A Toughy for Daffy

When the rain raineth
And the goose winketh
Little wotteth the gosling
What the goose thinketh.
-Anon.

Yes, it's raining here in Santa Monica, and the gosling and I wot not a thing of the goose's mental machinations. I do want to call to your attention, however, the word wotteth, and ask you to stare at it for several seconds. It won't help with the goose, but it will incline you to say, "man, that is one wacko language we have."

I can't tell you all the possible phrases one could make using the letters from raineth, winketh, wotteth, and thinketh, but I can tell you you'd have more "the"s at your disposal than with your average four-word set. And "eth"s. Moreover, I can tell you that the word solver can be re-arranged to form lovers, something I first considered while reading page 290 of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory (formerly Conclusive Evidence), where he talks about the pitfalls he incorporates into chess problems he designs, "to lead the would-be solver astray." Thus I thought also of would-be lovers, which did not, but could have, made me think of Cinderella's two step-sisters with respect to the prince. This in turn leads to the scene where one of these chops off her heel in an effort to fit in the glass slipper, which no doubt was supremely uncomfortable even without a severed foot (the real significance of the fairy-tale is that it prefigures ladies’ dress-shoe-shopping of today: every soirée instance of pandemic blistering is more aptly called a Cinderella story than the Mets’ '86 World Series win).

But the heel: there is no indication that the sister’s heel shortage led to an untimely death; on the contrary, her loggerheadedness seems to have gone on undiminished. My use of the l-word does not betray spite for that profession—my late great-grandfather Bloom was a logger by trade, and a good one at that—no, we have the British Bard himself to thank for its pejoration. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Biron exclaims, on having his guilt exposed by Dumain, "Ah, you whoreson loggerhead, you were born to do me shame!" This is the same Biron of the even better speech,

“Shot, by heaven! Proceed, sweet Cupid:
thou hast thumped him with thy bird-bolt under the
left pap. In faith, secrets!”

Secrets, indeed: mark how it all connects, for it surely does. One of the two most popular versions of the myth has a leaf falling on Achilles’ heel when his mother, the goddess Thetis, dips him in the river Styx to immortalize him. Note that the heel is the part of the body closest to the ground, whereas the head is the uppermost part, and that a leaf is the uppermost part of tree, whereas the trunk, or log, is the section closest to the ground. Thus the leaf is linked to the heel by the same relationship (arguably the opposite) as the log is linked to the head, and we can think of loggerhead and leaferheel as synonymous, leaving open the possibility of their antonymy. The other version of the myth holds that Achilles’ heel remained undipped, and thus vulnerable, simply because that is where Thetis was holding him. Either account works for us, though the former is more intriguing.

Few disagree that Achilles perished by an arrow—either of Paris or Apollo, or through some supernatural working of the latter in the former’s arrow—to the heel. “Shot, by heaven!” and also “under the left pap,” only not directly under it, but about four and a half feet lower, assuming normal-to-large stature. Since the rest of him was immortal, a blow to any place other than the heel would have failed. This makes us wonder: what if Achilles, whether to fit in a certain slipper or for some other reason, had previously cut off the self-same heel? Two results are likely—either the arrow would have missed, since there would have been nothing there to hit, or the arrow would have been harmless, since it would have hit an invulnerable part of Achilles’ foot. In either case, Achilles would have survived the shot!

But what are the chances of Achilles doing such a thing? Greater than we might think. Thetis, seeing from prophecy that her son was fated to die, disguised him as a female and put him under the care of Lycomedes of Scyros. Initially the fifteen-year-old Achilles refused to dress as a girl until he realized it was the only way to get at King Lycomedes’ daughter, and thus he gave in to being essentially identified as his own sister. Given the friskiness of the gods and of the ancient Greeks in general, it is not inconceivable that Achilles might have entered a situation in which, for love or greed, he would have chopped off his own heel. In fact, Achilles seems like the type who would rather lose his heel than dress as a girl, and so we can go so far as to say that the heelless story would have been even more likely than the Iliad’s account! What is more, Achilles and the wicked step-sister are linked linguistically and perhaps ontologically by their statuses as loggerhead and leaferheel.

I have come across those who would have had me write stati instead of statuses. The same would probably prefer syllabi to syllabuses, and so would err on two counts. First, in English we generally form the plural by adding –s or –es. This is the case even with foreign words, for instance, we write the plural of chateau as chateaus, even though in French it is chateaux (though I have seen exceptions). Thus, if we are speaking English, which we are, it makes most sense to say syllabuses. The second count is more informative: even in Latin, the plural of syllabus is not and never has been syllabi! Syllabus is a noun of the fourth declension (unlike cactus, for instance, which is of the second; that is what makes its Latin plural cacti), hence the Latin plural of syllabus is syllabūs (with a long u).

The bottom line is that Achilles would have been better off without that heel. If only leaferheel had been a loggerhead and sliced it off! History would have been changed considerably: the Greeks would still have sacked Troy, of course, but other, psychologically more significant, alterations of the space-time continuum would have ensued. Achilles’ child, for instance, with whom he had left his wife Deidamia (the aforementioned daughter of the king) pregnant, would not have grown up fatherless, which some studies have shown contributes to adolescent alienation.

I am utterly certain that I wished to expound several other connections between the Greek hero and Cinderella’s steppie, but in the process of following some have abandoned the others. Feel free to supplement this account in the comments section.

We could say the moral of it all is that a fairy godmother beats a god-for-a-mother, or that it is better to go to the ball in a pumpkin pulled by mice than to have been dunked as a kid headfirst in hell’s river by your own mother. But that might be reading too much into things. Really, it is simply that for some it pays to be step-sister to a coal-covered beauty with a kick-ass fairy godmother, and for some it doesn’t.