Stan Kelly-Bootle (to JansyM): I wasn’t blaming VN for your creative...Ramsdale conjecture! I’m not even denying VN his wonderfully amusing word-games, anagrams, and teasing puns. I’m saying that none of these childlike trivia makes a significant contribution to his enduring reputation as a narratival and stylistic humourist of genius...Ramsdale is ...it even a deliberately planted allusion seeking our spade work? Pace Jansy, the first things to check are indeed the etymologies. Not just (Rams + Dale) but the place names Ramsdale and Rams-xxxx. We get three plausibly fructuose links: RAM=randy-animal; RAVEN [hraefn] =Edgar Allan Poe?!; GARLIC [hramsa] =vampires.  If these don’t grab you, try the anagrams: Mal de Ars; Les Drama; Le Madras.

 

JM: You must be right. My additional interpretation of "ramsdale" must have arisen by freudian intertia, or vice and it probably better describes my private associations, such as the word "aríete" (from aries?) attributed to the medieval sculpted "battering ram," which I once found in an English poem (otherwise forgotten) in relation to sexual violence. It may not even have crossed VN's conscious (or ucs) mind...