A-Z of Captain Haddock’s ‘billions’ of legendary tirades

By PTI

NEW DELHI: Captain Haddock is a curator of language, forging unexpected metaphors to strike down his enemies with round after round of blistering verbal imagery, says the author of a new collection of the legendary exclamations of this trusted aide of fictional detective Tintin.

The irascible Captain Haddock made his first appearance alongside Tintin in 1941, and in the course of the 80 years that followed, has gone on to become one of the most loved characters created by renowned Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known as Herge.

In “Blistering Barnacles: An A-Z of Rants, Rambles and Rages of Captain Haddock”, French journalist Albert Algoud tells that from ‘thousands of blue blistering barnacles’ to ‘thundering typhoons’ to more obscure utterings like ‘bashi-bazouks’, ‘freshwater swabs’, ‘sea-gherkins’ and ‘two-penny halfpenny coastguards’, there is no character in literature with a more exuberant and idiosyncratic repertoire.

The book, published by HarperCollins imprint Farshore, explores the meaning and origin of the Captain’s curses and is an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to immerse themselves in the fine art of insult – with creative and colourful results.

Among the Captain’s exotic rants is ‘Koua Kouakouin Kouinkouin Koua Kouin Koua’, a voiceless velar plosive indicative of speechlessness which was uttered down the telephone at the arch-irritants and detective duo Thomson and Thompson and was one of the few occasions for which he had no recourse to his extensive vocabulary.

In “Tintin and the Picaros”, Haddock reserved the obscure but characterful epithet ‘Pachyrhizus’ for the vain and egotistical General Tapioca.

The word means a genus of five or six species of tropical and subtropical plants with edible tuberous roots, among which is the Mexican yam.

To imply brutishness, rudeness and lack of culture, Haddock would say ‘Visigoth’ or at times when he was lost for words, he would just shout ‘Pchkraaprvt’.

Algoud says his book celebrates a living lexicon.

Haddock plucks branches from a bewildering array of thematic trees with which to fashion his devastating arrows, he says.

Anatomy, botany, chemistry, entomology, ethnology, history, literature, medicine, meteorology, ornithology, psychiatry, theology and zoology are just some of the topics exploited by the Captain’s encyclopaedic rage, Algoud writes.

“Haddock also puts back into circulation, in delightfully unexpected ways, archaic or unusual terms, such as ectoplasm, abecedarian, anthropithecus, picaroon and mountebank,” he says.

According to Algoud, ‘inspiration’ was described in classical poetry as a type of intoxication conferred by the gods and it is “no coincidence that, in Herge’s work, the character chosen to embody such inspired verbal wizardry is the ever drunken Haddock.”