Having a word not taking the pith

#59

   A week or so ago I made an effort to sort out venal and venial once and for all. These two words aren’t in any way interchangeable and could be libellous when used as if they were; or – worse - not used at all because yours truly couldn’t remember the difference. You wouldn’t, for example, want to hear a politician described as venal when venial was what Silly-Sally B actually meant to say. We are none of us very far from a dictionary these days and so I tried to excavate a helpful mnemonic which might separate them permanently. Venal, I have it on good authority,[1] means open to bribery and comes from the Latin venalis, from venum, meaning ‘goods for sale’. Venial, on the other hand, means pardonable, excusable, permissible and derives from the Latin venia, meaning ‘pardon’. And there lay the mnemonic I sought – use the Latin root and then it’s plain that venial can’t come from venalis any more than venal could have come down to us from venia.

   Fair enough, I thought, and that’s plenty to be going on with until, a day or two later, when I stumbled upon a series of books called “I used to know that – stuff you forgot from school”[2]. Frightening - especially with the realisation that, despite the Herculean endeavours of Mrs Marten [English] and Messrs Quinn & Foot [Latin] between 1959 and 1963 I never did ‘used to know’ very much about the inner workings of our English grammar, let alone the more wondrous and abstruse mechanics of Latin. Quite why the word endings in Latin had to keep changing was a total mystery to me, aged 13; and is not a lot clearer even now.

   I particularly remember struggling with the declensions of the word for ‘table’. Tabula, tabulae – No, idiot, that’s a board or plank (seems appropriate). The proper Latin word for ‘table’ is mensa (isn’t it?). Mensa declines as mensa, mensa, mensam, mensae… err… mensarum? Mensis? (Whoops, no, you’ve slipped into the plurals) …give up. It mattered, apparently, whether I was speaking at the table, to the table or about the ruddy table. And then tables are, of course, feminine – aren’t they? Think ‘Old Mother Brown’ – now there’s a clue for another mnemonic… ‘Under the table you must go, E-I-E-I-E-I-O’[3]. (How does that help?) Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive… Cases? Don’t make laugh. Don’t make me cry.

   I still defy anyone to explain, convincingly, what is occurring when either the ‘dative’ or the ‘ablative’ come out to play. As my contemporary, John ‘Johnny’ Johnson [circa 1961], never tired of muttering darkly, “I seldom feel any need to speak to a table, don’t I sir?” And surely it was also about that time that Nigel Molesworth heroically annihilated all serious prospects for a study of Latin grammar by deploying, inter alia, his definitive ‘Private Life of the Gerund’[4]

 Molesworth n. ‘the curse of st custard’s’

   Grammar, as I think Mrs Marten once tried to explain to us (well, to Johnny & I), can be just like Meccano. You start with a box full of various pre-drilled units in red or green metal. These can be bolted together in many different ways to make all sorts of weird and wonderful contraptions. But, for all that they have moving parts and gears and pulleys, many creations will never appear to be more than an assemblage of bits of tin, in red or green. The skill is to make something that goes beyond being merely the sum of its parts; something that becomes the essence of “biplane” or “helicopter,” “auto-gyro” or “crane”. The problem with writing is the same, to go beyond the sum of the parts[5]. The point is to write well and not just grammatically. The solution, we agreed, the lovely Mrs Marten and I, was to read. To read and read and read, hoping that the way the language worked would stick somewhere in the midst of my little grey cells and become habit…or at least the basis for a decent standard of plagiarism.

   So lately, after all these years, I confess I’ve finally seen the point of studying Latin. Far too late of course. But now, as I struggle to remember which is which amongst pairs of similar-sounding words [inimical –v- inimitable, turbid –v- turgid or insidious –v- invidious] I try to first uncover[6], and then commit to memory, a Latin root for each. It helps to know that insidious [developing or advancing gradually and imperceptibly] comes from the Latin insidiae meaning ‘an ambush’ whereas invidious [likely to incur or provoke ill-will or resentment] stems cleanly from invidia meaning ‘envy’.

 Ashlyns School Staff – circa 1960

Mrs Marten, fourth from right in front row. Mr Quinn near centre of same row - next to 'The Beak'

   But beyond vocabulary and beyond the stew of declensions, nouns, verbs and adjectival what-nots, Mrs Marten – of Ashlyns School - it was, bless her, who first made me aware of the poetry of Shakespeare and of Yeats. One day she read to us The Lake Isle of Innisfree and suggested we copy it from the blackboard and learn it by heart for our homework.

   “By ‘art Miss?”

   “Yes, by heart.”

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.[7]

   If a good working knowledge of grammar was all we needed to write lines which soar from the page, demanding to be read aloud or learned by heart, then I would have no excuse for my continuing inability to distinguish with any certainty between a main clause and a subordinate clause; or to define a ‘participle’ with any degree of confidence. I have no idea how good at rote-learned grammar were William Shakespeare or William Butler Yeats. Clearly, they both drew upon something richer than a textbook knowledge of syntax, personal pronouns or the proper use of prepositional phrases.

Compare this;

When my luck has failed and no one likes me, I sit alone and cry about being a social outcast. My prayers to heaven go unheard.  I look in the mirror and swear about how life is treating me…[8]

With this;

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate…[9]

   Mrs Marten made me envy those who write with the thick-skinned confidence to leave pedantic grammarians reeling and cawing in their wake. In her quiet way she opened the gates to more, so much more. That’s the enduring point; she believed you just go on reading and learning. Learning and reading, reading and learning. And stuff where all the commas go. We can always learn more words and how to use them better. For imparting that simple truth a belated ‘thank you’ to all my teachers, thank you.

---

[1] Dictionary definitions in this blog are taken from The Chambers Dictionary, Chambers Harrap, 2003

[2] I Used to Know That. ENGLISH by Patrick Scrivenor. Michael O’Mara Books Limited. London. 2010. Other books in the series (edited by Caroline Taggart) cover Geography, Maths, History and General Science. You have been warned.

[3] From Knees Up Mother Brown! – Traditional English drinking song.

[4] Chapter 3: ‘How to be topp in Latin’ from How to be Topp. Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle. Puffin Books. 1962

[5] Poem, poesy, poetry and poet all come to us via Latin from the Greek poiesis from poieein to make. So poetry is a form of making – I love that.

[6] Ah ha! A deliberately split infinitive. Gotcha!

[7] From The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B. Yeats, 1893.

[8] From any number of paraphrasings of Sonnet 29 available as ‘study guides’ on the internet. Why would they do that?

[9] First quatrain from Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare.

Throwing the Book at Abu Qatada [Part 2]

#58

Recent events have turned our attention once more to an ancient copy of The Old Pretender’s Book of Travesties held by the Antiquarian Section of our Lost Property Department. Our reading resumes at Peculiars VI, Chapter 6, verse 6:

“ 6 And it came to pass that Abu Qatada al-Filistini, being greatly vexed in his own land, did fold away his tent in the night and journey by stealth into the land of the Angles and the Saxons.  There he did spew forth many intemperate harangues, which he did pass off as sermons, and great was the paranoia thereof. And it became known amongst the people of that land that he did big-up Osama Bin Laden and his brethren in the tribe of al-Qaeda, and the people were most assuredly not amused.

“ 7 And the scribes and scribblers of the Angles and of the Saxons were moved to denounce The Abu from their housetops and from their Redtops. And there began a mighty cacophony of voices crying, ‘Woe and thrice woe, for this Abu that has come amongst us is a foreigner who speaketh only foreign and weareth a  mighty foreign beard and, were that not bad enough, he is plainly also an ill-mannered sod to boot.’ And so it was that they did very soon bang him up in Belmarsh, according to their custom, and make as if they had thrown away the key.

“ 8 But then the friends of The Abu arose, saying, ‘Yeah, you is well out of order there, bro, and we is taking you to court so that we can habeas his corpus, in’it?’ And then did the leaders of the Tory-ites and the Labourites gird up their loins and speak unto the people saying, ‘This Abu, as thou well knowest, is a right pain in all our buttocks and any day now he will feel the force of our righteous size elevens upon his hind-quarters and be expelled forthwith unto the land of his forefathers which is in the Kingdom of Jordan.’

“ 9  But lo, an appeal was carried many leagues thence by an handmaiden of The Abu to the mighty Court of Human Rights which dwells beyond the Land of Nod in the Land of Euro. And the Eurocrats did demand that the Tory-ites do stay their heads, hands and feet for fear that The Abu might be delivered unto sundry wicked sons of bitches who would surely render his garments and water his board and apply their rods even unto his tender parts.

“10 And when this became known among the Angles and Saxons there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. For it was revealed also unto them that The Abu would receive great treasure of income support and housing benefit and be permitted a daily stroll even unto Pound Land, which is at the other end of the High Street.

“11 And Lo, signs and portents were made manifest in The Sky and darkness fell across the face of The Sun and even the dreaded Murdoch became but a humble shadow.

“12 And in those days there arose from amongst the Saxon host, one that was called Paul of Acre. And Paul was accompanied by a rushing wind of obscenities whenever he did pass about the City and the very ground did tremble beneath the wheels of his Roller. For he was  begat by Rothermere out of Northcliffe and did love to smite his breast mightily as he spake and to chastise the peoples of Euro land for being foreign and possibly French and sundry similar offences.

“13  And it came to pass that Paul of Acre did summon unto his presence  Young Cameron, leader of the Posh Boys; being the one that is called The Dave. And Paul spake unto The Dave saying, ‘It is an abomination in the sight of the people that The Euros is leaving us stuck with this undesirable foreign weirdo who hath broken all the Laws of Cricket. We know in our hearts that he should have been given ‘OUT’, leg-before if not caught-behind, and quite possibly off-side as well.’

“14 But The Dave was an oily man, and great was the smoothness thereof. And he did soothe Paul of Acre by saying unto him, ‘Give us this day our daily mail, even unto the seventh day. And know that I am on The Abu’s case both by day and by night. The twigs and twiglets of My Special Branch is all over him like a rash and we will soon have his sorry ass  bang-to-rights and show him the Red Card for handling the ball even within his own penalty area, no less.’

“15 But there were in that land others abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks. One of their number was called The Guardian of the Sheep and another was The Independent of the Goats. And they were sorely troubled and went amongst the people, saying, ‘The land of the Angles is a country of laws not of press Barons. The Eurocrats is right to have protected The Abu, despite our knowing that if he had his wicked way none of his nor our Human Righteousness would stand a snowball’s chance in Hell.  

“16 ‘Now therefore, let us give thanks that we dwell under the Convention of The Euro lands. For, verily, the right to be protected from torture is one that prevaileth at all times, irrespective of the victim’s conduct. Deprivation of rights is not a legitimate punishment for whosoever doth trespass or even seem to trespass against us.’

“17 And the shepherds and goatherds passed amongst their brethren, saying, ‘Get ye a grip, for all our sakes, thou bunch of silly-billies. We may not like it, but preaching offensive sermons doth not remove from The Abu all vestiges of human rights. For why else do we have courts?’

“18 And when news of this reached Paul of Acre he was filled with wrath and he saith unto The Dave in his private Chamber, ‘Yo, Rude Boy, we is being run by the distant Euros and their namby-pamby left-handed friends. It is a right stitch-up, I is telling you, which we are minded to abide no longer, in’it?’

“19 But lo, before The Dave could answer him, the door to the room bursteth open and in did stroll The Clegg, Prince among the Liberalites. Behind him lumbered Kenneth The Clerke but the girth of The Ken was too portly owing to great feasting on cakes and ale and he could not pass through the door.

“ 20 And The Ken did utter a mighty blast on his trumpet and another on his saxophone and he spake unto The Dave from outside, saying, ‘Cool it, Daddio, go man go, yeah! And now pray tell why it is that you is not listening to me and The Clegg concerning the Righteousness of the Euros? For am I not thine own annointed overseer of All Justice and stuff?’

“21 And then did The Dave smile his biggest smile and answered him, saying unto all that were gathered there, ‘Fear not, My Dear Old Things, for even as we do speak the Bless’ed Theresa in her Wing’ed Chariot is descending upon the Kingdom of Jordan to knock their simple towelled heads together and make plain unto them the error of their ways.

“22 ‘And hereafter shall only peace and justice fall upon our heads as the gentle rain falleth from Heaven; thanks be to Dawkins.’ And no sooner had The Ken and The Clegg gone upon their separate ways rejoicing than did The Dave scratcheth a note to self upon his tablet which did read thusly, ‘ Getteth The Ken away from the House of Justice at the earliest reshuffle for his feet are not well planted upon the stony ground of Toryism.’

“23 And in this manner and with sundry sleights, alarums, diversions and Olympian spectacles, The Dave did distract the hard-working families of the Angles and Saxons. And the readership of Acre fell once more into their complacent stupor, leaving only the aged Murdoch to lead as many as would follow him in a merry dance even unto the death.”

“24 And when all these things had come to pass, at the very last didst The Abu appeal even unto the Three Wise Men that is dwelling within the Special Immigration Appeals Commission and they did ponder the rights and wrongs of it all and scratch their buttocks for many a long month and twain. And lo they did finally relieve themselves of their judgement that the evidence extracted by sundry tortures even from the brethren of The Abu might still be held against his person and that therefore he could not rightfully be catapulted even unto the Kingdom of Jordan.

“25 And when the minions of the Home Office heard this they were sore afraid and did venture unto the Bless’ed Theresa with fear and trembling. And surely then the Bless’ed Theresa did let forth a mighty wail and did bang her head upon the wall and upon the floor and did foam at the mouth and did chew upon the carpet which covereth the floor of her chamber,  crying aloud, ‘Stone me and stone the bleedin’ crows! Verily, I is going to get a righteous roasting when I is breaking this news even unto the Host of The Smug Little Bercow which is called The Commons.’

“26 And lo it came to pass, even as Theresa hath predicted, and in the morning she was again toast in all the papers. And then did The Dave gird up his loins one more time and comfort her saying, ‘Fear not, my dear old fruit, for the pathway of the righteous is clear before us, even though it be as bent as a scenic railway. For Lo, the King of the Jordans is coming amongst us next week and I is well minded to get him on-side with a few of our surplus Harrier jumping jets and sundry other bits of impressive military kit. And in the meantime we is going to appeal the case of The Abu even unto the Court of The Three Wise Monkeys which I is even now inventing.’

“27 And at this did the Bless’ed Theresa fall upon his neck with kisses and did shout her hosannas loudly unto The Sky, for she knew in her heart that the Three Wise Monkeys would hear no evil, see no evil and could speak no evil. And thus was The Dave become, in her eyes at least, an operator of the highest order of smoothness.

“28 And at the going down of The Sun, and with even the once mighty ramparts of The Beeb crashing down about their ears, verily the peoples of the land of Angles and Saxons did weep copious tears into their pints and did enquire even of themselves and of any who would listen, just what the hell was going on.”

- May God help us all.

Amen

A dreamer of the day…

# 57

   I have been reading ‘HERO. The Life & Legend of Lawrence of Arabia’ by Michael Korda[1]. This engrossing biography describes how, ninety six winters ago, T.E. Lawrence - then a twenty-eight year old temporary 2^nd lieutenant and acting staff captain on the British army’s Cairo intelligence staff - went into Arabia in search of a leader for a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The person he was seeking turned out to be himself. The burden of responsibility for the successes and failures of that leadership led to the lowly anonymity he sought after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference had failed to deliver on the promises previously made by the British to their Arab allies.

 

Lawrence with Feisal at the Paris Peace Conference. Lawrence, in uniform but wearing an Arab headdress stands in front of Feisal’s Sudanese slave & bodyguard.

   Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday, falling for once, as it should, on November 11^th. Known to our grandparents’ generation as ‘Armistice Day’, the date was fixed long ago to commemorate the cease-fire on the Western Front in 1918 – at the 11^th hour, on the 11^th day of the 11^th month. As weeks go, this has not been an unusual one in the Middle East. Turkish troops are massing on their south-eastern border, the British prime minister has been touring the Arab Gulf States desperate to flog them expensive military hardware. Total sectarian gridlock has persisted in Iraq and the blood-letting of Syria’s civil war has continued unabated. The forces opposing the evil regime of Bashar al-Assad have met in Dohar and been pounded into some kind of interim unity by the Americans, the Saudis and others from the Arab League. Oh yes, and the Israeli prime minister has been disappointed not to see the incumbent US President deposed.

   It is one of the impenetrable ‘Ifs’ of history to speculate as to how different the Middle East might be today if Lawrence had been able to secure those wartime promises of independent Arab states. Different it certainly would have been, if only because Lawrence – unlike the generals and politicians who drew the maps for the eventual ‘peace settlement’ - was aware of the religious, cultural and ethnic divergences which have persisted within the region from that day to this. According to Korda, Lawrence also proposed joint Arab-Jewish governance of Palestine and opposed the kingship of Ibn Saud. Now there’s foresight!

 Lawrence photographed by Harry Chase at Aqaba, 1918

   Back in 1914, confronted by war with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the British began a web of mutually contradictory diplomatic agreements, treaties, declarations and ‘understandings’. These can be seen as either a series of colossal blunders or standard political gambits to ensnare and manipulate potential allies, regardless of the future consequences. Given Britain’s dire Imperial record, the contradictions were more probably the result of freelancing, stupidity, opportunism, poor communications and chauvinism than of any clever conspiracies or flawed 'master plan'.

   At that time, the British military and political leadership in Egypt was primarily concerned with the defence of the Suez Canal. That meant pushing the Turks – then dug-in between Gaza and Beersheba – as far north, and away from Sinai, as possible. A revolt by the Arabs of the Hejaz would tie down large numbers of Turkish troops and protect the right flank of the British advance. The Raj, on the other hand, operating from India and ruling over the single largest Muslim population in the world, feared that “Any attempt to ignite an Arab nationalist uprising in the Middle East could hardly fail to inspire Muslims in India to do the same.”[2] Unsurprisingly, throughout the war, Delhi was likely to be pursuing policies in Mesopotamia completely contrary to those espoused by the Arab Bureau in Cairo.

   As a result of McMahon’s exchange of letters with Sharif Hussein in 1915, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the British gave conflicting undertakings to the Arabs, to the French and to the Jews. They had, in short, promised more in the Middle East than they, or anyone else, could deliver. Based on his understanding of what had been offered, Lawrence prepared a map showing Syria as a huge arc from the Mediterranean to the Gulf and including what is now Jordan. He showed a smaller Iraq and an independent Kurdistan. He drew an Armenian state around Alexandretta [Iskenderun] and shaded-in a smaller Lebanon as a sop to the French.

Lawrence’s plan for the partition of the Ottoman Empire prepared by him for the War Cabinet, October 1918.

   At Paris in 1919, the British abandoned the Arabs and made a territorial deal with the French. Syria, then as now, was far too complicated for outsiders to resolve. None of the parties could even agree where ‘Syria’ began or ended. There were nomadic Bedouin to accommodate alongside city dwellers in Damascus and Jerusalem and the settled farmers and villagers of Palestine. And not everyone was a mainstream Muslim. There were Shia Muslims at odds with Sunnis. There were Druses, Circassians, Jews, Armenians and Kurds. The Christians were divided between Maronites, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics. Then there were the Algerians who had fled to the Levant from France’s colonial wars in Algeria. Down south, in the Hejaz, there were no cities equivalent to Jerusalem, Beirut, Aleppo, Homs, Hama or Damascus. Lawrence was optimistic that the Arabs and Jews might work together to develop Palestine but he would be dead before the exploitation of oil on the eastern periphery of Arabia made the least populated and most politically backward communities into the richest and most powerful. Oil was found in Iraq and all down the coast of the Persian Gulf, but not on the Mediterranean side, thereby ensuring that the more populous and more politically evolved territories like Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria have remained relatively poor.

   Korda mentions how Lawrence is frequently ‘credited’ with the invention of IEDs, roadside bombs and even suicide bombers. One of the stated aims of this biography is “to dispel the popular image of Lawrence as a guerrilla leader with romantic and impractical ideas.” But anecdotes, many of them humorous, and incidental details are not overlooked. After the war, Lawrence refused to accept any honours, titles or decorations; even those offered by King George V himself. As he explained to an earlier biographer, Robert Graves, Lawrence told the king “that the part he had played in the Arab Revolt was, to his judgement, dishonourable to himself and to his country and government. He had, by order fed the Arabs with false hopes and would be obliged if he were relieved of the obligation to accept honours for succeeding in this fraud.”[3] It seems that Lawrence promptly unpinned each decoration and handed it back as soon as the king had pinned it on him.

 

 1918: Lawrence’s Rolls-Royce armoured car [the Blue Mist] rolls into Damascus

   In 1920, Sir Herbert Samuel, a leading British Jew was appointed High Commissioner in Palestine. Winston Churchill came to visit him in Jerusalem and Lawrence took both men on a sight-seeing trip to Petra. Surrounded by a crowd of cheering Arabs, Churchill waved happily and asked Lawrence to translate what the men were chanting. “Death to the Jews,” answered Lawrence, quietly.

   George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte befriended Lawrence and Korda mentions that Michael Holroyd (Shaw’s biographer) believed GBS made use of Lawrence’s androgynous character and his irregular military career when writing Saint Joan. Both Lawrence and Jeanne d’Arc were small, homeless figures, “elected by the zeitgeist and picked out by the spotlight of history.” Korda remarks that GBS had a way of blending advice with abuse and quotes from one of Shaw’s letters to Lawrence; “Like all heroes, and I must add, all idiots, you greatly exaggerate your power of moulding the universe to your personal convictions… It is useless to protest that Lawrence is not your real name. That will not save you.”[4]

   In 1922, Lawrence attempted to enlist in the RAF under the assumed name of ‘John Hume Ross’. Even though he had prepared the ground by arrangement with the Chief of the Air Staff, Viscount Trenchard, when Lawrence arrived at the recruiting office, neither the Sergeant nor the interviewing officer liked the look of him. They were very suspicious that he had no copy of his birth certificate nor any reference from a previous employer. Deciding that he was most likely a criminal on the run from the law, they quickly showed him the door. The interviewing officer – it turns out - was none other than Flying Officer W.E. Johns who went on to write ninety-eight adventure stories about “Biggles”, a fictional RAF pilot hero

   Korda describes very fully how the war left Lawrence feeling stained. “In essence this was the feeling that would motivate him throughout the rest of his life: the belief not just that he had failed the Arabs by not getting them the state and the independence they had fought for, but that he was rendered, by what he had done, seen, and experienced, permanently unclean, unfit for the society of decent people, a kind of moral leper.”[5] As Lawrence wrote in his own story, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew….We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”[6]

   Korda acknowledges that no one has described his own genius better than Lawrence did himself and, after 699 pages, the book supplies Lawrence’s own words as his epitaph:

“…but the dreamers of the day are

dangerous men, for they may act their dream

with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

Aircraftsman T.E. Shaw

---

[1] Hero – The Life & Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Michael Korda. Aurum Press Ltd., London 2012.

[2] Op cit. page 256

[3] Op cit. page 448

[4] Op cit page 573.

[5] Op cit. page 435

[6] As quoted by Korda, op cit. page 462.