Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen!

The West Wing Litmus Test

In order to check off any item on my to-do list, that item must first pass a Litmus test: is it more interesting than a good beverage and an old episode of The West Wing? If so, it gets done, promptly (items like "buy new shoes" and "plan a dinner party"). And if not, than that item remains on the list until my brain is so full of liberal witticisms and dimly lit melodrama that there nothing else for me to do but work (items like "write a paper" and "clean my apartment" often get left until the eleventh hour, literally).

Today, the bubble burst, and I was reminded--woefully--that The West Wing is just a television show, and my education should not be neglected simply because I wish Jed Bartlett were really my President.

I was playing the third season DVD on my laptop and put on the episode, "Stirred," in which Bartlett makes an interesting point about Bond's famous Martini; "Shaken, not stirred," produces a very weak drink, since shaking causes the ice to chip and melt faster. Meanwhile, Donna, the assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff, campaigns to have an old high school English teacher recognized by the President in a proclamation.

At the end of the episode, Bartlett gets on the phone with Mrs. Molly Morello, the teacher of note, and exchanges some cutesy remarks. The President, an overeducated private school know-it-all, asks her if she taught Beowulf in the original Middle English or let her students use a translation. When she replies that she used a translation, Bartlett sighs: "We'll call that the Bond version."

I could have hurled my laptop across the room. Beowulf is a poem written in Old English, such an early form of English that it resembles German--more specifically, Anglo-Saxon--more than it does today's spoken English. Unless you've mastered Anglo-Saxon (and it doubtful President Bartlett has, since it's mentioned he speaks four languages, and English and Latin are already two of those), you're going to need the translation. Middle English*, on the other hand, is usually very easy to read and understand aloud if you have been paying any sort of attention in English class, and teachers who let college-level students read the modern-day translations are just wimps. Now that's stirred.

After a quick Google, I discovered that Bartlett's error was caught immediately by fans of the show (who are probably all overeducated and erudite). Aaron Sorkin, West Wing producer, is reputed to have replied, "Ic agan nic answaru."

This roughly--roughly--translates to "I have no answer," or "No comment." Cute.

So, with a sigh, I abandon my West Wing Litmus test and get down to the work at hand. The paper I write tonight is on early Arthurian legends and the Chivalric tradition in Victorian-era poetry, and I should get to it. You never know when this kind of thing will be useful.

"Even if you learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?" (Clarence Darrow)

*It should be noted that not all dialects of Middle English are as easily understood as, say, Chaucer's vernacular in The Cantebury Tales. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, is more easily read in the modern translations, being as the author was most likely (according to J.R.R. Tolkien and other scholars) from the West Midlands.

I'm just sayin'.