Memery

Whatever you're reading right now, what does it make you think of?

Line 81 of Euripides' Helen, spoken by the Greek Teukros to the woman he does not know is Helen -- for all Greece hates the daughter of Zeus, μισεῖ γὰρ Ἑλλὰς πᾶσα τὴν Διὸς κόρην -- touched off an Imagist flash in my brain . . .

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees, unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
(H.D., "Helen")

. . . and now I'm slightly more inclined to read Helen in Egypt than to continue with the actual Helen in Egypt I have here, conversing anonymous with Aias' brother beside the Nile. So, join the the club. Think tangentially. Give me your free associations!

The Exotic Sheep Jig

(Courtesy of fleurdelis28.)

Me: I don't know with whom else I can share a list of Shetland terms that includes a word for hermaphroditic sheep . . . Why? How many hermaphroditic sheep are born in the Shetland Islands? Is there something I've missed?

fleurdelis28: How often does it have to happen, I guess, before you need a word for it? We have a word for the general phenomenon; when there are more sheep than people, maybe that's the chief place you know it from...

I remember reading in an NYTimes article that in Nepal or somewhere similar that hermaphrodites form a separate caste consisting entirely of exotic dancers, or something like that.

Now I'm picturing hermaphroditic dancing sheep...

Me: *goes blind*

. . . I'm just curious why a simple adjectival phrase doesn't suffice.

fleurdelis28: Well, if you only ever see it in sheep, why would you need an adjective?

Me: I meant, like "Hermaphroditic Sheep" in English. When you have single words for something, it tends to mean you want to be able to say it quickly and often.

fleurdelis28: Well, yeah, but we also have experience with hermaphrodites of other species.  If we only ever saw it in sheep, and raised an awful lot of cumulative sheep, we might have a word, even if the total number of hermaphroditic sheep were relatively low.  Maybe they have a nice, dire superstition about it...

"The Tale of the Hermaphroditic Sheep...it came at dusk, as the tree branches scratched eerily in the cold north wind.  We shuddered in the light of the campfire.  It did an exotic sheep jig and left.  We blinked really, really hard."

Look, I'm highly amused . . .