The Last Samurai

I once read a book about an Australian girl who was given an English bulldog; a big truck was sent into town to collect the (as they thought) large animal, and brought back a baby bulldog that could be held in the palm of a hand. At the time I thought I would like a tiny bulldog of my own. Little did I know. L has read Ali Baba and Moses in the Bullrushes and Cicero’s De Amicitia and the Iliad which I started him on by accident, & he can play Straight No Chaser which he learned by listening to the tape & trying to copy it about 500 times—it is wonderful that he was able to do it and yet if you are trying to type 62 years of Crewelwork Digest onto computer in the same room it can sometimes be hard to feel a proper

For who was Mozart? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was an Austrian composer of genius, taught music by his father Leopold from the age of five, and displayed in the courts of Europe playing the harpsichord blindfold and performing other tricks. He composed string quartets, symphonies, piano sonatas, a concerto for the glass organ and several operas including Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. His sister Nannerl received identical training and was not a musical genius. I have heard it argued, and by a clever man too, that this proves that women are not capable of musical genius. How is it possible to argue this, you say, AND to know that a brother and sister may have no genes in common, without being committed to the unlikely theory that any man could be a Mozart with similar training? You say it, and I thought it; but the fact is that a clever man so seldom needs to think

What’s a syllabary?

A syllabary is a set of phonetic symbols each representing a syllable

he gets out of the habit.

What’s a syllable?

You know what a syllable is

No I don’t

A syllable is a phonetic element of a word containing a vowel, take the word ‘containing’ you could break it down to ‘con-tain-ing’ and have a symbol for each part. In Chinese each word is just one syllable long, a monosyllable. What would polysyllabic be?

With many syllables?

Exactement.

And oligosyllabic would be with few syllables

It would be, but it’s not used much, people seem to work in terms of an opposition between the one and the many

Duosyllabic

It would be better to say word of two syllables on grounds of euphony. In general if you are going to make up a word you should use the adverbial form of the number, which would give disyllabic except people often seem to use bi after mono, monogamy bigamy monoplane biplane. Usually Latin numbers go with words of Latin derivation, so unilateral bilateral multilateral bicameral multinational, and Greek numbers with words of Greek derivation, tetrahedron, tetralogy, pentagon

Trisyllabic

Yes

Tetrasyllabic

Yes

Pentasyllabic hexasyllabic heptasyllabic oktasyllabic enasyllabic dekasyllabic hendekasyllabic dodekasyllabic

Exactly

Treiskaidekasyllabic tessareskaidekasyllabic pentekaidekasyllabic hekkaidekasyllabic heptakaidekasyllabic

And who was Bernini? Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was ‘the greatest genius of the Italian Baroque’, who moved to Rome at the age of seven and was taught by his father

EIKOSASYLLABIC

Pietro, a sculptor. Rudolf Wittkower (German art historian, refugee from the Nazis [where to begin?], author of Art & Architecture in Italy 1600–1750) compares him to Michelangelo ([1475–1564]),

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TRIAKONTASYLLABIC

painter, poet, sculptor of genius …) in his capacity for superhuman

oktokaitriakontasyllabic enneakaitriakontasyllabic

TESSARAKONTASYLLABIC

concentration. ‘But unlike the terrible and lonely giant of the sixteenth century, he was a man of infinite charm, a brilliant and witty talker, fond of conviviality, aristocratic in demeanour, a good husband and father, a first-rate

enneakaitessarakontasyllabic PENTEKONTASYLLABIC

heiskaipentekontasyllabic

organiser, endowed with an unparalleled talent for creating rapidly and with ease.’

And Cézanne? Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French painter of genius, associated with the Impressionist

treiskaihexekontasyllabic

school of painting. He was inarticulate: people called him the Bear. He worked very slowly and with

oktokaihexekontasyllabic enneakaihexekontasyllabic

HEBDOMEKONTASYLLABIC

difficulty. He is most famous for his landscapes and still lifes. His method was to apply blocks of paint to the canvas, often with a palette knife rather than a brush. He worked so

heptakaihebdomekontasyllabic

slowly that even fruit could not

OGDOEKONTASYLLABIC

stand still enough: it rotted

What’s the longest word in the world?

I don’t know. I don’t know all the words in the world.

What’s the longest word you know?

I don’t know.

How can you not know?

I think it’s the name of a polymer. I can’t remember how it goes.

duokaiogdoekontasyllabic

Wait a minute. Here’s a good one. di(2-ethylhexyl)hexa-hydrophthalate.

Is that the polymer?

No.

What does it mean?

I once knew.

My dad would know.