The occasional “Words” feature on this blog aims to illuminate some of the more esoteric terms the common reader might encounter in fairly mainstream publications. This week’s phrase is contango:

Contango is

A) the pidgin form of English spoken by stevedores working in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt

B) the period during which young men in certain sub-Saharan tribes undergo rites of passage

C) the situation in which the current or spot price for a commodity is lower than its forward price

D) the maximum number of shipping containers a cargo ship can carry

Highlight the text in the quote box below to discover the correct answer.

It’s option C. Contango is often used in reference to oil markets because petroleum is a non-perishable good that can be stored indefinitely while owners wait for future contracts to mature. Contango is the reason why, for example, eight supertankers—each of which can transport up to two million barrels of crude oil—remain anchored less than a hour’s travel from the Dutch port of Rotterdam. These huge vessels are serving as floating storage as the facilities in Rotterdam are already at capacity. The information is taken from a report in NRC Handelsblad, “The world is swimming in oil,” which attempts to clarify the economics underpinning this stalled armada:
“It is what we call a contango,” says Pieter Kulsen, who has been working in the oil trade for thirty years. Traders buy cheap oil on the spot market and later sell it for much more on the futures market. The price difference is more than enough to pay for the cost of floating storage, especially since the tariffs on land are higher because of the capacity problems. Lots of people are taking advantage of this situation.

We have enough problems with linear narrative and true memory–from Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book

It is grimly apropos that I finally got around to reading Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture while the nation bobbed about in toxic wake left by the publication of Ryan/Laffoy Report. The Ryan Commission provided the most comprehensive factual account so far of how the institutions of Church and State worked hand-in-glove to facilitate the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of the Irish state’s “untermenschen.” And Barry’s novel undertakes the imaginative project of illustrating how forces of oppression could be applied in a particular setting, to particular people.

For much of her 100-year tenure on the planet, Roseanne McNulty née Clear, has been the object of these forces. Attempting at last to become the subject of her story, the ancient patient of the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital begins writing “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself,” in which she undertakes to clarify the course of events that led to her committal. Superficially belonging to that populous fictional cohort of “unreliable narrators,” Roseanne is not so much a duplicitous chronicler as one who is reluctant to face the enormity of the injustice that has been inflicted upon her. Passages in Barry’s novel unexpectedly recall Kazuo Ishiguro’s wonderful 2005 work, Never Let Me Go. The narrator in Ishiguro’s book adopts a cunctatory approach to her tale—by dallying fetishistically over humdrum details of boarding-school life, she allows her ultimate revelation to loom larger and larger in the background. Similarly, there is a sense that Roseanne’s reminiscences of her time working in the local cafe, her cinema trips to see Fred Astaire, and, most touchingly of all, the scattered childhood moments spent with her father, are all vain efforts to damn the floodtide of misfortune that have swept her old life away. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, as Eliot would have it.

Interleaved among Roseanne’s account is the Commonplace Book kept by her medical supervisor, the institution’s senior psychiatrist, Dr William Grene. Grene is also using his journal as a refuge and as a tool—to come to terms with his failures as a carer and a husband.

It could be argued that it requires a willed credulousness to accept that both documents, putatively intended for the writers’ eyes only, are crafted with a shared level of novelistic precision. But the acceptance of implausibly articulate storytellers is typically part of the reader’s side of the contract with the writer. The compensation for accepting that deal is a remarkable prose style, which employs a conversational, storyteller’s tone to smuggle a heightened language into the reader’s consciousness. The following passage, from Dr Grene’s journal, illustrates for me how this rich text narrowly avoids becoming clotted by the density of allusions it contains (note how often the word “like” modestly slips in yet another simile into the cascade of comparisons).

[Grene has entered his dead wife's bedroom, and has begun reading from her extensive library on rose cultivation.] I lay down on my own bed and continued reading, long into the night. It was as if I were reading a letter from her, or was privileged to enter a subject that probably lined her mind like wallpaper. Rosa Gallica, a plain little rose like the one you see carved on medieval buildings as Rosa Mundi, was the first. The late roses are the huge tea roses that look in gardens like dancers’ bottoms in frilly knickers. What a creature we are, bring a simple bloom to that over the centuries, and turning those mangy scavenging animals at the edge of our ancient camp fires into Borzois and poodles. The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.

The previous post described how a correction, even a quasi-erroneous one, can leave a lasting imprint on writing style. But a split infinitive is a mirthless solecism compared to the mockery—a cruelly effective pedagogical tool—the dangling modifier is supposed to engender. Again, given my education, which eschewed the stuffy business of teaching of “correct” usage, I became aware of the jeopardy posed by stranded participles only after an offender was brought to task. In this case, the offender was fictional.

In John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, a member of his suburban coven, Sukie Rougemont, has produced a gossip piece for the local rag. The reaction from her friends is less than rapturous:

“Well, honey, it had color, but you do run on a bit and honestly—now don’t be offended—you must watch your participles. They dangle all over the place.”

Indeed, Sukie’s infelicitous prose (did Updike wince slightly while sabotaging his usual flawless style?) does showcase a classic example of a dangling participle inadvertently conveying a ridiculous image:

Constructed circa 1895 in a brick English style, with a symmetrical façade and massive chimneys at either end, the new proprietor hopes to convert his acquisition to multiple usages…

Of course, the new proprietor was not constructed in a brick English style. A sentence such this falls in line with the comical botches usage guides have typically trotted out to buttress their arguments. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Usage goes as far to speculate that “funny examples have apparently been invented for the purpose of illustration. Actual dangling modifiers are more often of such a nature as to excite little mirth; indeed, they may hardly be noticeable except to practising rhetorician or usage expert.”

Case in point is a line from a recent Economist article on Ireland’s upcoming poll on the Lisbon referendum: “What of the second referendum on Lisbon this autumn? Looking at the polls, a Yes vote is widely expected.”

Reading this sentence according to the “rules,” we could quibble that a Yes vote would be unlikely to look at a poll. But that underrated tool for interpreting text—a degree of sanity—allows us to overlook the supposedly inappropriate modifier. If the result does not, for example, imply that a man was built from brick in the late 19th-century, it seems that a dangler can be easily swallowed, even by readers who can recognize one. Despite this commonsense approach, some of us still chaperone our participles with paranoid vigilance: we either struggle to parachute in phantom subjects (“Looking at the polls, most observers expect a Yes vote”) or groan in shame when discovering outbreaks in our own writing.