Subject
passati/pass water in ADA... from Browning to Lolita and PF
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Alexey Sklyarenko: "'Okh, nado (I must) passati!' exclaimed Percy in the Slavic slang he affected, blowing out his cheeks and fumbling frantically at his fly." (Part One, ch. 39)In his 'Notes to Ada', Vivian Darkbloom comments on passati: "pseudo-Russian pun on 'pass water'."
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JM: Relating " Okh, nado passati" to "Lolita" and "Pale Fire," through Browning, there is a scene with Lolita sucking on a straw for an ice-cream soda, when B's poem is first indicated. Next, in Pale Fire, it is taken up again:
"Here Pippa passes"..."Here Papa pisses." *
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*I can only lament that I never studied English slang with the book Matt Roth located, namely, W. E. Collinson's Contemporary English: A Personal Speech Record. Can I say "I'm pissed" to mean "perplexed", or "don't be pissed", hoping not to annoy someone, who might then answer: "Oh, piss off" ?
I also found out, wikiing again, that Browning ( "Pippa Passes") would have equally profitted from Collinson's book. Here is a most curious note related to his poem: " Besides the oft-quoted line "God's in his Heaven/All's right with the world!" above, the poem contains an amusing error rooted in Robert Browning's unfamiliarity with vulgar slang. Right at the end of the poem, in her closing song, Pippa calls out the following:
But at night, brother Howlet, far over the woods,
Toll the world to thy chantry;
Sing to the bats' sleek sisterhoods
Full complines with gallantry:
Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
"Twat" both then and now is vulgar slang for a woman's external genitals. When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary inquired decades later where Browning had picked up the word, he directed them to a rhyme from 1660 that went thus: "They talk't of his having a Cardinall's Hat/They'd send him as soon an Old Nun's Twat." Browning apparently missed the vulgar joke and took "twat" to mean part of a nun's habit, pairing it in his poem with a priest's cowl.
The town of Pippa Passes, Kentucky, is named for Browning's poem. (Kentucky!!!)
Samples of delightful humor in "Lolita" for renewed delectation:
1."She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice...- and my heart was bursting with love-ache. That childish wrist. My lovely child. You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction."
2. "We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001." [...] "Judging by the terminal figure," I remarked, "Fatface is already here."
3. "Vivian is quite a woman. I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop."
4. "Good, come on, we'll grill the soda jerk."
Browning's Concotion:
"This was the spot where the good farmer invariably stopped, and once, when they happened to be accompanied by his little boy, the latter, as he trotted beside them, pointed and remarked informatively: "Here Papa pisses." Another, less pointless, story awaited me at the top of the hill, where a square plot invaded with willow herb, milkweed and ironweed, and teeming with butterflies, contrasted sharply with the goldenrod all around it."
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