Jupiter and other gods

November 14, 2014

impoo & bicbw*

It has been a while – more than eight months – since I have written about pundits. (See here.) That doesn’t mean that I have not been irritated by one or another of these self-importantos (or -importantas) between then and now. (Actually by several and often.) It’s good to discover not only that the problem is not a new one, but that I’m in good company in my dis-ease. In the first of the Barchester series, The Warden, Anthony Trollope waxes almost wroth (as wroth as this exceptionally sympathetic writer can be) on the matter of the Jupiter and its opinion maker, Tom Towers.

          It is Towers' foremost opinion that it is by men like him that cabinets and bishops should be guided; 
it is to men like him that “lords and commons” should take heed; by them “judges [should] be instructed 
in law, generals in strategy, admirals in naval tactics, and orange women in the management of their barrows.”

          It would be “well for [the rest of] us in our ignorance” if we confided all thought to them. Away with “useless talking, idle thinking, . . . profitless labour.” And away not only with my (puny) useless talking and idle thinking; away with the idle talking and useless thinking of those unfortunately in power. For: Parliament is wronger than right - “see how futile are their meetings" - and “our chief ministers” provide no real “guidance in  . . . difficulties.” So why look to them, when we can look to – and trust – “the writers of the Jupiter,” who see all and into all?

          “From the diggings of Australia to those of California, right round the habitable globe, [don’t they] know, watch, and chronicle” all and every manner of thing? “From a bishopric in New Zealand to an unfortunate director of a north-west passage,” aren’t they the best judges of capability?  “From the sewers of London to the Central Railway of India – from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the cabins of Connaught,” don’t they know best howarrangements should be made?  
          It would be mad to think otherwise.  Ask them.

Eight months ago, too, I changed the omega (w) with which I was ending each post to any other letter of the Greek (or Hebrew) alphabet, because, as I wrote then, the omega suggested I thought I might know what I was talking about, and, I wrote, “I never do really.  So . . . from now on, depending on how confident I am, I’ll end with the next to the last letter of the . . . alphabet (y), or the one before that (f), or . . .”  I ended that post with l.

           For a while, under the Greek (or Hebrew) letter that indicated “the end sort of but no conclusion,” I also added “bicbw,” the abbreviation for “because I could be wrong.” This I adapted from my friend Gaspar Stephens’ notion that “the five most underutilized words in the English language are those making up the phrase, ‘But I could be wrong.’”

          Likely I am wrong now, about Tom Towers and his ilk, about pundits, even if I think I know my own mind. I do know I haven’t seen bicbw at the end of any of the opinion columns in any of our own Jupiters (The Times; The Washington Post; The New York Review of Books; Slate; Salon; or the Daily Kos; et al). Nor have I seen impoo, the abbreviation for “in my opinion only,” at any beginnings.

          Of course, I don’t read every issue, so I could be wrong.

t

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*pronounced im-pooh and bic-bow