Stan[ to
JM's "another Nabokovian coinage is the
unsoft "mollitude", often applied to Villa Venus...However, non-etymological
associations are common in our mind's underworld, particularly in the case of
polyglots such as Nabokov"] he 17th century slang, Molly for
tart/prostitute has survived chiefly in the American gangster's MOLL.
But, slang comes and goes. We still have the wonderful MOLLYCODDLE, meaning
'to pamper.' And, note that almost any girl's name can be used
offensively for gay males ...VN's MOLLITUDE is a sweet portmanteau
coinage, which SHOULD mean something like soft-centred solitude? It
follows all the rules of English agglutination, as with certitude and
plenitude. Well done with LUX-NUX-NOX. All three words are valid in both
Latin and English dictionaries.An all proper-English word-golf solution offers
a HOLE IN ONE, of course: LIGHT-NIGHT. Or vice-versa, since all solutions are
reversible.
JM: Light/Night, hole in one. Looks so easy! Mollitude
is a kind of "mollycoddling" (those soft-running velvet-cushioned carriages
leading to Villa Venus) but your "polyglot-mind's underworld" added a
particular item ("soft-centered solitude"). Nice.
Matt Roth: All the recent
discussion of Botkin's relationship to Kinbote (and K's relationship to
Shade), brought me back to Carolyn Kunin's discussion of Jekyll & Hyde.
Carolyn pointed out the parasite theme in PF and related it to VN's lecture on
Stevenson, where he whimsically relates Hyde's name to hydatid, "a tiny pouch
within the body of man and other animals, a pouch containing a limpid fluid
with larval tapeworms in it--a delightful arrangement, for the little
tapeworms at least." VN's definition here is quite similar to the definition
in Webster's 2nd, so we can imagine that, while researching Hyde's name, VN
came across this similar word and noted the fitting connection. It is
apparent, however, that VN's interest in parasites included more than just
definitions in the dictionary. When preparing to write PF, he must have looked
up info on the bot-fly...The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
48:558, describing the undesirable nature of tapeworms, which "frequently
crawl out of a person's anal canal"... it does contain an extensive
description of "hydatid disease." Did VN consider using a tapeworm as the
parasitic image in PF before settling on the bot-fly? Was he led to this
article by a card catalogue entry for
"hydatid"? ...
JM: Inspite of the reference to "hydatid" in VN's lecture
and the parasitic behavior of the botfly I very much doubt it that
Nabokov would have linked the two. Teniasis (also designated by "solitaria"
ie, enjoying intestinal mollitudes) is so very different from what one finds
in cattle infected by "bicho berna" (the larvae inserted into an animal's
skin by a botfly). Nabokov cannot have approached such different
parasites as if related, not even in his verbal dreams!
I'm frustrated because I couldn't yet locate the link
someone made between Phanes and the pythagorean butterfly (there's a
"butterfly theorem" though). Wandering through esoteric places, I found one
entry which hints at Kinbote's apparent displeasure with the Red Admirable
(would it lay eggs directly on rotten organic matter?), a link between
butterflies and witches.
Here it is: "Butterflies symbolize witches and
fairies, but also the souls of witches. Butterflies and witches have the
ability to change their form - butterflies change in the course of their
development - witches allegedly can change at will. Some people who view the
butterfly as the soul of a witch believe that, if they can find her body and
turn it around while she is asleep, the soul will not be able to find her
mouth and reenter, and the witch will probably die. This concept of the soul
may serve to explain why many medieval angels have butterfly wings rather than
those of a bird" www.spelwerx.com/symbols.html
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