'Paint Me the Bold Anfractuous Rocks'

“Sir, among the infractuosities of the human mind, I know not if it may not be one, that there is a superstitious reluctance to sit for a picture.”

A commonplace observation turned into a booby-trapped obstacle course. Rough translation: People don’t like having their portrait painted (or photograph taken). This is Boswell quoting Bennet Langton quoting Dr. Johnson. The year is 1780 and Boswell hasn’t seen much of his friend. He relies on their mutual acquaintance Langton to supply him with “a good store of Johnsoniana.” In this case, Johnson had asked Langton if his parents had “sat for their pictures, which he thought it right for each generation of a family to do.” They declined, Langton explained, and Johnson’s reply is recorded at the top.

 

We tend to be more indulgent with awkwardness in speech than in the written word. Most of us understand we have no delete or insert keys when talking. Johnson compounds the convoluted double-negative with that tongue-twisting word infractuosities. The standard spelling is anfractuosity. A borrowing from the French anfractuosité, it referred, according to the OED, to the “sinuous depressions separating the convolutions of the brain.” In other words, those valleys on the surface of the human brain, now called sulci.

 

When it entered English during Shakespeare’s life, the word referred to “a winding or sinuous route or passage . . . a turn, a bend; a fissure, a crevice.” As often happens with English, the noun turned metaphorical and came to mean “an instance of circuitous, intricate, or convoluted language, thought, reasoning, etc.” Johnson’s remark is cited as the second citation. Anfractuous is the adjective form, which T.S. Eliot used in the first stanza of “Sweeney Erect”:

 

“Paint me a cavernous waste shore

Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,

Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks

Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.”

 

This is mere speculation but Johnson may not have been showing off when he chose infractuosities. His sentence embodies anfractuosity. It is circuitous, intricate and convoluted. Perhaps he is guilty of the imitative fallacy.