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David Jones (discussed here and elsewhere) uses both archaic words gleaned from writers like Malory and modern slang he heard in the trenches of World War One, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. A short way into Part 4 of In Parenthesis (page 68 in my edition) occurs the line “Put the fluence on,” and fluence had the air of one of those Renaissance obscurities he loved so. Indeed, the first entry in the OED under that rubric is “A flowing, a stream” (c1611 CHAPMAN Iliad XVI. 224 That he first did cleanse With sulphur, then with fluences of sweetest water rense). But that didn’t quite seem to fit. The second entry cleared things right up:

aphæretic form of INFLUENCE n., occurring esp. in phr. to put the fluence on (a person), to apply mysterious, magical, or hypnotic power to (a person).
1909 J. R. WARE Passing Eng. 203/2 Put on the flooence, attract, subdue, overcome by mental force. 1923 WODEHOUSE Inimitable Jeeves iii. 31 She was always able to turn me inside out with a single glance, and I haven’t come out from under the ‘fluence yet. 1937 D. JONES In Parenthesis IV. 68 Put the fluence on.. drownd the bastards on Christmass Day in the Morning. 1957 A. E. COPPARD It’s Me, O Lord! ii. 21 It was avouched.. that if you rubbed the juice of a lemon on the palm of your hand you were armoured against suffering.. and as long as the ‘fluence’ lasted other canes broke too. 1958 M. PROCTER Man in Ambush vii. 82 If ever I saw a girl trying to put the ‘fluence on a fellow it was Tess. 1965 E. BRUTON Wicked Saint viii. 105 Put the ‘fluence on him and we’ll be away.

Judging by Google hits, it’s still in use; the Cassell Dictionary of Slang qualifies it as “Aus./N.Z.,” which is presumably why I haven’t run into it before, but if Jones and Wodehouse used it, it clearly used to have wider circulation.

Addendum. In reading G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (see this post), I have come across the following passage on page 191 (he’s discussing the highly sexual wife of a friend): “I don’t say she would have done anything, if it had come to the point; but the fluence was on, and she got me hot. I was glad to get out of that house.”

Addendum (April 2015). Veltman uses инфлюэнция (an obsolete variant of инфлюэнца ‘influenza’) in a similar sense in his 1848 novel Salomea: “Машенька бросилась к окну, взглянула, и все жилки ее затрепетали, кровь приступила к сердцу, дыхание заняло: это был начальный, безотчетный момент инфлюэнции гражданственности на нежные чувства и на национальнее неопытное еще сердце…. – Господи! Что с тобой! – проговорила с испугом няня и, схватив ее на руки, отнесла от окна. Но инфлюэнция уже совершилась…. Когда он, пораженный субъектом, дрожащими руками пощупал пульс Машеньки, Машенька открыла глаза, взглянула па Ивана Даниловича, вздрогнула … а в эту минуту рефлекция, или воздействие пораженных ее чувств совершило обратную инфлюэнцию на Ивана Даниловича, и он, как окаменевший, безмолвно, бездыханно держал руку Машеньки.”

A letter in Sunday’s NY Times Book Review section made me wince, smile ruefully, and then wince again:

To the Editor:
Caroline Weber’s interesting review of “Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon,” by James Sullivan (Aug. 20), fails to mention the foreign origin of one name for bluejeans.
History tells us that Mr. and Mrs. Levi Strauss spent their summers in Provence, France — specifically at Nîmes, where the heavy blue fabric was made. Because the dye was famous and was found nowhere else, the French called it “bleu de Nîmes.” Strauss anglicized the name to “blue denim.” The rest is history.
Ita Aber
New York

The first wince was at the completely false assertion about the Levi Strausses inventing the word, which has been around since the 17th century (1695 E. HATTON Merchant’s Mag. 159, 18 Serge Denims that cost 6l. each). The rueful smile was an acknowledgment of the irrepressible human need to connect stories with famous people (mixed with gratitude that the basic etymological fact, that denim comes from the phrase de Nîmes, is correct). The second wince was at the thought that the Times, once again, didn’t bother to check up on an assertion about language.
By the way, another letter in the same section added a sad detail to the story of the death of the great science fiction writer known to the field as James Tiptree, Jr. (her “real” name was Alice B. Sheldon): “Sheldon revealed that she had struggled against suicidal urges since her childhood. The handwritten suicide note found beside her corpse in 1987 had been written years earlier; she had carefully saved it until she was ready to use it.”

Some languages acquire a standardized literary language more easily than others. I had not realized that Igbo (sometimes called Ibo, which is how you should say it unless you’re a whiz at coarticulated labial-velar stops) had such a long and contentious history of attempts at standardization; Achebe and the Problematics of Writing in Indigenous Languages, by Ernest N. Emenyonu, lays out the whole sorry history:

The Igbo language has a multiplicity of dialects some of which are mutually unintelligible. The first dilemma of the European Christian Missionaries who introduced writing in Igbo land in mid-19th century was to decide on an orthography acceptable to all the competing dialects. There was the urgent need to have in native tongue essential instruments of proselytization, namely the Bible, hymn books, prayer books, etc. The ramifications of this dilemma have been widening over the centuries in complexity.

Since 1841 three proposed solutions have failed woefully. The first was an experiment to forge a synthesis of some selected representative dialects. This Igbo Esperanto ‘christened’ Isuama Igbo lasted from 1841 to 1872 and was riddled with uncompromising controversies all through its existence. A second experiment, Union Igbo, 1905-1939, succeeded through the determined energies of the missionaries in having the English Bible, hymn books and prayer books translated into it for effective evangelism. But it too, fell to the unrelenting onslaughts of sectional conflicts.

The third experiment was the Central Igbo, a kind of standard arrived at by a combination of a core of dialects. It lasted from 1939 to 1972 and although it appeared to have reduced significantly the most thorny issues in the controversy, its opposition and resistance among some Igbo groups remained persistent and unrelenting.

After the Nigerian independence in 1960, and following the exit of European Christian missionaries, the endemic controversy was inherited by the Society for the Promotion of Igbo Language and Culture (SPILC) founded by F.C. Ogbalu, a concerned pan-Igbo nationalist educator who also established a press devoted to the production and publication of educational materials in Igbo language.

Through his unflinching efforts a fourth experiment and seemingly the ultimate solution, Standard Igbo was evolved in 1973…

But some are not happy with Standard Igbo either, notably Chinua Achebe, who delivered a furious denunciation at a pan-Igbo annual lecture in 1999.

Perhaps what was most revolutionary in Achebe’s Odenigbo Lecture was not what he said but rather what he did. Two decades after his initial condemnation of Union as well as Standard Igbo, Achebe had not shifted from his position that Igbo writers should be free to write in their various community dialects unencumbered by any standardization theories or practices. Then as now, he resented attempts to force writers into any strait jackets maintaining unequivocally that literature has the mission “to give full and unfettered play to the creative genius of Igbo speech in all its splendid variety, not to damn it up into the sluggish pond of sterile pedantry.” In keeping with this principle, therefore, Achebe wrote and delivered his Odenigbo lecture in a brand of dialect peculiar only to Onitsha speakers of the language and almost unintelligible to more than half the audience.

I fully support the right of every writer (or other user of a language) to use whatever dialect they choose, but there should surely be a standard language available for public purposes that is intelligible to all, and I hope the problems involved can be overcome.

Anyone interested in Latin kisses (and come on, you know you are) should hurry over to Varieties of Unreligious Experience, where you will find a thorough literary/philological investigation into the words osculum, basium, and suavium, sometimes said to mean ‘a friendship kiss on the cheek,’ ‘a kiss of affection on the lips,’ and ‘a lovers’ deep kiss’ respectively. Turns out “the distinction between these words cannot be primarily one of meaning (whether social or anatomical), but must rather be one of register.” And the reason basium has had far too prominent a place in my image of Latin and suavium none at all is that I’ve read too much Catullus and too little Plautus. You know what they say: it’s all who you know.

On the second page of In Parenthesis, the following passage occurs:

From where he stood heavily, irksomely at ease, he could see, half-left between 7 and 8 of the front rank, the profile of Jenkins and the elegant cut of his war-time rig and his flax head held front; like San Romano’s foreground squire, unhelmeted; but we don’t have lances now nor banners nor trumpets. It pains the lips to think of bugles—and did they blow Defaulters on the Uccello horns.

When I first read this, many years ago, it must have been quite frustrating. Sure, there’s a footnote to tell me “San Romano” refers to “painting, ‘Rout of San Romano’. Paolo Uccello (Nat. Gal.),” but not being in London, I couldn’t trot down to the National Gallery to have a look. Of course I could have scoured the art section of the library for a reproduction, but you can’t really go to that kind of trouble for every passing reference. The OED would have told me that defaulter (in military use) is “A soldier guilty of a military crime or offence,” but that doesn’t go very far in explaining the reference. Now, with the wonders of the internet, I can google “San Romano, Uccello” and find any number of reproductions—this page provides a nice large image, if somewhat dark, while this one is considerably brighter—as well as the start of an article explaining who the “foreground squire” is (the Florentine Captain-General, Niccolo Mauruzzi da Tolentino, who, Wikipedia informs us, was in his 80s when he led his troops at the Battle of San Romano in April of 1432!).

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In David Jones’s hybrid masterpiece In Parenthesis, there’s a soldier with the unlikely name of Dai de la Cote male taile; a footnote tells us to “Cf. Malory, book ix, ch. 1.” Book IX, Chapter 1 of Le Morte d’Arthur begins:

At the court of King Arthur there came a young man and bigly made, and he was richly beseen: and he desired to be made knight of the king, but his over-garment sat over-thwartly, howbeit it was rich cloth of gold. What is your name? said King Arthur. Sir, said he, my name is Breunor le Noire, and within short space ye shall know that I am of good kin. It may well be, said Sir Kay, the Seneschal, but in mockage ye shall be called La Cote Male Taile, that is as much to say, the evil-shapen coat.

So far, so good, but it happens that in French the phrase cote mal taillée means something quite different; this cote is from Latin quota and means ‘quoted value; rating; assessment,” so that faire une cote mal taillée means to make a rough-and-ready assessment, or in general to “split the difference,” to compromise. (Léon Daudet, son of Alphonse, in Vers le roi, says “C’est [le Palais de Justice] le pays de la cote mal taillée, du « Monsieur a raison, mais vous n’avez pas tort », des accommodements entre le vrai et le faux”: ‘[The Law Courts] are the land of the cote mal taillée, of “This gentleman is right, but you, sir, are not wrong,” of compromises between the true and the false.’)

Must create a minor stumbling-block for French-speaking readers attempting Malory. I wonder how it gets translated into French?

John Emerson of Idiocentrism is trying to trace the Aristotle/bottle, Plato/potato school of doggerel back to its source. So far he’s gotten it back to Lord Byron, Don Juan (Canto I, 204; Canto VII, 4) and Conrad Roth of Varieties of Unreligious Experience has found a near-match in Ronsard; if anyone knows of earlier versions, cite away!

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I’ve almost finished Pat Barker’s Regeneration (a wonderful book, and I’m looking forward to the two sequels), and I’ve just run across an interesting conundrum in punctuation. A sentence on page 202 reads “Sassoon, Rivers left till last, and found him lying on the bed in his new room, wrapped in his British warm coat.” I was taken aback by the first comma, which seemed to me wrong (there’s not normally a pause after a preposed object—cf. “Hegel I’ve never been able to read”), until I mentally rewrote it without the comma and had “Sassoon Rivers left till last,” which temporarily threw off the sense of syntax and perhaps suggested a phantom character named “Sassoon Rivers.” So I turn to you, my picky and keen-eyed readers; comma or no comma? (No fair suggesting a rewrite of the sentence; it’s perfectly good English, you’d say it without a second thought, and what the mouth can say, the pen—or pixel—should be able to reproduce.)

Addendum. I’ve just (Sept. 6) run across “British warm” (see comments for explanation) in In Parenthesis, on page 97: “A young man in a British warm, his fleecy muffler cosy to his ears, enquired if anyone had seen the Liaison Officer from Corps, as one who asks of the Tube-lift man at Westminster the whereabouts of the Third Sea Lord.”

A typically multifarious post from The Daily Growler goes on to discuss burgoos, structuralism, golf, and Mezz Mezzrow, but it starts with a reminiscence of how the Growler learned to speak and write:

I could already “speak” by the time I entered public school; I was taught not to use contractions, especially “ain’t,” a forbidden word in my house. “Is not, young man, and if I catch you saying that word again, I’ll wash your mouth out with Lava soap” [an exceptionally harsh soap said to have been made from volcanic pumice ash] and I was afraid of my folks when it came to proper language; they really would have washed my mouth out with Lava had I tried to get away with using it again.

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My current focus on WWI is leading me to revisit David Jones’ wonderful In Parenthesis (review), whose preface includes this dizzying parade of allusions:

Every man’s speech and habit of mind were a perpetual showing: now of Napier’s expedition, now of the Legions at the Wall, now of ‘train-band captain’, now of Jack Cade, of John Ball, of the commons in arms. Now of High Germany, of Dolly Gray, of Bullcalf, Wart and Poins; of Jingo largenesses, of things as small as the Kingdom of Elmet; of Wellington’s raw shire recruits, of ancient border antipathies, of our contemporary, less intimate, larger unities, of John Barleycorn, of ‘sweet Sally Frampton’. Now of Coel Hên—of the Celtic cycle that lies, a subterranean influence as a deep water troubling, under every tump in this Island, like Merlin complaining under his big rock.

I remember the first time I read this, years ago, I was completely flummoxed; now, with the internet and Google, it reveals most of its secrets within seconds. “High Germany” turns out to be a song from the European wars of the 18th century, and “Goodbye Dolly Gray” a song from the turn of the 20th. And the Kingdom of Elmet? Ah, therein lies a bit of Languagehattery. Elmet was a Celtic holdout in what is now the southern part of Yorkshire, around Leeds; when it was overrun by the Angles in the early seventh century, the way was clear for further Germanic expansion and the creation of the kingdom of Northumbria. But before that, probably in the last years of the sixth century, it had sent a band of warriors to Eidyn (Edinburgh) to accompany the men of Gododdin on a last-ditch expedition to push back the Germanic invaders, which came to grief at Catraeth (probably Catterick in northern Yorkshire). The epic Y Gododdin, considered the earliest poem in Welsh and the oldest Scottish poem, eulogizes the heroes of that doomed expedition, including Madog of the small kingdom… except it’s called Elfed (pronounced EL-ved). Why? Because of one of the features of the Celtic languages, the lenition of intervocalic [m] to [β̃], which became /v/ (written f) in Welsh.

The Wikipedia article on Elmet mentions “an acclaimed 1979 book combining photography and poetry; Remains of Elmet, by Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin… re-published by Faber in 1994 simply titled Elmet, and with a third of the book being new additional poems and photographs.” I’ll have to look for it.