Words, words, words — and chess
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During his all too brief tenure as chess columnist for The Sunday Telegraph, the UK’s most illustrious grandmaster, Nigel Short, was an enthusiastic user of unusual words and metaphors. For example: he introduced me to the word oenophile in his columns (lover of wine) and strikingly employed the word spherical to describe the Falstaffian Soviet Grandmaster, Eduard (Eddie) Gufeld.
Since then, Nigel and I have corresponded about unusual words which have swum into our ken.
William Shakespeare is, of course, a rich source for such verbal troves. He can be credited with many achievements, not least, in my opinion, with writing the key texts which actually created English national and linguistic identity.
Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII brings to a close the mighty history cycle commencing with Edward III. The latter is now generally regarded as, at least partly, a Shakespeare original, and one of the very few which specifically mentions chess:
“And bid the lords hold on their play at chess,
For we will walk and meditate alone.”
(Scene 3 in the Royal Shakespeare Company edition.)
The cycle continues with Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Henry V, Henry VI Parts One, Two and Three, and Richard III. It is my opinion that this huge dramatic cycle, essentially one long play, represents the true English national epic in a way that Beowulf (too early in our national lifeline) and Paradise Lost (too Latinate for most readers, though a treat for those who like their English poetry in a Latin word order) do not.
If I am correct, then the Shakespeare histories together create our epic poem of national identity, on a par with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Welsh Mabinogion, Finland’s Kalevala, Portugal’s Lusiads and, for the Jewish people, the epic story of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.
In the course of his plays and poetry Shakespeare deployed a vocabulary of around 35,000 words. This is a global record, apart from that Olympic level logodaedalus, James Joyce, who operated with a staggering vocabulary in Finnegans Wake of over 64,000 words. However, many of these were one off inventions, never since revived and incomprehensible to the multitude, not so much caviar to the general as gibberish to almost everyone, apart from Joycean scholars ensconced in their most adamantine of ivory towers.
In practice, even the most literate of English speakers tend to operate within a maximum of 15,000 words, with the average being in the range 3000-5000. Enhanced vocabulary liberates thinking and creativity,equating freedom of expression with breadth of thinking and outreach of communication potential.
However, we now largely inhabit an increasingly reductive communicative environment. It is a largely non-verbal landscape, dominated by emojis, icons and abbreviations, with would-be aspirations to eloquence arbitrarily truncated in Tweets to a prescribed maximum of characters. One might describe it as verbal grunting, rather than efflorescence, with the full expression of cerebration now widely regarded as an evil to be avoided at best, or ignored at worst. Fortunately, our publication, TheArticle, represents an oasis in this wasteland. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but this does not necessarily imply that unexpurgated expression, as we practise in these pages, is anathema to our little grey cells.
In my own writing, which includes 207 published books on chess, mind sports, the nature of genius, poetry, art, biography and quantum physics, I consciously seek to give certain underused words their place in the sun, lest they be ignored, forgotten and ultimately retired. Such worthies include ultracrepidarianism (pontification on a subject , about which one knows nothing); Nigel Short’s oenophile (wine lover) and Porpentine (Shakespearean for porcupine). I draw the line, though, at James Joyce’s most extreme fabrication:
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk
This 100-letter monster appears on the first page of Finnegan’s Wake. The word is a phantasmagoric concoction, which rightly belongs in the ephemeral cabinet of curiosities, from which it so infelicitously escaped.
I also maintain a lively correspondence with that brilliantly imaginative figure, Grandmaster James Plaskett. James is also a seeker after meaningful coincidence, connoisseur of the weird and wonderful, hunter of the giant octopus and, with his wife, that ethereal poetess Fiona Pitt-Kethley, a fellow campaigner in the battle to expose the depredations of the late Brian Eley, a monster from whom all chess honours should be retrospectively stripped. We have previously written about him here: Damnatio Memoriae, Brian Eley, the Jimmy Savile of Chess and Unnatural acts: chess, paedophilia and Brian Eley.
I recently wrote to James (Plaskett, not Joyce) that I am a great believer in the chess improvement method of: identify a role model, copy that player’s openings and strategies and follow their innovations. Hence I took up the 1…g6 defences as a result of early 1960’s games by Botvinnik against Gipslis, Kuijpers, Yanofsky…
Last year I was considering writing a column about this methodology, in particular citing how my wins against RH Watson and a certain Mr Weinhold, respectively from 1967 and 1969, had been influenced by and modelled on wins by Botvinnik against Medina (1967) and Matulovic (1969).
These were solid facts about which I had been certain for years. In my recollection I had consciously and incontrovertibly been following Botvinnik’s cited strategies in both my aforementioned victories.
Earlier I had written to James about another topic close to my heart. Presumably almost everyone has read the books or seen the films of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. While I was at Dulwich College, I corresponded with Tolkien and I have retained a signed letter from him. In The Return of the King, the Hobbit Pippin plays chess against the guard Beregond on the battlements of Minas Tirith, while Gandalf himself is not averse to employing the occasional chess metaphor. James replied that he regarded Lord of the Rings as the greatest book of the 20th century.
In contrast….
I regard Game of Thrones as Lord of the Rings Lite. It was written by George RR Martin. Odd coincidence, though, that both fantasy authors have double R as their second and third initial. Furthermore…. Not many people know that George RR Martin is a professional chess arbiter for the US Chess Federation.
To conclude my recent correspondence with James (Plaskett, not Joyce) I thought that he (and I hope the readers) will be intrigued by the following curious experience. Just before the 1986 world chess championship in London, I was sitting in the living room of our Kensington flat, writing the programme. At one point I dropped my pen. It was a British Airways cross between a ballpoint and felt tip. It had a clip on it, so could not roll far. I was on a sofa, so the maximum falling distance was a bit less than two feet, if that.
I bent down to pick it up, but could not see it. I then searched the carpet and under the sofa (remember the clip stopped it from rolling) but I still failed to find it. Then Annette (my wife) and I tore the flat apart looking for it. But… It simply wasn’t there.
When we moved house some time later, we emptied the apartment, but the pen never turned up. Somewhere between my hand and the floor it had vanished into a mini itinerant black hole, disappeared into another time zone, was accidentally transported by space aliens or…?
To this day I have no explanation for what happened. This incident has led to my belief that anything is possible and as Heisenberg (originator of the Uncertainty Principle) once said: the universe isn’t just weird, it’s weirder than we can possibly imagine.
Which brings us back to the Fons et Origo of this week’s disquisition: Shakespeare’s assertion in Hamlet, that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dream’t of in our philosophy.
At the close of this column I will link readers to all four games , the challenge being to see if you can spot the anomaly common to both of my wins. Answer next week and top marks to those who spot the oddity before I reveal it.
And now for the above-referenced games:
Antonio Angel Medina Garcia vs. Mikhail Botvinnik
Milan Matulovic vs. Mikhail Botvinnik
Ronald H Watson vs. Raymond Keene
Raymond D. Keene OBE is an international chess grandmaster, former British and EU champion, author of 207 published books, with translations into 16 languages. He is fluent in French and German, can struggle in Dutch, Russian, Spanish and Latin and has published over 12,000 regular columns in such publications as: The Times (London) The Spectator, TheArticle, The International Herald Tribune, The Gulf News, The Australian (Sydney), The Daily Yomiuri ( Tokyo), The British Chess Magazine and The Gibraltar Magazine. He has read Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Old and Middle English and translated Goethe’s Faust.
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