Bilge Ise Köpeğinden Bahseder

by Artemus Zebulon Pratt
Speculative Grammarian Editor-on-the-Lam

“Your money or your life.”

My wife said, “Can we go now? Us two?”

He looked them up and down, “Yeah.”

“Why the dog?” I asked her.

“He has publications, dear.”

I shouted, “Come now, you know that Everything’s Edible If You Chew Hard Enough: A Dalmatian’s Daily Affirmations is hardly tenure fodder!”

“It’s a publish-or-perish world, dear.”

As they strode off I looked at the guy’s gun and said, “That might not work.”

He snarled, “Why not?”

“It might not have bullets.”

“It has bullets.”

“Then it probably will.”

I then somehow survived long enough to wake up to her ever-present slight smile. In the usual course of events, she came to ask, “Oat bran, dear?” As I ate, I caught a glimpse of her glance at me from the corner of her eye when she said abstractedly, “It occurred to me early this morning that Dalmatians are intelligent dogs. We might get one.”

I grunted, “The breeders have worked that field so thoroughly you’d get healthier results cross-breeding Hapsburgs.”

Having garroted yet another pointless prandial provocation, I sipped my coffee as she returned to the newspaper. “Ah,” she said, “Ratched-Kerr is retiring, it would seem,” which called to mind the departmental meet-and-greet in which he met-and-gret the new grad students with a nametag reading,

I am the regents’ griffon bleu;

Pray tell me, lad, whose pup are you?

A couple of reminiscences of the Dean that made me grateful I had suffered through dank¹ rather than dark academia and a table-clearing later, I bit the bullet and returned to reading the latest parvum opus by that notorious pair of lone wolves prowling around the encampments of the scholarly establishment, Filbert E. Gibbet and Fulva Tooke Horne-Swuggle, The North Caucasian Roots of the Eurasian Languages, in particular the chapter on the state of Parhae, a state of uncertain ethnic and linguistic composition located in modern-day Manchuria and northern Korea in the 8^th–10^th centuries that they argue was founded by a renegade group of proto-Adyghe speakers on one of their periodic cross-continental rampages behind the undisturbed curtain of recorded history that certain online denizens have seized upon as evidence that Manchuria is meant by history to be Russian.

So, yes, it is dismaying to see yet another entrant in the lists of modern power rivalry projected into the past to match wits, or something else, with Chinese and Korean scavengers around the kitchen midden of history. However, this latest effort (and an effort it is, too!) is at least entertaining in its dogged gormlessness with the sources: The name almost certainly does not come from Adyghe пстэури pstăwri ‘human being’ but, however we may interpret the significance of the adoption of the Chinese name, from a form rendered 渤海, read Bó Hǎi in Mandarin and Parhae in Korean (something like bwot xoj in Middle Chinese), that has been the subject of much admirable if unsettled philology; the geopolitical issues projected back into history are of course aggravated by the fact that since the early 20^th century that name, meaning “Swelling/Rough/Choppy Sea,” has been used for what any normal person knows as the Gulf of Zhili, and we all know who that belongs to.

And with that we see the single, solitary place where the recent Korean series The Silent Sea is wittier than Gibbet and Horne-Swuggle: The Korean moonbase on the Sea of Tranquility, the titular Silent Sea, is named Parhae for a notionally Korean state whose name “means” “The Choppy Sea.” —Well, either wittier or really embarrassingly malaprop on the part of the writers, which is a toss-up in this debased day and age in which not only scientific literacy in the arts and humanities has gone to the dogs: After all, the self-designation “I Non-Platonically² Love Science” is synonymous with “barista holding a humanities BA.”³ Mind you, there have been esthetic siblings of Attack of the Crab Monsters throughout the history of mass media, but that’s no excuse. After all, none of those earlier works made gravity something you could turn on and off with a switch—and if you could boost the gravity to earth-normal inside the moonbase,⁴ why would you need chemical rockets to get there in the first place?⁵ Still, we can at least say the series is better than anything written by S.S. Van Dine.

But really, what else could have been reasonably expected from the Common Corpse curriculum? It lacks even the virtue of its wretched predecessor of making a rightful place for corporal punishment in the educational process (fitting for the administration of the man who as governor put the “execute” and the “IV” in “executive”), even with the ridiculous restriction that only the right buttock could be swatted—it could have been predicted that No Child’s Left Behind would be a mixed bag at best.

Of course, not all was perfect in the past, as I was reminded by seeing a copy of an interview with parents who had taken their children to see Alien in the theaters in 1979, all fraught with the fears that the children would be scarred senseless. All balderdash, of course; I saw it then as a wee one,⁶ and all these decades later I salute the father who said, “I’m glad I brought him to see it. There’s things he needs to know if he studies in Australia.” Truly a man who has taken Struwwelpeter seriously to heart and fully assimilated the key principle of Teutonic parental discipline: Harsh but fair. Indeed, the only thing that scarred me at the time was the violation of conservation of matter inherent in the critter ballooning up so fast in mere hours (though of a piece with the sea levels dropping in The Silent Sea as 40% of Earth’s water somehow disappeared, but don’t worry, it appears out of nowhere again on the moon base thanks to, yes, a virus, and let’s not get into gruesome Gollum gill girl), and it didn’t so much scar as disappoint young me.⁷

Eventually even the peculiar delights of non-canonical historiography must give way to the delights of the dinner table. “Quite interesting shapings-up in the new dean pool, dear,” she said.

I sighed, “How much this time?”

“Nil as yet. The field is still shaking itself out. Fena Kes seems the current favorite, but Kölyök Kutya has some curious whispers of support. Still, I suspect it’s a case of ‘Kutya ugat, a karavan halad.’ Căţel Caine tossed her hat in the ring as well, but I suspect that’s as ill-fated as Pentu Koira’s gambit against Kerr all those years ago.”

“And what blandishments are being bruited about?”

“The usual. Reforms of the parking committee...”

“So rearranging desk chairs.”

“Quite.”

After a bite of salad, I ventured, “But no fundamental changes to curricula, no doubt.”

“A fixed routine is standard in obedience training.”

“Including for the trainers.”

The clock rang and we chuckled. After another bite I added, “Well, it doesn’t sound as if the grands patrons are up in arms.”

“They’ve been playing academic parlor tricks and making deals at daggers drawn in the dagger-drawing rooms even as we speak, no doubt.”

“The stakes are pretty high, so it might not get too dirty.”

“Yes, that usually comes with the parking committee assignments.”

“Cornered dogs and all.”

She smiled, “Yes, but that breed learns as pups who’s at the head of the Greek alphabet. They’ll just growl about it and truckle.”

“Those who examine life for a living sure do follow the unexamined academic folkways of the past.”

She smiled in her wonted fashion, “Yes, yes, dear, so you always say. Will you launch into your habitual comments about methodological individualism now?”

“I’m not sure they’re quite on point anymore.”

“They’re perfectly suited to describing human social institutions, but we’re talking about academia, dear. Any trainer would tell you that the institution is ideal for inculcating obedience to particular forms of control.”

“He who controls the feed holds the lead.”

“Indeed. Just feed and prestige, the twin levers of control. Han Fei would have been pleased. Might have taken notes.”

“It is nice not being subject to such institutional pressures. Good to be one’s own person.” She merely smiled obscurely.

In the event, her prediction of the outcome eventuated, as did…ah, but you must excuse me, it is time to walk the dog.

	Dimensional Feature Analysis of English Prepositions—CJ Quines
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