in terms of its intellectual content. The Oxford scholars made a terrible impression on the Italian. Bruno tried to defend the Copernican system, but he did so against men who, according to his account, barely knew how to argue (sounds like an Oxonian) and who were still trapped in medieval scholasticism.
This was all compounded by the fact that GB (an unquestionably brilliant scholar) had not troubled to learn English and by the fact that the English Professors did not know Italian. The argument (for such it quickly became) raged then in Latin. This must have been a sixteenth-century equivalent of empiricist American professors of fifty years ago, say, being confronted over table by Foucault in a furious conversation in poor Spanish.
Naturally, Bruno came off best and is praised by his host: but then Bruno wrote the account and Bruno always comes out best in those circumstances. A year later, England had chewed him up and spat him out. Then sixteen years later a fire was lit under Giordano’s toes. We’ll end with a detail that has always haunted Beachcombing: before GB was burnt his mouth was taped shut so that he could not spout dangerous sentences to the gathering crowds, something that the professors at that long ago meal would doubtless have approved of.
Beach is always looking out for remarkable meals: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Lost in Transmission May 4, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Medieval, Modern
Words echo through the centuries like coins dropped down an infinite well. And as they are passed on they are smoothed and confused in the mouths of the people. The best examples we have of this are, of course, placenames: in the space of eighty generations Londinium becomes London, Mamucium becomes Manchester and Euboricum becomes York. After a while the words cease to make sense: people no longer realise that when they say York or (Eourwic or one of the in between states) that they are talking about a yew tree.
Now this collapse of knowledge is particularly evident with place-names, but it can also be found elsewhere when words are dumbly repeated. A random example: in the mid-nineteenth century a Devon folklorist comes across the following verse at the end of apple harvest:
‘What zeal! What zeal is in all our town!
The cup is white and the ale is brown’.
Understandably she suspects that ‘zeal’ (pronounced ‘aus-ale’!) is not really zeal at all. Could it be, she suggests, ‘wassail’ (waes hael), the punch-like drink that is made (usually with ceremonies) and that takes place (you’ve guessed it) after apple harvest. She is almost certainly right. Somewhere, let’s surmise, c. 1750 wassail had dropped out of use in this corner of the county and the Devonian rustics were repeatingm empty syllables that they turned into something that they could at least understand. Zeal appears in a couple of south-western placenames, where it has been corrupted from Old English sele, ‘hall’: so the word is not as erudite as it might at first seem.
Another example, this time from Cornwall at the end of the nineteenth century. A doctor is visiting a patient out in the sticks and gives her some news.
My chief piece of intelligence on the day in question was that a relation of my own, whom she had once seen, was about to be married. The old woman was greatly interested and asked the name of the bride. On hearing that it was Margaretta, she at once assured me that was a lucky name, and begged me most earnestly to let the bride-groom known how to reap the full advantage of the luck; he must, it seemed, pluck a daisy on the eve of the marriage, draw it three times through the wedding ring, and repeat each time, very slowly, the words, ‘Saint Margaretta or her nobs’.
And what enough does this formula mean. Beach was slow here though not as slow as the doctor who was almost home when it clicked.
It was not until far on my homeward journey that it flashed suddenly into my mind that the words were a prayer, ‘Sancta Margaretta, ora pro nobis’, a genuine Latin intercession, handed down from Catholic times [almost four hundred years before]. Who knows with what rapture of devotion in days long past Saint Margaret’s prayer had been repeated in that very farmstead by the lips of men and women taught to feel a personal devotion to the Saint; and though now even the holy character of the words is forgotten, yet the fact that they have been kept in memory through so many generations, in never so corrupt a form, proves the strength of the feeling which once sanctified them, showing that in some one’s mind the prayer was stored up not to be forgotten, with a lingering trust that it would bring a blessing yet.
The inhabitants of that house are unlikely to have had any heirlooms that were three hundred and fifty years old: apart of course from ‘Margaret and her nobs’ that will have died with the old lady.
Beach is on the search for other examples of repeated phrases that have no meaning (anymore). It strikes him that a particularly fertile place to look would be where languages collide: after all, misunderstanding is at the root of most of these re-renderings.
Beach spent some time in his teens on a ranch in North America where third-generation Norwegians spoke to their cattle in garbled phrases that clearly came from the tongue of their ancestors who had crossed the great water sixty years before.
‘Hokey pokey’ was (before it became a dance) the word for ice-cream on the streets of London and New York: ‘here come the ‘hokey-pokey men!’ the children would scream. The etymology of this phrase is much debated but it is probably an Englished version of the Italian ‘Ecco un po’!’ [here’s a little], uttered by the ice-cream sellers.
Any other examples? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
5 May 2012: Patty writes: one that gets me here in the states having grown up hearing the full? version: “The proof is in the pudding” from “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”. One that I did hear a lot growing up was “Waste not, want not”, which makes perfect sense as is, but my grandmother would add “the old lady said as she piddled in the sea”. I’m sure there were many colourful variants to the first quote!’ Then Wade: In further searching for phrases that have lost their original meeting, I found this blog site. I included a couple of interesting posts. It struck me that it is somewhat similar to Bizarre History, but focused on language. Seems pretty interesting, and I thought you might like to bookmark it.Thanks Wade and Patty!
5 May 2012: Rayg writes: ‘What zeal! What zeal is in all our town! The cup is white and the ale is brown’. To middle-aged folkies, that’s instantly recognisable as what’s generally known as the Gower Wassail (from its 1947 collection by A.L.Lloyd) or the Somerset Wassail (from its 1895 collection by Baring-Gould). It’s kind of hard to believe “wassail” could drop out of use in Devon; it being cider country, there are wassail traditions all over. More likely the folklorist just didn’t “get” the accent: I’ve heard elderly local people here pronounce “s” in exactly a way – “s” as “z”, with a slight glottal stop in front – that could make “wassail” sounds like “what zeal”,. I hesitate to mention a classically-cited example: the one that the Hokey-Cokey is a parody of Catholic mass (“Hoc est corpus”). It’s just too damn pat, and I don’t think the attribution trail is terribly convincing. The ones I always like are Billy Ruffianisms – the rendering of foreign names into Anglicized soundalikes, as classically done by Nelson-era sailors: the Bellerophon becoming the Billy Ruffian, Amphitrite – ‘Am and Tripe, Iphigenia – Niffy Jane, etc.’ Thanks Rayg!
6 May 2012: Word Angel writes in with this quotation from Rustic Speech by Wright. ‘A few Latin phrases have made their way into the dialects, where they have assumed curious forms and meanings. For example : hizy-prizy (Nhb. Yks. Chs. Der. Som. Dev.), a corruption of Nisi prius, a law-term. It is used to signify any kind of chicanery or sharp practice, or, used as an adjective, it means litigious, tricky ; and in the phrase to be at hizy-prizy, it means to be quarrelsome, disagreeable. The plural form momenty-morries (Nhb.), skeletons, stands for memento mori, remember that thou must die, the name given to a small decorative object containing a skeleton or other emblem of death, cp. ‘ I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a Death’s-head or a memento mori,’ 1 Hen. IV, in. iii. 35. The Latin nolens volens appears as nolus-bolus (Wil.), nolum-wolum (Wil. Dev.), hoylens-voylens, oilins-boilins (Cum.). A mother sending off an unwilling child to school will say : Oilins-boilins, but thee shall go. Nominy (Nhb. Dur. Yks. Lan. Chs. Der. Nhp.) represents the Latin nomine in the formula In Nomine Patris, &c., the invocation used by the preacher before the sermon. It means : (1) a rigmarole, a long rambling tale, a wordy, tiresome speech; (2) a rhyming formula or folk-rhyme. Stan over at Cowpath writes meanwhile: One that comes to mind is Riding, Farthing, Reeve & Sherriff Related to this phenomena is true folk etymology – where a foreign sounding word is changed to familiar sounding words even if they make no sense. I wrote about them August 10. Thanks Word Angel and Stan!!
14 May 2012: John writes in: ‘I think we could find a lot of these words in the way people communicate with farm animals — the ‘sounds’ that we make to soothe/call cattle and horses might have their roots in older languages with the sound form lingering on past the meaning… I remember my mother telling me the proper way to call cattle, and thinking it made no sense at the time. This is from rural Ontario, from a family seven generations from Northern Ireland, but the words still remained. The approved cattle call was: ko boss……. I know that bos is an old Indo-European root of the word cow (hence bovine …). What other forms of addressing farm animals might hold ancient roots?’ Thanks John!
The Babel of History May 2, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Contemporary, Medieval, Modern
***Dedicated to Mike Dash***
The past according to a much worn-line is ‘a foreign country, they do things differently there’. Of course, if this were all then history would be a doddle. It would be enough to fill the Cutty Sark with sabres and give the natives music sheets for their acres. But, unfortunately for those who like the easy life, the past is many different countries and, almost as bad, the present is also a vast thalassocracy stretching to the horizon. The success of any historical venture will depend on the proximity of the historian’s land to the one he or she wishes to travel to: and that proximity depends to a large extent on language.
For a start, one language is rarely enough to study the past. There are the tongues that were spoken by the people(s) you want to study multiplied by the languages spoken by the nations that study them today. To deal with the Anglo-Saxons, for example, you would need Anglo-Saxon and Latin and perhaps some rudimentary knowledge of the Celtic languages or Norse. But you would also need English, German, French and (preferably) Spanish and Italian for secondary sources. That is bad enough, but let’s say you had an attitude problem and decided to study Anglo-Saxon missions in Scandinavia: then you would have to add Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. Or perhaps you decide to do your doctorate on Anglo-Saxons in the Varangian Guard in eleventh-century Constantinople: Greek, ancient and modern would matter and quite possibly Turkish and a couple of Slavic languages. If you are really serious about the Varangians you could do a lot worse than marry a Bulgarian.
Some areas of the past are neglected not then because they are inherently difficult in source terms, but because there are impossible language combinations. In some senses, this is becoming less common (for secondary sources) as English becomes the language of choice in academic journals. But, in other ways, it is getting worse as ‘minority’ or despised languages start to assert themselves. Take another example: the ancient Mediterranean was ultimately split into a Latin speaking western half and a Greek speaking eastern half. In the good old days scholars needed Greek, Latin and the colonial languages, French and English to study the Roman province of Africa. Today the Mediterranean is split between the Romance and Slavic speaking north: with Albania and Greece tagged on and the Arabic speaking ‘southern shore’. In the twenty-first century it will be a handicap for a Roman historian determined to study that same province not to know at least some Arabic for archaeological reports. Greek and Latin and a smattering of modern European languages will no longer be enough.
Of course, these kinds of examples are not just restricted to the classical world. There is no definitive book on the Voyage of the Damned, the final phase of the war between Japan and Russia in 1904/1905 for the simple reason that no scholar of stature has both Japanese and Russian. Ditto pogroms in the Second World War: who has Hungarian, Romanian, German, Polish and the Baltic languages? The Nazis and their friends killed many of those who could have replied ‘yes’ to that question. More modestly, the present author’s most productive medieval research took place a decade ago with material involving three different Indo-European language families. There was, in scholarly terms, lots of low-hanging unpicked fruit simply because no one who had troubled to look at it, had had this combination of languages before.
Then if this all sounds easy what about this email sent in by Mike Dash on the languages needed to master the story of the Mongols?
Someone – it might have been JJ Saunders – commented that to do a thorough history of the Mongols would require a historian who spoke, at minimum, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, Latin and Russian (just for the original source materials), plus of course ideally Mongol itself (for the Secret History.) Then to read what historians have written, which has not been translated, you’d need at least German and French as well as English, and ideally Czech and Hungarian. Hence in a discipline in which it is rare for a seminal work to stand unchallenged for more than 20-40 years (the longer period, I think, for the medieval stuff) there is always W. Barthold’s Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, originally a PhD thesis defended at St Petersburg in 1900. It remains the standard work because no one since has mastered all the languages required to supplant it. It would be interesting to know if any still-standard work on any other place or time antedates it.
Beach wonders if anyone could come up with a more challenging selection than Mike’s. It makes messing about with Old English and Greek look positively tame: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
Pyramids in Italy April 29, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient
The pyramids of the Etruscan king Porsenna (fl c. 500 BC) are one of the great mysteries of antiquity. What does this passage ‘mean’? What did they really look like (try and visualise them)? Where were they? Hell, did they ever really exist?
[Porsenna] was buried below the city of Clusium in the place where he had built a square monument of dressed stones. Each side was three hundred feet in length and fifty in height, and beneath the base there was an inextricable labyrinth, into which, if any-body entered without a clue of thread, he could never discover his way out. Above this square building there stand five pyramids, one at each corner and one in the centre, seventy-five feet broad at the base and one hundred and fifty feet high. These pyramids so taper in shape that upon the top of all of them together there is supported a brazen globe, and upon that again a petasus from which bells are suspended by chains. These make a tinkling sound when blown about by the wind, as was done in bygone times at Dodona. Upon this globe there are four more pyramids, each a hundred feet in height, and above them is a platform on which are five more pyramids.
Sepultus sub urbe Clusio, in quo loco monimentum reliquit lapide quadrato quadratum, singula latera pedum tricenum, alta quinquagenum. in qua basi quadrata intus labyrinthum inextricabile, quo si quis introierit sine glomere lini, exitum invenire nequeat. Supra id quadratum pyramides stant quinque, quattuor in angulis et in medio una, imae latae pedum quinum septuagenum, altae centenum quinquagenum, ita fastigatae, ut in summo orbis aeneus et petasus unus omnibus sit inpositus, ex quo pendeant exapta catenis tintinabula, quae vento agitata longe sonitus referant, ut Dodonae olim factum.Supra quem orbem quattuor pyramides insuper singulae stant altae pedum centenum. supra quas uno solo quinque pyramides.
This text appears in Pliny (obit 79: NH 36) who claims that he is quoting here Marcus Varro (obit 27 BC) perhaps his Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum, a lost work. Where Varro got it from is anyone’s guess. Talk of ‘Etruscan sources’ among Classicists seems optimistic, but this is the first century B.C.: so it is perhaps just possible.
Chiusi (Clusium of the ancients) has been excavated and there is absolutely no sign of what must have been – again granting that it once existed – an architectural monstrosity. The closest is what is sometimes called Porsenna’s Labyrinth, a series of tunnels under the city whose purpose is still not understood: several other Etruscan cities including Perugia have similar subterranean passages.
Twentieth-century digs at Chiusi have made Varro into a liar or more probably a naïf. But budding Indiana Jones are unwilling to give up such fabulous material and have decided that perhaps there was more than one Clusium. There has even been a mini Atlantis style hunt with archaeologists and desperados identifying other possible locations up and down the peninsula. A present favourite is the hill of or around Florence. Any other locations: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Oh and Beach cannot leave this without quoting von Humboldt on Porsenna
‘The story formerly current in Germany, and reported on the testimony of Father Angelo Cortenovis, that the tomb described by Varro of the hero of Clusium, Lars Porsena, ornamented with a bronze bat and bronze pendant chains, was an apparatus for collecting atmospherical electricity, or for conducting lightning (as were also, according to Miehaelis, the metal points on Solomon’s temple), was related at a time when men were inclined to attribute to the ancients the remains of a supernaturally-revealed primitive knowledge of physics, which was; however, soon again obscured.’
Chickpeas, Menstrual Blood and Witchcraft April 24, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Beach offers today for contemplation this extraordinary early modern text from De morbis ueneficis ac ueneficiis (1595) by Battista Codronchi (obit 1628), a practical guide to dealing with witch’s spells. In this book BC explains a curious personal experience that led him to undertake his study: an illness that struck his baby daughter Francesca. Beach should also note, here at the beginning, that of BC’s fourteen children, eleven died in infancy. This might explain better than any other fact his tone in the following passage.
A number of years ago, my daughter Francesca, who was ten months old and in the care of a wet-nurse, was afflicted by an extraordinary loss of weight, and with ever-increasing frequency her breath would come in loud gasps. When her swaddling-bands were taken off, she would always wail and cry and behave as though she were sick, quite unlike the way children act during the removal of the bandages, since they are usually quiet and take pleasure in the process even though they may be in discomfort or experiencing some distress or physical pain. We found no preternatural cause for her condition but we changed the wet nurse. [translation here and in what follows from Maxwell-Stuart]
Note to any broody time-travelling readers: never become a wet nurse. The chances are you’ll end up arraigned on a charge of witchcraft. In this case the wet nurse was lucky to just get the sack, particularly given what came after.
However, Francesca continued to decline and my wife began to suspect that because the child was rather pretty, she had aroused the envy or hatred of some elderly woman who had produced these harmful affects by means of poisonous magic. So my wife searched the mattress and found several signs of poisonous magic namely, chick-peas, coriander-seeds, a scrap of charcoal and a fragment of bone taken from a corpse, and a lump of something I did not recognize, but which an experienced exorcist told me was the kind of thing made by these offensive, shameless women I have been discussing [witches] from various substances mixed with menstrual blood. In addition, to this there were some feathers skillfully sewn together so that they could easily be attached to a cap, as is the fashion.
It is difficult to know what to make of this list. Was Francesca really under attack? Or was this just a collection of material that had accidentally accumulated? If Beach goes upstairs to his bed how many ‘witch’s tokens’ will he find in a sheet that has not been changed for a week and in and around a mattress that has not been turned for a year. Was ‘the menstrual bomb’, nothing more perhaps than a bit of melted tar brought in on the father or mother’s foot?
We burned all these in a fire what had received a blessing. Exorcisms were carried out for three days and other holy remedies applied, and she began to recover and put on weight, to the extent that we thought she had been cured. Nevertheless, a few days later she was very disturbed and was beginning to cry a lot, so we searched her bed again and found several more bits of magical apparatus which we burned. She seemed to be restored to health, but on the day of the full moon that month she spent the whole night sleepless and crying. Next morning her colour had turned ashen, and her physical appearance was so changed from what it had been the previous evening that it made us tearful and astonished in equal measure. Yet again we searched her bed and found two small pieces of dried nut and white bone, nine or ten fish-bones which had been fashioned into hair combs, and some little garlands put together with remarkable skill from various objects. After these had been surrendered to the fire we went to live in another house, and when an experienced exorcist had employed every other, more powerful remedy [at his disposal], by God’s kindness she recovered without any natural remedy.
What starts as an almost comic misunderstanding – at least according to Beach’s rationalist explanation above – becomes something sinister: there’s a short story in this. It is one thing, after all, to confuse a stray chick pea with witchcraft, but what of the little garlands ‘put together with remarkable skill’ or the fish-bone combs, more misunderstandings or a very pissed off member of the serving staff? Beachcombing hasn’t the slightest idea, but he is struck how well the parents’ understandable anxiety survives four centuries. Any other cases of cursed objects: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Beachcombing seems to remember an instant from Roman history in Tacitus or Suetonius?
***
26/4/2012: Adrian (of anomalist fame) has the menstrual lump down as a sootikin a new word for Beach’s vocabulary. Then Invisible dances with a feather crown: The “little garlands” in your post about the struggle to save young Francesca from evil influences brought to mind the “feather crowns” of folklore. They are circular feather formations found in pillows and featherbeds. I have always associated them with witchcraft or thought of them as an omen of death, but apparently they are also a sign that the dead person has gone to heaven. ( I can’t help but think that this is a later interpretation, meant to comfort those left behind. After all, if a loved one has died, which is more productive: assuming that the feather crown is a crown of glory or an artifact of witchcraft that must inevitably lead to investigations, trials, and lynch mobs?) Apparently there is a museum with a large collection of these items. Here is an excerpt from The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century, Judith Devlin, which tells a similar story of an overlooked child—from 1954 France. And this excerpt from Hoosier Folk Legends, by Ronald L. Baker gives both interpretations of the feather crowns. And one more set of tales about feather crowns as the result of a curse: Isaac Bashevis Singer also wrote about feather crowns in the Jewish tradition in the short story, ”A Crown of Feathers”. Thanks Adrian and Invisible!
23 May 2012: Invisible has some skepticism in relation to the sootikin: Quite unable to resist, I went looking for sootikins online, only to find this site http://unclestinky.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/sootikins/, which claims that the disgusting objects are mentioned in Pepys and Boswell, as well as an account from the reign of Queen Anne. What the site says about hygiene is also open to debate, but that’s another post entirely. I have to say, I cannot find any reference to sootikins or anything like them in Pepys or Boswell. Nor, indeed, anywhere else I have looked except in the poem below by Thomas Hood’s son, Tom Hood. It seems unlikely that he would have used a smutty word in a poem written for 19th-century children. Can someone quote the original reference to the sweepers in church or at the Thanksgiving service of Queen Anne? Nearly all the references online are identical and seem associated with The Urban Dictionary site. The Naming Of Kittens by Thomas Hood/Our old cat has kittens three/ what do you think their names should be!/ One is tabby with emerald eyes,/ and a tail that’s long and slender,/ and into a temper she quickly flies/ if you ever by chance offend her./ I think we shall call her this -/ I think we shall call her that -/ Now, don’t you think that pepperpot/ is a nice name for a cat?/ One is black with a frill of white,/ and her feet are all white fur,/ if you stroke her she carries her tail upright/ and quickly begins to purr./ I think we shall call her this -/ I think we shall call her that -/ Now, don’t you think that sootikin/ is a nice name for a cat?/ One is tortoiseshell yellow and black,/ with plenty of white about him;/ if you tease him, at once he sets up his back,/ he’s a quarrelsome one, ne’er doubt him./ I think we shall call him this -/ I think we shall call him that -/ Now, don’t you think that scratchaway/ is a nice name for a cat?’ Thanks Invisible!
