On not denoting

There are some very few things that are clearly defined and an entire universe of things that are not. Nearly everything gets harder to define the closer you look at it. Meaning is fractal, like Great Britain’s famous coastline. You’d think an island would be easy to define, wouldn’t you? Landmass in the sea. Easy. Land and sea are obviously different, solid vs. liquid. But then you try to actually measure the coastline and it turns out to be infinitely long, which doesn’t make any sense, because then how can it be bounded? Or you ask what the difference is between an island and a continent, and it turns out that you can’t come up with a definition that works for every case. What seemed so obvious moments ago is now lost, somehow, either completely impossible or vague to the point of uselessness.

I read a conservative writer the other day, never mind who, saying that one definition of conservatism is that, when it comes to crime, conservatives are always firmly on the side of the victims and not the perpetrators. The only reason to say this is to set up a strawman, the implication being that non-conservatives are on the side of criminals and (therefore) against the victims. I only have to gesture vaguely at the many conservative criminals who are still supported by conservatives to show that this is not true at all.

But there’s a bigger problem here, and it’s one of definition.

Firstly, not all crimes have clear victims. If you run someone down in your car on purpose, you’re a criminal and there’s a clear victim. If you commit a speeding offence but don’t hit anyone with your car, who is the victim? There’s a general sense that the ‘victim’ is the other road users you might have injured, but there’s no one specific, no one who’s going to appear in court and say something like, ‘That motorist is the one who sped near me!’ There are lots of crimes where we can say this kind of thing: vandalising public property, possessing drugs, taking bribes.

What’s worse for our effort to easily side with the victims is that there are some crimes where the only discernible ‘victim’ is the perpetrator. Not wearing a helmet or a motorbike in a car, for example, or possession of heroin. In these cases, to sympathise with the victim means taking the side of the criminal, because… they’re the same person.

‘Siding with victims’ can therefore only ever be a partial account of the supposed ideal conservative response to crime, because we can’t always say who the victim is or, where we can, the victim is in fact an irresponsible motorcyclist.¹

But the problems for our conservative friend don’t end there! If a guy mugs me and steals my phone, then I’m the victim and he’s the criminal. With my conservative friend firmly on my side, I head out and stab the criminal, only for my friend to immediately switch sides. ‘Hang on,’ I say, blood still dripping from the knife in my hand, ‘I’m the victim and you’re meant to be on my side!’

‘Ah,’ says my friend, ‘But now he’s the victim, you see, because you stabbed him.’

‘But my phone hasn’t been unstolen, has it?’ I say. ‘So I’m still the victim of the original mugging.’

At this point, my friend splits in two, like an amoeba, in order to side with both of us. This means that he’s siding with criminals, too, which violates the the second half of his conservative crime credo. I point this out to both of him and he explodes, showering the surrounding area with fuzzy logic and conservative amoeba goo.

Again, it appears that it’s not possible to have an account of crime where you say ‘I side with the victims!’. In real life, I had a friend who brought a knife into school. He’d read hysterical accounts of teenage knife crime in the (conservative) news and had concluded that he needed to defend himself. Had he been caught with the knife, he’d have been expelled from school. He might also have been criminally liable, though I doubt they’d have pressed it. Was he a victim? I think he was a victim of nonsense peddled by right wing newspapers, personally, but your mileage may very. Fortunately, he realised it was a stupid thing to do before he ever got caught, so he stopped carrying a knife around.

At the time, he and I were both 16 and therefore in the age and gender demographic most likely to be the victim of a crime. Of course, we were also, by virtue of those exact same demographic realities, in the group most likely to commit a crime. Who should we side with, remnants of the amoeba of my conservative friend? The victims of crime or the people so scared of becoming victims that they commit crimes? Or the victims of the crimes they commit?

Of course, age and gender are hardly the only important demographics when it comes to discussion of crime, but they illustrate a broader point. In fact, however you cut up the demographics, the people most likely to be victims of crimes are also the people most likely to commit them. Most obviously, victims of poverty are also the people most likely to be victims of crime and the most likely to be criminals. So you can’t sympathise with people who are likely be victims of crime without also sympathising with people most likely to victimise them.

There’s a lesson here for the left, too. It’s easy to dismiss ‘tough on crime’ policies as ‘tough on poor people’. The complication arises because, as the group most likely to be victims of crime, poorer people in general tend to take a pretty dim view of criminals. After all, if you’re living in poverty and therefore intimately understand the kinds of pressures that lead people to commit crimes, but nevertheless don’t commit any crimes, you’re unlikely to sympathise with people who cite those pressures as the reason/excuse (YMMV) that they committed crimes.² It’s easy to denounce policies on the basis that they victimise a particular group, but much harder if that group say they quite like those policies.

When you try and set up simple binaries, even with something as apparently straightforward as geography, you run into countless problems. When you try to make simplistic binaries a foundation of your political worldview, you cause problems because the simplistic worldview doesn’t map accurately on to the complicated world.

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Footnotes

1. I don’t personally think that either possessing drugs or taking stupid risks on a motorbike should be crimes, partly because the only victims are the perpetrators, but that’s by the by. Fact is they are crimes and we can’t distinguish the victims from the criminals ↩︎
2. My personal experience of criminals suggests that they tend to blame their victims for their crimes, rather than external social factors, but I’m sure some do. ↩︎

When a poem is not a poem

Online poetry culture is fascinating. The web has dramatically changed how we interact with language, so it’s no surprise that it’s affected poetry and our appreciation of it, too. Look at the way that ‘This is Just to Say’ has somehow become a meme, something as malleable as a screenshot from The Simpsons. Or the way that various people on Instagram have successfully wound up an entire generation of poets by writing the kind of thing you might find on a fridge magnet in a gift shop and publishing it as poetry.

I don’t like any of those Instagram poets, because they all write very badly, but I don’t think that what they do is not ‘real poetry’. It’s just bad writing. To illustrate my point, here is a typical poem by Instapoet Robert M. Drake:

The best kind
of humans are
the ones who
stay.

I’m not going to pretend this is good writing because it isn’t and I’m an honest person by both conviction and habit. It’s very bad, but it does illustrate some features that I think are distinctive in web poetry: short line length, no rhythm (i.e., it’s ‘free’ verse) and the use of line breaks for emphasis, almost instead of rhythm. It’s also irritatingly typical in its failure to even observe grammatical agreement. This happens a lot in English anyway (‘a number of rooms are free’ is the famous example; since ‘number’, the subject, is singular should the verb also be singular ‘is’ rather than plural ‘are’? Or should we say ‘are’ because what we’re ‘really’ talking about is (are?) the rooms?). But if you’re going to do this kind of thing in a poem, you should really interrogate it, rather than just leave it there. Indeed, just having ‘kinds’ would be better poetically and grammatically, as presumably there’s more than one kind of human who stays, anyway.

It’s shabby writing from top to bottom and asks endless questions which it makes no attempt to answer. Should I stay even after someone’s told me to leave, so that I can be the one kind of human who are the best? Why does it say ‘humans’, as though the speaker in the poem is a non-human? Or is there an an assumption that non-human animals do stay? Or that they don’t?

A lot of people find it irritating that someone like Drake, who, as we have seen, can barely write at all, is out there getting published as a poet, but there’s no discernible solution to this kind of ‘problem’. You don’t have to read him and my advice to you is that you don’t.

So, people who mainly get their poetry via Instagram have, by popular consensus, made Robert M. Drake a poet. This is fine, as far as it goes. But I didn’t write this blog to be mean about Drake. Because something far odder is what popular consensus has done to the writing of John Donne.

John Donne was a poet, who wrote in both Latin and English. He also wrote a lot of prose, some of it sermons which he wrote and delivered in his day job as the Dean of St. Paul’s. He’s still well-known as a poet, but the lines he’s most famous for are these, from a devotional work he wrote shortly after recovering from a near-fatal illness:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

(I’ve modernised Donne’s spelling and punctuation.)

You’re probably familiar with this passage or at least with some of the famous lines: ‘No man is an island’ and ‘for whom the bell tolls’ have each been quoted over and over again and used as the titles of various songs, books and films. It’s become one of the best-known statements of humanism and will probably remain well-known for as long as humanism is the default philosophy of our culture.

But the strange thing about this passage is that, in the last week alone, I have seen two different people, in different contexts, describe it as one of their favourite poems. But it’s not a poem. Donne wrote it as prose. He didn’t set it out as verse and it reads like prose. And yet, a lot of people, not just those two, think it’s a poem. Even better, one of them actually laid it out as verse, chopped up mostly at the semicolons but sometimes at the commas, like this:

No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,

And so forth.

Now, I didn’t want to say that Drake’s poem is not a poem. I am a little more confident in my view that this excerpt from a devotional tract is not a poem. I at least have authorial agreement on that point. Nor does chopping it up at the breaths make it into a poem. If Donne had wanted to express these ideas in iambic pentameter, he certainly could have done, but there’s no iambic pentameter here.

So, why do people think this is a poem?

Firstly, John Donne was a famous poet. It’s natural to come across some famous lines by a famous poet and assume they’re poetry. Or, it’s natural if you can’t hear poetic rhythm, which I am 100% certain most people cannot. A case in point can be seen in the ‘versified’ version above. You don’t need to beat out the rhythm on your desk or count on your fingers to see that these ‘lines’ don’t make any poetic sense.

Secondly, bits of it almost sound like a poem. ‘No man is an island’ starts us off with a series of trochees, which sound enough like iambs to mislead the casual reader. The other famous bit is even closer to iambic pentameter: ‘and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee‘. If you put a line break before ‘and’ and after ‘whom’, it’s a perfect iambic pentameter, which is quite pleasant. Even better, the same line is commonly misquoted, but in a way that emphasises the iambic because it relies on monosyllables: ‘send not to know for whom the bell tolls’.

That said, a few iambs does not make a poem. Iambs crop up all over the place in English and a lot of good writers, especially speechwriters, use them on purpose for this reason. Winston Churchill’s war speeches are a good example: ‘if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour“.’¹ Churchill was deliberately channelling the St. Crispin’s Day Speech, with the emphasis on people looking back on the battle after it’s all over, so the iambs are appropriate here both to make it memorable and to place it in a lineage of great British oratory about great victories against the odds.

Nevertheless, while people endlessly quote this and Churchill’s other war speeches, often while discussing football, I’ve yet to see anyone mistake any of them for a poem.

There’s another way in which the ‘No man is an island’ passage seems like a poem, and it’s one which relates to Drake’s poem: the didactic tone. Donne was being didactic because he was essentially giving a sermon. They’re meant to be didactic. Some poets (and their online audiences) have absorbed the idea of deriving lessons from poetry. Even if they’ve never read In Defence of Poetry, they’re looking to poets as the ‘legislators of the world’. Look at both Drake and Donne: ‘The best kind / of humans are’ [etc.], ‘No man is an island’. These are both stated simply as facts. There’s no suggestion that disagreement might be a possibility. The poet has spoken. By contrast, in ‘Their finest hour’ there’s plenty of grand claims, but the overall intent is persuasive. It’s rhetoric, rather than a lesson. This, I think, is one of the reasons people don’t mistake it for a poem. The tone is wrong for what they associate with poetry, or at least with random lines of poetry printed over a stock photo of a sunset.

<img class="wp-block-cover__image-background wp-image-6119" alt="A stock photo of a sunset, with the 'alamy' watermark still on, superimposed with text reading:<br><br>I’m not going to pretend<br>this is good writing because it isn’t<br>and I’m an honest person by both conviction and

Am I doing this right?

Donne goes on to extend and complicate his metaphor, because he was a good writer. Extended metaphor is a technique we associate with poetry and especially with the metaphysical poets, of whom Donne is the exemplar in English literature, so this is another reason people read this and think it’s a poetry. Drake, of course, is incapable of extending a metaphor. His whole ten-word poem is this one clunky claim about a kind of humans(?), whereas Donne’s point is made in just the five oft-quoted words, but he then goes on to explain and enliven what he’s said, and does the job so well that he ends by introducing another entry in your Big Book of Clever Quotes of choice, but it’s a similarly lecturing tone. He doesn’t say, ‘It could be said that the bell tolls for thee’.

Many of the odd bits of poetry that get quoted like this are similar. Think of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 and its (wholly inaccurate) claim that ‘Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove’. Or of that dreadful, dreary passage from Corinthians people love to read at weddings (‘Love is patient, love is kind, it does not make the assembled wedding guests stab themselves in a hand with a fork, just to feel something, anything, other than this.’²). (Obviously, I know this isn’t a poem, either, but I bet you the people who read it at weddings don’t.) The point is, the tone is the same: sweeping, grandiose statements, divested of irony, stripped of context, mistranslated, essentially bowdlerised into something that is intended to feel in some way inarguably true, even when, it palpably isn’t and possibly wasn’t intended to be.

It’s probably understandable that some people prefer Drake’s didactic poem over, to pick an example at random, a poem that asks you to put yourself in the place of someone driven to a murderous rage by the fish that he unwisely turned into an anthropomorphic abomination, especially when they’re just scrolling past. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if people enjoy Drake’s poetry or think that Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is a poem. But there ought to be more to poetry than a lecture.

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1. Note that the ‘poetic’ stress falls in a different place than the sense would suggest. No one wants to say ‘This was their finest hour’. We always say ‘This was their finest hour’ – as did Churchill. ↩︎
2. In the King James Bible, this passage is about ‘charity’, rather than ‘love’, giving us yet another reason to reject the New International Version. In the original Greek, it’s about ‘agape’ (ἀγάπη), prononuced with three syllables ‘a-GAH-pay’, ‘AH-guh-pay’ or ‘AG-a-pay’ (ɑːˈɡɑːpeɪ, ˈɑːɡəˌpeɪ, ˈæɡə-). It really means God’s love for humanity, which at least if you believe in it makes far more sense than looking at human love and saying it doesn’t envy, of all things. In any case, it obviously has no application to your wedding. ↩︎

A problematic performance

One of my favourite linguistic features is folk etymology. This comes about when people hear an unfamiliar word or phrase and replace all or part of it with a familiar one. Famous examples include ‘crayfish’, formed from mishearing the French ‘crevisse‘ and ‘bride and groom’, which was originally ‘bride and gome‘, ‘gome’ meaning ‘a young man’. ‘Gome’ fell out of use except in this one phrase, where eventually it was replaced with the more familiar but, in the context, inexplicable, ‘groom’ (guy who looks after horses).

Every language features dozens or hundreds of these. Someone told me just yesterday that they’d heard someone describe a watch as being ’embezzled’ with diamonds’, which is a simply wonderful error. Probably this was drawn not only from ’embedded’ and ‘dazzling’ but also ‘bevel’, a fairly common feature of the edges of the glass facing of a watch, but not a word in general day-to-day usage outside of the world of design. I hope this one catches on.

These examples are all quite innocent and fun, only of interest to big nerds. Sometimes, a similar phenomenon occurs with words that seem to have an obvious surface meaning which differs from the dictionary definition. For example, ‘fortuitous’ was coined to mean ‘accidentally’ or ‘coincidentally’. However, the resemblance to ‘fortunate’ is just too strong, and its meaning has now pretty much converged. If I said something like, ‘Fortuitously, I was diagnosed with cancer on the same day my wife asked for a divorce and I lost my job’, I would sound quite mad.

Again, this is all pretty innocent stuff, except for those of us I’m sure Facebook would refer to as ‘etymology fans’. Where this becomes an actual problem is, inevitably, where people try to read something political into words.

Take ‘performative’. There’s an obvious apparent meaning of this word: a performance, as in, putting on a show, as in, fake. But as an academic term, it’s intended neutrally, having a meaning more like when we talk of someone ‘performing an act‘. Taken like this, a small ritual like afternoon tea can be described as ‘performative’, but that doesn’t mean it’s fake, even if you, I don’t know, use decaf or something. But, when someone says things like ‘gender’ or ‘political affiliation’ are performative, a large number of people take that to mean they have said those things are in some way not real. This false characterisation of the argument is then partially internalised and before you know it, people are banging around telling each other that ‘the left’ don’t think gender is real because ‘they’ think it’s all performative while, often, at the same time insisting that ‘the left’ don’t really believe anything, because being left wing is just performative.

It’s all become terribly problematic, much like a Sean Connery-era Bond movie. Speaking of which, what does ‘problematic’ mean? Obviously, it means that Bond movies are a problem, that watching and enjoying them is or causes a problem. Except… it doesn’t. ‘Problematique‘ was first (I think) used by Louis Althusser, as a noun, to mean a conceptual framework, a way of approaching something. This was adopted into English as ‘problematic’ (again as a noun) and from there gave rise to a related verb, ‘to problematise’. But ‘to problematise’ something didn’t mean to make that thing a problem, or to find (or invent) a problem with it, but to approach it with a new conceptual framework and discuss what arose from that new analysis.

To go back to our first example of a ‘problematic’ text, ‘to problematise’ Goldfinger doesn’t mean to, e.g., get upset by the depiction of Pussy Galore or of Oddjob, but to ask questions about that depiction in light of a new set of ideas, of third wave feminism or Marxism or whatever. It doesn’t mean: to complain that Pussy Galore is a stupid name; or that in the book she’s a lesbian who turns straight because Bond, and his penis, is just so irresistible; or even to complain that not depicting her as a lesbian in the film is a case of LGBT erasure.

If you glazed over a couple of paragraphs back when I started talking about Louis Althusser, I’d like to congratulate you on having a normal human reaction. That’s roughly how you should react when people talk about things being ‘problematic’. To refer to a text as ‘problematic’ is intended by academics to mean, ‘texts from which new ideas arise when we analyse them in a new way’. It’s a pretty neutral, arguably quite boring, idea. But because the word contains the word ‘problem’ it’s taken by many people to mean ‘this film ought to be banned and anyone who ever enjoyed it is a sick freak’. It’s a bit like the Richard Herring skit about the PE teacher who lives his life by the philosophy that, if a word contains a smaller word, the meaning of the smaller word effects the meaning of the larger word¹, but taken literally.

This isn’t to say that the fault here is dumb right wingers who don’t know what problematic ‘really’ means. There are plenty of left wingers who clearly get a kick out of throwing the label on every other thing, including not only texts and ideas, but people. Plenty of seething online arguments have taken a form like, ‘Is enjoying Taylor Swift problematic?’ but the point is that none of that sentence actually makes any sense; ‘enjoying something’ isn’t a text; it’s not a thing that can be approached with a conceptual framework, so it cannot be ‘problematic’.² Similarly, when the phrase is used of something it can actually be applied to, like the music of Taylor Swift, there shouldn’t be any question of whether something is or isn’t ‘problematic’, because the concept is neutral. The word just means, ‘New thing we can say using a new approach’. Can we get new ideas out of ‘Shake it Off’ by applying a Marxist-Leninist framework? If so, we’ve problematised it and discovered a problematic. If not – and I strongly suspect this is the case – it just isn’t and can’t be problematic, and it doesn’t matter who Swift is or isn’t dating.

The worst misunderstandings of all come about when an identical word is used in different ways. Take ‘racism’. When many people think of ‘racism’, they think of the thugs who murdered Stephen Lawrence: stupid, evil people who think that darker-skinned people aren’t really people. This seems quite easy to agree on; even the Daily Mail, in a rare honourable moment, hated those guys. But the very same word, ‘racism’ is also used with a related, broader, but quite different meaning, to do not with any individual’s stupid opinions, but with how society is structured, who holds the power and how it’s used. When someone says, ‘Is Britain a racist country?’, the problem isn’t that we disagree on the answer, it’s that we don’t agree on what the question means. Some people hear ‘Is Britain full of people who hate black people?’ and other people hear, ‘Are there structures in Britain that make life harder for racial minorities?’. When you consider that many people take ‘Britain’ as a metonymy meaning ‘me and my mates, some of the best of whom are [etc.]’, you can see why they might get a bit upset.

Because people on both sides conflate the two meanings (intentionally and otherwise), people who hate structural racism suddenly find themselves on the back foot when talking about racist policies when they’re being promoted by people who look like Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman. Conservatives, with some justification, think they can’t be described as a racist party when so many of their senior representatives, including the Prime Minister, are visible minorities. Yet, their policies and rhetoric about immigration and about British minorities are racist in every other sense. It feels odd to say that skin colour isn’t really relevant when discussing a racist policy but, as the history of the British-Irish relations, or of the Romani people, or of Jews in Europe all show, it doesn’t actually matter how people look when it comes to racial discrimination. But the difficulty in discussing these things is exacerbated by the overlapping meanings of the word we use to describe the discussion.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Jeremy Corbyn’s years as Labour leader were marred by a raging debate about antisemitism. Often the reason this was so acrimonious was that, instead of discussing structural issues with the processes of the Labour party and the way people thought about Israel and Palestine, people got derailed into arguing about whether Corbyn himself was a racist. Much as with Sunak and his idiotic Rwanda scheme, the question wasn’t actually relevant. But because of the word ‘racism’ being used simultaneously to refer to structures and to attitudes, it seemed like it was.

I don’t have any hard answers to the above, apart from my general principle that words do actually mean something. I’ve been described as a snob³ for saying this kind of thing,⁴ but as I think I’ve shown above, it’s not snobbery. Being imprecise with language puts you into stupid positions, positions that are all the more stupid because you don’t even realise they’re stupid (like engaging with an argument about whether it’s immoral to enjoy James Bond movies). It puts a barrier between you and talking about the world as it actually is, which is a still more important principle. At least if you know what you’re talking about, you have a chance of explaining yourself and, if you do get into an argument, it might not be a stupid one.

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1. It might be funnier the way he does it. ↩︎
2. Of course, even without the words, people might argue about the ‘real’ topic which is ‘Is it moral to enjoy Taylor Swift’s music?’ But, I put it to you, this is such a transparently pointless and stupid argument that few people would have it and fewer would care about it were it not for the dangerous attraction of the word problematic. ↩︎
3. Which I am but, annoyingly, not for this reason. ↩︎
4. Including once, mysteriously, by someone who also that it was a rule to never split an infinitive. ↩︎

Craft and feel: The Poetry Book Society’s Spring collection

This quarter, the PBS did us all a favour and didn’t publish anyone, not even a single person, who claimed that they were allowed to write things because their DNA said so. It’s a low bar, but they sometimes do not clear that bar.

Here are some notes on the books they chose, with some thoughts about what I liked and what I didn’t like.

Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick

The selections this quarter really highlight something I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is that art has to combine craft and feel. Victoria Kennefick has both. As the title Egg/Shell comes in two halves or sequences, though that title also encourages us to not think of the two as totally separate. The first section, ‘Egg/’, explores Kennefick’s feelings towards her first child as she struggles to conceive a second child, while the second, ‘/Shell’, addresses her partner’s coming out as trans. Refreshingly, Kennefick sees no need to weigh in to the acrimonious ‘debate’ around trans people as recently stirred up by bigots, except to end the Acknowledgements section with the standalone sentence: ‘Trans Rights Are Human Rights.’ Which they are.

Kennefick tackles both her main themes with guts and sensitivity. When I use the word ‘sensitive’, I don’t mean ‘delicate’. This is visceral stuff, approaching the levels of Andrew McMillan’s excellent recent collection. There has been a lot of recent poetry about motherhood (this isn’t even the only one chosen by the PBS this quarter) and Kennefick occasionally drifts into cliche or at least familiarity. Mostly, though, it’s an excellent, powerful addition to this growing subject.

The Silence by Gillian Clarke

When I used to sit and read the whole AQA GSCE English Literature Anthology instead of paying attention to whatever my English teacher was saying, there was only one poet in there I didn’t like, and it was Gillian Clarke. I’d like to blame my immaturity for this, but this, the first full collection of hers I’ve read, didn’t do anything to change my mind. The odd thing is that it’s not bad, but it feels somehow bloodless: all craft and little feel.

Baby Schema by Isabel Gallymore

The second collection about motherhood this quarter, except that this one is about not particularly wanting to be a mother. At points for me this veered alarmingly close to the idea that ecologically speaking, the world would be better off with fewer humans. I do not like this idea. But maybe I’m misreading it. There are lots of good jokes in this one. I enjoyed ‘Morning’ in which the speaker says only that word to a human being while showering gooey affection on that human’s dog.

The Asking by Jane Hirshfield

Of course, I wouldn’t start off talking about poems having craft or feel without sooner or later coming to a collection which has both, in spades. These selected poems, taking in a career retrospective plus a few new ones, are excellent. You’d think I might be annoyed on finding that someone else has already written a poem about the philosophy of Empedocles, but I always love it when I independently have the same ideas as other poets. The whole point of this activity is empathy: feeling the same things other people feel. And, of course, Hirshfield does it completely differently to the way I did. This was by far the longest selection this quarter but I never got bored of it. The only difficulty of course is that now I need to go and by all her books. Of course, if you’d like to help me do that…

Eleanor Among the Saints by Rachel Mann

This is one that grew on me as I read it, so that I had to go back and read it again once I’d got to the end. At first it felt like the opposite of Gillian Clarke: all feel and little craft. I don’t think my initial impression was entirely wrong, in that the collection actually does just get better as it goes, but there is more craft than I first realised. There’s just a slippage of control at points. There’s more to the viscerality of poetry than just talking about blood a lot which is something I can get from, like, Megadeth. That said, there’s some really good stuff here, especially towards the end. Mann also pulls off the rare trick in the two-column format where you can actually read it both ways, either left-right then top-bottom or top-bottom then left-right. I feel like most poets start doing this then give up part way through (control again!) but Mann, commendably, doesn’t.

As usual, though, one of the main reads I get from religious poets is that, if believing in Jesus is so difficult, perhaps stop?

Holy Winter 20/21 by Maria Stepanova (trans. Sasha Dugdale)

This, the best translation choice in a long time, is a reflection on exile by someone who knows what they’re talking about, having been driven out of Russia by Vladimir Putin and his fellow thugs. Immediately, then, there’s a heartache to these poems: the poet’s homesickness and the gap between the Russia that could be, as represented by Stepanova, and the actually existing Russia as represented by the war in Ukraine. There’s a very effective recurring image of snow falling in unexpected places. Ovid, not used to it, sees it falling on the forum back in Rome, although such a thing has never happened before, as Stepanova/Ovid also notes. As well as linking the old Rome with the ‘third Rome’ of Russia, there’s just a hint of hope, here, of a connection between home and exile.

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How Augustus shaped our political language

With a bonus section on the maddest claim to the succession of the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire continues to be a big deal for people, for some reason. I studied it at school and naturally I always found it interesting – it just is. I didn’t really understand just how weird people were about it till I went to the site of the Temple of Julius Caesar and saw that people had left flowers there. Here we are, at the temple to a guy who was very much a genocidal dictator who died two thousand years ago, and people are still putting flowers down here. Two thousand years is a long time, long enough that some of those people were almost certainly descended from people killed by Caesar and, quite possibly, also descended from the people who killed Caesar. I would also wager money that some of the people who laid flowers thought that they themselves were descended from Caesar, which is the least likely of those three options although, again, given it was so long ago, it’s at least possible.

Wild though such speculation is, they certainly wouldn’t be alone in thinking of themselves as being, one way or another, descended from Rome, or a certain idea of Rome, anyway. The word ‘Caesar’ in its various forms (Kaiser (German), Tsar (Slavic), Qaysar (Arabic)) lived on as a title for just shy of two thousand years until the deposition of the last Tsar of Bulgaria in 1946 (incredibly, he’s still alive at time of writing, though of course no longer a tsar). In one of history’s small ironies, in the actual Roman Empire, Caesar meant something a bit more like modern ‘prince’, in that it denoted the heir apparent; Augustus was the main title of the emperor. Caesar himself never used Caesar as a title because it was, after all, just his name.

A king by any other name

But this determination to hang on to Roman names and titles doesn’t stop with Caesar, either the word or the man. You might already know that ’emperor’ is derived from the Latin imperator, a word which goes even further back than Caesar, to the kings of Rome. It originally meant, basically, ‘guy who gives the orders’ (think of ‘imperative’) and hence ‘military commander’, but was later tagged on to the many names and titles accrued by Caesar’s heir, Augustus, who, by general consensus, is considered the first Roman emperor. Like Caesar and Augustus, ‘Imperator’ was literally Augustus’ name, albeit an assumed one. He used it as his praenomen, equivalent to a first name, in his regnal name, which was in full ‘Imperator Caesar Augustus’.

So, all of Augustus’ names became titles upon his death or at some point afterwards. But he did also use various titles in their own right, associated with the various offices he held. These included Princeps Civitatus, ‘First Citizen’, and Princeps Senatus, ‘First of the Senate’ and hence leader of the Senate. These two titles were rolled into one, princeps, from which we derive our word ‘prince’, still very much in use as both senior royal and, in the case of Monaco, head of state. The use of princeps as a title continued for centuries, until the emperor Diocletian decided it was time to stop pretending he wasn’t a monarch. Outside of strict etymology, the concept of a leading politician as merely ‘first-among-equals’ survives today in the terms ‘premier’, ‘prime minister’ and ‘first minister’, and in numerous other political and judicial concepts. It survives, too, in the way we address the speakers of parliaments as ‘Mister’ or ‘Madam’ Speaker. George Washington was thinking of this later usage when he decided that the President of the United States should be addressed as ‘Mr/Madam President’. Even ‘First Lady/Gentleman’ as an honorary tag for the spouse of a president descends from this idea of the First Citizen of Rome.

As well as being Princeps Senatus, which gave Augustus the right to speak first in the Senate, he was also often one of the two consuls throughout his rule. Like imperator, the title of consul predated Augustus, but unlike imperator it never became the sole preserve of the emperor. It too has been revived at various points, lastly (I think), during the French Revolution. As in republican and imperial Rome, the French consulate was an office held by multiple people, but with three instead of two officers. However, this three-part rule also had its antecedent in Rome: both Julius Caesar and Augustus were part of different ‘Triumvirates’, wherein the rule of the empire was divided up between three rivals, who eventually turned on one another. As with both Roman triumvirates, the French consulate was unstable and shortly collapsed, leading to sole rule by just one of the triumvirs: Napoelon.

Like Julius Caesar, Augustus was also made pontifex maximus, the high priest of the Roman religion. This survives today as one of the titles of the Bishop of Rome, better known as the Pope. The word ‘pontiff’, used for both the Pope himself and Catholic bishops in general, derives from the same term.

Other titles granted to Augustus were tribuni plebis (tribune of the plebs, whence ‘tribune’ in modern English) and censor, both of which again survive today, although neither has ever been used for a head of state, as far as I know. Like all good (bad) revolutionary populist leaders, Caesar and Augustus stole power from the very people whose names they acted in, rendering the tribunes, originally the offices of the common plebeian classes, even more of a pointless facade than the rest of the institutions of Rome that they variously co-opted and overthrew.

A quick recap: Imperator Caesar Augustus, Princeps Civitatus, Princeps Senatus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribuni Plebis, Censor and (occasionally) Consul. That’s nine or so names and titles (counting ‘princeps’ twice). All survived him as titles. Seven survived not only the first emperor but the fall of the empire many centuries later. Only ‘Augustus’ itself has fallen away entirely as a familiar word (except in the name of the month and as a given name – not a common one in English, granted), while ‘censor’ is a familiar word with an unrelated meaning (the Roman ‘censor’ conducted the census). Of those seven surviving titles, five have been used as names of heads of state or government: emperor, kaiser/tsar/qaysar, prince and pontiff (because the Pope is the head of state of Vatican City, the world’s least nationy nation), with only consul having a long break before its brief revival. Those last two big survivors, Prince and Pontiff, are still going strong today, so that, at least as far as etymology’s concerned, we’re still living in the world Augustus built. If we count the various ‘premier/first/prime minister’-type titles, of which there are dozens around the world, then princeps has the longest legacy of them all. In fact, the only one of Augustus’ regnal names and titles which didn’t survive the empire in any major way was, ironically, the one that was of greatest importance to the Romans themselves: Augustus.

Old names for old guys

Beside the titles associated specifically with Augustus, we’ve hung on to ‘senate‘ as a legislative body made up of old guys (no longer quite exclusively, but the etymology of the word ‘senate’ is related to age, as also seen in ‘senile’; insert your own joke here). We also still have the concept of a Dictator. Dictator means the one who speaks, as in ‘my word is law’, but it would be a stretch and also just daft to relate it to the idea of a ‘Speaker’ in a legislative assembly. Julius Caesar was Dictator Perpetuo – dictator for life – but Augustus repudiated this title for himself and in fact abolished the office. Now, a cynic might say he only did this because he already was a dictator in all but name, but a cynic at the time, particularly one who didn’t want to be crucified, might just shut up. Like Augustus, modern dictators don’t tend to include ‘dictator’ as part of their titles, preferring benign sounding title like ‘Chairman‘ or ‘General Secretary‘. So even when we don’t use Roman titles, the manner in which we don’t use them is similar to the Romans.

But it’s not just etymology where we can see the influence of Rome on our political ideas. There are all those words, of course, for our senates, pontiffs, premiers and princes. Then there’s the nominal separation of powers of judges, magistrates, military leaders and priests. There’s our multiple legislative houses, (houses of commons, lords, representatives and so forth replacing the senate and the tribunes). We also rely on clever little fictions (everyone knows the King of England isn’t really the Head of the Church of England and everyone knows the US President isn’t really the head of the army). And, more symbolically still, there’s our obsession with putting eagles on flags and seals. With all of that and more, we’re still leaning heavily on Roman ideas of government and leadership.

Throughout history, by adopting these old Roman names, titles and concepts, or local variants, those various kings, politicians and pretenders were trying to say something about themselves and, quite often, the thing they were trying to say was: ‘This country is the legitimate successor to the Roman Empire and I am the legitimate successor to the Roman Emperors.’ Nowadays, we don’t tend to actually invoke the translatio imperii, the idea that some ruler or other was the successor to the Roman Empire. This is almost a shame, I think, because its one of those wonderfully mad ideas that exists with a local logic that makes no sense from the outside, like monarchy or test match cricket.

Who gets to be a Roman?

Somewhere near the top of the page, I promised to explain the maddest claims to be the successor to the Roman Empire. Unsurprisingly, it’s the English (see above, re: monarchy, test match cricket).

Like much that is strange about our country, we can blame Henry VIII for this one. As we all know, Henry VIII was desperate to father a son but struggled to beget¹ one who wasn’t stillborn or illegitimate or, for all anyone knows, both. Having convinced himself that the fault lay with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, he tried to get a divorce. Naturally, to do this he had to literally send a letter to the Pope and ask for permission. Unfortunately for Henry, the Pope said no and you had to listen to the Pope because, see above, he sort of, but not really, derived his authority from Augustus, the high priest of a different, pagan religion, and who, in any case, never ruled any of England, the place Henry lived in. I did say that none of this made sense.

To try and get around the fact that Augustus’ sort-of great-great-great-etc.-successor didn’t want him to dump his wife, Henry split away from the Catholic church. This was kind of a big problem, because apart from anything else, many people at the time maintained this strange fiction that there was only one earthly power, reflecting the sole heavenly power, God. The fact that there was just obviously not just one earthly power was no impediment to this way of thinking. This is the same ‘reason’, incidentally, that centuries later Napoleon (yeah, him again) got a Pope² to come all the way to Paris to hand him a crown. And it’s why until shockingly recently, western historians still referred to Caesar and his successors as rulers of the world³. The world is quite a big place, and it’s safe to say that Caesar didn’t rule it or even know about most of it. He didn’t even rule the biggest empire at the time, because that was China, a place Caesar had probably never heard of. Nevertheless, he doth bestride the world like a colossus.

However! To match the extremely strange views of political philosophers of the time, there were also plenty of extremely strange historians who were willing to advance still stranger theories about exactly who bestrid the world and why. According to these historians (or the English ones, anyway), Henry VIII did in fact have the right to rule England and the brand new Church of England. Did they derive this idea from some straightforward notion like sovereignty or right of conquest? Did they derive it just from the fact that there was, really quite obviously, more than one king knocking about the place?

No, they did not. They derived it from the Romans. Unfortunately for them, there was no reason whatsoever to do this. Instead, they hallucinated one.

Saint Helena was the mother of Constantine I (‘the Great’), who you may recall was the first Christian Emperor of Rome. This bit of the argument is the strongest bit of it, because it’s true. This Helena, they said, was English and the argument starts to go downhill really quite rapidly at this point because, first, England didn’t exist at the time and, secondly, she was actually Greek. Anyway, they somehow went on, because the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor⁴ was British (no), that meant that the very idea of a Christian Roman Empire was also British (hang on –) and so that also means that whoever happens to be King of England now, a millennium later, inherited that right from the Romans (what?).

The reason English historians sort of got away with this kind of thing is that everyone was at it. The Holy Roman Empire (supported by the Pope), the Ottoman Empire (supported by ruling Constantinople and possessing heavy artillery), the Byzantine Emperors (till they found themselves on the receiving end of said artillery), the Trebizond empire, the Tsar of Russia, the Bulgarian empire and some distant relatives of the last Byzantine Emperor (all supported principally by themselves), each made some sort of claim to being successors of the Roman Empire. There are many more examples; these are just the claims made during Henry VIII’s lifetime.

Oh, incidentally, the problem of there being six or seven different emperors is called ‘The problem of two emperors’. Could pre-modern historians actually count? Experts suspect that no.

Who gets to be a Trojan?

At least for the English, then, the fixation with Rome was at first a matter of political convenience. And once people are obsessed with something, it tends to self-replicate: we’re kind of obsessed with the Romans because the generations before us were obsessed with them, too. Many of our contemporary ideas of what happened during the fall of the Republic are heavily influenced by William Shakespeare. He’s the reason we still use the name ‘Mark Antony’ for the man who called himself Marcus Antonius. Shakespeare wrote four plays about Rome (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra⁵, and Coriolanus – more on which below) and one (Troilus and Cressida) about the Trojans, from whom the Romans, for similar mad reasons to those discussed above, thought they were descended.

So, you might say that the source of our strange idea that it’s important to establish a succession of imperial power from a distant, mythologised past was also invented… by the Romans.

And another thing…

What got me thinking about the Romans this week was watching Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes. Like Richard III, which I wrote about last week, it has an updated setting, which suits it quite well. Again, the performances are all excellent (Vanessa Redgrave in particular stands out as Volumnia), though no amount of acting can disguise the fact that Coriolanus is a very odd play with a deeply unsympathetic protagonist. The summary is that he hates poor people. He becomes a military hero by defeating the Volscians at Corioles, is granted the name ‘Coriolanus’ and expects to be elected consul, but is thwarted in this by the tribunes. He then goes to the same Volscians he had conquered and persuades them to march on Rome under his leadership. When he arrives at Rome, his mum comes out and points out to him that it might not be such a good idea to sack the city where his family lives and, this having apparently not previously occurred to him, he agrees to stop. When he goes back to the Volscians they, presumably annoyed at having marched all the way to Rome for nothing, murder him.

It’s all very dark and difficult. Even Frank Kermode struggled to interpret it, which tells you something about how tough it is. Probably the key oddity is that Coriolanus doesn’t much go in for soliloquies. Hamlet behaves quite oddly, but he regularly stops to tell the audience what’s going on; even when he contradicts himself, he at least tells us he’s contradicting himself. Coriolanus rarely talks to the audience and spends most of the play bellowing at the plebs. Still, even odd Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Volumnia’s big speeches are excellent and Aufidius (Gerard Butler) is compelling as a mirror of his great rival, Coriolanus. Fiennes acts the hell out of everything, as per, glaring unnervingly at everyone (I’m sure he blinks at some point but it feels as though he doesn’t) and conveying his character’s fundamental brokenness. He portrays Coriolanus as more of a machine than a human being, an absolute wreck of a man, and so succeeds in making Shakespeare’s strangest hero if not actually sympathetic, at least understandable.

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1. These still being the days of begetting. ↩︎
2. A different one, presumably. ↩︎
3. Westerners weren’t alone in this, obviously. The Emperors of China also claimed to rule the whole world and treated ambassadors as servants of vassals, come to pay tribute. This was understood by everyone concerned to be an elaborate fiction, but they played along with it because, well, how else were they going to get at all that tea, silk and opium? ↩︎
4. Just to make this even more entertaining, historians of the time also imagined that Constantine I’s dad (Constantius I) was himself a secret Christian which, if it were true, which it isn’t, would mean that Constantine the Great wasn’t the first Christian emperor. I’d say this makes the theory even more nonsensical but since none of it makes sense anyway I’m not sure it really matters. ↩︎
5. These two – Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra – make a sort of loose pair, with various shared characters, most notably Antony. Obviously they’re set around the same time, too, focusing on the fall of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. It’s from Julius Caesar that we get the image of the man – and therefore the emperors who succeeded him – bestriding the world like a colossus. ↩︎

What does it mean to be wrong?

It’s always tempting and sometimes right to cast your political opponents as evil and stupid. For example, Donald Trump just is both evil and stupid. The throughline of his behaviour is that he positively enjoys hurting people (is evil), lies constantly (is evil) and doesn’t have the capacity to cover up either of these habits (is stupid).

However, too many people do this not just to individuals to whom it clearly applies, like Trump, but instead as a blanket judgment on everyone who disagrees with them. It’s very easy to slip into these frames: why do religious people believe in god, who obviously doesn’t exist? Why do people deny the crimes and failures of the Soviet Union, which obviously did happen? It’s very easy to fall back on the above two explanations. After all, the people making claims like ‘God answers our prayers’ are very obviously just flatly wrong about this, and indeed it’s impossible to understand how they could be right (a personal fave of mine is athletes who pray for victory in rugby matches or whatever). It’s tempting to say that this is because they’re stupid and that’s why they get things wrong.

But here’s the problem: wrongness is not sufficient to prove stupidity or evil. And I can prove it, by showing you that you’re wrong about all kinds of things, and so is everyone you know and love. Once I’ve done this, you’ll have to accept either:

• That you, your loved ones and your political allies, are approximately as stupid or evil, and therefore are no better than, people who disagree with you, OR;
• That being wrong about things does not make you stupid or evil

Gapminder is a great little activity which will show you that you’re wrong about an astonishing array of things. In a nice illustration of the old saw, ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,’ you’re going to find that your knowledge about the world is so limited that the little bit of information you do have just makes you more wrong: it’s a multiple-choice quiz but most people would do better if they picked answers at random. Sometimes, we’re all a dawkins.

Now, maybe you’re going to score better than the average person (full disclosure: I did better than average, and I would’ve done slightly worse if I’d picked at random). This might make you smarter or gooder(?) than the average person, but the problem remains: if being wrong on the facts is evidence that a person is stupid or evil, then it cuts both ways. Being very slightly less wrong means that you’re very slightly less evil, not that you’re good.

For the sake of our sanity, not to mention intellectual consistency, we have to conclude that people we disagree with are for the most part neither stupid nor evil. They’re just people we disagree with.

What I’ve been reading

This week, I read Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth fame (your definition of ‘fame’ may vary). Moore and his bandmates have been artistic heroes of mine, ever since my brain was completely rewired by hearing ‘100%’ on 120 Minutes, and I normally tell people Sonic Youth is my favourite band, and that Daydream Nation is the GOAT album, at the slightest prompting. So, you might think I would enjoy reading nearly 500 pages about the de facto band leader and you would be right, I loved it.

Various reviewers hoping that Moore would describe the breakdown of his first marriage in lurid detail have been disappointed in the book but those people are a. prurient, gossip-fixated misanthropes who, b., deserve to be disappointed (refer to a.). Flick to the end of the book if you’d like to read Moore largely confirm his ex-wife and -bandmate Kim Gordon’s account of their divorce given in her own memoir, Girl in a Band (which I also recommend), but don’t expect much more detail than she gave. It obviously sucks to be Gordon in that situation and I’m disinclined to be sympathetic to people who cheat on their partners, but ultimately it’s their business, not mine, and so I’m also dinsinclined to be judgmental about it.

The love affair Moore’s mainly concerned with isn’t with Gordon or with his now-wife Eva Prinz, but with music. Most of the book contains ecstatic accounts of various songs, albums, gigs and bands that Moore was lucky enough to see and hear over the last six decades, starting with his brother bringing home The Kingsmen’s immortal ‘Louie Louie’ and ending with tributes to guitar iconoclasts John Fahey and Ron Asheton (who also appear several times earlier on in the book, often part in one or another of the author’s innumerable side projects). It’s enough to send you down any number of crate digging expeditions or online rabbit holes, whether tracking down some of those side projects, re-listening to old faves or discovering something new and, presumably, insane which you’d never heard before. There are even a few surprises in there for a longtime fan like me. Obviously teenage Thurston was a big fan of Captain Beefheart, but would anyone have guessed he also loved early KISS and saw them in concert?

Moore is a decent enough writer to get across the awesome power of music as he felt and still feels it, even when he’s discussing artists I’ve never much liked (despite Moore’s enthusiasm, Sid Vicious as a person and a musician continues to be extraordinarily unappealling). That said, he has a few tics that a better editor might’ve excised: he invariably ‘connects’ with people when he wants to say that he saw, spoke or met them, sometimes more than once a page, but that’s by-the-by.

He’s hugely generous to people who maybe don’t deserve it (Vicious, again) and even to acts like Alice in Chains, who most of his scene-mates were and are dismissive of as johnny-come-latelys and sellouts. He doesn’t shy away from telling stories that reflect poorly on him and his bandmates, either. Poor old Bob Bert, who was repeatedly sacked and then shamefacedly invited back to the band when new drummer number X spontaneously combusted or what-have-you, comes across as an inadvertent hero due to his unending willingness to come back into the fold despite this treatment. He even eventually comes out on top by quitting on them, leading them to recruit Steve Shelley who, by good fortune, happened to be not only in need of a job but actually hanging out in Moore and Gordon’s appartment at that very moment.

For those interested in the interactions of Sonic Youth as a band, there’s relatively little here and not much to surprise anyone. I’d guess that, with the possible exception of Gordon, Moore’s bandmates are mentioned less frequently than, e.g., Iggy Pop. Lee Ranaldo, in particular, is a bit of a ghost, and it’s tempting to wonder if that might be down to a personal rift of some sort. As far as I know, Moore and Shelley are the only members of SY who never threatened to quit before their breakup in 2011 (Ranaldo did when they left one of his songs off of Dirty without telling him; I didn’t know Gordon had till I read the book). Moore is honest about his own shortcomings as a bandmate, apologetically describing numerous occasions on which he was clearly being an overbearing dick towards the others; it’s always been clear that despite the ‘sonic democracy’ of the band, Moore was the de facto leader (no surprise that it was Ranaldo, not Moore, who found himself left out of a tracklisting discussion, for example) and the book leaves you with the slightly uncomfortable feeling that this might’ve been simply because he was more stubborn, rather than because of relative talent, contributions or hard work. On the other hand, his solo output, both during and after the band’s lifetime, suggests that he may simply have been the most prolific songwriter.

I also read Pandemonium, Andrew McMillan’s 2021 collection, which is really good, but be warned, it’s very, very dark. What I like about McMillan’s poetry (which I’ve written about before) is that he is never ambiguous and especially never vague, which many poets land on while aiming for ambiguity. There’s always a clarity of thought and emotion, perfectly expressed in clarity of language. Probably the best collection I’ve read this year.

I also just finished The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell. I really loved Hamnet and this is nearly, but not quite, as good. It’s a fictionalised biography of Lucrezia d’Medici, immortalised in Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, which we all remember from GCSE English. I found it not quite as compelling as Hamnet for two major reasons. I’m going to discuss this with spoilers in the next paragraph, so skip it if you’d rather not find out what happens.

First, it’s oddly repetitive in its use of imagery of trapped animals. It’s not that this isn’t an apt metaphor for Lucrezia’s life, but it’s used so often it loses its impact. It also struck me as just a little obvious. Possibly the fact that it was written during the pandemic (as O’Farrell discusses in an epilogue), when we were all to some extent trapped, led her to re-use this idea a little more than was necessary. Secondly, the ending, in which Lucrezia escapes and her maid, Emilia, literally marked out for death in an accident during Lucrezia’s childhood, lost its shock due to how predictable it was. Somehow, despite being predictable, it was also forced: there’s much discussion of how careful Alfonso is to guard his property, how penetrating he is in divining other people’s secret motives. Despite this, in a roughly twenty-four hour period, during which he was conspiring to commit a murder, one woman sneaks into his castle completely unnoticed while another – his wife! – sneaks out, similarly without attracting any attention. It also lets Lucrezia off the hook. She bears some indirect responsibility for Emilia’s murder, but since she never even finds out about it (which again seems unlikely: does she just never hear, at all, about the death of the ‘Duchess of the Ferrara’, or about the Duke’s remarriage?), she completely gets away with it.

I’d still recommend reading it, but it’s a slightly qualified recommendation. Hamnet, on the other hand, you should definitely read.

As a result of all my Sonic Youth reading, I’ve been re-listening to all the SY and SY-adjacent albums. They remain the greatest, if you were wondering, and I also spent a fair bit of the week trying not to buy the various rarities I don’t already own (don’t get me started on the Custom SY Jazzmasters that Fender made a few years back). I also started to put together a massive playlist of albums and bands that Moore discusses in the book. It’s a work-in-progress at time of writing, in that it ends in the 1970s. I’m going to keep adding to it but it’s already several hours long! Still, there’s some good stuff on it. You can listen to it here:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/6LKF7lx3X48yy9ucnG5AuN?utm_source=generator&theme=0

A collection of music Thurston Moore talks about in Sonic Life: A Memoir.

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The linguistics of London bus names

A good way of finding out if someone knows a single thing about linguistics is to find out if they think that prescriptivism is a legitimate way of looking at language. If they think it is, they do not know what they’re talking about. If they think it isn’t, they might know what they’re talking about.

This comes as a surprise to people who’ve spent most of their lives being told that they spell or speak ‘incorrectly’. The ‘rules of language’ we’re taught are in fact more like a dress code or table manners. If a man wears brown shoes with a black suit, many people will say he’s dressed wrong but of course this is mainly a matter of custom, like holding your fork in your left hand. As long as you don’t dress so badly that you die of hypothermia or eat your food so badly that you – I don’t know, injure yourself? – you might be doing things impolitely or improperly, but you’re not doing them wrong.

The same holds for language. There’s really one high-level ‘rule’ of grammar: if a native speaker of your dialect can understand you, you’re speaking correctly. All the other stuff about split infinitives, double negatives and avoiding cliches is a matter of style and custom. It’s important because we, as a culture, deem it important.

The rules that do exist are not a matter of how people should speak but a matter of how they do speak. Any competent English speaker can understand the phrase ‘to boldly go where no one has gone before’, so it’s not wrong in any meaningful sense. The judgement that it’s ‘wrong’ is customary or aesthetic; the judgement that it’s right is a matter of fact: you couldn’t ‘correct’ it if you didn’t understand it.

(I might, additionally, argue that the judgement that it’s aesthetically lacking is also wrong. Try ‘to go boldly where no one has gone before’. The rhythm is wrong!)

With that out of the way, we can now talk about London buses, which is far more fun. Because there are ‘rules’ of grammar when it comes to their names and it’s the fun kind of ‘rule’; one that’s observed and described, not one handed down from on high by Transport for London.

Whether you say ‘number’ depends on the number of numbers

First off, all bus names take the definite article: ‘the 22’, for example, not ‘a 22’. This is true even though there is more than one of every bus, so that, in accordance with the wisdom of the ancients, two can come along at once. We also only very rarely use the word ‘bus’ as part of the name. Strictly speaking, we’re referring to the route the vehicle takes, not the vehicle itself, but no one ever refers to the route explicitly. You’d never recommend someone take ‘bus route 94’, for example, only ever ‘the 94’. But there are many other rules. Excitingly.

Let’s say you’re in Canada Water and you’d like to escape. Who could blame you? The bus you take if you’re going roughly north is ‘the number 1’. It’s one of the oldest bus routes, perhaps unsurprisingly, given its name. You never call this bus ‘the one’: it has to be ‘the number one’. So, this is the first rule of London bus names: their number is preceded by the word ‘number’. Saying just ‘the one’ or ‘the nine’ sounds odd, somehow, so we ‘fix’ it – without knowing we’re doing it – by adding ‘number’ in front.

This is also true of two-digit bus numbers below twenty. So, ‘the number eleven’ (for whatever reason, there is no number ten). But, when the bus has a two-digit number above twenty, like the 25, saying ‘number’ seems to be optional: people use it more or less indifferently, not according to any pattern that I’ve been able to discern.

While we’re at Canada Water Bus Station, you might also get the 381. But three-digit bus numbers have a different set of rules. The 381 is never called the ‘three hundred and eighty-one’. It’s always the three-eight-one, and it’s always just the three-eight-one, without ‘number’. Perhaps this is because on some level we don’t think that ‘three-eight-one’ is a number, so it feels silly saying it. Or perhaps it’s just too many syllables.

If however, the bus was the 380, you would say ‘the three-eighty’. Again, this may be a sort of linguistic conservation, sparing us the enormous effort of saying the extra syllable in ‘three-eight-zero‘. So, there’s another rule: three digit bus numbers which end with ‘zero’ are read as two numbers. If there are two zeroes, as with the 100, you read the whole number (‘one hundred’, rather than ‘one-zero-zero’). It’s never just ‘a hundred’, likely because it feels mad to use two articles (‘the a hundred’). Rarely, the ‘hundred’ bus routes also get ‘number’ in front of them, but less frequently than the two digit bus routes. Like those routes, though, there isn’t a clear rule for when to say or not say ‘number’.

Then there are the night buses and various local buses which have a letter in front of the name, like the N1 (a night bus) or the W19 (a local bus in Wanstead). These obey the same rules about how to say the numbers but are never preceded by the word number, for the straightforward reason that they’re not numbers. Hence, ‘the en one’ and ‘the double-you nineteen’.

If you’ve ever wondered what to call the 171, now you know. What’s interesting about linguistics is how these rules form and change by absolute democratic consensus, even though they’re fairly complicated. It’s taken me around 500 words to explain something that millions of people do every day without the slightest discussion, debate or argument. We might still not have worked out the best way to settle all of our differences, but linguistics, even the mundane linguistics of bus names, shows how we can solve complex problems with simple rules and without the slightest dispute. And that’s beautiful.

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Everyone isn’t anyone

Here’s a very simple English comprehension test:

Anyone can be a professional football player

Everyone can be a professional football player

Ignoring whether either is true, what’s the difference between these two claims?

Most people can see the difference, though it’s perhaps a little harder to explain exactly what it is. If we applied boolean logic, we could say that the first is an or statement and the second is an and statement.

My view is that both statements are false, but that the second statement is categorically false. You don’t need to know anything outside of the definitions of the words to understand that it’s impossible. If everyone were a professional footballer, there wouldn’t be anyone to referee the matches, or drive the trains that took fans to the matches or film the matches. Not to mention there’d be no doctors, farmers or whatever else, because absolutely everyone would be a professional footballer. It just doesn’t make any sense at all and the absurdity is very obvious. It’s logically false: if everyone was a professional footballer, no one could be a professional footballer.

What about the first sentence? It’s not obviously false in the same way as the first. We can safely elaborate the claim by qualifying it without changing the overall meaning, ‘Anyone who works hard enough’ or ‘Anyone who works hard enough and is very lucky’, could be a professional footballer. Either way, it makes a surface kind of sense in a way that the ‘and’ claim doesn’t. Sure, put in the hours, you could probably make it as a pro footballer. Makes sense.

Now we’ve established the logical coherence of the claims, we can interrogate whether they’re empirically true. Can anyone become a professional footballer? Could I, for example, become a professional footballer?

I do have some advantages: I live in a culture where football is very popular and culturally embedded, so it’d be quite easy for me to find people to play with, and I’m more likely to bump into a talent scout. I’m a man – most pro footballers are men – so that works in my favour. I’m able-bodied, too, which helps for exactly the same reason. Things are looking up for my mid-life career switch.

On the other hand, there are some quite obvious things that are going to make this hard for me. I’m 35, an age by which many pro footballers have already retired. Even if I start training every hour I’m awake, I’m unlikely to get good enough, quickly enough, to catch a scout’s eye. Another downside is that I have limited interest in either watching football or playing it, which is a bit of a disabling qualification, as I think it’s safe to assume that most professional footballers quite enjoy football.

Alright, so I’m not going to become a professional footballer now. What if I’d started trying when I was much younger? Well, again, part of the reason I’m not interested in football is that I’ve never been good at it. I’m pretty fit and strong these days, but I basically don’t have the hand-eye co-ordination to play any kind of sport involving a ball. I’ve tried to get good at kick-ups at various times in my life and I just can’t. I can’t juggle more than two objects, either, for what I imagine is much the same reason. I’ve also never liked the macho culture of team sports and I also generally dislike organised fun of any kind, which includes sports.

An autobiographical note

Additionally, despite what I might have put on my CV at various times, I am not good at working as part of a team, largely because I hate being told what to do but also hate telling people what to do. At my last-but-one actual job, I spent huge amounts of time editing the website to make sure it met the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative protocols, and it only occurred to me recently (that is, nearly three years after I left the job) that I never actually told anyone I was doing it. This is the kind of thing I tend to do as an auto-self-defence mechanism: if people know what I’m doing, they often try to tell me how to do it, or when to do it or, worst of all, not to do it. I fucking hate all of this, so I just avoid it altogether. This makes me a great employee if you assume I’m probably going to do something good if you leave me alone, and a terrible employee if you apply absolutely any other standard whatsoever. Although, for the fucking record, the kinds of standards people try and hold employees to are stupid and the world would be a better place if we stopped trying to do it.

Stupid or not, this attitude to life makes me pretty terrible at team sports, because if someone yells something like ‘Pass!’ at me, my default reaction is not to, just, pass the ball but to think, ‘Don’t fucking tell me what to do’. I still do this even if it manifestly is the case that passing would be a good idea. I might still pass, but the fractional delay wherein I’m going ‘lol, lmao’ means that it’s the moment, rather than me, that passes, and we lose the match. I once remarked to a colleague that I’d never been much into team sports and they replied, with arguably excessive sarcasm, ‘No! Really?’

So, using me and my terrible personality as an example, I think we can safely say that not anyone can be a professional footballer. Some people simply are better at the things that you need to be good at to be a footballer. Other people couldn’t be professional footballers because they just don’t really like it and could never summon the motivation to practise something they don’t like to the level required to become incredibly good at it.

Then there’s the age limits. If you’re 35, your chances are low. If you’re 95, it’s fair to say that your chances are non-existent. If you’re a member of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe – I don’t know how you’re reading this but, hi, nice to meet you, you probably know this next thing already but the guys in the big yellow things are not your friends – your chances are also very low.

Or-claims and if-loops

At this point, we need to modify our claim in ways that do change the meaning, to something like:

Anyone can become a professional football player, if they have the native skills, the time and the inclination to put the effort in, and they live in a culture where professional football also exists, and if they’re still young enough for any of the above to plausibly make a difference.

The problem with the ‘anyone’ claim isn’t that it doesn’t really apply to professional football, but that it doesn’t really apply to anything. Believers in meritocracy think that these kinds of claims are true in a broad sense, but they’re not. Can ‘anyone’ succeed in life? Well, it depends what you mean by succeed. Let’s say it means, ‘Reach the top of your profession’. For a footballer, than means play for your country, say, or winning the Premier League (or local equivalent). For a doctor, that means ‘Become a consultant’. For a writer, it might mean ‘Win the Booker prize’. Can anyone do these things? I don’t need to much modify my footballer analogy to suggest that the answer is: obviously not. We value these things precisely because hardly anyone does do them, and the obvious reason for this is that hardly anyone can do them. I’m a writer and, as you can probably tell, I can’t write as well as George Orwell. My evidence for this is that if I could, I would. The reason I don’t is the exact same reason that I don’t run 100 metres in less than ten seconds: I literally, absolutely, cannot.

Okay, but let’s say that we’re saying something like, ‘Anyone who works hard enough can rise to the top of their chosen professional field’. Is this true? Let’s say you decide to take Elon Musk’s advice and work for every hour that you can. There are 168 hours a week. The average human adult needs to sleep for about seven hours a night in order to function. That’s 49 hours a week, give or take how much you differ from the average, which leaves you with something less than 119 hours per week, because I’m assuming you need to eat and take care of your basic hygiene, and that will require some time away from your desk, even if someone brings you your meals. Surely, anyone can rise to the top by working these slightly-less-than-119 hours a week?

Well, maybe. People do have some innate abilities, so anyone working 119 hours a week who is slightly less able than average will get less out of those 119 hours. The believer in meritocracy, though, is broadly happy with this. Sure, some people get less out of those 119 hours, but they beat out the people working a mere 100 hours. So, that’s basically fair, as far as meritocracy goes. If anyone can do those things, it’s fair to reward the people who do. And in theory, success is not a zero-sum game. The slightly-below-average person working 119 hours a week still ends up ahead of the slightly-below-average person working 109 hours a week, so we ought to see a reasonable distribution of merit to the most meritable across the whole range.

You can probably guess what I think of meritocracy based on this description of it, but lets leave my not-at-all-humble opinions aside for a moment. I think the meritocrats’ views do have some limited merit to them. They paint a pretty miserable view of the world, I feel, but they’re not logically incoherent. Note that logically coherent doesn’t mean good and desirable. As a human being, I can see that a world where we all have to work for every waking minute or be considered undeserving is a bad one. But, if I were a sentient AI or a Vulcan or something, I could probably go along with them.

The point where these views become a serious problem is where people mistake ‘anyone’ for ‘everyone’. If anyone can succeed, we just have to work harder to make sure that we do and, if we don’t, we didn’t work hard enough. Depressing, but there’s a certain pitiless logic to it. If everyone can succeed, we have some problems. First, it’s logically incoherent, for the same reason as the football analogy. Transparently, not every writer can win the Booker prize. If they did, it’d be a prizes-for-all situation, in which winning becomes pointless and we’re back to square one, with no one succeeding.

But even if we take a very broad view of success, we can see that the everyone-can-succeed mantra is incoherent. Every single ‘successful’ person is completely reliant on dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of unsuccessful people. Every successful writer needs a vast publishing industry, which is made up almost entirely of people who wish they could be successful writers, but aren’t, in order to experience any success.

This, or something similar, is true of every industry. You can’t make millions selling smartphones without thousands of people working in hellish conditions mining the minerals that go into smartphones, and thousands of people working in less hellish, but still pretty poor, conditions packing those smartphones to be sent to consumers. Similarly, you cannot become a billionaire owner of discount supermarkets unless there are a lot of people in the world who need to work and shop at discount supermarkets.

You can keep going down this ladder forever: successful people rely on slightly less successful people, who rely on even less successful people. You can’t become Prime Minister without the support of hundreds of MPs who will never become Prime Minister; those MPs can’t become MPs without the support of their staff, who won’t ever become MPs, and lots of volunteers, who likewise won’t ever become MPs or even become people who work for MPs; the volunteers can’t volunteer unless they have time to spare, so they themselves need to be moderately successful, despite not working 119 hours a week, because if they did, they couldn’t be volunteers, too, and any success they’ve had will surely rely on some of the supermarket workers or mineral miners.

So, if everyone packed in their job as a bus driver or checkout worker in order to follow their dreams, we wouldn’t all succeed. Rather, the entire economy would collapse. We need some of us to not succeed, to not follow our dreams, to not achieve anything of any socioeconomic significance because, if we unsuccessful people don’t exist, their can be no achievement of any kind, at all.

But there’s yet another problem with the idea that everyone could succeed (I’m aware that I’m punching a dead hamburglar at this point, but bear with me). If everyone can succeed, then the people who don’t are pretty suspect, right? They could succeed, but for some reason they don’t. Almost like they’re choosing to be a drag on the rest of us! Suddenly, you’re in an Ayn Rand novel. The ethical conclusion of socioeconomic interdependence – that if your system relies on someone doing something, you need to treat them with dignity while they do it – is inverted. Suddenly, those failures deserve to be punished for their slackness. And all because you chose to believe something that doesn’t make any sense.

Unfortunately, the anyone claim leads to a similar place. You didn’t work hard enough, so your failure is, ultimately, on you. We can perhaps sympathise with someone who truly couldn’t work hard enough but the fact remains the same: they were less productive and their more productive peers reaped the reward of greater productivity. Anything else would be unfair. Both the ‘anyone’ and the ‘everyone’ versions of the claim thus have big ethical problems. At their worst, they both lead to the same absurd Randian conclusion, wherein millionaires kid themselves that they don’t need poor people, and are thus under no obligation to them. The everyone claim gets there sooner, and then additionally leads to the conclusion that actively punishing the economy’s failures is justifiable.

I’m not saying the entire libertarian/conservative worldview hinges on a failure to parse a sentence correctly. The semantic example just shows that there’s a very small step between a coherent-but-unpleasant way of looking at the world and an incoherent and actively evil way of looking at the world.

“Everyone isn’t anyone” by Frank Podmore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Technoglossia: an imaginable itinerary through the particular universal

I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn.

– Gandalf the Grey

But Biggs and I were going to go to Tosche station to pick up some power converters!

– Luke Skywalker

I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow

– The Third Doctor

There’s a distinctly sci-fi/fantasy way of writing which I think a lot of people probably see as either filler or scene-setting, but I think there’s far more to it than that, when it’s done well. There are, of course, infinite examples of it being done badly, usually using the phrase ‘some kind of’ or ‘sort of’ something or other, which is neither informative nor aesthetically pleasing.

Whatever it is, exactly, I don’t think there’s not a precise term for the mode of writing, which I’ve given some samples of in the epigraph. In sci-fi it’s sometimes called technobabble (or ‘treknobabble’ when talking specifically about Star Trek), but that obviously doesn’t cover The Lord of the Rings or the other examples I’m going to get into. I don’t think ‘babble’ is an appropriate phrase for it, anyway, because I do think it serves a specific purpose, whereas ‘babble’ suggests randomness. Other terms like ‘jargon’ aren’t quite right, either, because jargon is subjective: meaningless to laypeople but meaningful to experts. With this type of writing, we usually know something of what is meant, but the precise detail is elusive.

I think a new coinage is needed. I suggest technoglossia, from the Greek techne, ‘art’, and glossia, ‘language’, hence, ‘a language of art’. As I’m going to show, technoglossia is language where meaning is irreducibly carried at the level of the phrase.

Like so much else, it was JRR Tolkien who introduced technoglossia to SFF writing. The fantastic thing about Gandalf’s speech at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm is that it seems to be absolutely freighted with meaning but it’s almost impossible to parse, even though only two of the words (Anor and Udûn) come from his invented languages. It seems to all be about different types of fire, but why should fire prevent other fire from passing? Who or what are Anor and Udûn? Why is only one of the fires – the ‘Secret’ one – given a capital F?

Tolkien has answers to all of this, naturally, but anything that requires you to look stuff up on a fansite can safely be said to be metatextual. More to the point, even when you do know what Anor and Udûn are (sort of) and what the Secret Fire might be, you still don’t really know much about what Gandalf means. ‘Anor’ turns out to be Sindarin (or Quenya?) for ‘sun’ and Udûn means ‘Hell’ or refers to a region of Mordor but presumably here it’s the former . Does knowing that Gandalf wields the sun’s flame or that the Balrog is a hellfire demon tell us much? Not really. For example, is the Secret Fire different from the flame of Anor/the sun? Can you serve one without wielding the other? It’s still unclear.

However, knowing the purported meaning does tell us something about why Tolkien wrote these lines in this way: they sound better with the Elvish words, which work better rhythmically: using Anor and Udûn brings the speech closer to iambic pentameter. The first two clauses reflect each other nicely, and then we get a great echo on ‘flame of Anor’/’flame of Udun’, contrasting the two flames. We don’t know what they are precisely, but we know they’re opposed and, most importantly, we know whose side we’re on.

There’s a definite hint here that, much like Jules in the final scene of Pulp Fiction, Gandalf just needed some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before he popped a cop in his ass. (Or did he expect the Balrog to go, ‘Oh yeah, good point. I’ll head home, then’?) In fact, in Pulp Fiction, Jules even notes that the content of what he’s saying isn’t important and allows of several possible interpretations. Certainly in the minds of whoever makes and buys t-shirts and posters with film quotes on them, the first interpretation, that it’s just cool, remains the prevailing one.

If you don’t have a Bible handy, you can look up Ezekiel 25:17 online and check whether Jules is really quoting it (he isn’t). For both Tolkien and Tarantino, what’s relevant is not the words themselves but their aesthetic value. Both are examples of what Tolkien called a ‘cellar door’: words or phrases with an aesthetic beauty that has nothing to do with their actual meaning. The reason this is technoglossia, though, is that ‘cellar doors’ are beautiful whenever and however they’re used, and independent of their meaning, but technoglossia serves a particular purpose.

Obviously the flipside of the existence of cellardoors is that there are some sounds that are just ugly. With apologies to the Gretchens and Ferguses of the world, I honestly though both those names were made up for fictional characters who the audience were supposed to dislike. There’s no earthly reason anyone would choose to attach those sounds to a baby. Sorry. I’m also not a huge fan of my name, if it helps. Slightly perversely, I do think it suits me, but did I have any choice but to be a weird nerd after I was lumbered with the name Frank Podmore? Imagine if I was a bodybuilder or something. It would just be crazy. No one would believe me. You read the name Frank Podmore and you just know that’s a guy with strong opinions about Balrogs (which do not have wings).

Anyway.

Treknobabble is a subtype, usually used to dig Star Trek writers out of plotholes caused by the laws of physics. Transporters obviously can’t work because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Not a problem: the Enterprise has a Heisenberg compensator! (I love this.) Here, treknobabble, and the associated imaginary technology, does the job that ‘fate’ does in fantasy fiction, by making sense of things that make no sense. Treknobabble is usually not chosen for its aesthetic quality, though naturally some of it is better than others. Reportedly, some Trek writers specialised in writing it and would be called on to add something appropriate when required. Similarly, some actors were especialy good at delivering it. The aesthetics of certain phrases I think partly explains why Star Trek‘s writers are notably fond of some phrases, almost to the point of their becoming snowclones. ‘Subspace/space-time anomalies’, for example, crop up so often that they’re no longer anomalous. Much like the possibly related ‘subspace/space-time phenomenon’, these sound best with an American accent.

We can see this effect happening with other technobabble, too. I don’t think neutron flows exist outside of Doctor Who but, if they do, you couldn’t reverse their polarity because neutrons don’t have one – hence the name. But aesthetically speaking, you couldn’t ‘reverse the polarity of the proton flow’ or the ‘electron flow’ because, ironically or not, neither alternative flows. Here, the Third Doctor gives us a sentence which is not only meaningless but defies a basic principle of the laws of physics. It doesn’t matter because it sounds right.

This foregrounding of aesthetic over meaning exists outside of SFF too. Sigur Rós often sing in ‘Hopelandic’, which the press often wrongly refer to as an invented language. It’s actually just a collection of speechlike sounds, an auditory equivalent of asemic writing. We can’t call Gandalf or the Doctor’s entires in this blog ‘asemic’, because they have meaning, but it at least gets us closer. There are also millions of fans of opera who enjoy music sung in languages they don’t speak. I’m not a big opera fan myself. Someone once gave me a spare ticket to see Carmen and I quite enjoyed it but I genuinely had to look it up just now to find out what language it’s in (French). Like most people who have ever listened to Carmen, I enjoyed the whole thing, including the words, on a purely aesthetic level, much as Sigur Rós fans enjoy their songs in Hopelandic (and Icelandic, for the overwhelming majority of us who don’t speak it).

In Shakespeare’s Language, Frank Kermode reports asking a Shakesperean actor what they did when confronted with speeches they didn’t understand. The answer: they tried to deliver it as though they did understand it. Trek‘s actors did much the same thing. Again, it’s fair to say that a lot of Shakespeare goes entirely over the heads of contemporary audiences, yet we still flock to hear it performed.

Another parallel is in Finnegans Wake, another work that hacks often describe as being written in an invented language. In fact, it is recognisably English, often in a Hiberno-English dialect, in most of its grammar and vocabulary. For example, I just let the book fall open at random and landed on the passage famous for giving the langauge the word ‘quark’:

— Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark

Finnegans Wake, p. 383

Clearly, this isn’t a ‘made-up language’. Apart from ‘quark’, there’s no entirely made-up word here. The syntax is Hiberno-English and the only other oddity is ‘Muster’ (a real word) where we might expect ‘Mister’ or ‘Master’. What we don’t have for most of the Wake is the kind of clear meaning that we normally expect. It’s nonetheless a lot more like technobabble than it is like Hopelandic.

The other oddity of the Wake is that James Joyce insisted that it all had meaning, but most readers struggle to discern it and, even among those who feel they understand it, there’s not much agreement as to ‘the’ meaning (whether ‘actual’ or ‘original’ or ‘intended’). Whether this makes it a novel or something else entirely is an open question. One interpretation is that it was intended to foreground aesthetic beauty over meaning, in which case it has something in common with Tolkien’s use of invented language in LotR (particularly the elvish languages of Quenya and Sindarin). It’s possibly not a coincidence that both work best when read aloud.

This might be a more controversial claim, but technoglossia also occurs outside of SFF and postmodernism. For example, we all know the word ‘tightfisted’ meaning ‘stingy’. It seems to refer to the way a miser might hang on to their cash or wallet: with a tight fist. So far so good. But look how Charles Dickens, from whom we derive the word, uses it in A Christmas Carol:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!

(my italics)

Scrooge doesn’t have a tight fist. He is a tight fist. This is more complex metaphor, but there’s more to it than that. What does this idea actually mean? Or, rather, how does it mean what it means?

Let’s break it down: I have some idea what a grindstone is, though I’ve never seen one. Based on what I know, it sounds like having a tight fist would be a good practice, approved by all health and safety officers, since I don’t want to drop what I’m grinding. But clearly Dickens isn’t complimenting Scrooge’s grinding technique. If Dickens had simply said, ‘He was (or had) a tight fisted hand’, it wouldn’t mean much at all. Nor if he said he was ‘a fist (or hand) at the grindstone’. Much like Gandalf’s speech to the Balrog, the meaning here is both obvious and hard to parse: take away any element and it falls apart completely. The phrase needs every word to convey the meaning, but when we break it down, the meaning seems to slip away from us. Maybe we’re not being tightfisted enough?

This is technoglossia. Neither Dickens, nor Tolkien, nor the various writers of Doctor Who and Star Trek are babbling when they use language this way. Nor is it exclusive to SFF, as we’ve seen with Dickens. It’s a mode unto itself, one which conveys a primary meaning at the level of the phrase, a meaning which, crucially, cannot be found only through analysing the meanings of the component words. SFF uses it perhaps more than other genres, though it can also be found in, e.g., CSI‘s descriptions of how forensics works (‘Enhance!’). It may appear more often in SFF partly because of Tolkien’s influence and partly because, when you’re imagining a new world it may come naturally to you to also bend the language a bit, even when you’re not also inventing one. I expect you can find technoglossia in all kinds of writing, though, because, as we’ve seen with Dickens, it’s a uniquely powerful way of conveying an idea.

When binaries are ambiguous

A little while ago my oldest kid led the whole family into a lengthy discussion about what the opposite of ‘sweet’ is. My immediate thought was ‘sour’, possibly because I used to eat sweet and sour chicken nearly every week as a kid. My partner thought ‘salty’. After a bit of back-and-forth, I realised that she was right, for an entirely nerdy and pedantic reason: sour things are acidic, and the opposite of acidic is alkaline, which tastes bitter. Therefore, sour is the opposite of bitter. Once they’re taken care of, we’re left with the other two major flavours, salty and sweet, so salty must be the opposite of sweet. Or maybe umami, but nobody counts that.

The point of this conversation is not that I’m a weird nerd who thinks you can prove things about taste by resorting to chemistry, but that both our kids, aged seven and four at the time, were able to join in. Opposites are really easy to understand and a lot of our thinking about the world is noticeably affected by our desire to put things into two categories. You’re male or female, left wing or right wing, young or old, straight or gay, alive or dead, for us or against us. Even when we accept that many of those things are actually on a spectrum, we still default to the binary.

Of course, in reality, things are rarely simply opposite or binary. Terry Pratchett was fond of pointing out that some of the things we think of as opposites are not opposed at all: darkness isn’t the opposite of light, but the absence of it. Compare also hot and cold, or silence and sound.

Surely, though, up and down are simply binary? As long as you can identify a horizontal plane and you’re not talking about quarks, no one can doubt that up means up and down means down. This is easy mode. And because it’s so obvious what they mean, up and down correspond by metaphor or metonymy to lots of other things, too. If I have a dimmer switch and someone asks me to turn the light up, I know how to do it, even though light obviously doesn’t have an ‘up’. If someone tells me to slow down, I know exactly what they mean, whether or not I’m on a hill.

Clearly, we live in a happily binary universe, at least with regards to up and down. Right until someone tells me to turn the air conditioning… up. Suddenly, I’m sweating, and not because of the heat. I wish it were because of the heat, because then, perhaps, I could work out what they meant. There’s a remote control for the aircon. It has a plus and a minus. Okay, so plus means up. Right. And minus means down. But what does that mean? If I increase the power of the aircon, that means there’s more power. That’s up. But then the temperature will decrease. It will go down. But the total amount of entropy in the universe will also increase (go up), which is to say, there will be less complexity (which… seems like down).

Okay, the person who asked me about the aircon probably wasn’t thinking about thermodynamics. I really wish they’d just get up and do it themselves but unfortunately I’m closer to the remote, plus I already picked it up. I can’t back down now. Perhaps I could back up? I hit some buttons at random. There’s a beeping noise. This will buy me some time. All I need to do is work out whether plus means more power or more temperature. I surreptitiously search for online aircon manuals, hoping for enlightenment. These things were designed by engineers. Engineers know what’s up.

I have no idea of the model of this particular aircon unit, but there must be some sort of industrial standard. I’ve found a manual with a picture of a knob. Turning it clockwise makes it cooler. So, clockwise must mean something like up. When time increases, the clock goes that way, clockwise, hence the name. Clockwise means up and so up means cool. QED. But, in the same manual, there’s a picture of a remote control. It’s hard to make out, but I think it’s saying that pressing the plus button will increase the temperature, which means up means hot. Oh no. Does clockwise mean down? How can that be? I suppose when the clock hand first moves from neutral, zero, it does go down, first, rather than up. Have I been reading clocks wrong this whole time? Is my time running down as it goes up? Well, yes. Egg timers are much clearer on this particular point.

Speaking of which, time is definitely running out (down? opposite of in?) for me to make a decision about how to turn the aircon up. The beeping bought them off. They have both put on a jumper and opened a window. This is inscrutable behaviour. After further discussion, I realise that when they were talking about turning up the aircon, they make meant the fan speed.

I give up.

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