Simple answer, Robert, matching your jovial year-end spirit. We don’t sing “Larvae and Shepherds, Come Away!” Likewise, Hamlet did not say to Ophelia “Pupa, in thy orisons be all my sins remember’ed.” The reason might _possibly_ be that since time immoral, the Greeks and Romans called their “semi-divine females” NYMPHS, long before the entomologists borrowed the word! Nabokov’s lepidottery [sic] don’t really enter into it. His NYMPHET happened to be a diminutive semi-divine piece of jail-bait in human form. Judging from Humbert’s favourite pleasure, the nearest entomological name for LO would be Blow-Fly?
PS: Any Nabokovian mathematicians out there? If so, look for LEWIS CARROLL IN NUMBERLAND, Robin Wilson, W W Norton, 2008. Enough wordplay, perhaps, for non-mathematicians. E.g., the origin of his pen-name is quite Nabokovian. Born Charles ENTWIDGE Dodgson. That middle name is a Latin variant for Louis, and Carol is related to Charles. Whence Lewis Carroll. VN was teasing when he said Carroll was an H-H prototype. Carroll certainly loved photographing naked nymphets but NO HANKY-PANKY.
Meum Culpum: the quote I assigned to Tweedle-Dum in a recent post was really from another Carroll character, Humpty Dumpty:
“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” This is one of the KEY in-jokes in Semantics and I can hear VN chuckling as he translated this into Russian.
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
On 03/01/2009 01:38, "Robert H. Boyle" <KatyaBelousBoyle@AOL.COM> wrote:
No wish to bug Nabokovians, but a question in need of an answer.
Why did Nabokov, a lepidopterist, call Lolita a nymphet? Lepidoptera do not have nymphs, they have larvae.
Only ancient insects, primitive insects if you will, such as the Plecoptera (stoneflies) and the Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) have nymphs.
Should Lolita have been a larvalet instead of a nymphet?
Or was VN thinking of Lolita as a damselfly and thus a nymphet? Please, a definitive entomological/etymological answer. Thank you,.
RHB