Reading Between the Lines

Bookshelf

We might want to start by taking a look at the literary origins of some phrases we use every day. Not surprisingly John Milton is responsible for ‘All hell broke loose’ featured in Paradise Lost, Rudyard Kipling gives us ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ and Tennyson contributes ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’. The latter comes from In Memoriam – the poet’s long requiem for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. This phrase is often quoted with reference to love but in fact Tennyson is meditating on the loss of a good friend.

Before we go any further I should probably issue a warning: It’s probably better that you stop reading now if you suffer from verbophobia (the fear of words), sopophobia (the fear of learning) graphophobia (the fear of looking at writing) or hipomonsteresquipedalophobio (somewhat ironically the fear of long words). Assuming that you’re all okay though we’ll plough on.

They always say you should never judge a book by its cover, equally you should apparently be wary of judging a book by its title as these working titles of classics suggest: Catch 22 was ‘Catch-18’, Pride and Prejudice ‘First Impressions’, Tolstoy worked with ‘All’s well than ends well’ before settling on War and Peace and one wonders whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover would have caused such a stir if it had been published under its working title ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’.

Equally all may not be as it seems in the world of novelists, they’re a slippery bunch and the use of pen names or pseudonyms is common. Barbara Cartland’s real surname is McCorquodale, George Orwell was known to his friends as Eric Arthur Blair and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took Latin versions of his two first names and came up with Lewis Carroll.

Let us end with a couple of quotations (not quotes by the way; quote is a verb, quotation the noun) firstly Groucho Marx helpfully observes ‘Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.’ And I’ll leave you with a little in joke for all the literary buffs out there- in a dazzling flash of insight James Joyce’s wife Nora once asked him ‘Why don’t you write books people can read?’.