And They’re Off

Unusual names of racehorses, collected by Paul Dickson in What’s in a Name?, 1996:

  • Bates Motel
  • Disco Inferno
  • Up Your Assets
  • Race Horse
  • Crashing Bore
  • English Muffin
  • Leo Pity Me
  • Cold Shower
  • T.V. Doubletalk
  • Ranikaboo
  • Holy Cats
  • Hadn’t Orter
  • Strong Strong
  • Honeybunny Boo

After the Jockey Club rejected several names for one filly in the 1960s, the exasperated owner wrote “You Name It” on the application form. “We did,” said registrar Alfred Garcia. “We approved the name You Name It, and I think she turned out to be a winner, too.”

This race, run at Monmouth Park in 2010, seems to take on a deeper significance near the end:

| Language

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hardwick_Hall_3_(7027835143).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

scattergood
n. a person who spends money wastefully

Built in the 16th century to flaunt its owner’s wealth, Hardwick Hall, in Derbyshire, boasted large windows when glass was a luxury. Children called it “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.”

Unfortunately, writes Stephen Eskilson in The Age of Glass (2018), “a cold day saw the chimneys of Hardwick Hall drawing cold air through the drafty windows and circulating it again to the outside,” “a sui generis example of thermal inefficiency.”

| History · Language · Technology

Family Plan

Given names of the 11 children of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Russell of Vinton, Ohio, 1972:

  • Noel Leon
  • Novel Levon
  • Norwood Doowron
  • Nerol Loren
  • Leron Norel
  • Noble Elbon
  • Lledo Odell
  • Laur Rual
  • Loneva Avenol
  • Lebanna Annabel
  • Leah Hael

“Mother did it, but I don’t know why,” Laur told UPI. “She would take names from the Bible and other books and compare them until they came out that way.”

Bonus palindrome item: Volume 1, Issue 5 of Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, titled “Fearful Symmetry,” is a deliberately contrived visual palindrome, not just in structure but often within individual panels (designed by artist Dave Gibbons). Pedro Ribeiro shows the correspondences here.

| Art · Language · Oddities

Inspiration

Anna Rabinowitz’s 80-page poem Darkling is an acrostic of Thomas Hardy’s 1900 poem “The Darkling Thrush” — taking the first letter of each line in Rabinowitz’s poem spells out Hardy’s.

“I found myself … haunted by ‘The Darkling Thrush,'” she said, “by its tone of millennial mourning, by its note of hope in the thrush’s song, and most especially by its opening line which situates the poet at he meditates on the passing century: ‘I leant upon a coppice gate.'”

| Language · Poems

An American in Paris

A note sent by Mark Twain’s American traveling companion to his French landlord, 1867:

PARIS, le 7 Juillet. Monsieur le Landlord — Sir: Pourquoi don’t you mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it? La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice. Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je l’aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble. You hear me. Allons. BLUCHER.

“I remonstrated against the sending of this note, because it was so mixed up that the landlord would never be able to make head or tail of it; but Blucher said he guessed the old man could read the French of it and average the rest.”

(From The Innocents Abroad.)

| Language

First Things First

George Orwell’s six rules of writing, from “Politics and the English Language,” 1946:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

But “one could keep all of them and still write bad English.”

| Language · Literature

Winifred’s Bloomers

English novelist Winifred Ashton had a disastrous gift for inadvertent double entendre. From Cole Lesley’s biography of Noël Coward:

The first I can remember was when poor Gladys was made by Noël to explain to Winifred that she simply could not say in her latest novel, ‘He stretched out and grasped the other’s gnarled, stumpy tool.’ The Bloomers poured innocently from her like an ever-rolling stream: ‘Olwen’s got crabs!’ she cried as you arrived for dinner, or ‘We’re having roast cock tonight!’ At the Old Vic, in the crowded foyer, she argued in ringing tones, ‘But Joyce, it’s well known that Shakespeare sucked Bacon dry.’ It was Joyce too who anxiously inquired after some goldfish last seen in a pool in the blazing sun and was reassured, ‘Oh, they’re all right now! They’ve got a vast erection covered with everlasting pea!’ ‘Oh the pleasure of waking up to see a row of tits outside your window,’ she said to Binkie during a weekend at Knott’s Fosse. Schoolgirl slang sometimes came into it, for she was in fact the original from whom Noël created Madame Arcati: ‘Do you remember the night we all had Dick on toast?’ she inquired in front of the Governor of Jamaica and Lady Foot. Then there was her ghost story : ‘Night after night for weeks she tried to make him come …’

“Why could she not have used the word ‘materialise’?” wrote Lesley, who was Coward’s secretary. “But then if she had we should never have had the fun.” See Shocking!

| Language

In a Word

ergophobia
n. an aversion to work

isolato
n. a person who is physically or spiritually isolated from their times or society

hebetate
v. to make dull or obtuse

suspiration
n. a long, deep sigh

Drawn from the last line of a 1951 poem by Pierre Béarn, the French phrase métro, boulot, dodo describes the monotony of workday life: Métro refers to a subway commute, boulot is an informal word for work, and dodo is baby talk for sleep.

Anna Kaloustian wrote in the Yale Herald, “No English expression manages to quite grasp its prosaic implication, its banality.”

| Language · Society

Transparency

https://pixabay.com/photos/church-window-window-church-1843900/

There is writing which resembles the mosaics of glass you see in stained-glass windows. Such windows are beautiful in themselves and let in the light in colored fragments, but you can’t expect to see through them. In the same way, there is poetic writing that is beautiful in itself and can easily affect the emotions, but such writing can be dense and can make for hard reading if you are trying to figure out what’s happening.

Plate glass, on the other hand, has no beauty of its own. Ideally, you ought not to be able to see it at all, but through it you can see all that is happening outside. That is the equivalent of writing that is plain and unadorned. Ideally, in reading such writing, you are not even aware that you are reading. Ideas and events seem merely to flow from the mind of the writer into that of the reader without any barrier between.

— Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir, 1994

Elsewhere he wrote, “There is a great deal of art to creating something that seems artless.”

| Language · Literature