"He is na dog, he is a lam"

1. A house made entirely of vintage books (appropriately I got this from Random House's twitter feed):

2. From Sally Mapstone's LRB review of an edition of William Dunbar's poems:

Scots were not popular in late medieval Oxford. Two fellows of Merton came up before the college authorities in 1497 after a fracas in which one had accused the other of being a Scot. The perpetrator, William Ireland, was warned not to issue such an infamy against anyone else.

This stereotype was new to me:

The first of a pair of punning poems on James Dog, an officer in the Queen’s wardrobe, persistently declares, ‘Madame, ye heff a dangerous dog,’ and the second then just as assiduously corrects that statement: ‘He is na dog, he is a lam.’ [...] Unravelling the nature of Dunbar’s relationship with the Queen is even trickier because of Margaret’s appalling posthumous reputation among Scottish historians, in which the familiar stereotypes of the unstable, sexually malleable, meddling English female have played far too straightforward a part.

(The reviewed edition -- which I had checked out for much of college -- is notable partly for ordering the poems alphabetically by first line. This is actually what led me to the review: I was reminded by the abstract of Jenny Davidson's ABCs of the novel event (which I would definitely attend if I were in NYC) of alphabetical order as one obvious alternative to chronological order...)

3. Courtesy of Calista, a magnificent bit of scatological verse (John Oldham, "Upon the author of a play call'd Sodom"):

Vile Sot! who clapt with Poetry art sick,
And void'st Corruption, like a Shanker'd Prick.
Like Ulcers, thy impostum'd Addle Brains,
Drop out in Matter, which thy Paper stains:
Whence nauseous Rhymes, by filthy Births proceed,
As Maggots, in some T---rd, ingendring breed.
Thy Muse has got the Flow'rs, and they ascend,
As in some Green-sick Girl, at upper end.
Sure Nature made, or meant at least t'have don't,
Thy Tongue a Clytoris, thy Mouth a C---t:
How well a Dildoe, wou'd that place become,
To gag it up, and make't for ever dumb? 
[...]
Or (if I may ordain a Fate more fit)
For such foul, nasty, Excrements of Wit,
May they condemn'd to th'publick Jakes, be lent,
For me I'd fear the Piles, in vengeance sent
Shou'd I with them prophane my Fundament)
There bugger wiping Porters, when they shite,
And so thy Book it self, turn Sodomite.

See also: Language Log on excrement as metaphor; it is only a minor stretch to read LL's name in a scatological sense.

Self-anointing

Hedgehogs do it:

Hedgehogs are fairly vocal and communicate through a combination of grunts, snuffles and/or squeals, depending on species. Hedgehogs occasionally perform a ritual called anointing. When the animal encounters a new scent, it will lick and bite the source, then form a scented froth in its mouth and paste it on its spines with its tongue. The specific purpose of this ritual is unknown, but some experts believe anointing camouflages the hedgehog with the new scent of the area and provides a possible poison or source of infection to predators poked by their spines.

Looked up because hedgehogs are a Thing on tumblr (see also: here, here). Some other notes:

• In the Middle Ages a hedgehog was also a furze-pig, a hurcheon, an urchin, or (by metanalysis) a nurchin. Wikipedia says the -hog names have to do with snoutedness; wonder if a pig connection is behind the biblical belief that "An vrchon, that chewith kude,‥is vnclene."
• Naturally the hedgehog appears, as "hurcheon," in the extravagant linguistic treasure-house that is Dunbar's Twa mariit women & wedo, "With his hard hurcheone scyn sa heklis he my chekis."
• Hedgehog-roasting appears to have preceded knife-crime as the national British sport (Guardian):

Research suggests nettle pudding may be the oldest known recipe, dating from 6000BC, closely followed by smokey stew, meat pudding, barley bread and roast hedgehog. [...]  Ruth Fairchild, who led the research, said that however off-putting the Neolithic dishes might sound, many were forerunners of the food we enjoy today.

"The way our ancestors cooked hedgehog - wrapped in a casing of grass or leaves to stop the meat burning - is an early version of many modern recipes which involve meat being wrapped or coated, such as chicken kiev, beef wellington or cornish pasties," she said.

[some dishes] have disappeared from the British dining table, including garum and liquamen, sauces made from fish guts and heads; smokey stew, a combination of bacon and smoked fish; meat pudding, a mix of offal, fat and herbs; barley bread, an early form of unleavened bread; and in mitulis, a Roman equivalent of moules marinière.
Roasted meats (Hedgehog)

"Hedgehog should have its throat cut, be singed and gutted, then trussed like a pullet, then pressed in a towel until very dry; and then roast it and eat with cameline sauce, or in pastry with wild duck sauce. Note that if the hedgehog refuses to unroll, put it in hot water, and then it will straighten itself."

From medievalcookery.com/oddities

Also tantalizingly recipe-ish is this excerpt from Reliquae Antiquae: " Tak the grees of an urcheon, and the fatte of a bare." Wherefore? To anoint a hedgehog?

Shogging

Paul Collins's article on the etymology of shitfaced (via Light reading) has a throwaway remark about Scots "words like to shog, a verb that means 'to shake from corpulence.'" This sent me back to the only place I'd seen "shog" before, a William Dunbar passage that is even better than I remember it being [fpelling flightly modernized from the Google books version]:

My fore-grantschir hecht Fyn Mac Kowle
That dang the devil, and gart him yowle,
The skyis rained when he wald scowle,
He troublit all the air:
He gat my grantschir Gog Magog,
Ay when he dansit, the warld wald schog;
Five thousand ells yeid in his frog
Of Hieland pladdis, and mair.
Yet he was but of tendir youth;
But after he grew mickle at fouth,
Ellevyne mile wide met was his mouth,
His teith was ten ell sqwair.
He wald upon his tais stand,
And tak the sternis doun with his hand,
And set them in a gold garland
Above his wyfis hair.

He had a wyf was lang of clift;
Hir hed wan higher than the lift;
The hevyne reardit when she wald rift,
The lass was no thyng slendir;
She spittit Loch Lomond with hir lippis;
Thunner and fyre-flaucht flew fra her hippis;
When she was crabbit the son tholit clippis;
The feende durst nocht offend hir.

Glossary (disclaimer: I'm not a Scots scholar). hecht = hight, was called. dang = flogged (pret. of "ding"). gart = made. ay = always. dansit = danced. ell = roughly a yard. yeid = went. frog = frock. mickle at fouth = to full bigness, "fulth". tais = toes. sternis = stars. clift = cleft. lift = sky. fyre-flaucht = fire-flight, lightning. tholit clippis = suffered eclipse.

Incidental OED factoid:

The Old Germanic word [for ell] (a compound of which is elbow n.) meant originally arm or fore-arm, and is cognate with Greek ὠλένη, Latin ulna, of same meaning. The diversity of meanings is common to all words denoting linear measures derived from the length of the arm; compare cubit n. and Latin ulna. The word ell seems to have been variously taken to represent the distance from the elbow or from the shoulder to the wrist or to the finger-tips, while in some cases a ‘double ell’ has superseded the original measure, and has taken its name.

 See also here for my favorite Dunbar poem (with glossary), famous for first OED use of "fuck."

"And one kitchen blender" -- miscellanea

1. Get away from it all at the Wild Ass Homestay in Tibet. If you're lucky your expenses might be paid by the Ass Meat Research Group. (The comments on the latter post are quite good. See also here for an explanation.)

1'. In Wild Ass comments, Victor Mair mentions that "dashlar/tashlar" are Turkic words for "stone." (This looks like a mix-up, I think he meant to comment on this other -- fascinating but less "neat" -- post.) There is an apparent cognate in Beijing dialect, and Mair speculates on possible Turkic influence... but of course what came first to my mind was the English word "ashlar" for paving stones, which -- although its etymology isn't satisfying -- derives from previous English words for "axle" and such and has nothing to do with Turkic.

2. Slate has an interesting and gross article -- the kind that belongs in a Mary Roach book -- about fecal transplants as a cure for recurrent intestinal diseases that arise when antibiotics kill off almost all the bacteria in your intestines and the surviving (mostly evil) ones proliferate in the resulting bacterial vacuum.

And then there's the do-it-yourself crowd. All you need is a bottle of saline, a 2-quart enema bag, and one standard kitchen blender. Mike Silverman, a University of Toronto physician who wrote up a guide to homespun fecal transplants for the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, says it's entirely safe to do the procedure this way

3. Via Jeremy, a clever article in the latest issue of Science explains how one can make "isotopes of hydrogen" that are substantially heavier than tritium. The idea is to replace one of the electrons in helium-4 with a muon, which is basically similar to an electron but much heavier. The muon, being much heavier, orbits much closer to the nucleus than the electron does (it is more "classical" and has less spread), so the electron effectively sees a nucleus that's got one positive charge but the mass of (say) a helium-4 atom.

4. I have been meaning to post/link to this William Dunbar poem for some time now. If you can read Late Middle Scots or tolerate looking at the glossary, it is a wonderful bit of work... it is also notable, among other things, for being (a) the first OED entry for "fuck" and (b) the only poem that had to be expurgated from library editions of Auden's Book of Light Verse. Though technically in Scots dialect it's mostly in baby-talk and onomatopoeia:

Quod he: "My kid, my capirculyoun,
My bony baib with the ruch brylyoun,
My tendir gyrle, my wallie gowdye,
My tyrlie myrlie, my crowdie mowdie,
Quhone that oure mouthis dois meit at ane,
My stang dois storkyn with your towdie:
Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane."

5. John Quiggin's musings on the Egypt question are somewhat thought-provoking:

The idea that the US can legitimately use its military power to ensure continued access to oil resources rests, in large measure, on the (not entirely unfounded) assumption that those controlling the resources are a bunch of sheikhs and military adventurers who happened to be in the right place, with guns, at the right time. Without the Arab exception, the idea of oil as a special case, not subject to the ordinary assumption that resources are the property of the people in whose country they are found, will also be hard to sustain.