July 5, 2019 - Chapter Fifty-three


Following Ahab’s refusal to board the Albatross, our narrator shares some information about encounters between whaling vessels at sea. We’re told they engage in a “gam,” which is apparently a whaling term used to describe such a meeting.

Curious, I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary to find out something about this word. I append the definition here for your perusal. Note that the OED provides only a single example before Moby Dick.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Idea

Image
It's a pretty straightforward idea. One novel ( Moby Dick , by Herman Melville), one summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day inclusive), around six pages per day, one blog post per day of roughly 100 words (perhaps more) on what I've read and observed. I meant to do this a few years ago and kinda pooped out. This year I'm going to try it again. Wish me luck.
Read more

July 26, 2019 - Chapters Eighty-two, Eighty-three, and Eighty-four

Image
The first two of today’s three chapters (the third returns to whaling and a fourth whale chase) refer to several more instances of whales in classical literature, as well as returning to some from earlier in the book (e.g., Jonah). Two allusions are of particular interest. First is that to Ezekiel 32:2: “Thou art like a lion of the nations, and art as a dragon in the sea” (Geneva 1599), where dragon is sometimes rendered whale . The second is to the Philistine god Dagon: “In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name.” Dagon is pictured below.
Read more

May 27, 2019 - Front Matter

If you've read this novel before, you know it begins not with the iconic quasi-opening line of "Call me Ishmael" but rather with several pages with the headings "Etymology" and "Extracts," the latter of which provides a number of quotations from literature over several centuries in which the word "whale" appears. A few things caught my interest that hadn't before. First, while I had thought the opening line of "Etymology," referencing an "Usher," was a direct quotation from Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," I was apparently mistaken. It is not. Second, regarding the "Extracts," while many readers know that the term commonly translated as "whale" from the Book of Jonah is actually literally "big fish" in Hebrew, it turns out the term thus translated in Genesis also doesn't mean "whale." The word in Hebrew -- tannin -- means something closer to "se...
Read more