associated
maestro di cappella Krogh
Pecksniffism timing
Sometimes I am surprised to see the words that come out of the Moby lexicon. I mean, Pecksniffism!? How strange and wonderful is that? I am not sure what all resources were used to compile Moby, but I do know that a word was included in the common word list if it was contained in at least two dictionaries. But the hyphenation file is not limited to just common words--whereas the common word list has about 75,000 words, the hyphenation list that I'm using has about 185,000.
Maestro di cappella is a fancy name for a conductor or music director. The most famous people with the last name Krogh are Egil Krogh, a lawyer involved in Watergate, and August Krogh, a Nobel Prize winner in physiology. (Neither, to my knowledge, ever conducted an orchestra. However, Hanne Krogh is a Norwegian singer who won the Eurovision song contest in 1985.) Pecksniff comes from the Charles Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit, which I had never heard of, despite my tendency to hang out with Victorian enthusiasts. Apparently Mr. Pecksniff was a big ol' hypocrite, who claimed to have superior morals and then went around mistreating everyone. So to be a Pecksniffian is to hypocritically tell other people what to do and to intrusively interfere in other people's business.
I am finding it a bit of a stretch to find connections between the three lines today. Anyone care to take a stab at it?
Your research into what Poesytron 575 references is entertaining. It brings up all kinds of meanings I didn't forsee.
ReplyDeleteFor my part, I like to image "Pecksniffism," as the ideology of sniffing something after you peck it. If our maestro Krogh has a pecksniffing sense of timing, then our orchestra is probably deeply confused. The audience riots...