I have been wending my way through some of the Jeeves oeuvre of P. G. Wodehouse. The comic misadventures of the feckless Bertie Wooster and his unflappable gentleman's gentleman Jeeves are quite engaging. I was startled, however, to come across a curious concatenation of prose in the early pages of The Code of the Woosters.
Bertie is dismayed upon returning home to his flat to discover that a pile of telegrams awaits him. He has learned from sad experience that such missives are a reliable harbinger of difficulties with his wastrel upper-crust friends or demands from his daunting aunts. Jeeves enters to find his young master brooding:
“Are you ill, sir?” he enquired solicitously.Imagine my reaction upon reading these lines. Bertie is in “twitter” mode and has lapsed into obscurely abbreviating his prose. The Code of the Woosters dates from 1938, so this is a most remarkable and quite prescient anticipation of today's trendy tweeters.
I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.
“Not ill, Jeeves, but all of a twitter. Read these.”
Of course, I buckled down and began to decode Bertie's hidden message. The “c” could easily stand for coma or catalepsy, but couch makes for a less sensational reading. Then Bertie passes an “h. over the b.” He notes that the “h” is “agitated.” Passing a haddock over a brazier would serve, since that would undoubtedly agitate a haddock that was not quite dead. But perhaps we should content ourselves with imagining that Bertram Wooster was merely passing an agitated hand over his brow.
Right-ho. That's the ticket.
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9 comments:
The only haddock I know is Tintin's best friend and adventure companion, Captain Archibald Haddock, but I suppose he wouldn't like to be passed over a brazier...
Wasn't Bertie the twit?
Quite.
I think it more likely that "c." refers to chair rather than couch since it says "a c." rather than "the c." and a living room or sitting room is more likely to have one couch and more than one chair.
A good point, Margaret, although Bertie Wooster lives in pretty fancy digs and probably has several couches.
But would he have called it a couch? I am not sure & haven't The Master's works to hand.
My daughter aged 22 is a huge House fan. After she had watched several episodes in a row, I staged an intervention & had her watch two bits of Wodehouse -- I can't remember now which. She was fascinated, not so much by the content, but by how Hugh Laurie had changed...
Indeed, Liz, I do not know if Bertie would call a couch a couch. Searching the text reveals no occurrences of the various synonyms: couch, chaise, chesterfield, divan, sofa. Margaret probably made the right call with "chair."
As for the multi-talented Hugh Laurie, I am a big fan. I recently watched my DVD set of "A Bit of Fry & Laurie" again. Great stuff, though some of the Brit-specific stuff is hard to understand (or "suss out," as they say).
I'm less enamored of "House," which is more of a soap opera than ever before now that the House-Cuddy subplot has become so intrusive.
Would a wacky mathematician be addle-pated?
I've stopped watching House altogether. It was bad enough that they decided his being crazy wasn't important enough to actually impact the show, but then the Cuddy thing happened. And THEN she decided that he should have a freakin' medical student on his team. I still have four or five eps on my DVR but I'm not sure I'll be watching them.
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