Behoof

An archaic word, if it’s not too absurd,
Gives the air of an all-knowing Mentor.
But no-one approves when you write “it behooves”,
Unless you’re an irl centaur.

Latin

Almost a decade ago I bought a copy of Teach Yourself Beginner’s Latin but never got past the first chapter. I’ve wanted to learn Latin since I sang parts of Carmina Burana in a combined choir at high school. The fact that it was dropped from the curriculum of state schools between my parents’ and my generation has always made me feel vaguely cheated.

Recently, I tapered off a course of antidepressants and one of the side-effects was that I found myself with a lot more spare mental energy. I happened across the Latin textbook and started over again, and this time I’ve been making headway and really enjoying it. In the last couple of weeks, when working on translations, I’ve had a surprising and gratifying experience: while I’m laboriously figuring out the case and meaning of each individual word, every now and again I’ll actually read a sentence without having to break it down piecemeal, a much faster process which leaves me feeling like my brain has somehow overtaken itself.

My goal (apart from finishing the book) is to translate the lyrics of David Bowie’s ‘Starman’, for no other reason than that the phrase ‘homo stellarum’ popped into my head and it has a certain ring to it.

The SPQR app for iOS has been very handy for practising verbs.

My man day

It has come to this blog’s attention that certain forms of behaviour previously thought to be gender-neutral may now be regarded as dangerously effeminate unless otherwise labelled. The following account of a day in the life of the author should clear up any lingering doubts.

I get out of bed, have a shower and then sit down to a breakfast of man muesli with man yoghurt.

Before I leave I put on my man coat – despite its velvet facings, it is definitely a man coat – and my man scarf. My man scarf was a gift from my man girlfriend and I knot it with a casual man flair.

I need these man items of clothing because it is cold outside. Man cold.

Then I man walk to the man bus stop and wait for the man bus.

Once on the man bus I get my man book out of my backpack: man critic Harold Bloom’s authoritative study of the great Irish man poet W B Yeats. I am troubled by the reflection that a study of a poet who believed in fairies and desired to be reincarnated as a lovely golden bird may not actually be that manly a man book. But then I recall that Harold Bloom is such a man professor of English literature that he once put his man hand on Naomi Wolf’s thigh when she was his student. Mmmm, now that’s man teaching.

I arrive at my workplace, which is a man university. I get a man cappuccino at the cafe and catch the lift to my man office, perhaps exchanging man gossip with any man friends who should happen to be in the lift.

After a long day of man office work – subtly differentiated from ordinary office work by the fact that I, a man, am doing it – I catch the man bus home.

Because it is a Wednesday, I have custody of my man children, who are all girls. I man cook their man dinner, and man put them to bed.

After I man do the dishes, I may relax with a beer, but most nights I have a cup of man tea.

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Shakespeare: the funny bits

The Boys: NO GUЯLS ALLOWED
The Girls: Oh, yeah? [They bat their eyen.
The Boys: Hubbada-hubbada! [They write poems.
Holofernes: Hubbadabilitudinitatibus.
Moth: [Aside to Costard] They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

The last line could stand as the motto to this series of posts. Love’s Labour’s Lost is basically a satire of Euphuism, which is one of those folorn literary movements which is remembered, if at all, as a target of mockery, rather than by virtue of its own works. Euphuism’s chief exponent was John Lyly, a name which is almost too good to be true, as if he thought ‘Lily’ wasn’t precious enough.

So the play’s a treat if you like Renaissance English and seriously dated comedy. If not, I imagine it would be a crashing bore, because the qualities of Euphuism which Shakespeare is poking fun at are close to those things – elaborate conceits, classical allusions and sophisticated rhetoric – which make Shakespeare himself difficult to understand. We have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

“Money for jam”

Clichés reconsidered

I’ve always regarded the manufacture of jam as messy, time-consuming work involving cauldrons of boiling syrup, clouds of sickly vapour and the ever-present threat of scalding burns. In traditional communities it is performed only by the bravest and most hardened of kitchen workers, such as grandmothers. If I were ever to get money for jam I would consider it a just compensation for my pains but the common usage of the phrase carries the mystifying implication that making jam is such a delightful and carefree employment that it is practically its own reward.

Perhaps my ideas on this subject were distorted at an early age by tales of horrific jam-related injuries.

It has been suggested that I have misinterpreted the idiom and that the jam in question is to be consumed rather than made. In other words, we are to imagine being paid to eat jam. This seems unlikely, but it is better than any of my tentative hypotheses, all of which rely on an omitted prefix of the word ‘jam’ or its homophones, and none of which (‘door’, ‘toe’, ‘The’) are particularly appealing.

“I know it like the back of my hand”

Clichés reconsidered

I wonder how long it has been since you had a good look at the back of your hand? I took the time to inspect the back of my own left hand not long ago, and found it to be strange and unfamiliar territory. The hairy lower-left-hand corner was divided with uncanny precision from the remaining portion, a larger and quite bald quadrilateral across which several veins, prominent yet disturbingly delicate in appearance, meandered in random loops and curves. Several spots and blemishes and many dozens of wrinkles were new to me and the whole expanse seemed much older than I remembered it. If I were to be dropped in the middle of a vast simulacrum of this landscape without guide or compass I am sure that I would be completely disoriented and yet this very fantasy is often used as a bold assertion of one’s navigational skill. Of course, it may be that I am unusually ignorant of the backs of my own hands. For all I know my readers would be able to quickly render a schematic diagram of their own from memory. Although the only way to put this theory to a rigorous test would be for you to try the experiment with your hands tied behind your backs, drawing with a pencil held in your teeth, but I think that we may dispense with such drastic measures as we are all friends here.