-
About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Hatcheston Halt by John Matthias
2. Disinterest and Aesthetics Pt 1 by Tronn Overend
3. Out of the house and into the business district by Martin Stannard
4. We need to talk about Vladimir, by Jonathan Gorvett
5. Two new poems by Fred Johnston
6. Several dwarves and one pet by Meg Pokrass
7. The wheel in the tree: An appreciation of Penguin Modern Poets 12. By Ian Seed
8. Wonder Travels: a memoir by Josh Barkin
9. Five poems from Fire by Jaime Robles
10. Three instructive texts by Rupert M. Loydell
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but YOU CAN START HERE: On John Wilkinson’s ‘Wood Circle’, by Rupsa Banerjee | The Ringstead Poems by Peter Robinson. With an afterword by Tom Phillips | From Dialyzing: poetry by Charline Lambert. Translated by John Taylor | The O.E.D Odes by Lea Graham | Demarcation and three more poems, by Pui Ying Wong | What are poets for? Alan Wall on Nathaniel Tarn’s Autoanthropology | Martyrdom. Anthony Howell on the Russian invasion of Ukraine | Bard-think: Anthony O’Hear on teaching with Shakespeare | The Pleasure of Ferocity: A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor | Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg | Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt | What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane | The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall | The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias | Young Wystan by Alan Morrison | Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner | Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez | Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell | Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Big Noise in the Night: Film commentary by Simon Collings | Gli Ucelli and two more poems by Michael Anania | Interior and three more prose poems by Linda Black | For Britney (or whoever) by Fran Lock | The wages for reading is rage: Reflections on the Book Revolution in Texas. By Christopher Landrum | Selfies by Rupert M Loydell | The Loves of Marina Tsvetaeva by C.D.C. Reeve | My Mother’s Dress Shop by Jeff Friedman | The Bride’s Story. Grimms’ No. 40. An elaboration by W. D. Jackson | Poetry Notes: Early titles for 2022, by Peter Riley | Short Icelandic Fiction: Fresh Perspective (Nýtt sjónarhorn) by Aðalsteinn Emil Aðalsteinsson and The Face and Kaleidoscope by Gyrðir Elíasson | Exercises of memory: Prose poetry by Adam Kosan | Species of light and seven more poems by Mark Vincenz | Two Micro-fictions by Avital Gad-Cykman | Pictures, with Poems: A two-generation collaboration. Photographs by Laura Matthias Bendoly, with poems by John Matthias | In Famagusta, a revisit by Jonathan Gorvett | Shakespeare’s Merchant by Oscar Mandel | Toughs by Anthony Howell | Holding the desert, a sequence of poems by Richard Berengarten | Two pages by Michael Haslam | Contusion not Rind by Peter Larkin | Four poems by Katie Lehman | Blind summits, a sequence of poems with an audio track, by Peter Robinson | The Censor of Art by Samuel Barlow | Small Magazines, and their discontents (as of 1930) by Ezra Pound | Modern Artiques by Robert McAlmon | Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Blavatsky in violet: poetry by Alan Morrison | Everything that is the case: A review of John Matthias’s Some of Her Things by Peter Robinson | Khlystovki by Marina Tsvetaeva, newly translated by Inessa B. Fishbeyn and C. D. C. Reeve | A king and not a king, a poem by W. D. Jackson | Violet, an essay by John Wilkinson :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
-
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
Time Out’s New York listings here.
In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- A note on the Fortnightly’s ‘periodicity’.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- Newsletter
- Submission guidelines.
- Support for the World Oral Literature Project.
- The Fortnightly Review’s email list.
- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
- The Initial Prospectus of The Fortnightly Review.
- The Trollope Prize.
- The Editors and Contributors.
- An Explanation of the New Series.
- Subscriptions & Commerce.
-
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
.
Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
-
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
.
European populism? Departments
Subscribe
0 Comments
Etymologizing.
By ALAN WALL.
WE LIKE TO get to the bottom of things. We like to stare at an apple-pie and see quarks and electrons. We like to ponder a ruin and see the building in all its elevated glory. We look up at the stars and conjure their origin in the Bing Bang. We consider a tangled modern psyche, and trace our way back through its labyrinth until we get to primal causes, confusions and overdeterminations. And we certainly like to etymologize; to look at a word in the present and see how it appeared at the get-go.
Even when we thought the heavens were filled with gods and goddesses, we could still track and trace them with more effect than we can currently track and trace our mutant viruses.
Even when we thought the heavens were filled with gods and goddesses, we could still track and trace them with more effect than we can currently track and trace our mutant viruses. Maybe the virus is our new god; we certainly fear it. And it structures our life as much as the triune deity once ordained the life of a medieval monastery. The terminology of the ancient gods still directs our science. If we describe a type of light as ‘iridescent’, we are still adverting to the goddess Iris whose etymological home is in that word. She was a messenger of the gods, whose physical attribute was the rainbow. And of course we have Woden, Thor and Freya lurking in our days of the week, and the two-faced god Janus inhabiting the boundary-month of January. Secularization always leaves a lot of gods behind, because the language never renounces its ancient science or its superstitions. That’s why we still use those Ptolemaic terms sunrise and sunset. It’s why if we employ the word disaster (however unastrological we may be) we are summoning an ill-positioned star. It’s why, if I describe someone as ‘jovial’ or ‘saturnine’ or ‘mercurial’, the language is asserting through me that the planetary influence on one’s personality is never far away.
So when we go out etymologizing, we are on a god-hunt. It used to be wildly speculative. But it has been tamed into something like a science. Staring at the word curmudgeon, which owns up to no genealogy, Samuel Johnson in his great Dictionary of 1755, speculated. He reckoned it might have come from the French coeur méchant, or naughty heart, and then been Englished. No evidence for this has ever been found, yet that speculative birth has now grafted itself on to the word. And there are plenty of words awaiting explication. The phrase ‘to peter out’ appears to come from American mining in the 1840s, meaning to come to the end of a seam. No one knows what lay behind the usage. It could be something to do with stone, since petrus is the Latin for a stone. Jesus famously re-named his apostle ‘Simon’, and called him either Petrus, or Cephas (the Aramaic equivalent), quipping that he was the rock upon whom he would build his church (though he could not have used that word at the time). He also predicted that Peter would betray him three times. The rock of his church duly did just that, thrice, then he heard the cock crow, and went out into the street to weep bitter tears. So, who knows? Maybe the mining boys in one area were particularly steeped in the Bible, and knew that when Peter petered out, he wept outside at his own disloyalty. It’s as good a guess as coeur méchant.
Some words we can locate precisely. Some we must employ conjecture to unfathom. Blurb is easy enough. Invented in the 1900s by Gelett Burgess (whose photograph, taken as he worked his ‘nonsense machine’, decorates the top of this page), the word has proved itself supremely suited to its purpose. Serendipity is another. Horace Walpole coined it in 1754, after the story ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’. Every time these lads of Ceylon wandered out in the world something unexpectedly wonderful happened to them. Serendipity makes for happy days. Kodak is an unusual one: a word constructed to signify nothing at all. Simply to register as a brand. Not attached to anything else. And Milton was a great inventor of words. He had vast swarms of fallen angels brought together, so he called the meeting pandemonium. He also gave us sensuous, a state of which he strongly disapproved.
And words sometimes anagrammatize themselves. This happens a lot in Joyce, and in the Armed Forces. There the term SNAFU is known to one and all: Situation Normal – All Fucked Up. Or here’s Nabokov: Eros, the rose and the sore. That one really stings. Sometimes words get worn into usages, like pebbles rounding out on the shore. So the old God Sibs (the siblings of God) were the people in a family who came together for a christening. Often hadn’t seen one another for a long time. A lot to catch up on. So they Godsibbed. And soon enough they were gossiping. Thus does the sacred render itself profane.
The word silly, like the word nice, has degenerated. The one once meant blameless, immaculate, and the other indicated a precision. But it is no use hungering after earlier usages. As Johnson sadly observed in the Introduction to that great Dictionary of his, usage always wins in the end. If enough people say the word, meaning this, it will sooner or later mean this. Disinterested is currently in the process of becoming indistinguishable from uninterested, which is a shame. And what about decimate? It once meant to kill one in every ten. This seems pretty specialised and relatively unusual. Not if you were a rebellious Roman legion. That was a specific message: we kill one in every ten of you mutinous soldiers. There are still nine left. And, believe me, you’re equally killable. The word had an afterlife. It became a tithe in the Middle Ages, and later still when Cromwell taxed the Royalists in 1655. Now it just means killing a large number. Imprecision has re-wilded the language.
During the mad cow disease outbreak, one newspaper ran a headline asking: ‘Should Cows be Vaccinated?’ This was a more interesting question than the paper appeared to realise. During the dark days of smallpox in Britain, Jenner had noted that farmgirls, milkers of cows, tended to be immune. So he engaged in vaccination, so called because a small amount of cow (vacca in Latin) was injected into the human body. If you vaccinate a cow, you are putting the cow back into the cow. Perhaps a more modern equivalent would be Vietnamisation. This consisted of letting Vietnam be Vietnam again by pulling out your American troops.
Until the nineteenth century etymologies could tend to be fanciful. So we have Edmund at the opening of King Lear. Now, Edmund is a bastard, and he is not shy in owning up to his state of bastardy. But he acknowledges how dim a view others take of his unorthodox parenting by finding the word base in there. That is a false etymology. There is no base in the original bastardus, though there might well be a packsaddle, and a random son. Edmund’s rhetoric is still magnificent, however shaky his etymology:
Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? Base, base?
It’s doubtful that Edmund would feel more uplifted if it were pointed out to him that the word actually derives from a huckster on a horse, coming at night and leaving again by early morning; leaving a remnant of himself in a womb. Some etymologies seem too obvious to ignore. After all, the heavy drinker forbidden drink knows only too well which evil etymologist has put the sob into sobriety…
♦
Related
Publication: Wednesday, 1 December 2021, at 16:39.
Options: Archive for Alan Wall. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.