Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From the back-cover description of Monty’s Private Pictures: Thirty One Postcards from A Class Apart:

Montague Glover was born in 1897. A decorated Army Officer and a successful architect, he was also a keen amateur photographer. His pictures from the twenties and thirties chronicle the three great loves of his life: rough trade, men in uniform and a handsome young blond called Ralph Hall, his lover for over fifty years until Monty’s death in 1983. Their story is told in A Class Apart [by James Gardiner].

(Linguistically interesting material boldfaced.)

First, a note on Glover and Hall. Here’s a montage of photos of Hall:

More detail in Glover’s Wikipedia entry:

He is most notable for his depiction of homosexual life in London during the early to mid-20th Century through private photographs taken primarily for his own enjoyment. His photographs tend to document ‘rough trade’, the working class male prostitutes of the period, making distinctive note of the divisions of social class as depicted by dress. Many of his photographs also depict members of the military. [And he was a great fan of big baskets.]

Glover is also notable for his depictions of his partnership with his lover, Ralph Hall, one of the very rare documented examples of a gay long-term relationship prior to the legalization of homosexuality in Britain in the 1960s. Hall, born in 1913, was a working class lad from the East End of London. The two met around 1930 and Glover employed him as his manservant, perhaps to provide a social alibi for two men living together. The relationship lasted for more than 50 years, surviving the Second World War during which Hall was drafted to the Royal Air Force.

But that coordination:

the three great loves of his life: rough trade, men in uniform and a handsome young blond called Ralph Hall

This is slightly non-parallel: it has two type-denoting NPs (rough trade, men in uniform) conjoined with an individual-denoting NP (a handsome young blond called Ralph Hall). The rhetorical effect is to present Hall as a type in himself, a type with only one member — an effect enhanced by putting the reference to Hall at the end of the coordination.

This entry was posted on May 10, 2011 at 10:21 am and is filed under Coordination, Gender and sexuality, Photography, Semantics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.