Notes on the Nature of an Adage and of the Language of the Press „The Hell Thought It” by (?) János Arany

Abstract

The relationship and similarities of the printed press to oral culture with regard to language, content, news and genres has not been examined yet in Hungarian media history. Leaning mostly on German results on the field, in the first part of my paper I reflect on the possibilities and possible new achievements which a similar research project could generate dealing with Hungarian newspapers and journals. The major part of the paper illustrates the theoretical introduction by one selected example. Since more than a hundred years there has been living an anecdote, more exactly an adage assigned to János Arany in literary and social discussion and even in scholarly works: „The hell thought it”, a sentence denying any kind of authorial intention and deeming irrelevant any interpretative move relying on it. By now we know that the sentence can be connected to Arany only conditionally or only in variants or only by oral transmission, and we also know that its message is contradicting Arany’s ideas and principles about poetics and criticism. However, the adage is persistently popular. But if we shift attention from the authenticity of the adage to its usage as the linguist Lajos Lőrincze suggested when examining the sources of it, we are facing ever‐changing forms and meanings which help to explore the language of publicism, 20th century history of criticism, the nature of taboos and tropes of literary theory, literary texts dealt with in a popular manner, and, lately, ideas about how to renew the methods of teaching literature.