David Adesnik at OxBlog gives us Webster’s definition of a “canard”—- he argues that “the belief that war will destabilize the Middle East [is] a canard.” This reminds me of a sublimely awful mixed metaphor thrown out by historian Mark Kishlansky in his A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714. Writing about the charlatan Titus Oates he says “He testified to meetings that never took place between people who couldn’t have been there, and he was eventually hoist on his own canard.”

Natural opportunities to use a line like that don’t come along very often. I bet he’d been saving it up for years.

Here’s another example of the form. It’s going to take a whole paragraph to wind up to. In Dublin of the 1930s and after, the two main theaters were the Gate and the Abbey. The Gate was founded by Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir, one of Ireland’s few publicly gay couples of the time. It was known for bringing modern drama—- Chekov, Ibsen, and so on—- to the Irish stage. The Abbey was founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory as part of the Anglo-Irish revival. It had more of an Irish flavor, producing Yeats’ own plays and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. When asked for local opinion about the two companies, a local genius said “you could think of them as being like Sodom and Begorrah.”

It might be that Irish people have a particular weakness—- I mean, gift—- for this kind of thing. The zenith of the art can be found in the Keats and Chapman vignettes of Flann O’Brien, where a shaggy-dog story resolves itself into an appalling pun.

None of which has anything to do with the Middle East, but I’ve started my Thanksgiving holiday early.