My husband gave me a copy of Plutarch’s Moralia for our wedding anniversary, the romantic old thing. It is in the translation of Philemon Holland, made in 1603 and republished in 1657. At the back is ‘An Explanation of certain obscure words… in favour of the unlearned Reader’. That’s me.
Some entries in the glossary make sense. To Pinguifie, we are told, means ‘To make fat’, and Gymnosophists were ‘Philosophers of India who went naked and led beside a more austere and precise life.’ But some entries seem to define simpler terms by harder ones, as with Satyrs: ‘Woodwoses or monsters. Creatures with tails, yet resembling Men and Women, and in part Goats.’ I like the idea of woodwoses being more familiar than satyrs.
Curvature, says the glossator, means ‘a Bending or Crookedness. Also a Runde.’ A what? A runde, is, I think, a round, though in what sense, who can say? — a ring, a chain-link, a turn of yarn, a group of people standing for a round-dance, an archery target, a ruff, a piece of beef, a turret, a clump of flowers, the curve of a river, an orb, the vault of heaven, a rung, a chair-leg, a sword-stroke, a song, a circle of life, a circuit, a diversion, a sentry patrol. I’ll know it when I find it in one of the preceding thousand pages.
It comes as a surprise to find that skeleton needs explaining, even if Holland prefers the form sceleton. But no one had used the word in English before 1578, 25 years before Holland’s book. And how pleasant to inhabit a world too where critics were unknown, apart from those of ancient times, the ‘Grammarians who took upon them to censure or judge Poems and other works of Authors’. John Florio was one of the first in modern times to catch one of those unwelcome coelacanths alive, in his Worlde of Wordes (1598), writing of ‘those notable Pirates in this our paper-sea, those sea-dogs, or lande-Critikes, monsters of men, if not beastes rather than men; whose teeth are Canibals, their toongs adder-forkes, their lips aspes-poyson, their eies basiliskes, their breath the breath of a grave, their wordes like swordes of Turkes’. Who’d be a critic after that? Worse than woodwoses.
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