Quote:
|
'Do you know who I am?' he asked. 'I am Psamathos Psamathides, the chief of all the Psamathists!' He said this several times very proudly, pronouncing every letter, and with every P he blew a cloud of sand down his nose.
|
We have already heard that Psamathos makes a great fuss about the proper pronunciation of his name, but that name is of course Greek in origin (it means 'Sandy, son of Sandy' and 'psamathist' roughly means 'studier of sand'), so the
p really ought to be silent. To understand this joke, one would have to have read a comment in the Oxford English Dictionary, which described the dropping of the
p from
ps words in English as 'an unscholarly practice often leading to ambiguity or to a disguising of the composition of the word'. It recommends pronouncing the
p in all Greek loan words apart from
psalm,
psalter, etc. Quite a scholarly joke for a children's book like
Roverandom.(1)
The Oxford English Dictionary is also the butt of this gem from
Farmer Giles of Ham:
Quote:
Some may well ask what a blunderbuss was. Indeed, this very question, it is said, was put to the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford, and after a thought they replied: 'A blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact aim. (Now superseded in civilised countries by other firearms.)'
However, Farmer Giles's blunderbuss had a wide mouth that opened like a horn, and it did not fire balls or slugs, but anything that he could spare to stuff in. And it did not do execution, because he seldom loaded it, and never let it off. The sight of it was usually enough for his purpose. And this country was not yet civilised, for the blunderbuss was not superseded: it was indeed the only kind of gun that there was, and rare at that. People preferred bows and arrows and used gunpowder mostly for fireworks.
|
***
1: This information comes from the endnotes in the rather good edition by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond (HarperCollins, 1998).