Harvey Wallbangers and Tam O'Shanters. Martin Hannan
Читать онлайн книгу.
The trouble with history is that it is written by historians, sometimes long after events have taken place. People lose context, and fail to understand why something happened; for instance, why a word was coined at the time.
‘Baroque’ is usually taken to derive from a Portuguese word ‘barocco’ which supposedly meant a misshapen pearl. The connection was presumably because Baroque Christian art was so gross and over the top – out of proportion – in response to the Reformation. The Italian for Baroque is indeed ‘barocco’.
There is an alternative derivation. Federico Barocci (1526–1612) is curiously not bracketed with the very greatest of Italian artists, but it is often forgotten that his prolific work was hugely influential in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There is a noticeable difference between his early work and his later output, after he had become a lay monk and eagerly embraced the Roman Church’s struggle against the forces of the Protestant Reformation. From being an almost mainstream Renaissance artist, he became a purveyor of massively colourful art and a master painter at that period in Italy, especially Rome, which is the acknowledged forerunner of Baroque. Peter Paul Rubens was just one of the many artists influenced by Barocci.
The point is that Barocci was not his real name. He was born Federico Fiori da Urbino and was given the nickname Il Barocco, a two-wheeled cart drawn by oxen – why, we do not know – from which came Barocci. Given his fame at the start of the period we now call Baroque, is it not more likely that those he influenced acknowledged the inspiration of Il Barocco?
BLIMPISH
We call an old, set-in-his-ways fuddy-duddy a ‘blimpish’ character, and this is a possibly unique example of an eponym that was adopted from an existing name and then reinvented to mean something else entirely.
A blimp is a non-rigid airship, the term first being used in 1915 and supposedly deriving from the noise that was made when someone pushed a finger into the dirigible’s surface. Try poking a balloon and you’ll see why.
When cartoonist David Low of the Evening Standard was looking to satirise the British officer class of the 1930s, he created Colonel Blimp, borrowing the name from the ‘gasbag’ airship. Blimp was old-fashioned, fiercely reactionary and, as Low himself said, ‘a symbol of stupidity’.
The wonderful British film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a ‘blimp’ slightly more sympathetic, but Winston Churchill still wanted it banned because it showed older officers as frankly doddery. The public lapped it up, however, as they loved Low’s cartoons, and ‘blimpish’ took root and is used to describe someone who is out of touch.
BOSWELLIAN
(n. Boswell, Boswellism)
Dr Samuel Johnson’s obsessive admirer James Boswell (1740–95) has given us an eponym which is so apt for our age of bloggers who never miss a detail of the lives of celebrities.
It is thanks to this Scottish lawyer and minor aristocrat, the 9th Laird of Auchinleck, that we know so much about Dr Samuel Johnson whose dictionary is the forerunner of all books which try to delineate the English language – including this one.
His early diaries of his travels in Europe were notable in themselves, but his life of Johnson (1791) and the brilliant journal, Tour to the Hebrides, saw Boswell at his very best, the book being a template for both travel writing and celebrity gossip memoirs. Despite the fact that, by his own admission, he shipped an ocean of booze in his life, Boswell remained a fastidious diarist and wrote of his encounters with famous people and prostitutes alike.
‘Boswellian’ has thus come to describe an obsessive chronicler and fan of another, when it could just as easily mean excessively lustful or practically alcoholic.
BYRONIC
The most common meaning of Byronic is to describe somebody that is both heroic and flawed, much like Lord George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) himself.
The 6th Baron Byron could hardly have been anything other than ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, as he was famously described by his lover Lady Caroline Lamb, not least because he was the son of ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, was born with his right foot clubbed, and endured an ‘interesting’ childhood which involved seduction by his governess at the age of ten, the same age as he inherited the barony of Byron.
He became the first and, some would say, greatest of the Romantic poets who bestrode English literature in the early 19th century. Many decades before an anti-hero was even defined, Byron created a ‘hero’ very much based on himself in Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage, his semi-autobiographical narrative poem that took him six years to complete. In the poem, Byron depicted himself as clever, arrogant, sexually louche, cynical, moody but always brave. Similar tragic and tortured heroes appeared in several more of Byron’s poems and his play Manfred. Byronic heroes littered novels and poems from then on, and their traits can still be seen in our modern anti-hero.
There is no doubting Byron’s personal courage, as he embraced unpopular political causes and played a leading role in the Greek independence campaign, though he died before seeing battle. Nor can his ‘mad’ traits be discounted, so this eponym is definitely accurate.
CADMEAN
(See also Pyrrhic below)
A word that is underused because ‘Pyrrhic’ is overused, ‘cadmean’ is exclusively seen in connection with a victory, for it means a win achieved at great loss to oneself and one’s companions or entourage. Cadmus, the mythical founder of the city of Thebes, needed water for his new metropolis, and sent his followers and friends to fetch the waters from a spring. Unfortunately for them, the spring was guarded by a water dragon who made mincemeat of Cadmus’s people, but not the leader himself. Having killed the monster, only then did Cadmus find out it was a pet dragon of the god Ares, who duly made his life hell on earth thereafter. Winning isn’t everything, especially when you’re up against the vengeful denizens of Olympus.
CAROLINGIAN
Meaning ‘descended from Charles’, this adjective refers to the powerful dynasty of the Frankish kings who ruled much of France and Germany from 751AD to just before the end of the first millennium. In monarchical terms, such dynasties usually take their name from its founding king, but when you consider that the first King of the Franks was Pepin the Short, you can see why the family preferred the name of his father, Charles Martel. Known as ‘The Hammer’, though he never took the title of king, Charles was a great warrior who united the Franks and fought off the Muslim invaders from the south, paving the way for Pepin to take the kingship. Though a good king himself, Pepin was succeeded by his son, another Charles, better known in history as Charlemagne, or Charles the Great.
Martel and Charlemagne were both called Carolus in Latin, so the dynasty came to be called Carolingian, though by rights it should have been named after the true founder, and termed ‘Peninian’. And that’s the long and the short of it.
CHAUVINIST
How does an excessively misogynist person carry the name of Nicolas Chauvin, a simple French soldier in the Napoleonic wars who may or may not have existed? ‘Chauvinist’, both as a noun and adjective, and the condition of chauvinism, are nowadays almost exclusively used in the context of gender differentiation – male chauvinist pigs, usually.
Yet chauvinist originally meant excessively patriotic, and takes its root from Nicolas Chauvin, who was supposedly a foot soldier in the Army of Napoleon Bonaparte and who was distinguished by his blind patriotism, belief in French superiority and devotion to ‘l’Empereur’. He was allegedly badly wounded, even maimed, and may also have been honoured by Bonaparte himself.
The trouble with this