I say! The story behind screamers, and other literary curiosities...

Mike Bodnar explores some of the stuff we take for granted in literature every day...

"We all know what exclamation marks are for!" smirked Julian.

"I didn't ask you what they're for," retorted Gabby, "I asked if you know where they come from, not what they're for or where they go."

Julian shuffled on his knees to the door of the tree hut, then turned. "You're a girly swot, Gabby. I'm not playing!" And with that he exited the structure, and - forgetting the ladder had been hauled up - fell immediately to his death.

The End.

Okay, not your average Enid Blyton snippet, but, y'know, lol! It's just to grab your attention.

Because, while I was reading a novel the other day (Mick Herron's latest Slow Horses book, Clown Town, since you ask), I suddenly wondered where exclamation marks came from. 

No reflection on Mr. Herron's writing - I am easily distracted - but when he relates that one of his characters says something 'in italics' - that got me pondering the origins of italics too. There is a link between exclamation marks and italics, and it's called Italy. The clue, obviously, is in the word italics itself. Jackson Lamb and his clowns had to wait while I investigated.

So let's start with - yes let's! - exclamation marks, because I have done the legwork for you. 

"Guarda! Posso mettere più parole sulla pagina!"

Turns out we must travel back to the 13th or 14th centuries (the jury is still out), where, stepping from the Tardis, we discover that monks, toiling away on their tomes, would use a particular way of spelling 'joy' ('io') in Latin, which was to put the 'i' directly above the 'o'.

Over time, the 'o' became more of a dot, and the word eventually ceased to be a word and became the exclamation mark we all know today. Does that bring you joy?

If it does, you'll also be delighted to know that io is pronounced 'ee-oh', or even 'yo'. So when someone in your 'hood calls out, 'Yo!' you know they are really shouting joy to you. Either that or they're about to mug you.

But here I am being flippant again. Straight face, let's continue.

The man himself

For evidence, while we're in bygone Italy, we can meet Coluccio Salutati, where in one of his manuscripts we find the very first example of io written as an i above an o. 

However, he wasn't the one to popularise it; fast forward just a few decades - still in Italy - and we find printers such as Venetian Aldus Manutius standardizing the i above the dot to express and emphasise strong emotion. The rest really is history.

(As an aside, printers later called the exclamation mark the 'bang,' 'screamer,' and even the 'shriek'!)

Italics

As mentioned, the word italics provides a glaringly obvious clue to its origin, and once again it's printer Aldus Manutius who is the prime suspect. And we don't even have to get back in the Tardis.

Just a year or so after he discovered and popularised the joy of the exclamation mark, he got his assistant to craft a more cursive script for an edition of the Epistole of St. Catherine of Siena

Italics in action

. There followed rapid adoption of the slanting italic script by Manutius, but not, I must emphasise, for emphasis.

No; instead, the smaller slanting cursive script was used because it took up less space than more traditional typeface, enabling the publishing of more compact pocket books, in, for example, octavo format.

Not that cursive script was new - scholars and other scribes in the 14th century had often written in italics, but it was Manutius who began using it in print, and he in fact modestly named the type 'Aldino.' 

We don't call it Aldino today, because, very soon after Manutius claimed ownership (which, by the way, received papal approval three times, bless), competitors outside Venice also adopted it (some say counterfeited it), but called the script 'italics' as a way of giving Italy as a country ownership, rather than just one man. (I'm surprised they didn't call exclamation marks 'exclamitali' ©Mike Bodnar).

Just my type

Italics have a special place in my heart because when I was about ten or eleven years old, I was given a brand new typewriter, an Olympia 33 portable. I didn't think twice that it actually had italic type hammers, and that everything I typed was strongly emphasised. Writing a letter, I'd begin with, 'Dear Shaun,' except it would of course come out as an imperative Dear Shaun, and finish with an emphatic 'Your friend, Mike.' 

My school assignments likewise were presented in urgent typeface, though not, it has to be said, always in a timely manner.

But I learned to type on that machine, and it was my trusty workhorse for at least the next ten years.

Ellipses...

And so, at least in this article, to the final item of punctuative interest: dot, dot, dot - the ellipsis. Ellipses have, of recent times, become somewhat controversial. But first, some more time travelling. Follow me.

Terence, Andria, translated by Maurice Kyffin: 
London, 1588
(The British Library Board, C.13.a.6 sig. Iiiiir)

The use of dots to show a pause or a tailing off in speech can be seen in an early Roman play, Andria, in a 1588 English translation of previous Greek versions. Here, it seems, the translator has taken the liberty to introduce a pause or tailing off in speech using a series of dots. In this case (see pic) there are four, and they are more dashes than dots, but their purpose is the same: they demonstrate a deliberate absence of words.

Literary academic Dr. Anne Toner, in a paper on the origins and use of ellipses, has this to say...

But an absence of words usually signals a heightening of emotion or action ... The ellipsis acts therefore as a form of stage direction. As such, it has proved to be a powerful and extremely useful dramatic resource. In speaking aloud, pausing is, after all, a vital aspect of the delivery of meaning: a slight hesitation speaks volumes. As Toner says: “...not saying something often says it better."

Which makes me want to leave the rest of this article blank, just so you can marvel at the creativity that isn't actually here...

'Jack sweeps Rose up in his arms
and takes her into the bedroom...'

But you don't get rid of me that easily. I agree with Dr. Toner that something unsaid can also be something revealed. I feel, for example, that ellipses are the equivalent of the slow mix between scenes in a movie, something that suggests time passing, or a 'meanwhile moment.' 

Also in movie terms, ellipses are like the fade-to-black at the end of a scene, where no more needs to be said. For example, 'Jack sweeps Rose up in his arms and takes her into the bedroom...'

You could adopt this in a practical sense at home. For example, tomorrow evening, when it's approaching bedtime, try saying to your partner, 'D'you fancy a bit of dot dot dot?' and see what happens. Don't blame me if you get a black eye.

'Boomer ellipses'

So, to the controversy. Ellipses, when employed in a messaging or texting context, have taken on a tone of aggression in today's internet-based communication. Apparently. But - it must be stressed - this interpretation is entirely the domain of... young people. (See what I did there?)

Ooh, sarcasm!

People my age - and let's not say anything about that other than I was a teenager when Apollo 11 landed on the moon - and 'boomers' in general, have been accused by Gen Z and millennials of not understanding ellipses, or at the very least, misusing them. 

Seriously; they even call them 'Boomer ellipses,' because, duh, they're so old fashioned? (The question mark is so that in your head this sounds like a young person speaking.)

A Gen Z or millennial today will typically use ellipses in their phone messages to indicate sarcasm, displeasure, hesitation or annoyance, whereas we boomers continue to employ and interpret ellipses as they have been understood for over 500 years. In short, we have a generational divide; we employ ellipses as they were originally intended - to show a continuation, a pause, or a passage of time, while Gen Z and millennials have reinterpreted them as the bad guys - the Three Dots of the Apocalypse.

It's just one indication of how language usage is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace. But at least, for now anyway, bangers, screamers, shrieks and exclamitali (© Mike Bodnar) are safe. 

But, one wonders, for how long...

(Cue dramatic music. Fade to black.)

Epilogue

Julian didn't really die after falling from the tree. No characters were harmed in the writing of this article, although some Gen Z and millennial egos may have suffered mild bruising.

Double-Oh Really??

Mike Bodnar breaks cover to reveal that he's been of interest to the Hungarian intelligence service, and that spying is in the family...

Secret meetings must have taken place
during Hungary's communist era...

Surreptitiously checking our surroundings, I mutter: "The roses attract handbags early this year." To which you respond, "Fish swim backwards when the moon is full." 

And with the security protocol satisfied, we can continue our conversation, comrade. It's good to know who's on your side.

However - and before you swivel the lamp in my face - I have to declare I am not a spy, and never have been. Okay, stick needles under my fingernails if you must, but my story will stay the same. 

I do love spy books and movies though, so when, in 1964 I found myself in the lounge of a posh Hungarian hotel room in Budapest, with my father checking the chandelier for microphones, I was enthralled. Yes, even at the age of double-oh nine-and-three-quarters, I'm fairly certain I had already seen Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and maybe Goldfinger, so I was well-educated in the world of secret agents, foreign powers, and hidden listening devices. 

My father tapped the lamp shade and mimed someone listening with headphones pulling them off their ears in annoyance. I thought it was funny.

Listening to Double-oh-nine and three-quarters
and his parents

Spoiler alert: he didn't find any listening devices, but that's not to say there weren't some in the bedside lamps, or the telephone. Because it turns out my father, André, was of interest to the Hungarian intelligence service - then under communist rule - and three years later he would be recruited by them as a spy.

How do I know this top secret information? Because I have been party to some declassified Hungarian state files. Of which, more later. But first, a bit of context...

My father - André Balint Bodnár (Codename Franz. No seriously...) - was born in Hungary in 1922. Despite Hungary being land-locked, he became a seafarer in the merchant navy, rising eventually to captain. His travels by ship took him to many foreign ports, including Liverpool, England. It was here he met, wooed, and married my mother. I was born after an appropriate interval in 1954, but four years later my parents divorced. Wasn't me, your honour.

Who's that man?

So I grew up without a father most of the time, although he did have legal 'access' to me, and when in port he would come and visit, and treat me well, buying me new clothes, taking us into town in a taxi, and once even building me a train set that was so big it had to be hung on hinges from a wall. But for all that, he was a stranger. I remember whispering to my mum one day during an early visit, 'Who's that man?'

Fast forward to 1964, and suddenly (at least it seemed to me) my mother and I were travelling to Hungary, where we were to meet my father for a two-week holiday, which is how we came to be in the Duna Hotel in Budapest looking for microphones.

1964, in Tiszalök, Hungary.
L to R: my half-brother Endré, my Hungarian
grandmother, me, and
spy-in-waiting, André, my father

Over two weeks we travelled around Hungary's hotspots, including to the village of Tiszalök, where André's mother and her husband lived. My half-brother Endré was there as well, at least for our visit. There were no microphones in Tiszalök either, but who knows who the chickens in the garden were reporting to?

Within the 111 pages of declassified file material, recently received by my Budapest-based nephew Csaba (pronounced 'cha-ba'), I am mentioned multiple times, including, erroneously, that at the age of nine I learned to speak Hungarian. If you use the needles on me, I will confess (quite rapidly) to learning how to say good morning, thank you, and cherry lemonade in Hungarian, but that's about it. I could never have passed on information on troop deployment, tank movements or the daily habits of the local Bolshevik command. But I could have quietly informed you where to find the best thermal baths, and wiener schnitzel - hardly intelligence that MI6 would value. Of more interest is that the majority of the 111-page documents focus much on my father.

Image:  Public Domain, httpscommons.wiki

While I make light of needles under fingernails, for many Hungarians in the 1960s and throughout its communist rule, the prospect of being interrogated was very real. In Budapest today, there is evidence of that, at 60 Andrássy Avenue, the Terror Haza - The House of Terror Museum.

Director-General of the museum, Dr. Mária Scmidt, explains: "The House of Terror Museum is a building which commemorates two tragic eras in Hungarian history. From 1944 to 1990, our nation was robbed of its independence and freedom - first by Arrow Cross thugs supported by German Nazis, and then by communists backed by the Soviet Union. We have since recovered both our independence and freedom, to become free citizens of an independent Hungary. Because we Hungarians are a people of freedom!"

Crest of the
State Protection Authority

The Terror Museum - which is in the old headquarters of the State Protection Authority - celebrates escaping the oppressive fascist and communist regimes, while also reminding Hungarians and other visitors of the cruelty and fear of those two particular eras. In the basement there is a cellar dedicated to the torture of suspects and prisoners, of which there were so many that those in charge - the political police - had to take over the basements of other nearby buildings, creating a terrifying maze of cells and torture rooms. 

About now you're probably keen to attach bits of me to a car battery and interrogate me about how my father became a spy for the communists. Well, put down the electrodes because I will sing like a canary.

Nephew Csaba, who has the declassified files (which are all in Hungarian), tells me that my father was recruited as a spy in 1967. His 'operational area' was the Middle East, and as mentioned, he was codenamed Franz.

A Dilmun tanker being guided by a tug towards
McDermott's Oil Storage on Deiraside of
Dubai Creek. Image: dubaiasitusedtobe.net

I'm not too surprised that he was recruited, because, as a captain, he was commander of a small oil tanker for the Dilmun Navigation shipping company, and was based in Bahrain. 

At that time, despite being oil-rich, the area was devoid of the infrastructure necessary for the transport of oil and fuel locally. Rail and road networks were poor or non-existent, so fuel delivery around the Gulf depended on a fleet of 'small ships', owned and operated by Dilmun Navigation. This included the delivery of aviation fuel to a jetty near Dubai Airport, from where it was pumped via underground pipes to the airport itself. The ships became a familiar sight around Dubai Creek and Port Rashid.

A page from The Franz Files

It was on one of these vessels that my father was captain, and with oil wealth expanding in the Middle East, it is hardly surprising that the Hungarian intelligence authority saw him as an easy and convenient local source of information, an agent already-in-place. Our Man in the Middle East.

However, despite this sounding like a good premise for a John Le Carré novel, Franz, it seems, turned out not to be good covert operative material. Csaba tells me, "I think he wasn’t a good spy, because the file was closed one year later."

Which is a bit disappointing to me as Double-Oh-Seventy-One now. He had plenty of other talents - he was a cartoonist and artist, and spoke multiple languages - but spying seemingly wasn't one of them.

The files show he had been monitored as a potential English spy for years, which is possibly why Hungarian counterintelligence recruited him. Maybe they thought it was better to 'keep your enemies closer.'

Csaba says he doesn't see any big surprises in the files, despite their length. "What I see is that he was very naïve," he concludes, and that he had accepted the role "for money and patriotism." 

Which sounds about right. He was a charmer, probably fancied himself as James Bond, loved to spend money (when he had it), but later in life I always thought of him as what we call in English 'a wide boy.' Wikipedia has it in a nutshell: Wide boy is a British term for a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is synonymous with spiv.

"Or... he was really an English spy," adds Csaba at the end of one of his messages, given to me on a microdot hidden in a newspaper and surreptitiously handed to me in a brush-pass one foggy night in London. (Actually by Facebook Messenger, but the London bit sounds better).

One day I hope to see copies of the intelligence files on my father, even if they're in Hungarian. I won't understand a word of them, unless there's a reference to cherry lemonade.

So for now, case file closed.

Fifty-five Million Reasons to Change the Lottery System

 Mike Bodnar wants more people to win lotteries...

As I write this, the New Zealand lottery has 'jackpotted' to NZ$55 million. Even if I don't buy a
ticket for the next draw, there's one thing I will bet on: many, many more people will do just that. Because greed. Or desperation. Or because they've just been pulled back off the road by a stranger who saved them from stepping in front of a bus, and the hero says, 'Think you'd better buy a lottery ticket, mate.'

Whatever, everyone, it seems, wants to be super wealthy. For this we can perhaps blame Bezos, Musk, Thiel and all the other multi-billionaires around the world - along with the wealthy celebs (I'm lookin' at you, Taylor Swift) - who are able to indulge in their every whim regardless of cost. Musk et al don't even have to book first class, because, of course, they have their own jets. They certainly wouldn't ever wonder how they were going to pay the next winter energy bill. Why would you when you could just buy the energy company?

I mean, imagine having an income of US$1 trillion annually (which Musk is in line for after 75% of his shareholders voted in favour of the obscene 'salary.' Seriously.); that's over $83 billion a month, or $19 billion per week, or - imagine it - $2.7 billion per day. Nobody, I repeat, nobody can spend that kind of money on a daily basis. They could give it away of course, but do they? By and large, no.

To scale that down a bit, someone in Aotearoa/New Zealand could, this week, win NZ$55 million, which, even without investing it, would mean a daily income of over $150,000 dollars. Even this relatively miniscule amount (compared to the billionaires and trillionaires) would be almost impossible to spend. It would, however, be easier to give away, but there's no guarantee that a winner will automatically be a philanthropist. Probably just the -pist bit.

However, if the winner took it all (there's a song in that...) and did spend at that rate, they
would have a zero bank balance in about 12 months. So, some investment would be prudent, along with judicious spending and ongoing fund management. I could help with that.

I would, though, argue that nobody in Aotearoa/New Zealand needs $55 million. Nobody. Unless - and it's a big unless - they really are of a philanthropic nature and wish to set up educational trusts for example, say in multi-disciplinary areas for the less advantaged. There's no shortage of need. But - to use an appropriate analogy - what are the odds?

Speaking of need however, there are almost certainly 55 people in the country who could absolutely do with 'just' a million dollars, and many, many more who would be very happy with, say, a quarter of that - to pay off the mortgage maybe, help the kids get on the property ladder, or pay off student loans. Or yes, go on a cruise or buy a new car. I know this because I'm one of them. And because, well, wealth.

You can see where I'm going with this; $55 million is an obscene amount of money for one person to win. Nobody needs that amount, so I propose that the Lotteries Commission caps each jackpot at - ooh, let's think for a moment - $10 million, and, when it reaches that, they guarantee ten winners of $1 million each. The jackpot never gets to be more than $10 million, and each time it does reach that, well, there are ten massive parties in different parts of the country to gate-crash. Just listen for the pop of champagne corks. And form an orderly queue, behind me.

I mean, if this week's draw were to guarantee 55 winners of $1 million each, that would create  55 new millionaires in New Zealand. Look what that might do for local economies. Plus - while there's still the potential for family squabbling over the spoils - $1 million is a far more manageable amount than $55 million. Life-enhancing perhaps, rather than totally life-changing.

I'd also wager that knowing there are going to be 55 guaranteed millionaires after

This time next week...

Saturday's draw (the biggest to date btw), more people would be inclined to buy tickets for it. Which means the odds of you winning decrease. At least, that's how it seems to me, but I'm no statistician.

And yes, I know, creating more millionaire potential opens up a whole new debate about the dangers of encouraging more gambling - the increased mental salivation that goes with a greater chance of winning, but I'm sticking with the proposal of a more equitable distribution of the lottery winnings here. There are already mechanisms in place to monitor and restrict gambling amounts, though the efficacy of them is a debate for different forum.

Anyway, rant over. You know what I'm going to do now, don't you? Of course you do. And of course I am. But if I win the full amount you can look forward to the establishment of the Mike Bodnar Foundation for Students of All Ages Who Want a Degree in Anything They Can't Currently Afford. Or something like that. Sure, I'll certainly be -pist, but I will also be a philanthropist.

Wish me luck.