"Confusionitis Canonicus "

(or, "Does One Bathe In A Bath-Chair?")

Since Sherlockians are often the type of people who read a lot in general, many of you have probably committed, at one time or another, the "I've read this word before but I never knew it was pronounced like that" blunder. It's an affliction common to those who expand their vocabulary more by literature than by the spoken word.It's also similar to a more specifically Sherlockian phenomenon. Case in point: On the fifth reading of WIST you suddenly realize that when Holmes spoke of spending instructive days with a spud, he meant a spade. And you always thought he was talking about potatoes.

It's only natural that we should occasionally misinterpret, or even be completely baffled by, certain turns of phrase in the Canon. Sometimes the error is due to the roughly hundred-year gap between our world and Watson's. You won't find a reefer jacket in any recent issues of Gentlemen's Quarterly, for instance. And if readers on this side of the Atlantic initially wonder why Holmes had to climb on Watson's back to peep in a "first-floor" window (PRIO), they may be excused on the grounds of not being born in England. If they had been, they would know that the first floor is the one above the ground floor.

Ultimately, of course, there is really no excuse for ignorance. Even if you don't happen to be reading the Annotated, or have a reference such as The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana handy (neither of which will necessarily tell you everything you'd like to know), a dictionary is often sufficient to clear up the matter. But the narrative itself is often so engrossing that one is loathe to interrupt the reading of it. And so contextual clue and a bit of imagination must suffice, with variable results.

Each person's list of misunderstood or mysterious references is different. Someone not familiar with architectural terms might not realize that the "fanlight . . . which shed a single blurred circle on to the garden path" of Laburnam Villa (SIXN) was a window, not some type of lamp. Another reader might wonder why Watson expressed such a yearning for "the shingle of Southsea" (RESI, CARD) -- was he that fond of roofing material? Or did it have something to so with wanting to start a practice there; that is, "to hang out his shingle"? Of course, once you know that "shingle" refers to coarse sand, you'll also understand what it was doing on the beach in LION.

Sometimes, though, the false images persist even after enlightenment comes. You may know full well that "M.P." stands for "Member of Parliament," but that doesn't stop you from fleetingly interpreting it as "Military Police" every time you run across it. And doesn't "lumber-room" still make you think of two-by-f ours? A tide-waiter (NOBL) may well be a customs officer, but certain otherwise sensitive Sherlockians have confessed to consistently picturing him as a man in a tuxedo, white linen folded primly over one arm and a silver tray balanced on the other, with pant legs prudently rolled up as he walks along with waves lapping at his feet.

Happily, these instances of confusion are rare, considering the size of the Canon. Though separated from Victorian England by time and distance, we're not all that far from it yet. Perhaps someday our less fortunate descendants will require as many footnotes to read the Canon as we do to read Shakespeare, or even Chaucer . . . perish the thought!

In the meantime, all we have to worry about are such trivial matters as how a dress can be described as both blue and beige (COPP) . . . or what would happen to you if a bag with a "wiper" in it were dropped on your head (SIGN) . . . or how Le Brun, the French agent, came to be attacked by Apaches on the streets of Paris (ILLU). If you don't know the answers, this time we're not going to tell you. You need a little mystery in your life. After all, you're a Sherlockian.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, August 1985)