Twice in recent days the word inglenook/ingle-nook has come to my notice.  First in a Ngaio Marsh whodunnit published in 1939 and taking place probably a couple of years before (it mentions Hitler but not the war), describing a pub interior.  I didn't know the word and it seemed to be something to do with a sitting place near the fire.  Today at our writing group, attended by 4 other women ranging in age from 70 to 2 in their 90s (though they seemed offended when I described enjoying the company of old people, such as them) one of the stories was about Crockerton in England near Longleat (which we are having a series about on TV at the moment) from where her ancestors came. 

That preamble with all its brackets is to allow me to ask the history of this sitting place and whether it is still used now.  I understand what a nook is but what is 'ingle'.  I remember one of LM Montgomery's books was called Anne of Ingleside. So it must have some sort of 'place' meaning.

"Be a little angel and bring a little angel..." That was our teacher "Smelly" Lynch's witticism (punned in Irish) when he requested that each of us in the class should take a lump of coal from home with us to school every day during the coldest bits of winter to keep the open fire in the classroom alive for another school-day (the alternative was doing bouts of physical jerks in the aisles between the desks at half hour intervals).

Smelly's pun involved a bit of a linguistic cheat. Strictly speaking "aingeal" (from "geal" and "an" - "bright ember") refers only to coal which is no longer giving off flame but is glowing and still hot enough to be used to ignite a newly set fire. The OED agrees that it means ember in Gaelic but then says only that this is a "possible" root for the English word "ingle", the problem apparently being that it pops up in the English format first as a "Scottish" term but that there is no evidence of its actual use in Scottish Gaelic. This strikes me as a pretty snobby and insular attitude for the OED to adopt since there are quite well documented and ancient examples of its use in Irish Gaelic, the language which gave rise to the Scottish version anyway. But I think it's fair to assume therefore that the word was primarily one used by the lower and illiterate classes and well below the OED radar before it eventually found its way into romantic "Scottish" English poetry in the 18th century, when the OED claims it seemingly miraculously manifested itself in its modern form as an alternative word for fireplace.

In fact "ingle" is by far an easier word to trace back through time than "nook", which even the OED throws its metaphorical hat at, muttering vague allusions to Norwegian, German and Sanskrit before then admitting total etymological defeat.

Many years ago I wrote a series of short articles for a caving magazine tracing the names of English caves/potholes. The underlying idea was that prominent open cave entrances - such as Gaping Gill, Yordas Cave, Douk Cave, Rowten Pot and Alum Pot, all in the Yorkshire Dales - while mostly inpenetrable, were almost certainly viewed as mysterious, probably mystic sites - entrances to the underworld etc. (and sometimes more prosaically just somewhere to dispose of rubbish) - and in the same way as other physical features (eg mountains and rivers) their names often reflect how they were viewed by the inhabitants of the area a thousand or so years ago.

One such name is Ingleborough - which describes a prominent hill (one of the Dales' well-known 'Three Peaks'), as well as a prominent resurgence cave on its lower flanks just outside the small town of Ingleton. In this local context 'Ingle', used as a prefix, seemed to me at the time to have derived from 'Angle' or 'Engle' meaning essentially 'English', combined with the Saxon word 'burgh', roughly a fort, or 'ton', a town (both the Brigantes and the Romans built large commanding forts on the summit of Ingleborough Hill). Ingleton, it seemed, was thus in the 9/10th century being singled out as an Anglo-Saxon settlement in what was otherwise a predominently Irish-Norse occupied district, with many villages and farms still having clear Norse names. But I now wonder if there was not an influence of the Irish 'fire' meaning. The adjacent village to Ingleton is Ireby ie Irish town (with the classic '-by' Norse ending), and the hillfort on the summit of Ingleborough has at various times been used as the site for a signal beacon. (As a place name ending '-ing' usually derives from the Saxon 'ingas', meaning place of, as in Worthing - the place of Worth/Wurth's people).

Coincidentally, but almost certainly unrelated, given your 'coal/ember' comment above, Ingleton does have coal deposits just south of the town, which were worked in the 19th century by several small but locally important coal mines.

I have always understood the inglenook as being the interior corner of a large, recessed fireplace, often the most desirable seat in the pub.

The Dictionary of the Scots Language acknowledges ingle as deriving from Old Irish, [O.Sc. ingle, fire(-place), from c.1500, Gael. aingeal, fire, phs. orig. from O.Ir. aingeal, sunshine, light, shining, gleaming.]  

Outside Edinburgh we have Ingliston( beside the airport), - could this be English town?

Nook or Neuk according to the DSL can be either a corner or a promintory (East Neuk of Fife).
[O.Sc. nok, headland, 1375, Mid.Eng. noke, corner, angle, chiefly north. in usage.]

ferval wrote:

Nook or Neuk according to the DSL can be either a corner or a promintory (East Neuk of Fife).
[O.Sc. nok, headland, 1375, Mid.Eng. noke, corner, angle, chiefly north. in usage.]

... my emphasis.

Far be it for me to dispute the wisdom of the OED but could not inglenook just be tautology to express a diminutive: a wee "corner-corner", or "nook-nook", in the same way as in French a "doggy" - as opposed to an ordinary "dog" - is familiarly known as a "chien-chien".

From wiki:
Angle comes drom the Latin word angulus, meaning "corner"; cognate words are  the Greek ἀγκύλος, meaning "crooked, curved," and the English "ankle ". Both are connected with the Proto-Indo-European root ank-, meaning "to bend" or "bow".

Perhaps but I don't think so, I have a vague recollection of ingle being used in the glowing, gleaming sense in Scots referring to twilight or gloaming but I can't find a quotation.

This is a verse from The Farmer's Ingle by Robert Fergusson (1773):

Weel kens the gudewife that the pleughs require
A heartsome meltith, and refreshing synd
O' nappy liquor, o'er a bleezing fire:
Sair wark and poortith douna weel be join'd.
Wi' butter'd bannocks now the girdle reeks,
I' the far nook the bowie briskly reams;
The readied kail stand by the chimley cheeks,
And had the riggin het wi' welcome steams,
Whilk than the daintiest kitchen nicer seems.

Burns: The Cotters Saturday Night

"At length his lonely cot appears in view,
       Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
   Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher* through
       To meet their dad, wi' flichterin noise and glee.
       His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonnily,
   His clean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie's smile,
       The lisping infant prattling on his knee,
   Does a' his weary carking care beguile,
   An' makes him quite forget his labour and his toil."

I'm inclined to stick with the Gaelic root for the fireplace, especially since it's a word that's been in continuous use for some few thousand years and hasn't changed its meaning one iota.

However the "Ingle" in place names (and variations thereof), though a separate issue, is itself a fascinating one. As denoting the "Angles" it features naturally enough in quite a few English place names, including England of course. But while Victorian antiquarians liked to wonder if the name originated from a Roman description of Jutland as "Angulus terrarum" (an angled land) a more telling and way lengthier trail is to be found if one keeps pushing eastwards across the continent, through Engelrute, Engelburg, Engelheim (Charlemagne's homeland) and Ingolstadt, all in modern Germany, Angleria in Northern Italy, Engelhartzell on the Austrian Danube, Engelweis and Engelstelen in Switzerland, Engelhausen (as was) in the Sudetenland, and even Engelholm in Sweden. The trail peters out as one enters Slavic and Russian territories with their more recently imposed nomenclatures, but then erupts again just beyond the Black Sea in Ingelsol and Engelsgrad as it wends its merry and very ancient way back into the mists of time (and Asia).

I had no idea this was going to lead to such an interesting etymological discussion!  Thanks to you all.

Since writing that I seem to have discovered inglenooks everywhere.  In The Oldie this month Johnny Grimond was discussing the pros and cons of a 27th letter in the Roman alphabet and said about thorn (the 'th' sound). He said, "It was represented at first by a letter that looked like a 'b' superimposed on a 'p'.  That evolved to become a 'y', which, when followed by an 'e', was used for 'the', most often in conjuction in the popular imagination with 'olde'.  It is widely believed that, in 1992, the inglenook-fanciers' gazette, Ye Olde, became The Oldie.

And I am sure I found it somewhere else, too.  Have remembered there is an Inglewood in NZ too.  In Taranaki, in the North Island, near where one of my sons lived.  I suppose the burning meaning of ingle would make sense here, though I suspect it originated in someone's use of their home town or home farm back in Scotland or Ireland, a common practice here.

I was shopping in Exeter yesterday and treated myself to Peter Ackroyd's new book: Queer City - Gay London From the Romans to the Present Day. Lo and behold, on page 2 I've just read this: "The 'ingle', or depraved boy, was well known by the end of the sixteenth century. Is there a phrase - every nook should have an ingle? Ingal Road still survives in East London."

That's interesting Temp, I wasn't aware of that meaning of ingle, but yes, it certainly does indeed seem to have been a common term in late Elizabethan England. Will Shakespeare's friend, John Florio, in his English-Italian dictionary, 'Worlde of Words' (1598) defined the Italian, catamito, as "a ganimed [ganymede], an ingle, a boie hired to sinne against nature". And Ben Jonson in his play 'Epicene' (1609) has one character voice envy for another's luxury, including his option of him having "his mistress abroad and his ingle at home." Closer to modern times, T E Lawrence in 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' wrote, "Abd el Kader called them whoresons, ingle's accidents, sons of a bitch, profiteering cuckolds and pimps, jetting his insults broadcast to the roomfull."

At times it seems an ingle could also mean any lover, paramour or favourite (ie not just male) and the 'Encyclopedia of Homosexuality' (Ed. WR Dynes, 1990) adds that by combining the different meanings of ingle (ie a fire, hence the inglenook next to the fireplace ... with the meaning of a sexual partner) the term 'inglenook' was sometimes (mid-18th century) used as slang for "the female pudenda". I note also that in modern Spanish ingle still means simply the groin.

But I wonder though if the origin of the word 'ingle' ... meaning a (male) catamite, toy-boy, rent-boy, favourite, ... or equally a (female) whore, tart, floosie, prostitute, favourite ... might also ultimately come from the same Irish origin for a glowing glede, ember or flame ... and so be akin to the 20th century use of a "flame"  to mean a lover, or the expression "carrying a torch" for someone?

Hi there! Sorry for this "out-of-delay" kind of "answer" but should you read ahead you'll understand my being astrayed that far…

I am a Spanish translator of university books (mainly of History) and I am translating right now the very interesting Peter Ackroyd's new book: Queer City - Gay London From the Romans to the Present Day that you cite right up here.

I was puzzled by the expression "every nook shoud have an ingle", but even now, after reading your great explanations, I see it difficult to render the meaning of that expression into Spanish: does it say that "every corner (or "hole") should have it's amber (heat, or fire)". That would allow for a malicious interpretation, of some sexual connotations, which I gather is what the author is implying there.

Am I correct, or am I being too "brainy" to say the least…

Thanks a lot in advance for your help,

CM 

Hi ComicMonster, re "every nook should have an ingle".

... since it's from Peter Ackroyd's history of gay London, I would take that as a cheeky play on words to jokingly suggest that it might be nice (from a gay man's point of view) if every corner (or similar hidden place) contained a rentboy/cute guy/cruising bloke etc..., bearing in mind, as we have discussed above, that in modern English the word 'ingle' is nearly always only used together with 'nook', as 'inglenook', a (secret/hidden/cosy) space in, or next to, a big fireplace. The expression takes a perfectly respectable word 'inglenook' and breaks into two to make a slightly risqué joke ... but the play on words only works if you understand rather old-fashioned English. The joke/wordplay depends on how one understands the word 'ingle', which isn't at all a common word these days - but as a joke, ingle, meaning an ember, doesn't really work for me.

What does everyone else think?

Temperance I think has read Ackroyd's book, I haven't. What's the full quote and context? ... and when are we talking about ... 18th century, perhaps?

OK, Meles meles, I think I see what you mean… Now it's my turn to try to explain that, briefly, in a footnote… But the good think it's that I am now assured about the interpretation. The key stuff here (for me, I mean) is to know, from your explanation, that "inglenook" is a common word in English and that the joke arises from the mere splitting of it into two words that lends themselves to a twist of meaning…

Thanks a lot for your help, I couldn't have done without it… 

CM

I'm glad you think I was of help ... this morning, to me, my post reads like a load of wordy waffle. 

I can't find Ackroyd's book online, but there is what I take to be a synopsis of a his book or a stand-alone related article, Ackroyd - Queer City ebook, in which Peter Ackroyd himself, directly after stating, "The 'ingle', or depraved boy, was well known by the end of the sixteenth century," asks: "Is there a phrase - every nook should have an ingle?". So I don't see it as an old saying, but is just a witty bit of wordplay by Ackroyd himself ... and that reinforces how I read it.

Good luck with the translation. Being a gay history I imagine there are a lot more double-entendres, innuendos, and risqué allusions ... never the easiest things to render into another language.

Yes, yes, this is also what I understood from your explanation —in fact your clarification throw also light on the possible reasons of this question mark… Why was the author putting it in interrogative form? It seems now obvious he is suggesting a kind of tentative pun, a "clin d'oeil" so to say.

And yes… I am afraid this is going to be a nightmarish sort of translation, but also quite challenging and interesting. It's not the first time I translate this author and I have always liked (and asked for) "difficult books" —gosh, I knew we had to be watchful about our own desires, lest they may come true! ).

And since I am not from the "milieu" this is going to be twice as demanding I guess, but I am sure it will be worth the effort (hope the future Spanish-speaking readers should think the same of the results…)

Thanks again —it hasn't been any "wordly waffle", or the most useful kind of "gaufre" in the first place.

Take care,

CM

Testing

ferval wrote:

Perhaps but I don't think so, I have a vague recollection of ingle being used in the glowing, gleaming sense in Scots referring to twilight or gloaming but I can't find a quotation.

One way of making it work, press the "quote" button. The reply box, very narrow, appears with a brown background

There was a large amount of formatting code embedded in ComicMonster's last post which was upsetting the frame displays. Fixed now.

Hi ComicMonster and welcome to the site. I've done a fair bit of translation in my time too and can only sympathise with you. I really like Ackroyd's writing style myself, but he can be very lyrical in his prose and this - as I'm sure you know - is what every translator dreads most. One false allegory or dodgy euphemism and you're suddenly in a semantic dead-end from which there is no escape.

Yep, that's why we are one of the most risky bussiness since otoman dragomans' times.

That forum really, really looks like historical and literary gold for translators… Thanks for welcoming me. I'll just try to be up to the task.

All the best

[I'll use the "quote button" next time, sorry; I'm no techno-geek at all… more like pen and paper…]

CM

You don't need to use the "quote" button - the problem was really that you'd obviously copied the wording of your post from some other application where you'd composed it first and which had then inserted a lot of hidden set-up code when you copied and pasted into the dialogue box here. An easy way to avoid that is if you're cutting and pasting use the "paste as plain text" option - that strips away any such code and just puts the text into the post.

I see, I'll keep it in mind.

Hi, I am afraid this may not be finished: I've just found, in the aforementioned Acroyd's Queer City, a sentence, included in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601), in which the term is used in it's sense of "rent-boy":


"In Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) Ovid learns that his son is to become an actor. ‘What? Shall I have my son a stager now, an ingle for players?’"

The problem here is that there's another word for which I can't find a Spanish equivalent: "stager". Do you know what's the meaning of this word? I've found a definition, but I don't think it apllies to the present case, since it says it's a term used in Northamerican English (unless it passed from Elizabethan times to the New World): "A person whose job is to style and furnish properties for sale in such a way as to enhance their attractiveness to potential buyers".


I will need anyway, at least, an English synonim, to try to find the equivalence for my translation.


Thanks a lot for your help,


CM

"Stager" I understand to just mean actor, as in one who acts on a stage ... and the reference to a rent-boy in, "... a stager now, an ingle for players?" to me simply suggests a mild play on words, along the lines that, as an actor, he is like a prostitute in that he performs for pay and the pleasure of others. Bear in mind that in early 17th century England women very, very rarely performed on stage - female parts were played by young men or boys - and to be an actress was thought rather shameful and indeed "actress" was almost synonymous with "prostitute" in common perception (a perception widespread throughout Europe and one which persisted well into the 18th century). Similarly the good-looking young male actors who made their living dressing as women, also had the reputation of being rent-boys, or at least homosexual, whether they were or not.

So if you want a simple synonym why not:"What? Shall I have my son a performer now, a prostitute for players?" NB I'm not sure whether by players he means the modern use as 'actors' ie those that perform plays, or he means those that attend players, ie the audience ... perhaps the ambiguity was deliberate.

PS

Careful... in Poetaster isn't Ovid's father actually worried about him becoming a playwright - ie a writer of plays - rather than a player/actor himself? That might suggest a slightly different reading of Ben Jonson's words, as in Ovid junior is being accused of prostituting his skills and abilities (as an orator) for common actors. I'll try and find the whole verse to get the context.

Here's the text (from Act 1 Scene 2):

Enter OVID senior, followed by Luscus, Tucca, and Lupus.
OVID SENIOR: Your name shall live, indeed, sir! you say true: but how infamously, how scorn'd and contemn'd in the eyes and ears of the best and gravest Romans, that you think not on; you never so much as dream of that. Are these the fruits of all my travail and expenses? Is this the scope and aim of thy studies? Are these the hopeful courses, wherewith I have so long flattered my expectation from thee? Verses! Poetry! Ovid, whom I thought to see the pleader, become Ovid the play-maker!
OVID JUNIOR: No, sir.
OVID SENIOR: Yes sir! I hear of a tragedy of yours coming forth for the common players there, called Medea. By my household gods, if I come to the acting of it, I'll add one tragic part more than is yet expected to it - believe me when I promise it. What, shall I have my son a stager now? An ingle for players? A gull [ie a gullible dupe]? A rook [ie a fool]? A shot-clog [one who is only tolerated because he pays the bill for everyone else] to make suppers, and be laughed at? Publius, I will set thee on the funeral pile first.
OVID JUNIOR: Sir, I bessech you to have patience.
LUSCUS: Nay, this 'tis to have your ears dammed up to good counsel. I did augur all this to him aforehand, without poring into an ox's paunch for the matter, and yet he would not be scrupulous.

So yes, Ovid senior is actually worried about his son becoming a writer of plays ... but I still feel my comments above are valid - his concern is for his son getting involved in the whole potentially debauched business of the theatre. Remember that Jonson's 'Poetaster' is itself a play and so the above references to the dubious sexuality of the playwright, the play-actors and the play-audience, can also be seen as humourously mocking. The joke is perhaps all the more directed at the audience because the play was written for, and first performed by, the Children of the Chapel Royal, who were all boy choristers with unbroken voices who, besides putting on plays and other entertainments for the court, sang in religious services in the Royal chapels, and so were most unlikely themselves to have been rent-boys. Also the whole play, and particularly the character of Ovid junior who aspires to write plays, is thought to be a satitical attack on a couple of Jonson's rival playwrights.

But that's all rather getting away from a "stager" being an actor, and that actors, especially the males playing female rôles (and there are several such parts in Poetaster), were widely associated in people's minds, however unfairly, with homosexuality and prostitution.

That provides good info for a nuanced footnote.

I am seriously thinking of mentioning the help of your comments in these notes, should you consider it worthwhile.