Desultor

I’ve noticed Patrick O’Brian doing the following a couple times. Here’s H.M.S. Surprise, p. 258:

   ‘Certainly. I feel much for the gentleman. But he seems to be of a sanguine humour, and Pullings tells me the captains of Indiamen become exceedingly rich — they shake the pagoda-tree like true British tars.’
   ‘Rich? Oh, yes, they wallow in gold. But he will never hoist his flag! No, no, poor fellow, he will never hoist his flag.’

This reminds me of an account which Boswell gives us of Samuel Johnson:

Nor would it be just, under this head, to omit the fondness which he shewed for animals which he had taken under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a
cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I
frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same
Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying ‘why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;’ and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’

This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.’ And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.’

I’ve never read Boswell, but that last paragraph is employed by Nabokov as the epigraph to Pale Fire. It hit me hard when I read that book, and has stuck in my head since.

This isn’t counting variations with “many a truth”, “many an honest word”, etc. Also counting them as little as possible when they crop up as parts of sentences: I’m looking here for the proverb.

“There’s many a true word spoken in jest” is at H.M.S. Surprise, p.89.

The funny thing about this sort of post is that it may itself be indexed by some search engines, making any subsequent attempts to do the same thing far more difficult. It can snowball, too. Ah well, nobody ever called this science!

Words come when you need them. One day you meet a curious new one, or reencounter a strange old friend. Your curiosity having been engaged but for whatever reason left unsatisfied, what do you see next day but the same word! I have seen so many instances of this phenomenon that I am hard put to attribute it to any influence but that of a kind and loving God.

For instance, summat, meaning “something” in certain dialects of English. I convinced myself last night that characters in The Office were using this word, which I’d only seen in books.

It’s an easy-to-say version of somewhat. Folks I talk to only use somewhat adverbially, as in “Isn’t it somewhat annoyingly faux-folksy to use the word folks in linguistic exposition?”. But since its earliest days it’s also been able to mean “something”, which is easy to handle if you think of what not as relative or interrogative, but as substantival. If you see what what I’m talking about.

Anyways, I was catching up today on the disheartening backlog of words I’ve marked to look up in Patrick O’Brian novels, and came across the following [H.M.S. Surprise, p. 68]:

He found himself staring at Killick, who said, ‘Three bells, sir. Gentleman back presently. Here’s coffee, sir, and a rasher. Do get summat in your gaff, sir, God love us.’

I think I’ve seen the word in George Eliot, too, so maybe it’s “Midlands” English? That label, however, wouldn’t quite fit Slough, where The Office is set — that city is in the Southeast of England. Ah well — I just don’t have the right dictionary to know about the distribution of summat. The OED is very close to useless on regional variation — alls you ever get is their haughty little “regional” label, with never an indication of what “region” they’re talking about.