Dogs, dictionaries, and eyelash legs
With Sarah Ogilvie, Sarah Dunant, and Iona Lee
Earlier this week, I walked up to my local Vue to catch the evening showing of Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattinson. On the whole, I’d say I enjoyed it and would recommend if you’re after something quite fun where Pattinson gets a break from his usual ‘brooding guy’ role — but it did feel like a film of two halves.
The first looked like an examination of the dilemmas posed by a human cloning machine that meant Pattinson’s character could be sacrificed in the name of science and ‘reprinted’ the next day. But, somewhat suddenly, it became another movie entirely — one about encountering a native species on a foreign planet that a colony of humans, spearheaded by Mark Ruffalo’s Trump-coded character, intended to settle on. (A shame that filming began too early to switch this to a Musk-esque tech billionaire, but I’m sure the directors have rued the fact already.)
In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t tell you what happens to these animals — except to mention one particularly grim scene where Ruffalo’s spouse, a cloying and sinister caricature of the dyed-blonde trophy wife, cuts off the tail of one of the captured creatures and blends it into an experimental sauce. Typical of my aversion to anything slightly gory, I had to look away. It’s quite hypocritical of me, really — I balked at the scene, but am still not vegetarian.
Maybe what made me so uncomfortable is an idea that Sarah Dunant highlights in her feature for today’s Boundless: ‘the final irony of man’s relationship to domesticated animals [is] that both their “being” and their “not being” depends on us.’ It’s a heavy responsibility, this thin line between being and not being, and an uncomfortable reality that cutting off the tail of a new species to see how it tastes isn’t at all out of character for the human condition. But by the end of Mickey 17, I felt a little more optimistic; if you give it a watch, let me know if you think we deserve that responsibility after all.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
Down at the fill sock
Sarah Ogilvie, author of The Dictionary People and an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, on the society that made it happen
When I became an editor on the Oxford English Dictionary 25 years ago, one of the first things I did with my small wage was to join the London Philological Society. It is the oldest learned society in Britain dedicated to the study of language, founded at the University of London in the mid-19th century. Most of the dictionary staff were members of ‘Fill Sock’, as we pronounced it. Four times a year, we caught the train together from Oxford to London, and attended the Friday afternoon meetings.
You could hear the hubbub of male voices from outside the room at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury. Once inside, most of the members were elderly men wearing tweed jackets. They looked pretty similar to the original founders of the Society who, in 1842, started their meetings in exactly the same way: cups of tea, followed by a lecture given by a member on a topic such as ‘The Dialect of West Somerset’ or ‘On the Etymology of the Latin Adverb Actutum’ (which means ‘instantly’, in case you're wondering).
Joining the Philological Society was such an important rite of passage when I became an editor on the OED, because it was at one of its meetings in 1857 that three members had come up with the radical idea of creating a new dictionary which would be different from all dictionaries before it. This would be a dictionary covering every word in the English language, and describing, rather than prescribing, how each word is used in its natural habitat, i.e. written sources. It was to be an historical dictionary, tracing the history of every word.
Sarah Ogilvie is Senior Research Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Oxford, and author of The Dictionary People: the unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary
Animal attraction
Sarah Durant on furry friends through history
I am pretty certain the little dog had a good life, much of it spent under the voluminous skirts of Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua and renowned Renaissance art collector. The Marchesa Isabella, by anyone lights a formidable character, had a particularly soft spot for little 'Aura', so that when, in the summer of 1511, the animal fell to its death over the edge of steep drop, her grief was such that her courtiers vied with each other to compose the best classical eulogy. (This was the Renaissance after all.)
Female sentimentality? The fripperies of privilege? Possibly, though having spent much of the last two decades writing books set within the Italian Renaissance I know she’s not alone in her passion for these four-legged creatures. Pet dogs find their ways into all manner of Renaissance paintings. Indeed, art experts argue that one of the first times a young apprentice called Leonardo from Vinci put his mark on a commissioned canvas was the image of a fluffy white dog in a painting of 'Tobias and the Angel’.
Then there were images of hunting hounds. And, more importantly, horses. If small dogs suggest gender expectations (witness those inbred little creatures that celebrities now carry in their handbags) then, for Renaissance man, the equivalent was surely the beauty, power and symbol of the horse: vital to any army, the heart of all sophisticated land transport and postal systems and, of course, integral to the ubiquitous pastime of hunting.
Sarah Dunant’s novel on Isabella d’Este, The Marchesa, is published by White Fox on June 5 and will be serialised on BBC Radio 4
Sarah also joined Erica Wagner on the latest episode of the Boundless podcast — tune in on Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Poetry from Iona Lee
We bowed into the cottage with a sunken roof,
a damp moss millstone propped up by the low front door –
white-washed stone and oxidised copper – it was not unlike
a place where I once lived, long ago, collecting millipedes
picked from the high pile carpet. I liked their eyelash legs.
Inside, the evening was in soft focus – hearth smoke,
hash, Nag Champa – rooms of mothy, musty shadows;
the bookshelves draped in a dust as thick as blanket mulch,
and gap-toothed with provocative concepts – folklore,
esoteric mathematics. We gentled down.
Our host, the jeweller, was a recluse. Teeth set
in silver and each knuckle exhibiting a glass eye,
winking – green as newborn leaves. He was smoking
with a roach clip like some wizard pimp, his wit
intermittently glimmering – sharp as a wolf’s smile.
Iona Lee is a poet, artist, and performer from Edinburgh. Her debut collection Anamnesis was published in 2023 by Birlinn General
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