Lepidus, Lapras, Pokélogan, Thomas B. Marsh, and Peter

In my February 6 post "Pokélogan," I discuss my plesiosaur Pokémon keychain by that name and my disappointment when I discovered that the creature's "real" name was the vastly inferior Lapras. William Wright went on to connect Pokélogan with Thomas B. Marsh and Thomas B. Marsh with St. Peter.

The real name, Lapras, reminded me of something, though, and the other day I finally figured out what. Back in 2018, I read the Arden Shakespeare edition of Antony and Cleopatra, with helpful but occasionally mildly zany notes by R. H. Case. The most memorable of these was a comment on a dialogue in which Agrippa says, "'Tis a noble Lepidus," and Enobarbus replies, "A very fine one." About this use of Lepidus, the name of one of the triumvirs, as if it were a common noun, Case writes:

This comment was possibly evoked by the sound of the word Lepidus, which, to me, at least, is rather suggestive of some kind of sea creature of the inerter type. But perhaps this is seeing too much.

I have to say I'm a huge fan of this note. It's almost Pale Fire tier. If more footnotes were like this one, I would read more footnotes.

So no less an authority than R. H. Case assures us that the name Lepidus is "suggestive of some kind of sea creature" -- like, say, a sky-blue Loch Ness monster with a shell and horns? In American pronunciation, the d in Lepidus is flapped, making it sound like a Spanish or Japanese r; and the u is reduced to a schwa, which would be considered an a sound in Japanese. That gives us Lepiras, which is pretty close to Lapras. I personally didn't think Lapras was such a great name for a sea creature, but I'm prepared to defer to Professor Case on the matter.

Lepidus means "pleasant, charming," but it can also be a variant of Lapidus, "made of stone, stony." A sea creature made of stone would certainly be "of the inerter type." The name Peter, of course, also means "stone." St. Peter was also a "triumvir" of sorts in the Synoptic Gospels and Mormon tradition, together with James and John.

Pokélogan is Elvish, because of course it is -- plus a note on Xanadu

"Pokélogan" -- as an alternative name for the Pokémon Lapras -- comes from two sources. The first is the poké- element in Pokémon, which comes from the English word pocket. The second is pokelogan, an obscure dialect word of unclear origin, meaning "marshy or stagnant water that has branched off from a stream or lake."

I've acquired from William Wright the habit of looking strange words up on Eldamo to see if they mean anything in any of Tolkien's Elvish languages. The search string pok returns only this:

So it means "bag" or "pouch," just as poké- means "pocket."

Logan returns no results, but loga and logn are both hits:

I haven't cherry-picked here. Both loga and logn return only these results, all of which are about swamps and thus directly related to the meaning of pokelogan. Tolkien may well have been influenced by the English words pouch and pocket when he coined poko, but it would be quite a stretch to say that the second half of an extremely obscure American dialect word inspired the Oxford Anglo-Saxonist to create loga and logna.

I think this is just as impressive a hit as Prika-vlein, and it suggests that Pokélogan may have more synchronistic importance than I had thought. One possibly important angle that comes to mind is that Pokélogan was specifically the name of a Lapras keychain, the purpose of which is to keep keys together. See yesterday's post about "keys . . . which must be combined and used together."

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On a mostly unrelated noted, William Wright has been posting a lot lately about the 1980 movie Xanadu. In the February 6 post "Ho!" he does for Xanadu what I've just done for Pokélogan above: break it into two parts and look them up on Eldamo. The components into which he separates it are xan and adu. This made me think of Xan, the name of the mosquito in the Popol Vuh, and I had the thought that every time I killed a mosquito, I could say, "Xan, adieu!"

And shrink not, brothers, from the kill:
'Tis but your own suck'd blood you spill.

His latest Xanadu post, yesterday's "How can you be talking to me? You're a movie!" is about a scene in which Kira tells Sonny to look up the word muse in the dictionary. He does so and finds at the end of the entry a sentence addressing him by name. Then she turns on the TV, and the characters on the TV show also start talking to him.

Today I was reading Calvino in a coffee shop, and the background music got my attention when the singer sang the word green at precisely the same moment that I read the word green. (It had to be that word of course!) Then a new song came on, which turned out to be "Too Deep To Turn Back" by Daniel Caesar. It begins thus:

So what's the price?
We're like mosquitoes to light, in a sense
I feed off bio-luminescence

"Mosquitoes to light"? Isn't it usually moths that we talk about in that connection? Then when it got to "I feed off bio-luminescence," it made me think of William Wright's December 10 post "A Vampire's Weekend," in which he characterizes Ungoliant, Tolkien's giant spider-demon, as "acting very much the vampire in sucking the last light from the Trees." A vampire drinks blood, like a mosquito, but this vampire was instead drinking light, and specifically light which came from living organisms, the Two Trees. Feeding off bio-luminescence, you might say.

Near the end of the song we have these lines:

Oh Lord Jehovah, what's this I see?
Bourgeoisie tryna silence me
They don't know what I've been through
Don't know what I pree'd
Seeing shit that you see up in your TV screen

That seems to tie in with Sonny seeing some supernatural shit up in his TV screen in Xanadu.

Pokélogan

Pokémon has been in the sync stream lately, which made me think of something I hadn't thought of in ages.

Sometime in the late 1990s, I somehow acquired a Pokémon keychain which looked sort of like a sky-blue Loch Ness monster. I can't remember how I came to be in possession of such a thing; I either found it somewhere or was given it. I didn't know what that sort of Pokémon was properly called, but somewhere along the line it came to be known as Pokélogan. I can't remember how that came about, either. Looking it up now, I find that pokelogan (with a silent e) is a dialect word from New England, meaning "a usually stagnant inlet or marshy place branching off from a stream or lake." I guess I probably ran across the word in Thoreau or some similar writer and then saddled my keychain critter with it because it begins poke- and has aquatic connotations. (I don't know why I'm so vague on all this. I usually have an excellent episodic memory.)

Years later, some more Poké-literate acquaintance informed me of the thing's real name, which was something uninspired and forgettable and just generally vastly inferior to Pokélogan. On February 4, when I posted "One-eyed × purple people eater," in which I mention my general ignorance of all things Pokémon, I thought of Pokélogan and racked my brain trying to remember its "real" name but got nothing.

This morning I browsed /x/ a bit and clicked on a thread with the nondescript title "How many paranormal experiences have you had?" The second reply was this:

I don't think I would even have read the post had it not gotten my attention by mentioning chameleon, a word which has been in the sync stream, early on. (Incidentally, the Chinese implicitly agree with his dinosaur chameleon theory; the final character in 變色龍, "chameleon," corresponds to -saurus and appears at the end of all dinosaur names.) I kept reading and found Lapras as the name of a plesiosaur-like Pokémon. This, surely, was the name I had been trying to remember two days ago, Pokélogan's "true" name! A quick search confirms this:

Laplace as the transliteration of the Japanese caught my eye, since obviously that's not a normal way of transliterating Japanese. Scrolling down, I find that the name "may be a reference to Pierre-Simon Laplace, a mathematician who wrote several books on the mathematical properties of the sea and tides." I somehow didn't know that about Laplace. What I did know is that he was one of the first thinkers to propose, more than a century ahead of its time, the concept of what would later be known as a "black hole."

I think I still have that Pokélogan keychain somewhere. If I find it, I'll add a photo here.

Update: Here it is:

Another "raised by wolves" sync -- and Shadilay!

The phrase "raised by wolves" -- as used as a slogan by the Minnesota Timberwolves -- came up in my February 1 post "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan."

Today I was browsing in a new-to-me used bookstore I had discovered, and I was drawn to a novel called Swamplandia! by Karen Russell even though the cover had that "critically acclaimed" look that usually makes me give a book a wide berth. I opened it up and found this:

The sync fairies have spoken. I bought the book.

William Wright left a comment on my original "raised by wolves" post in which he connects the expression, by way of the Rudyard Kipling character Mowgli, with spacefaring frogs:

The phrase "Raised by Wolves" reminds me of Jungle Book. Mowgli is raised by wolves. Kipling said that Mowgli was a made up name - in other words, though it meant "frog" in the book, this wasn't based on any known languages.

As an amphibian, Mowgli would be able to live and travel on both land and water - perhaps even Many Waters?

A frog crossing space has come up in your own posts, where in one instance you reference Pepe the Frog crash landing on a shooting star. The 'thumb'-nail image for that video you posted has Arnold's head swapped with that of a green frog as he flees the temple (likely skipping out of this world for another).

This immediately made me think of the 1986 Italo disco song "Shadilay" (I mentioned Italo Calvino in the post), which on September 11, 2016, was suddenly discovered by /pol/ and became associated with Pepe the Frog and his Egyptian deity alter ego Kek.

For those unfamiliar with the song and its memetic significance, see "SHADILAY: The sacred word that founded a new meme faith." That article also points out that Shadilay was the name of a fan-created Pokémon made in 2015, described by the author as "a glum-faced amphibian, water/ghost-type Pokemon." Since another "ghost-type Pokemon" has recently entered the sync stream, that seems relevant.

Kipling said that Mowgli means "frog" but that he'd just made it up. Shadilay is also a made-up word, but according to its creator, Marco Ceramicola alias Manuele Pepe, it means "spaceship." (I can't seem to find where he said that, but I'm sure he did. A 4plebs search confirms I'm not crazy.)

One-eyed × purple people eater

On February 2, William Wright posted "Purple People Eaters," and I followed up with my own post on the One-Eyed One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater theme, "I wouldn't eat you 'cause you're too tough." In a comment on my post, WanderingGondola wrote that she has a purple hoodie which a family member has nicknamed the Purple People Eater. She included a link to a photo of this hoodie, which is portrays a Pokémon called Gengar:

Interestingly, one of the Gengar cards I found online just now shows the creature with a long red tongue, a feature recently seen here in my January 25 post "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires":

This evening I was wandering around an unfamiliar part of Taichung and passed one of those claw-crane machines. I belatedly noticed that it prominently featured a one-eyed monster -- the Monsters Inc. character Mike Wazowski -- which made me go back and look to see if there was anything else in there suggesting the Purple People Eater. Sure enough:

I have zero experience with Pokémon and can't tell a Snorlax from a Slowbro, and I certainly wouldn't have recognized Gengar had WanderingGondola not just brought it up.