verbarian
adj. relating to words
gasconade
n. boastful or bombastic language
philautia
n. self-conceit; undue regard for oneself
procacious
adj. cheeky, provocative
An odd little detail from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:
“His next instructor in English was a master, whom, when he spoke of him to me, he familiarly called Tom Brown, who, said he, ‘published a spelling-book, and dedicated it to the UNIVERSE; but, I fear, no copy of it can now be had.'”
After Arthur Conan Doyle’s death, his biographer Hesketh Pearson claimed to have discovered among his papers the scenario of an uncompleted tale.
A girl appeals to Sherlock Holmes for help — her uncle has been found shot in his bedroom, and her lover has been arrested as a suspect. The lover has recently had a quarrel with the old man; a revolver is found in his house that could have fired the fatal shot; and he owns a ladder whose feet match marks below the dead man’s window and which bears incriminating soil on its feet. The girl suspects another man who has been paying court to her.
Holmes and Watson go to the village, where they discover a pair of stilts in a disused well. When the accused man is found guilty of murder, Holmes is driven to a desperate stratagem: He dresses an actor as the murdered man, mounts him on the stilts, and has him approach the villain’s bedroom window, crying, “As you came for me, I have come for you!” Terrified, the man makes a full confession: He had planted the revolver and smeared the ladder’s feet with soil, hoping to win the girl and her money.
Pearson adds, apparently without intending the pun, “Presumably Doyle scrapped this because he felt on reflection that the episode of the stilts was rather tall.”
Of the story, Richard Lancelyn Green wrote, “there is no evidence to show that it is by [Doyle] and strong internal evidence to suggest that it’s not.” For what it’s worth, Robert A. Cutter completed the adventure in 1947.
The joists in the tower in which Montaigne wrote his Essays are inscribed with his favorite quotations from Greek and Latin authors, many of which appear in his writings: “It is not so much things that torment man, as the opinions he has of things.” “Every reasoning has its contrary.” “Wind swells bladders, opinion swells men.”
He wrote, “The room pleases me because it is somewhat difficult of access, and retired, as much on account of the utility of the exercise, as because I there avoid the crowd. Here is my seat, my place, my rest. I try to make it purely my own, and to free this single corner from conjugal, filial, and civil community.”
The numbers in the diagram below correspond to this table in the German Wikipedia. English translations are here.
In large Latin letters on the central rafter are the words “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. I PAUSE. I EXAMINE.”
A Philosopher seeing a Fool beating his Donkey, said:
‘Abstain, my son, abstain, I implore. Those who resort to violence shall suffer from violence.’
‘That,’ said the Fool, diligently belaboring the animal, ‘is what I’m trying to teach this beast — which has kicked me.’
‘Doubtless,’ said the Philosopher to himself, as he walked away, ‘the wisdom of fools is no deeper nor truer than ours, but they really do seem to have a more impressive way of imparting it.’
— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899
George Orwell’s six rules of writing, from “Politics and the English Language,” 1946:
But “one could keep all of them and still write bad English.”
John Donne may have posed for his own funerary monument. In his Lives of 1658, Izaak Walton writes:
… Dr. Donne sent for a Carver to make for him in wood the figure of an Urn, giving him directions for the compass and height of it; and, to bring with it a board of the height of his body. These being got, then without delay a choice Painter was to be in a readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth. — Several Charcole-fires being first made in his large Study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand; and, having put off all his cloaths, had this sheet put on him, and so tyed with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed, as dead bodies are usually fitted to be shrowded and put into the grave. Upon this Urn he thus stood with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might shew his lean, pale, and death-like face; which was purposely turned toward the East, from whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour. Thus he was drawn at his just height; and when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bed-side, where it continued, and became his hourly object till his death …”
It’s not clear whether this really happened — the sketch, if there was one, has been lost. The statue stands in St. Paul’s Churchyard in London.
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.”
Sign outside the public library at West Pittston, Pa., October 2016:
Vladimir Nabokov composed this puzzle for his wife Véra in 1926. The title, “Crestos lovitxa Sirin,” roughly means “Nabokov’s crossword”: krestlovitska approximates the Russian kreslovitsa, “cross” plus “words”, and Sirin is a pseudonym Nabokov often used, a reference to the creatures of Russian mythology. The upper half of each wing contains the grid, the lower the clues.
Nabokov, a trained entomologist, had published the first crossword in Russian two years earlier. Forty years later, in the Paris Review, he likened writing a novel to creating a crossword: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose.”
(Adrienne Raphel, The Crossword Mentality in Modern Literature and Culture, dissertation, Harvard University, 2018.)
Each year since 1993, the Literary Review has presented a Bad Sex in Fiction Award “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” Here’s 2013’s winner, Manil Suri, in his novel The City of Devi:
Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands — only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.
