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Monday 7 July 2008

Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth looks into the Borromean Index

My husband went to a medical conference, paid for by a pharmaceutical company, in Padua, where the university has been teaching medicine since the 14th century. So I went too and popped over to Venice, taking with me Mrs Ruskin.

I mean Effie, who, poor thing, ran away from John Ruskin in 1854 after six years of marriage when he had still not steeled himself to do the deed. Nothing wrong with her. She had eight children after she married Millais. Her letters Effie in Venice, edited by Mary Lutyens, were, I found, just the companion to a few days in that irresistible city.

Effie refers to a visit to the Borromean Islands, the property of the rich old family to which the sympathetic saint Charles Borromeo belonged. But the phrase reminded me of something I’d come across recently in that memorable, slightly flawed children’s book The Box of Delights by John Masefield. In the first chapter, a fake clergymen speaks of the shape of the boy Kay’s face having the true Borromean Index.

Borromean does not appear in the 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, except by chance in a quotation illustrating the use of the word note, in a letter written in 1739 by another formidable woman traveller, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. At the ‘Borromean Library’, she writes, ‘strangers have... liberty, on giving a note for it, to take any printed Book home with them.’ Very handy.

That didn’t really help with the Borromean Index. Did Masefield just make it up, or is there such a thing?

In trying to find out, I came across something interesting, but slightly mind-numbing: Borromean rings. True Borromean rings (see diagram) are three circles interlinked symmetrically so as to be inseparable; if any one ring were absent, the other two would fall apart. Their name drives from a heraldic emblem of the Borromeo family, found on Effie’s islands, but they more widely symbolise strength in unity, and even the Blessed Trinity. The difference between true Borromean rings and nine false kinds may be found at the website [www.liv.ac.uk/~spmr02/rings]. There are all sorts of variants, such as Viking interlinked triangles. But this doesn’t help me with the Borromean Index. Can anyone, please?

Dot Wordsworth

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