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unearths some literary gems.
From Having Fun, by Denis Mackail:
from the foreword:A preface or an introduction or a foreword....suggests that the author isn't such a clown or nitwit as some of the subsequent matter might suggest. "Ha!" says the reader. "A preface;" yet even as he skips it, he feels an increased respect for the rest of the volume.***[Mackail's "system"]I perceive the faint glimmerings of an idea. I seize it by the scruff, I wheedle and cajole it, and presently it ceases to glimmer, and develops a distinct outline. I then pat it on the back, give it a good meal, and prepare a careful scenario from it. I then sit down and write something which has absolutely no connection with it whatsoever.from "Mr. (and Mrs.) Mystery"Mr. Blankett and Mrs. Flaptonfrom "Ten for Tact"Professor Gumm and Doctor Rumpelbach [remember them, from another DK piece? here again, they're offstage characters only, this time joined in the wings by...]that clever Miss Pothecaryfrom "Bradsmith Was Wrong" [another callback--in this case a bookend; cf. previously snippetized story called "Bradsmith Was Right"]an utterly illegible postscript in which I could only distinguish a word that looked like "cheese"from "Calling a Cab"Mrs. Netherhampton--hitherto (and also hereafter, for the sake of simplicity) known to us as Aunt Maudefrom "The Kiss-Effect"[the setting is a soundstage filming session]In the dark little projection-room...a farrago of blithering rubbish was being poured on to the undersized screen. Not that it would be blithering rubbish--or, to be more accurate, not that the public would consider it blithering rubbish--when it had all been cut and edited and arranged in the right order.***"Query shadow," wrote a hand emerging from the sleeve of a pullover. "Query sleigh-bells," wrote another. "Query old joke," wrote a smaller hand with a couple of rings on it.***"Fred! Sam! Mr. Noseworthy!"from "The Courtship of Beano Blennerhassett"A ceremony without young Beano's attendance might be perfectly legal, but the idea had got about, at any rate during that particular season, that it would be much safer if he were there. There was something about young Beano's waistcoats that no mere clergyman or caterer could hope to replace.***Miss Hyacinth Worple-Dewsbury***Miss Worple-Dewsbury's younger sister Cowslip***He put in a rush order for an absolute whale of a waistcoat and the very dickens of a tie.***He plunged into the throng, seized an ice from an astonished dowager, a glass of champagne from a flabbergasted admiral, a plate of sandwiches from a poor relation, and was back again by the gramophone in almost less time than it takes to tell.***[!]He made it sufficiently clear--in spite of innumerable ambiguities, anti-climaxes, ellisions [sic], hiatuses, inversions, oxymorons, pleonasms and one or two zeugmas...that his love was a definite arbutus.from "Romance at Belloni's"the Honourable Algernon Frothingham and the distinctly talented Miss Sunshine Potts***No Kidding, a transatlantic operatta which was positively packing the Palaceum***Carlo's smile and Carlo's adjectives were only waiting to consolidate and crystallize anything that might come their way.from "The Two-Seater""He's asleep!"The evidence of dead silence might have seemed insufficient to some people, since it is quite possible to be awake in a room by oneself without talking, coughing, groaning or kicking the furniture.***She could have wished that she had managed the first [gear] change...with less resemblance to the sound of a giant clearing his throat.from "The Best Man""There was a sort of light in her eyes, and a sort of absolute I-can't-describe-it on her mouth."from "As a Matter of Fact"But this--for grammarians will already have pounced on my use of the pluperfect tense--was before my experience had been enlarged by the incidents which I am about to describe.***The urgent thing that remained was to find out what in the name of thunder he had been doing, and why in the name of everything else he had made such a mystery of it.from "What Noise Annoys an Author?"Hey, not to say ho, for the kind of work that was going to knock that American syndicate endways.***Mrs. Blizzard***Messrs. Snapper and Snapper [house agents]***[narrator's aside upon the introduction of a "young lady" as a second main character]But if you think, now, that he's going to marry her, you're wrong.[I admit I did--and, based on past experience, with no little justification!]***Ideas were coming from Heaven alone knows where, words were being selected from that strange garbage-heap known as the English language; they were meeting; they were running down Mr. Longridge's right arm; they were flowing over his sheaf of paper.***"My name's Hill-Hill. Freda Hill-Hill."***And yet--and yet...Three more very literary dots...***[In various stories, Mackail's characters exclaim "Blank!" or "Oh, blank!" I explored this on Facebook.]In various early 20th-c. short stories I've been reading by Denis Mackail, vexed characters are represented as using "Oh, blank!" as an expletive. I think I've probably seen other British authors of yore use this euphemistic oath as well.So, obviously, "blank" stands in for stronger language, language that might have been deemed unacceptable in the light fiction of that era. What I'm wondering, though, is whether real-life oath-inhibited people ever actually *said* "Oh, blank!" in so many words, or whether "Oh, blank!" was only ever an author's convention, seen in print but never heard, with real-life folks relying on their various other euphemisms.I've just consulted my New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, which I should have done sooner. It notes, for the expletive "blank," that it is "written more often than spoken, but not without uses in speech." (I also usually search old literature via Google Books to research this kind of language stuff—but obviously there would be an unavoidable paradox in this instance!)Incidentally, the note I quoted from Partridge above is in an entry that lumps "blank," "blankety," and "blankety-blank" all together. I'm pretty familiar with "blankety-blank (etc.)" in popular culture. More curious about "Oh, blank!" specifically.A question that even slang researchers might not easily be able to answer is whether "Oh, blank!" actually *originated* in print (as a publisher's precursor to the journalese "[expletive deleted]" that I personally recall from the 1970s), to then pass into oral use; or whether it followed the more typical path of slang in general, arising in oral culture first and then being naturalistically incorporated into fictional dialogue. By the way, Partridge traces the "blank" family of expletives back to the mid-19th century.***
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