Those are the Dukes of Brittany and Bourbon on caparisoned horses at a tournament fight (1460s), from "Le Livre des tournois" by Barthélemy d'Eyck, illustrating the Wikipedia article "Caparison."
I encountered the word this morning in the sentence "But he prances in his new caparisons, and neighs a happy scorn at the old."
The "he" is a grotesque racist Democratic Senator (in 1905), who popped onto my blog this morning as I delved into the weird word "bestridden." Having been turned on by one weird word — because I desperately needed to say "on an Earth bestridden by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos" — I was vulnerable to the lure of any other weird word, and "caparison" was that word.
From the Wikipedia article:
"Caparison" is also a verb, and it can be used figuratively, as you see in this historical example in the OED:In antiquity, a "magnificently caparisoned horse" takes a central place in a vision reported in the deutero-canonical text, 2 Maccabees 3:25, which prevents the Seleucid emissary Heliodorus from a planned assault on the Jewish temple treasury in Jerusalem
In the Middle Ages, caparisons were part of the horse armour known as barding, which was worn during battle and tournaments. They were adopted in the twelfth century in response to conditions of campaigning in the Crusades, where local armies employed archers, both on foot and horse, in large quantities. The covering might not completely protect the horse against the arrows but it could deflect and lessen their damage.
a1797 W. Mason Heroick Epist. Sir W. Chambers O let the Muse attend thy march sublime And with thy prose caparison her rhyme.More famously, there's this, from Shakespeare's "As You Like It":
Good my complexion: dost thou think, though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?A doublet and hose... I think I understand that. Let me lean against this tree and ponder...
Posts
16 comments:
"Cry Trunalimunamaprzure, and let slip the horsies of war!"
Have a care, blog host, or this sort of language ramification soon will lead to you hosting a Dungeons and Dragons party, complete with miniature figurines - including kniggets on well caparisoned stallions, owl bears, and half-orc bards. You are no flibbertigibbet, but have a care!
This Wikipedia article about Tillman, is why I stopped reading it. Tillman's racial attitudes were mainstream for the South Carolina Pol from 1890-1918. I doubt he and Woodward wilson, for example, differed much.
But the article acts like Tillman's most important historical attribute was his "racism". And it wasn't. It was his populism and fight for the average "poor white" in SC. But then you get that constantly on Wikipedia. You'll look up some 19th century American novelist, and out of nowhere you'll get a whole paragraph about their supposed "antisemitism". Based on nothing more than a passage in one of their 20 novels.
OK, from now on I start from the most recent post.
Shouldn't that be "bestrode"?
Skirts are horse clothes!
I had the word in a crossword puzzle once a few years ago. Had never heard it before then, though.
Nice pic of the jousters. That book would have been a NYT bestseller in 1460, if only Gutenberg could have gotten things going a little sooner. …Your concern over “bestridden” is understandable —my spell-check tries to make it “best ridden”— but in fact it is a perfectly ordinary inflection of the verb “bestride.” Which of course is old news from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”: “Why, man, he doth bestride the Earth like a colossus…”
Apologies for misquote from memory.
“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings...”
Horses and hawks wear furniture.
Q: when are you bestride a horse >>> while riding astride in the saddle.
so the horse has to be a-stridden before it can b-stridden.
the rider can never be b-stridden
I misread that as best-ridden and thought, did Ann mean beast-ridden? Or that the planet was best ridden by them? Or best rid of them? Or was it outer space? All these caparisons! I mean comparisons!
"Shouldn't that be "bestrode"?"
Not for the past participle. It's the same as the difference between "rode" and "ridden."
Of course (not a Mr. Ed reference)...it's how one thing is like or not like another thing...
"""Did you know what a caparison is?"
I did, but only because "caparisoned in gang colors" was used in an article I read years and years ago in the Wall Street Journal. They have much better writers than the NYT. I mean, have you ever read a Maureen Dowd column?
Since we are doing old non-Latinate verb inflections, could you put in a plug for “wrought” instead of “wreaked”? It’s making me nuts to see that error proliferate: not just wrong but unpronounceably ugly to the ear.
“Wreaked.” Ugh.
Among the things I learned reading SM Sterling’s Emberverse was caparison and also all the weird words for colors and figures in heraldry. First time outside the Emberverse these synapses ever fired.
Post a Comment