Talking with a friend, it occurred to me that quite possibly the most universally conceived blog idea, if not, thankfully, the one most commonly realized in practice, is some variation on this:
“I should keep track of everything I eat and every time I take a crap.”
Taking a walk through the neighborhood today after breakfast at Red Bicycle, I was greeted on one block of Houghton St. by a trio of dachshunds, two of them running toward me while a third held court on a lawn in the middle of the block.
With all the barking and trotting alongside and earnest looks, they seemed to be torn between an instinct to protect their home turf and some larger gut loyalty to anything human that might acknowledge and validate their eager presences. I felt like a diplomat, ferried along by an involuntary but respectful armed escort from one checkpoint to another.
As the story goes, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was rather messily killed by knights of King Henry II of England on Dec. 29th, 1170, after the king asked from his sickbed, regarding Becket, “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Or maybe “…troublesome priest”. Or “meddlesome priest”?
Or possibly pestilent, pestilential, tiresome, meddling, vexing, worrisome, insolent, accursed, cursed, bothersome, dammed [sic], insufferable, or parish priest. It depends on who you google, though “turbulent”, “troublesome”, and “meddlesome” seem to dominate the more direct discussions of Henry’s query and Becket’s death, and to dominate the snowclonish repurposings of same as the results below suggest.
(Or it may have been “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”, according to Edward Grim, but that’s hardly as snappy or as good for riffing. Repeatability is nine tenths of the meme.)
In any case, Henry and Becket are dead and I’m hardly a historical scholar; but the phrase lives on as a popular snowclone, and I am enthusiastic about snowclones indeed, so I decided this morning to do a little googling and put together a list of the first several dozen riffs on this phrase I could find.
In other words, what sorts of things other than priests do folks on the internet wish they could be rid of, and how, exactly, would said folks characterize said non-priests?
But first, a little digression. Now, besides being shit at history, I’m the very layest of lay etymologists, so someone with a better grasp of either would be able to provide more clarifying detail here, but one lurking question about the variation in word-choice in the popular phrases is that of whether any given word was contemporary to Henry II when he was committing his sly bedridden speech act in the late 12th C.
The OED’s cites for “turbulent”, for example, only go back to the 16th and 17th century, four hundred years or so after Henry uttered it.
“Troublesome” similarly has plenty of mid-16th century cites, but nothing earlier. “Trouble” itself has cites back to 1230, though, and “some” is an older word still though I’m having trouble making sense of the OED’s citations of this variant of the “-some” suffix form in particular.
“Meddlesome” has nothing before the early 17th, though “meddle” like “trouble” seems to be roughly contemporary to Henry II.
How much of this is a just a natural symptom of relatively poor records before Gutenberg hit the scene in the mid 15th C. I can’t say. I know a whole lot less than I would like about the practicalities of the work the OED and etymologists in general do.
But, in any case, the path from what Henry II did say to what folks are willing to suggest he said is an interestingly twisty one, the road from Early-Middle English (or Anglo Norman or Old French or whatever Henry was shouting in when under the weather and upset at his holy men) probably being as much one of translation as anything. Assuming, again, that he even said this and not what Grim quotes. (Unfortunately, the historical works of Preston & Logan do not address the subject.)
In order to avoid a pile of references to original line, I used the search string “will no one rid me of this” -”priest”, and looked through the first ten or so pages of results.
I’ve organized the results by type — the big three modifiers, miscellaneous other modifiers, and a handful of versions that eschew the modifier entirely in favor of a bare noun phrase, as well as a note about a structural collision.
There’s an interesting variety here. Some citations are explicitly political or bureaucratic in a way that suggests a very strong intentional nod to the historical root (though with varying moral vectors, from “let’s not be hasty or careless with our words” all the way to “for god’s sake, go eliminate the figurative archbishop already”); others are clearly farther from the source, and it’s worth speculating a little about where the reference is a knowing literary play and where it’s a second-hand play on a phrase unmoored from its origins, and to what degree that can be deduced by the form and presentation of the snowclone.
(One otherwise unremarkable citation I saw attributed the line to Shakespeare. It does feel a little Shakespeare-y to me; on the other hand, it doesn’t feel very Twain-y or Franklin-y. There’s a web game waiting to be made here where quotes (actual, apocryphal, or newly fabricated) are presented to the reader who is then asked to pick between which of those three overly-attributed English figures wrote it up. Another day.)
In any case this is necessarily not an exhaustive list of even what google can find; the hitcount for the search is around 13K, and while that is presumably inflated by omitted duplicates and such I don’t have the patience to try and crawl through the whole list. There are no doubt more examples to be found for the intrepid searcher. And now, the list:
meddlesome Duke
meddlesome PIECE
meddlesome Stiftung
meddlesome beast
meddlesome bow
meddlesome judge
meddlesome man
meddlesome marionette
meddlesome monk (a variant quote of Henry II)
meddlesome mouseketeer
meddlesome officer
meddlesome poop
meddlesome problem
meddlesome slump
meddlesome state trooper
meddlesome student worker
meddlesome transcription
meddlesome woodpecker
troublesome Avenger
troublesome Elmendorf
troublesome Friend (of Courtney Cox)
troublesome bitch
troublesome catcher
troublesome chair
troublesome congress
troublesome cough
troublesome government
troublesome hockey player
troublesome lawmaker
troublesome malware
troublesome man
troublesome plugin
troublesome plumber
troublesome pope
troublesome prelate (another variant quote of Henry II)
troublesome press
troublesome weed
troublesome work
turbulent Democratic Congress
turbulent Loser (of the reality show)
turbulent Prime Minister
turbulent Red
turbulent SFX Deputy Editor
turbulent author
turbulent bird
turbulent central banker
turbulent chancellor
turbulent judge
turbulent penguin
turbulent picnic table
turbulent snow
turbulent splash screen
bothersome 130-pound diabetic
indolent man
irritating modal fallacy
moose-eating harpy bitch
obstructionist Senate
overrated, overblown, omnipresent celluloid stupidity
pestilential beast
stinking town
termagant wife
tiresome coon
ubiqtuitous frontsman
upstart mouse
Dwarf
annoyance
ex-girlfriend
man
stock
access denied
There were also many hits for pages using the forms “…woman” or “…daughter of Marwan”, as a point of citation regarding Muhammed and Islam, on any number of pages taking a generally deeply critical stance re: same.
I’m ten-foot-poling that one; I’ll note the curiosity of the structural overlap with the popular rendering of Henry II, but beyond that you’re on your own if you want to explore it. Let me know if you find anything linguistically or historically interesting.
As I was cleaning up a spare computer to give to a friend yesterday, I found a cache of old files that I thought I’d lost to a hard drive failure years ago.
A lot of those recovered files are individual daily entries in what these days I’d probably call a workday liveblog, but which at the time I referred to as just “the worklog”. I wrote it at my desk, on an aging Palm IIIc cradled in a small keyboard peripheral for easy typing, making little time-stamped sub-entries throughout the day. At home each evening, I’d sync the text files off my Palm and upload them on some (terrible) custom blog software I’d written for myself.
My job at the time was as a “phone technician” at the (now-defunct) local call-center for one of the big market research companies. I made out-going calls, mostly cold calls, to try and either conduct or arrange for a time to conduct market research surveys with a mix of consumers, small business people, and IT folks at larger businesses. I did not like that job very much at all.
I don’t know why I started writing the worklog. But I kept at it for months; I haven’t checked, but I’d estimate I wrote somewhere on the order of 100,000 words.
This is the first entry in the worklog, from June 2003, unedited. I had been at this job for about a year at this point.
6/12/03
7:20 am
I’m pretty tired of clarifying with people that I’m not selling anything. Pretty much every time I talk to a receptionist, I say hi, blah blah blah, and they say, but we already have a contract for our printers, and I say, no, when I said market research I meant MARKET FUCKING RESEARCH, and they say oh, hold on, I’ll transfer you.
7:28 am
It bothers me when part of the work I do involves trying to suppress my natural reaction to another person’s reasonable statement.
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If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
- Voltaire, Épître à l’Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs
If [John F. Kennedy] didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and then shoot him.
- Rob Sheffield, Vanity Fair
The following is a list of some of the people, groups, places, and varyingly abstract concepts that folks on the internet believe would need to be, in the case of their non-existence, invented, according to Google.
I searched only for cases that matched the (seemingly canonical) English translation that leads this post; there are more lax forms, e.g. “…we’d have to invent him”, that turn up many additional hits if you care to go looking, but I wanted to keep things simple and go for the (arbitrarily?) pure snowclone with this one.
It’s interesting that the intention of any given citation may vary: in some cases (especially with political figures) it seems mostly to be used as a jab at the named figure, or at those who depend on that named figure or group for fodder; with less political figures, it tends to be more of a neutral or even laudatory expression.
The list, in as-the-hits-arrived order:
God
The Twenty-First Century
Osama bin Laden
Civic Intelligence
DPRK
The Internet
The founders
Stephen King
Old 97s
The Codex Seraphinianus
Mignon Fogarty
Minivans
Hippies
Archivists
Evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci
Donald Trump
This Potato Salad
McCain
The Stig
Tom Waits
Joe Lieberman
Ayn Rand
Al Qaeda
Rock Bottom
P.Z. Myers
McDonalds
This website
The PC Controversy
The Mafia
In-ear monitors
Manchester United
William “The Refrigerator” Perry
Christmas
Spacetime
Etruscan
Hong Kong
Mobile telephony
Homosexuals
The Roman Empire
(Previous entry — first entry)
Sunday, May 9
21:00
Engaging landed alien craft in Yukon, Canada. By far the largest craft we’ve seen up close.
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(Previous entry — first entry)
Saturday, May 1
13:08
Animal Squad are on return vector to HQ from the alien base they’ve just routed in Fiji when our intel guys report a terror attack in Beijing. Christ on a crutch.
Deploying the squad from Bram. The vamps. They’re armed and armored and itching for some action; I hope they don’t get more than they can handle.
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Glengarry Glen Foo
or: things other than closing that googling thinks you should “ABC: Always Be…” doing.
This is from a scan of the first fifteen or so pages of a google search for “abc. always be” -”always be closing”, sorted into a few categories, looking at how people use the “ABC: Always Be x” template as a snowclone.
-ing forms:
Calling
Canceling
Capturing
Cartooning
Casting
Celebrating
Challenging Yourself
Charging
Clicking
Cobbling
Collecting
Combining
Communicating
Compounding
Conditioning
Connecting
Conning
Constructing Business Models
Contacting
Cosplaying
Crafting
Creating
Crediting
Crouching
Curling
Cutting
Things that aren’t an -ing form:
Calm
Careful
Cautious
Certain
Cheerful
Classy
Clean
Cleared
Comfortable
Concise
Confident
Congruent
Conservative
Cool
Courteous
Covert
Cute
Things that don’t start with C:
Base-Closing
In Control
Promoting
Things that probably weren’t supposed to start with C but who knows really:
Cprepared
(Previous entry — first entry)
May 1
9:59
Infiltrating alien base on Fiji. I don’t know if we’re ready, but we’re as ready as we can be and this isn’t a chance I’m going to let slip by.
—
Located two ground-level elevator shafts. Split into two teams to make the descent. Don’t like coming down blind like this.
Gazelle is first down to what appears to be ground level of the alien base. Big place, lots of corridors. Same general material as the alien crafts we’ve seen — is this thing a pre-fab structure flown in from wherever the xenomorphs came from, or is this earth-side construction? I’m not sure which answer I’m less eager to hear.
Immediate contact, a grey. Clean take for Gazelle, and proof that these plasma weapons work just as well when we’re the ones firing them.
Hamster nailed coming down the elevator. Dammit. Wolvie gets revenge.
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(Previous entry — first entry)
Thursday, April 1
Morning
Going ahead with the third-base initiative. I’d like to be able to have a non-combat facility, to focus specifically on research and manufacturing projects.
Pricing things out, we can’t do better than to build in India, and there’s some excellent infrastructure available for our tech needs. We’re setting up a bit west of Hyderabad.
I’m calling the new base Kali Yuga. I’m honestly not sure if that’s me being pessimistic or optimistic or fatalistic or what. Three months ago I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me this is how I’d be spending April Fool’s Day.
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