MDMD2: The Learned English Dog

[Dave Monroe]

"All at once, out of the Murk, a dozen mirror'd Lanthorns have leapt alight 
together, as into their Glare now strolls a somewhat dishevel'd Norfolk 
Terrier, with a raffish Gleam in its eye,--" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 18)

Okay, breath caught (I am asthmatic, you know).  To continue, from William 
Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (Norfolk [!], CN: New Directions, 
1951), Ch. 7, "The English Dog," pp. 158-74 ...

   "I should like to put here a verse from Luke Hutton's Black Dog of 
Newgate (1596) to show the solidity of feeling which might appear behind the 
rogue business ....  While starving in Newgate and waiting execution this 
highwayman hears the voice of the prisoner chained to the ouside wall, who 
begged food there not only for himself but forv all his fellows.

   Woe's me, thought I, for thee so bound in chains.
   Woe's me for them thou begs for to sustain.
   Woe's me for all whose want all woes contains.
   Woe's me for me that in thy woes complain.
   Woe's me, woe's you; and woe is to us all.
   Woe to that dog made me to woe a thrall.

The beggar who speaks for the others takes on the functions of Christ, and 
seems to include the others in himself.  A queer suggestion of mutuality, 
not merely that we are in the same boat but that you could say about me what 
I say about you, clings to the words I want to examine, and finds a direct 
and splendid expression here." (p. 161)

Note, by the way, that from Newgate, those "waiting exceution" were thus on 
the path to Tyburn (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 15) ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=611&sort=date

And that Dixon finds himself able to say about Mason what Mason says about 
him, precisely in relation to "Taahburn" (ibid.) ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=1125&sort=date

Shortly before "a somewhat dishevel'd Norfolk Terrier" (but why "somewhat 
dishevel'd"?) "strolls" across their path.  And so, to continue from Empson 
...

   "To find what became of this sentiment in the eighteenth century one had 
best avoid finsihed and artificial works like the Beggars' Opera, but ....  
The main point, of course, is that by [Sir Robert] Walpole's time one was 
much safer; the thing ["rogue"] has become playful ....
   "With this goes the emergence of 'you (gay, young) dog' beside 'you 
rogue' ... both terms may now be applied to respectable characters.  The 
humour of mutuality in the word shifts from the good citizen's feeling about 
the vagabond to a man's feeling about his own set.  But I have missed out on 
a stage in which this shift was forced through.  The Restoration aristocrat, 
or rather the kind who affected language through fashionable slang (and in a 
less degree the genteel wit of the other Charles' days, shadowed by the same 
threat by the forces of Puritanism), combined pride in rakishness with a 
queer sort of political scepticism, quite compatible with being a Tory.  It 
was easy for him to use 'rogue' in the old sense about a friend.  This would 
imply that the friend was out-and-out, fit for power, and yet that he had a 
reckless courage felt to be 'generous' (a key notion for the words) more 
because it meant throwing his life away than because he or anyone was helped 
by it; that he had accepted a sort of social outlawry by bceoming and end in 
himself....  The point for the linguist is not that the Restoration gentry 
were unusually roguish, but that during the Restoration a fairly permanent 
way of feeling had enough influence to affect certain words.
   "'Dog' is an importnat one.  The word plays an unusual trick in first 
getting its hearty feeling in one or two special phrases, which seem already 
to depend upon a feeling about dogs denied in other uses of the word.  
Before the Restoration the dog of metaphor, by and large, is snarling, a 
sycophant, an underdog, loose in sex and attracted by filth, cruel if it 
dare ....  There is the Biblical dog, a pariah, living on crumbs ... also 
the dog-faced Thersites of homer, a mean and envious mocker ....  Shylock is 
eminently a dog of this sort and often ....  It is not clear how far this 
feeling would apply to actual dogs ....  It is clear anyway that very mixed 
feelings are there to be drawn upon.
   "The derivation of the word is not known, but something can be said about 
the effect ofd the sound, which makes it particularly ready to carry a 
duality of feeling....  Compare the opposite sound God, which begins at the 
back of your throat, a profound sound, with which you are intimately 
connected ('ich'), and then stretches right across to a point above the 
teeth, from back to front, from low to high, with a maximum of extension and 
exultation.  'D' does not stop the movement as 'b' would by closing your 
lips, so that the idea can shoot upwards straight out of you.  The 
suggestion of retching in the 'g' ('gob') is absorbed by this, and an effect 
of disgust appears only inwearing, 3for which the word is well suited.  In 
'dog' you do not simply do this backwards; ... the efgfect can hint at a 
change of mind.  The 'do' sound is all in the front, connected with an 
external object; it moves the tongue out and down with an effect of giving 
(as in the Aryan root) or of ejecting something from the front of the mouth. 
  Then (with a sudden movement of affection, or a discovery f the truth, or 
a final anathema) the word reaches across to something deep, personal to 
you, and despised." (pp. 161-4)

Okay, another breather here (much yet to go).  But even that Norfolk (as in 
"New Directions books are"--or, at any rate, were--"published by James 
Laughlin at Norfolk, Connecticut"), again, note Pynchon's anachronism here 
...

"Prior to 1979 the Norfolk Terrier was known as the Norwich Terrier with 
drop ears.  In 1979, it became a separate breed and known as the Norfolk 
Terrier."

http://www.akc.org/breeds/recbreeds/norfolk.cfm

I can't help but "'read things into' these words," "they seem to mean a 
great deal; indeed absurdly too much" ...

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