Midgets and midges are essentially “close” synonyms for small entities. It’s hardly a “pun” when they are interchanged. We can only guess which name came first: either the ‘t’ 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 ‘t’ following the common rule for forming diminutives! A smaller midge might plausibly be called a ‘midgette’ with second-syllable stress. Stress and spelling would then change to give us mid’get? Common usage emerged to favor ‘midge’ for insects (in particular the Chironomid) and ‘midget’ for dwarf humans and other species. Nevertheless, BECAUSE LANGUAGES WORK THAT WAY*, ‘midget’ has evolved idiomatic usages as noun and adjective for anything tiny or insignificant. “Don’t bother me with your midget hypotheses.” (skb, 2008!) One can imagine Victor Fet informally telling us that “this particular scorpion is a midget among the arthropods.”
* There’s 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 “A Primer of Freudian Psychology,” 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, “Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” J Clelland (Penguin) -- that’s about 0.002p per swive -- who said there was a financial crisis? Clelland gets quite randy without any naughty words — it’s all florid euphemisms: “He introduced his plenipotentiary instrument into her ...” hardly the stuff to arouse today’s youth although it led to the author’s and printer’s 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: “Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in Nabokov's Bend Sinister,” 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 out—at 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...