Body Language
"The standing army is only an arm of the standing government."
("Civil Disobedience," first paragraph).
Contributor Suzanne Tureter comments, "All those standing
(foot?) soldiers turn into a single arm as Thoreau zooms out
to a bigger picture, I glimpse the full extent of the Body Politic
here - and it's male. Consider the manly profile of expansionist
warfare in Thoreau's further allusion to the Mexican War a few
lines later - our politicians have been 'using the standing government
as their tool.'"
Special Category:
Possible Puns
"His [Joe Polis's] common word was 'Sartain.'" [The
Maine Woods, Princeton ed., p. 107]
François Specq,
a French translator of The Maine Woods, queries as follows,
à propos of the foregoing sentence in the "Chesuncook"
essay:
"I take 'Sartain' to be a mispronunciation of 'certain.'
But, though Thoreau published 'Chesuncook' in the Atlantic Monthly,
could there be an allusion to Sartain's Magazine, in which he
had published 'Ktaadn'?"
Nice point, François. Thoreau sartainly didn't have
to look very far for a distorted spelling to represent Joe's
accent. And he must have savored the homonymity later on, during
his famous quarrel with Atlantic editor James Russell Lowell
over Lowell's high-handed handling of "Chesuncook."
P.S. And what about Joe POLIS, of all surnames? We'll bet
Thoreau enjoyed the similarity with polis, the Grecian
city-state and prototype of democratic civilization (in Latin,
civis). Whether or not Thoreau chose "Polis"
from among the several ways to spell Joe's name (also seen as
Polus and Porus), he must have relished the irony, since he perceived
in his Penobscot guide those civilized virtues long relinquished
by most Anglo-Americans.
Favorite Folk
Etymology
From Chongbuk National University in Chongju, Korea, YOO Inho, the Director of the English Education
Department, writes that his most fun pun, in "Walking,"
is Thoreau's derivation of saunterer from either "Sainte-Terrer,"
a seeker of the Sainte Terre or Holy Land, or else sans terre,
without land, hence "equally at home everywhere." (For
the record, pedestrian etymologists lean toward Middle English
santren, to muse.)
Prof. Yoo adds that - for him, at least - there's one more
thing about 'saunterer': The pronunciation is absolutely similar
to the Korean word meaning "shake [a job] off your hands"
(saun = hand, and terer = a form of ter-da
= "to dust off, to empty, to rob, to strip).
"If only the word saunterer is spoken, it's an imperative
form, a command: 'Finish with that!' 'Wash your hands of it!'
'Knock it off!' Try it out on the next Korean you meet (but don't
forget to add -yo at the end, to make your request less
rude). So when I am sauntering, the word is triply rich to me.
Besides the English and French derivations, I feel that I am
walking after getting things off my hands."
Professor Yoo is the Korean
translator of Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education,
one in the recent Houghton Mifflin trilogy sponsored by the Thoreau
Society.
Puns You Get When
You Hear Them Spoken, But
...You Might Not Notice Them In Print
This from Richard J. Schneider, editor of The Concord Saunterer.
"My favorite - one that Walt Harding always enjoyed also
- is the one that most people miss in the second paragraph of
'The Ponds' in Walden: An unlucky fisherman who has caught nothing
since morning finally concludes that 'he belonged to the ancient
sect of Coenobites.'"
Hint: soft "c," and pronounce
the diphthong as "ee."
Puns You Get When
You See Them In Print, But
...They Don't Come Across When Spoken
"Really, there is no infidelity, now-a-days, so great
as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the
churches… One is sick at heart of this pagoda worship."
(A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, "Sunday,"
paragraph 42.)
Penny Medrasco of New Bedford, Mass., says that after staring
at this passage a while, she found the pun by underlining just
three consecutive letters.
While We're
On The Subject
Raymond Tripp, the author of a wonderful Walden commentary
called Two Fish on One Hook (1998), found a gem in Walden:
"I'm sure someone has hit upon agri-culture, i.e.,
'agree-culture,' as a takeoff on Christianity as something of
an institutional conspiracy, etc."
["Economy," 56. Both the italics and the hyphen are
Thoreau's.]
We can't agri, Ray - you may be the first. Nobody else
in this year's survey submitted it, and although practically
all checklists and annotators include this dissected polysyllable,
no one but you has explained why Thoreau both hyphenated the
word and italicized the first part.
Puns Created By
The Mere Addition Of An Intensifying Prefix
Rainier Cox of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, thinks that "What
Befell at Mrs. Brooks's" is a slick title for Thoreau's
slapstick narrative of one person after another losing their
footing in puddles, in his journal for 19 March 1856 (VIII, 212).
(By the way, that's the same Mrs. Brooks that Sandra Petrulionis
profiled in the winter 1999 Thoreau Society Bulletin.)
Homonyms
"Furniture! … Pray, for what do we move ever but
to get rid of our furniture, our exuviae; at last to go from
this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned?
It is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man's
belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our
lines are cast without dragging them,-- dragging his trap. He
was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap." ("Economy,"
88)
Debra Kang Dean has pointed out that this wordplay in Walden
involves two homonyms: trap(s) (possibly derived from Old French
drap, cloth) and trap (from Middle English træppe).
"Thoreau refers to personal inheritance and property first
as fetters and baggage, then as traps, until at length the denotative
(though less familiar) meaning of the word traps - personal belongings
- acquires the connotations of its more familiar homonym."
Ms. Dean's News of Home (1999) was
selected for publication in BOA Editions' "New Poets of
America" series.
Métaphore
filée
"If he had had any journal advocating 'his cause,' any
organ, as the phrase is, monotonously and wearisomely playing
the same old tune, and then passing round the hat, it would have
been fatal to his efficiency." ("A Plea for Captain
John Brown," 56.).
Samuel Lachise of Québec City remarks that Thoreau
is playing one organ in two registers. As the word shifts from
instrument of communication to the concrete meaning of church-organ,
why, there we are, seated in the pew, solicited for our offering
and listening to the instrument's (and preacher's) insufferable
wheeze.
Something About
Politicians
"At Passadumkeag we found anything but what the name
implies,-- earnest politicians, to wit… men who talked rapidly…
endeavoring to say much in little… but always saying little
in much." (The Maine Woods, Princeton ed., p. 8.)
Kerry "Kix" Labrescia of Minneapolis sent in the
above favorite, a few pages into "Ktaadn," followed by this comment:
"The politician as a keg seems to have an honorable
precedent in American campaign mud-slinging. When John Hancock
stood for governor of Massachusetts in 1787, opponents derided
him as 'the empty barrel.'"
An Expert Opines
We dared to ask Michael West, author of Transcendental
Wordplay (Ohio UP, 2000) to share his favorite.
Though he found the "challenge too painful, or punfull,"
Prof. West submitted the following from his book, explicating
a short passage drawn almost at random from the Journal
that he believes illustrates one function of Thoreau's double
entendres.
" 'When I criticize my own writing I go by the scent,'
Thoreau claimed (8 May 1852). 'By it I detect earthiness.' Puns
are, appropriately, pungent. Far from being merely clever, Thoreau's
wordplay often provides the earthiness that anchors a more ethereal
insight. Here is the Journal entry:
For years my appetite was so strong that I
fed - I browsed - on the pine forest's edge seen against the
winter horizon. How cheap my diet still! Dry sand that has fallen
in railroad cuts and slid on the snow beneath is condiment to
my walk. I ranged about like a gray moose, looking at the spiring
tops of the trees, and fed my imagination on them, - far-away,
ideal trees, not disturbed by the axe of the woodcutter, nearer
and nearer fringes and eyelashes of my eye. Where was the sap,
the fruit, the value of the forest for me, but in that line where
it was relieved against the sky? That was my wood-lot; that was
my lot in the woods. The silvery needles of the pine straining
the light.
(3 December 1856).
"What an aesthete this Yankee was! His strong appetite
was actually the finicky taste of a sensory epicure. He has affinities
with the American luminists and other such painters. Here he
ranges the woods less like a moose than like James McNeill Whistler,
composing monochromatic landscapes by squinting experimentally.
With a Japanese delicacy, the pines are brushed in as a line
against the sky. As their tops blur into ideal trees and into
his eyelashes, we may well wonder "where was the sap …
of the forest." The passage risks over-refinement, as it
risks a certain woodsman-spare-that-tree sentimentality.
"What pulls it back from both is the penultimate sentence.
Its marvelous pun emphasizes that binocular vision keeps this
observer from being imprisoned by his carefully cultivated perspectives.
The joke is not only ingenious but earthier than anything else
in the passage. The aesthete who strains his light through pine
needles is the same homely soul who enjoys a cheap diet. Yes
- this man saw a lot in the woods."
Celestial Mechanics
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with
planetary motion - or, rather, like a comet, ... since its orbit
does not look like a returning curve ..., it seems as if the
earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. (Walden,
"Sounds," paragraph 8)
Many have commented on the tone, sense, and context of Thoreau's
mythologizing of the train in Walden - making due allusion
to Hawthorne's "Celestial Railroad," etc. - but few
besides Malcolm Ferguson of Concord realize that the engine's
"planetary motion" originates in physics.
Ferguson writes that this is his favorite pun. '' Planetary
motion is where the engine's steam-powered battering ram
piston's thrust is translated into a rotational or planetary
motion to impel the train's wheels to Boston or throughout the
earth's orbit." (Concord Journal, June 29, 2000).
There Was a
Sprite
Named Amphitrite
Randi Claybrough of Gardner, Mass., finds a "sprung pun"
in The Maine Woods:
"There was another steamer, named Amphitrite, laid
up close by; but, apparently, her name was not more trite than
her hull." (Princeton edition, p. 94)
Amphitrite (4 syllables
- don't forget that e),
the name of Poseidon's Nereid wife, the goddess of the ocean,
is unquestionably a trite christening for a ship. But
how can a ship's hull be trite? If we know the etymology,
we know the answer: "Trite" comes from Latin tritus,
"worn out," so it means the same as its Saxon synonyms
"shopworn" and "threadbare." Thus poor, battered
Amphitrite is doubly (amphi?) trite.
Every Wife
Has Such a Shirt
Overheard in: The
Shop at Walden during last year's Thoreau
Society Gathering. Visitors looking over the T-shirts for
sale. Different colors, different quotes from H.D.T. After long
deliberation, a young man unfolds a lavender
shirt and holds it up to
his lady friend's chest.
He:
"Here - perfect for you."
She: "You're right,
yeah… I should get some for my sisters, too."
The shirt: "Always
one has to contend with the stupidity of men."
From Milton to Mamie
O'Rourke
A final
contribution from Samuel Lachise, the armchair philologist of Québec
City:
“In
‘Autumnal Tints’ (Natural History Essays), Thoreau writes beautifully
about the play of sunlight and foliage in the scarlet oak, his favorite tree.
Remember that the scarlet-oak leaf is deeply scalloped,
so that when it flutters, it mingles its earthly substance with
the sky’s light.
The leaves, he writes, ‘dance, arm in arm with the light—tripping it on fantastic points...’
“At this point I’m thinking: Whoa! Nice play on ‘trip the light fantastic’!
But wait – that’s a line from some popular song long after Thoreau’s era--
What’s going on here?
”Found out on the Web that ‘trip the light fantastic’ was coined by
Milton, a poet Thoreau knew well, in L'Allegro (1632): ‘Come and trip
it as ye go, On the light fantastick toe.’ (Thanks, Sheila at
http://www.eosdev.com/logapr00.htm)
“But wait again! Trip has its original sense of ‘step lightly,’ but how
can a toe be fantastic? I assume the adjective here means
‘capricious,’ which etymologically has to do with capering or leaping.
“So now, if I leap ahead 262 years, this expression is revived in J. W.
Blake’s lyrics to the popular Sidewalks of New York, thus:
Boys and girls together,
Me and Mamie Rourke,
Tripped the light fantastic,
On the sidewalks of New York.
“The toe has vanished, and in its place the former adjective
fantastic has slid into the nominal position, as if it were the name of a
dance – a light dance. Another century later, my current dictionary
gives trip the light fantastic as an established idiom.
“In between
then and now comes H. D. Thoreau with his scarlet-oak leaf. In Thoreau’s
version, light—the daylight—is the noun. The leaf trips the
light (dances with it, I suppose—a loose application—by holding
it in its points (its arms). Perhaps the fluttering leaf also half-obstructs
the light, like a rapid-action shutter, and so blends with it. As Thoreau
writes, “you can hardly tell at last what in the dance is leaf and what is
light.”
Reminder: We love Thoreau's puns.
Mail your favorite to puns@calliope.org
or Calliope Puns, 1116 Mass Ave, Lexington MA 02420.