An Actual Oubliette

I had often heard and used the word oubliette, but until a couple of weeks ago I had never actually seen one.

An oubliette is a dungeon with an entrance (usually in the ceiling) but no exit. If you meet a chap you don't like, you can throw him into an oubliette and then forget about him entirely. The French for forget is oublier, hence the name.

Of course, despite the rumours, I don't own an actual dungeon, but the word is so useful as a metaphor that I use it regularly. I've even used the word on this blog here and here. The OED mentions that oubliette is almost always used figuratively. Then, on holiday, I was visiting the castle of Najac and saw this sign:

A ladre, by the way, is a miser. So the sign says Tower of the Misers, Ancient Oubliette. And next to the sign was a door (apologies for the quality of the photos, I had only my phone).

And here is the best photograph I could take of the interior of the metaphor.

It only remains to mention that I also visited Albi, which is the town after which the Albigensian Heresy was named, although it's better known as Catharism, which means purity. Catharism is very important in the history of buggery as I explained in this old post.

Playing Little Roll

All the world, as some minor poet once observed, is a stage and all the men and women merely players. To act upon this stage you need, of course, a script, and that script was once given to you not as a book but as a rolled up sheet of parchment. You were given a roll and thus you were given a role.

The shift from concrete noun to abstract happened in Medieval French before the word had even arrived on these chilly shores and the first role-player in English was John the Baptist* who "from God hath receiued such a rowle, it being inioyned him, to prepare the way of the Lord."

This means that the 98,200 references on the Internet to playing little role rather than a little role read rather awkwardly. Role-play has become a zombie metaphor. If we could forget actors, playing little role would seem fine. But as an actor would only play a little role or a little part, the omission of the indefinite article is liable to raise the thoughtful reader's hackles. Indeed, this whole post comes from a question on the Dear Dogberry page.

The problem is, though, that the "a" suggests importance. Compare and, if you must, contrast:

Elephants play little role in British politics


Elephants play a little role in British politics

The first sentence suggests "little or no" and is final. Are elephants irrelevance...s? Yes. The second sentence suggests that pachyderms do something, probably more than you think, and that the writer is now going to explain exactly what small role they play.

So, what to do? Should one stay true to the moribund metaphor or stride callously onwards into the waste land of contemporary usage? I can't say I'm sure. I would only write of playing a little role, and when I want to dismiss something as an irrelevant elephant I shall use another phrase entirely.

While we're on the subject of actors and their parts, I should inform you that winging it has nothing to do with flying, it is rather instead what an actor does when called in to play a role at short notice and is forced to learn his lines in the wings of the theatre. He can only reasonably do this if he has been given a small roll.

Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road on one huge roll of paper.

That is the only interesting thing about the book.

*So far as I can tell.

Homer Among the Postmoderns

Here is a postmodern metaphor. It's taken from Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America:

The sun was a like a huge 50 cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and lit with a match and said 'Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper' and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.

It's postmodern, you see, because it's got lots of utterly unnecessary details like the match and the newspaper that don't help to describe the sun. It just keeps scuttling along for its own sake.

This is in sharp contradiction to how metaphors used to be used. Here is Homer describing a chap called Simoisius being stabbed:

...he was cut off untimely by the spear of mighty Ajax, who struck him in the breast by the right nipple as he was coming on among the foremost fighters; the spear went right through his shoulder, and he fell as a poplar that has grown straight and tall in a meadow by some mere, and its top is thick with branches. Then the wheelwright lays his axe to its roots that he may fashion a felloe for the wheel of some goodly chariot, and it lies seasoning by the waterside.

Which goes to show that time has no dominion and there is nothing new under the sun. The great thing about Homer is that there are so many translations that you can put poets into the ring and force them to fight for you amusement. Above was Samuel Butler's prose translation. Here is the same passage in Alexander Pope's version:

Short was his date! by dreadful Ajax slain,
He falls, and renders all their cares in vain!
So falls a poplar, that in watery ground
Raised high the head, with stately branches crown'd,
(Fell'd by some artist with his shining steel,
To shape the circle of the bending wheel,)
Cut down it lies, tall, smooth, and largely spread,
With all its beauteous honours on its head
There, left a subject to the wind and rain,
And scorch'd by suns, it withers on the plain

Thus pierced by Ajax, Simoisius lies

Stretch'd on the shore, and thus neglected dies.

And here it is in Chapman's Homer (which Keats first looked into):

Cut off with mighty Ajax' lance ; for, as his spirit put on,
He strook him at his breast's right pap, quite through his shoulder-bone,
And in the dust of earth he fell, that was the fruitful soil

Of his friends' hopes; but where he sow'd he buried all his toil.

And as a poplar shot aloft, set by a river side, 
In moist edge of a mighty fen, his head in curls implied,
But all his body plain and smooth, to which a wheelwright puts

The sharp edge of his shining axe, and his soft timber cuts

From his innative root, in hope to hew out of his bole
The fell'ffs, or out-parts of a wheel, that compass in the whole, 
To serve some goodly chariot; but, being big and sad,
And to be hal'd home through the bogs, the useful hope he had
Sticks there, and there the goodly plant lies with'ring out his grace:
So lay, by Jove-bred Ajax' hand, Anthemion's forward race...

Generally, I prefer Chapman's version; but I think in this passage the Twickenham dwarf wins by a nose.

The Inky Fool contemplating a hair cut

Consider Your Metaphors

We're trying to change the course of the Titanic, it cannot be done in a day.

   -George Papaconstantinou, the Greek Finance Minister, on administering Greece's finances

Greece leaving the Euro

Cold, Hungry Ceilings

The pay ceiling, effectively freezing the earnings of four million public sector workers for at least two years, will bite in 18 months.
   - Today's Evening Standard

Some people would wrongly accuse this sentence of mixing its metaphors. 'How', they would whinge from their imitation-ivory towers, 'could a ceiling freeze or bite?' Such brainless pedants haven't considered either igloos or Napoleon III's private theatre at Fontainebleau, of which a picture below.

Om Nom Nom Nom

Just to Prove that I'm not Entirely Horrible

On the previous page of the Standard to the one I was whinging about earlier, in a review of a book on Henry V, I found this line:

In 1415 came victory at Agincourt, during which the cream of the French nobility was violently curdled.

A beautiful resuscitation of a moribund metaphor. It even avoids the more obvious whipped. The reviewer, Dan Jones, should be knighted immediately.

That said, I am at least 99% horrible, and the remaining 1% is a trifle weather-damaged.

Less handsome than you imagined