BULL!

Time once again to dip into the tiny treasure known as Everybody’s Writing-Desk Book, co-authored by Charles Nisbet and Don Lemon.

For those new to Possumblog, my wife gave me this book as a Christmas present (eerily peculiar, seeing as how she doesn’t know that I have a blog) and it has been a source of sage writing advice and interesting historical flummery ever since.

Today’s excerpt (from the 1901 edition edited by Dr. James Baldwin) is from pages 40-42, and deals with…

6. CONGRUITY OF FIGURES.

An Important Rule.—A sentence, or any complete series of words, is properly congruous only when the sensuous images its several words represent are just as harmonious as are the ideas, or mental realizations, they suggest.

EXAMPLES OF CONGRUITY

Obvious Incongruities.—When Sir Boyle Roche, in the House of Commons, declared how he ‘smelt a rat, saw him floating in the air, and was determined to nip him in the bud’, every one laughed at the obvious incongruity of these three figures in conjunction.

The most patent sort of incongruities of speech are those known as ‘Bulls’, ‘Irish Bulls’, or ‘Hibernianisms’—a product, however, not confined to Ireland. Of such was the somewhat hesitating address of an Irishman to a rather distant acquaintance. “When I first saw you I thought it was you, but now I see it is your brother”. Of such was also the modest reply of an English student when asked what progress he had made in medicine: “I hope I shall soon be fully qualified to be a physician, for I think I am now able to cure a child.” The progress from the cure of a child to that of a full-grown man would probably be quick.

In an old Dublin paper we read: “General — scoured the country yesterday, but had not the good fortune to meet with a single rebel”. A washing-machine was advertised under the title “Every man his own washerwoman”. Grey, in his notes on Hudibras, tells of a lawyer who in an action of battery explained to a judge “that the defendant beat his client with a certain wooden instrument called an iron pestle”.

It is not uncommon to read in the newspapers of a “unanimous resolution, with only one or more dissentient voices”. A vote of thanks is sometimes given to the chairman for his “spirited behavior in the chair”! Chairs have been reported to be “worm-eaten by rats”. Sir Boyle Roche, writing to an Irish nobleman, expressed the hope “if ever you come within a mile of my house you will stay there all night”.

An Irish newspaper, giving an account of Mrs. Siddons’s appearance, relates: “On Sunday, Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful adamantine, soft, and lovely person. . . . The house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold, with thousands of admiring spectators who went away without a sight.” (English as she is Wrote.)

An advertisement was worded, “Two young women want washing”. Another, “Teeth extracted with great pains”.

Not quite so obvious are the following incongruities, which we take the liberty of citing from W.B. Hodgson, Errors in the Use of English:—

“Bacon was the great father and inventor of common-sense, as Ceres was of the plough.” (Sydney Smith.) So that Ceres, the goddess, was a father!

“The pestilential air of Hong Kong destroyed them (as it does everything living belonging to animate and inanimate creation.)” (H.C. Stirr, China and the Chinese.)

“In this book, Lady Morgan embodies her own views in the heroine, who is as wild . . . as ever trod the stage of theater or page of romance.” (Lady M.’s Memoir.)

“We are all Englishmen and men of Devon as you (Lucy Passmore) seem to be by your speech.” (Kingsley, Westward, Ho!)

“It was our duty not to give hasty judgments until both sides of the question were before us.” (Speech of Hon. E.L. Stanley, 14-12-’65.) Hasty judgments may be given after?

“Was he able to dine upon £800 a year, or did he require twice that amount to do so satisfactorily?”—i.e., dine on £800 a year.

The following from Blackmore is either sublime or ridiculous:—

”He roared so loud and looked so wondrous grim,
His very shadow durst not follow him.”

Indeed.

Anyway, what always strikes me whenever I do these little exercises is how much cultural literacy the authors demanded of their readers—we have references to Roche, Butler, and Grey, as well as examples of the 18th century stage and Greek mythology.

And so, with the help of Google, I get some much needed learning up.

As for the title of the post, there is a great Richard Lederer article about Irish bulls and the colorful Sir Boyle Roche in the March 2001 Journal of Court Reporting (Googlecached). Seems Sir Boyle would have had great success deciphering ‘misunderestimated.’

The next bit of needed cultural info is the reference to Hudibras, a series of burlesque poems written by Samuel Butler. Later editions of the books carried engravings by Hogarth and commentary by Zachary Grey:

[…] Another clergyman of literary tastes, Zachary Grey, rector of Houghton Conquest, Bedfordshire, wrote much on church questions, but is mentioned here because of his edition of Hudibras, “with large annotations and a preface,” which appeared in 1744, with illustrations by Hogarth. The text was explained by plentiful quotations from puritan and other contemporaries. Warburton rendered some help, which he apparently thought was not sufficiently acknowledged; for, in his Shakespeare, he said that he doubted whether “so execrable a heap of nonsense had ever appeared in any learned language as Grey’s commentaries on Hudibras.” A Supplement to Grey’s valuable work, with further notes, appeared in 1752. Grey attacked Warburton in several pamphlets, and charged his antagonist with passing off Hanmer’s work as his own. In 1754, Grey published Critical, Historical and Explanatory Notes on Shakespeare. He died in 1766. […]

Sounds like Grey would have enjoyed blogging.

The cryptic (to me at least) reference in EW-DB to a 'Mrs. Siddons' (sorta like someone a hundred years from now puzzling over mononymous stars such as Cher or Elvis) got me to searching, and I found that in her time she was just as much a celebrity as Nicole Kidman or Catherine Zeta-Jones today. An actress with all sorts of juicy history, there is a good biography of her at the Burns Country site and at Encyclopædia Britannica.

Being a big star, she knew the importance of image, and despite not having a swarm of paparazzi around her, she still managed to get herself two-dimensionalized quite a bit. Here is a portrait of her in the National Gallery by Thomas Gainsborough, and then one by Joshua Reynolds, and one by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and an engraving by Adam Buck.

Personally, I still prefer Miss Zeta-Jones.
posted by Terry at 10:58:00 AM