A Pilgrim’s Digression

I don’t know how often you use the Amazon.com site, but recently I discovered a feature I rather like, and that I’ve even found useful from time to time, the “Search inside this book” feature. It allows you to do a keyword search on a book in the Amazon.com catalog, as long as that book has been digitized and encoded for searching.

To give you some examples of how it works, I’ve been reading a book titled McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in the West of Ireland. I went to Amazon, looked up the book, and clicked the “Search inside this book” link (you can also mouse over the image of the book cover for a search box, as well). I typed in “sod.” And these are the results I got: four pages in the book where the term “sod” is used, mostly vulgarly.

“…’McCarthy’s,’ it said. ‘Hungary’s Top Irish Pub.’ I turned up my collar. Budapest can still be quite chilly in March. Sod this, I thought. Next year I’ll go to Ireland…”

“… good idea to travel with an unfashionable and preferably out-of-date guidebook , otherwise you end up like all those poor sods you see reading the Lonely Planet Guide in real, authentic places that are reassuringly full of other people just like …”

“… I never saw it, but she comes back over and says, ” ‘Ere, Da, you’ll never guess what, dirty old sod grabbed hold of me boob.” ‘So I’m like, right, he needs a slap and she’s all, no, no, leave it …”

“…they mob the great big bunny. ‘Pinky! Pinky! Pinky!’ The poor sod inside buckles under the onslaught of good- natured blows to the head and kidneys. ‘Da! Da! Da! Take a picture! …”

I tried to glean other, perhaps more creative uses of the term from Roddy Doyle’s works, but to my surprise Doyle hardly uses the term, preferring the American eqivalent “fuck” in all its infinite variety. In The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Doyle doesn’t use the word “sod” even once, but “fuck” earns 22 pages of search results.

So I went looking for authors who might also use “sod” in some interesting ways. My search was unfortunately limited by my own limited knowledge of authors.

James Joyce, our patron saint, uses the term once in Ulysses, during a Leopold Bloom monologue in the “Hades” episode:

“… A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he’d have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave…”

By contrast, Joyce uses it at least seventeen times in Finnegans Wake. Just a few examples:

“For to sod the brave son of Scandiknavery.”

“…(there’s a sod of a turb for you! please wisp off the grass!)…”

“… would not throw himself in Liffey; he would not explaud himself with pneumantics; he refused to saffrocake himself with a sod.”

“…dry yanks will visit old sod…”

The latter passage, if written by a modern Irishman, would probably be a reference to the penchant for Americans to vacation in Ireland in search of their “heritage,” which they hope to locate in one week or less.

Many of the books at Amazon are not keyword searchable in the way I’ve just demonstrated. Apparently, the authors haven’t released their books for digitization and encoding. This was a problem for my little experiment in linguistic archaeology. Books by Flann O’Brien were unsearchable. So was Seamus Deane’s one novel.

If anyone can think of other Irish, or even British authors whose works would be worth searching for vulgar slang, I would be glad to continue this adventure in a future post. In the meantime, you may be wondering “But what use is this feature to anyone?”

One example will do: for a blog post I was writing, I wanted to quote a passage I remembered from a Hannah Arendt book, but I did not have the book on hand. I went to Amazon, did a keyword search on a distinctive term I remembered from the passage, and voilá. I had my quote. All without leaving my desk. All within seconds.