"James Lipton - ExaltationOfLarks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lipton James)

The Church was doing something wrong in England. If Pope Clement had read The Book of St. Albans England might be Catholic today!
A BLAST OF HUNTERS
A THREATENING OF COURTIERS
A PROMISE OF TAPSTERS
A LYING OF PARDONERS
A GORING OF BUTCHERS
A SCOLDING OF SEAMSTRESSES
A WANDERING OF TINKERS
A DRUNKENNESS OF COBBLERS
The term in St. Albans is Dronkship. Says the NED: "Drunkship-DRUNKENNESS. b. a drunken company 1486 Bk. of St. Albans F vij, a dronkship of Coblers."
A CLUSTER OF KNOTS
A RASCAL OF BOYS
Vide the earlier note on rascal.
A DISWORSHIP OF SCOTS
A WORSHIP OF WRITERS
Probably a reference to the reverence of writers for their patrons and not, alas, vice versa.

So you see, by 1486 the venereal game was already in full swing. There are examples of it in most of the early manuscripts. The first Harley Manuscript gives gaggle of gossips, and the very early book The Hors, Shepe, & The Ghoos contributes a pity of prisoners and a hastiness of cooks. The extreme importance of these books in the fifteenth century is indicated by the fact that the last named was one of the first printed by William Caxton in the year that he introduced printing to England. And if we are still inclined to think of the social terms of venery as frivolous, C.E. Hare asserts that a blast of hunters and its fellows "were all probably in use at one time or another." There is of course no law or canon of usage that gives any of these terms sole possession of the field, but clearly they were once considered well enough establish to take their places with a flock of sheep and a school of fish.
But, that the codifiers of these terms knew they were playing a word game is equally clear, from the terms themselves - and the history of the game in the centuries since Caxton. It has never stopped. The reader of this book may already know the popular philological story that usually takes Oxford as its local. In it, four dons, each representing a different academic discipline and therefore a different viewpoint, were flapping along the Oxford High when their path was crossed by a small but conscpicuous group of prostitutes. The quickest of the dons muttered, "A jam of tarts." The second, obviously a fellow in Music, riposted, "No, a flourish of strumpets." From the third, apparently an expert on nineteenth-century English literature, came, "Not at all... an essay of Trollope's." The fourth - Modern English Literature - said, "An anthology of pros." (I have heard versions that included "a peal of Jezebels," "a smelting of ores" and even "a troop of horse," but this begins to be flogging a dead one.)
Besides, the dons' venereal terms, as brilliantly constructed as they are, seem to me to obscure the point of the venereal game by drawing attention to both ends of the phrase; that is, not only to the term, "anthology," but its object, already a synonym, "pros." What we are admiring is the verbal dexterity and ingenuity; what emerges is not poetry but a joke, not revelation but a chuckle.
There has, of course, through the long history of the game, always been the temptation to make a joke of it, and sometimes the temptation is irresistable. I began playing the venereal game long before I knew that Dame Juliana (or anyone else) had. For a few euphoric days I thought I had invented it. And I have often been tempted by the punning aspect of the game, as when I decided that a group of male homosexuals should be known as "a charm of fairies," "a basket of fruit," "a bundle of faggots" (in England, "a packet of fags"), "a board of trade," or "a burrow of Queens." Though I'm rather pleased with some of these terms as verbal machinery, I have ended by striking them en masse from the list that follows. For me they fail to qualify for the same reason as those of the illustrious dons.
Having taken this high-handed attitude toward what a venereal term is not, I suppose it is incumbent upon me to try to explain as briefly and precisely as I can what I think it is. First of all, obviously, I think it is poetry. Robert Frost wrote, "There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another." (Italics mine.)
Certainly, by this definition the venereal terms are the essence of poetry, the "chiefest" thing, for they are unalloyed metaphor. More specifically, most of them are synechdochic in form, letting a quintessential part (pride, leap, gaggle, skulk) stand for the whole, giving us large illuminations in small flashes.
My principal objection to the dons' terms, and my "charm of fairies," etc., is that they do not say "one thing in terms of another"; they say two things, both "essay" and "Trollope's"; and lost in admiration for the double double entendre (quadruple entendre?), we lose poetry and illumination too. We have witnessed some verbal sleight-of-hand; but "anthology" and "jam" tell us nothing about whores, and that is, or should be, the purpose of the game. At least it is in the best examples I can think of, e.g., A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS - "parliament" tells us something, it gives us a valuable quiddity of owls.
My position on this is, of course, much too dogmatic. A joke may illuminate, and you will find a number of them that I couldn't resist in the list that follows. The only reason I have emphasized this point is that one of the basic rules of the venereal game is that it is the term that matters. In an exaltation of larks, "exaltation" is the operative word. If "larks" had been turned into a synonym that made a jeu de mots of the whole phrase, I feel that more might have been lost than gained.
In some cases, as perhaps in "a flourish of strumpets," we seem to have both a joke and revelation, but, for me, "an anthology of pros" stands somewhere outside the venereal game, the goal of which, I feel, is to tell us something quintessesntially true about the term's object - something we failed to notice or took for granted until that moment. The term of venery is a searchlight that illuminates something for us, letting us see it with fresh insight, or as if for the first time.
If you join in the venereal game - and by now it must be nakedly apparent that this book is an invitation to - you will probably find that your first attempts are almost all alliterative (like gaggle of geese).
My advice, for what it is worth, is to fight that impulse. If the proper, poetic, illuminating term happens to be alliterative with the group it is describing, well and good; but if it is not, nothing is lost, and there may be a clearer focus on the main thing: the term, with its gingery secret. In the venereal game, as in the arts, simplicity is the goal and distillation is the way. "Omission," Lytton Strachey wrote in 1912, "is the beginning of all art."
Since the venereal game has been going on for more than five hundred years, there have been a great number of players. C.E. Hare, in his Language of Field Sports, assembled a long list of contemporary venereal terms from various sources, and some of them deserve repetition: AN OBSTINANCY OF BUFFALOES, A BASK OF CROCODILES, A TOWER OF GIRAFFES, A POMP OF PEKINGESE, A CONDESCENSION OF ACTORS, A DEBAUCHERY OF BACHELORS, AN ERUDITION OF EDITORS, AN UNEMPLOYMENT OF GRADUATES, AN UNHAPPINESS OF HUSBANDS, AN EXAGGERATION OF FISHERMEN and A WOBBLE OF BICYCLES.
In a recent issue of the Bulletin of the Mensa Society, a doctor in California cut through the whole medical profession, coming up with such contemporary venereal terms as A BRACE OF ORTHOPEDISTS, A JOINT OF OSTEOPATHS, A RASH OF DERMATOLOGISTS, A FLUTTER OF CARDIOLOGISTS, A GUESS OF DIAGNOSTICIANS, A PILE OF PROCTOLOGISTS, A CORPS OF ANATOMISTS and A SMEAR OF GYNECOLOGISTS.
The list that follows consists of the terms of venery that I have coined or encountered since I first began unearthing these shards of poetry and truth. I hasten to acknowledge that some of the terms are not mine. As I played the venereal game, like Tom Sawyer whitewashing his fence, I found that spectators didn't stay spectators long. If you should feel the urge, there are more brushes in the pail.

A TRANCE OF LOVERS
A PIDDLE OF PUPPIES
A TRIP OF HIPPIES
A SLOUCH OF MODELS
A FLUSH OF PLUMBERS
A WINCE OF DENTISTS
A LURCH OF BUSSES
AN ESCHEAT OF LAWYERS
A WRANGLE OF PHILOSOPHERS
A SNEER OF BUTLERS
A DISAGREEMENT OF STATESMEN
A CRUNCH OF WRESTLERS
A STRING OF VIOLINISTS
A BABBLE OF BARBERS
AN ACNE OF ADOLESCENTS
A NERVE OF NEIGHBORS
A MERDE OF CANICHES
AN ODIUM OF POLITICIANS