I always thought that ‘FBI’ referred to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, but today I learned that the letters actually stand for the Farmland Bird Index.

Now I will be able to make sense of even the most convoluted plot in an American crime drama. All those agents are in fact engaged in the counting and classification of birds. The veil has been lifted from mine eyes!

FBI Agent

Bird

From today’s Grauniad. Well worth memorising (and adding to).

England’s drought draws attention to the condition of England’s rivers. And England’s rivers – with those in Scotland and Wales – have ancient names, often conferred before the Roman legions came, and passed down almost unchanged to the present. Daily Mail spread on the misery that will last all summer featured the Bewl, the Chess and the Pang. But these are just the start. What about the Mease, the Tees, the Dee, the Cree, the Nar, the Ter and the Ver? Or the Box, the Yox and the Axe? Or the Neet, the Fleet and the Smite? Do not forget, either, the Ebble, the Piddle, the Polly, the Nadder or the Wandle. Or the Feshie, the Mashie and the Wissey. Then there are the Lugg, the Ugie, the Meggat, the Tud, the Lud and the Irt. Like these other rivers, the Wampool, the Snizort, the Skirfare, the Deveron, the Cocker and the Stinchar speak of a deep Britain, to which we are more connected than we realise. Or would be if it rained.

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

Robert Pirosh, in a 1934 letter reproduced at Letters Of Note

Not just any dining room… but the dining room on the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin 129 Hindenburg!

More pictures at airships.net

An amusing letter in today’s Grauniad:

Having written a piece of music based on the sinking of the Titanic, I might perhaps be lumped with the Titanoraks (Pass notes, G2, 5 March). Inevitably this 1969 piece is being performed several times this year. Recently a young Belgian composer contacted me to ask if his composition on the subject might be performed alongside mine in his country. His piece is written from the point of view of the iceberg.

Gavin Bryars

Billesdon, Leicestershire

Today is Collop Monday, so here is what you ought to be eating (and a tip on what to do with the servants):

PIG-FRY – This is a Collop Monday dish, and is a necessary appendage to “cracklings”. It consists of the fattest parts of the entrails of the pig, broiled in an oven. Numerous herbs, spices, &c. are added to it ; and upon the whole, it is a more sightly “course” at table than fat cracklings. Sometimes the good wife indulges her house with a pancake, as an assurance that she has not forgotten to provide for Shrove Tuesday. The servants are also treated with “a drop of something good” on this occasion; and are allowed (if they have nothing of importance to require their immediate attention) to spend the afternoon in conviviality.

from The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction: Containing Original Essays; Historical Narratives; Biographical Memoirs; Sketches Of Society; Topographical Descriptions; Novels And Tales; Anecdotes; Select Extracts From New And Expensive Works; Poetry, Original And Selected; The Spirit Of The Public Journals; Discoveries In The Arts And Sciences; Useful Domestic Hints; &c. &c. &c., Vol. XIII (1829)

Thanks to Ian Visits for reminding us all.

In Elizabethan England, “the verge” was an area of legal jurisdiction, defined as the territory within a twelve-mile radius of the body of the Queen, wherever she happened to be. Thus, a sort of legal, royal “aura”.

Does anybody know if the verge still exists in the present day, at least in (legal) theory?

And lo!, we come to the two thousandth postage at Hooting Yard. (Two thousand, that is, in the current format. There are an additional nine-hundred-and-fifty or so postages in the 2003 -2006 Archive.) I suggested divers methods of celebration when we hit one thousand, so you might want to go and read that.

Now there are so many posts that, were each one a year, they would stretch back as near as dammit to the birth of Christ, I am minded to mark two thousand more quietly. Hooting Yard is, I hope, quite clearly a place for those intoxicated by love of words. So what better way to celebrate than with a quotation containing an extraordinary, and sadly neglected, coinage?

I retired myselfe among the merrie muses, and by the worke of my pen and inke, have dezinkhornifistibulated a fantasticall Rapsody of dialogisme, to the end that I would not be found an idle drone among so many famous teachers and professors of noble languages.

That is from the preface to Ortho-epia Gallica by John Eliot (1593). According to Charles Nicholl, “the Ortho-epia Gallica is a curious and colourful work : ostensibly a language-manual, of the type very popular in cosmopolitan London, it turns out on closer inspection to be a lampoon of other language-manuals and of the foreigners who wrote them”.

My source is Charles Nicholl’s A Cup Of News : The Life Of Thomas Nashe (1984), wherein I also gleaned those other recent bits of Nashery.

In Strange Newes of the intercepting certaine Letters and a Convoy of Verses, as they were going Privilie to victuall the Low Countries, his 1593 pamphlet attacking Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe devised the following nicknames for the target of his matchless invective:

Gaffer Iobbernoule

Gamaliel Hobgoblin

Gilgilis Hobberdehoy

Gregory Habberdine

Gabriel Hangtelow

Timothy Tiptoes

Braggadochio Glorioso

Infractissime Pistlepragmos

The picture above is a still from Alan Bridges’ 1985 film The Shooting Party, based on Isobel Colegate’s novel of 1981. James Mason plays Sir Randolph Nettleby, landowner, enthusiastic bird-shooter, and budding pamphleteer. John Gielgud’s character is giving him some pamphleteering tips, having had his tract on animal rights printed by an “anarchist in Dorking”. Earlier, Gielgud has been marching about the field brandishing a placard in an attempt to disrupt the bird-shoot. Intriguingly, the name of Gielgud’s character is Cornelius Cardew. Mere coincidence, or was Isobel Colegate gently teasing another upper class Englishman given to protest and to the brandishing of placards? And are there any other instances of fictional characters being given the names of English Maoist avant garde composers?

Fond as I am of inconsequential yet somehow intriguing facts, I was delighted to learn from today’s paper that the mother of soon-to-be-a-gaolbird Lib Dem MP Chris Huhne used to be the voice of the speaking clock.

Today is the first day of the Muggletonian Great Holiday, celebrated on the third, fourth and fifth of February each year. On those three days in 1652, the tailor John Reeve (1608-1658) received his commission from God, and was told that his cousin Lodowicke Muggleton (1609-1698) was to be his “mouth”. Reeve learned that he and Muggleton were the two witnesses referred to in Revelations 11:3, and that God had empowered them to pronounce upon the fate of individuals. As Muggleton wrote in his 1663 tract The Neck of The Quakers Broken, “He hath put the two-edged Sword of His Spirit into my Mouth, that whosoever I pronounce cursed through my Mouth, is cursed to Eternity”.

It was long thought that, of all the sects which sprang up in the English Civil War period, only the Quakers survived into the twentieth century. During the 1970s, however, one Philip Noakes came to light in Kent, a living Muggletonian in possession of a huge archive of material covering the sect’s entire history.

The Muggletonians believed that human reason was unclean. This led them to reject physical science. They refused to accept the laws of gravity or the rules of mathematics, and they considered astronomy to be wrong. The stars, they said, were only as big as God made them appear from earth. In later years, Muggletonians banned hot air ballooning, because the balloons would crash into the sky, a solid band around the earth.

Portrait of Lodowicke Muggleton by William Wood, circa 1674 (NPG)

NOTE : My thanks to Andy Hopton, whose 1988 essay in Small Press Gleanings is my source – and was my introduction to the sect.