In my yesterday's post I remembered the mention of
New Amsterdam in Ada, but forgot about the Old. Telling Van about her
'dramatic career', Ada says: "he [Bosch] too was hooted by hack hoods in much older
Amsterdams, and look how three hundred years later every Poppy Group pup copies
him! I still think I have talent, but then maybe I'm confusing the right
podhod (approach) with talent, which doesn't give a dry fig for rules
deduced from past art." (2.9)
podhod + hood = pohod +
dohod
pohod - Russ., campaign;
march
dohod - Russ., income,
revenue
Dohod reminds me of Vasen'ka Veslovsky's
pun in Anna Karenin: "Wünscht man Dochots, so hat man auch Klopots"* (Part
Six, chapter XXII). In the same chapter of Tolstoy's novel there is a sentence:
"Весь этот день ей всё казалось, что она играет на театре с
лучшими, чем она, актёрами и что её плохая игра портит всё дело" (All
that day it seemed to her [Dolly] as though she were acting in a theater with
actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole
performance).
*Pseudo-German
Klopots is corrupted Russian hlopoty, "troubles, pains"
Hlopoty - ty = ploho = holop = hlopok -
k
ty - Russ., you (thou, Germ. du)
ploho - Russ., bad,
badly
holop - Russ., serf;
lackey
hlopok - Russ.,
clap; bang; hlópok - Russ.,
cotton
Alexey Sklyarenko