The malady lingers
AS you may have heard, the five surviving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus have just realised that the Year of the Snake is almost over. On January 31, the Year of the Horse begins, so if they don’t make a comeback now they’ll have to wait another 12 years for such fortuitous timing, by which time more members may have unsurvived.
The surreal comedy-sketch series began on British television in 1969. Six years later, the word “Pythonesque” slithered into our lexicon. (Recipe writers, please note the use of slither — the word you’re after when dismembering onions is “sliver”.) No other TV series has spawned an official new word. You don’t hear spiky-haired children with hepatitis described as Simpsonesque, or overweening snobs called Frasieresque.
So now John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones plan to perform together (minus Graham Chapman the unsurvivor) after a break of 30 years. That is neither here nor there. (Actually it will probably be there, since that’s where they mostly live, although it would be quite pleasant if they came here too.)
Whether or not they reunite, the impact of the Python gang on the English language is remarkable and indelible. There are more pet pythons called Monty than there are rhinos called Neal. Actually, there are more pythons called Monty than there are rhinos at all. Not to mention more goldfish, hedgehogs, bats, mice and mutilated bees called Eric.
Another word they gave us is “spam”. It already existed as a canned meat-like substance (the trade name was registered in the US in 1937, based on either “spiced ham” or “shoulder pork and ham”, depending which side of the pig pen you lean towards). Knowledge of spam spread around the world only after the immortal scene in which Graham Chapman and Eric Idle, dressed as spam — I mean man — and wife try to order a spam-free breakfast from a spam-obsessed waitress in a spam café near a table full of spamloving Vikings in horned helmets, who sing about spam.
There can be no better word to describe the plague of unsolicited marketing, even though it didn’t exist at the time. Sometimes a word needs to wait for its proper time to come. Spam was one of those. There may come a time when kumquat surprises us all.
The name Monty Python was chosen for the best possible reason — simply because it sounded funny. Had the knights who appear in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (in a scene entitled “Knights with a Repetitive Tendency to Repetitively Say Ni Repetitively”) demanded a tablecloth instead of a shrubbery as a toll fee from King Arthur, no one would have laughed. Some words are funnier than others. The word python comes from the mythical serpent slain by the mythical Greek sun-god Apollo, near Delphi, originally called Pytho. (And we say the Monty Python team had imagination.) Python only began to be used in reference to real snakes of the large tropical variety in 1836, by the French, who pronounced it “pee-thon”. Which brings us back to The Holy Grail: “I am French, why do you think I have this outrageous accent?”
In 1985 an Australian palaeontologist discovered the fossil of an enormous prehistoric snake. He called it Montypythonoides riversleighensis. There may be nothing in the least funny about naming a several-million-year-old snake after a troupe of absurdist comic savants, of course. But I’m sure the Python team could make something of it. Let’s hope they do. In a shrubbery.