Flying Chaucers (Linguistics)

[Mick Harper]

As for all this spycraft, alchemical and Rosicrucian hokum, I am inclined to say

[Pete Jones]

[Mick Harper]

I will be hugely impressed if you know who Biffa Bacon is.

[Pete Jones]

no, I'm not that impressive.

While we're here, why do you Brits call someone named Barry "Bazza"?

[Mick Harper]

I would guess it is an Australian coinage. Possibly from Barry McKenzie but you're the etymologist.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Wile E. Coyote]

Diamond Geezer (trusted, local)

Guido Fawkes (untrusted, foreign)

[Mick Harper]

You're babbling, man.

[Mick Harper]

Putting up a Medium story this morning I spotted this exchnage which has no bearing on the Bazza controversy but is serendipitously irresistible. [Barry is an East End Jew.]
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Barry Robinson
"But hurry, there will be something else for you to ponder tomorrow".
I think I will wait for that. I hope you had a good weekend, Mike.

Mick Harper
Mick's the name, Bazza, I'm Irish on my uncle's side.

Barry Robinson
I apologise Mick. I am Irish from my mother's side.

Mick Harper
As long as she is black Irish and not Jewish Irish that is acceptable.

[Pete Jones]

I'm reading Edwin Johnson again and he points out that Bede just means prayer (as in "bid"). Do you Brits have any real names? Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Bede are about as believable as "Wile E"

[Mick Harper]

I was just discussing British actors who shake spears for a living over on the Mind & Body thread. We definitely need a list of these 'suggestive names'.

We had already established that Renaissance savants had a tendency to 'discover' obscure Classical writers with famous Classical names. Starting with Ptolemy. That's the cartographer and astronomer Claud Ptolemy, nothing to do with pharaohs of a similar name. Josephus Flavius was a jobbing historian, not a sprig from either the Flavian emperors or the House of David.

[Pete Jones]

I need to find it to quote exactly, but there's the early mention of Tacitus, where he's listed along with two other clearly pseudonymous names. Tacitus = silent, because to the Renaissance, his work was lost. But he wouldn't have had such a convenient, on-the-nose name "back" when Pliny was writing him letters directly.

The two others were something like Simplicius or Charitus.... I'll find it

[Pete Jones]

Plato, founder of platonism
Pletho, main proponent of Neo-Platonism

Their students:

Aristotle, name means aristos ("noble") + telos ("purpose"), rejected his famous teacher's philosophy for an empirical approach

Gennadus Scholarius, name means gennadas ("noble, generous") + schola ("scholar, student"). Rejected neo-platonism for empiricism.

(All cribbed from Sylvain Tristan (pen name) who wrote a book following Fomenko. He argues ancient Greece happened in 1400s Greece, with an 1800 year shift/duplication)

[Pete Jones]

Perhaps this is a stretch, given that it rides on my own particular hobby horse, but William Caxton simply has to be a pseudonym.

First, he's the first, legendary (?) printer in England, and printers I assume we're mostly engaged in getting things like the Canterbury Tales to the public (soon after that book's composition, no doubt).

Second, his name is Cax-ton. Cax and many words similar to it mean "to write, to inscribe, to engrave" in many many languages. Hebrew, for one, where khaqaq means "inscribe/engrave". Japanese, for two, where Kaku means all those things. Korean, where Chaek means "literature". There's a Tagalog version too, but I can't remember it right now.

And since script means the same as scratch (which is how you engrave), then we can add a mountain of additional words nearly identical to Cax-, all of which mean scratch.

Further, a press or mill is something like Cax in many places as well.

[Pete Jones]

I would guess the Hebrew word is the specific allusion within Cax-ton, given that (per Edwin Johnson), Caxton's Chronicle of England was printed at a Benedictine abbey -- clueing us into the source of the chronicle but also maybe the true identity of the publisher. Seems plausible that the monks would call on Hebrew for their invented publisher name