Lucky Bag

Apologies, this month you are getting a very mixed bag of trivial and introspective stuff. I feel it’s a bit irresponsible of me, when the world is going to hell in a handbasket: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and so on. However, I don’t really know how to write the serious material, even if I wanted to. But I just want to say that I am as appalled as anyone else at the horrors going on in the world.

Words that you always have to look up

Are you like me, there are some words whose meaning you have to look up every time you encounter them? You meet this word in a book or article you’re reading, you look it up and think, ‘Oh, that’s what it means. Now I know.’ Then a couple of months later, you come across it again, and you’ve already forgotten the meaning. Orwell made this point not about meaning but about spelling: he observed that he could never spell the formal name for a snapdragon, antirrhinum, without looking it up in a dictionary. My brother John once told me of an art critic who used to note the carminative effect of a particular artist’s work until one day he looked the word up (do it yourself if you don’t know).

Anyway, here are a sample of words which I have to look up every time I read them, each with my own suspected definition followed by the correct meaning.

Callow (adjective).

•     Duffy definition: (of a person) both callous and shallow at the same time.
•      Correct definition:  (of a person) immature, inexperienced.

Laconic (adjective).

• Duffy definition: (of a person) laid back, relaxed.
• Correct definition: (of a person) with a tendency to use few words in expressing one’s meaning.

In relation to this word, I must digress in reporting that it always puts me in mind of the Trojan priest Laocoön, although it has absolutely nothing do with him. Laocoön was the guy who warned against the Trojan horse, noting that he did not trust the Greeks, even when bearing gifts. The Gods who wanted the Greeks to prevail arranged for a giant sea serpent to emerge from the waves and devour Laocoön and his two sons. Must have been less than pleasant for them, but you can’t fight City Hall.

Anyway, when we did Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin at school, our teacher Dopey Dawson was at pains to point out that the correct pronunciation of the name was in four syllables, Lah-aw-co-on, with the lah as in the note on the tonic sol-fa scale and the co as in co-operative. Do you remember when Jeremy Paxman was the quizmaster on University Challenge on the telly? Do you remember his sneering, supercilious style, which came particularly to the fore when one of the competitors got an answer wrong? No-one pointed out to him that it is all sublimely easy when you’ve got the answer written on the card in front of you. On one occasion, when one of the competitors had given the wrong answer to the question of who had feared the Greeks even when bearing gifts, Paxman sneered, ‘No, it was Lay-oh-kun,’ with the U in kun pronounced  as in uniform. I thought, you pretentious ignoramus, looking down your nose at the kids who don’t know the answer, and you can’t pronounce Laocoön.

You might protest that we have no way of knowing how words were pronounced a couple of thousand years ago. However, I strongly suspect that Dopey Dawson was alive around the time of Virgil, and possibly was on speaking terms with him. So he must have been right.

Anyway, back to the fun.

Lapidary (adjective).

• Duffy definition: something to do with rabbits?
• Correct definition: either to do with engraving stones, or of writing style, having the precision, ingenuity and simplicity such of engraved work.

Mercurial (adjective).

• Duffy definition: (of a person) clever, sparkling with wit.
• Correct definition: (of a person) subject to rapid changes of mood.

Protean (adjective).

• Duffy definition: relating to either atoms or space rockets.
• Correct definition: readily changeable with respect to form; displaying great diversity or versatility.

Rubric (noun).

• Duffy definition: some sort of puzzle?
• Correct definition: a system of practice, or set of rules.

I have probably oversimplified the complete and appropriately nuanced definition above. I just want to tell you something about when I still did an honest day’s work occasionally. When you set university exams, an external examiner from another university reviews and requests changes before the exam is let loose upon the students. On one occasion, a rather pompous external examiner made a lot of smug remarks on my MSc exam in cancer screening and prevention, including that the marking scheme did not follow the appropriate rubric. He had clearly just learned the work rubric and was showing it off. I wondered whether I should point this out in my response or just wait until the exam board meeting when I would have the opportunity of giving him a fourpenny one. As it turned out, I behaved like my usual cowardly self and drafted a bland response thanking him for his useful comments.

Saturnine (adjective)

• Duffy definition: with a wicked, sardonic wit, and a stupid grin on one’s face.
• Correct definition: gloomy, surly.

As you can see, I have a 100% record. I get it wrong in every case. I am sure there are other words, which I can’t remember at the moment, but this gives a flavour of my persistent ignorance. Notice that all but one are adjectives. Do you think this means anything?

A Feast of Stephen

In the very first of these blogs, I paid tribute to the humorous writing of Patrick Campbell, the brilliant Sunday Times columnist of the 1960s and 70s and my discovery of him in my teenage years. At about the same point in my life, I also came across the early 20^th century Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock. The subheading above, A Feast of Stephen, is the title of an anthology of his work edited by the brilliant Welsh-Canadian writer Robertson Davies. Leacock was an inspired literary funny man, with an unerring eye for the ridiculous. In one of his pieces, he describes an encounter at a séance, when apparently, Napoleon Bonaparte has been contacted.

‘Hello,’ I called, ‘Est-ce que c’est l’Empereur Napoléon à qui j’ai l’honneur à parler?’

‘How’s that?’ said Napoleon.

As I remarked in a previous blog on Beachcomber, Flann O’ Brien and other humourists, they were often breathtakingly conservative and fogeyish in their views. Here is Leacock on the subject of women in higher education, essentially stating that women should know their limits and stick to the humanities. There is not a hint that this is ironic:

In all that goes with physical and mathematical science, women, on the average, are far below the standard of men. There are, of course, exceptions. But they prove nothing. It is no use to quote to me the case of some brilliant girl who stood first in physics at Cornell. That’s nothing. There is an elephant in the zoo that can count up to ten.

On the other hand, there is much good-natured stuff that is very funny. Let us leave him with his reflections on the 1930’s tendency to an austere lifestyle, taking crank exercises, prohibition of alcohol and so on, all in order to improve efficiency at work, rather than the unreconstructed but wittily expressed bollocks upstairs:

Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder if I stand alone in this thing. Am I the only person left who hates it?

The Duffy Toilet Parts

A rather positive update. My post-treatment PSA is down with the wines and spirits at 0.19, suggesting that the treatment has done its stuff, and I won’t need anything else other than regular PSA tests. I was almost certain that this would be the case, but you never know until you get the result… Still have some side-effects, which I won’t tell you about, but these are gradually abating. So yippee.