Curculio – Michael Hendry

What’s it like living in one of the hillier parts of the Shenandoah Valley? Like living in a Grandma Moses painting, but with slightly duller colors and much better perspective. I really like driving past cows on the way to work, and having mountains on the horizon all day.

InstaPundit is duly impressed that Amazon sells bacon-flavored jelly beans. I’m more astonished by the last two things listed under ‘customers who bought this item also bought’: the bacon wallet (imitation bacon, I presume) and the Mr. Bacon vs. Monsieur Tofu Action Figures (making Tofu a Frenchman is a particularly nice touch).

I gather from various English novels read over the years that public-school boys routinely called each other by their last names (perhaps still do), and that brothers were called (e.g.) ‘Smith major’ and ‘Smith minor’. I’ve always wondered what they did for more complex cases. Specifically:

1. What if two unrelated boys had the same last name? Was the elder, or taller, ‘Major’ and the other ‘Minor’? I’ve taught as many as three unrelated Smiths in a class of 13 in Alabama.
2. What did they call three or more brothers? This must have come up now and then. When the third one arrived, were the first two renumbered ‘Smith primus’ and ‘Smith secundus’ and the third called ‘Smith tertius’, like ancient Roman daughters?
3. What did they do for twins, identical or fraternal? (When I was in graduate school, one of my friends had a pair of red-haired 5-year-old identical twin boys living next door. Since she couldn’t tell them apart and their names were Pat and Dan, she called them both ‘Pan’. They were as mischievous as their age, gender, and hair-color suggest, so it was a very suitable name.)
4. I assume at least some of these schools are now co-ed. Has that affected the question, or did the last-name rule go out before the girls arrived?

Do any of my readers happen to know the answer to these questions?

If I fail to say what lies on my mind it gives me a feeling of flatulence; I shall therefore give my brush free rein. Mine is a foolish diversion, but these pages are meant to be torn up, and no one is likely to see them.

(Kenko, Essays in Idleness 19, tr. Donald Keene)

Laudator Temporis Acti has an amusing post on ‘comical construes’. Here is another, as I heard it from one of my professors in grad school:

In Satires 1.4.120, Horace uses the phrase nabis sine cortice, “you will swim without a cork”, to express the independence of adulthood. Some years ago, a Harvard undergraduate translating the passage could not find nabis in his own little dictionary, so with admirable diligence he went to the library to check the unabridged lexica. In one or more of them he found nabus, a hapax legomenon of alleged Ethiopian origin found in the Elder Pliny (Nat. 8.69, according to the OLD). Assuming that nabis was an alternate form of this word, he combined it with the more general meaning of cortex and translated nabis sine cortice “a giraffe without a skin”. At that point, the eminent scholar teaching the class threw his book across the room and swore he would never teach undergraduates again. Of course, verb forms like nabis, where the stem is only a single letter, are hard to construe if you haven’t learned your endings.

If I ever knew the professor’s name, I have forgotten it.

                              However many books
Wise men have said are wearisom; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep verst in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge;
As Childern gathering pibles on the shore.

(Paradise Regain’d, 4.322-30)