Fun with Animals

Comparing human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities, defined broadly as anthropomorphism, is an innate, highly entertaining tendency of human psychology. 

The human-to-animal route is a particular favorite of humanity’s, as well as an age-old practice. The English language comes complete with an eloquent system of Classical metaphors that, in order to connote specific meanings, compares animals’ physical appearances, actions, and intentions with those of humans’, and, in this way, exaggerates those same traits, such that they become more obvious, stronger, funnier. 

Likening your fellow Man to an animal can, however, sometimes possess the propensity to be rather smashmouth football. Calling someone an ape can quickly get you into a spot of bother. To suggest doing something doggy style might also provoke a stiff reaction. Therefore, seek the friendship of understatement. And nothing says understatement quicker than scientific writing. 

By its very nature of attempting to remain detached and objective, scientific writing has a built-in understatement monitor, the literary result of which is often ironic. Scientific words are often so nebulous in meaning that they feel almost ghost-like; therefore, scientific words are essentially invisible to the weal public, so one may use them flagrantly, disparaging, and with minimal fear.

A stand-up, modern gentleman’s work-around for rendering the blunter admission of “ape” might be found in the adjective simian. For comparison to another, slightly more dignified knuckle-dragger, consider ursine: like a bear. For sheeple who follow as the flock, ovine might be the bellwether. Whenever some swine’s eating like a pig, tut-tut him for his porcine ways; and, if he drinks tea directly out of the whistling kettle, his ways are more saurian, as lizards find the heat preferable and are known for things burnt and tonguey. Elected above the normal system of life, often a clever representation of tragedy, and in possession of possible psychic abilities? Try corvine. If she’s got a neck, she’s struthious. If Ulysses’s Buck Mulligan would say that she “bucks like a goat,” she’s probably redheaded, and you can also call her hircine. Someone who’s either lupine or vulpine might blow your house down, and these evil predators are often cloaked in ovine attire. His aqua-based partner in crime is the shark, which is described by the adjective selachian. “Silly goose” feeling a bit tired? Call that foolish, helpless, loveable lummox anserine. That’ll cook your goose. In English literature, the description of ugly, demonic protectors of treasures that sometimes symbolize fertility belongs to toads, or bufoniform creatures. Everyone knows a cockroach when she sees one; the good for nothing, unwanted, dirty pests, otherwise knowns neighbors, resemble something blattoid. Satan himself couldn’t escape the biting description of ophidian: an evil, poisonous, backstabbing, lying trickster with a penchant for deceit. Neither could Gríma Wormtongue give the raspberry to his parallel with the vermiform and therefore death. But, now I’m just peacocking, which is quite a pavonine thing to do.

Now for the elephant in the room. For an extensive analysis on comparing humans to animals, do consider forgoing the extra stop by the vegan restaurant tonight in favor of purchasing Ward Farnsworth’s much more enjoyable Classical English Metaphor. The book’s built like an ox.  

A Queer Bag

I once tutored an extremely bright young freshman who, when prompted by his professor to write a more than modest-length essay about The Fear of the Unknown, twisted his brow, pouted angrily, and said, “but, if I ain’t know what it is, how can I be scared of it?” 

The contemporary system of American colleges and universities is unfortunately no stranger to such high feats of intellect. Much to the surprise of all, however, he did not finish the semester. And, although we might also wish for ourselves such a privileged life of gadding incompetence and drooling ease, we aren’t all so lucky. 

Having already conquered breathing and washing our bodies, those of us highly developed creatures who endeavor to understand a thing or two about our “reality” (as Nabokov would have written it) often sense The Unknown as something of a lurking fear. The English language contains no dearth of words within its lexicon to report on this effect. There are, however, fine discriminations betwixt selections. Let’s start with something that might make us feel a bit queer.

Queer did not always mean “affluent student with good parents and a need to be the center of attention,” rather it served as an adjective that described something as “strangely off,” or “oddly amiss.” Rumored to be derived from the German quer (oblique), queer also means feelin’ “slightly ill” (heard often in traditional Irish music), as if one were feeling not quite knowingly sick but wambling on the verge of something, perhaps along Queer Street. And to queer something has always meant “to spoil or ruin” it, which presents an interesting irony against today’s fashionable usurpation. In fact, I should wager queer now as a word almost entirely ironic. 

Strange is of French origin and means “something unusual or surprising,” specifically in a way that is “difficult to understand.” This may describe an external event or the way one feels, both of which usages arise from strange’s connotations with something “never before seen or encountered and likely unfamiliar,” even “alien,” which supports a notion of linkage with the archaic sense of the word: “unaccustomed to or unfamiliar with.” Odd would be the closest in meaning to strange, though not geographically. Odd was born and raised in Old Norse and also applies itself to numbers that have one left over as a remainder, whenever divided by two. Be there a connection between something’s being off-kilter and its lack of even division?

Fey is perhaps my favorite word to describe oddity, if only for its aesthetic appeal. Fey is a stronger word than strange or odd, for it connotes “an impression of vague unworldliness or mystery,” as well as describes someone as “having supernatural powers of clairvoyance.” Fey is of Germanic origin and has reached your eyes today through Dutch and Old English. There is also an archaic, Scottish definition that means “fated to die or at the point of death,” which leads one to wonder why Shakespeare, for Macbeth—or, The Scottish Play—chose to name the witches therein not The Fey Sisters, but rather The Weird Sisters.

In fact, The Weird Sisters makes complete sense and is, though it sounds commoner, a more sophisticated usage. Weird is also of Germanic origins and therefrom the Old English wyrd or “destiny,” or, more specifically, “having the power to control destiny.” German mythology defines weird closely to how the Greeks defined Fate. But, they are not the same. The German idea of weird means a web of interconnected events, of which a linear path can be neither drawn nor understood, whereas the Greek idea of fate took things more linearly. Something that’s weird is of unstoppable, pre-determined origins that, whilst momentarily fey, was ultimately a cosmic certainty. Nowadays, as most things, we’ve simplified it to mean “supernatural or unearthly,” or, if you’re of humbler ilk, “something bizarre,” which comes from the Italian bizzarro. In this sense, then, Macbeth, by powers beyond his reason and control, had always been doomed to something weird.

Though fate is an ancient Greek concept, we receive the word by way of Latin. Greek mythology’s The Fates presided over the birth and life of humans, each person’s destiny weaved by them: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—another three weird ladies. As a society, we tend to stick a bit etymologically truer to fate than to weird. Fate is a development of events within each person’s life that are outside of each person’s control, which, like things weird, are pre-determined and controlled supernaturally. Unlike weird, however, fate is thought as linear. Think of weird as a spider web and fate as a river.

Supernatural has been a difficult word to avoid using, as it is today used to describe essentially any force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. Natural things, as we’ve come to understand them, are things native to our physical, material, observable world, things that can be sensed and are therefore measurable. Super- is a prefix that roughly means “over” or “above,” which has heavenly connotations. Preternatural is a near synonym, preter- meaning “beyond” or “more than.” 

There are also more secular, yet less powerful, words that one many employ to describe anything deviating from what is normal or usual—often in a way that is undesirable or worrying—words such as unusual, uncommon, and unconventional are decent neutral choices with a slight leaning in meaning towards societal normativism. Unorthodox is also a fine, middle-brow selection with some religious connotations. Abnormal and atypical are alternatives, but they’ve become bloodless, scientific bores that have actually taken on meanings of their own and have, like queer, become almost entirely ironic in nature. Outré would be a good, neutral choice for the Francophile who wants to describe a thing that is “beyond the limits of what it considered usual, normal, or proper” and carries the notion of “singularly unique,” which is an unfortunate contemporary redundancy to commit on the part of the Author, as “unique” has now essentially lost all meaning, for everyone is today “unique”—one need only a red streak in one’s hair.

Funny and Curious inhabit one category; both have amusing aspects, which can simultaneously describe something strange or unusual. Funny can describe something that arouses suspicion, as well as, like queer, one’s feeling “slightly but undefinably unwell.” Curious contains the obvious meaning of “eager to know or learn something” but can also be used as an adjective or nominative adjective to describe something that arouses the need to know or learn: “This is a curious novel; do you perhaps have a copy that I might borrow?”

Uncanny is a current crowd-pleaser, and is, in my opinion, a trifle over-used and will soon find itself queered. Uncanny describes something that’s simultaneously odd and unsettling, due to the described’s enigmatic nature and potentially threatening manifestation. Bandying nowadays about The Uncanny Valley is common. I’m bothered by the redundancy found in this phrase, as it describes by merely re-describing the definition of uncanny. A perhaps helpful metaphor, however, is the aim here. 

We’ll finish with a mystery. The meaning of the prefix myst-/myster-, which occupies a spot in English by way of Ancient Greek, Latin, and French, respectively, is best translated today as “one whose eyes are closed.” Anything with this prefix possesses a connotation of secret enigmatic strangeness. Moreover, it carries an esoteric sentiment, conjuring images of the soul or the spirit, rather than things material. And, finally, as in the case of things mystic or mystical, symbolic and allegorical significance that transcends human understanding is suggested, religion or the occult often implied. 

The Importance of the Unnecessary

Though a common misconception and favorite mantra of jealous minimalists the world over, “Charles Dickens was” not “paid by the word.” Rather, he was paid by installment. He did have, however, one highly enviable up on Twenty First Century lexoslaves in that he was paid. Nevertheless, no matter how one might want to spin Dickens’s preternatural ability to describe at length any and all things as merely a by-the-word, middle-brow money laundering scam, the fact remains that the gentleman could indeed describe. 

The Description is a lost art. And the Description has received this predicate nominative adjectival pejoration due to our unhealthy obsession with The Useful, The Economic, The Necessary. Why, when one failed poet in brown corduroy asks another yawning novelist on hiatus what his favorite epoch of literature is, does that same overweight adjunct professor always respond with “the Nineteenth Century?” The Nineteenth Century was the heyday of the novel—the heyday of Realism. And it is likely this truth that forces that same school-debt encumbered, part-time bike courier to reply with the century aforementioned.

Good Realist writers were/are concerned with (un)necessary detail. And it seems to be the unnecessary and not the necessary that reminds us of our world. Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, written in 1836, during only his twenty-fifth year on this earth, is not only a post-doctorate-level mirth-driven abdominal workout, but also an A-1 exercise in The Unnecessary. 

So, how does one write The Unnecessary? First, gather together all of your friends who are fluent in Ancient Greek. Now, perform the same task for those who are fluent in Latin. Very good. Now that you are still alone and with quite a bit of free time on your hands, this could be a great time to ponder the fact that the average sentence length, as compared from the time of Shakespeare to today, has decreased over seventy-five percent, from over seventy words per sentence to under fifteen. A much-needed decrease in convoluted thinking, some might say. A woeful increase in small ideas, others would riposte. Either way, it remains true that we use fewer words than ever to describe our world. 

In the olden days, before divorce and UberEATS, there was this thing called a Classical Education, whose interests were, briefly stated, to bestow onto its students a deep, rich, fulfilling connection with the roots of human civilization and a meaningful, unfractured perspective of the world. Sixteenth through Nineteenth Century students were ensconced in this education, and Charles Dickens was one of those lucky students, although he left formal schooling at eleven-years-old to work in a factory in order to amass the funds required to bail his father out of a debtors prison. Students of this time were well-versed in Ancient Greek and Latin, languages heavily reliant on the long sentence, or what is known to better people as hypotaxis. 

Hypotaxis enjoys many long-since-forgotten philological entreaties. A well-constructed bout of hypotaxis is scintillatingly complex. You remember complexity. Although there is much historical and contemporary evidence for the contrary, we do sometimes listen to and trust in those who actually think. Whether it proves competent or incompetent, hypotaxis of a good variety gains the reader’s trust, as it verifies that the narrator or character has thought a goodish deal about what he is saying. Try to convince an editor today to publish an opening sentence like the opening sentence of The Pickwick Papers:

“The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.”

Immediate trust.

Hypotaxis is also inherently polite. Moreover, hypotaxis is sexy; we inherently like to strip away its layers of meaning and tease our mental faculties with its hidden parts. 

Around 1900 or thereabouts, however, there came this newer and therefore, obviously, much better idea called a Progressive Education, which decided hypotaxis evil and the frenetic acquisition of office workers to be the most important pedagogical endeavor. 

In a contemporary world thoroughly wanting in hypotaxis, it is simplicity itself to find the correlation between the loss of the long sentence and the loss of the lengthy description. Consider just one of the hundreds of painstakingly detailed passages in Dickens’s description of a debtors prison:

“It was getting dark; that is to say, a few gas jets were kindled in this place which was never light, by way of compliment to the evening, which had set in outside. As it was rather warm, some of the tenants of the numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on either hand, had set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them as he passed along, with great curiosity and interest. Here, four or five great hulking fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco smoke, were engaged in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer, or playing at all-fours with a very greasy pack of cards. In the adjoining room, some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers, yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age, writing, for the hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances, for the perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose heart it would never touch. In a third, a man, with his wife and a whole crowd of children, might be seen making up a scanty bed on the ground, or upon a few chairs, for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, the noise, and the beer, and the tobacco smoke, and the cards, all came over again in greater force than before.”

According to James Wood’s How Fiction Works, nineteenth-century Realism bolstered the birth of the unnecessary detail: “19^th-century realism…creates such an abundance of detail…that it will always contain a certain superfluidity, a built-in redundancy, that it will carry more detail than it needs. In other words, fiction builds into itself a lot of surplus detail just as life is full of surplus detail.” Dickens’s above passage is uncommon in today’s fiction because of its overabundance of detail. Of course, it paints a nineteenth-century picture, but it serves no ulterior motive but to describe for the reader the scene; it describes itself for itself; it enjoys the existence of itself for itself. The Detail is enough; it is its own end.

Let us turn to a man unafraid to let his pen run wild, the prince of petty himself, Oscar Wilde: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

Wordsymthe’s Fine Wares

I hear a lot of talk nowadays about free speech. The truth is, however, that, for the halfwit, language always costs something. Wordsworth never wrote too much about a word’s worth, as it wasn’t worth it to him; advertisers, however, have considered this idea, and, since then, they’ve been capitalizing on your desire to buy a moment’s identity.

Fancy yourself fond of the Quaint and the Cozy? Perhaps you’re best sold by a bit of the Olde. Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic antiquity have been deemed by Moderns as the kings of all things quaint and cozy. To sell rubbish of the like, the key is to sound not too old, so as to confuse and intimidate your customers with a powerful ancientness. Rather, if a business wants to sell a sleepy evening, just throw, as Rich Boy might have suggested, a few e’s on it. Additionally helpful would be a k or two, or, if you’re of bolder ilk, three. Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe works well on your standard child but take heed—those with a need for tweed require more sophisticated ruses as adults and thusly seek establishments anointed with such titles as Pumblechook’s Publick House, Sigrid’s Steake and Steinn, or Wycliffe Taverne. And a post-prandial stroll would be better appreciated upon Grosvenor’s Greene than upon anything merely green. 

So, you want Cozy but not necessarily Black-Plague-and-dysentery-in-the-chamber-pot cozy? You might, then, just consider something vaguely British. American orthography and speech, although often etymologically older than our dentist-less counterparts’, have been deemed by the hoi polloi as too modern. Indeed, the English have been chosen as the gatekeepers of Cozy, even their books on murder and grand deception donning the title “Cozies.” Yes, simply anglicize anything you’d like by a smidgen, and you have yourself not a boring, old, belt-line-to-your-armpits American movie theater stinking of Stetson cologne, but a Centre Cinema. It’s not curb service, you bean-burning cowboy, rather kerb service. Tire Town is tired, so make it Village Tyres. Whether you’re selling favours, colours, programmes, or connexions, they all, with a bit of the Union Jack jacking things around, sound identical but look somehow classier.

Although I might argue that people find the Brits cute due to the modern caricature of their previous ways resembling something vaguely child-like, another way to swindle someone with the Sweet would be to jettison the Anglophilia for a moment to inhabit the orthography of a true child. This method works best on people with lots of money and no taste. With pockets full and head empty, Kathy stops by the Kit Kat Klub, and Beth, who is not a big reader, by Olive ‘r Twist Cocktails. Mark finds nothing wrong with the Kuntry Kitchen’s rather salty menu, neither Sandy with the Sip ’n’ Sup’s predictable array. And the business performed by the Knick-Knack Knook caters mostly to those with an appetite for local history at second-hand prices. So, k’s are cute yet classless.

Many of your contemporaries will mention to you that they find class systems to be archaic forms of arbitrary hierarchy under which oppression is the main side-dish, yet those same many are just as hungry to purchase their spot. Which shop possesses the pleated trousers on which one may really count? Dave’s Pants Store? or The Regiment for Men? There’s a sale this weekend at both Hal’s Hut and Lorrimer Limited. Where exists the better buy? You are to buy a wedding gift for lost-trusted friend: as regards general quality, does the General Outlet Depot or Regency Room Exclusives ring the sacred bell of fraternity? Fine wares are desired: The Squire Shop, Carriage Trade Fashions, or Joe’s Quality Goods? Wrong. So, why did we choose those other stores? My bet is that we see these titles as resembling those of the nineteenth century’s, a century associated with class. 

And nothing says class to the philistine like anything French. It’s a certainty in English: use more French-derived words, sound smarter. In 1066 A.D. the French talked it over with the English, and English said it would be OK to let them run the island for a while. Therefrom the French perfumed up the place for a few hundred years. Chaucer wasn’t into it, but everyone else who knew what was what did their business in French. Therefore, French words in English hold a special, higher place in the lexicon. If one wants to kill an animal and turn his or her skin or flesh into either a bag, shoe, or dinner, just throw a French appellation on it, and things are all right. 

For example, two gentlemen walk into L’endroit Pour Manger, which they know to be spectacular. One asks what’s in the Soupe du jour. The waitress, new to her craft, ventures a wry one: “It changes every day.” That same gentleman smiles blankly. The other gentleman submits a perusal to the le menu and runs a stubby finger over and subsequently stumbles painfully through pronouncing the following:

• Oeufs durs et crudiés de la saison, “well done, please.”

Our waitress smiles. And for dessert?

• Pommes de terre frites et haricots verts du potager

But illiteracy can also be used to one’s advantage. Imagine that you need to sell tons of garbage in bulk quantities to simple, no-fuss folk with a job to do. The salt of the earth can’t be bothered with the French, neither have they time for English. Who needs to lay a tough coat of caulk, whenever one could grab a tube of Tuff-Kote. Need to slap up something quick? Try Kwik-Kote Paint. Why work hard, whenever Redi-Kash loans are easy? Dri-Kleen spot remover for those meatball sandwich stains—E-Z-Gro fertilizer for the do-it-yourselfer who takes no guff. Even jetsetters sometimes struggle with reading. For that, there’s the fairly priced Nite-Flite Air Fares. 

It’s not Alright

If I were given a dime for every time I’ve heard “but, language is flexible; it changes,” then I should have just a few extra dollars, for my friends, thank God, are not literature undergraduates. The damage that this now worthless phrase has inflicted upon my heart, however, must have already cost me a fortune.

Why is it not alright?

It’s not alright because it’s not all right; it has nothing to do with being stuffed to the nipples with methane. Whenever one embarks upon alright, one is truly searching for all right.

All right means that everything’s “all right,” as in it’s not at all left, as in it’s not at all evil, as in it’s all good. 

Whenever something’s all right, all acts as an adverb, describing the adjective (or nominative adjective) right, which, in this case, is intensifying the rightness. 

To wantonly use alright is not the sign of an understanding soul more accepting of newcomers, rather of poor discriminatory abilities. Surely, homophones can be a nuisance in English, but the fact that we cannot persuade that same homophone-sufferer that listening to audiobooks is not the same as reading should not be our problem to bear. 

Those at fault, however, are somewhat intelligently attempting to truncate the word into a word-pattern similar to those they’ve before seen. Perhaps top form here would be to provide a comparative list of distinctions, and, through this, describe what all right offenders believe to be doing. 

All ready: All serves as a pronoun that describes a group of people who, or things that, are prepared to begin, or ready. “We are all ready to sacrifice grandma.” 

Already: An adverb of time, already describes something that has happened before, or is presently underway with, something else: “We have (are) already sacrificed (ing) grandma.” 

All together: This describes how several things or people are currently oriented, or how something (or someone) is to be done, which is to say that everything or everyone is in one place or group, or that something (or someone) is to be done all at once: “Let’s put the Christmas trees all together, so that we can celebrate all together.”

Altogether: An adverb describing how something is to be done all in one place, or in a group, or otherwise all at once: “Why don’t we just throw the Christmas trees out altogether?” 

The same connective logic applies with a part: The indefinite article (a) and singular noun (part) describe one element that is not necessarily a part of a larger whole but could be: “A part of me believes that my toaster talks back to me, which could be a part of my problem.” A part cannot, although taken apart physically, cannot describe something that has been taken apart.

Apart unparted tempts those again with this tendency to confuse parted forms with the adverbial form, which, in this case, modifies “tear”: “You don’t want me in your house; I’ll tear that place apart.”

Any way: Any is a determiner; way is a noun. Witness and behold: “You could do the job in any way that you like, as long as you get it done.”

Anyway: “Forget it. You don’t have the correct tools, anyway.”

Some time: “I have some time on Friday to meet, if you would like.”

Sometime: “I would certainly like to meet sometime, but Friday does not work for me.”

Now consider the interesting case of a pace and apace.

A pace: A pace consists of an indefinite article (a) and a noun (pace): Select a pace on the treadmill that is right for you.”

Apace: An adverb that means to do something swiftly or quickly: “As I have only thirty minutes to complete five miles, I shall forsooth endeavor to move my legs apace.”

This pace case, although idiotically described, shows the vast area for misinterpretation of which the written word, if wielded incorrectly, is so easily capable, which is a nice segue into pure idiocy.

A lot—Allot—Alot 

A lot is used in English by all to bypass the Words of Number/Amount conundrum, as “a lot” can be used to refer to “a lot” of pencils on the desk, but also “a lot” of chocolate pudding spread all over the sidewalk. Allot is a verb that means to apportion or provide a certain amount of something to someone or another thing. 

Alot: not a word. 

This is all to say that there’s no way around it: Alright is an outright error, for alright is not a word; it attempts to supplant one word that already has its own logic with nothing. Alright attempts to slip the Trojan Horse in through the backdoor but doesn’t hold up. But enough of that talk. 

Fowler, Elster, and many other authorities on the English language hold firm that alright be either fashionable, barbarism, or something worse. The modern Fowler’s, fudged around with by Butterfield, suggests a compromise. Butterfield says that we should keep all right in its rightful place yet further asserts that alright could be used to distinguish from all as a pronoun, as in many of the above examples, as well as simply using alright for the adverbial form, much like we use already and altogether. He suggests two other reasons for a distinction to be made, but malarky smells worse whenever piled upon one another, I assume. 

The Dosser Chronicles: Germany—A Dosser Doubles Down

Halt.

The best description of the German, his environment, and his soul has already been written. To read the most accurate artifact anent the modern Teuton, visit my previous article , or circumvent the middleman altogether by purchasing Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel. For an exact and unbiased treatise on the German language, seek “The Awful German Language,” located in Appendix D of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad. 

***

A dark-haired woman-porter approximately six feet in height, with the shoulders of an experienced dairy farmer and wearing a red jacket with gold fringe, growled at me in what seemed like the Yiddish of a professional wrestler. 

“Fahrkartenkontrolle,” she snarled again.

“Hello.”

Not long after that I felt a large hand persuade me out of the train and provide thereafter a hefty push. It was when I was lying on the main train station’s platform and staring up at the bottom of an enormous brown boot, behind which the milkmaid’s face could be seen laughing deeply, which earned the laughter of her male comrades, that I knew I had reached Bonn, Germany.

Or, at least that is how my memory had recalled the event. I realized later, however, that this is just called “not knowing the language.” In fact, I’m beginning to doubt that I ever was pushed at all. 

Anyone who’s taken an American train or been in an American train station will know that, although he or she might have never been to Germany, Germany’s is better. This is true. Bonn’s train station is a work of some admirability, nearing perhaps the architectural grandeur of at least a half-respectable American museum or public metropolitan library.

But the American Imagination, at some point, went one step further, conjuring up Germany as one sleek, uncut unit of clean lines, smooth rides, and punctual pink heads moving swiftly and logically in and out of crisply closing doors. But this apt metaphor of German automotive expertise does not seem to have yet translated to the railway sector. 

The next two trains for which I was scheduled were both delayed—significantly and ignominiously. The next one didn’t show up altogether. A few moments later, the announcer over the loud-speaker, in so many words, expressed that we suck it up thusly.

Soon after, reliable word was relayed to me from an authentic German source: “Welcome to Germany.” Perhaps in another epoch, was this true: Germans are punctual. No longer. I know no less punctual a people. 

Typically, where there are trains, there are homeless. This naturally leads me to my first observation on Germany’s homeless population: there aren’t any—at least by American standards. Sure, perhaps they don’t have a home, but this isn’t enough to suffice the definition of the term. I’m looking for something closer to my face, screaming, and ostensibly in-touch with things beyond our corporeal world. In any case, it’s easy to dislike, indeed grow Scrooge-like to the American breed. 

Here they read books, speak two or three languages (not one of them German), and place their offering plates out of their own reach, their heads lowered in the Old Style. And they’re polite as well. I don’t always give money to German bums, but, when I do, there’s some Dickensian satisfaction about the whole thing. I should forsooth sooner trust your standard German bum over your standard American landscaper or roofer any day of the week. Your standard German bum has yet some class.

And, speaking of good bums, I’ve realized why there is precisely zero crime in Germany. Apparently, the entire German police force is entirely comprised of beautiful, young women. And who would want to put his hands on a beautiful, young woman? You’ve never lived until you’ve seen a young German policewoman make a U-turn at a busy mid-day intersection. She is in her habitat; she looks right doing it. Her tight ponytail reveals a German face in its rightful place of intensity, her German body covered in what looks most correct on a German: a uniform. To what crime she is reporting, however, is of great mystery to me. There are statistics online stating that crime indeed occurs in Germany. I’m certain, however, that one could walk drunk across Germany in a suit made of legal tender and only come out of it the richer. It is my assertion that someone in Sector 5 had been reported seen without his daily ice cream. 

The Hindus worship the cow in their way, and the Germans do it in theirs. In a fashion hitherto by Yours Truly unseen, everyone is eating ice cream. They flock from all around just to gawk at it religiously through the glass. It borders on a cultish feeling. And the weather and its temperature seem not to affect how the Germans prefer ice cream: they want it cold and by the bucket. I heard one German mother ask her toddler daughter what she wanted to do that afternoon, and the little tike said, “look at the ice cream.” 

I praise Germany’s treatment of children; the children here are treated as adults. In the United States, an independent, well-adjusted, un-murdered child who walks home on his or her own is an extinct species. Everyone in the purlieu of an American child is only there to either end its precious, innocent life, or in some way make it permanently much worse. In Germany, children are walking home en masse. They’re wandering the streets. Taking trains. Frequenting bars. Adults are talking to them—petting their heads. And who wouldn’t want to pet the head of a German child? Barring Asian competition, German babies inhabit the role of cutest babies on Earth—pink, smiling nuggets already in perfect step with the authority of their parents and eager to learn the laws of the land. As Jerome K. Jerome reports about German children in his book Three Men on the Bummel: “‘you get yourself born,’ says the German government to the German citizen, ‘we do the rest’.” 

One does not merely follow the rules in Germany, rather the rules simply exist and to follow them is to follow the highest ideal. And, against all my contrarian sympathies, there’s something to that. I know not if one must trade freedom in order to be safe. But, it must absolutely be said that the German world is a safe one. Imagine a universe where, upon staring at someone in the eyes, no one’s looking to “knuckle-up” or “run it.” “Moin!” Anna says at 9:00. Not much of a morning man myself, I notice this immediately. “Abend!” Hans chimes in at 18:00, and the good fight continues for the Germans. And they’re winning. There is a quality of life here that the Americans cannot touch. I’ve never felt like the biggest scallywag of the populace before, but it is as such now. The people here remind one of a dairy products advertisement: broad-shouldered, trusting folk who work hard, tell it straight, and smell of high-brow cabbage.

There are other kinds of curious effects from this law-abiding soul that one may witness within the populace. This is most readily observed at German crosswalks. If it is your desire to see an American soul squirm, tell it to stand at an empty crosswalk and wait for the red light to turn green. You’ll sooner see it take up arms and storm the Capitol than wait the duration. Germans, however, “are willing, nay anxious” to obey the supreme law of the traffic light. It is, in fact, a curious thing to see a group of Germans, with no cars for miles, waiting for the crosswalk sign to turn green. And they’re all doing it with that unmistakable German Look, which has simultaneously something vacant yet intensely preoccupied about it. A German either stares into your soul or doesn’t notice you at all. And they do it all in the middle of the sidewalk, especially if they’re over sixty years of age. An inordinate number of Germans are also contemplating water, perhaps because they have none. In the faces of these Germans looking at creeks, one can see how the German mind, so many years ago, saw a lake and said contentedly to itself: “See.” 

In crosswalk finality, if you cross during this time, the shibboleth has been uttered, and you certainly feel the biblical stare as you safely glide from one side to another, looking back from your final destination, wondering at the big German bodies.

And I must say that the people here certainly are large. The broadness of the American shoulder is one of worldwide acclaim, and, in more recent years, the broadness of the American waist. But I speak now of pure size. About fifty percent of the women in this country rival my height, and the other half take careful daily measures not to step on me. The men are giants, plain and simple. It’s no wonder that they gave the Romans such a hard time, and why it took the entire world, twice, to persuade them to have a seat. And those coming from countries even farther north look almost majestic in their height. Nordic women could be mistaken, to the pragmatic American eye, for something mythological. 

But make no mistake: they desire to be governed. And the German government is happy to oblige. The bureaucracy in Germany is something of an ultimate test of patience. I really do believe Sigmund Freud to be essentially entirely a charlatan, but I have noticed your standard German citizen to possess a goodish degree of impatience, and I believe that to be due to his relationship to the parental unit: the government. If I were born with the name of Sixty-Four And One-Quarter, I should still feel less like a number than I currently do. It is rumored that Kafka is a humorist. To me, he’s merely German journalism. Franz Kafka is not known for his particularly exuberant feelings about bureaucracy. Kafka’s 1926 “novel” The Castle (itself a reliable visitor’s guide to Germany) is no exception to Kafka’s stark commitment against that stinky, French word, even going so far as to die in order to spare himself the displeasure of having to write a second draft. Notions of the like are apparent in the interactions amongst the populace. I’m waiting for someone to hand me a form to Commence Conversation, and, at its end, another to confirm Conversation Termination. 

But there are obvious positives to this. The sense of perennial hierarchy in Germany keeps in-tact many things that, in the United States, are now but relics of a lost, better time. There’s still the idea of class in Germany, which is generally desirable, knowing intimately the effects of a society without any. The system of contemporary American values currently runs things in quite the opposite fashion; the better one’s lot, the more one tries to prove one’s egalitarianism, and those already at the bottom beat their chests and scratch their loincloths accordingly. Indeed, it is here where the noses of difference can be most seen peeping over the cultural fence. And the German lifestyle, in this case, is far preferable to the American one. Moreover, things work well, there’s enough to go around, and people respect the nighttime hours as hours of sleep. 

As for classroom and educational culture, Germany’s respect for authority and hierarchy takes over. The teachers are the experts, and the pupils are there to learn from them. Students of all ages assume teachers masters or mistresses of their subjects, and, as such, it is poor decorum to interrupt the learning process by interjecting, imposing upon, or otherwise derailing the learning process. And, if a teacher is proven incompetent, then he or she is shown the door and put back on the excellent German unemployment whence he or she came. In the United States, the teacher is often something of a walking target for physical and spiritual pranks. In the inner-cities of The United States, one is better off with a degree in cage-fighting than of any academic subject. To some more “progressive” souls, the German system might seem intellectually limiting. I ask you, then, to compare the success of a standard German education to an American one. You will find it difficult, as there is not one. The Germans drag us through the mud. And, to me, that says something.

But, under the weight of all this German quality and control, one inescapably ugly variable reigns supreme. 

How does it happen? Who allows it? How do German minds conceive it? Why is it not cleaned up? The graffiti, of course. It biffs the foreign eye with great heft. Amongst such genuinely gorgeous villages and landscapes, the cacographic scrawlings of the bottom tenth percentile lay thereon with the omnipresence of a short man at the helm of a governmental structure. What’s more amazing is that the populace seems not only to tolerate it, but rather to embrace it. In the middle of the day, “professionals” of the aforementioned trade take up arms, take it to the streets, and undertake masterpieces. Cars drive by, but the “artists” continue. Pedestrians look on with indifference. The elderly dodder by unphased as Germany is tattooed to the teeth. Here, I side with the Yanks’ take that graffiti is to be contained to areas in which graffiti is the best that area can conceive, and if it occurs elsewhere, shoot it dead with the biggest gun possible.

Notwithstanding her take on graffiti, Germany’s is a culture that seems to value logic—this championing of logic undoubtedly playing a role in its being the highly detail-oriented culture that it is. It might also claim some stake in the German’s reputation for being humorless. 

But to suggest that the Germans possess no sense of humor is a joke. Everything that these people do is for the sake of humor; they sacrifice themselves at the altar of it. They’ve got humor here down to a science and are committed to it on a societal level. Leather shorts? They must be putting it on. Try it. Tell a joke, make fun of someone, make fun of yourself, turn a good phrase, use irony, satirize something, understate the absurd: your average German will best you with his deadpan face. And, just to prove his comedic superiority, he will up you with the ultimate: “I don’t think that’s true.” Indeed, everything that they do is funny, for they are, without a doubt, one of the goofiest groups of people I’ve ever seen. All jokes aside, they’re definitely laughing about something out here. I hear them do it. About what, I’m not sure.

I have a decent guess, though. There’s a practice here called “walking,” which, auricularly, I have difficultly differentiating from the English “walking.” In practice, however, the distinction is tacit. Germans claim that the poles they use to thrust off the ground exist as practice for whenever cross-country skiing is again possible. It is my belief, however, that this be not for the off-months’ practice for skiing, rather more in line with the well-known German past-time of waking up, eating something with mayonnaise, and saying to herself, “but, how do I make it goofier?”

As regards a quick note on food in the main, as previously noted, you better like it with mayonnaise. Or pork. If not, you’re liable to starve. Waking up on Sunday in Germany to an empty refrigerator is another surefire way, as “Shoot On Sight” laws have been applied to all grocery-seeking patrons on Sundays. And, in those grocery stores, which are closed on Sundays, there exists a race therein called “cashiers.” There’s something akin to this race in English-speaking lands, but it is not identical. Your German cashier can be found sitting behind the register in any store where legal tender is accepted. Their language is a simple yet consistent one: “Hallo. Kassenbon? (or) Beleg?  Schönen(es) Tag/Abend/ (or) Wochenende. Tschuss.” They do not waver from those words. 

Thereafter, a shopping cart is thrusted into the back of your knees, and you are swiftly shown the door. Indeed, whenever one enters a German register line, one’s priorities should be sorted not unlike in manner as those of the military officer’s a few days before the big charge, for there’s no going back. But Germans always play it fair. They foreshadow, indeed, warn you of the forthcoming experience the first moment that you enter the store, with those gates that open on the righthand side and close after you go through them. Even the stores have a German personality: start on the right and move to the left. If you try to leave through the entrance gates, thus disrupting the order of things, the gate growls. If you do not buy anything, then you must go through the shameful experience of squeezing your way past the people in line at the cash register, as empty register-lines are always cordoned with a steel turnstile. This aids the German economy significantly.

German dogs, unlike German humans, possess significant autonomy in Germany, indeed enjoy a great deal of freedom here, for dogs always walk sans leash. To see a dog on a leash here has the same effect on the eye as seeing a child on a leash, which always renders an effect of disbelief. Bicycles here are one way for a human to experience the same joy as a dog. There’s an air of superiority exuding from those riding them, and, if you’re in the way of one, expect no clemency.  

German windows are also of an unprecedented nature. Someone in Germany, at some point, must have said to another: “let’s have the best windows in the world.” And then, like a German, he did what they said.

Unlike those in the Anglosphere, Germans like get to the point. Goofy or not, Germans do value directness of communication. This can lead one to interpret them as rude or perhaps soulless. 

I, for one, am not certain of this latter diagnosis. I side a bit more with Jerome K. Jerome’s scientific take on the matter:

“The Germans are a good people…I am positive that the vast majority of them go to heaven… [that the] the soul of a single individual German has [however] the sufficient initiative to fly up by itself and knock on St. Peter’s door, I cannot believe. My own opinion is that they are taken there in small companies, and passed in under the charge of a dead policeman.”

In today’s case, the policeman might be some sort of high-standing bureaucratic official, like a Vodafone representative.

In every case, however, the Germans are, without a doubt, lovely, passionate creatures who try their little, Döner-filled hearts out every day to be the model of what I imagine the closest thing to a Good Person looks like. And, they often succeed. I, too, am certain that the overwhelming majority go to heaven–as long as they don’t have to make it there by train.

Main Points of the German Language:

• “Huh?” is “hää?”; “um” is “ärhm” ; “ow” is “owuh.”

• “Excuse me” is “hmph.” 

• “Hallo” is reserved for shop-owners or done entirely with the eyes—and everything is “schön.” In fact, I’m convinced that one could get away in German with word alone. 

• Or “ja,” which is used in all cases whenever another word cannot be found. In English-speaking countries, the “yes” system is a trifle more varied. We use various “yes types” to convey various moods or indicate certain various forms of subtle information. The German, “ja” is not only sufficient, but a sign of fluency.

• Only educated German women speak German. German men utter collections of grunts very near German; it sounds like it, rings the same consonant-gilded bell, but ultimately falls short of intelligibility. As regards the German language in the main, they both make it up as they go along.

The Dosser Chronicles: France

My first significant impression of The French I had received as a tartan-clad child in Protestant school. I had been freshly diagnosed with ADHD, and Valley Christian had recently implemented for all Kindergarteners the “Good Morning Song,” during which we should praise the Lord by concocting a tune that consisted of singing “good morning” in various languages.

Well, I was rather a scholar with the first bit, which was English. Then there came “Guten Morgen,” which I correctly deduced as some kind of Muppets variant. “Buenos Dias” was next, which perplexed me greatly. Then, “Bonjour.” Well, this was obviously nonsense.

My ability to spell correctly French-derived English words has not changed much since this day. And my spoken-French, I believe, has decreased.

It is, in fact, possible to live a full American life without meeting one French person. We are all aware that they bathe in cheese, have hats that melt on one side, and tend to take the easy way out, but we have never actually seen one. 

My second impression of The French came over twenty years later, when I was living in a West Philadelphia ghetto, where I observed an absurdly tall, absurdly thin gentleman, who possessed the uncanny ability to drink to farfetched excess, roll his own cigarettes with the accuracy and speed of a convict, perform great feats of mathematics with his brain alone, and speak through only his nose a curious dialect that consisted mostly of “fucking American bastards.”

Well, now, here was a friend. 

That French look taught in schools

18 months later and that same man, my good friend Paul, was driving us and various camping materials in his Volkswagen Golf along the northern coast of his native France.

Compagnie:

It was in this charming river-town where I learned my first important cultural difference in France: there are no male bathrooms. Or, at least that’s the only logical conclusion available to us. All the men are piddling outside. 

Karl Pilkington once said that “if you’re not happy looking a knob in the face, there’s something wrong.” 

Full Pilkington investigation on knobs below:

And, whilst I agree with Mr. Pilkington, he does not specify anything as regards urination. Trusted friends have told me that I whinge in surplus, have too many a moan; but, I had been in France for fewer than ninety minutes and had in my time there taken more knobs to the face than I had during all of my American locker-room experiences combined. Yours truly also had his first experience with a Turkish bathroom, which, for those unaware, is, I am sure, a version of practical joke in France. I, for one, left laughing and nodding to my travel-companion in the negative.

Then, I learned another French curiosity, which ended up being similar in Germany: they still smoke here. And you can even do it at the restaurant table. I inquired amazedly with my companion if it were perhaps a lapse in decorum to assault the lungs of other restaurant patrons, whereupon he gave me that classic French look depicted above. To describe it physically would be redundant, but you are certain, whenever looking at it, that you are the dumbest person on Earth.

I and my guide were obliged to spend one afternoon in Paris. The Eiffel Tower, for those in doubt, is indeed real. But, more interestingly, deodorant is optional, whilst kissing strangers is mandatory. In fact, Paris is something of an introvert’s nightmare. Moreover, you are expected to contribute to the chaos, which does not stop, and people are touching you. French trains also trains rival American trains in the Nightmare-Factor. 

It was in Paris where I first saw an interesting soporific that is taken liberally throughout France. In The States, it is called Bocce Ball. Everyone in France is playing the game, though it’s certainly a stretch of the definition of the word. I am told that there is even a professional circuit.

Setting out for our journey along the northern coastline, I noticed something along the road that I really could not believe. I asked again and again of my friend if there were really baguette machines everywhere. Perhaps it were my accent, but he couldn’t understand my laughter. 

The coastline of France, I imagine, is one to rival coastlines across the globe. Take Étretat:

Your humble author caught in an unflattering pose whilst attempting to avoid skin cancer:

A true beauty to behold is that of Le Mont Saint Michel. My being utterly confounded with the most basic of construction methods, indeed feeling great accomplishment to the point of mania at connecting two Legos together with my own hands, the mind baffles at how this feat of architecture was possible in the fifth century. It is my understanding it be general discourse that, if a civilization were to exist in the past, then it were less advanced. I challenge you to visit Le Mont Saint Michel and then your local parking garage, and we may then again clash intellects. 

In general, France feels old, which is something I really like, as I’ve always preferred the friendship of the elderly to those of my age-bracket.

It must be said that I tend to make it my habit to render most of my experiences into a kind of understated, ironic, some might say, humorous bite to the neck. I’ve heard the term “take no prisoners” of my writing style. I should describe my French companion as of a similar ilk. International relations, however, took a turn for the sincere in Normandy.

Show me a man or a woman who can cast his or her eyes upon the over 9,000 Christian crosses and over 150 Stars of David on Normandy Beach without holding back tears, and I’ll show you someone in need of medical examination, if not of the eye, then of the heart. I’m here to report that my companion and I are apparently medically sound. 

I recall a young French girl momentarily locking eyes with the writer. She waved at me, slowly.

Moreover, the French hold a flag-folding ceremony and 21-gun salute (albeit gun-less) every day for the American lives lost in Normandy in the defense of a world ever in pursuit of Liberty. If that’s not love, then I’ve never felt love in my life.

When all matter crumbles, it is the upholding of the sacred contracts that we make to other human souls that stand, survive the hand of time. 

My companion and I did not speak for 45 minutes, which, barring times of sleep, was the longest time that we kept silent from each other, although his English vocabulary be not 1000 words, “fuck” consisting of 990 of them, my French being that of speaking English. It was here that I understood something immemorial.

France is beautiful country—the French a beautiful people.

I met a delightful French woman in England who said to me that “you could put The French in a box.” Whilst I imagine that you could fit anyone in a box, given the right box, they do feel like old friends, the French. I trust them. And that’s more than I can say of most. 

An Honest Delusion: Gilbert Pinfold’s Modern Paranoia

Honesty speaks for itself; it is tacit, easily discernible, and many applaud its virtue. Whilst one would correctly interpret Honesty as a corollary to something sincere or authentic, there is required, to reach this corollary, a process wholly without standard definition, a process that could be indeed entirely without honesty. Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold depicts the darkly comic nightmare of reclusive Catholic novelist and chronic insomniac Gilbert Pinfold, and his progression into the worlds of paranoia, delusion, and acute schizophrenia. Through the synthesis of a guilelessly intimate characterization of Gilbert’s neuroses, and the techniques of unreliable narration befitting of such a character, Waugh both comments on his zeitgeist and renders a surreal story about the inescapable plight of the Modern artist in middle-age. In an interview with Waugh ( transcribed for and located in the back of the Back Bay Books edition of the novel), upon the interviewer’s first question regarding whether “Pinfold is an account of [Waugh’s] own brief illness,” Waugh responds with a hauntingly “Almost exact.”

The novel begins with a predominantly expository chapter that, with the subtle yet steadily strengthening undercurrent of latent paranoia, depicts the origins of Pinfold’s neuroses. One’s suspicions might first find arousal during Pinfold’s fearful impression of “The Box.” A piece of small machinery that ostensibly deals with the curing of ailments and illnesses, The Box, Pinfold opines as “An extremely dangerous device in the wrong hands,” even suggesting it as “sorcery.” Henceforth, the narrative becomes rapidly more self-critical, reporting that Pinfold finds “he had made no friends in late years” and concludes “he must be growing into a bore.” Thereafter, one receives more insight into Pinfold’s main psychological motivators: “His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, and jazz—everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.” Thus far, I’m on-board with Pinfold, feeling the friendship grow with each passing line.

This abhorrence for contemporary life and Romantic yearning to exist in a time other than his own are suggestive of a kind of psychological dissociation all too familiar to artists of a certain ilk, which notion is further bolstered by Pinfold’s distant, God-like description of “his exalted point of observation” and, as if he himself operates in the third-person (the narration style of the book), the detached way he enacts “the part(s) for which he casts himself.” This is what yours truly likes to call The Floating Disembodied Eye, and I observed in this manner for most of my twenties. One reads that Pinfold would “look at his watch and learn always with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much still lay ahead of him.” The symptoms of psychological unrest pester on, as one gleans that “Mr. Pinfold slept badly” and that “For twenty-five years he had used various sedatives.” Pinfold requires on “even the idlest day…six or seven hours of insensibility[,]”suggesting a strong aversion to gregariousness and other more shallow versions of Modern camaraderie. A man after my own heart.

The opening chapter closes with a B.B.C interview with Pinfold., wherein Pinfold describes the young interviewer as “commonplace…slightly sinister…accentless… [having an] insidiously plebian voice… [and] menacing,” making clear his distrust and distain for the younger, blander, globalist generation. Hear, hear. Pinfold also suspects that he can “detect in the interviewer an underlying malice.” After the interview, Pinfold renders a rib-tickler about a recently deceased celebrity whom the interviewers were next to pursue: “Cedric Thorne has escaped you. He hanged himself yesterday afternoon in his dressing-room.” The interviewers, for some reason, were bothered by this humorous take on demise. Then, Pinfold reassures the interviewers that he himself is “free of the fashionable agonies of angst.” Waugh’s quiet diatribe against Modernity’s usurpation of quaint English life, however conveyed through the lens of neuroticism, does not make it a false diatribe; indeed, it is riddled with truths.

Accurately described pathways into psychosis aside, Pinfold’s true mastery of The Paranoid is through Waugh’s complete mastery of craft. He depicts said neurological diversity through prose techniques, chief of which is his not entirely objective rendering of character interactions whilst aboard the SS Caliban, on which Pinfold’s neuroses completely take over.

Pinfold’s paranoia is on full display. He is constantly misinterpreting the words, thoughts, indeed the entire demeanor of everyone with whom he interacts. During a tete-a-tete with a woman who yesterday much enjoyed the conversation she had with Pinfold, Pinfold continues thusly: “I’m afraid I was an awful bore last night… All that nonsense I talked… I shan’t hold forth like that again.” To which, the woman responds, “Not while you were with us…I was fascinated…Please do.” Pinfold overhears further conversations in which he is discussed as a drinker and as addicted to sleeping pills—all such conversations taking on a sinister and highly accusatory manner. Pinfold’s interpretations are indeed ludicrous. And the effect is a humorously dark one (90+% Cacao).

Pinfold often reports auditory hallucinations that occur in his personal compartment aboard the ship. His hallucinations, which he claims to hear through the wires or the vents, range from hearing a priest strongly reprimanding a boy for having “pictures of girls stuck up by [his] bunk,” to the unforgettable hooligans who threaten to “wait until he’s asleep…then…pounce,” call him “a Jew,” and thusly also the apt “Mr.Peinfeld.” It is also through the vents that Pinfold also takes part in a marriage ceremony between his doppelgänger and a young girl named Margaret. 

Perhaps most unsettling is that the scenes are quite effective on readers due to their preying on foibles about which many people become occasionally paranoid, perhaps leading one to empathize with Pinfold, a character one might perceive as insane. 

Waugh’s Pinfold masterfully coalesces the elements of extreme unreliability of narration and extreme honesty of subject matter. Far from pulp sensationalism or tales of The Strange, Pinfold seeks what T.S. Eliot considered to be the most important thing for each generation’s literature: find that era’s Realism. It seems that the only way to convey some truth in today’s effortlessly absurd Clown World is to abstain from suggesting rational, ethical, sane characters to be the best representatives of both individual psychology and common personality at large. It is likely more honest to posit that the denizens of today all share more in common with insomniacs, paranoids, and neurotics, share more with people like Gilbert Pinfold. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is Waugh’s haunting promise of the inevitability of the artist’s mind. That, with each passing hour, one hears growing louder the devil’s laughter. 

Plotting over Plodding

If a story were to perform less like a contention with after-dinner bloat and more like a nimble creature flitting across the open plain, then it is likely plotted well. There are a goodish many reasons why one might write a story that plods—saunters in its pilgrimage over antique wooden bridges, stops to contemplate a riverside cowslip—but to incite action is not one of them. The illustrious humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, amongst his many writerly talents, is known for his highly successful snappiness of story and preeminent command of plot. Though he eventually became known as the king of the plotline, Wodehouse reported that his plotting of a story was often his most difficult task. Something of confessed monomaniac himself, he required plotted perfection, a vaudeville-like story so intelligently manipulated and crafted for quickness, that the reader hardly has time to stop and smell the Realism. Nevertheless, even realistic narratives need to move. In Ukridge, Wodehouse’s 1924 collection of linked short stories, “The Exit of Battling Billson” is a typically agile Wodehousian story, through which, upon an analysis of the story’s six major scene-location changes, one may better understand the art of story-movement, and therefore learn to become a bit more up and at ‘em himself.

We begin our jaunt at The Theatre Royal, Llunindnno. It is here where our narrator, Corky, espies “a large man…(whose) air was that of one who has recently passed through some trying experience.” This man is none other than the notorious Stanley Featherstone Ukridge, and it is he who had just experienced the mild ignominy of being forcibly removed from that same theatre. After Corky denies Ukridge’s request “to bung a brick through the window,” the story, only one-page-old and already riddled with tension and expectation, wastes no time pub-crawling to a different public-house, whose “lights… shone like heartening beacons,” in which location a conversation is had, the story develops, and the prospect of movement again looms large. 

Said conversation involves such familiar tones as Ukridge’s managing of a familiar pugilist named Wilberforce Billson, aptly nicknamed Battling Billson, and how Ukridge “couldn’t be more in the velvet if they gave (Ukridge) a sack and a shovel and let (him) loose in the Mint.” Upon a short repartee about this less than likely aspect of grand fortune, Wodehouse shows no fear in beginning the next paragraph with Corky’s saying: “I was in a curiously uplifted mood on the following morning as I set out to pay my respects to Mr Billson.” And in the short span of three pages, we have already been to three locations, presently culminating at another public house, in which Mr Billson is “‘spillin’ (patrons’) beers’” because “‘(b)eer, he proceeded, with cold austerity, ‘ain’t right. Sinful, that’s what beer is.’” After this sound conception, Wodehouse frog-marches us to the next location: “I stood on the steps of Number Seven Caerleon Street,” Ukridge’s trappings. 

At Ukridge’s digs, Corky and Ukridge discuss the unfortunate circumstance of Battling Billson’s new Puritanical attitudes, from which they suffer to learn that Billson, in addition to the consumption of beer, now also believes that ‘fighting’s sinful.’” It is also described, with great dispatch, that Ukridge, fresh out of boxers to manage, decides to fight the match himself. A rigged fight, but a fight nonetheless. We are swimming right along when we enjoy another swift movement to Oddfellow’s Hall for the lacing up of Ukridge’s gloves. Wodehouse summons the occasion with celerity unmatched, the introduction to the hall occurring in the first sentence of page 187’s main expository paragraph.

For the proceeding six pages, a long scene (by Wodehousian standards) depicts Ukridge’s surprisingly capable boxing prowess, and the sudden relapse of Battling Billson into the throes of prizefighting. As it is viewed from more than a few angles, the scene feels something very much like movement or location change itself, each angle containing new happenings. After this highly entertaining fiasco, directly after learning that “a hush fell” on the audience, we awaken back at Ukridge’s flat: “The little sitting-room of Number Seven Caerleon Street was very quiet and gave the impression of being dark.” Even during the last scene, much action is had, and ultimately the story completes itself, as many Wodehouse creations do, on-time, with in a kind of red-herring-led, fully logical, ironically full-circle ending.

Need every story to thrive off a razor-sharp plot such as Wodehouse’s? Yes—if one wants the feeling of movement and action, the feeling of sprinting alongside a story. Some of us might ask: but when do we change scenes? Wodehouse might argue the answer to be right now. Wodehouse does not linger; a sentence is all it takes for us to traipse across villages, cities, and ideas. This lightning-fast teleportation style is a challenge in wit. To be pithy enough to complete such a cross-town leap is, indeed, also a challenge in prose. More still, it is a challenge in plot. And it is whenever these three writerly elements decide to hold hands that we readers behold something truly special. 

The Over-Under

It is a safe bet that, if one’s voice naturally found its tenor at what might be constituted as a disputatious row, we would, rather quickly, cease to believe he be perpetually angry, but merely irritating. If one’s eyes resembled the First Flood at the sight of every minor misdeed the world put forth, we would equally decipher this candidate as not to embody Empathy itself, but Shallowness. If it were one’s predilection to encode all of one’s statements with hidden meanings, we would likewise understand this character as not infinitely interesting, but rather a purveyor of falsified information. And it is this healthy suspicion of the abject that may be safely translated in understanding why most contrivances of humor today are so outrageously unfunny: there lacks a baseline, irreverence palls as the new orthodoxy, and the signaling that one was “just kidding” makes the whole thing into a total joke. Luckily for us, no philosophical exploration is required to better ourselves as regards this matter. The formula? Euphemism, Understatement, Overstatement. 

Why does this combination work? It greatly enhances the most important elements of humor: tension, misdirection, unpredictability. If things were, as they currently are, one giant, ostentatious break of decorum, then all Funny ceases to exist, and one is merely in observance of a kind of anarchy, a form of government entirely without nuance: pooh-pooh. For a fix, seek no further than a therapeutically winsome dose of nineteenth-century irony. The art of laughter reached perfection in Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat, a novel teeming with decorous interpretations of the indecorous, deadpan observance of the grotesque, and—with the good conscience not to laugh at itself—tasteful overreaction to the mundane; a novel I should wager as a remedy for the recent comedic unpleasantness.

By those much wiser than we, the gentle Euphemism has been exposed over the last hundred years or so as “being fake” or “not keeping it real;” the sagacious horde responsible for this social enlightenment reminds us that not all of us have been blessed with such significant neurodiversity as to know the “real” to be better represented by grunts and bludgeonings. However, we press onward in our ignorance, for we know euphemisms to be the direct path to a good laugh, and that is, after all, what we Cretans desire most. 

Euphemisms are our baseline—a place of secure inoffensiveness—and come ready-made for humor, as their very existence depends on irony. Consider J., the narrator and main character of Three Men in a Boat, and his delineation to a local doctor of his many maladies. Whereupon, said medical professional sniffs out a hypochondriac and writes J. a helpful prescription, which J. “did not open,” and on which was written:

1 lb beefsteak, with

                                                1 pt bitter beer

Every six hours.

                                                1 ten-mile walk every morning.

                                                1 bed at 11 sharp every night.

                        And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.

When J. tenders this prescription to a chemist, who “read it, and then handed it back,” and “said he didn’t keep it,” J. is inclined to ask if the man truly is a chemist, whereupon a wonderful euphemism occurs: “I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.” Through just this wee smidgen of propriety, humor is created. The Wise Ones would have preferred this line to read a bit more in the imperative, contain a few four-letter imprecations, and a gun to someone’s head, but that’s why we remain the unenlightened.

If the Euphemism is our baseline, then the Understatement is our gentlemen’s agreement, a subtle handshake of understanding that the writer enjoys with the reader without offending his sensibilities by asking if he “gets it” or by reminding him it was a joke. The Understatement is the king of humorous narrative-modes. According to Thomas Whissen in his book A Way with Words, the Understatement “is a sophisticated type of irony in which the speaker wants to be tactful and truthful at the same time.” Additionally, Whissen writes that true irony, much like the definition of true wit, is difficult to master, for it requires “two meanings [to be] conveyed, one literal, the other intended.” Furthermore, he reassures us that “[i]t is the tension between the two meanings that produces the ironic effect.”

As a general thing, Three Men in a Boat is laden with Understatement, indeed to the extent wherein one laughs even more at the consideration that he might not be reading humor at all. Consider the simple example of J. describing what it is like to eat whilst camping in the rain: “[r]ainwater is the chief article of diet at supper.” Or, if one enjoys something a little more highbrow, consider J.’s depiction of his aunt and uncle during a bit of DIY around the home: “Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Poger was going to hammer a nail into a wall, she hoped he’d let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done.”

A Bit Under It

However, it is the Overstatement that best expresses the novel notion of incongruity through the unpredictable. Different from the recent Modern phenomena of comedy as a screaming-match of ill-conceived jokes regarding genitalia, classic Overstatement is closer to a form of well-crafted word-level hyperbole. According to Whissen, this effect can be easily achieved with something as simple as adding a “contradictory” adverb to a verb, creating a type of oxymoron: “remarkably unnoticeable… devastatingly plain… bewilderingly simple…distressingly soothing….” For a well-developed Overstatement, we may again consult J.’s rendering of his uncle performing some minor home-improvements: “And then he would have another try, and, at the second blow, the nail would go clean through the plaster, and half the hammer after it, and Uncle Poger be precipitated against the wall with force nearly sufficient to flatten his nose.” Now that is quite a hammer swing. 

Hammer Time

One may also refer to J.’s account of a local mode of transportation: “I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse.” One indeed wonders how J. is privy to this horse’s habits of slumber. These are the more important questions to ask oneself.

It seems, in this case, the old soporific of less is more lives up to its thrice-beaten name. To shamelessly gormandize upon embellishment whilst blatantly semaphoring one’s every half-baked machination are the witless ways of humorless clowns. Do not be like these people. Do not be fooled by the masses who laugh at solemnity masquerading as a good time. Instead, seek a good time masquerading as what seems like solemnity. Seek the bad news turned good. Seek the grotesque turned commonplace. Seek the ludicrous turned monotonous. Seek help.