Geek chic is not freaky
QUESTION Does the insult geek date from the 19th century?
THE modern geek is an overly diligent, unsociable man obsessively devoted to a particular pursuit, whether it be computers, comics or sci-fi TV shows.
However, the word dates back to the 15th century when it was geke, though by the 16th century it had evolved to gecke.
It came into the English language from the Low German geck, via Middle Dutch, as gec, a fool, simpleton or dupe.
It first appeared in English in this sense in Alexander Barclay’s Certayne Eglogues of 1515: ‘Aiijb, He is a foole, a sotte, and a geke also/Which choseth... the worst [way] and most of ieoperdie.’
In an 1876 glossary, F.K. Robinson was the first to use the modern spelling: ‘Gawk, Geek, Gowk or Gowky, a fool; a person uncultivated; a dupe.’
The word’s modern shift in meaning is traced to the influential 1947 film noir Nightmare Alley, which centres on the rise and fall of sideshow mindreader Stan Carlyle (Tyrone Power).
The carnival’s geek was a gruesome yet tragic figure, a down-and-out addict tricked into a nightmarish job of biting the heads off live animals for the entertainment of the audience.
The film provided the context for the geek as a marginalised figure, which was then appropriated as an epithet for social outsiders. By the mid-1990s, a geek’s fortunes changed dramatically. The computer industry helped many to achieve great financial success.
Geeks have been romantically linked with beautiful women in TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory and films including Superbad and Knocked Up.
Simon Finch, Ashford, Kent.
QUESTION Did a bishop once win the World’s Biggest Liar competition? Who are notable winners of this title?
THE World’s Biggest Liar has been held at the Santon Bridge Inn in the Lake District valley of Wasdale in England since 1974.
The contest honours the memory of 19th-century Wasdale Head Inn landlord Will Ritson, who would regale patrons with his tall tales. He tried to fool Victorian tourists into believing turnips in the dale grew to be so large that farmers hollowed them out for use as byres for their Herdwick fell sheep.
He also claimed to have mated a foxhound with a golden eagle and that the resulting pups kept the area free of foxes.
Each November the best dissemblers gather at the Santon Bridge Inn to tell the most elaborate fibs. The contest is open to all but MPs, who are deemed to be professionals in an amateur arena. Lawyers were once banned, too, but the prohibition has been rescinded.
Entrants must lie for between two and eight minutes.
Dialects are permitted – chucking in a bit of local slang is a geet barrie (very good) way to curry favour with the judges.
Legend has it that a visiting bishop, stumbling across the contest in progress, puffed himself up and declared: ‘I have never told a lie in my life.’
He was immediately declared that year’s winner. However, there is no record that this happened.
Fell runner Joss Naylor took the crown of the World’s Biggest Liar in 1979 and 1982.
His nephew Mike Naylor has also won – on six occasions. In 2004, he claimed a local firm called Bang! No Folk Left (BNFL) was set to flood Wasdale.
Herdwick sheep would be replaced by fish farming, monitored by Daftra, the British Ministry of Underwater Fisheries and Food. The Wasdale Show was to be replaced with seahorse racing, he claimed.
Cumbrian farmer John Graham has won seven times.
The only female winner was TV presenter Sue Perkins, in 2006.
Her tale of ‘muttons of mass destruction’ began with the unlikely claim she had been born in Wasdale, but that at an early age her voicebox had been adopted by a rich couple from Surrey. She donated her £25 prize money from her triumph to a local animal sanctuary.
Alan Kay, Windermere, Westmorland.
QUESTION Was William Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet inspired by the seventhcentury Arabic love story of Layla and Majnun?
WHILE the two stories are similar, it is difficult to establish whether the 12th-century folk tale directly inspired the Elizabethan bard.
There are several Layla And Majnun stories by Arabian, Persian and Turkish poets through the centuries.
The oldest version was written in Persian by Azerbaijani poet Nizami Ganjavi as a mathnawi, a long poem of rhyming couplets.
It relates how Qays ibn alMullawah falls in love with Layla al-Aamiriya. He composes heartfelt poems declaring his love.
His open efforts to woo lead to him being dubbed ‘Majnun’, or ‘crazy man’.
When he then asks for Layla’s hand in marriage, her father refuses the request because of the stigma of madness.
Layla is subsequently married off to a rich merchant and later dies of a broken heart.
The body of Majnun, who has been roaming the desert, is found near her grave.
Lord Byron called this tale of unrequited love and tribal factions the ‘Romeo And Juliet of the East’.
Turkish scholar Agah Syrry Levend believed Eastern love stories were introduced to Western literature during the Crusades. He argued Layla and Majnun is the source of the medieval romances Aucassin and Nicolette, Tristan and Iseult and Floris and Blancheflour, as well as Romeo and Juliet.
The tragic plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet was by no means original. It was based on a folk tale that appeared in many different versions in 15th- and 16th-century Europe.
Arthur Brooke’s 3,020-line poem The Tragicall Historye Of Romeus and Juliet in 1562 is the first English translation of Matteo Bandello’s Italian Novell and was the key source for Shakespeare.
Eric Clapton borrowed the tale for the Derek And The Dominos album Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs. The song I Am Yours is a direct quote from a passage in Layla And Majnun.
Rachel Hardings, Warwick.
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