Special offer.

 World Cup special offer. 

Kip’s, Berkeley, CA. One week ago.
     “As I understand it,” Confucius was saying to no one in particular, “M is the 13th letter of your Western alphabet. So, who am I going to root for going forward? Morocco is clearly out, Argentina is led Messi, France by Mbappé, and Croatia by Modrić.”
     “My good sir,” a man in a military jacket, having just stepped off the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, spoke over Confucius’ shoulder, “Pardon me for interrupting.”
     “No,” Confucius turned toward him, motioning to the empty stool beside him. “Sit.”
     “Allow me to introduce myself; I believe I can help you with your dilemma. Ljudevit Gaj,* modest,” swallowing the word with a modest cough but then repeating it for clarity, “modest creator of Ljudevit Gaj’s Latin alphabet. My card.”
     Confucius took it, odd proportions. There was only the name on the front and the dates 1809 - 1872. “Ah, turn it over,” Ljudevit Gaj said.

“I believe you'll find that in the alphabet my talented countryman Luka uses, M is the 18th letter.”

                                                                       12.19.22

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 * Don’t ignore the “1 minute read.” You know how much you use the site.

Special offer. This FIFA World Cup commemorative: Kǒng & Lju on a field of checks. (Actual size. Exclusive from The Ambiguities.)

Paronomasia

 continued from here

 Paronomasia 

Dramatis Personae: Axel and Nils Sundstrøm, Bel Monk, and Uncle Albert, wrapped up in a wool scarf and his full-length overcoat though its 40°F warmer inside Corner Coffee than outside on Division Street. And me.

Setting: Corner Coffee at the intersection of Division and Market. The smell of coffee, milk, and wet wool. Muted gabble. E.g.,

Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot
1845-1903

Nils: Blah, blah, blah. Politics. Blah. Kyrsten Sinema. Kari Lake. Now Arizona politics.
     Until he stops to take a swallow of his, and I push in as he raises mug to mouth. Wait until it touches his lips, and I’ll be too late: “What do Lutherans find funny?” I say. “What do they laugh at?”
     “Not much,” Bel says. “Mostly they twitter. Or they bark.”
     Nils is putting his mug down, but Axel says, “Wait!” the older brother.
     And Bel goes on: “They’re nervous, or they’re angry.” Nils has put his coffee down and has both hands around his mug. But Axel says again, “Wait!” “Because they’re caught off guard and they don’t know what to say,” Bel twitters nervously, demonstrating. “Or they can’t believe what they’re hearing,” — an angry bark. (Big dog!)
     Nils: “I . . . ,” but Uncle Albert doesn’t hear, or he doesn’t care: “You are still thinking about your de Maupassant story,” he says to me. “It’s ruin, as I said before. And requital.”
     Taking his wool-gloved hands from his lap and putting them on the table: “No one likes being laughed at, so they retaliate. Stand-up comics. They imagine that the audience is laughing with them, but as soon as they sense someone is not, someone becomes a heckler; and the comic will set out immediately to turn the laughter so it is directed at him.
     “Varajou’s brother-in-law and sister laugh at nothing, they are too serious — not only self-serious, too serious altogether. Or, they laugh aloud at nothing. Still, they are sniffing, snorting at Varajou’s improvidence and yobbery. Why shouldn’t he snort and sniff back? Except his snort and sniff will break out — not when he sees that he’s mistaken the mayor’s wife for a bawd and her daughters for chippies, but when he gets what that means for his self-righteous brother-in-law, who depends on the mayor, what it means for his smug sister, who depends on her husband — then he will  break out in raucous har-de-har-har-har that he upsets their pinched, prudish, grasping apple-cart?

     “Think about it.”

 

Nils gets up, “Head,” he coughs.

     Axel says, “It’s not just Lutherans, it’s the Presbyterians, too, the Baptists, the Methodists, the Norwegians, the Finns, and the Latts. Bel is right. Most laughter is nervous chirp, angry bark, or confused coughed — or menacing, the witch’s cackle, the villain’s bwahaha. It is almost anything but delighted. It may be the only pure laughter not of children is at puns. We groan but without bitterness or cynically; we’re not nervous or angry, or lost. We laugh at puns, but it is never laughter truly at but we’re laughing with thepunster. Poor guy. He can’t help it.”

 

“‘Bawd’?” I say to Uncle Albert. “‘Chippies’?”
     Axel because he can’t help it, turning also to Uncle Albert: “What do you think it was, the bawd rate?”
                                                                       12.12.22 

An officer but not a gentleman.

Guy de Maupassant
1850 - 1893

 An officer but not a gentleman. 

There’s a story by de Maupassant, typical of him in that it is not a story but an anecdote, with too obvious a point: “The Noncommissioned Officer.”     The feckless officer has decided to spend his leave in a small, backwater town with his sister and her husband though they are his opposites, proper, pious, and provincial. The officer is, if not a man of the world, worldly — hard-charging, hard-drinking, and randy, one of those men “for whom life has no greater pleasures than those of the café and public women.” These do not come free: he has decided to visit his sister because there is no one else of his family and acquaintance he has not borrowed from. So perhaps she and her husband, a local official, will . . . .
     But he discovers what he should have known all along had he any insight: all he will receive for his “troubles” are a week’s worth of prim lectures and bad meals. The meals he must eat, but the lectures he will ignore because he is a lout. He is, de Maupassant informs the reader, in the phrase the whole story is worth reading for: “Boasting, blustering, full of disdain for everybody, he despised the whole universe from the height of his ignorance.”
     The story ends predictably when the officer, having drunken his fill at a local café, and, looking for other satisfactions (his other satisfaction), misunderstands the barman’s directions and stumbles into the house of his brother-in-law’s patron, there mistaking the patron’s wife for a madame and his daughters for whores. His poor brother-in-law is mortified! Har-de-har-har-har. The officer falls on the floor laughing. But what is so funny?

I think, “I’ll ask Uncle Albert.”
     He's asleep in front of the France-Poland match; or, he’s asleep at the half. He has turned off the sound because he finds the Fox commentary team’s analysis simultaneously vapid and irritating. (Before he goes to bed, he’ll catch up with James Richard’s “The Totally Football Show.”
     I nudge him. “What? Go away. What?”

     “de Maupassant. I have a question.”
     Again, “What?”
     “About a story: ‘The Noncommisioned Officer’ in English.”
     “I don’t know it.”
     “The main character’s name is Varajou.”
     “Varajou,” he corrects my pronunciation.
     “Maybe. I don’t know, however, if I can find it.” He pulls his right talon from underneath his throw, painted with penguins, and points at his brain.
     “Come on,” I say.
     “Likely it is in there,” Uncle Albert says, “but the index . . . .” He stops.
     “Can you read what I’ve written?” I’ve printed it out.
     He waves his hand. I put the copy in it.

 

“Vaguely,” he says, waving the paper but referring, I take it, to his memory of the story.
     “So?”
     “So, what?”
     “My question,” I say: “What’s so funny?”
     “Ruin,” Uncle Albert says and waves the page toward me until I take it back from him.
     “Ruin?”
     “Yes. Ruin and recompense.”
     “That’s it? Meaning?”
     “Think about it.”
                                                                       12.04.22
                                                                                                                                                      to be continued*

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* TA returns on a once-a-week schedule. Mondays. Sometimes Tuesdays. Maybe.