[lit-ideas] Re: Bad Poetry Competition 2011/ Rennie Airth
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2011 09:22:09 -0700
On Jun 17, 2011, at 8:36 AM, Donal McEvoy wrote:
>>
>
> Besides sheafs of bad poetry, there are several, as yet unpublished, articles
> in my drawers on the effect of trench warfare on W's 'TLP': perhaps most
> obvious being the 'ladder' analogy, as in normal life these are not discarded
> when climbed (as usually we want to use them to climb down), but in the
> trenches the last man to go over-the-top had to ditch the ladder back into
> the trench so it could not be used by either the enemy or cowardly comrades
> to descend into the trench. (Ladders were only put back into position when
> the whistle blew for everyone to take a break). In the later Wittgenstein,
> the 'beetle in the box' was inspired by the habit of many soldiers of keeping
> one about them as a ration and his thoughts on the possibility of a 'private
> language' provoked by the widespread use of military code and shorthand terms
> that had no explicit reference to their 'objects' yet were readily understood
> within the trench 'form of life'. Though some
> commentators have thought the title 'TLP' paid homage to Russell and
> Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica", in turn a nod to Newton, Latin-based
> codes were prevalent in among the Kaiser's officer class and 'TLP' was an
> abbreviation of a dog-Latin euphemism for a sexual practice commonly indulged
> in the trenches whenever there was a lull.
>
Yes, but my point was that even the field artillery wasn't "in" the trenches.
My great uncle was in the artillery; my grandfather was in the infantry. They
had very different wars.
David Ritchie,
whose last paper was on WW1 slang
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