Pyroglossia

Brothers, don't let too many of you become teachers. Error is common to everyone, of course, but we who teach are subject to even sterner judgment. The consummate man is he whose discourse is free from error, because he maintains a hold on the bridle to his whole body. So do we steer whole horse's bodies, when we put bridle-bits in their mouths, in order that they obey. And behold the ships: big as they are and driven by the crashing winds, they are steered by a tiny rudder in whatever direction the pilot pleases. This is how the tongue works: a small appendage, it makes grandiose declarations. Behold the quantity of timber kindled by a tongue-sized fire!

The tongue is itself a fire. Among our appendages, the tongue was installed as an ornament of iniquity, defiling our whole body and setting alight the wheel of coming-into-being with a flame caught from Gehenna. Humankind is capable of enslaving every stripe of beast and bird, every reptile and creature of the sea, and has done so; but the tongue is something no human being has ever enslaved - an unsteady evil, swollen with deadly venom. We bless the Lord and Father with it, and with it we curse [our fellow] human beings, who were born into God's likeness. Brothers, it should not happen that curse and blessing issue from the same mouth. Do fresh and stagnant water bubble up from the same spring? My brothers: can fig trees put forth olives? or grapevines figs? No more than seawater can be made fresh to drink.

James 3:1-12

Madmen who were poets 2

[‘Abd al-Rahmān Muhammad ibn ‘Ubayd Allāh] al-‘Utbī said: Abū Wā’il said to my father, "Despite my dementia, if you ask me about poetry you'll find that I know a thing or two about it." My father said, "Do you compose any poetry yourself?" "Yes," said Abū Wā’il, "much better than yours. Here's one of mine:

   If, after my ribs lie buried, their weeping forgotten,
      Jawmal would only speak to me,
   I bet my bones would answer her.
      I bet my old carcass would spring back to life."

My father said to him, "Not bad, except that the woman's name is ill-chosen.' Abū Wā'il said: "In reality her name is Juml, but I improved it." My father said to him, "God save us from the dementia that makes you think so."
      My father also told me that Abū Wā’il recited to him:

   When it hurts this much to part from a stranger,
      how much more when from a lover's side [min habībi]?
   My heart is stupefied with longing
      when I remember he is dead [yamūtu].

"That doesn't even rhyme!" my father told him. "One verse ends with bā’ (ب), the other tā’ (ت)." "And you cannot supply the missing point?" said Abū Wā’il. "Furthermore," my father said, "the voweling is off. One verse has a genitive case ending where the other ends in an indicative verbal suffix." "I say," replied Abū Wā’il, "when faced with difficulty you supply no point."

When the mother of Sulaymān ibn Wahb al-Kātib passed away, a lunatic scribe named Sālih ibn Shīrzādh regaled him with an elegy, reciting:

   By what happened to Umm Sulaymān we are laid low
      as if at a blow from the amputator's sword.
   You were the reins of the house, Umm Sālim; now,
      the house's reins have wound up in the grave.

Ibn Wahb said, "When was one of God's creatures so mistreated? To lose one's mother and hear her mourned with such a [crappy] poem, in which my name is changed from Sulaymān to Sālim!"
      Another verse of Sālih ibn Shīrzādh's goes like this:

   Do not liken the silent fart to a curative;
      the audible fart is the true Ādharītūs [Adrestos?]

From The Necklace Without Peer of Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih (continued)