Received thinking gets happy-slapped by reader.
From time to time I write to the OED. It's not like a penpal thing, that would be awful. But I do keep a list of words which interest or confuse or delight me when I read - because, as we've learned, I am twelve kinds of sad when it comes to such things - and occasionally I come across ante- or post-datings which I like to pass on to people as relentlessly obsessed as myself.
Now that the OED is going through revisions for its 3rd, never-to-be-published-in-print-form edition, it has finally revised an entry I wrote to them about, and sure enough my citation and new date have found their rightful place in the annals of scholarship. What is this word, you ask? Well, brace yourselves, because this is going to turn our current understanding of linguistic history on its mofoing HEAD. The word - so shamefully misunderstood for decades - is night-bat.
"Oh, night-bat," you may say dismissively. "The old synonym for ‘bat’, which survives to this day in dialects across the Caribbean. Any fool knows that was not used before the 1650s." Sure, that's what they wanted you to think. I suppose you believe there was no second gunman too. But I, in an act of what I can only describe as reading a book, saw it in Florio's translation of Montaigne, which as we're all well aware came out in 1603. He says, and I think he has a point, that
there were found divers populous nations, in farre differing climates, that lived upon them; made provision of them, and carefully fed them; as also of grasse-hoppers, pissemires, lizards, and night-bats. . .
Try to imagine what this means. For years, lexicographers have been swanning around, secure in the certain knowledge that no inhabitant of the early 17th century would have a clue about night-bats. Oh there might have been one or two rakish professors at the OED who imagined, in an idle moment, some Jacobean courtier mentioning a night-bat - but then they would slap their thighs and laugh - laugh! - with the sheer, giddy impossibility of such a thing. Say "night-bat" to a typical 1620s man in the street - according to Conventional Wisdom - and he would look at you with blank incomprehension and assert, "I have literally no idea what you're talking about."
Just picture the boffins' faces when my email came through. I like to imagine all the philologists sitting around in their operations room, much like the ones in which NASA scientists monitor a shuttle launch - shirt sleeves rolled up, drinking endless cups of coffee, staring at the big screen - when my (brilliant, incisive) note flashed up, perhaps around two in the morning. Perhaps some red lights went on; someone walking past in the background with a clipboard would have stopped and looked up. There would have been a moment of silence - and then, spontaneous applause, cheering, emotional men hugging each other, popping corks. "Hodgeson...wake the Prime Minister."
I offer this memo only to give you all some insight behind the headlines and breathless news reports which will, I'm sure, soon follow.
Now that the OED is going through revisions for its 3rd, never-to-be-published-in-print-form edition, it has finally revised an entry I wrote to them about, and sure enough my citation and new date have found their rightful place in the annals of scholarship. What is this word, you ask? Well, brace yourselves, because this is going to turn our current understanding of linguistic history on its mofoing HEAD. The word - so shamefully misunderstood for decades - is night-bat.
"Oh, night-bat," you may say dismissively. "The old synonym for ‘bat’, which survives to this day in dialects across the Caribbean. Any fool knows that was not used before the 1650s." Sure, that's what they wanted you to think. I suppose you believe there was no second gunman too. But I, in an act of what I can only describe as reading a book, saw it in Florio's translation of Montaigne, which as we're all well aware came out in 1603. He says, and I think he has a point, that
there were found divers populous nations, in farre differing climates, that lived upon them; made provision of them, and carefully fed them; as also of grasse-hoppers, pissemires, lizards, and night-bats. . .
Try to imagine what this means. For years, lexicographers have been swanning around, secure in the certain knowledge that no inhabitant of the early 17th century would have a clue about night-bats. Oh there might have been one or two rakish professors at the OED who imagined, in an idle moment, some Jacobean courtier mentioning a night-bat - but then they would slap their thighs and laugh - laugh! - with the sheer, giddy impossibility of such a thing. Say "night-bat" to a typical 1620s man in the street - according to Conventional Wisdom - and he would look at you with blank incomprehension and assert, "I have literally no idea what you're talking about."
Just picture the boffins' faces when my email came through. I like to imagine all the philologists sitting around in their operations room, much like the ones in which NASA scientists monitor a shuttle launch - shirt sleeves rolled up, drinking endless cups of coffee, staring at the big screen - when my (brilliant, incisive) note flashed up, perhaps around two in the morning. Perhaps some red lights went on; someone walking past in the background with a clipboard would have stopped and looked up. There would have been a moment of silence - and then, spontaneous applause, cheering, emotional men hugging each other, popping corks. "Hodgeson...wake the Prime Minister."
I offer this memo only to give you all some insight behind the headlines and breathless news reports which will, I'm sure, soon follow.