Free association

[randy_byers]

Seeing a reference to a new Washington Post blog called whorunsgov.com, I initially read it as whoresongov.com. So I googled "shakespeare whoreson" to double-check where I'd seen this word before, and I came to this in King Lear: "Thou whoreson zed! thou unnecessary letter!" Sounds like something that should go in the colophon of the Corflu Zed program book.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

By weird coincidence, I've just read a paper on Shakespeare translation that discusses this very passage.

Ce zéro, fils de pute! Cette trentième lettre de l'alphabet!

(Ruth Morse, "Reflections in Shakespeare Translation", Yearbook of English Studies 36.1 (2006), p. 81)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

What an interesting translation! Zed becomes zero, and then called the thirtieth letter. I wonder if "trentième lettre" is a standard phrase in French, or if this is whimsical.

It's interesting to compare this to something I stumbled on when I googled "whoreson zed": "Why do the British pronounced the letter Z 'zed'?" Amongst other things, this article claims that "zed" is from the Old French "zede" (ultimately from the Greek "zeta"). So why "zéro" instead of "zede"? Perhaps "zede" has an archaic connotation, I dunno.