Shaggy Dog

I’m reading Tristram Shandy, the most famous shaggy dog story of all time.

As it happens, I’d never heard of the book until I saw ads a while back for a movie version of it. I wonder what the less-known shaggy dog stories are. Has anyone ever heard of, or read, this book? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

It was written a long time ago (1759-ish), so really, we’ve had time to find out about it. In the movie (which is really about making a movie of Tristram Shandy), everyone’s heard about it, and they’ve mostly read it (though maybe not since their school days). Maybe it’s a British thing, and over here in the US we don’t bother with it. But in the movie, Gillian Anderson says she loves it. She’s not playing a character. She’s playing herself, saying that she loves the book. So. I don’t know.

It’s good. I really like it. The entire thing is one silly digression after another, which sounds tedious, but it’s done well enough to be really funny. And it’s dirty. It opens with Tristram’s mother and father having sex, about to conceive Tristram. As the father climaxes, the mother asks him whether he remembered to wind the clock. This interruption ruins the whole event, setting Tristram’s life down the wrong path. And the dad wasn’t too happy about it, either.

There are lots of notes, of course, because he refers to things I know nothing about (window-money, for example, was a sort of luxury tax on windows in houses).

Whenever I read old stuff, I’m reminded about how our language is changing. Any reader of this blog knows that I think about words and how they change meaning. And I don’t mind that they change meaning, really. But I do complain a bit when either of the following two things happen:

1. A word becomes less precise, spreading its meaning or usage to a point where you need context to understand it.

2. A word gives up a meaning, leaving a vacuum there, and starts to mean something that we already have a word for.

For number 1: One of the nice things in Tristram Shandy (or any old book) is that so much can be understood without waiting for the context to become clear. “Whom” is different from “Who”; “That” is different from “Which”; and “Less” is different from “Fewer.”

As a reader who understand those differences, it’s distinctly easier relying on definitional cues over contextual ones. As definitions blend into each other, we need to understand more about the sentence before we can process the words in it. Which means more work. And I’m lazy.

As for number 2: It’s a matter of a diminishing palette. The example I often go to is: Transpire.

“Transpire” used to mean, among other things, “to become known.” Now that definition seems to be defunct. Instead, “transpire” has become a pretentious way to say, “happen” or “occur.”

But we ALREADY have words for “happen” or “occur,” and we’re giving up our only word for “become known” or “leak out.”

Not a dire circumstance, but just sort of sad. The way that it’s sad to hear about an extinct mole gone from sub-tropical woodlands.

So, anyway. Tristram Shandy. Pretty good so far.