Opinion: Fight on, Derb!
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My peregrinations this morning brought me to National Review‘s The Corner, where I was heartened to see that John Derbyshire—professional fuddyduddy and the United Kingdom’s greatest export to the New World since Ronnie Biggs—is still shining in that rough. Today, the author of (the highly recommended) Seeing Calvin Coolidge In a Dream theorizes that politically correct Comstocks have been taking their erasers to the poetry of Emily Dickinson—specifically that his daughter’s school copy of ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ has been given surgery to remove any hints of aggressive behavior. Notes Derb:
‘We passed the school where children playedAt wrestling in a ring;’ Nellie’s sheet had: ‘At recess, in a ring.’
My second thought (after ‘He named his daugher Nellie?’) was to say: You go, Derb! The new version of the line is a clunker. But a litterateur came up with a less aggro explanation for the discrepancy: That the Swan of Amherst’s poetry exists in so many variant versions that the daughter’s school could easily be legitimate.
What seemed fishy to me was ‘recess,’ which, in both the schoolyard meaning and the trochaic pronunciation, I figured to be a twentieth-century usage. But in a quick search I turned up this article on the history of recess, which quotes an 1884 paper arguing over the value of ‘recess,’ in its modern form. By the time I was done with that, another Derbophile had already come up with evidence that the variant version was in fact written by Dickinson, in her original draft.
So another slight but interesting mystery is solved in a hurry, and without a tiring trip to the library, thanks to the power of distributed intelligence. Time for recess!