"James Lipton - ExaltationOfLarks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lipton James)
4: Habitat: A shoal of bass, a nest of rabbits.
5: Comment (pro or con reflecting the observer's point of view): a richness of martens, a cowardice of curs.
6: Error (resulting from an incorrect transcription by a scribe or printer, faithfully preserved in the corrupted form by subsequent compilers): a school of fish, originally "shoal."
The preceding six families of venereal terms are my invention. In the lists that follow I will not indicate to which family I would assign each term, preferring to leave it to the reader to decide whether a murder of crows belongs in the second or fifth family. These decisions are proper moves in the venereal game.
All of the authentic terms you are about to encounter received their first official stamp in the so-called Books of Courtesy, medieval and fifteenth-century social primers, intended, as the quotation from Sir Nigel indicates, to provide a gentleman with the means of social acceptability, and to spare him the embarassment of "some blunder at table, so that those who are wiser may have the laugh of you, and we who love you may be shamed." (William Blades, in his Introduction to the 1881 facsimile edition of The Book of St. Albans, refers to the book's subjects as "those with which, at that period, every man claiming to be 'gentle' was expected to be familiar; while ignorance of their laws and language was to confess himself a 'churl.") The Books dealt with a variety of subjects, but in the largely rural England of that time, the section on the Hunt was doubtless the most important. And in nearly all the Books of Courtesy, the authors saw fit to transcribe a list of the proper, accepted terms of venery. After Egerton (the earliest surviving manuscript, referred to earlier in a footnote), most of the lists were based on previous compilations, always with some omissions, errors and additions. In spite of this variance, each succeeding list gave greater weight of authority to the terms. In the fifteenth century there were several important manuscripts containing lists of terms. In addition to the Egerton, which contained one hundred six terms in its list, there were two Harly Manuscripts, with forty-eight termsin the first and forty-five in the second, The Porkington Manuscript, with one hundred nine, The Digby and The Robert of Gloucester Manuscripts, each with fifty.
The subject was of such importance that, in about 1476, within a year of the establishment of printing in England, a printed book, The Hors, Shepe, & The Ghoos, appeared, with a list of one hundred six venereal terms. But by far the most important of the early works on the subject was The Book of St. Albans, with its list of one hundred sixty-four terms, printed in 1486 at St. Albans by "the schoolmaster printer."
The accredited author was, interestingly, a woman, Dame Juliana Barnes, reputedly the sister of Lord Berners and prioress of the nunnery of Sopewell. There has, however, been considerable debate on the subject of Dame Juliana, with some authorities insisting she was a pure invention and others arguing strenuously for her existence. William Blades, a great expert on early English printing, came out staunchly for Dame Juliana in his Introduction to the facsimile edition of The Book of St. Albans. In it he inveighs against most of her biographers for only adding to the mystery with their highly imaginative accounts of her life. At one point an "expert" read her name as Julyan and produced a learned biography of a man. So she remained, writes Blades, until "Chauncy, in 1700 (History of Hertfordshire) restored her sex... and then set to work upon making a family for her. His first discovery was that, being a 'Dame,' she was of noble blood. Finding also that the family name of Lord Berners was, in olden time, spelt occasionally Barnes, he soon supplied a father for our authoress, in the person of Sir James Berners. And so the game of making history went on merrily.... But enough of such sham biography; let us return to facts. The word 'Dame' did not in the fifteenth century... imply any connection with a titled family, it meant simply Mistress or Mrs.... Allowing that Lord Berners' name was sometimes spelt Barnes, is that sufficient reason for making our authoress a member of his family? I think not."
Having disposed of falsehood, Blades argues for the truth of Dame Juliana's existence, largely from internal evidence in the Book itself, finally commiting himself to the extent of pronouncing her "England's earliest poetess." He allows for the possibility that two parts of the Book, on Hawking and Heraldry, may be the works of the anonymous "schoolmaster printer," but he grants Dame Juliana undisputed authorship of the part on Hunting (the one with which we are concerned).
Other authorities have held that the entire Book of St. Albans is nothing but a compilation of earlier works and folk material, put together by one or several printers under the collective nom de plume of Dame Juliana. At this distance we cannot decide the matter, and so it seems that Dame Juliana is doomed to suffer the literary fate of Homer (there could be worse). Whether Homer was one blind poet or several generations of nameless bards, and whether Dame Juliana was a lone and quite extraordinary prioress or a plagiary of printers in the fifteenth century, the important fact remains that The Book of St. Albans is the definitive work on the subject at hand, and a fascinating work by any standard. (In 1496, the famous and aptly named Wynken de Worde (the aptness is no coincidence: his real name was Jan van Wynken), successor to the first English printer, William Caxton, reprinted The Book of St. Albans, and in the sixteenth century there were more than a dozen new editions of the book.) It contains three parts, the first on Hawking, the second on Hunting, and the third on Heraldry. The book on Hawking contains such paragraph headings as "A medecyne for an hawke that has loft here courage." (In this section I have retained the language of the Book, with its f's for s's and its "ys" and "is" plurals, to give some of the flavor of the original. I don't think translation is necessary; the contemporary eye adjusts quickly to the dusk of fifteenth century orthography.) and "The maner how a man fhall put an hawke in to mewe - and that is to be wele nooted."
The first book ends by assigning certain hawks to certain ranks, thus: "Theys hawes belong to an Emproure... Theis hawkes to a kyng... For a prince... For a duke... For an erle... for a Baron... Hawkes for a knyght... Hawkis for a Squyer (These variant spelling, Theys and Theis, Hawkes and Hawkis, sometimes occuring in the same line of text, are common in early English printing)... For a lady (Each of these headings is followed by a list of the proper hawks, e.g., "There is a Merlyon. And that hawke is for a lady.")... An hawke for a young man," and the section concludes with "And yit ther be moo kyndis of hawkes," listing them, then closes with "Explicit." (An abbreviation of explicitus est liber (the book is unfolded) (from the time when it was in fact a rolled parchment). It usually appears in colophons with the author's name, and is simply a fifteenth-century way of signifying The End.)
The second book, the one that concerns us, on Hunting, begins with a brief foreword by Dame Juliana: "Lyke Wife as I the booke of hawkying aforefayd..." "Likewise, as in the book of hawking aforesaid are written and noted the terms of pleasure belonging to gentlemen having delight therein, in the same manner this book following showeth to such gentle persons the manner of hunting for all manner of beasts, whether they be beasts of venery, or of chase, or Rascal. (The four beasts of venery were the red deer (hart and hind), hare, boar and wolf. The four beasts of the chase were the fallow deer (buck and doe), fox, marten and roe. C.E. Hare, in The Language of Field Sports, writes that "rascal" originally meant "rabble" or "mob," and that it was a hunting term "applied to all beasts other than the four beasts of venery, and the four beasts of the chase." All three groups were locked in a rigid hierarchic order. Conan Doyle's Knight of Dupplin is firm on the subject: "He spoke also of several ranks and grades of the chase: how the hare, hart, and boar must ever take precedence over the buck, the doe, the fox, the marten and the roe, even as a knight banneret does over a knight, while these in turn are of a higher class to the badger, the wildcat, or the otter, who are but the common populace of the world of beasts.") And also it showeth all the terms convenient as well to the hounds as to the beasts aforesaid. And in certain there may be many diverse of them as it is declared in the book following."
There follow two septets, a form popularized a hundred years earlier by Chaucer, each comprising three rhymed couplets and an internally rhymed concluding line. The first septet is called "Beftys of venery," the second "Beftys of the Chace."
The entire book is addressed to "My dere chylde" (in the second line of the opening poem). Further on in the text we encounter such phrases as "Do so, my child." "Think what I say, my son," etc. This maternal tone in the book is one of the most frequently advanced arguments for Dame Juliana's authorship.
The book continues almost entirely in verse, with such titles as "What is a bevy of Roos grete or fmall" and "the rewarde for howndys." It contains a very long poem called "How ye fhall breeche an hert," with explicit instructions for removing "the finale gutties... the leuer [liver]... and after that the bledder..." and concludes on the recto of sig. tiiij (the 24th page) with "Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes in her boke of huntyng." Though this would seem to end the book, in fact, and to our eternal good fortune, it does not. Because of Dame Juliana's colophon here there has been some argument as to the author ship of the seven pages following it which conclude the book of Hunting and contain, among other things, the famous venereal list. This is one of the principal reasons that the schoomaster printer sometimes shares creative credit with the prioress.
What ever their authorship, the seven pages contain treatises in both poetry and prose on such subjects as "The propreteis of a goode Grehound" and "The propretees [sic, another example of variant spelling] of a goode hors," followed by a battery of maxims and homilies under the heading "Merke wele theys iiii thynges." One of the things to be marked well is: Too Wyues in oon hous [Two wives in one house], too cattys and oon mous. Too dogges and oon boon: Theis fhall neu accord I oon.
And then, on the facing recto page, we find the title "The Compaynys of beeftys and fowlys," followed by two vertical columns beginning with "An Herde or Hertis" (harts), and continuing, in fifteenth-century English, through an exhaustive list of one hundred sixty-four venereal terms, some surprising, some amusing, and some arrestingly beautiful. The most startling thing about the list is that not all of the terms in it refer to beeftys and fowlys. Of Dame Juliana's (or the schoomaster printer's) quite astonishing digressions into the realm of poetry and wit, more will be said in Part III of this book. For now, we will confine ourselves to the true and authentic terms of the hunt, compiled not only from the Book of St. Albans but from all the available manuscripts and books on the subject.
The list of venereal terms in this book is intended neither as etymology nor zoology. None of these musings pretend to a high order of scholarship. They are at most an innocent summer ramble through unfamiliar fields; any discoveries made along the way are fortuitous and no enlightenment is promised. In fact, the one tree we will probably not encounter is the bodhi. The venereal list that follows is not complete, comprehensive or final. If it is anything more than meets the eye, perhaps it is literary, in the sense that T.S. Eliot once described literature as "the impulse to transcribe one's thoughts correctly." Our language, one of our most precious natural resources in the English-speaking countries, is also a dwindling one that deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes. We don't write letters, we make long-distance phone calls; we don't read, we are talked to, in the resolutely twelve-year-old vocabulary of radio and television. Under the banner of Timesaving we are offered only the abbreviated, the abridged, the aborted. Our Noble Eightfold Path consists entirely of shortcuts. And what are we urged to do with the time saved by these means? Skim through the Reader's Digest at eighteen hundred words a minute, eating a pre-cooked dinner of condensed soup and reconstituted meat and vegetables on a jet going six hundred miles an hour. Refreshed by our leisurely holiday we can then plunge back into the caucus-race with renewed vigor, dashing breathless behind the Dodo toward an ever-retreating finish-line. Before it is too late I would like to propose a language sanctuary, a wild-word refuge, removed and safe from the hostile environment of our TV-tabloid world.
Perhaps it is already too late. Under the influence of film and television especially (both valuable but intensely pictorial arts) the picture is finally replacing those maligned thousand words. Soon, if all goes badly, we may be reduced to a basic vocabulary of a few hundred smooth, homogenized syllables, and carry tiny movie projectors and bandoliers of miniaturized film cartridges to project our more important thoughts (too precious to entrust to mere words) in the proper pictorial form on the shirtfront of our conversational partner. Eventually we may be able to press a button on our belt and produce an instantaneous, abstract, psychedelic, atonal, aleatory lightshow that will penetrate straight to the beholder's chromosomes, influencing not only him or her, but logophobic generations yet unborn. Wordless, we will build the new Jerusalem!
But, for now, while we are still enmeshed in the encumbering toils of language, perhaps this list of terms will slightly expand our means of performing the most difficult feat on earth: transferring one thought from one mind to another. I assume this is an important task, or why else would Eliot be concerned about transcribing his "thoughts correctly," or Dylan Thomas have written, "I hack / This rumpus of shapes / For you to know / How I, a spinning man, / Glory also this star..."? Wordsworth, in the famous Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads in which he formulated the often quoted definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility," even had the audacity to describe the poet as "a man speaking to men." Coleridge muttered stubbornly that poetry was "the best words in their best order," and even the angels are on our side (or vice versa), for we find "How forcible are right words" in Job 6:25, and "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver" in Proverbs 25:11. Hart Crane, in an excess of philological zeal that would have earned him the contempt of some of our contemporary theorists, dared to exclaim, "One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment," and in one of the Four Quartets Eliot admits that "Our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the language of the tribe." High contemporary marks to Mr. Eliot for the tribal reference, but F for preferring speech to macaronic chants and mindblowing mumbo-jumbo.
It may be argued that our language has in fact grown in the past quarter of a century, at least in two areas: science and slang. Certainly the language of the laboratory and the launching pad has begun to seep into our common speech, and some of the words and phrases we are using freely now have an awesome, transcendental beauty: supersonic, module, cyclotron, transistor, helix, retrorocket, isotope, stereo... even ballistic missile, which, in spite of its ominous significance, has a stunning echoic sound. The majority of the scientific words, however, are still Greek and Latin monstrosities with all the charm and euphony of eccentroosteochondrodysplasia.
For a short while it looked as though American slang might enrich the language, particularly the sinuous patois of the black American and his mimics, the elective disaffiliates: jazz musicians, beatniks, and hippies. Cool, dig, drag, funky, hip and flip were pungent, useful additions to our speech. More recently the hippies showed some originality and imagination in such small poetic flights as blow your mind, turn on, hangup (which seems a much more expressive word than neurosis or problem), up tight and freak out. There was a nice conscious rhyme in flower power, and the popular songs of this generation have shown some ingenuity and daring in both themes and words. Some of the best recent lyrics of Bob Dylan, Donovan, Jim Webb et al. are stylistically closer to Rimbaud than Tin Pan Alley, and this may be to the good.
The trouble is that the revolution is in danger of burying itself in a wearying welter of repetition. No sweat and out of sight begin to lose their charm on the fiftieth hearing, and groovy, kicky, wiggy, unreal and wild, by pushing out nearly every other adjective in a generation's speech, don't expand the language, they diminish it.
And the poetry need not come exclusively from poets. In fact, the poet and critic Louis Untermeyer has written, "We cannot escape from poetry. We need its power of quick communication in every casual activity... The very man who belittles poetry in public practices it in private.. His dreams are poetry... his simple sentences rely on the power of imagery... we delight to intensify a hard drizzle by saying 'it's raining cats and dogs'... [A] good servant is not merely rare but 'scarce as a hen's teeth,'... The fruit-grower... capitalizes the power of poetry by saying thiat [his oranges] are Sunkist, a conceit worthy of the Elizabethan singers... The architect daringly suggests the tower of Babel with the 'skyscraper'; the man in the street intensifies his speech by tightening it into slang, the shorthand of the people, by 'crashing' a party, 'muscling' in, 'hitting' the high spots. Language is continually being made swift and powerful through the medium of the poetic phrase."
So, here are some new candidates for our contemporary lexicon. They are the trophies of what has been, for me, a long and exciting search that began when I realized with a sudden exhiliarating shiver that gaggle of geese and pride of lions might not be just isolated pools of amusing poetic idiosyncrasy but estuaries leading to a virtually uncharted sea, sparkling with found poetry - and intriguing poetic possibilities. Every curious soul has its moment on that peak in Darien. That was mine and it led to these pages.
I have two hopes: one, that the evangelistic tone of this preface will be forgiven, and, two, that a few of these terms, from Parts I and II - and even from Part III - will stick to our ribs and be ingested into our speech. If they do, it isn't just that we will be able to turn to someone and coolly and correctly say, "Look - a charm of finches." What is more important is that a charm of poetry will have quietly slipped into our lives.
Part I
The Known
This brief list contains the genuine terms of venery that are still a part of our living speech. They are as old as the other terms that follow, but we still use them, and it is this fact that has led me to separate them from their brothers. They may be so familiar to our ear that we say or read them without thinking; they have lost their poetry for us.
But stand back for a moment from some of these familiar terms - a plague of locusts, a brood of hens, a litter of pups (plague! brood! litter!) - and perhaps their aptness and daring will reappear.
So with all the terms in this part: we begin on familiar ground, to sharpen our sense by restoring the magic to the mundane.
A SCHOOL OF FISH
As noted earlier, school was a corruption of shoal, a term still in use for specific fish (vide Part II). C.E. Hare, in The Language of Field Sports, quotes John Hodgkin on this term arguing that school and shoal are in fact variant spellings of the same word, but Eric Partridge, I think correctly, sees them coming from two different roots, the former from ME scole, deriving from the Latin schola, a school, and the latter from the OE sceald, meaning shallow. I think it is obvious that in the lexicon of venery shoal was meant and school is a corruption.
A PRIDE OF LIONS
A HERD OF ELEPHANTS
A FLOCK OF SHEEP
A BAND OF MEN
Hence also band for a group of musicians
A LITTER OF PUPS
A SLATE OF CANDIDATES
Doubtless deriving from the time when nominees' names were chalked on one.
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