Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I’ve run across a couple of phrases this past week that initially read opposite from their intent.

In an anniversary card, my dad said, “It’s not as easy as you make it seem.” On first reading, I took it to mean that we were making it harder than it should be. A second reading cleared it up, but it was weird that my brain turned it backward.

Yesterday, in a chat conversation, someone said, “If there were more convos like this, I’d be more unreluctant to be online.” Twisted syntax, to be sure, so I don’t blame myself for blinking twice before I was able to winkle the meaning out of this one

But these two instances triggered a memory. I remembered a phrase from a book read years ago.

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

Good old BIlbo Baggins. What a card.

I read The Hobbit and the LotR trilogy when I was in junior/senior high. I do not know every line of the books and I cannot do a scene-to-chapter comparison between Jackson’s movies and the books as a party trick. Still, a few key phrases from the books have stuck with me over the decades, and this was one.

Bilbo says this line during his speech at his eleventy-first birthday. It’s a wonderfully convoluted sentence–intentionally contorted–and I always took it as Bilbo’s tricksy way to slam his less savory relations while not insulting his friends; sort of a backhanded compliment, as it were. But was I correct? The two instances from this week made me wonder.

So, for the first time ever, I parsed it out.

Taking the two clauses separately, and reducing the “half of you” and “less than half of you” obfuscators, I got two relatively clear sentences

• I don’t know you half as well as I should like.
• I like you half as well as you deserve.

I was stunned. All this time I thought Bilbo was putting down his rough-side-of-Hobbiton relations, when in fact he was complimenting them. Yes, there is deprecation built into the sentence but it’s self-deprecation, saying that he hadn’t done enough. Tricksy it may have been, yes, but not snide.

I’m not a LotR fanatic, so I’m not very interested in why Tolkien put this bushel of tangled sentence structure into Bilbo’s mouth at that particular time and then pointed out to the reader just how confusing the statement was to his audience. I’m more interested in why I never before parsed it out myself.

As a high-achieving, low-social-skills youth embedded in AP classes and hours of practicing, rehearsals, and concerts, I know I was pretty damned arrogant. Back then, the thought that I could have misinterpreted a sentence, no matter how tangled, just didn’t compute. I read the line, I interpreted its meaning, I moved onward. But obviously there was the seed of doubt buried deep in my consciousness, or it wouldn’t have sprouted to life this week.

Since my youth, I’ve read a lot of classics, and have been slowly ambling through the syntactical forest of Proust’s magnum opus. I’ve read a lot of convoluted syntax and have no qualms about going back and re-reading a sentence if it didn’t click first time through.

I’m glad to know, at last, what Bilbo really meant. I’m also glad I’ve learned enough not to be so damned arrogant as to consider myself infallible. (Yes, that’s right. If you think I’m arrogant now, you should have met me when I was in my prime. Hoooooo-boy!)

Happy Friday.

Onward,

k