Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0020339, Sat, 17 Jul 2010 22:40:03 +0100

Subject
Re: Pythagorean trousers
Date
Body

On 09/07/2010 21:14, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:

When Russian school children learn it [Pythagoras Theorem], they are made to
memorize this couplet:
>
> Пифагоровы штаны
> на все стороны равны
> (All sides of Pythagorean trousers are equal).
>
> Alexey: are there any Russian puns here we need to know about? As written, the
> verse is amusing (rather Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear) but doesn’t seem to
> help mnemonically! Quite the opposite, in fact. The theorem concerns the sides
> of a right-angled triangle (x-squared + y-squared = hypotenuse-squared) and
> it’s easy to prove that these three sides cannot ALL be equal in the Euclidean
> (flat) plane (as specified in the theorem). Interestingly, all three sides can
> be equal In curved spaces of the kind that Nabokov distrusted.
>
> Trousers (also pants, breeches, breeks, kecks) are also funny in English
> literature and idioms. You can be caught with them down (Clinton). Rolling up
> the bottoms is a sign of age (T S Eliot). Dominant wives wear the trousers
> figuratively (Mrs Bennett). At night, Felix folds them over the back of a
> chair with proletarian tidiness (a truly Nabokovian, unexpected insight in
> Despair). The Irish anti-hero improvises: Brian O’Lynn had no breeches to
> wear, so he got an ould sheepskin to make him a pair; with the woolly side out
> and the hairy side in, Sure they’re pleasant and cool, sez Brian O’Lynn.
> We now have the verb, to trouser. Honest money can be pocketed with a clear
> conscience, but obscene Bankers’ bonuses are always trousered.
> Stan Kelly-Bootle.


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