The font in Christ’s Chapel
Neither are the direct objects twins – identical or fraternal, nor are they siblings, they’re not even of the same species. And yet they parallel one another by the tricky way they’re linked. Not OP/SIN by or limited to itself, not merely OP/SIN, not OP/SIN with nothing added, but OP/SIN plus something else. This is affirmat ion by the negative of the contrary, by the negation of its opposite. It’s litotes (l ī’t Ə - t ēz’), the last of our tropes. Some authorities regard litotes as the same as meiosis , through their shared notion of ‘understatement’; that would not appear to be p laying a part here. But both serve to intensify or enhance impressiveness. I like to think of litotes as the double-negative trope. Two negatives form a positive in electric circuitry; language is wired with finer distinctions. The engraver of the font cover was no slouch: isn’t that a cagey way of boosting his reputation as the anti thesis of inept? The seven technical names in boldface themselves came into English from Greek, and stem from two millenia and more ago, when grammarians began to investigate their own language scientifically, devising terms for phenomena. In 1969 Dulwich College Press published Dulwich: a Collection of Writing about the Village and the College – a sort of scrapbook. Reprinted in it, from The Gleaner , No. 13, for 23 July 1823 (two centuries ago!) was an article stating that the cover atop Christ’s Chapel’s baptismal basin bore a ‘Greek anagram’. It’s not an anagram, but the journal wasn’t far off. Stanford mentions the particular term for the sound - patterning of interest to u s almost in the same breath as he cites a few examples of ‘phrasal anagrams’, in which one phrase is formed by reordering the letters of another. He presumes the Greeks ‘had to see them written out before they could follow them’ (p. 85). Anagrams are beloved of puzzle editors, who can come up with them by the dozens. The Dulwich inscription is something far rarer, stumbled upon so infrequently as to seem almost magical, and mysterious. is a palindrome. A palindrome , literally a ‘running in reverse’, reads the same from right to left as it does from left to right. It redistributes the letters symmetrically, sometimes, as with ours, pivoting on a lone letter, sometimes not. The House of God in Istanbul, consecrated to ‘Holy Wisdom’, personifies an abstract noun. Sophia comes from sophos , the adjective meaning ‘wise’. Sophos also means ‘clever’. SOP/HOS is a one -word palindrome. So, too, is ABBA, as in the Swedish pop group. Extended beyond a single word, they become harder to sustain. Mathematical dexterity might foster their production. I suspect a programme can generate palindromes, but what’s to keep the results from being nonsensical? That the words in a complete sentence can be redistributed this stringently seems almost to defy probability, and hint that there is something inexplicable about language. Apalindrome turns up as if a chance discovery, like a rare gemunearthed by accident, there all the time, waiting to be found. From what strange vein did it emerge? How can a statement read the same forwards and backwards? If several words strung together this way form a coherent thought, it’s brilliant, like burnished metal. This is uncanny. And if a saying has relevance, an applicability, even, as with ours, t o an object which it labels, it’s beyond amazing: it’s a miracle.
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