The Divided Mind. Part One: Stoicism
But would anyone, short of a madhouse, believe it? Neither of those clean little cherubum, Nero or Nobookisonester himself, ever nursed such a spoiled opinion of his monstrous marvellosity as did this mental and moral defective (here perhaps at the vanessance of his lownest) who was known to grognt rather than gunnard upon one occasion, while drinking heavily of spirits to that interlocutor a latere and private privysuckatary he used to pal around with, in the kavehazs, one Davy Browne-Nowlan, his heavenlaid twin, (this hambone dogpoet pseudoed himself under the hangname he gave himself of Bethgelert) in the porchway of a gipsy’s bar (Shem always blaspheming, so holy writ, Billy, he would try, old Belly, and pay this one manjack congregant of his four soups every lass of nexmouth, Bolly, so sure as thair’s a tail on a commet, as a taste for storik’s fortytooth, …….
….. that is to stay, to listen out, ony twenny minnies moe, Bully, his Ballade Imaginaire which was to be dubbed Wine, Woman and Water- clocks, or How a Guy Finks and Fawkes When He Is Going Batty, by Maistre Sheames de la Plume, some most dreadful stuff in a murderous mirrorhand) that he was avoopf (parn me!) aware of no other shaggspick, other Shakhisbeard, either prexactly unlike his polar andthisishis or procisely the seem as woops (parn!) as what he fancied or guessed the sames as he was him- self and that, greet scoot, duckings and thuggery, though he was foxed fux to fux like a bunnyboy rodger with all the teashop lionses of Lumdrum hivanhoesed up gagainst him, being a lapsis linquo with a ruvidubb shortarttempaq, bad cad dad fad sad mad nad vanhaty bear, the consciquenchers of casualty prepestered crusswords in postposition, scruff, scruffer, scrufferumurraimost andallthatsortofthing, if reams stood to reason and his lanka- livline lasted he would wipe alley english spooker, multapho- niaksically spuking, off the face of the erse.
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’, 1939.
An extract from a chapter concerning Shem the Penman, and which is a portrait of the artist, but indirectly also a portrait of Shaun the Post, for most of it is narrated from the brother of Shem’s prejudiced point of view. It is self-evident in some ways that Shem is a self-parody of Joyce, as his artistic endeavours are exposed to ridicule; and yet in spite of this the chapter reflects a profound and quite original artistic principle set forth in the Wake, at least it is not usually listed for inclusion among the duties of the creative artist’s source of inspiration, whomsover or whatsoever that may be; that is to say, the need for the writer to undergo a thorough purging; (I have discussed this principle already in ‘The Seventh Degree of Wisdom’, Part Five).
Neither Nero or Nebuchadnezzar ever nursed such a high opinion of himself, this mental and moral defective, he was known to grunt rather than grumble upon one occasion, while drinking heavily, to that interlocutor from the side and private secretary (privy sucker) he used to pal around with in the cafes, his heaven laid twin, Bruno the Nolan, (Giordano Bruno, (1548–1600)). This hambone, that is to say, amateur dogpoet faked himself under the hang name he gave himself of Bethgelert, (see the notes below for the sad story of the hound Gelert), house of the learned, this name he gave himself while standing in the porch way of a gipsy bar (free spirits in other words). Shem was always blaspheming and I swear by Holy Writ that he would try, testing the criminal law for debtors, to pay for his four soups on the last day of the next month, late payment of debt to prevent execution at the last moment, as sure as there is a tale on a comet, more likely a cat. As a taste for an old man’s teeth, missing most like, he would urge us to wait just twenty minutes more for his imaginary ballad called Wine, Woman and Water clocks, or How a Guy Finks and Fawkes When He Is Going Batty. Water clocks of course merge the flood with determinate time. And Guy Fawkes, (1570–1606), is an Irish symbol of independence, so Shaun is alleging that Shem is crazy to be independent and dangerous.
Shem asserts he was avoopf, pardon me, aware …. avoopf …. aware….. and aware deconstructs into awe are ….. Shaun has a marked reluctance with regard to naming his God …much like the Hebrews. The most fundamental axiom of the Kabbalah, that esoteric method of Hebraic esotericism, is that the real God in and of Himself is completely hidden and unknown to us humans; Tzimtzum is the term given to the contraction whereby God began the process of creation through contracting his infinite light for the purpose of permitting a conceptual space in which finite and seemingly independent realms can possibly exist, a primordial initial contraction into which new creative light can shine. And thus we have a religious philosophical system attesting to an insight into divine nature; and yet this nature is hidden and unknown to us humans. How appropriate for J.J.’s night book, this book of darkness. And Shaun is aware of no other shaker of the pick, which is to say, author, no other shake his beard (Shakespeare of course), either prexactly, none the same before, unlike his polar antithesis, andthisishis, and this is his competition among polar opposites, or precisely as the same as woops, pardon the fart poow, as what he fancied or guessed the sames as he was himself, which is to say, he was unique in his own estimation.
And it gets worse … being a child with words, that is to say, he plays with them, with a shorter and short temper like a bad dad cad fad sad mad and old van in his head bear, the consequences of causality prepested cross an cuss words in the post position. he is scruff, scruffier, scruffermost and all that sort of thing, if rhyme stood to reason and his thread lifeline lasted he would whip any English speaker, metaphorically speaking, off the face of the arse … or the earth in tzimtzum creation. Which is to say, Shem thinks highly of himself, in particular with regard to words. And so it is that in this analysis of Shem’s attitude about himself that Shaun ponders upon the art of writing as discord, as struggle, as engagement, and as antitheses …. andthisishis….. oh the stress of the artist.. what is to be done? well, no wonder Shem has a taste for storik’s fortytooth …. Stoic fortitude, about which Shakhisbeard our Bard, if we remember, had this to say:
I will be flesh and blood,
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
(‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Act 5, Scene 1)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), it has been suggested, regarded Stoicism as something of a slave ideology; for emerging from the development of self-consciousness (after an encounter between what are two distinct self-conscious beings that themselves only emerged after their encounter the essential part of which dialectic being recognition whereby the two self-consciousnesses are constituted in being each recognized as self-conscious by the other a movement inexorably taken to its extreme and taking the form of a struggle to the death in which one masters the other only to find that such mastery makes the very recognition he had sought impossible, since the slave, in this state, is not free to give it), is, from the one-sided practical attitude of desire and the master, a new form of theoretical attitude brought about by the insights of the slave, this theoretical attitude being a kind of rationalism, which is to say, the Stoics believed that the universe was governed by logos or reason, and that man’s rational soul is a fragment of that divine logos, and so we can achieve well-being by tuning ourselves into the cosmic scheme of things.
As Hegel writes: ‘[Stoicism’s] principle is that consciousness is a being that thinks, and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important, or true and good only in so far as it thinks it to be such.’ And from Stoicism the subsequent transitions are to Scepticism and then to the Unhappy Consciousness which I will look at in parts two and three of this series. Hegel refers to actual historical episodes in his discussion of Stoicism leading some commentators to suppose that in mentioning that the Stoic aims at freedom ‘whether on the throne or in chains’, Hegel intends to incline our thinking towards the late or Roman Stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, the former an Emperor, the latter a liberated slave. I prefer not to read the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ as an essay on speculative history of the kind he presented in the ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History’; rather, the historical episodes have the place in the narrative because they relate to particular stages in the conceptual development that is being traced out for consciousness; which is not to say the transition from the Master/Slave relation to Stoicism was not a historical transition with a socio-political rationale with Stoicism arising as both the Master and Slave seek to escape from the unsatisfactoriness of their social world as they abstract from the reality of their situation into a world of contemplative indifference to their surroundings, (this explains why Karl Marx, (1818–1883), et al make so much of this dialectic):
‘This consciousness accordingly has a negative attitude towards the lord and bondsman relationship. As lord, it does not have its truth in the bondsman, nor as bondsman is its truth in the lord’s will and in his service; on the contrary, whether on the throne or in chains, in the utter dependence of its individual existence, its aim is to be free, and to maintain that lifeless indifference which steadfastly withdraws from the bustle of existence, alike from being active as passive, into the simple essentiality of thought. Self-will is the freedom which entrenches itself in some particularity and is still in bondage, while Stoicism is the freedom which always comes directly out of bondage and returns into the pure universality of thought. As a universal form of the World-Spirit, Stoicism could only appear on the scene in a time of universal fear and bondage, but also a time of universal culture which had raised itself to the level of thought’.
It may seem from this, that Hegel intends us to treat the move from the Master/Slave relationship to Stoicism in quasi-materialist terms, as a form of consciousness that emerges in response to its socio-political predicament, in a failed endeavour to come to terms with it; however, with Stoicism, consciousness is taking a new turn, and the insights that are required to make this turn possible are only available once consciousness has been through the Master/Slave dialectic, for when consciousness moves to the rationalism of the Stoics, it has arrived at a new attitude to the world; given that the Stoics saw reality as permeated by reason, so that thought is seen as giving us access to the rational structure inherent in things, which are now no longer viewed as other by the subject:
‘We are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape, a consciousness which, as the infinitude of consciousness or as its own pure movement, is aware of itself as essential being, a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness. For to think does not mean to be an abstract ‘I’, but an ‘I’ which has at the same time the significance of intrinsic being, of having itself for object, or of relating itself to objective being in such a way that its significance is the being-for-self of the consciousness for which it is [an object] . . . In thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity my being-for-myself; and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement within myself’.
It is clear enough already that this is not going to turn out well. Stoicism puts me in mind of Othello, ‘the stoic-captain whose few words know their full sufficiency’, as F. R. Leavis, (1895–1978), remarked. And T. S. Eliot, (1888–1965), in his essay, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’,declares that Othello’s last speech is a ‘terrible exposure of human weakness’. Othello has turned himself into ‘a pathetic figure’:
OTHELLO
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t.
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus.
Stabs himself
According to Leavis (somewhat contradicting Eliot’s view): ‘Othello dies belonging to the world of action in which his true part lay’, and ‘he remains the same Othello; he has discovered his mistake, but there is no tragic self discovery’. However, as Hegel presents the development of stoical consciousness, the sense that ‘[i]n thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other’ is very much what he himself hopes he will give us as a result of his attempt to find rational satisfaction for the subject in the world; and to the extent that we have arrived at the idea that thought can help the subject find itself in the world, ‘we are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape’, one first represented by the rationalism of Stoicism. Prior to this, consciousness was dominated by the assumption that thought contrasts to the world of concrete experience, while self-consciousness had merely seen the world as an other to be negated; but the Stoic adopts a rationalistic stance that offers a way out of the difficulties that these assumptions have caused, by treating thought as a vehicle through which the subject can find itself in the world, much as Hegel himself believed:
‘The signification thus attached to thought and its characteristic forms may be illustrated by the ancient saying that ‘nous governs the world’, or by our own phrase that ‘Reason is in the world’; which means that Reason is the soul of the world it inhabits, its immanent principle, its most proper and inward nature, its universal’.
It would be incorrect, therefore, to allege that Hegel saw in Stoicism merely a ‘slave ideology’; rather, it is the beginning of a new philosophical perspective that would ultimately culminate in something resembling his own outlook. However, we must ask, with regard to this transition, what grants it its place in the dialectic in conceptual rather than socio-historical terms? In particular, how does the position of the slave lead consciousness into this new shape? Well, Hegel had characterized the position of the slave as being that of the slave discovering through working with things in the world that the world co-operates as he or she endeavours to bring his or her ideas to realization in his or her products, so that nature no longer seems alien to it and thus as something to be negated, or as somehow beyond thought, thereby making the kind of shift in outlook needed to lead us into Stoicism.
As Charles Taylor , (1931 — ), has put it: ‘Through work, discipline and the fear of death, the slaves have come to a recognition of the universal, of the power of conceptual thought’.
One can see the appeal of Stoicism. To put it bluntly, how does one reconcile oneself to all the crap that is going on around oneself? But ultimately it cannot satisfy. The slave’s awareness of himself or herself as achieving an insight into the workings of the world moves the dialectic of consciousness onto a perspective identified as Stoicism and which holds that thought enables us to be at one with the rational universe. However, Stoicism may well be heir to the rationalistic world-picture of Plato, (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 BC), and Aristotle, (384–322 BC), to which Hegelian speculative rationalism owes a debt, nonetheless Stoicism is a form of rationalism that was much more abstract and formulaic than it had been in, as Hegel puts it, ‘the bright Grecian world’; thus rendering its ‘recognition of the universal’ as inadequate.
Though historically subsequent to the work of Plato and Aristotle, Stoicism is conceptually inferior and so, to express the matter philosophically, it is an expression of rationalism in its crudest and most primitive form: ‘The selfsame consciousness that repels itself from itself becomes aware of itself as the element of being-in-itself; but at first it knows itself to be this element only as a universal mode of being in general, not as it exists objectively in the development and process of its manifold being’. And what is Hegel’s meaning here? Well, as he goes on to say later, ‘the abstract thinking of Stoicism . . . turns its back on individuality altogether’, by adopting a rationalistic picture that is too much sundered from the concrete world: ‘This thinking consciousness . . . is thus only the incomplete negation of otherness’. By offering merely empty generalizations, the Stoics failed to relate their concept of reason to individual particulars; they could therefore only provide platitudes, not concrete advice or knowledge, and for Hegel a rationalism that is overly abstract and formal in this way is easily degraded and can swiftly succumb to an assault by any anti-rationalist critic.
Stoicism falls prey to such critics because of the central crux confronting Stoic thought, the difficulties for the Stoic in identifying any criterion for truth in their epistemology, and in giving content to their vague claims in ethics that living in agreement or in accordance with reason whatever that may mean constitutes the good life. Stoicism is idle chatter, in other words. ‘But this self-identity of thought is again only the pure form in which nothing is determined. The True and the Good, wisdom and virtue, the general terms beyond which Stoicism cannot get, are therefore in a general way no doubt uplifting, but since they cannot in fact produce any expansion of the content, they soon become tedious’. Hegel in an earlier work had characterized the Roman Peace as ‘the boredom of the world’. An astute observation. For myself I could never become nor would I wish to be a Stoic, I am never bored enough. And thus, Hegel argues, confronted with such conflicts in doctrine, the Stoics came to appear merely dogmatic in their optimistic claims regarding the rationality of the world and the happiness that could come from conforming ourselves to it in some abstract sense, and such dogmatism naturally enough gives rise to a form of more critical and alas ultimately anti-rationalistic Scepticism.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the skeptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasn’ing but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much.
- Alexander Pope, (1688–1744)
To be continued…..
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ Quotation:
1. New York Times Book Review 28 May 1922, 6: ‘James Joyce’s Amazing Chronicle’ (review of Ulysses by Joseph Collins): (of Joyce) ‘He is the only individual that the writer has encountered outside of a madhouse who has let flow from his pen random and purposeful thoughts just as they are produced’.
2. cherubim = one of the second order of angels of the Dionysian hierarchy, reputed to excel specially in knowledge (as the seraphim in love); In modern art, a cherub is usually represented as a beautiful winged child; Applied to persons: a beautiful and innocent child; and Joyce’s note: ‘clean little cherubs’ → Sporting Times 1 Apr 1922, 4: ‘The Scandal of Ulysses’ (review of Ulysses by Aramis): ‘Joyce is more than a bit like that himself. Lenehan and Boylan are clean little cherubs compared with him’.
3. Nero = the fifth Roman emperor (AD 54–68). He became infamous for his personal debaucheries and extravagances and, on doubtful evidence, for his burning of Rome and persecutions of Christians.
4. Nebuchadrezzar II = the second and greatest king of the Chaldean dynasty of Babylonia (reigned c. 605–561 BC). He was known for his military might, the splendour of his capital, Babylon, and his important part in Jewish history; no book is honester; (notebook 1924): ‘Nobookishonester (Nabucco)’ → Nebuchadnezzar II was subject of Verdi’s Nabucco.
5. nurse = to hold in one’s heart or mind, keep in memory or consideration
6. New York Times Book Review 28 May 1922, 6: ‘James Joyce’s Amazing Chronicle’ (review of Ulysses by Joseph Collins): (of Bloom’s thoughts) ‘the product of the unconscious mind of a moral monster’.
7. defective = a person who is subnormal physically or mentally; and detective; and(notebook 1923): ‘mental defective’
8. Vanessa; and quintessence; and Nephthys is the Greek form of an epithet (transliterated as Nebet-het, and Nebt-het, from Egyptian hieroglyphs). The origin of the goddess Nephthys is unclear but the literal translation of her name is usually given as ‘Lady of the House’, which has caused some to mistakenly identify her with the notion of a ‘housewife’, or as the primary lady who ruled a domestic household. This is a pervasive error repeated in many commentaries concerning this deity. Her name means quite specifically, ‘Lady of the [Temple] Enclosure’ which associates her with the role of priestess. She is the sister of Isis and companion of the war-like deity, Set. As the primary ‘nursing mother’ of the incarnate Pharaonic-god, Horus, Nephthys also was considered to be the nurse of the reigning Pharaoh himself.
9. lowness; and love-nest.
10. grogner (French) = to grunt, grumble.
11. grognard (French) = a grouser, a grumbler.
12. interlocutor = one who takes part in a dialogue, conversation, or discussion.
12. a latere (Latin) = from the side, aside; in intimate association with; and ‘a latere †i’ → a latere Christi (Latin): from the side of Christ (a term applied to a type of highly-ranked papal legate; usually just ‘a latere’).
13. pal = keep company, to become pals + to fool around — to ‘hang about’ aimlessly.
14. kavehaz (Hungarian) = cafe, coffee-house; and SDV: to an interlocutor he used to pal around with in a gipsy’s bar.
15. davy = affidavit.
16. Castor and Polux = twin sons of Leda and Jove, hatched out of one egg (O Hehir, Brendan; Dillon, John M. / A classical lexicon for Finnegans wake).
17. hambone = a performer doing an imitation of negro dialect; negro in American comic strip; amateur (Slang).
18. pseudo = false, counterfeit, pretended, spurious.
19. agnomen = additional name subsequently acquired + give a dog a bad name and hang him (phrase).
20. BEDDGELERT = ‘Gelert’s Grave’; village in North Wales, named after the legend of the hound Gelert, who was left by his master King Llewelyn to guard his infant son. Returning to find Gelent covered with blood, his master slew him before he discovered the body of the wolf Gelert had killed in protecting the baby. ‘Beth-Gelert’ is a doggerel poem on the subject by William Robert Spencer (1769–1834); and {with that private secretary, Davy Brown-Nowlan [Bruno of Nola], his twin with the pseudonym Bethgelert [a dog’s grave]}.
21. archway = an arched or vaulted passage, the arched entrance to a castle, etc.; porch = an exterior structure forming a covered approach to the entrance of a building.
22. Gypsy Bar, Paris, frequented by Joyce.
23. blaspheme = to utter profane or impious words, talk profanely.
24. Holy Writ = holy writings collectively; spec. the Bible or Holy Scriptures.
25. billy = fellow, companion; brother.
26. manjack = individual man, single one, man.
27. congregant = one that congregates with others, a member of a congregation; ‘1 congregant’.
28. sou (French) = a five centimes coin.
29. nex (Latin) = murder; and last next month.
30. bolly = a bogy, hobgoblin.
31. as sure as there’s a tail on a cat (phrase).
32. taste = a trying, testing; a trial, test, examination; and a taste, a little.
33. story; and storico (Italian), historic; and starik (Russian), old man; and Stoics’ fortitude.
34. say.
35, ony = any; and only.
36. minny = minnow (a sort of fish); and minutes.
37. moe = more.
38. bully = good friend, fine fellow, brother, companion, ‘mate’.
39. Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière: ‘Le Malade Imaginaire’.
40. dub = to invest with a dignity or title.
41, water clock = an instrument designed to measure time by the fall or flow of water; and waterclosets; and in 1917, Joyce was approached by a man called Jules Martin to rewrite a screenplay entitled ‘Wine, Women, and Song’ (obviously so named after J.H. Voss: ‘wine, women and song’).
42. guy = Guy Fawkes — an effigy habited in grotesquely ragged and ill-assorted garments and traditionally burnt on the evening of November the Fifth, usu. with a display of fireworks.
43. fink = squeal, inform; and thinks and talks; and f*cks.
44. batty = the buttocks or anus; mad, crazy, silly; resembling a bat; and Woon, Basil, asked Joyce to write on ‘What you feel and do when you are going blind?’ (Letters, I, 237).
45. maistre = master.
45. plume (French) = feather, pen; and Thackeray: ‘Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche, Esq.’ (contains letters with many comical misspellings).
46. (hiccup).
47. Shakespeare; and ‘Ah, there’s only one man he’s got to get the better of now, and that’s that Shakespeare!’ (Nora Joyce).
48. exactly; and (notebook 1924): ‘exactly unlike or precisely the same as what I know or imagine myself to be’ = Jespersen: The Growth and Structure of the English Language 139 (sec. 135): (quoting Charles Dickens) ‘they are exactly unlike. They are utterly dissimilar in all respects’.
49. polar = directly opposite in character, action or tendency.
50. antithesis = an opposition or contrast of ideas; the direct opposite, the contrast.
51. same; and Jespersen: ‘The Growth and Structure of the English Language’ 136 (sec. 133): ‘More than in anything else the richness of the English language manifests itself in its great number of synonyms, whether we take this word in its strict sense of words of exactly the same meaning or in the looser sense of words with nearly the same meaning… Sometimes the Latin word is used in a more limited, special or precise sense than the English, as is seen by a comparison of identical and same’.
52. woops = exp. of mild apology, surprise or dismay; and (hiccup).
53. greet = great.
54. scoot = a drunken spree, a bout of drunkenness’; and Scott, Sir Walter, (1771–1832), Scottish poet, novelist.
55. ducking = prompt bowing or bending of the head or body; Scott, Dickens and Thackeray.
56. thuggery = the system of robbery and murder practised by the Thugs; and Tom, Dick and Harry.
57. foxed = cheated; Wyndham Lewis: ‘The Lion and the Fox’ (1927, about Shakespeare); and fixed face to face.
58. bunny = a pet name for a rabbit; vulva (Slang).
59. Roger = Used as a generic or special name for persons; and roger (Slang), to f*ck; and rod (Slang), penis; Charles Dickens: ‘Barnaby Rudge’.
60. teashop = tearoom, lunchroom, cafe; and bishop.
61. lioness (Slang), prostitute; Lyons Tea Shops, London.
62. humdrum = dullness, monotony; and Lom-drom (Loumdrum) (Gaelic), Bare-ridge; Dundrum, district of Dublin; drum (Slang), brothel; and London.
63. ‘Ivanhoe’, novel by Sir Walter Scott.
64. gaga = crazy; and up against, against.
65. lapsus linguæ = a slip of the tongue; and lapsi (Finnish), child; and linquo (Latin), I leave.
66. rovidebb (Hungarian) = shorter.
67. short temper; and empa (Finnish), (comparative; e.g. Finnish vanhempa: older).
68. Meillet & Cohen: ‘Les Langues du Monde’ 328: (of East Caucasian languages, such as Chechen) ‘all the nouns are divided among several ‘classes’ or grammatical genders, of which the number sometimes reaches up to six… Each gender is characterised by a consonant’.
60. Algernon Charles Swinburne: ‘A Ballad of Francis Villon’: ‘Villon our sad bad glad mad brother’s name’.
61. nad (Serbian) = above (shorter of iznad).
62. Vanity Fair = a place or scene where all is frivolity and empty show; the world or a section of it as a scene of idle amusement and unsubstantial display; vanha (Finnish), old; and vanhat (Finnish), the old ones; and ‘bear’, Ursa Major [Maurice Behan]; and ‘Vanity Fair’. novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848.
63. casuality = the relationship between cause and effect, the principle that everything has a cause.
64. pester = to annoy, trouble; to entangle, obstruct the movements of (obs.); and preposter = praeposter, now used chiefly at English independent schools which began as grammar schools for the teaching of Latin grammar. It is the equivalent of prefect. The word originally referred to a monastic prior and is late Latin of the Middle Ages, derived from classical Latin praepositus, ‘placed before’.
65. crossword = a puzzle in which a pattern of chequered squares has to be filled in from numbered clues with words which are written usu. horizontally and vertically
66. post postition = placing (as a particle) after a gram. related word (as ward in cityward); and Meillet & Cohen: ‘Les Langues du Monde’ 164: (of Finnish) ‘most postpositions are formed with the genitive’.
67. scruff = the nape of the neck; to seize (a person) by the nape of the neck; Applied to what is worthless or contemptible; refuse, litter; spec. base money + Meillet & Cohen: ‘Les Langues du Monde’ 167: (of Finnish) ‘this comparative can also be applied to a noun: Finnish ranta ‘shore, bank’, rannempana ‘closer to the shore’.’
68. ream = a large quantity of written matter; a quantity of paper (480 or 500 sheets); and without rhyme or reason (phrase).
69. it stands to reason (that) = it is quite clear (that), it is reasonable, it is natural or evident (that).
69. lanka (Finnish) = thread; and life line (palmistry).
70. wipe = to put all to death, destroy completely, exterminate; and wipe arse.
71. Halley’s Comet = the best-known of the short-period comets, visible from Earth every 75 to 76 years.
‘August 1682, did a comet appear in the north-west, and in the north-east. Its first appearance at Glasgow was on the 17th of that month; the star was big, and the tail broad and long, at the appearance of four yards, and continued till 20 days was at an end.’ (The Minister of Easter Kilpatrick, ‘Law, Memorialls’).
Halley’s Comet, 1682
72. spook = to inhabit or visit as a spook, scare, frighten; and Ally Sloper, grotesque, disreputable figure in a late-19th-century comic paper; and ‘spooky speaker’.
73. metaphorically = in a metaphorical sense; by the use of metaphor; and multi-phonetically; and phone (Greek), sound, voice; and pohjoinen (Finnish), the north.
74. Erse = Irish; and face of the earth, surface of the earth; and Asar, Ausar, Wsir, Wesir, original (Kemetic) name of Osiris.
