This Fabulous Legend Was Simply Incredible

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday June 30, 1989

ALAN PETERSON

I WAS a boy at a remarkably eventful time for followers of cricket. Bradman was our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

I have seen him described as a legendary or fabulous character. Legendary and fabulous my foot. Those words have to do with legends, fables and myths. Bradman was as real and solid as the figures against his name on the scoreboards were.

In one way we kids could have justified the word legendary as appropriate for our hero. In earliest English usage a legend was the story of the life of a saint.

Toward the end of the 13th century a weary Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, laid down his quill after a long literary labour in Latin. His book, a collection of saints' lives, bore the title Legenda Sanctorum (literally"things to be read of the saints"). It was generally known as Legenda Aurea("Golden Legends").

More a devotional work than a set of historical biographies, it was popular enough to be translated into other languages, including an English version published by Caxton. Well, once you had seen the latest miracle play and been to plainsong practice, 13th-century life offered no mad whirl of excitement.

The spur to my examination of legends was a letter from a reader, K. Peretz, of Rose Bay, who nominated "legendary" as the adjective of 1988-89.

K. Peretz reported having seen or heard the word legendary applied to the Soviet conductor Evgeny Svetlanov, the pianists Shura Cherkassy, Sviatoslav Richter and Artur Rubinstein, sundry other musicians, the entire Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Stradivarius and the composer Messiaen.

Others listed as legendary had been Joan Collins, the Esther Williams Water Ballet, Evita Peron, Idi Amin, a service-station owner, a punter, lunches at Beppi's, a $4,000 hi-fi diamond stylus, the Laser car, the Nimrod Theatre, the film La Dolce Vita and Paul Keating's press conferences.

After a search for a replacement, K. Peretz concluded: "I don't have to go further than 'famous' or 'well known'." That is a let-down for a legend, but most of the comments about legendary could also have been applied to fabulous, although it has nothing to do with saints, and modern dictionaries do not try to hobble it to fables. They accept that it is being used also as the equivalent of wonderful, exceptionally pleasing, marvellous or terrific. The Macquarie Dictionary says this use is colloquial, and the Oxford labels it trivial.

The Romans launched the word fabula, which could mean a discourse, narrative, story, dramatic composition, the plot of a play or just a common fable. Fabulous turned up in English about 1300, meaning a fictitious story. Most of us connect our first fables with Aesop, a Greek and a bit of a fable himself. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, he was a writer in the sixth century BC, a slave who was eventually freed. Other sources link him with wild adventures.

Do you remember The Fox and the Grapes and The Tortoise and the Hare? They were his creatures - or theirs perhaps because a lot of writers' ingredients may have gone into Aesop's pot. If legendary and fabulous don't mean what they say, what of incredible? We know it means "you can't believe it", but we are used to hearing it devalued to something like "surprising" or "just fancy that". The wonder is that it was weakened so early. There is an example in the early 1400s by the poet John Lydgate: "For incredible was ... To se howe he through his great myght The Grekes put proudely to the flyght."