Martin Fone's Blog, page 254
July 29, 2018
Feat Of The Week
What do you do when you already hold the world record for setting the most Guinness World Records and have already caught the most knives in a minute (%$) and the most grapes in your mouth (86) in 60 seconds?
Well, of course, if you are New Yorker, Ashrita Furman, you slice 26 water melons on your stomach in a minute using a Japanese traditional sword known as a Katana. As well as setting up another record – he currently holds over 200 of them – he didn’t suffer a scratch.
Perhaps he could get a job in a restaurant.
If you want to see him in action, click on the link. https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1019642965214531585
I shall be following his further exploits with interest.
July 28, 2018
July 27, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (190)?…
Faffing about
Since I joined the serried and ever-increasing ranks of the baby-boomer retirees I can be accused of spending more and more time faffing about. By this I mean that I spend time on ineffectual activities which don’t really get anywhere. About can be replaced by the adverb around – the sense is the same.
It is very much a colloquial idiom, with very few examples to be found in literature and I had assumed that it was a euphemism for the stronger and to many sensitive ears the unacceptable execration that is the Anglo-Saxon f**k. However, this is not the case and faff as a verb has its own, distinctive etymology, although its precise roots are not certain.
There are two front runners for the prize of being the root of faff. The first contender is the Dutch regional word, maffelen, which meant moving the jaws. It was adopted in Scottish dialect and in the vernacular of certain parts of England to mean, in its intransitive form, to speak indistinctly or to mumble, to move the jaws (and tongue) for no obvious end result. In its transitive form, maffle meant to cause to be confused or bewildered.
There is another contender, faffle, another word to be found in English dialect, which means to stammer or stutter. It is tempting, because of the match of the first syllable, to think that faffle is the root of our phrase but there is no conclusive evidence to prove it and it may just be that faffle is a variant of maffle. It is all very confusing and you could faff about without getting too far in your enquiries. In speech, though, these words had been in use since the 16th century.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded usage of the phrase in print was as recent as 1874 in a book entitled Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents and Strange Events, by Sabine Baring-Gould who filled in his long hours as a clergyman by collecting folk-songs, examples of local folk lore and dialect. He recorded, “t’ clock-maker fizzled an’ faffed aboot her, but nivver did her a farthing’s worth o’good.” Despite the clock-maker’s well-meaning attentions, his attempts to help the woman came to naught, as good an example of the modern usage and meaning of the phrase as you could get.
But a North Yorkshire glossary, dating from 1868, throws up another definition of faffle – “as when a person blows chaff away from corn held in his hands, or the wind when it causes brief puffs of smoke to return down the chimney.” This sense was transported, perhaps literally, to the Antipodes where it appeared in the Australian Journal of 1879. “No, it [a candle] burns quite steadily now; you are right about it faffing about before, because it blew towards my face.”
It may not be straining credulity too much to think that both senses we have uncovered are variants of the same original sense. The spluttering candle or the wind that fails to make good its escape up the chimney or a puff that disturbs a sample of corn held in the hand are examples of things that weren’t meant to happen like that and, by extension, as evidence of their ineffectiveness. Whether there is anything to this or it is just a piece of sophistry, what is clear that the sense of wasting time or acting ineffectually won out.
It is only recently that the phrase has been deemed appropriate for the printed page but it seems to be used with increasing frequency in newspapers, both here and in Australia. A recent notable example was this headline from the Australian Financial Review of 11th March 2016; “Mr Turnbull has to stop faffing around.”
Quite.
July 26, 2018
Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Twenty Five
Charles Waterton (1782 – 1865)
It is a fascinating to see how our perceptions of someone have changed over time. Take Charles Waterton, for example. The Yorkshire born naturalist and taxidermist was viewed principally as one of the 19th century’s foremost eccentrics, not least because he featured in the pages of Edith Sitwell’s 1933 classic, The English Eccentrics. Today, he is viewed as a pioneering environmentalist.
Observing nature and conducting experiments in the tropics in South America in the 1810s required considerable ingenuity and was certainly not for the faint of heart. Waterton once jumped on to the back of a crocodile, seizing its front legs in a vice-like grip and riding it as if it was a bucking bronco, a feat of balance, determination and derring-do which he put down the training he had received riding with the foxhounds of Lord Darlington.
Keen to observe at close quarters the teeth of a boa constrictor, he couldn’t get his native guides to summon up the courage to bundle it up into a sack. Undaunted Waterton whipped off his braces and bound the poor creature up with them. I hope his trousers stayed up. The guides’ circumspection was perhaps justified. After all, when Waterton tried to interest a vampire bat to bite his toe in order to study the effect of its toxins, the ingrate creature swooped down and bit his amanuensis instead. The experiment was abandoned.
Returning to his family home, Walton Hall, in the 1820s Charles astonished his neighbours by building a three mile long perimeter wall around the estate, some eight to nine feet high. The purpose? Not to keep nosey parkers out but to keep fauna in. He was in the process of constructing one of the world’s first wildfowl and nature reserve. Perhaps slightly more unnerving, callers would often find him up a tree, “dressed like a scarecrow,” the better to observe birds or, on occasion, to return chicks which had fallen out of their nest in a storm. He is also credited with inventing the nesting box.
Waterton cut a striking figure. Eschewing the fashion of the time to sport a full set of whiskers and a luxuriant head of hair, he was clean-shaven and wore his hair closely cropped. That was the least that would unnerve an unsuspecting visitor. His house was full of strange creatures, including an albino hedgehog, a duck without webbing on its feet, and a Brazilian toad which, for a time, accompanied him everywhere. Anyone venturing into Waterton’s room would encounter a live three-toed sloth hanging from the back of a chair.
Taxidermy was one of his passions and he would often create grotesque creatures from the parts of two or three different animals. Guests were frightened out of their wits when they came across them in darkened passageways, Waterton adding to his sport by, as an ardent Catholic, naming the most extraordinary specimens of his work after prominent Protestants.
Dinner could also be a bit of a trial. He allegedly dissected a gorilla on the table after the dishes had been cleared away. He would surprise his guests by greeting them on all-fours and occasionally would nip them on the shins as if he were a dog. It is surprising anyone came around.
But Charles was also an environmentalist, waging a long campaign against a soap works adjacent to his property who he claimed were polluting the area. He won his case in 1839 and the company relocated to pollute (and bring employment to) nearby Wakefield.
Charles was deeply affected by the death in 1830 of his young wife in childbirth – the baby survived – and from that day on he slept, wrapped in a cloak, on the floor with a block of beechwood for a pillow, rising at 3.30am and breakfasting on dry toast, watercress and a cup of watery, black tea.
He died from injuries sustained in a fall and his body was taken by barge to its final resting place, between two great oak trees, which, sadly, no longer exist.
A naturalist with a streak of eccentricity, I would say.
July 25, 2018
Book Corner – July 2018 (2)
Continental Crimes – edited by Martin Edwards
I am a sucker for these collections which offer the prospect of an entertaining light read with the opportunity to enjoy again some old familiar friends and to discover some long-forgotten writers. Just to prove that murder most foul is not peculiar to the English countryside and the dark alleys of the metropolis, Edwards has compiled a collection of fourteen stories where the action takes place sur le continent and, inevitably, on a train bound for Venice.
As with all anthologies the quality of the fare is variable. If I was being pedantic, heaven forfend, Jefferson Farjeon’s The Room in the Tower is more of an atmospheric ghost story than a tale of crime and The Secret of the Magnifique by E Phillips Oppenheimer is both overlong and ends with a bit of a damp squib. And for the modern audience the ending to Michael Gilbert’s Villa Almirante – “many a successful marriage has been founded on a good beating” – is a bit rich. Even I, who defend politically incorrect statements as a reflection of their time, think Edwards might have been better advised to omit this story which is of moderate quality at best.
One oddity is to be found in Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Popeau Intervenes. The ‘tec, one Hercules Popeau, has many of the characteristics found in one of Agatha Christie’s Belgian sleuth, Hercules Poirot. Lowndes’ creation predates Christie’s character and she was rightly pissed by how closely Poirot resembled her man and it is worth getting the book just to compare and contrast. You will not expend many little grey cells in the exercise.
I am a fan of Arnold Bennett and his A Bracelet at Bruges – more a case of how the crime was committed than by whom and with a dash of romance thrown in for good measure – doesn’t disappoint. Conan Doyle opens up proceedings with a superbly crafted non-Holmesian tale, The New Catacomb – not one for claustrophobes. G K Chesterton is represented with a Father Brown tale, The Secret Garden, in which the diffident cleric solves an impossible mystery involving a gruesome beheading. It is one of the best Father Brown stories, in my opinion.
Agatha Christie provides us with a tale of mystery and intrigue on a train en route to Venice. Have You Everything You Want? is a fairly lightweight affair and certainly not one of her best but introduces Parker Pyne to her readership. More to my taste was The Perfect Murder by Stacy Aumonier which featured a couple of impecunious brothers whose plight was not helped by relatives with deep pockets and short arms. I also enjoyed the slightly folksy and twee Petit-Jean by Ian Hay.
I was left thinking that many of these stories would have worked well in an English setting. For sure, the continental aspect added a bit of the exotic to proceedings but there was very little that was distinctively foreign about many of the tales, perhaps a reflection that most of the writers were Anglo-Saxons.
On the whole, I found that was less to admire in this collection than in others that Edwards has produced but there was enough to whet and sustain my appetite. There is nothing better than to dream of sunnier climes on a dank and dreary English evening.
July 24, 2018
A La Mode – Part Six
The Macaronis
Although claimed by the Americans as theirs during the Revolutionary War, the song Yankee Doodle was originally created by the Brits to ridicule their colonial cousins. This fact, in part, explains the rather odd opening verse; “Yankee Doodle went to town/ A-riding on a pony/ Stuck a feather in his cap/ And called it macaroni.” What the lyrics are referring to is a particular fashion that was rife amongst the English aristocracy from around the 1760s called macaroni and the stupid Americans belief that by sticking a feather in their headwear they could claim to be adopters of the fashion.
So what were the macaronis?
In the mid 18th century a kind of finishing school for chaps was the Grand Tour involving a tour round the cultural centres of Europe. As well as broadening their tiny minds, it exposed them to different styles, fashions and foodstuffs. Some of their experiences resonated with them so much that they eagerly adopted them when they returned to Blighty. By 1764 they had already come to the attention of Horace Walpole, who wrote in a letter about “the Macaroni club, which is composed of travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses.”
These young men cut quite a dash, their trademark style being a large wig and slim clothing. They also developed a penchant for a form of Italian pasta called macaroni, little known in England at the time, and from which they took their name. To be described as macaroni in the 1760s was to be acknowledged as sophisticated, upper class and worldly. Although, to many, their dress and appearance was a tad on the feminine side, still it remained on the right side of propriety and to some even seemed trendy and exciting.
And that was their undoing.
Whilst it was acceptable, perhaps even expected, for the nobs to make a spectacle of themselves, it was a different matter when the style was adopted by the sons of honest country folk and the middle class. Within a decade the term macaroni became one of ridicule with an association with effeminacy. Indeed, some went so far as to suggest that these dedicated followers of fashion belonged to a third sex.
One song at the time picked up the them with gusto; “his taper waist, so straight and long/ his spindle shanks, like pitchfork prong/ to what sex does the thing belong? Tis call’d a Macaroni.” The Oxford Magazine was equally censorious; “there is indeed a kind of animal, neither male, nor female, lately started up among us. It is called a Macaroni.”
The caricaturists went to town. Macaronis were depicted as gaunt men wearing tight trousers, short coats, bright shoes, eccentric walking sticks, and extravagant wigs, topped off with ridiculously small hats which could only be removed by the dexterous manipulation of the tip of a sword. One cartoon showed a youth with hair so long that his hairdresser had to walk behind him to carry it. Another showed a country gentleman deploring the depths of depravity to which his trendy son had sunk. In the fourth act of She Stoops To Conquer, 1773, Oliver Goldsmith wrote of the treatment that any one suspected of macaroniism might expect; “I shall be laughed at over the whole town. I shall be stuck up in caricature in all the print-shops. The Dullissimo Maccaroni.”
The Macaroni fashion, unsurprisingly, died out in the 1780s, to be replaced by a more masculine form of extravagant dress, dandyism.
July 23, 2018
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Eighty One
Nettie Stevens (1861 – 1912)
How the sex of a child is determined at conception has puzzled many grey cells more powerful than mine over the centuries. Aristotle thought it was all about environmental heat and advised males who were looking to sire sons to copulate in the summer. A popular theory going the rounds in Europe during the 19th century was that it was all about nutrition. A good diet produced girls whilst a poor one resulted in males. That was one way of keeping down the food bill.
A more drastic course of action was promulgated by the 18th century French anatomist, Michel Procope-Couteau (1684 – 1753), who in The Art of Having Boys revived Parmenides and Anaxagoras’ theory that the testicles and ovaries were either male or female. Excision of the unwanted reproductive organ would ensure the birth of a child of the desired sex. I’m not sure too many followed his strictures and he did come up with a more practical alternative. The female should lie on the correct side and let gravity take care of the rest.
It was only at the turn of the 20th century that we had a clearer idea of how sex was determined and this is where some insects and our latest inductee into our illustrious Hall of Fame, Vermont-born geneticist Nettie Stevens comes in. A late entrant into the groves of academe she was awarded a doctorate in cytology by Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1900 and continued as a researcher, looking into the subject of sex determination.
Drosophila melanogaster, to give the fruit fly its Latin tag, is often used in research because they can be bred readily in laboratory conditions, breed quickly and lay a large quantity of eggs. Of particular interest to our Nettie was the fact that they only have four sets of chromosomes and it was these that she studied under her microscope in 1905. She quickly discovered that the chromosomes differed between the sexes.
Transferring her attentions to the mealworm, Stevens identified and isolated a chromosome she called Y, realising that it was linked to and the opposite of the X chromosome discovered by and so named by Hermann Henking in 1890. Extending her research to include egg tissue and the fertilisation process, Nettie realised that the X and Y chromosomes always existed in pairs and that it was the presence or absence of the Y that determined the gender of the result of the fertilisation process. The sex of a baby had nothing to environmental factors – it was down purely to genetics and the Y chromosome.
But Nettie was not working in a vacuum – Edmund Wilson was also carrying out researches into how sex was determined. His methods differed from Nettie’s – he concentrated on species where the male had one fewer chromosome than the female and concentrated on the testes as eggs were too fatty for his staining methodology. It is almost certain that Wilson had access to Nettie’s results and although he concluded that environmental factors also had a hand in sex selection and was less adamant in its conclusions, his paper was published first and being a chap, he was credited with discovering the chromosomal basis for sex determination.
The other villain of the piece is the prominent geneticist, Thomas Hunt Morgan. He wrote the first text book on genetics and there is evidence that he corresponded with Nettie, asking for more and more details of her experiments. When she died in 1912 of cancer, Morgan was dismissive of her contribution, inferring she was more of a researcher than a scientist. There was no mention of Stevens in his magnum opus and to make matters worse in 1933 Morgan and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
Although Stevens’ theory could not be proven at the time, it turned out to be right and it is only now that her contribution is beginning to be recognised. Her period in obscurity makes her a worthy inductee.
If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone which is now available on Amazon in Kindle format and paperback. For details follow the link https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=fifty+clever+bastards
For more enquiring minds, try Fifty Curious Questions by Martin Fone
July 22, 2018
Sporting Event Of The Week (16)
I’ve been somewhat distracted recently but at least the 23rd World Wife-Carrying Championship, held as usual in the small Finnish town of Sonkajarvi in early July didn’t totally escape my notice.
This year’s winners were a Lithuanian couple, Vytautas and Neringa Kirkliauskas, who triumphed over 52 other pairs of competitors, including six times world champion, Taisto Miettinen, to claim the crown. There are qualifying events held as far afield as the United States, the UK, Sweden and Estonia. A Finnish couple finished second and a Swedish pair third. There are also prizes for the funniest attempt, the best dressed and the strongest carrier.
The race, which takes around an hour to complete, is a heady mix of running, wading through a slippery pool and completing an obstacle course. Legend has it that it owes its origin to an initiation ritual established by Ronkainen the Robber in the 19th century. Anyone who wanted to be in his gang was made to carry sacks of grain or live pigs over a similar course. Others ascribe its origin to the earlier practice of wife-stealing.
Be that as it may, at least this year’s winners are a happily married couple.
Long may it continue!
July 21, 2018
Hand Shake Of The Week
They say you can tell a lot about a person by the type of handshake with which they greet you. Some try and dominate you with a bone crusher of a handshake – a sign that they feel inferior, I always think – and for a few moments you are left wringing your paw trying to get the blood circulating through the veins again. Usually no harm is done but you make a mental note to avoid their proffered hand at all costs.
A woman in Sydney, I read this week, claimed that the handshake of an estate agent at a property auction in May 2017 was so firm that her left hand became swollen. She went on to say that she was in pain for several months and it was so bad that she had to see a quack and undergo a course of physiotherapy. She reported the incident to the police in August 2017 who decided to press charges.
John Anthony, a senior member of the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal – doubtless a firm handshaker himself – threw the case out, commenting that “the police report does not in my view support any act of violence in the nature of a deliberate or reckless act that could be classified as an assault.”
So, firm handshakers remain free to inflict temporary pain on their victims. Perhaps it is time to turn the other cheek and demand a kiss.
July 20, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (189)?…
Dot and carry one
Here’s a rather obscure expression which I first came across as a boy when I was engrossed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of derring-do that is Treasure Island, published in 1883. In Part Four the Doctor regales us with his narrative of events at the stockade, jolly exciting they were too, and he reports “I was not new to violent death…but I know my pulse went dot and carry one.” I hope from the context I was clever enough to surmise that his pulse was pounding or had an irregular beat.
More recently I read Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End, 1924 – 28, and came across this passage; “And Sandbach went off, dot and carry one, and began a furious row…” The context for the use of this curious phrase is completely different from that of Stevenson’s and can only refer to the gait of the unfortunate Sandbach. And then there is Rudyard Kipling’s tribute to the regimental bhisti or water carrier, Gunga Din. “’E would dot and carry one/ Till the longest day was done.” This might be mystifying if we didn’t have the chorus, “He was Din! Din! Din!/ You limpin’ lump o’ brick dust, Gunga Din.” Din’s dotting and carrying one was down to his gait.
According to Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era, published in 1909, dot and carry one referred to a “person with a wooden leg.” He even helpfully explained the meaning behind the component parts thus; “The dot is the pegged impression made by all wooden legs before the invention of the modelled foot and calf. The one is the widowed leg.” Francis Grose in his invaluable Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1785, identifies an earlier variant, dot and go one. This, he reveals, is “generally applied to persons who have one leg shorter than the other and who, as the sea phrase is, go upon an uneven keel.”
So it would appear that our phrase deals with irregularity, initially of gait and then by extension more figuratively to pulse.
But then Grose lets slip a rather revealing clue by way of an aside. He notes that our phrase was also “a jeering appellation for an inferior dancing master, or teacher of arithmetic.” I’m blessed with two left feet and when I trip the light fantastic, the verb is literal rather than figurative and so one can see why an incompetent dance teacher could be likened to someone with mobility issues.
But a maths teacher?
It is a while since I had the joys of learning to do my maths but I seem to recall that when I was doing any sort of complicated calculation I was encouraged to set the units down in a column and to carry over the tens to the next column. It seems that this has been the way of inculcating the joys of mathematics into the noddles of the young for centuries, although in the 18th century dots were used for every unit of ten (or twelve if you were dealing with money) that you wanted to carry over.
Not everyone sees the immediate benefit of learning mathematics and so N Withey – his first name has not carried over – had the bright idea of setting the concepts of arithmetic to song, the result of which was his A Little Young Man’s Companion or Common Arithmetic Turned into a Song, published in 1796. There we find, “the odd pence must go down, sir/ or nought if you have none,/ or for every twelve that you had in pence/ you may dot and carry one.”
It is not too fanciful to think that this mathematical convention was then used figuratively to describe the gait (and more relevantly the mark) of a wooden leg. Stevenson’s usage was a further development still.
