From akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu Wed Mar 8 17:07:18 2000 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id RAA16102 for ; Wed, 8 Mar 2000 17:07:17 -0800 Received: from darwin.helios.nd.edu (akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.114]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id RAA28008 for ; Wed, 8 Mar 2000 17:07:16 -0800 Received: (from akriman@localhost) by darwin.helios.nd.edu (8.9.2/8.9.2) id UAA01205 for classics@u.washington.edu; Wed, 8 Mar 2000 20:07:14 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2000 20:07:14 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred M Kriman Message-Id: <200003090107.UAA01205@darwin.helios.nd.edu> To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: carbingestion and "beautiful" words Phillip S. Peek: > Brutus' wife Porcia is said to have commited suicide by swallowing hot > coals (Plutarch, Brutus, 53). Anyone know of other examples of someone who > is said to have commited suicide in the same way? Ernie Moncada: > ... And not really an > analagous death, but Caius Proculeius Varro committed suicide by > drinking white lime or plaster (I couldn't shake this recollection at > the time I went for an upper GI). EJM I think plaster would be slow. I've heard of white limestone -- that would be slow AND make you burp. People usually prefer to go in a more dignified manner. If it was quicklime (CaO) then he could have swallowed it down as a powder or in small chunks. With enough of it, he could have died from internal scalding, as the reaction with water [CaO + H2O --> Ca(OH)2] is very exothermic. Janice Siegel mentioned lye (NaOH usually, KOH sometimes), and that too would burn, as she notes. However, rat poisons usually do not contain lye, because enough to kill would be enough to burn the soft moist tissue of the mouth, so the rat wouldn't willingly eat it for very long. Instead, rat poison is a tasteless seasoning (I think the standard is "arsenic" -- really arsenic trioxide) added to some bait the rat willingly scarfs down. Dorothy Parker wrote (in a poem my notes have entitled "Resumé" [sic]): | Razors pain you; | Rivers are damp; | Acids stain you; | And drugs cause cramp. | Guns aren't lawful; | Nooses give; | Gas smells awful; | You might as well live. I suppose this might be a creative misunderstanding of Housman, who wrote [Last Poems (1922), no. 38] | Too full already is the grave | Of fellows that were good and brave | And died because they were. As long as I'm quoting DP, I'll mention her choice for the _two_ most beautiful words in the English language: check enclosed [I have no original source for this, but I'd guess it was uttered at the round table at the Algonquin Hotel and published in Franklin P. Adams's column "The Conning Tower" the next day.] (In case there's any trouble recalling them, Johnson's words were "No man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money" recorded by Boswell for 1775 or so, a timely thought in advance of Adam Smith's publication.) DP's choice connects nicely with D. Lange: > Some years ago a contestant on The $64,000 question was named Cellardoor > (T?P?)Crockett. Her mother had thought it the most beautiful word in the > English Language just like Joan Rivers. Since Elizabeth Vandiver posted > Somewhere--maybe in his wonderful essay "On Fairy Stories"?--J.R.R. > Tolkien says the same thing. I've never been able to hear "cellar door" > as particularly beautiful myself (not even when pronounced with an > Oxford accent!), though as a young teenager I tried mightily, pietatis > causa, when I first read Tolkien's praise of it. De gustibus... I guess some killjoy is going to suggest that the contestant's mother got the cellardoor idea from Joan Rivers, Tolkien in turn from watching The $64,000 Question (whom Joyce misunderstood to have said "cuspidor") or some similarly unlikely scenario. Just to show that independent minds have thought in similar ways, I will point out that six or seven years ago IIRC, when I mentioned the Nancy Mitford story (about pavement) to a distinguished classicist, he immediately noted that Mitford and Bennett were obviously wrong, since "windowsill" is the most beautiful word in the English language. _I_ see a pattern. Perhaps it is not out of place to mention my own apparent choice at age five, when I still spoke mostly Spanish. As I've found occasion, somehow, to mention twice before on this list, the first words I learned (not counting the cognate _no_) were "garbage can," which I think I enjoyed saying for all the wild new sounds they contained. (An Indian friend of mine once pointed out that "dust bin" and "garbage can" are not terms for the same thing in different dialects, but instead encode a philosophical divide.) Anyone looking for literary support for the beauty of some other word should look in the first scenes of Shaw's "Back to Methuselah," an alleged play, where the serpent has learned speech by hiding in the grass and listening to Adam and Eve. She (the serpent) invents a number of new words, often to the delight of A&E. In scene 2, Adam asks | Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely | is a great and blessed invention. but the serpent invents "procrastination" instead of "list-posting." .