Stan
Kelly-Bootle (to AB): "We don’t seem to have the same problem with
Lewis Caroll and the Alice-embedded Jabberwocky and Walrus & Carpenter
ditties...Finally...At any level of nested inter-novelizing, can we ever find
the fictional novelist OUT-PERFORMING the onlie-begetter, the one who collects
the royalty cheques (if any).Quick SIGHTING...Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has
a character using PALE FIRES to describe the ladies who fail to win Henry VIII’s
attention. ..Without the text at hand to confirm, the term comes over as a
FAMLIAR IDIOM of those times (pre-dating Shakespeare, of course, so possibly an
anachronism?)"
Stan
K-B (to Jansy): larvorium and larvarium may not really differ in the big wide
wonder-world of words. Just as dictionarize and dictionarise are the same
word,...There may well be some JS/VN poetic off-license at work, some punning on
the roots. A Roman entomologist’s toilet might be called a
larvatorium? Genuine neologism (meaning what?); typo (whose?); or playful
orthography ...Some dictionary somewhere may have larvorium, either as an alt.
spelling, or as a word with a totally unexpected meaning. That is a hard lesson
in linguistics: the etymological fallacy. Who would have thought that ‘silly’
(via G selig OE saelig = blessed) would end up so sillily as ‘daft?’ I love DN’s
‘Real and Plausible.’ In one popular song, the ENGLISH ‘Vraie Chose’ becomes the
FRENCH ‘Le Real Thing!’ Vive le Franglais Renversé. (Eng. ‘a souvenir’ = Fr. ‘un
keepsake.’) Verisimilar is VERY SIMILAR to Plausible but a tad
MUSTIER."
A. Bouazza:
"E.L. Doctorow's Loon Lake
(1980) features a poet, Warren Penfield, and chunks of his
poetry are liberally distributed over the
novel..."
JM: Whenever I read Stan,
extraterrestrial jokes pop into my mind. For the
"onlie-begetter"(sic) who collects the royalty cheques, there is one that
reminded me of Zembla:
Q: what's the difference bt. a neurotic,a psychotic and
the psychiatrist?
Answer: the neurotic builds castles in the air, the
psychotic lives in them and the psychiatrist gets paid for the rent.
Concerning stang there's the very visual Mr.Hulot
in one of Jacques Tati's movies, carrying a lamp-pole in a bus and, after
alighting at his destination, carrying along several passengers who'd been
holding onto it, mistaking it for a stang.
My down-to-earth conclusion, qua "larvorium"
(introduced, with stang, by Gary Lippon and not by me), is that it is neither a
neologism nor a "punning on the roots," but
an inoffensive mistake, later corrected in ADA.
Bless and bliss
(aesthetic or otherwise) are equally related (silly/saelig/blessed) and "saelig"
is related to sea and soul (Zee,sea, saelig,Seele) according to Bruno Bettelheim
(on Freud's distinction bt. "soul","mind" and "psyché" following
ancient German beliefs about the souls of the dead inhabiting the
waters, as it happened in ADA, with Lucette, with Hazel...).
Your mustifying
Franglish souvenir led me to VN's archaic "prevene" (prevenir),
which is verily very much alive in Portuguese ( "um homem prevenido
vale por dois", "é melhor prevenir do que remediar"), like his
"omoplates".
I'm in favour of
listening to language on the move, always reshaping itself and being
reborn across dictionarised (thanks,SKB) rigid borders and
oceans.
A. Bouazza might
help me with Meredith, with whose work I'm insufficiently acquainted. Louis
Untermeyer believes that, differently from Thomas Hardy, Meredith, as a poet, is
far superior to Meredith, the novelist. Did Meredith
include fictional-poets in any of his copious
novels?
Alexey, the anagram
with "Avidov" reminded me of one about Salvador Dali ("Avida Dollars") which
might be close to TOoL's "Philidor Sauvage", although in the latter
there are too many tumbling letters to deal with.