Posts by Dr. Boli
THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF.
From Dr. Boli’s Fables for Children Who Are Too Old to Believe in Fables.
Once there was a boy who had a keen pair of eyes and a particularly loud and piercing voice, so he was employed by a syndicate of sheep-owners to watch over their flock. “And if you see a wolf among the sheep,” the leader of the syndicate told him, “you shout ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ at the top of your lungs.”
The boy solemnly swore that he would keep a careful eye out and warn everyone the moment he saw a wolf, and he went to work watching the sheep with unflagging vigilance.
He had been watching most of the afternoon with nothing to report, when suddenly a wolf sprang out of the underbrush and, to his horror, began devouring one of the sheep.
“Wolf! Wolf!” the boy cried at the top of his lungs.
Immediately the leader of the syndicate came running.
“Look here, boy,” he said sternly, as the wolf continued his meal, “what are you trying to do? Do you want the whole village to think we don’t know how to take care of our sheep?”
“But the wolf is eating them!”
“That’s no excuse for such an unseemly ruckus. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And the leader of the syndicate turned and walked away, leaving the wolf to eat mutton until he was satisfied.
The next day the boy was in position again, and once again the wolf leaped out of the brush and began tearing a sheep to pieces.
“Wolf! Wolf!” the boy cried in his piercing soprano.
The leader of the syndicate came running even faster than he had the previous day.
“Now, what did I tell you?” he demanded angrily. “You’re making the whole village think there are wolves about! Do you think that makes them feel secure?”
“But the wolf is right there,” the boy explained.
“I don’t want to be bothered with details! Now, not another peep from you, or there will be serious consequences.” And he turned and stomped away angrily, once again leaving the wolf to eat sheep until he could eat no more.
The next day, the boy was in his place, and once again the wolf leaped out of the shrubbery and began gobbling up sheep.
The boy was not at all certain what to do. He seriously considered just letting the wolf go about his business unmolested. But in the end he remembered that he had sworn a solemn oath to watch over the sheep, and he did what he knew was his duty.
“Wolf! Wolf!” the boy cried.
This time the leader of the syndicate simply called the police and had the boy arrested, and he is now serving six years in juvenile detention for disturbing the peace.
The wolf, meanwhile, ate all the sheep at his leisure; but the members of the syndicate decided that they had never liked sheep very much and were better off without them.
Moral: A comfortable lie beats immoderate truth any old day.
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YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US.
In honor of the thirteenth anniversary of his migration to the World-Wide Web, Dr. Boli is reprinting a few favorite articles from the past thirteen years.
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Thank you for calling the 911 Emergency Services Hotline. All our operators are busy at the moment, but your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.
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All our operators are still busy at the moment, but your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.
Your Yohogania County 911 Emergency Services Hotline is supported in part by a grant from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Medley Administration, which promulgates standards for on-hold music for emergency hotlines nationwide. You may be assured that the on-hold music you are enjoying right now meets the strictest federal standards.
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FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
HOW TO REMOVE AMBIGUITY.
Mary, Queen of Scots, shown with one head but not the other.
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Pronouns are useful tools, but may sometimes cause ambiguity in a hastily constructed sentence. An example (from a Wikipedia article):
Mary, Queen of Scots, at one time owned her head, which was subsequently preserved by Jesuits in the Scottish College, Douai, France, from where it was subsequently lost during the French Revolution.
Here is how to remove the ambiguity:
Mary, Queen of Scots, at one time owned St. Margaret of Scotland’s head, which was subsequently preserved by Jesuits in the Scottish College, Douai, France, from where it was subsequently lost during the French Revolution.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
NEWLY DISCOVERED PORTRAIT FROM LIFE
OF CHARLES ANTHON.
The well-known portrait of Anthon by Mathew Brady.
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The great classical scholar Charles Anthon had much to do with the high standards of learning in nineteenth-century American universities. His textbooks on the ancient languages were widely admired, and the proof of their utility may be found in the fact that many professors resented them for making the students’ work too easy. Dr. Anthon is also famous in Mormon lore as the Columbia professor who was shown a transcribed “Egyptian” inscription from the Golden Plates and pronounced it a hoax, which has been interpreted in Mormon history as “authenticating” it.
Once in a while, it is Dr. Boli’s privilege to make an original contribution of his own to scholarship. Today he is proud to announce the discovery of an original portrait from life of the great Dr. Anthon. It has lain undiscovered for a century and a half among the never-circulated books in a university library, but there is good evidence for its authenticity:
The image was found on the dedication page of The Elements of Greek Grammar, by R. Valpy, with additions by C. Anthon. What is our evidence that this is a portrait from life? The book was donated to the University of California in 1873; before that, it had formed part of the library of Dr. Francis Lieber, Professor of History and Law in Columbia College, New York. Since the volume itself is the 1847 edition of a very-often-reprinted work, and since it is the sort of book one would purchase as a student, but not as a professor of law and history (who presumably has already been through his first year of Greek), we may reasonably assume that it belonged to young Francis Lieber when he was a student at that same college, where he would have seen Dr. Anthon every day. The chain of evidence is strong. This is very probably Charles Anthon as he actually appeared to his students.
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE.
The German language went through a period of intense nativization, when Latinate words were ruthlessly expelled from the language, and German substitutes found, no matter how awkward. Many of us have forgotten that, in the nineteenth century, there was a fanatical group of scholars determined to return English to its Germanic purity as well:
Speechknowledge, or Philology, is one of the branches of Folkknowledge, or Ethnology. Folkknowledge shows us the several stocks to which mankind belong; Speechknowledge, their several ways of speech and the laws which these follow.
Note that, aside from the parenthetical explanations of the invented nativist terms, the only Latinate word in those two sentences is “several,” for which there is no good Germanic equivalent (“different” and “various” being Latin as well).
The movement to Germanicize English never succeeded, and one may well ask why German could do what English could not. Dr. Boli could think of several reasons:
1. Germans have always had a genius for ruthless expulsion.
2. English gave up blackletter type much earlier. German was regularly printed in Fraktur until Hitler’s minions decided that Fraktur was part of the Jewish conspiracy; but German printers had a tradition of putting all the Latinate terms in roman type, so that old German books look like they’ve come down with a bad case of the roman pox. The ugliness of the type was often mentioned by the nativist activists.
3. By the time English was having its own small nativist fad, it was a global language, and for the most part the fad was confined to England itself. In particular, there was a more or less unified English and American market for books and magazine articles. Standard German was mostly confined to one continuous area, most of which came under the control of an empire that was very much interested in establishing a native German culture. It is notable that dialects of German established elsewhere have proved very absorbent of foreign terms and resistant to nativism; witness Pennsylvania Dutch.
4. The English and American sense of humor must have had some influence. Germany made a national industry of its scholarship, and thus made scholars into authority figures. When that English passage quoted above was published in 1858, a large percentage of readers would have burst out into the same undignified derisive laughter that would greet the same passage today. As G. K. Chesterton said, “Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” Germany succumbed to that danger.
“Folklore,” a word invented by Germanicists in the middle 1800s, seems to be the one permanent contribution of the Germanicizing movement in English. It is a good addition to our language, because it is more general than the Latin “legend” or the Greek “myth.” It is also short and easy to read or say. But that the Germanicists utterly failed to introduce “speechknowledge” as a substitute for “philology” must be regarded as a triumph of the true genius of the English tongue.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
A VISIT FROM MRS. PHELPS.
Hi! I’m Mrs. Phelps, of Mrs. Phelps’ Domestic Helps, the widely syndicated advice column for homemakers, here to brighten your life with a great big heaping helping of helpful hints. You remember—you won a visit from me in that contest in Happy Happy Home, the happy happy magazine for happy happy homemakers. By the way, you could get rid of the squeak on that door with only a little WD-40 and an ordinary mascara brush. Don’t thank me—that’s what I’m here for. Do you get tired of this doormat slipping around like that? Just a little bit of chewing gum at each corner can fix it. Put another wad in the center to be extra secure. I must say, you have a lovely living room. Did you know that you can get rid of those ugly fingerprints on the wall with a simple mixture of chlorine bleach and sulfuric acid? Be sure to wear your gloves, ha ha! So this is your desk. When my desk gets to be a mess like this, I carefully sort everything into stacks, label the stacks, tie them up with good butcher’s twine, then pile them in the fireplace and toss in a lighted match. It’s a great way to keep warm on those long winter nights! And did you know you could get those ugly, crusty old bloodstains off your letter opener with nothing more than a can of ordinary paint stripper? Be careful where you’re pointing that, ha ha! If you want to make the sharp end perfectly safe, just pound it about two inches (or five centimeters) into the desk with an ordinary household hammer. You see, the way you’re waving it around now, you could hurt somebody, and we wouldn’t want that to….