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Re: THOUGHTS re: stranger-danger; midges-midgets
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Midgets and midges are essentially ³close² synonyms for small entities. It¹s
hardly a ³pun² when they are interchanged. We can only guess which name came
first: either the t¹ sound was there originally and suffered the fate
common to final consonants (think of forest -> fore^t -> pronounced foray);
or someone decided to add the t¹ following the common rule for forming
diminutives! A smaller midge might plausibly be called a midgette¹ with
second-syllable stress. Stress and spelling would then change to give us
mid¹get? Common usage emerged to favor midge¹ for insects (in particular
the Chironomid) and midget¹ for dwarf humans and other species.
Nevertheless, BECAUSE LANGUAGES WORK THAT WAY*, midget¹ has evolved
idiomatic usages as noun and adjective for anything tiny or insignificant.
³Don¹t bother me with your midget hypotheses.² (skb, 2008!) One can imagine
Victor Fet informally telling us that ³this particular scorpion is a midget
among the arthropods.²
* There¹s a strong metaphorical force at work which is essentially playful
and inventive even at the everyday common-language-user level. Of course,
we admire VN so much because he magnifies that force in dazzling ways and
unexpected directions.
Re-COMIC COsMIC: a midget [sic] detour at the Oswestry second-hand book
market last week, I bought ³A Primer of Freudian Psychology,² C A Hall
(Mentor Books) for 50p (Brit pence) -- prends garde, Jansy, your expertise
will soon be challenged! And for 25p on a nearby shelf, ³Fanny Hill or
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,² J Clelland (Penguin) -- that¹s about 0.002p
per swive -- who said there was a financial crisis? Clelland gets quite
randy without any naughty words it¹s all florid euphemisms: ³He introduced
his plenipotentiary instrument into her ...² hardly the stuff to arouse
today¹s youth although it led to the author¹s and printer¹s arrest in 1749.
Imagine my shock on reading the word GENITAL only to discover the word was
in fact GENIAL. JM and Freud can no doubt explain my lapse. But we are back
to those verbal coincidences and how much significance they hold. There IS a
scientific test, a computer program that would take at most an hour on a
NASA super computer.
Take each headword in the OED. Change each of its interior letters in turn
and check if the resulting word exists in the OED. If so PRINT both words &
definitions. Else continue the interior letter substitutions. For a
3-letter word we would test 25 variants. For a 4-letter word, 25 x 25
variants. And so on throughout the OED. We could then analyze the set of
paired words to see, e.g., what proportion have any semantic correlations
(synonyms, antonyms etc.) If the GRANT allows, we repeat for all other
languages with decent dictionaries.
NB: slighter longer algorithm could produce all meaningul anagrams of each
OED entry. D E Knuth has already done similar work with his selected
dictionary of common 4 and 5-letter words, e.g., testing whether any two
words can be connected via WordGolf single-letter substitiutions.
skb
On 20/09/2008 12:35, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> Matthew Evans: Speaking of "comic" and "cosmic"[...] "sunset midges" are
> actually rendered as "sunset midgets"? I don't want to believe that this is a
> typo, because I am utterly charmed by the idea of a golden twilight dwarf. The
> image conjures an almost Lorelei-like figure, palisade-side, standing in tiny
> silhouette against the setting sun.
>
> SB: Webster's Second gives as definition 3 of midget "the biting midge,
> punkie"...Robert Grossmith: ³Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics
> in Nabokov's Bend Sinister,² Russian Literature TriQuarterly 24 (1991):
> 151-162, mentions:"In Nikolay Gogol (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p.
> 81, there is a reference to "sunset midgets," and in The Real Life of
> Sebastian Knight (New York: New Directions, 1977), p. 138, to "midgets ... per
> forming a primitive native dance in a sunbeam" (in the 1982 Penguin edition
> this is altered to "midges"). One suspects some minor Nabokovian wordplay,
> punning on the midges' small size, a possibility borne outat least in
> relation to the Nikolay Gogol "midgets"by the fact that the latter work
> deliberately exploits the comic potential of misspelling."
>
> JM: Even with the Webster's Second definition approaching midget to midge, I
> think that the wonder remains: both in the suggested image that charmed
> M.Evans and its biting correlate.
> I couldn't understand why Evans linked the dwarf to a Lorelei-like figure: a
> poem by H. Heine, Die Lorelei, describes a youth that is plagued by nostalgia
> about a vaguely remembered old-tale describing a mermaid combing her golden
> hair with a golden comb. And yet, I remembered an indirect reference, through
> Cahrles II and Fleur, to the Lorelei, in PF [ " the wistful mermaid from an
> old tale] and, lo and behold, we find "sunbeam dust" two paragraphs before her
> emergence [He would sweep her out of his chair, his eyes still on his writing
> pad, and stretching herself she would move over to the window seat and its
> dusty sunbeam]
>
> Heine had a peculiar position, among the Romantics (from his exile in Paris,
> he wrote a critical book to introduce the French to German Romanticism and
> their pantheistic, non-classical lust for elves and fairies...).
> Perhaps VN was, distantly, referring to Heine through the midgets? You
> remember that in Ada the mosquitoes are, and similarly "entomologically",
> linked to Chateaubriand...). Kinbote's "Lorelei" appears "in the vestibule of
> sleep" when nymphets are substituted by heaps of putti cherubs...
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hardly a ³pun² when they are interchanged. We can only guess which name came
first: either the t¹ sound was there originally and suffered the fate
common to final consonants (think of forest -> fore^t -> pronounced foray);
or someone decided to add the t¹ following the common rule for forming
diminutives! A smaller midge might plausibly be called a midgette¹ with
second-syllable stress. Stress and spelling would then change to give us
mid¹get? Common usage emerged to favor midge¹ for insects (in particular
the Chironomid) and midget¹ for dwarf humans and other species.
Nevertheless, BECAUSE LANGUAGES WORK THAT WAY*, midget¹ has evolved
idiomatic usages as noun and adjective for anything tiny or insignificant.
³Don¹t bother me with your midget hypotheses.² (skb, 2008!) One can imagine
Victor Fet informally telling us that ³this particular scorpion is a midget
among the arthropods.²
* There¹s a strong metaphorical force at work which is essentially playful
and inventive even at the everyday common-language-user level. Of course,
we admire VN so much because he magnifies that force in dazzling ways and
unexpected directions.
Re-COMIC COsMIC: a midget [sic] detour at the Oswestry second-hand book
market last week, I bought ³A Primer of Freudian Psychology,² C A Hall
(Mentor Books) for 50p (Brit pence) -- prends garde, Jansy, your expertise
will soon be challenged! And for 25p on a nearby shelf, ³Fanny Hill or
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,² J Clelland (Penguin) -- that¹s about 0.002p
per swive -- who said there was a financial crisis? Clelland gets quite
randy without any naughty words it¹s all florid euphemisms: ³He introduced
his plenipotentiary instrument into her ...² hardly the stuff to arouse
today¹s youth although it led to the author¹s and printer¹s arrest in 1749.
Imagine my shock on reading the word GENITAL only to discover the word was
in fact GENIAL. JM and Freud can no doubt explain my lapse. But we are back
to those verbal coincidences and how much significance they hold. There IS a
scientific test, a computer program that would take at most an hour on a
NASA super computer.
Take each headword in the OED. Change each of its interior letters in turn
and check if the resulting word exists in the OED. If so PRINT both words &
definitions. Else continue the interior letter substitutions. For a
3-letter word we would test 25 variants. For a 4-letter word, 25 x 25
variants. And so on throughout the OED. We could then analyze the set of
paired words to see, e.g., what proportion have any semantic correlations
(synonyms, antonyms etc.) If the GRANT allows, we repeat for all other
languages with decent dictionaries.
NB: slighter longer algorithm could produce all meaningul anagrams of each
OED entry. D E Knuth has already done similar work with his selected
dictionary of common 4 and 5-letter words, e.g., testing whether any two
words can be connected via WordGolf single-letter substitiutions.
skb
On 20/09/2008 12:35, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
> Matthew Evans: Speaking of "comic" and "cosmic"[...] "sunset midges" are
> actually rendered as "sunset midgets"? I don't want to believe that this is a
> typo, because I am utterly charmed by the idea of a golden twilight dwarf. The
> image conjures an almost Lorelei-like figure, palisade-side, standing in tiny
> silhouette against the setting sun.
>
> SB: Webster's Second gives as definition 3 of midget "the biting midge,
> punkie"...Robert Grossmith: ³Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics
> in Nabokov's Bend Sinister,² Russian Literature TriQuarterly 24 (1991):
> 151-162, mentions:"In Nikolay Gogol (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p.
> 81, there is a reference to "sunset midgets," and in The Real Life of
> Sebastian Knight (New York: New Directions, 1977), p. 138, to "midgets ... per
> forming a primitive native dance in a sunbeam" (in the 1982 Penguin edition
> this is altered to "midges"). One suspects some minor Nabokovian wordplay,
> punning on the midges' small size, a possibility borne outat least in
> relation to the Nikolay Gogol "midgets"by the fact that the latter work
> deliberately exploits the comic potential of misspelling."
>
> JM: Even with the Webster's Second definition approaching midget to midge, I
> think that the wonder remains: both in the suggested image that charmed
> M.Evans and its biting correlate.
> I couldn't understand why Evans linked the dwarf to a Lorelei-like figure: a
> poem by H. Heine, Die Lorelei, describes a youth that is plagued by nostalgia
> about a vaguely remembered old-tale describing a mermaid combing her golden
> hair with a golden comb. And yet, I remembered an indirect reference, through
> Cahrles II and Fleur, to the Lorelei, in PF [ " the wistful mermaid from an
> old tale] and, lo and behold, we find "sunbeam dust" two paragraphs before her
> emergence [He would sweep her out of his chair, his eyes still on his writing
> pad, and stretching herself she would move over to the window seat and its
> dusty sunbeam]
>
> Heine had a peculiar position, among the Romantics (from his exile in Paris,
> he wrote a critical book to introduce the French to German Romanticism and
> their pantheistic, non-classical lust for elves and fairies...).
> Perhaps VN was, distantly, referring to Heine through the midgets? You
> remember that in Ada the mosquitoes are, and similarly "entomologically",
> linked to Chateaubriand...). Kinbote's "Lorelei" appears "in the vestibule of
> sleep" when nymphets are substituted by heaps of putti cherubs...
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/