Subject: Chesterton's dance step language--GKC's *Club of Queer Trades*

From: "T. Peter Park" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:02:13 -0400

Dear friends,
I've found the G.K. Chesterton story that I asked you all about a
couple of days ago, about the professor who invented a language of dance
steps. It is Chapter 5, "The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd," of
Chesterton's novel *The Club of Queer Trades*.
One of my "list-sibs" on the "Anglican" list (Hi, Mike!) was kind
enough to privately e-mail me last night to inform me that the story I
was looking for was *The Club of Queer Trades*, which he said could be
found in Vol. VI of Ignatius' Collected Works. This morning, I did a Web
search to see if I could find *The Club of Queer Trades* online, and
sure enough I did find it. It is at:
<http:biblestudy.churches.net.CCEL/CHESTERT/QUEERTRA/QUEERTRA.HTM>
I printed up the chapter from there, but it might possibly be found at
other websites as well.
The chapter describes an elderly eccentric professor,Prof. Chadd,
noted among ethnologists as the second greatest or perhaps even gratest
authority on the "relations of savages to language." After being chided
by a friend on the merely bookish pedantic superficiality and the smug
ethnocentric Darwinian scientism of his supposedly learned knowledge of
the mentality of Zulus and other "savages," Professor Chadd seemingly
"flips out." He quits speaking, and instead begins dancing, in a private
"language" of his own composed entirely of dance steps. His friend
finally starts dancing with him! However, Professor Chadd does not start
going around trying to "sell" his dance language to the world as an
international language in the manner of Esperanto. That, I have to
confess, had been the mistaken impression I had gotten years ago from
the very brief allusion to the story in G.R. Shipman's "How to Talk to a
Martian," the 1953 *Astounding Science Fiction* article that helped set
off my own life-long interest in linguistics in my early teens.
Pax vobiscum,
T. Peter <[email-masked]>