Felicitous Words

“Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.”—Susan Howe
Henry VIII bequeathed to his royal children a love of seeing bulls and bears “baited,” that is, penned up in a ring or chained to a stake and set upon by fierce dogs. The bulls—on occasion “wearied to death” for sport—seem to have been more or less anonymous, but the bears acquired names and personalities: Sackerson, Ned Whiting, George Stone, and Harry Hunks (the latter blinded to increase the fun).
That parenthesis might well have read “the latter named to increase the fun.” For it seems that the point of delectation was whetted by dignifying the creature with a human name.

Thomas Dekker: At length a blind bear was tied to the stake, and instead of baiting him with dogs, a company of creatures that had the shapes of men and faces of Christians (being either colliers, carters, or watermen) took the office of beadles upon them, and whipped Monsieur Hunks till the blood ran down his old shoulders.
It seems, at times like this, how little language accomplishes. It doesn’t keep us from barbarism (etymology of which speaks for itself), and the naming of animals humanizes them insofar as we feel freer to treat them like humans—that is, wretchedly. Speaking of naming, I went to a christening a week ago. If naming is one level of optimistic abstraction, then “christening” adds to it a second level: the baby is named to a larger corpus and sacralized. Even that is not enough—witness the “company of creatures that had the shapes of men and faces of Christians”—but it does create the conditions for a contradiction. And in contradiction begins thought. As long as blood runs (down his old shoulders), thought races. It races to staunch it.
(Italicized passages from Will in the World)