N is for the Nautical, Bureaucratic Books of Thomas H. Raddall

Research and Development: The Institution and the Contractor

The administrative production of knowledge into digital transference. 

Digitization circa 2011. 

I have considered the relationship between the institution and the contractor. The reason for this being a recent read of The Nymph and the Lamp in lieu of the relatively recent anniversary of the 3-D release of Titanic. While audiences glommed at the wreckage of the metallic hull shattering in more than one visual dimension, I mused over the vocabulary in The Nymph and the Lamp. While the screenplay for Titanic has considerable, smashing detail to the dialog of the workers of the ships at the turn of the 20th Century, this element has long fascinated many readers. For example, Melville honed much of his texts to the sounds of life on the rapturously unpredictable ocean. The difference between a read of Moby Dick and, say, The Nymph and the Lamp is that I imagine the latter text hasn't been endlessly glossed with edits for the textbooks of American schoolchildren.

Perhaps, this is owing to the biographical detail of the writer, Thomas H. Raddall, a Briton born in school itself. Raddall was born in Hythe England at the British Army School of Musketry in 1903. The culture of the school was such that modern writer John Atkins discussed it in Black Powder, a journal of regalia and information for the studies of the Muzzle Loaders Association of Great Britain. He noticed that the attendants of this organization left with a particular understanding of military thought, implying that the cadets learned a considerable deal about weaponry. The school served the purpose of testing and experimenting with military equipment, which would then later be adopted by the military. Before Raddall's birth near or in this compound, the place reportedly was no longer used to fend of attacks of the French army. The temporality was focused upon the Minie bullet, an expanding bullet actually invented by a French citizen. Stereotypes of conflict aside, Atkins said that he school was built in 1853 and was "brought about by two majors developments in the design of the military rifle and the bullet" (35).

According to the Black Powder article or Atkins himself, the town viewed the inhabitants as a spectacle of the population. Atkins remarked that "the barracks in Hythe itself were used by the school staff, having been built to house 'military lunatics' in 1842... but no mention is made to what happened to them (35).  One of the children of these perceived fanatics was, of course, Thomas Raddall. His life-long involvement in the Canadian military and his work as a writer challenges the notion that the military is devoid of occupational theoretics. Much of the vocabulary in Raddall's piece reflects an end-user understanding of war devices and consistent inlay about military life. In this essay, I would hazard that the jargon in this text rings with unprecedented reverberations.

Of late, I have been preoccupied with a recent read of The Nymph and the Lamp. Thomas H. Raddall's work reached me in a tattered copy in, of all places, the recesses of a building owned by the government postal service. The work itself reminded me more of a modernist version of Thomas Pynchon, as if it were one in which the sparks and centrifuges tempered themselves out into remote sequences about nature. Instead of talking about the Pacific northeast, you could juxtapose American structuralism in remote military spaces with Pynchon's jots about electric pine trees. In conjunction with the release of Titanic, this vocabulary about ships would be pertinent to overall comprehension about military jingo as distributed by an author with a pizazz for the institutional life.

I ping to some of this terminology shortly.

The definition of these terms likely reflect nautical slang from the turn of the last century used by Ballard in the composition of the text. However, the entire course of a person's vocabulary cannot be uniquely contributed to an individual profession. Despite the fact that patois-like dialogs formulate and flourish in relation to machinery, anthropological linguists cannot necessarily be capable of constituting that environment as the single habitat. A body of users with different native languages approach objects in the visual sphere. The spontaneous development of piecemeal reference is fashioned as each unique user attempts to describe the object in different ways while connecting to common linguistic understandings or conceding to the creation of language through nonverbal agreements. The evolution of nautical language, surely, has its own architecture.

Regardless of these potential discrepancies, I have collated a short list of interpretive terms to reach the search engines. Some have been deduced from contextual inquiry and cannot be found in other dictionaries.

• bollard: 1. The part of the ship that you use to tie lines to in order to moor a ship. 
• bitt: 1. Same as "bollard." 
• fo'c'sles: 1. This is the kind of word that has been warped in an abbreviation for "forecastle. 2. Might refer to the bunks of sailors or spots near the front of the ship. 
• the sea-ice: 
• jingbang: 1. Everything 2. Synonym to "the whole kit and caboodle." 
• Marina (n): 1. In this case, the name of Raddall's island. 2. Jocose Spanish term for "sailor."
• The Labrador Drift: 1. Part of the current off the coast of Greenland that pushes ice south, likely responsible for the position of the ice encountered by the Titanic.