428“khams daqāʾiq… and not khamsah daqāʾiq”: the humor lies in the author’s attribution of an irrelevant cause to a grammatical rule, the rule in this case being that a feminine noun (here the implied daqīqah, singular of daqāʾiq) is preceded by the shorter, masculine, number form when counted.
429“because each is a ‘congregator of fineness’ (jāmiʿ al-nuʿūmah)”: the language is that of rhetorical theory, which would claim that the words for “flour” and “minutes” share the same consonantal root (d-q-q) because flour consists of finely ground grain while minutes are fine divisions of hours, and the phrase might more accurately be rendered “because they share the common factor of fineness”; however, the wording is primarily a set-up for the play on words that follows a little later.
430“The first six have ‘parts’ at either end” (al-sitt al-ʾūlā fī-hā farq): i.e., “have distinct beginnings and endings”; however, sitt (“six”) also means in the Egyptian dialect “lady, mistress” (from sayyidah), while farq (“dividing, partitioning”) also means a “parting” as a way of dressing the hair; thus, the words are a set-up to allow the joke that follows.
431“Nuʿūmah Mosque” (jāmiʿ al-nuʿūmah): while jāmiʿ is, as the shaykh will explain, an active participle, of the verb jamaʿa, yajmaʿu (“to gather together, collect, congregate”), it is also used in common parlance as a substantive meaning “mosque.”
432“ʿUdhrah… Virgin… must be stretched out” (ʿUdhrah… ʿadhrāʾ… yajibu madduhā): the learned monk wrote of a tribe famous for the celebration by its poets of passionate but unconsummated love; however, the ignorant Qayʿar Qayʿār, seeing ʿUdhrah, thinks that the monk intended ʿadhrāʾ (“virgin”), which should be pronounced with a long vowel at the end (madd), though in the colloquial it is pronounced with a short vowel. Thus, while stating a correct grammatical rule (the word for “virgin” should be written with —āʾ at the end), he demonstrates that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”
433“daʿawtu ʿalayh… ṣallaytu ʿalayh”: the use of a preposition after a verb in Arabic, as in other languages, may modify the sense of the verb. Thus plain daʿawtu and ṣallaytu both mean “I prayed,” but daʿawtu ʿalayh means “I cursed him” whereas ṣallaytu ʿalayh means “I prayed for him.”
434“tashīl… ishāl”: verbs with the consonant-vowel patterns CVCCVCV (verbal noun form taC1C2īC3) and VCCVCV (verbal noun form iC1C2āC3) may have causative or declarative sense relative to the semantic area of the three-consonant root. Thus, from the root s-h-l, associated with “ease,” are created the verbs sahhala (tashīl) and ashala (ishāl). Each, however, has a different denotation. Thus, sahhala means “to make easy, facilitate,” while ashala means “to be struck with diarrhea.”
435Many of the words used in the letter are double entendres or malapropisms, as follows: “sodomitical”—ibnī “filial” may be read as ubnī (from ubnah (“passive sodomy”)); “penetrated it”—awlajtu should mean “I caused to enter” and is often used in connection with sexual intercourse, but here is used intransitively; “the shittiest part”—ukhrāh “its end” is both a deformation of ākhiratihi and also may be read akhraʾihi (from kharāʾ (“excrement”)); “excrements”—al-fuḍūl may mean either “(bodily) wastes” or “merits, favors”; “creator of pestilence”—al-fuṣūl may mean either “chapters” or “plagues”; “a ‘congregator’ of both the branches of knowledge and its roots”—the word jāmiʿ appears to be used here simply to maintain the running joke relating to “congregator/mosque,” which is resumed in the immediately following passage; “long of tongue”—ṭawīl al-lisān may intend “eloquent” but idiomatically means “impertinent”; “with ’ands too short to”—qaṣīr al-yadāni ʿan commits, for the sake of the rhyme, the gross grammatical error of al-yadāni for al-yadayni; “of broad little brow”—reading wāsiʿ al-jubayn (counterintuitively in the diminutive) for the expected wāsiʿ al-jabīn (“broad of brow”); “wide waistcoated”—reading ʿarīḍ al-ṣudar (from ṣudrah “waistcoat”) for the expected ʿarīḍ al-ṣadr (“wide of breast, magnanimous”); “deeply in debt”—reading ʿamīq aldayn for the expected ʿamīq al-dīn (“deeply religious”); and “of ideas bereft”—reading mujawwaf al-fikar for mujawwif al-fikr (“pentrating of thought”), itself probably a spurious locution.
436“The Extraction of the Fāriyāq from Alexandria, by Sail” (Fī-nqīlāʿ al-Fāriyāq min al-Iskandariyyah): the base sense of inqilāʿ is “to pull up by the roots,” but the references to sailing in the first paragraph indicate that the author is simultaneously implying the concoction of a humorous new sense derived from qilʿ “sail,” which has the same root as inqilāʿ.
437al-Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād: 326–85/938–95, vizier to the Būyid rulers of Iran; the verses evoke such Qurʾanic passages as “And unto Solomon (We subdued) the wind and its raging” (Q Anbiyāʾ 21:81).
438The priest substitutes letters he can pronounce for those he cannot. Thus he says hāʾ (h) for ḥ (ḥāʾ) as in al-rahmān for al-raḥmān (“the merciful”), for ʿayn (ʿ) as in hitābukum for ʿitābukum (“censuring you”), for khāʾ (kh) as in al-mihaddah for al-mikhaddah (“the bolster”), and for the glottal stop (ʾ) as in rahzan for raʾsan (“resolutely”); hamzah (ʾ) for ʿayn (ʿ) as in al-ʾālam for al-ʿālam (“the world”); kāf (k) for qāf (q) as in akūl for aqūl (“I say”), for khāʾ (kh) as in akshā for akhshā (“I fear”), and for ghayn (gh) as in mashkūl for mashghūl (“busy”); sīn (s) for ṣād (ṣ) as in nasārā for naṣārā (“Christians”) and for thāʾ (th) as in akassir for akaththir (“I repeat often”); dāl (d) for ḍād (ḍ) as in al-hādirīn for al-ḥāḍirīn (“those present”); tāʾ (t) for ṭāʾ (ṭ) as in tūlihi for ṭūlihi (“its length”); and zayn (z) for dhāl (dh) as in lazzāt for ladhdhāt (“pleasures”) and for ẓāʾ (ẓ) as in mawhizatī for mawʿiẓatī (“my counsel”); s for th and z for dhāl are also common “errors” of native speakers. Sometimes the same letter is used with different values in the same word as in al-akdak for al-aghdaq (“the most bountiful”), or all the letters in a words are changed, as in al-sukh for al-ṣuqʿ (“the region”). These changes sometimes result in the production of meaningful words (e.g., kalbukum (“your dog”) for qalbukum (“your heart”)) but more often in nonsense, e.g., rahmān and rahīm.