On bad penis puns.

Modern English is built on a foundation of The King James Bible and William Shakespeare – the former, plagiarized from a person we burned on the stake for his efforts; the latter, Lord Regent of Bad Penis Puns, as though his very name compelled him: Willy-I-Am Shake-Spear, Billy Wagcock, old I am a dick now brandishing said dick.

English: a hodgepodge tongue, its literature begun with a bloody tale of dragon baiting, vernacular eschewed until Chaucer made his fame from crude jokes and sex slang, the modern form a mongrel mix of guttural Germanic old and ornate Norman new.

And the modern modern era began in Year 1 p.s.U – the first year “post scriptum Ulysses,” which was, according to T.S. Eliott, “the most important expression which the present age has found,” and perched at the apex of the Harvard committee’s 92% male twentieth century centenary – a year otherwise known as 1922, since few aside from antisemitic fascist Ezra Pound felt that Joyce’s tome compelled a novel calendar.

Ulysses: supposedly in conversation with the past, but the conversation only flows one way. Knowing the Greco-Roman myth changes how a reader reads Joyce, but Joyce doesn’t alter our perception of the past, unless to cast undeserved disparagement upon Penelope, privileging post-agrarian men’s fear of wicked women’s wanton sexuality.

Quite the contrast with Barbara Hamby’s poem “Penelope’s Lament,” in conversation with the past as though conversation requires both speaking and listening:

PENELOPE’S LAMENT

– Barbara Hamby

No sex for twenty years except with my handmaidens

and myself, so when you turned up like a beggar man,

O I recognized you but needed time to trade in

my poor-widow persona for something more Charlie Chan,

you know, a razor hiding behind a cream puff mask,

irritated by my number-one-and-only son,

ranting about food and money, hiding sheep and casks

of wine in caves, so the suitors would be forced to run

away. As if they would. A more ratty shiftless bunch

of creatures would be hard to rustle up. My bad luck,

they wanted to be king. I’d thought of giving them a lunch

of strychnine. Then you showed up, a geriatric Huck

Finn. So be my guest, finish them off, then I mean

to poison you. O Ithaka is mine. I am queen.

Or there’s Emily Wilson’s recent translation of The Odyssey, also actually in conversation with the past, respectfully acknowledging words that were there already, gracefully responding with what they’re now seen to mean.

After Odysseus returned and the suitors were slain, his son resolved to murder the women whom the dead suitors had coerced into sex … or raped. In Wilson’s words,

Showing initiative, Telemachus

insisted,

“I refuse to grant these girls

a clean death, since they poured down shame on me

and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.”

At that, he wound a piece of sailor’s rope

round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar,

stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground.

As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly

home to their nests, but somebody sets a trap –

they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;

just so the girls, their heads all in a row,

were strung up with the noose around their necks

to make their death an agony. They gasped,

feet twitching for a while, but not for long.

Joyce’s Ulysses – the unidirectional address – is in conversation with the past the way a bloviating mansplainer is in conversation with his victim.

Mansplaining, better explained not by me (a man) but by Kate Manne, from Entitled (excerpted with a few additional paragraph breaks for internet readability):

On other occasions, manifestations of epistemic entitlement may result in a less privileged speaker deciding not to make her intended or fitting contribution to the conversation. This will then often constitute what the philosopher Kristie Dotson calls “testimonial smothering,” where a speaker self-silences.

…

A mansplainer may be nigh on uninterruptable.

The point is epitomized by an incident recounted by Rebecca Solnit, in her classic and galvanizing essay “Men Explain Things to Me.”

…

Solnit had attended a dinner party with a female friend, where she’d been prevailed upon by the older, “distinguished” male host to linger after dinner to talk about her writing.

“I hear you’ve written a couple of books,” he offered genially.

“Several, actually,” she ventured.

“And what are they about?” he inquired, in a patronizing tone – much “the way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute practice,” as Solnit puts it.

She nevertheless obliged and began to describe her most recent book at the time, which was about Eadweard Muybridge, an English American photographer and pioneer of motion pictures.

She didn’t get far, however.

Solnit recalls: “He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. ‘And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?’ So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingenue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book – with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.”

The very important book, Solnit’s female friend soon realized, was Solnit’s.

The friend tried to interject this point three or four times. But the mansplainer failed, somehow, to hear her.

When he finally registered this news, his face fell; he turned “ashen.”

Solnit writes: “That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the The New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless – for a moment, before he began holding forth again.”

Of the many insights that Solnit offers us here into the nature of mansplaining, one of the most striking is the way both speakers in this exchange are assigned roles, which are then difficult to break from.

Solnit’s host was the authority, of course; and she was cast as the naive one – “an empty vessel to be filled with [his] wisdom and knowledge” she writes, “in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor.”

Because of the social dynamics in play here, it then became very difficult to change the course of the conversation.

…

But the skewed sense of epistemic entitlement that structured the exchange left her host’s face “ashen” when he finally registered his error. She was in danger of humiliating him.

Still, he was only momentarily deterred: he proceeded to explain other things when unceremoniously deprived of that fledgling site of epistemic domination.

Joyce is out to impress and overwhelm – “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” As though only speaking, not listening – not the relationships that outlast us – could save someone from death.

Joyce’s Penelope: a woman, a wife, sexually voracious, not to be trusted. Joyce’s hero, Odysseus: masturbating in public at the sight of a schoolgirl’s underclothes.

As though the original myth were insufficiently misogynistic. As though the myth needed more than the misogyny made clear with Wilson’s words, more than the misogyny marked in Christopher Logue’s War Music, a modern epic in (two-way) conversation with the past, in which Odysseus’s ally Achilles pouts to his mermaid mother:

“The Greeks have let their King take my prize she.

And now they aim to privatise that wrong.

Make it Achilles’ brain-ache, fireside, thing.

So go to God.

Press him. Yourself against Him. Kiss his knees.

Then beg Him this:

Till they come running to your actual son,

Let the Greeks burn, let them taste pain,

Asphyxiate their hope, so as their blood soaks down into the sand,

Or as they sink like coins into the sea,

They learn.”

And yet, within Ulysses, there is an absolutely gorgeous scene, some thirty-four pages long in my edition, “Scylla & Charybdis,” in which Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s Telemachus, lectures lyrically on William Shakespeare.

As expected for an English text, sex jokes abound.

Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism, as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies.

Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeen woman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures.

You know Manningham’s story of the burgher’s wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon’s blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III.

Sexuality, per his post-agrarian mind, described as dirty – “scortatory,” a word for sultry goings on that lacks the playful good-humor of “fescennine” or the simple celebration of “sensuous.” In the local university library’s Oxford English Dictionary, the only citation for the word “scortatory” came from this scene, although later editions of the OED include a precedent from 1794 and a nineteenth century denunciation of “scortatory religions.”

Past usage for “capon” is rather more lively, although Joyce’s particular employment is as childishly petty as the Reddit wasteland’s proto-incel overuse of the word “cuck” to describe any unwanted situation – in 1398, Trevisa writes that “the capon is a cocke made as it were female by keruynge away of his gendringe stones.”

Consensual sex as though castrating an uninvited party – not that the encounter between Shakespeare and the woman is described as clearly consensual, but the person supposedly castrated by Willy’s (which would have been Dick’s) dalliance was the burgher, apparently uninvolved in either pairing.

Sex as competition – which perhaps seemed sensible to Joyce since his very eloquence is intended to be competitive, a thunderous plaint demanding that we recognize his exclusive triumph, with this scene a fractal microcosm of the whole, Dedalus’s competitive banter seeking victory for his own (& thereby Joyce’s) prodigious intellect.

Loving or laying or writing to win. Within a world where, without behavior like this, neither sex nor intellect would be mistaken as finite goods.

Throughout the marvelous X+Y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender, Eugenia Cheng encourages us to avoid needless competitive thinking:

In No Contest, Alfie Kohn characterizes competition as coming from situations where resources are scarce.

But education involves a resource that can never be scarce: one person having knowledge and wisdom does not prevent someone else from having it. It might be scarce in the sense that not many people have it, especially when it comes to very specialized knowledge, but the whole point of education should be to share knowledge and wisdom with the next generation and thus ensure that it keeps growing.

So the fact that we make education competitive is at worst contradictory and at best a choice that we should acknowledge and question.

It’s not a competition, but men’s attempts at female sex wit have at times been less than winning, travesties like the Bond-ean “Pussy Galore” or even our Latinate word for internal parts that means etymologically not “birthing channel” or “wayfare of life,” but rather “sheath.” A place to put your sword. With the whole shebang described by medical men too squeamish to undertake actual inspection – the second century Roman scientist Galen instructed his readers (men) to “Think first of the man’s turned in and extending inward.”

It seemed obvious to Galen – despite his likely inability to birth a child – that you could “Turn outward the woman’s” … or “turn inward … the man’s” and “you will find the same in both in every respect.”

“The same in every respect.” Except that men also believed that a uterus was a living creature, mischievous and untrustworthy inside a woman’s body – “hysterical,” from the Greek word for “womb,” a castigation that someone’s excess of feeling or rage against patriarchal oppression was due not to circumstance but to her wandering organ. The genitalia that crept up inside her and latched onto her brain.

English is for alliteration (which sounds better if you slur the initial vowel sounds into sameness); romance for rhyming. Neither English nor true romance languages have great words for sex, but our latinate word is better.

The term “fornicate” comes from heat and warmth. Although not in the good, true way, that love can both spiritually and corporeally warm us like fresh baked bread. Instead, we have the word because sex is what goes on in brothels, and a traditional set of brothels had vaulted chambers, and these rooms vaguely resembled the shape of baker’s brick ovens, and these hot warm ovens were where bread was made.

Etymologically, fornication leaves something to be desired. And yet, it’s the best we have.

“Fuck” comes from farming and violence – the possible root words mean “to plow” or “to punch”. As though sex is something that a person with a penis does to another.

Not something shared – as with the Maori word “hika,” which can mean either making fire or making love – but something taken. Predisposing English speakers to see men’s genitals as pushy, greedy things. The English language can betray us as we try to build a better world.

Although at times there’s truth. The violence and the greed – at times, tragically often times, men can be such dicks.

On weird spelling.

A friend recently served me tea in a mug with spelling advice, the sort that reads “i before e except after c, or when …” then rattles off words like “foreign,” “neighbor,” and “weird.” The resident eight-year-old dramatically read the mug. She also read my tea leaves when I’d finished drinking. The leaves seemed to form a w, which prompted me to write her a letter about why “weird” is spelled so weirdly.

I’ve long struggled with spelling. Elementary school spelling bees made me feel faint – luckily I’d be asked to sit after one or two words – and I still feel slightly dizzy when spelling aloud, even though I only do it for my three-year-old or the men in jail. Nobody’s out to disparage my intellect, but spelling makes me anxious.

My friends teased me for weeks in eighth grade because I’d written a report about squirrels for science class, and apparently I spelled the word “squirrel” twelve different wrong ways in just four pages. I can’t even think of twelve reasonable mistakes, but my friends claimed to have counted. Then again, eighth graders are prone to exaggeration, especially in the service of malicious humor – I certainly was.

Conventional English spelling really is abominable, though.

I don’t think much is known about English before 1,000 A.D. Plenty of people spoke the language earlier, but they weren’t writing it down. Which is a shame, really. At Pages to Prisoners, we get a lot of requests for information about ancient religions, but there’s not always much to send. Nobody knows what the ceremonies at Stonehenge were like because that religion was displaced by Christianity around 700 A.D., before the English were writing. Visiting Romans had written about early Anglo-Saxon beliefs, but their writings were propaganda, all condemning the “dangerous, wild druids.”

But there are books in English from the past thousand years, and these show the way spelling changed over time. Since parenting doesn’t leave me much time to trawl through libraries for their oldest, rarest manuscripts, my linguistic spelunking is confined to the OED. I have the two-volume edition (and sufficiently sharp eyes that I can still read it without the magnifying glass).

The sentences using “weird” include spellings ranging from “wyrde” to “wierd” – I’ve tried my best to guess what each might have meant, but I’m decidedly unpracticed at early English. Rather than research or expertise, all I can offer are my attempts to sound out each word and guess what a writer might’ve wanted to convey. But these writers’ beliefs were very different from my own.

1000: What wyrde has hyder my iuel vayned. (author unknown)

I assume this means, “What power has heard my vain cry,” or “Why does fate not take mercy on me?”

Soon after this was written, William the Conqueror earned his title – England came under the rule of Normandy. French became the courtly language of England, and English was considered the uncouth province of serfs and servants. Even now, French-derived words are generally considered more polite than the Anglo-Saxon, and we use French words to describe animals that have been killed and cooked for wealthy people to eat.

1385: The werdys that we clepyn destene Hath shapyn hire that she mot nedis be Pyteous sad. (Chaucer)

“The forces that we call destiny have shaped her that she might need be piteously sad.”

In the early 1400s, English became courtly language of England again. But official use didn’t make spelling any less eccentric. Books were being produced one at a time, hand-copied by monks who sometimes altered words to suit their fancy.

When the monks were deciding how to spell words, they often included etymologically-relevant silent letters. Written language, they felt, should reveal its history. For instance, the French word ile – land surrounded by water – became the English ile. Then an “s” was added to make clear that the word derives from the Latin “insula.” Fine. But then the monks assumed that the similar word yland must have the same history, so they changed its spelling to “island.” They were wrong, though. The word yland comes from proto-Indo-European “akwa land,” a “water land.” It should have no “s.”

There were no English dictionaries. When laypeople wanted to know how to spell a word, they’d check a Bible. But each Bible had been copied by hand by a different monk. Words were often spelled differently from one Bible to the next.

In the mid 1400s, Johannes Gutenberg introduced a “movable type printing press” to Europe. (I was taught that he invented it, since elementary school history teachers in Indiana didn’t much care for celebrating Chinese discoveries. We’d talk about China only on the Lunar New Year – instead of their cultural and scientific achievements, we learned about paper dragons and superstitions.)

With the printing press, there was more incentive to lengthen words. Book producers had always been paid by the line, whether they were copying by hand or setting type, but typesetting is faster. There was more risk of running out of work. So the printers boosted profits by changing “frend” to “friend,” and the like. Why would they worry about befuddling elementary students born centuries in the future?

And yet, the OED’s post-Guttenberg citation for “weird” has a particularly lithe spelling.

1470: As werd will wyrke, thi fortoun mon thou take. (Henry)

“As the powers that be will work, your fortune may you take,” perhaps faintly presaging “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.”

In the middle of the 1500s, England began to import English-language Bibles. These were typically typeset abroad by people who used the spelling conventions of their own languages – we owe our “h” in “ghost” to the Dutch word “gheest.” We almost wound up with silent “h”s in “ghospel” and “ghossip,” too, but thankfully those “h”s disappeared before they had a chance to confound me in spelling bees.

With more printed Bibles to consult, spelling conventions began to ossify.

1585: Vhom suld I warie bot my wicked weard, Vha span my thrifties thauard fatall threed? (Montgomerie)

I assume this means “Whom should I fear but my wicked fate, who has spun my thread toward calamity.” This seems like a particularly sad sentiment, to me. Something goes wrong, a friend offers sympathy, and you say, “Nah, don’t worry about it, it’s just that God has cursed me. Nothing to be done.”

Cheer up already, Eeyore!

In the 1600s, King James authorized a new translation of the Bible. This is when English first looks like the language I speak.

And there was Shakespeare. I think I’ll blame him for weird’s weird spelling. In Macbeth, he wanted for weird to be pronounced with two syllables – in several of his plays he toyed with characters matching the pronunciation of words to their strange spellings.

(I still get confused when kids are playing Clue and somebody asks about the wanton rampages of kernal Mustard. It’s not pronounced colonel?)

Instead of saying “wyrd” like we do, or “wurd” like English speakers had for centuries, he wanted the actor on stage to say “wee – yurd,” the way you might drawl it out if you saw a really gross slug or something. Presumably that gave the people writing down his play an added incentive to spell it “weird,” to make clear that it needed two vowel sounds.

After all, words spelled with “ie” were well-known to have a single sound, just the typesetters’ way of making a quick buck.

1835: Puir auld wives … Were seized in Superstition’s clutches, An’ brunt to death for wierds an’ witches. (Alexander Smart)

“Virtuous women took up superstition and were burnt to death for being strange, or witches.” Aren’t we humans grand?

1895: Weird wends as she willeth. (William Morris)

A beautiful sentence, to my mind. It’s recent enough to need no translating, but you could render it as “Fate does whatever fate wants,” or even “God works in mysterious ways.”

Where will weird wend my life’s weft next?

On charming sentences and sifting the OED.

For the most part, I didn’t have fun at school. But I always enjoyed the days when we were given lists of new spelling words and told to look up their definitions and write a sentence using each. Sure, eventually we’d have a spelling test that I would fail — I scored between zero and thirty percent on spelling tests so often that my mother was called in for a conference, which terrified me, expecting to be yelled at, but instead she burst out cackling because she’s perhaps the only person whose spelling mistakes are as idiosyncratic as my own — but that first day, with the sentence writing, was always a blast.

I loved writing sentences that you could imagine being part of a story without going through the effort of writing all the rest. And still do, honestly. If I were attempting to pretend my affection was motivated by something other than an aversion to sustained effort, I would allude to Anne Carson here: her art is often fabulously fragmentary, possibly due to her background in ancient Greek literature, from which we often have only scraps and pieces of the original works. It’s easy to imagine this quotation from her fantastic Autobiography of Red as being the sole surviving remnants of a larger work, but she included everything a reader needs:

XV. TOTAL THINGS KNOWN ABOUT GERYON

He loved lightning He lived on an island His mother was a
Nymph of a river that ran to the sea His father was a gold
Cutting tool Old scholia say that Steichoros says that
Geryon had six hands and six feet and wings He was red and
His strange red cattle excited envy Herakles came and
Killed him for his cattle

The dog too

XVI. GERYON’S END

The red world And corresponding red breezes
Went on Geryon did not

If you haven’t read that book yet, I highly recommend it — Autobiography of Red, alongside Queer and Love in the Time of Cholera, is one of my top three for the literature of unrequited love. Carson’s work is strange, beautiful, powerful, and funny. Most of the humorous passages in Autobiography of Red build slowly, so I don’t have a good short one to slap up here and convince you, but consider this essay from her collection Plainswater:

On Reading

Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days, I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous?

Anyway, I’d obviously stress my fondness for Carson’s work if I were attempting to claim that my love of single sentences had any other root than laziness. But it doesn’t. I read slowly. I write slowly. A single sentence … wham! It’s over and done with so fast!

Sometimes I can find beautiful sentences in the OED, but this is more rare than you might expect — the editors have a clear preference for early usages, whereas I don’t much care when something was written. But they’ve definitely included some brilliant ones. For instance, here’s one they found Henry Swinburne’s Travels in the Two Sicilies:

Mephitic vapours and stagnated waters have converted this favourite seat of health into the den of pestilence, at least during the estival heats.

I like picturing the facial expression of a fourth-grade teacher stumbling across that sentence while grading a student’s vocabulary homework. Although, if I’d been that teacher, I would’ve assigned the word “aestive” instead of “estival;” that’s my preferred archaic adjective for “summer.”

Which, right, I wish I’d spent more time looking at the OED back when I was in fourth grade and failing all those spelling tests. I could’ve made so many more bratty pronouncements! I could have explained that “correct” spelling in English is rather meaningless because the conventions have shifted so often, and the conventions are often incorrect as well — English spelling typically tracks etymology, not phonetic pronunciation, but the standardized spellings sometimes have the etymology wrong. For instance the S in “island” was included because some monks thought the word was etymologically related to “isle,” but they were wrong.

Not that my fourth-grade teacher should have been impressed by such pronouncements. I would’ve been trying to explain away my having included the wrong number of Rs and Ls in “squirrel.” But I can dream.

Here are two more doozies that I learned about from the OED. The first is from Samuel Hageman’s Once (while attempting to learn his first name, I learned that Hageman was a Brooklyn theologian who published, amongst other works, a volume titled Bird-songs translated into words):

They stopped at the door of the pawnshop… There sat the hateful abactor, skilled at agony, and dextrous in the arts of distress.

And this, from John Trevisa’s 1398 translation of Bartholomaeus’s On the Property of Things (which is written like a science text, although it lists the griffin as a type of bird — modern scientists now know griffins to be mammals — and oysters as the natural enemy of the crab, whereas we all know that the sworn enemy of a crab is generally another crab):

The capon is a cocke made as it were female by keruynge away of his gendringe stones.

I suppose this sentence, with its, um, eccentric spelling, looks more like something that I would have submitted to a teacher.

And I still do peruse the dictionary regularly, writing my own definitions and using some of the more intriguing words I find in original sentences. A recent favorite was for capnomancy, divination by smoke. I jotted down a line of dialogue that I hope to include if I ever write an orcs-dragons-and-axe-weilding-princesses style fantasy novel: “Capnomancy my ass! Any fool can predict doom when the whole goddamn town looks to be on fire!”

I showed this sentence to K’s & my then-housemate after returning from the library (though not immediately after — I considered it necessary to remind her of the definition for the word “obganiate” seventeen times first), at which point she asked me about the other good divination words in English. Indeed, there are enough good ones that she promptly began a series of paintings depicting them: her favorite is alectryomancy, divination by the mealtime meandering of a rooster.

Sadly, I don’t have a scan of that piece of artwork — I only have computer files for the types of divination we included in our board game. Luckily I do have her painting for capnomancy, as well as a beautiful joke painting she made for chresmomancy. Perhaps “joke” isn’t the correct word, actually: jokes are usually funny. Whereas my preferred type of humor is something that I think is funny, but clearly isn’t. The only “joke” is that chresmomancy doesn’t actually refer to divination through the use of psychedelics, it’s divination by the ravings of a lunatic. But I did a lot of sitting for people during college and, believe me, one could reasonably get the two confused.