Partly-pooper

I recently discovered the 17th-century English writer and churchman Thomas Fuller (here are some of his witticisms and aphorisms).

The first collection of his sermons was published in 1640 under the title Joseph's Party-Coloured Coat, which I am now reading. In the Wikipedia article (from the EB 1911), the title was given as Joseph's Partly-Coloured Coat. I corrected it there as a "minor change", giving as reason "corrected partly-coloured to party-coloured in title of book by Fuller". Of course before doing this I had checked the title in an edition scanned into Google.

One Adam Bishop (user page) has now reverted my correction. I wonder why? Was it to restore the mistake from the original EB article (assuming it was there)? Was it because his intuitions about the correctness of a bit of old-timey English prevailed over knowledge of it?

An unread speaker of contemporary English might well think: "party-coloured doesn't make sense, a party doesn't have a colour, it must be 'partly-coloured'". This would reveal not only ignorance of the word parti-coloured (in today's spelling), but also of the biblical story of Joseph's coat, which in the KJV is a "coat of many colours". "Partly coloured" doesn't even make much sense, apart from being wrong in the context of Joseph's coat. If anything, the coat was "completely coloured". That would be true even if it had been of only one colour.

I added an external link to Joseph's Party-Coloured Coat in the Wikipedia article, undid Bishop's reversion, and am waiting for the next episode. Is it often this hard to correct such a simple mistake in a Wikipedia article, against the opposition of people who work by intuition? All Bishop would have had to do was to check a library, or find a scanned edition of the book, as I did. If he wasn't working by intuition, what was he working by?

I see that "partly-coloured" has started propagating in search results, sites that apparently contain cut-and-paste sections of the Wikipedia article with the typo. Compare the results of searching for "Thomas Fuller" and "partly-coloured", with those of searching for "Thomas Fuller" and "party-coloured".

One of the biggest problems with the Wikipedia approach is that mistakes spread before they can be corrected, if they ever are corrected.

Exquisite detail

Sometimes I encounter single words that bind an exquisite detail. Decades ago, I read this in a dictionary:

fremitus: a sensation felt by a hand placed on a part of the body (as the chest) that vibrates during speech

A fremitus is not what is felt by the person speaking, in his own chest and by it, but by a hand (his own or someone else's) placed on his chest. In what situation would the need for such a word arise? I think I read it originally in a medical dictionary. Could an absence of fremitus when someone is speaking be a symptom of some malfunction? Or is fremitus just a reality-detail with a name?

The last sentence of Bacon's essay Of Studies is: "So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt". I wondered whether "nostrum" had the same connotations as "receipt" in the 16th century, and what the sense was of nostrum = "our". So I looked it up in the OED:

nostrum: A medicine, or medical application, prepared by the person recommending it; esp. a quack remedy, a patent medicine

The exquisite detail is "prepared by the person recommending it", which explains the "our".

PC and sympathy

At the Kansas State University website I find an astonishing claim that Browning's Johannes Agricola in Meditation is "unsympathetic" to Agricola. The commentator on the poem, which is reproduced there, says it shows how well the technique of dramatic monologue

can be used for effects of humor and purposes of satire. In the speaker of the poem we encounter the poet's unsympathetic imagination of the kind of mentality he believed was fostered by the teachings of the tradition known as Protestant Antinomianism.

It is hard for me to imagine the imaginative machinery of a person who takes this poem to be presenting an unsympathetic picture of Agricola. The tendency of the poem, blindingly effective in every line, is to render the passionately felt belief of an "Antinomian" in such a way as to make the reader able to recreate it in his own imagination.

But the induction of sympathy is not a call to belief. This is where I think the commentator goes astray. I can find only one explanation for his or her calling the poem an "unsympathetic imagination" of Agricola. This explanation requires me to suppose that the commentator is a thoroughly modern, all-embracing Protestant (that is, anti-Antinomian and so non-Agricultural) who yet believes that to sympathize is to condone. The commentator likes Browning and wants things to stay that way. So in the poem Browning must be unsympathetically portraying Agricola's beliefs, because the commentator does not sympathize with those beliefs. I can barely imagine reading the poem in such a frame of mind: "Agricola is presented as self-righteous, he thinks he's OK with God and so can write off everyone else without a qualm".

But it's not always about sympathy and poetical correctness. The commentator seems to be unfamiliar with the willing suspension of belief, as a technique of reading - in this case religious belief. That is the counterpart, for the Christian literary critic, of what Coleridge once hoped to encourage in a different context, in the general public. Note that I have nowhere implied here, nor intend to claim, that Browning "had Antinomian sympathies". Rather, I am stating a generalized version of Coleridge's idea: that it can be useful to occasionally suspend belief, and disbelief, and anything else that a reader may otherwise depend on - in the interests of gaining new insights, as well as avoiding chronic dependence on the old ones. Change the label, and think again, at least once a week.

The poem starts:

There's heaven above, and night by night
I look right through its gorgeous roof;
No suns and moons though e'er so bright
Avail to stop me; splendour-proof
I keep the broods of stars aloof:
For I intend to get to God,
For 't is to God I speed so fast,
For in God's breast, my own abode,
Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed,
I lay my spirit down at last.
I lie where I have always lain,
God smiles as he has always smiled;
Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,
Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled
The heavens, God thought on me his child;
Ordained a life for me, arrayed
Its circumstances every one
To the minutest; ay, God said
This head this hand should rest upon
Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.
And having thus created me,
Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,
Guiltless for ever, like a tree
That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know
The law by which it prospers so:

The poem ends:

For as I lie, smiled on, full-fed
By unexhausted power to bless,
I gaze below on hell's fierce bed,
And those its waves of flame oppress,
Swarming in ghastly wretchedness;
Whose life on earth aspired to be
One altar-smoke, so pure! -- to win
If not love like God's love for me,
At least to keep his anger in;
And all their striving turned to sin.
Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white
With prayer, the broken-hearted nun,
The martyr, the wan acolyte,
The incense-swinging child, -- undone
Before God fashioned star or sun!
God, whom I praise; how could I praise,
If such as I might understand,
Make out and reckon on his ways,
And bargain for his love, and stand,
Paying a price at his right hand?