Being the weblog of Mark Forsyth
I am moving to Substack. When blogs were a thing, I blogged. Now that Substack is a thing, I shall stack my subs. Those who wish to read my writing, whether motivated by pity, morbid fascination or nostalgie de la boue, can simply click, or press with your despairing finger upon this link . The Inky Fool advances confidently into the future
While I was researching Rhyme & Reason (available in all good and goodish bookshops), I came across a little anecdote that tells us something Terribly Important (I think) about history. It's a anecdote about T.S. Eliot and the young - indeed future - Queen Elizabeth the Second. There is a story, which is recounted as history in several perfectly respectable books, about a reading of The Waste Land…
A fortnight ago, in a little break from launching Rhyme and Reason , I took a young lady for a walk in a woods, and returned with a muddy left knee and a fiancée. I have been told that it is important that I understand the meaning of this engagement. So I have checked up. Engagement is closely related to a mortgage (note the gage in both), and to a wager, which I would have suspected. The original…
People like to release animals. They release lions onto the savannah, or orcas into the ocean, or beavers into the wild, or organ-grinders' monkeys onto the street, or bulls into china-shops. But I like to release books. I like to think of them creeping, taking their first little steps, sniffing the air of the market place, and then galloping off into the wild, neighing proudly. This is why I have…
Distinctly tropical I recently discovered that the Seychelles were named after Jean Moreau de Séchelles, a Frenchman, who never set his gallic, garlicky, eyes upon the islands that bear his name. The Seychelles were named in his honour because he happened to be the minister of finance when the islands were acquired by France in 1756. He had been in the post for a whole two years, and then he had a…
More maligned than malignant I've been writing a new book: a short, simple, light-hearted history of English poetry. And I've nearly finished. It ought to be out by Christmas and will probably be called Rhyme and Reason , although things are still to be finally decided. While writing, I've found several things that won't fit in the book, but which, having done all the research I thought I'd put on…
I've a written a new book. It's a children's book and it's called A Riddle for a King . It's suitable for those aged between about eight and twelve, although it has been rigorously tested on children from six to thirteen (I test all my products on children and animals). The six-year-old had to have it read to him, but he loved it. The story is about a boy called Philo, who goes to a magical land…
Start with something simple. We've got the verb give, which we all know, and the thing that you give is a gift. They're quite obviously related. This is Not Interesting. Then you've got people who use the word gift as a verb, as in "I gifted it to him." That's a bit odd because it's verb to noun to verb again. But it's still pretty obvious. Then you have the verb drive . And when the wind drives…
Today is the first of May, or that's what Shakespeare thought, as did all proper Englishmen. May, for him, ran from May 11th to June 10th. The reason for this is reasonably simple. Ancient folk noticed that there were 365 days in a year. This allowed for calendars etc. Life was simple. Then Ancient Romans noticed that this wasn't quite right. In fact, there were 365 and a quarter days in a year.…
It is of immense importance to absolutely everyone that The Illustrated Etymologicon is now published, out, in the shops, for sale, and begging to be bought. It's the same text as the original Etymologicon , but now filled, on each and every page, with delicious illustrations. Is is therefore illustrious. Illustrious and illustration both come from the Latin illustratus which meant lit up. In…
I've done another little video essay with the splendid people at Little White Lies. It's about the rhetorical trope of epistrophe. And, just to end every blogpost with the same words, The Illustrated Etymologicon is coming out in November.
Pancallism is the belief that everything is beautiful, or at least everything that exists, which is quite a lot of things. The idea, occurred to some medieval scholastic philosophers. Their reasoning went roughly like this. God exists. Existence is one of the features of God. All the features of God are beautiful. Hence existence is a kind of beauty. I exist. Therefore, I must be beautiful. This…
Today is, of course, the 74th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting . The event is celebrated by lexicographers everywhere because it gave the English language two new terms: flying saucer and pelicanist . Kenneth Arnold was a businessman and aviator who, on June 24th 1947, saw nine thingummybobs flying past Mount Ranier in Washington State at over a thousand miles an hour. Or, he says he…
The week is a curious thing: the division of our lives into a revolving, unfinishing cycles of seven days. Especially as seven days bears no relation to anything at all. Some people, rather foolishly, think that seven days is a quarter of the lunar cycle: seven days from new moon to half full, another week to full, another week waning to half, and another week until it disappears. But there's a…
The nomenclature of England is a foggy thing, cunningly designed to confuse foreigners, who will wonder, in their simple foreign way, why they're consuming a Devonshire cream tea in Devon, why an earl's wife is a countess, why Nottingham had a sheriff, and why the Welsh Marches rather than march. Thank God that I'm an Englishman, and was therefore born confused, rather than having to become so,…
The original logo There's a website where you can buy an Apple Macintosh for 40p. Well, in fact, you can buy three for £1.20. That amounts to the same thing. Also, it's not really an Apple Macintosh, it's a McIntosh Apple; but the one is named after the other. Back in 1811 a Canadian fellow called John McIntosh started selling a new cultivar of apple, which became known as the McIntosh apple. It…
The Italian for a butterfly is a farfalla , and so the pasta that looks like a butterfly is called farfalle . One can think of this as beautiful, or one can think of a plate heaped high with dead butterflies. The choice is yours. It's a lot better than thinking of linguine as a plateful of little tongues , which is rather horrid. Linguine is a diminutive, as is spaghetti . The Italian for string…
Tall? Sometimes an etymology is so obvious that I can't believe that I've never noticed it, and I marvel at my own duncedom. The Greek letter omega, as in alpha and omega , was just the big O, the mega-O, O-mega. The shorter O in the Greek alphabet is called called omicron , or small O. I am/was able to recite the whole Greek alphabet, and I had never noticed. Another hidden big is Charlemagne,…
I have, in my solitude, taken up playing the violin. Fiddling while Rome does not burn. I have long suspected that the only thing I truly grasp is nonsense, now it is fiddlesticks. Violin is the diminutive of viola , and viola come from the Latin vitula which meant stringed instrument , and vitula was named after Vitula, the Goddess of Joy. This is presumably on the basis that playing music makes…
For some reason unknown to me vaccines have been much in the news of late. It's all the fault of a fellow called Edward Jenner (1749-1823) who had the eccentric idea of preventing smallpox in humans by injecting them with cows, or possibly cowpox. Cowpox is a demure disease, but, once you had got used to it, you could fight off smallpox, which was a dastardly disease. The Latin for cow was vacca ,…