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Jansy: two quick reactions (recalling Newton's 3rd Law that Action and
Reaction are Equal and Opposite. His actual Latin words can be taken
quite naughtily:
" ... the actions of two BODIES upon each other are always equal and
always opposite in direction. Whatever presses or draws something else
is pressed or drawn just as much by it." The Law seems to break down
somewhere between Glendale and Arcadia?):
a. Since 'M' is the midway, 13th letter, for most English
Dictionaries, esp. VN's beloved Webster II, the M section is approx.
central page-wise, and hence the most likely to be found 'open' after
casual flippage.
b. If Zemblan is Indo-European, 'coramen' might also be related to the
Latin proposition _coram_ meaning 'in the presence of,'
'face-to-face,' whence the well-known adverb _coram populo_ (note the
ablative!) = 'publicly.'
While I've got you online, some brief comments on your "rejection" of
my posting about the use of 'sans' by Shakespeare and Kinbote. Cole
Porter's "Brush up your Shakespeare' (in Kiss Me Kate) is sound
advice for Nabokovians! "Start quoting him now! B-U-Y-S and the Women
you will wow! If they think your behavior is heinous, kick her right
in the Coriolanus; B-U-Y-S, and they'll all kow-tow, forsooth ..."
Native Anglophones are generally more easily misled by BardSpeak than
'foreigners' are. We can be so deaf to how the English language was
changing grammatically, phonetically, and lexically during the 15th
to 17th centuries.
We giggle in the wrong places thinking, e.g., that 'excrement' has the
modern excremental meaning! "To be or not to be" (much exploited by
VN) in the Folio Hamlet is NOT really a modern QUESTION, but a Latin
QUAESTIO* We assume "How far that little candle throws HIS beams" is
poetic apostrophe (personification), but 'HIS' was the masculine and
neuter form of the Middle English pronoun not yet fully replaced by
the upstart neuter 'ITS'
* The Quarto Hamlet says "that's the POINT."
Risking a longer example, note the now easily-lost subtleties of THOU
and YOU in the following (Richard III Act 1 sc 2) Familiar, though to
those languages which retain the 'tutoyer' conventions.
LADY ANNE
Thou art the cause, and most accursed effect.
[Thou is insulting!]
GLOUCESTER
Your beauty was the cause of that effect;
Your beauty: which did haunt me in my sleep
To undertake the death of all the world,
So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.
[You/your is conciliatory, humble!]
LADY ANNE
If I thought that, I tell thee, homicide,
These nails should rend that beauty from my cheeks.
GLOUCESTER
These eyes could never endure sweet beauty's wreck;
You should not blemish it, if I stood by:
As all the world is cheered by the sun,
So I by that; it is my day, my life.
LADY ANNE
Black night o'ershade thy day, and death thy life!
GLOUCESTER
Curse not thyself, fair creature thou art both.
[Thou is now switched to endearment, in the context of love
declarations, howbeit cruelly insincere! Cf the ambiguity of French
'tu.'
McWhorter & others swear they never really understood Shakespeare
until they read him in German or French. I see a connection here with
VN's approach to Pushkin's Onegin: how to capture the emerging Russian
for modern readers.
skb