with a note on the syntax of yore

Source.

Plucking the winds, my ethnography of Gaoluo village and its ritual association, chronicles vicissitudes in the peasants’ lives. At the end of chapter 6 (“Turmoil and tedium”, on the Cultural Revolution) I reflected on how our paths coincided:

Over the other side of the world, in total contrast to their experiences, I took my first steps on my own Long March (more like a Leisurely Stroll) to Chinese musicians and Gaoluo, absorbing enough hippy influence to become “hooked” (shangyin, as the Gaoluo musicians say) on Zen, and thence also on Daoism, Tang poetry, and all the rest. In 1972 Nixon went to see Mao in China, visiting the Great Wall, where he sagely observed, “It’s a great wall”. That same year I started studying Chinese at university; the following year the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed in China. None of this buttered any parsnips in Gaoluo.

I suppose some international, and younger, readers may wonder WTF parsnips are, and why ever anyone might want to butter them. I must have heard the expression in my youth, but I don’t know how I later became so partial to it.

“Faire words butter noe parsnips” is attested from 1639, in the days when the potato was only just becoming a staple (and when spelyng was a Free Countrie—another liberation promised by Brexit?). This site also adduces John Taylor’s Epigrammes (1651):

Words are but wind that do from men proceed;
None but Chamelions on bare Air can feed;
Great men [sic] large hopeful promises may utter;
But words did never Fish or Parsnips butter.

On whose syntax I might comment:

Poets of Yore o’er verb–object inversion may splutter—
An order consigned by Latter Epochs to ye gutter
He who reverses them is clearly a Nutter—
Yet grammarians ne’er a Cavylle do mutter.

OK, I do get it, really—it’s history, innit… 

Cf. Some global idioms.

As to my own culinary habits, I tend to roast parboiled parsnips and potatoes, with shallots, all basted in oil (not butter) and lashings * of spicy Turkish orta. For more cuisine, with links, click here—including the late great Ciaran Carson’s paean to the fry-up and the music of time.

* Here I was boldly seeking another role for “lashings” beyond what I supposed was its traditional duty as measure-word for ginger beer; but in fact, as posts like this explain, it wasn’t Enid Blyton who bound the two together—it seems to have taken hold in our imaginations only since the Comic Strip’s Five go mad in Dorset. This kind of thing happens a lot: see e.g. What’s the craic?.