Engaging Inventories
Engaging Inventories
Two techniques for making likable lists
Rudyard Kipling once used a list to convey the experience of a young man of family, who, having fallen in the world, found himself serving as a common soldier. In particular, he employed a technique that, faute de mieux, might be called ‘setting up the zinger’. To begin with, the poet mentioned four things that put the hero of the poem on par with his squadron-mates. Then, to complete the idea, he includes an incident that reminded readers that the ‘gentleman ranker’ in question had been trained for a very different life.1
Oh, it's sweet to sweat through stables, sweet to empty kitchen slops,
And it's sweet to hear the tales the troopers tell,
To dance with blowzy housemaids at the regimental hops
And thrash the cad who says you waltz too well.
Some two centuries before the birth of the Bard of Bombay, William Bradford filled his history of Plymouth Colony with lists that, if I am not too badly mistaken, he composed with considerable care. When, for example, he praised the heroic efforts of those who nursed the victims of a great epidemic, he organized the catalog of chores performed in ascending order of unpleasantness.2
In the time of worst distress, there were but six or seven sound persons, who, to their great commendation be it spoken, spared no pains night or day, but with great toil and at the risk of their own health, fetched wood, made fire, prepared food for the sick, made their beds, washed their infected clothes, dressed and undressed them - in a word, did all the homely and necessary services for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear mentioned …
Closer to our own time, television screenwriter Joe Keenan once provided the eponymous hero of Frasier with a list that combined these two techniques. When exhorting his producer to resist the wiles of media mephistopheles Bebe Glazer, the radio psychiatrist shouted ‘She has no scruples, no ethics, and no … reflection’. 3 (The first two of these characteristics might have applied to any unprincipled talent monger. The third, however, suggested that the knavery of this particular agent, and her ability to tempt, went well beyond the bounds of natural naughtiness.)
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Rudyard Kipling ‘Gentlemen Rankers’ Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses (London: Methuen, 1892) page 62 (Please note that this poem was not included in earlier editions of this collection.)
William Bradford (George F. Willison, editor) The History of Plymouth Colony (New York: Van Nostrand, 1948) pages 101-102
Only Frasier could compare an agent to a vampire!