Wordplays

[HuManBing]

We've all heard the wordplays that make up fun curses and predictions. Ravenloft seems full of these cunning tricks of language.

What are some of the nice ones you know?

I'll start.

1. A Greek myth has it that a king wanted to wage war on his neighbor. He went to the Oracle and asked what would happen if he invaded. The Oracle answered truthfully that he would destroy a great kingdom.

The king was overjoyed and went back and invaded. His invasion was thwarted, and his own kingdom was destroyed. The Oracle's words came true.

[brilliantlight]

A man asks "What will I find to the north?" The mystic replies "A land where gold falls like rain" When he goes there he starts digging all over the place to find gold but never notices that the yellow leaves of autumn are falling all around him.

[HuManBing]

Most curses or forbiddances tend to be somewhat flowery, which leads to abstraction. When coupled with sexual relations, which are already fairly obliquely referenced, it leads to easy circumvention by a pedantic reading. A modest example, from my own experience:

Question: "Did you sleep with my daughter?"

Answer: "No, I never slept with your daughter... (sotto voce)... But she did sleep with me."


I have mild insomnia, and can't fall asleep whenever there's anything foreign in bed with me. This doesn't prevent me from doing all sorts of other stuff in bed, though. And it certainly doesn't prevent a daughter* from falling asleep beside me, even if I'm wide awake.


Other literary allusions to sex are equally fun to exploit. To "lie with" somebody can be easily circumvented by the use of a good bedroom swing, and "to be known to" can be thwarted by a facemask that obscures the identity. Even "couple with" automatically presumes there are only two people involved. So if you've got a masked ball with bedroom swings and lots of guests invited, you could circumvent all these terms at once.


Also, on a somewhat related note, the very term "love" is open to interpretation. A "lover" in English has come to mean romantic partner (sometimes even exclusive of a spouse), but it could quite reasonably mean anybody who loves, whether a parent or sibling. (In Chinese it means spouse, and only spouse, which is quite different from the English representation.)


* NB: Not my daughter, i.e. somebody else's.

[HuManBing]

A teacher once suspected me of a catcall during a school function.

He asked me what I knew about it. I knew that I had done it. But my response was not technically a lie. I said:

"No, I didn't see who did it."

[HuManBing]

I read this story as a child and assumed it was a famous Native American legend. But now I do a search online and I can't find it anywhere. It may have been a relatively recent work of fiction.

One Native American tribe was in dire straits, having lost most of their land. The chieftain of the tribe ordered his son, who had a Claw Foot (misshapen foot) to go talk to the chieftain of a more fortunate tribe. The son went and had his audience, and the chieftain said that he would only be able to spare one buffalo skin's worth of land.

The boy was given a buffalo skin and told to select the land he wanted by putting the skin on the ground.

This was a clear insult. The "gift" of land would only amount to a few square feet at most - a paltry solution. But the boy had an idea. He cut the hide into strips, and rode around an area of land, dropping off strips here and there, until he had described a decent village-sized parcel. Because this was now "outlined by the buffalo hide", the chieftain permitted the less fortunate tribe to live there.

[Mangrum]

I read this story as a child and assumed it was a famous Native American legend. But now I do a search online and I can't find it anywhere. It may have been a relatively recent work of fiction.

What you have there is actually an updated legend originally about Queen Dido and the founding of Carthage.

[Ail]

I read this story as a child and assumed it was a famous Native American legend. But now I do a search online and I can't find it anywhere. It may have been a relatively recent work of fiction.

What you have there is actually an updated legend originally about Queen Dido and the founding of Carthage.

I knew I had read it somewhere before... but I thought it had been in Celtic mythology. How easily these archetypes can be mixed and confused :-/

[HuManBing]

What you have there is actually an updated legend originally about Queen Dido and the founding of Carthage.

Going on Mangrum's excellent lead, I bring you a quote from the Wikipedia page about Dido, a.k.a. "Elissa":

Eventually Elissa and her followers arrived on the coast of North Africa where Elissa asked the local inhabitants for a small bit of land for a temporary refuge until she could continue her journeying, only as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide. They agreed. Elissa cut the oxhide into fine strips so that she had enough to encircle an entire nearby hill, which was therefore afterwards named Byrsa "hide". (This event is commemorated in modern mathematics: The "isoperimetric problem" of enclosing the maximum area within a fixed boundary is often called the "Dido Problem" in modern Calculus of variations.)

[HuManBing]

Tolkein has the classic "no man can harm you", which leaves the supposedly invincible person vulnerable to a woman's attacks.

Even so, it's not clear whether an action taken by a man is exempt if there's a superseding cause. "No man can harm you, but a boulder certainly can if dropped from a high distance, regardless of who pushed it first".

[HuManBing]

One of my friends once said he aimed to die in bed with many beautiful women.

Female assassins could certainly fulfill his wishes, though probably not in the sense he intended.

[HuManBing]

Likewise, "I'll see you in hell" is a singularly Pyrrhic curse.

[HuManBing]

There is a chilling scene in No Country For Old Men where Chigurh has just shot Carson Wells at point-blank range with a silenced shotgun.

Carson's phone rings in the sudden quiet. Chigurh reaches over and answers it.

Moss (over the phone): Hello?

Chigurh: Yes.

Moss: Is, uh, Carson Wells there?

Chigurh (looks at Carson's remains): Not in the sense that you mean.

[InVinoVeritas]

I knew I had read it somewhere before... but I thought it had been in Celtic mythology. How easily these archetypes can be mixed and confused :-/

Well, the Celtic myth I remember was that Vikings had invaded the Hebrides and met with the local king on the Scottish mainland. The king said that the Vikings could take the land they could sail around in a day, figuring that he'd lose some islands, that's it.

The Vikings then sail up the Firth of Clyde, drag their boat across the small isthmus for the Kintyre peninsula, and claim a huge chunk of the mainland.

[HuManBing]

German folktales, as collected by the Brothers Grimm, have plenty of occurrences where a landowner makes a pact for some favor with wood sprites and the like. The wood sprites ask for the first thing that brushes his leg when he gets back to the house. The man agrees, thinking it will be a calf or a dog or something. When it turns out to be his toddler son, the landowner realizes he's been cheated.


A Russian folktale also had an interesting case of a peasant woman making use of contractual ambiguities. She had to go to her lord's castle, neither walking nor riding, at neither day nor night, neither naked nor clothed. She threw one leg over a pony but kept the other on the ground, and went wearing a fisherman's net to the castle just before dawn.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

German folktales, as collected by the Brothers Grimm, have plenty of occurrences where a landowner makes a pact for some favor with wood sprites and the like. The wood sprites ask for the first thing that brushes his leg when he gets back to the house. The man agrees, thinking it will be a calf or a dog or something. When it turns out to be his toddler son, the landowner realizes he's been cheated.

Sounds a lot like what happened with Van Richten's son and the Vistani.