Rude Names: A Magazine   You have to be very careful when naming something so that some unforeseen problem doesn’t sidetrack the product. A case in point is with Apple’s new iPad. Apple must have thought it was so clever using a name that trades on its iPod, but whatever value the product, an immediate uproar arose about the similarity of names. After all, it depends only on the difference between two English vowels, one of which, the Æ as in cæt, mæd, mæn—and pæd—doesn’t exist in most other languages, making the difference between the two names very difficult. There was also an uproar from the Boston area of the US and from Ireland, where local speech tends to pronounce those two vowels alike, with iPad ending up sounding much like iPod.

But sometimes naming problems can’t be helped, as external events overtake the product. Perhaps you’ve heard recently as I did on TV, about a Canadian magazine having to change its name because of sniggering. Well, the story is very interesting, and sniggering turns out to be only part of it.

Much of Canada’s history evolves around the Hudson’s Bay Company, which today has essentially evolved into a major department store, usually shortened to just The Bay. I last stopped into one on my recent trip to Victoria BC (2008/21). Also, historically much of the endeavors of the company involved fur trapping, beaver fur being among the most common pelts. Thus, when, in 1920, the company wanted to celebrate its 250 years of age at the time, it decided to start a magazine about Canadian history, and it was decided that a logical name for it would be The Beaver, with the present subheading Canada’s History Magazine. When Canada’s National History Society in Winnipeg acquired the magazine in 1994, it retained the title.

But the name of the animal developed other connotations. My online etymological dictionary tells me that in 1910 “beaver” became slang referring to a bearded man, but that by 1927, the slang use had evolved, as the dictionary delicately puts it, into a gynecological sense, with the meaning “female genitals, especially with a display of pubic hair”. So the magazine was named quite innocently in 1920, and it wasn’t until about 1927 that the sniggering started—and has lasted ever since. One can imagine someone picking up the magazine and expecting something quite different from what it contains.

Well, the magazine has finally yielded. It was partially since the animal name implied a nature magazine instead of the history magazine it was. And it was only partially because of the sniggering. It was an article in the New York Times that made clear to me the fundamental reason for the change: “Web Filters Cause Name Change for a Magazine”. The magazine is a bimonthly, and a large part of its mission involves reaching kids in school, and their teachers. And it was the internet that forced the name change. In the last two years, web filters at schools and junk filters in email programs began to block access to material containing the magazine’s name, imperiling the magazine’s mission. Access to many other readers was similarly blocked.

So the name was changed, but actually quite cleverly: the heading and subheading were simply more or less reversed. Starting with the April-May 2010 issue, the magazine is now being called Canada’s History, followed by the small subtitle: Formerly The Beaver. I suppose they could in time drop the subtitle, or perhaps even keep it for historical purposes, no pun intended.

Rude Names: A Dessert   Although I was going to leave this topic at this point, it occurred to me that men need equal time here. If we’re going to look into names with sexual innuendo involving female genitalia, it would behoove us to continue our sniggering and look into the same involving male genitalia, at which point we once again come back to the topic of Spotted Dick.

I invite readers to refer back to the very last sentence of the very first posting on this website, 2001/1. It was our return after many years to Britain that year, we’d just gotten off the QE2, picked up a car at Southampton, and drove to Exeter. At dinner at the hotel that evening, we ended with a dessert of Spotted Dick “just to be sure we were really back in England” to quote myself in that posting.

For the uninitiated, Spotted Dick is a steamed suet pudding, often served with custard. It’s studded with dried fruits, usually currants or raisins, hence “spotted”. The earliest references to are recipes dating from about 1850. The problem with the traditional name, of course, is the word dick. There are two explanations for the name (beyond the penis and Richard connotation) that I feel are reasonable.

One is that dick in this use is a dialectical form derived from the last syllable of “pudding”. One can reasonably envision a change to “puddink” to “puddick” to “dick”. The other explanation that seems reasonable is a change from the word “dough”, which can go to “duff”, “dog”, or “dick”. A dialect pronunciation of “dough” can be DUFF instead of DOH, similarly to “rough” and “tough”. As an example, there is another dessert called Plum Duff. Another dialectical pronunciation of “dough” can be dog, and Spotted Dog is indeed another name for Spotted Dick, and a change from DOG to DICK is a stretch, but not unreasonable.

In recent years, some attempts have been made to change the name Spotted Dick. Some hospitals found patients were embarrassed to order it, and the large Tesco supermarket chain noted a decline in the sale of tins of Spotted Dick because people were embarrassed to be seen checking it out. But the solution that some hospitals and other authorities tried during the course of the last decade was absolutely ludicrous. They tried to change the name to Spotted Richard (!!!). That’s a “cure” that’s worse than the malady. If there’s no real reference in the name to a penis, there is certainly no reference to Richard.

As the Canadians found, name changes can be reasonable to stop the sniggering, as long as the change makes sense. I think there are two reasonable changes in this case. One is to call the dessert Spotted Dog, since that’s an interesting metaphorical image and since it already exists as a traditional alternate use. But the best solution to my way of thinking is to simply call it Spotted Pudding, which is conceivably how the name started out in the first place.

Project Gutenberg   We recently (2009/18) discussed Tools of the Trade, devices that help make research easier with the purpose of collecting information for dissemination, one of the things we do here. I have just come across another one I’m pleased with. It’s Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org, named after the German printer who revolutionized printing and thereby literacy, Johannes Gutenberg (2005/17). You can use it free of charge to download ebooks that are not, or no longer, copyrighted. For instance, you can type in “Maugham” and “Rain” (2009/6) and read the novella online. I had reason to use it twice recently as I’ve been researching Australia and have compiled tons of notes. I wanted to expand on quotes I’d seen by Mark Twain about Australia in his “Following the Equator” of 1898, and by Matthew Flinders, who promoted the name Australia, in his “Voyage to Terra Australis” of 1814. I found them both on Project Gutenberg, found the passages I needed, and got lengthier and more meaningful quotes than what I’d had. Where else could I have gotten two 19C books to look over so easily?

Proust & Madeleines Redux   Then I had another occasion to use Project Gutenberg. I was at my sister Pat’s house and the pastries she served with coffee included madeleines. Because of the madeleines, the discussion moved to involuntary memory to Proust, since that’s what madeleines have become famous for, and that evening I researched Proust to find the complete madeleine story beyond the bits and pieces I was aware of, and I consider it worthwhile concluding this posting with.

I discussed Proust, involuntary memory, and madeleines rather fully in the very last part of 2007/14, which also included a quote in French one could have learned. I urge that be reviewed, as this current posting will only be an extension of that, but including additional information. We will this time include pictures of madeleines and of the madeleine pan needed to bake them. I also want to point out that anything, by means of any one of the senses, can invoke involuntary memory. The scent of baking cookies brings you back to Grandma’s kitchen; the sound of some music you like brings you back to a past encounter. But Proust used a food, madeleines, to become the poster child for involuntary memory. Proust’s writing is wordy, and in order to tie together the below five-paragraph excerpt on madeleines, much intervening text had to be eliminated.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day . . . when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin . . . . Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours . . . .

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray . . . , when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me . . . immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents . . . ; and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine . . . . [I]n that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.