Babel, page 64
* And even this exam ritual was rather tame compared to the way things were done in the late eighteenth century. Back then fourth years were subject to what was called the ‘door test’, in which recent examinees lined up to walk through the entrance the morning after grading finished. Those who had passed would step through the door with no trouble; those who had failed would be treated by the tower as trespassers, and suffer whatever violent punishment the current wards were designed to inflict. This practice was finally abolished on the grounds that maiming was not proportionate punishment for academic underperformance, but Professor Playfair still lobbied annually to bring it back.
* Though many Babel graduates were happy to work in Literature or Legal, the silver-working exam had higher stakes for scholars of foreign origin, who found it difficult to find prestigious postings in departments other than the eighth floor, where their fluency in non-European languages was most valuable. Griffin, upon failing his silver-working test, had been offered a continuation track in Legal. But Professor Lovell had always expressed the belief that nothing except silver-working mattered, and that every other department was for unimaginative, untalented fools. Poor Griffin, who had been raised under his contemptuous and exacting roof, agreed.
* The English night and Spanish noche, for example, are both derived from the Latin nox.
* A trap as tricky as false friends is folk etymologies: incorrect etymologies assigned by popular belief to words that in fact had different origins. The word handiron, for instance, means a metal tool to support logs in a fireplace. One is tempted to assume its etymology involved the words hand and iron separately. But handiron is truly derived from the French andier, which became andire in English.
* Jīxīn: 雞心; jìxing: 記性.
* A reasonable mistake. The characters in yànshǐ are 艷史. 史, shǐ, means ‘history’. 艷, yàn, can mean both ‘colourful’ and ‘sexual, romantic’.
* 鮮.
* Gabriel Shire Tregear, a London-based print seller and flaming racist, issued a series of caricature prints known as ‘Tregear’s Black Jokes’ in the 1830s which aimed to ridicule the presence of Black people in social situations where Tregear thought they did not belong.
* In the mid-eighteenth century, Babel scholars were briefly seized by an astrology fad, and several state-of-the-art telescopes were ordered for the roof on behalf of scholars who thought they could derive useful match-pairs from the names of star signs. These efforts never yielded anything interesting, as astrology is fake, but the stargazing was pleasant.
* Milton, 1645:
‘Come, and trip as ye go,
On the light fantastick toe.’
* In that time, the authorities in Oxford, like those in London, seemed to think the poor were akin to little children, or animals, rather than grown, intelligent adults.
* As with all valuable and expensive things, there was a massive underground market for counterfeit and amateur silver bars. At New Cut, one could buy charms to Banish Rodents, to Cure Common Ailments, and to Attract Wealthy Young Gentlemen. Most were composed without a basic understanding of the principles of silver-working, and involved elaborate spells in made-up languages often in imitation of Oriental languages. Yet some were, occasionally, rather incisive applications of folk etymology. For this reason, Professor Playfair conducted an annual survey of contraband silver match-pairs, though the use of this survey was a matter of utmost secrecy.
* In doing so, Babel and Morse greatly upset the inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, whose own telegraph machine had been installed on the Great Western Railway just two years prior. However, Cooke and Wheatstone’s telegraph used moving needles to point to a preset board of symbols, which did not afford nearly the range of communication that Morse’s simpler, click-based telegraph did.
* In an act of incredible academic generosity, they allowed this improved system to also be referred to as the Morse Code.
* A list of offences that Babel undergraduates had got away with in the past included public intoxication, brawling, cockfighting, and intentionally adding vulgarities to a recital of the Latin grace before dinner in hall.
* The character 爆 is composed of two radicals: 火 and 暴.
* Ramy was, though he did not know it, then at the centre of a debate between the Orientalists, including Sir Horace Wilson, who favoured teaching Sanskrit and Arabic to Indian students, and the Anglicists, including Mr Trevelyan, who believed Indian students of promise ought to be taught English.
This debate would come down firmly on the side of the Anglicists, best represented by Lord Thomas Macaulay’s infamous February 1835 ‘Minute on Education’: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’
* Wilson’s election to this position had raised something of a controversy. He had been in heated competition with Reverend W.H. Mill for election, and Reverend Mill’s supporters spread the rumour that Wilson had insufficient character for the job, as he had eight illegitimate children. Wilson’s supporters defended him on the grounds that in fact, he had only two.
* ‘Goodbye; may God be your protector.’
* The proliferation of Britain’s railways had happened very quickly after the invention of silver-powered steam engines. The thirty-five-mile Liverpool-to-Manchester line, built in 1830, was the first railway built for general use, and nearly seven thousand miles of track had been laid around England since. The line from Oxford to London would have been built much sooner, but Oxford’s professors delayed it for nearly four years on the grounds that such easy access to the temptations of the capital would wreak moral havoc on the young, naive gentlemen left in their care. And because of the noise.
* Baynes ended up placing a cannon in front of the English Factory to keep the Chinese from seizing his wife, and it was all very exciting for a fortnight until the lady was at last peaceably persuaded to leave.
* This society, founded in November 1834, was created with the goal of inducing the Qing Empire to become more open to Western traders and missionaries through deploying ‘intellectual artillery’. It was inspired by the London Society, which generously elevated the poor and dissuaded political radicalism through the gift of education.
* Reverend Gützlaff indeed often went by the name Ai Han Zhe, which translates as ‘One who loves the Chinese’. This moniker was not ironic; Gützlaff really did see himself as the champion of the Chinese people, whom he referred to in correspondence as kind, friendly, open, and intellectually curious people who unfortunately happened to be under the ‘thralldom of Satan’. That he could reconcile this attitude with his support for the opium trade remains an interesting contradiction.
* 洋貨.
* 晴天, qīngtiān; qīng meaning ‘clear’, tiān meaning ‘the skies or heavens’.
* Guǐ (鬼) can mean ‘ghost’ or ‘demon’; in this context, it is most commonly translated as ‘foreign devil’.
* This was true, though Ramy did so only because he would not have been allowed to matriculate otherwise.
Religion had always been a point of contention between the four of them. Though they were all mandated by the college to attend Sunday services, only Letty and Victoire did so willingly; Ramy, of course, resented every minute, and Robin had been raised by Professor Lovell to be a devout atheist. ‘Christianity is barbaric,’ Professor Lovell opined. ‘It’s all self-flagellation, professed repression, and bloody, superstitious rituals as dress-up for doing whatever one wants. Go to church, if they make you, but take it as a chance to practise your recitations under your breath.’
* Horace, on the education of youths to ward off corruption. ‘A cask will long retain the flavour of that with which it was first filled.’
* From the Latin rabere: ‘to rave, to be mad’.
* 駟不及舌.
* Here Letty was referring to the establishment of humanitarian societies for the protection of Indigenous peoples in British territories, such as the evangelical authors of the 1837 ‘Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes’, which, though recognizing British presence had been a ‘source of many calamities to uncivilized nations’, recommended the continued expansion of white settlement and spread of British missionaries in Australia and New Zealand in the name of a holy ‘civilizing mission’. The Aborigines, they argued, would not suffer so greatly if only they learned to dress, talk, and behave like proper Christians. The great contradiction, of course, is that there is no such thing as humane colonization. The contribution of Babel to such a mission, meanwhile, was to supply English teaching materials to missionary schools and to translate English property laws to peoples displaced by colonial settlement.
* This is a great lie, and one that white Britons are happy to believe. Victoire’s following argument notwithstanding, slavery continued in India under the East India Company for a long time after. Indeed, slavery in India was specifically exempt from the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. Despite early abolitionists’ belief that India under the EIC was a country of free labour, the EIC was complicit in, directly profited from, and in many cases encouraged a range of types of bondage, including forced plantation labour, domestic labour, and indentured servitude. The refusal to call such practices slavery simply because they did not match precisely the transatlantic plantation model of slavery was a profound act of semantic blindness.
But the British, after all, were astoundingly good at holding contradictions in their head. Sir William Jones, a virulent abolitionist, at the same time admitted of his own household, ‘I have slaves that I rescued from death and misery, but consider them as servants.’
* The poor Germanists always lost to the Romance linguists in these verbal spars, for they had to deal with hearing the words of their own King Frederick II of Prussia thrown back at them. Frederick was so cowed by the literary dominance of French that he wrote in 1780 an essay, in French, criticizing his native German for sounding half-barbarous, unrefined, and unpleasing to the ear. He then proposed to improve the sound of German by adding -a as the final syllable to a great quantity of verbs to make them sound more Italian.
* Gora – ‘white, pale’, in reference to skin colour. Sahib – a salutation of respect. Put together, with the right tone of sarcasm and vehemence, it means something else altogether. Let it not be forgotten that, though Jones professed a great love and admiration for Indian languages throughout his career, he initially turned his scholarly attentions to Sanskrit because he suspected indigenous translators of being dishonest and unreliable.
* Other projects included, among others:
1. A comparative analysis of the quantity of footnotes added to translations of European texts versus non-European texts. Non-European texts, Griffin found, tended to be loaded down with an astonishing amount of explanatory context, to the effect that the text was never read as a work on its own, but always through the guided lens of the (white, European) translator.
2. An inquiry into the silver-working potential of words originating in cants and cryptolects.
3. Plans for the theft and subsequent return to Egypt of the Rosetta Stone.
* The Hermes Society also had connections with translation centres at universities in America, but these were even more repressive and dangerous than Oxford. For one, they were founded by slave owners, built and maintained with slave labour, and their endowments were sustained by the slave trade. For another, these American universities since their founding were preoccupied with the project of evangelizing, eradicating, and erasing Natives; the Indian College, founded 1655 at Harvard University, promised free tuition and housing to Native students who were required in turn to speak only in Latin and Greek, convert to Christianity, and either assimilate into white society or return to their villages to evangelize English culture and religion. A similar programme at the College of William and Mary was described by their president, Lyon G. Tyler, as a prison where Native children ‘served as so many hostages for the good behaviour of the rest’.
* This is true. Nice comes to us by way of the Old French nice (‘weak, clumsy, silly’), from the Latin nescius (‘ignorant, not knowing’).
* Thomas Love Peacock, essayist, poet, and friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, had also enjoyed a long career in India as an official with the East India Company. He was, in that year, the Chief Examiner of Indian Correspondence.
* Meaning one’s favourite trope or favourite line of argument.
* This is not a quotation from the Book of Genesis, which recounts the scattering of languages at Babel in much tamer terms. It is rather from the Third Apocalypse of Baruch, falsely attributed to the scribe Baruch ben Neriah. Griffin, in a fit of disillusionment, had briefly pursued a project recounting various versions of the fall of Babel.
* 火藥味.
* 兔死狐悲.
* He would never know, for instance, that there was a time when Griffin, Sterling, Anthony, and Evie had thought of themselves as a cohort as eternally bonded as Robin’s did; or that Griffin and Sterling had quarrelled once over Evie, bright and vibrant and brilliant and beautiful Evie, or that Griffin truly hadn’t meant it when he’d killed her. In his retellings of that night, Griffin made himself out to be a calm and deliberate murderer. But the truth was that, like Robin, he’d acted without thinking, from anger, from fear, but not from malice; he did not even really believe it would work, for silver responded only sporadically to his command, and he didn’t know what he’d done until Evie was bleeding out on the floor. Nor would he ever know that Griffin, unlike Robin, had no cohort to lean on after his act, no one to help him absorb the shock of this violence. And so he’d swallowed it, curled in around it, made it a part of himself – and while for others this might have been the first step on the road to madness, Griffin Lovell had instead whittled this capacity to kill into a sharp and necessary weapon.
* This supplementary silver bar is one of the rare Old English–to-English match-pairs, created by a Hermes scholar, John Fugues, who participated in a project in the 1780s where scholars locked themselves in a castle and spoke only Old English to each other for three months. (Such experiments have not been repeated since, though not for lack of funding; Babel was simply unable to find volunteers willing to undergo the same extreme isolation, compounded by the inability to properly express oneself to others.) The Old English bēacen refers to audible signals, portents, and signs – instead of the rather flat English meaning, which just refers to a great signal of fire.
* 死豬不怕開水燙.
* This loophole was, in fact, deliberate. In its early days, the tower viciously attacked entrants and escapees alike, but the wards were imprecise, and the number of wrongful maimings escalated until the city government insisted there had to be some sort of due process. Professor Playfair’s response was to catch thieves only upon departure, when the incriminating evidence would be in their pockets or strewn across the cobblestones around them.
* This decision had been a matter of fierce debate between Robin and Victoire. Robin had wanted to hold all the scholars hostage; Victoire, instead, made the compelling argument that several dozen scholars were much more likely to comply with being forced out of a building at gunpoint than being trapped in a basement for weeks on end, with nowhere to bathe, do their laundry, or shit.
* The word strike, in relation to labour, originally had the connotation of submission. Ships would drop, or strike, their sails when surrendering to enemy forces or saluting their superiors. But when sailors in 1768 struck their sails in protest to demand better wages, they turned strike from an act of submission to a strategic act of violence; by withholding their labour, they proved they were in fact indispensable.
* The verb भिन्त्ते (bhintte) makes use of the Sanskrit root भिद् (bhid), which means ‘to break, to pierce, to strike, or to destroy’. भिन्त्ते has a variety of meanings, including ‘to fracture, to distract, to dissolve, and to disunite’.
* Professor Craft had drawn Robin’s and Victoire’s blood and replaced their vials in the wall; they were now as free to enter and exit the tower as ever before.
* The tactics of revolt spread fast. The British textile workers picked up these techniques of barricade from the 1831 and 1834 Canut revolts by silk workers in Lyon. Those revolts had been brutally repressed – but, crucially, they did not hold the backbone of the entire nation hostage.
