Snippets, connections

1. From Dainty Ballerina, an account of the wedding of James I's daughter Elizabeth. A lot of "white Satten," much "Pearle and Golde," and more than a whiff of Spenserian influence:

Upon her head a crowne of refined golde, made imperiall by the Pearles and Dyamonds thereupon placed, which were so thicke beset that they stood like shining pinnacles.  Upon her amber coloured haire, hanging plaited down over her shoulders to her Waste, betweene every plaight Gold spangles, Pearles, Riche stones, and Diamonds, and many Diamonds of inestimable value embroidered upon her sleeves, which dazzled and amazed the eyes of the beholders.

2. A crash blossom, of sorts, in an old issue of the Daily Illini left in the men's room: "Anti-gay bullying victim remembered at vigil." The sense is obvious upon reflection -- this is about one of those teenage suicides last year -- but the natural way to read the headline is as if the victim were anti-gay: "All those PC bullies!"

3. I quoted Randall Jarrell on Auden yesterday: "Auden [...] lies back in himself as if he were an unmade bed." This strongly reminded me of something but I couldn't, at the time, quite place it; it's Catullus 31:

O quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum,
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto?

("O what is happier than when, all cares resolved, the mind puts down its burden, and we come exhausted with the labor of travel to our home, and rest on the longed-for bed?") This passage has an amusingly high density of false friends. I've always loved the idea of acquiescing in one's bed -- it is precisely what one fails to do a lot of the time -- and Jarrell's line uses the same association in reverse.


4. In case you missed the addendum to the sloth/sleuth post, "sleuth" appears to come from the same Norse root as "slot." A sleuth is originally a slot, or groove, or trail, left by an animal, then becomes an elliptic term for a tracking dog or sleuth-hound, and finally the sleuth-hound becomes a detective by metaphoric extension. I am frustratingly unable to come up with the right technical term for this device, but there must be something more precise than "metaphor."

"Ubi cunt?"

Ray Girvan pointed out in Light reading comments that a lot of the early n-grams for obscenities were artifacts of bad OCR. A little digging confirms this theory; there is a lot of (Latin) "eunt" and "sunt" and the like that Google scans in as "cunt" -- and this is so even in the 18th century. Then there are cases where a word like "mitescunt" -- written with the long s -- gets scanned in as "mite/cunt." More egregiously a lot of Latin words like "ducunt" and "dicunt" are broken up by the OCR for no reason. And then there is considerable misreading of italicized and Gothic lettering, so for instance, "Divers Presbyterian divines came also" is scanned in as "...d'vinu cunt alfi." While much of this is inevitable I don't understand why Google can't do a better job of classifying Latin texts as Latin rather than English.

Note that this is unrelated to the noise issue, which only affects pre-1650 texts

The thing is that with a lot of these words, the story that the graphs tell -- of a freewheeling past followed by Victorian repression followed by the 20th century -- is broadly consistent with what the usual picture of English literary history. But (a) how often does one really see "cunt" in 17th century writing? (b) in the age of the poem and pamphlet, literary writing perhaps constituted a smaller part by volume of the total output than it did in the age of the novel. Anyway, we report, you decide.