In Jenny Turner’s long LRB review essay on a couple of books by Stuart Hall (archived), there occurs the following sentence:
And so, too, with the police, and the courts, and schools and churches and social services, as explored in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall.
Does anyone have a sense of what “paddingly” means in the phrase “paddingly Socratic”? The only thing that occurs to me is a typo for “ploddingly,” but that seems unlikely in the LRB, and I am so out of touch with both current UK colloquialisms and current high-Left jargon that I have no useful context for it.
For those who don’t care about high-Left jargon and its discontents, check out William H. Race’s “The Process of Developing a Publishable Paper in Classics: An Illustrative Example and Some Suggestions,” as excerpted at Laudator Temporis Acti; the suggestions seem useful, the first being “Start with primary material and trust your instincts. This is the origin of your original contribution. If you jump too quickly into the secondary literature, it is easy to get lost in a sea of δόξα.”
just a wild guess “used as padding or filler”
“Paddingly” as in “have been padded with a lot of unnecessary verbiage”?
Ah, you’re both probably right. That adverbial use strikes me as so bizarre that it wouldn’t have occurred to me, but I think that must be what is meant.
I am away from my OED subscription now (they knock me off if I log in from the wrong country), but I thought it might be the verb pad ‘to walk softly or with a quiet or muffled tread’ or ‘to tramp along a road; to travel on foot’. From Chambers, here. (With a slight suggestion of or contrast to peripatetic? Formed like swimmingly?)
(Example of padding from Harriet Beecher Stowe here, for example.)
As a Brit and LRB reader (not sure if High Left), it’s not a familiar phrase, but I’d read it (like Xerîb) as analogous to “ploddingly” — either a thinko or a deliberate variation — with “padding” in the verb sense of walking in slippers or soft shoes, suggesting a similar monotony to “plodding” but somewhat softened, if not necessarily lightened. (So not at all in the sense of “filler” as david and AB suggest.)
Hmm… I think that actually makes more sense. Thanks!
Perhaps they avoided ‘ploddingly’ so as not to evoke any hint of Policeman Plod.
My guess was the same as Peter L’s, but never mind “paddingly”, what’s a “Socratic delivery”? Socrates isn’t known for plodding speeches, the opposite if anything (just this morning I was reading the amusing dust-up between him and Protagoras on exactly this point).
Now, “maddeningly Socratic” – that would make sense.
“Socratic” does not seem like an altogether inappropriate description of Policing the Crisis. For example, could a societal reaction to a crime actually precede a pattern of such crimes? I take paddingly, as other have here, to be somehow softening that characterization.
For me “paddingly” evoked the nicely archaic “footpad,” for a fellow walking softly who is not to be trusted (because he has criminal intentions). But that’s probably just me.
Socrates isn’t known for plodding speeches, the opposite if anything
The opposite would be rousing speeches, but he certainly didn’t do those. What he did is put short, leading questions to a captive audience, and then expect answers. Not speeches, but impudence. As do cross-examining lawyers, shrinks and kindergarten supervisors.
That eats into the time budget, because one has to wait for answers. For years now I simply ask rhetorical questions, answer them myself and continue talking at my interlocutor until he (or she!) is reduced to a frazzle of uncertainty.
Of course that doesn’t work with many people. That’s how I recognize these are worth talking and listening to.
Trying to come up with synonyms for what I think it means, maybe sneakily?
The opposite would be rousing speeches
Ah, but a thing can have more than one opposite, though S. himself, the arch-sophist, denies this a little before the passage I mentioned above.
An arch-sophist should know that there are many ways to deal with a claim. Denying it is only one way. Another is to relativize it: “That depends on …”. A further way, the one I favor, is to ignore the claim altogether and talk about other things that make more sense to me.
Ah, you’re one of those people who never answers the interviewer’s question. “And did you personally witness it?” “I am reminded of something a friend of mine once said when we were both visiting a louche bar in Tribeca…”
Depends.. If I agree to an “interview” about a specific matter, I answer questions about that matter – and nothing else. For example, when a programmer calls to ask for help or an opinion, I give it free of mind-fuck. Or if I were summoned to testify in court.
But who would want a “general interview” with me ? I would reduce them to tears of frustration on national tv. It’s reputational suicide for the interviewer, and I don’t want to be charged with aiding and abetting.
To be fair, what the friend said may well be more interesting than the answer to the interviewer’s question.
There actually is a benign, non-evasive version of this, too: answering, not the question that the interviewer actually asked, it is true, but the question the interviewer should have asked, if they had had a better grasp of the issues.
Hat, my reply to your last comment went into “moderation”. Because of language, I suspect.
Moderated for immoderation. Or possibly, immodesty.
There actually is a benign, non-evasive version of this, too: answering, not the question that the interviewer actually asked, it is true, but the question the interviewer should have asked, if they had had a better grasp of the issues.
That’s what I meant by “talk about other things that make more sense to me”. It is an impudence to hint at what someone “should have done”. That’s one thing it’s best to ignore, I find. A word to the wise excites resentment. These days, even a raised eyebrow is probably actionable.
Or the politicians’ version of answering the question you’d rather have been asked and hoping no one notices
Off post topic but precisely post date, in what languages do February 29 have a special name?
Norw.: skuddårsdagen/skot(t)årsdagen, lit. “Shotyear Day”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/leap_day
Catalan: dia bixest m
Chinese:
Mandarin: 閏日／闰日 (zh) (rùnrì)
Czech: přestupný den m
Esperanto: supertago
Estonian: liigpäev
Finnish: karkauspäivä (fi)
French: bissexte (fr) m
German: Schalttag (de) m
Hungarian: szökőnap (hu)
Icelandic: hlaupársdagur m
Ido: bisextila dio
Irish: lá bisigh m
Japanese: 閏日 (ja) (うるうび, urūbi; じゅんじつ, junjitsu)
Latin: dies intercalarius
Northern Sami: gárgádusbeaivi
Russian: високо́сный день m (visokósnyj denʹ)
Spanish: día bisiesto m, día intercalar (es) m
Swedish: skottdag (sv) c
Thai: วันอธิกวาร
Welsh: diwrnod naid m
with “padding” in the verb sense of walking in slippers or soft shoes,
My (BritE) first thought was yes this sense. But I don’t think any suggestion of monotony let alone “plodding”.
A toddler pads across the floor, probably rather meandering, rather as Socrates approaches his conclusion (that is, the conclusion he’s pre-destined you’re going to arrive at) indirectly/via several distractions and side-trips.
Oh, so I could have fucking googled it. Oh, well.
No, wait. Are these technical terms (“leap day”), or names of February 29 (“Leap Day”/”Leapday”), or both?
(Edit: And thanks, mollymooly. My annoyance was with my own lack of basic research.)
Technical term, not used often. Reminders that 2024 is a Schaltjahr are much more common.
The few examples of “paddingly” in GBooks all seem to be invented independently, all referring to walking softly.
Russian: високо́сный день m (visokósnyj denʹ)
The word «високосный» is notorious because Russians always want to spell it «высокосный» — quite understandably, since высоко- ‘high’ is very common and the correct spelling doesn’t appear to mean anything at all. See, for instance, this helpful explainer on the Orfogrammka site.
(It’s actually a mutated descendant of Latin bisextus.)
OED’s two adjectival senses for padding (we note that paddingly has no occurrence in the full OED text):
Neither is effective or lucid here, transformed into an adverb, though ingenuity can find sense if sense is wanted at any price. My interim conclusion, once a natural predisposition to charity is exhausted:
It’s merely an idiosyncratic usage on Turner’s part, regrettably ill-considered and possibly ill-informed, that fails to communicate even to a sophisticated critical readership such as we have here at the Hattery. Either that or it’s a deformation from some other word (patently, or maddeningly said at the very moment a dog barked in the distance?) occasioned by a mis-hearing (or an automated mis-transcription) of dictated text.
that fails to communicate even to a sophisticated critical readership such as we have here at the Hattery.
I think you’re extrapolating unjustifiably beyond the evidence to hand. a) @Hat quotes only half a paragraph from the context; b) the LRB expects a “sophisticated critical readership” that might not very much intersect with the readership here; c) “commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall.” suggests to me we need go read some Hall to understand his style (I don’t know it).
And you seem to be ignoring that several Hatters offered conjectures as to what the phrase could mean. (Sophisticated we might be, but with the time and inclination to go chasing that down: not so much. We might get a better idea watching some of 1991 BBC2 series, or viewing lectures from that link.)
No, wait. Are these technical terms (“leap day”), or names of February 29 (“Leap Day”/”Leapday”), or both?
To expand on what DM said, Schalttag can be used for any leap day in any calendar that has them. German has no specific term for “February 29th” except the date itself (“29. Februar”). Of course, you could say “am Schalttag” and people would probably get that you’re referring to February 29th and not to some leap day in some other calendar, but that’s simply because references to leap days in other calendars are rare in everyday German conversation.
So are you saying that the Norwegian term refers specifically to February 29th, and a different term is used for leap days in other calendars?
Yeah. It can be compared to julaften “December 24” and nyttårsaften “December 31”. A general leapday would probably be a skuddag. A leap month is a skuddmåned.
But generic and specific use aren’t mutually exclusive. Juledag(en) is the name of December 25, but it’s still just one of several juledager.
In modern AmEng, Feb. 29 is not infrequently referred to as Sadie Hawkins Day, although this wiki thing claims this is a “confus[ion]” that was not approved by the original deviser/proponent of the occasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadie_Hawkins_Day I would not expect SHD to be used to refer to a leap day in a calendar other than the Julian-or-Gregorian.
WIWAL, skuddagen was February 24. (ante diem bis sextum Kalendas Martias. See GJ Caesar passim).
But since nobody knew they ought to move birthdays after February 23 forward in leap years, it was still people born on February 29 who had a practical problem. It would be deliciously confusing to treat Feb 24 as the intercalated day for celebratory purposes so that people born on that date in a leap year became homeless.
(Also, last time I googled this [as one does], I learned that the Romans, always a pragmatic people, probably used a.d. VI Kal. Mart. for our Feb 24, and bis VI for Feb 25. After all, it was the second sextus, never mind that it was the first so numbered when counting back from the calends. My Latin textbook just assumed that bis was second in the counting order, not in real time).
Heh, paddlingly may have been intended. Just one letter more: a letter likely to have been missed in typing or expunged in unreviewed editing, through a muddle involving its second occurrence in the -ly element. Muddled or muddied in transmission, but every bit as defensible as paddingly.
The fact that we can’t work it out with any confidence at all is a weighty datum. Vagueness or multivalency is only useful if it produces an intended effect. What was this author’s intention?
I’ve written to Turner c/o the LRB blog address (the only mail I could find for her); I don’t expect to hear back, but if I do I will, of course, report on it.
If you really want to communicate to a sophisticated critical readership, she also has a Xitter account @neepmail
I saw that, but I don’t know how to do Xitter.
As this is a currently active thread, I post my request to the helpdesk here – the “Recently commented” function seems to be broken; it mixes posts that actually have been commented on recently with posts that were last commented on decades ago. Paging John Cowan!
The fact that we can’t work it …
@Noetica: I object (again) to you presuming to speak for “we”. I do not share your view.
Of course the ingeneity (sic, and I wish I’d written that before, if only for DE’s sake) needn’t stop there. We could conceivably be confident that the adverb palterly was intended.
OED:
And for palter:
Yes, we could be confident of that as the mistranscribed word: but perhaps not justifiably. Still, look how Socratic 2.a–c are. Would palteringly have been a better and more pellucid choice than paddingly?
“… so does the artist weave and unweave his image.”
“supertago” is definitely the best one. Makes me want to learn Esperanto so I could use it in a sentence.
Looking for a certain folk song in my collection of recordings, I just came across a use of the verb pad in this Scottish folk song sung by Tony Cuffe, who was a mainstay of the trad music scene in the Boston area when I was living there in the 90s.
My guess would be passingly, a double tap just one key right of what was intended.
passingly
Ingeniosity! I find 13 other vaguely defensible substitutions of one or two letters (mostly adjacent), to modify Socratic. Adding these 13 to the 6 proposals above in the thread, and the original paddingly, we get a list of 20 candidate words that the author might have intended:
We are left with one burning question: How should these 20 be ranked for plausibility in the original sentence? It was this:
We could usefully put the same question a little differently: How should the 20 candidates be ranked for likelihood of Hat not posting a query here for Hatters to consider?