quid hoc sis vult?

I've got a dictionary of foreign terms sitting in my toilet. It's a book with a list list of foreign terms which we (actually a very small subset of we, but never mind) use in English. Phrases like Dieu et mon Droit, which sometimes appears on the side of £1 coins; or quid pro quo, which doesn't and maybe should, but is Latin for something in return - by which I mean "something in return" not "[something] in return", nor even retsomethingurn (or gnihtemos), if you want to get cruciverbalist about it. I chose those examples because I had actually heard of them previous to owning this book, but it's full of phrases I haven't heard of and my plan was that subtly precipitating them mid-colloquy would make me look a great deal better educated than I am. And who doesn't want to look better than they are?

Of course just reading the entries was no good, because one Latin phrase looks much like another after a minute or two, and my memory is so shot it could practically be used to cull pheasants. So I found myself wishing for an index where I could go with an english word or phrase of my own imaginings and have it transformed into a highly rarefied bon mot, ready for insertion into my blogpost. In italics, of course, which is basically just a way of saying ooh look how clever I am, I used such a weird word it has to go on a slant. Or possibly it's just a way of telling your reader it's ok you don't have to understand that word, you're allowed to look it up. Anyway I found myself wishing for such an index and I turned to the back and à merveille! there was such an index. Well, of course fortuna favit fortibus and all that, so I wasn't entirely surprised, and a die my writing has a poco a poco become festooned with exotic phrases, like a prize cow shrouded in rosettes.

The downsides of this policy are, das ist Pech! a) it's an irritatingly unhelpful index and rarely supplies anything like the phrase you need; b) it's amazing how quickly you can slip into sounding like Boris Johnson; and c) surely the very definition of pretentious must be trawling the index of a book of foreign phrases trying to find something to make you sound classically educated. I mean Davus sum, non Oedipus, obviously, but I know that honor habet onus, so I felt obliged to write about it - to put my cards on the table, so to speak - so that we all understood each other.

I got 750 words but a bitch ain't one

Writers are often told, along with many other globules of advice - like, get a proper job you jackass - to start the morning by writing a few pages of whatever the hell comes into their head. Recently these appear to have been named 'morning pages', but the idea is well established, that a morning bathing in the stream of your consciousness allows you to unclog your writing brain and tone it up a bit. It's quite relaxing as well, feeling as if you are achieving something without too much effort. Sometimes it can help you think about what you want to write, sometimes it serves as a vent for your anger at the way the world is such a pile of shitcuntfuck, other times it merely gives you an opportunity to fail to string coherent sentences together, but it doesn't matter what you write, good, bad, beautiful or nonsense, and that's the point.

750 words is a run by a nice man in Seattle and its sole purpose is to help you write your morning pages. It counts and saves your output as you write and gives you a notice when you've hit your 750, which it estimates to be three pages worth. It has nice little icons to show you when you've written for a few days on the trot, for the primary school pupil in all of us, and it tells you how quickly you wrote what you wrote. It gives you an amusingly inaccurate 'analysis' of what you've written, comparing mindset, time orientation, primary sense and so on, so you can get an idea of your writing patterns. In time-honoured internet fashion, you can compete against complete strangers to see who can write every day, although nobody can read what you've written. You can search through your old morning pages as you wish, and that's about it. Privacy seems to be as secure as you're going to get, ie yeah he could just sell everything you write but probably he won't. Of course you could just do it yourself on Word or even - god forbid - paper but it's marginally more involving this way. Anyway, I recommend it.

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In search of the underdog

Nick Clegg says that the Tories in Scotland are 'irrelevant'. This may well be true but ha! Talk about forgetting where you've come from, two weeks ago and the Lib Dems were 'irrelevant'. I can't stand politicians - obviously, since I can't stand most people - but it's a little galling watching Nick Clergg, who I once saw completely underwhelm a huge meeting against the Heathrow third runway, make the jump from non-entity to political powerplay superdemon, with an attendant rise in smugness clustering around like flies surrounding a man with shit on his head.

It's apparently a very British thing to love an underdog, just as it's very American to love winners and get drunk on weak lager and shout about it. Why that is I couldn't say, not that that's going to stop me from trying. It might be because the British are so used to winning things, like wars and football well you know naval battles and whatnot, that we automatically side with the underdog out of sympathy - which would suggest that Americans are basically massive losers making up for their massive loserness by supporting winners. On the other hand, it's possible that we are such losers that we automatically identify with underdogs because that's what we are.

Perhaps we prefer underdogs because this country is so class-ridden that most of us are underdogs from the moment we're born (the radical's perspective) or perhaps it's that we're just bitterly jealous of anyone who sullies themselves enough to make it in the world (I don't know what perspective that would be). I don't have any clear idea of what it is we see in underdogs; perhaps we admire their pluck, their courage to keep going when they're clearly going to lose - Eddie the Eagle springs to mind - their courage to be known for being a total loser their entire life. Having said that, Eddie might say that in some way he won, because he won the hearts of a million British people who were like 'fair play to him having a go at something like that, I'd shit myself', and also to be fair he was the best ski jumper in Britain by a fair distance, so not a loser at all in fact, when you come to think about it.

I don't think we admire pluck, I think we like underdogs because they don't make us feel bad or at least any worse about our miserable lives, which is why, as soon as they stop being underdogs and start being overdogs, or whatever they become, hot dogs maybe, we drop them like a hot potato and cast around for someone else more underdoggy.

Dropped like a hot potato's a funny term isn't it, I mean when was the last time you picked up a hot potato? Not, of course, that it's not possible to pick up a hot potato, I'm sure that it is, I'm sure in olden days sailors used to pick up hot potatoes on the docks all the time, or something, and possibly caught hot potatoes in the process.

So where does the term underdog come from? It could be from greyhounds, but they rarely seem to be under, more to the side or just behind. Could it be that Britain's favourite animal metaphor is to do with the receptive dog in coitus? Perhaps the British only like people who are getting fucked by the top dog, but then how does that fit in with the traditional idea of the underdog being someone who comes from behind? What else could it be, underdog, a dog that used to go underground that everyone liked? Maybe it's related to dogging, that favourite British past-time, maybe Britain loves underdogging, no, I don't think I'm going to pursue that line of thinking.

Of course underdog could come from dog fighting, as in the dog that submits (under) the top dog, but in that case the underdog would be the loser, whereas underdog tends to mean the least fancied before the event, the David going up against the Goliath, and in fact there's an implied meaning of underdog that they often go on to win, otherwise they're just losers.

So I don't have a clue. A bit of research did turn up this attempt at etymology, but apart from being extremely tenuous, it's totally unreferenced and seems to be, more to the point, nonsense.