Having just been declared an official Type 2 Diabetic, I was intrigued by these references to sweets (candies) and anti-dulcinism.
Again we see a semantic spread that can impact different readers according to their linguistic backgrounds. Both dulce and dolce are familiar to most educated Anglophones via Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Horace and Wilfred Owen), La Dolce Vita (Fellini), and Dolce far niente (borrowed idiom: the joy of idleness). Here the Latin root is dulcis = pleasant/cool, with not a candy-wrapper in sight. The extension of dulcis to a sweet sugary taste, the consumerist epitome of pleasantness and instant gob-comfort, is rather unfortunate, especially for us diabetics. For us, sweet is now sour, unless it’s artificial.
The remarkable irony is that the Romans had a word for sugar that proved to prophetic ... Drum-roll ...SACCHARON!
English is particularly rich in offering ways of nouning adjectives and other non-noun categories. Our eight parts of speech can be juggled in wondrous ways, witness the verb to noun!
VN had a wide choice going from adjective (sweet=dulce) to noun (sweetness-dulc????). Any of –dom, -ness, -ity, -ment, -ence, -ance, -hood, -itude, etc., readily work semantically, however unfamiliar and ugly some of these suffixed nouns may strike the unforgiving prescriptionist. It’s largely a quirk of fate that certain suffix combinations catch on, while others fade and die.
Dulcitude is a pleasant choice, borrowing the natural Latin noun-suffix, -itudo, as found in multitudo. I can hark back to the majesty of the King James Version: more impressive having Jesus preach to the multitudes than to mere mobs and crowds.
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
On 04/10/2011 09:05, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
A. Sklyarenko: "...the famous writer Pyotr Nikolaevich...says that he is an antidulcinist, a person who doesn't like sweets ("The Event," Act Two). According to A. Babikov..."antidulcinist" hints at Dolce stil novo (the literary movement of the 13th century in Italy) and at Eugene Onegin ('Here was, to epigrams addicted / a gentleman cross with everything: / with the too-sweet tea of the hostess')..."
JM: In Nabokov's EO, ch.6,XLIV, lines 5-6, we read: "Dreams, dreams! Where is your dulcitude?/ Where is (its stock rhyme) juventude?" and he dwells on his choice of the word "dulcitude" to translate "sweetness" (Pushkin's sládost'), to add an archaic touch to his translation, before he'll pair it with "juventude" (mládost').
Nabokov recognizes that "the analogy is strained"*. Perhaps he is partially critical of his indulgence in verbal sweets! Would this make of him a stylistic "antidulcinist," too?
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*"The noun mólodost' ('youth,' as a state or a period) has an archaic form, mládost', no longer in use even in poetry[...] there are passages where mladost' should be rendered by 'youthhood' or by an even more obsolete word. Thus, when ...Pushkin laments the passing of youth and mentions a twinning rof rhyme words that in our times would not come about, one twin being dead - Mecht,mecht! gde vásha sládost'?/ Gde, véchnaya h ney rífma, "mládost' "? - this translator has not been able to resit the temptation of Dreams, dreams! Where is your dulcitude?/ Where is (its stock rhyme) juventude?" It may be argued that in no age has dulcitude-juventude cropped up commonly in English poetry as sládost' - mládost' did in Pushknin's day and that therefore the analogy is strained. It might have been wiser to render the terminals as 'sweetness' and'youth' and explain the situation in a note."