Many have come to expect this place to be just a general bitching ground where I rail against a world that, I feel, is designed pretty much entirely to piss me off. However, I do occasionally come across genuinely interesting nuggets of information that, just for a while, distract my attentions from things that irritate me, but not for long. Towards this end of this blog I have prepared a short piece about the Norse god “Tyr” who I am going to guess no-one has really heard of, even though we all use his name at least once a week and we certainly will see it written down at least once a day, but Tyr brings me very conveniently to the subject of todays rant because he was also known in old English as Tiw (as many Norse gods were such as Odin/Wotan, Freya/Frygg (the schoolboys favourite), etc – and that’s the last hint to Tyr’s identity you’re getting!) and homonyms are something I do particularly enjoy. Now I have come to realise over the years that my somewhat puritanical attitude towards spelling, and more particularly towards grammar and punctuation are not something that everyone shares. In fact I’d probably go as far as to say that in linguistic terms I’m probably bordering on the autistic, or certainly aspergers at any rate. Anyway I love language I think English is a stunning language and anyone who mangles it deserves to be stabbed with a set square.
As I stated earlier I love homonyms (or words that are spelled the same and have different meanings) a well placed homonym can often bring the bookish language lover a genuine smile on a dreary day, I’m reminded of the wonderful Sandi Toksvig anecdote where she tells about smiling at a sign saying “Enjoy Reading” and wondering why a sign declaring the joys of the county town of Berkshire would be at a fair in Suffolk when actually the sign was instructing the studious among us to actually “Enjoy reading” though in fairness as she claims the huge tent of second hand books behind it ought to have been a hint. Now for the pedants among you I know that’s technically a heteronym rather than a homonym but if you picked up on that to be honest you should close this blog down and book yourself into the local remand centre for the safety of the rest of us! Anyway what I am trying to get to in my roundabout way is something linked to a homonym that greatly angers me, I call it an “Idionym” myself. For example if someone came to me in work and asked to “Borrow your compass” I would look at them with a look of mock incredulity before casually informing them that sadly I have left my crampons, ice axe and other mountaineering equipment at home. If however they would like to draw a circle perhaps my “pair of compasses” could be of some use? Equally if for example I was playing a nice game of “Trivial pursuits” (well it is the season) and granny asked to borrow the dice I would take the singular of that item and insert it viciously up her nostril until she realised that “dice” is plural, what she would like, I believe, is “The die”, it’s not hard people! To be honest I think I just have anger issues, I’m not certain what would happen were I ever on a date in a seafood restaurant and my date asked to “Borrow a piece of scampi”, to be honest I’d probably stave her head in with a lobster hammer! Firstly how can you borrow food????? Secondly NO! You may take SOME scampi or A scampo, scampi is the plural for gods sake, but you know I’m a bit on the cranky side also possibly making threats against my dining companions with various pieces of speciality cutlery for not knowing the plural and singular of their dish is perhaps one of the main reasons I am still spectacularly single!
Now I’m fully certain you’ll all be sat there sniggering at my rage and thinking it’s unimportant but to me it’s vital. Now you probably don’t care what I think, and all power to you, but be aware if you do come to me and ask for the dice or a compass obviously I wouldn’t really react angrily, I would just give you the pair of compasses or the die and end up venting my spleen via a blog, but I will also judge you. Now if you can live with a 5.5ft man with a dodgy beard judging your grammar then go for it, god help us all should there ever come a time when some other arbiter of intellect is chosen such as wrestling a bison to the ground or some kind of physical exercise, should that happen to be honest I’d be screwed (more than likely by the bison!), but until that day comes embrace our beautiful language and use it properly!
Now as we end just a word about the wonderful Tyr who I mentioned earlier. Now I’m almost certain you all worked out that he is the god who gave us the fine day of “Tuesday” but relatively little is known about this god who is so important that we use his name on a daily basis. We don’t even know if he was Odin’s father, Odin’s son or indeed just Odin’s right-hand man. All that is known of him is that he is the god of battles, heroism and swords, deeply ironic given that he only had one hand, to be honest you’d think that they’d at least have chosen someone to be god of battles that wasn’t forced to fight southpaw. What’s even stranger is the manner in which poor Tyr lost his hand. Loki, the all-round bad egg of Norse mythology, had a son called Fenrir who took the incarnation of a wolf and he must have been quite a thick wolf to be honest because he kept letting himself be chained up by the other gods before breaking his shackles and going on a killing rampage. Obviously the gods were slightly concerned by this feral wolf wandering around and so they commissioned some helpful local dwarves to create them a ribbon made of some of the rarest things in nature such as fishes breath, bird spittle, mountain roots and (most bizarrely) a womans beard (clearly the Scandinavians like a gal with a bit of bristle!). Anyway the ribbon was created and the gods went to tie up Fenrir who in a fit of bizarre piquancy agreed to be tied up but only if one of the gods would place their hand in his mouth as a gesture of good faith that he would be released. Only Tyr was brave (or in my opinion stupid) enough to place his hand in the wolfs jaws and when Fenrir was secured by this “Gleiphnir” ribbon they all just laughed at which the angry Fenrir bit down hard on Tyr’s hand severing it, which, by all accounts, the gods found even funnier, clearly a slightly masochistic bunch! Fenrir of course would have the last laugh finally escaping his chains to join the final battle of Ragnarok (Armageddon) on the side of the giants against the gods and would ultimately kill Odin before being killed himself by Odin’s son Vidar (keeping up?). As for poor Tyr who has now been cruelly cast into history, he and his stumpy right hand were there at the final battle where he is killed by Garm (a dog not incomparable to Cerberus in Greek mythology, some versions say he is the brother of Fenrir interestingly enough). Along with Odin, Thor and Freya he has been given his own day so next Tuesday just give a little thought to brave stumpy armed Tyr the only god stupid enough to put his hand into a feral wolfs mouth and sadly consigned to history.
This week Matt:
- Struggled with the demands of his man-flu and drank a small lake's worth of Lemsip.
- Every time he had cough mixture felt the need to bellow "Covoooooooonia!" at the bottle, which really isn't advisable if you have a sore throat.
- Had an argument with a chemist, perhaps I'll make that the first blog of the new year.....
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