Mind your language
1 HAVE just moved the cat from the kitchen table in the hope that it had made a day-bed of some annotations I had collected on J.K. Rowling. I thought they would be timely (or timeous as people like to say, all of a sudden).
Since I can't find them and we've heard quite enough about Harry Potter for the time being, here is some more on bezoars. Lady Jennings from Cam- bridge has just had what we all recog- nise — the word popping up again after encountering it once. She found bezoar (the supposedly counter-poisonous con- gelation in a goat's stomach, `Mind your language', 15 January) in Christo- pher Smart's A Song to David: For ADORATION, incense comes From bezoar, and Arabian gums, And on the civet's fuer.
The metre shows that Smart pro- nounced bezoar as two syllables, before the 19th-century spelling-pro- nunciation came in. Lady Jennings suggests that Smart, at least, supposed bezoar emitted a smell. Perhaps it does, or else its place in incense is attributable to its antidotal quality, as Sir Thomas Browne puts it. For I, too, experienced the Jennings effect by stumbling across bezoar yesterday in his Vulgar Errors even though it is not in the table of contents. I do love Browne's high 17th-century prose; here is what he says about some pre- cious stones:
That lapis lazuli hath in it a purgative fac- ulty we know; that bezoar is antidotal, lapis judaicus diuretical, coral antepilep- deal, we will not deny.... But that an amethyst prevents inebriation; that an emerald will break if worn in copulation; that a diamond laid under the pillow will betray the incontinency of a wife: that a sapphire is preservative against enchant- ments; that the fume of an agate will avert a tempest, or the wearing of a chrysoprase make one out of love with gold, as some have delivered, we are yet, confess, to believe, and in that infidelity are likely to end our days.
It is odd that one so doubting of these erroneous attributes of stones should still think the bezoar a sure anti- dote. Sir Thomas Browne was a physi- cian. Did he ever try out bezoar against poison, and, if he did, would it have truly been bezoar or some other gummy or concreted matter? My hus- band does not know, not using it in his pharmacopoeia, thank heavens. Do any of you keep a bezoar, like a rabbit's foot or a sachet of Beecham's?
Dot Wordsworth
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