Dr. Metablog

Words of My Life -- Outing

During my lifetime, the word "outing" has mutated beyond recognition. It first entered my youthful vocabulary (as did so many other words) through the medium of baseball. An "outing" -- in the old days --meant to me only a stint on the mound. "Podres has had a good "outing" today." The more general meaning of "outing" as a short trip taken for pleasure, such as a picnic, or a jaunt in the country, only came into my  life many years later. "They enjoyed a family outing to Montauk." The fact of the matter is that my family of origin didn't go on "outings," but at some point I must have heard I heard about such journeyings from friends or read about them in novels.

These days, I rarely encounter the baseball or picknicky meanings of "outing." "Outing" has transformed into the obnoxious word that describes the odious and hostile practice of exposing the sexual identity of a person against his/her will.  From picnic to nasty, alas.

Frankly, I prefer the traditional significations and activities.

Words of My Life: Bottom

"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope that the Dodgers might come through with a game-winning rally. Later, when I discovered that there was more to human existence than baseball, the various and colorful meanings of "bottom" began to reveal themselves. For example, the posterior part of the human body, which I knew as the ass or the behind or the tuchas, was, I learned, called the "bottom" by people of sophistication. A euphemism?  A Britishism? 

Even later on, I discovered that bottom, signifying buttocks or butt was not the root meaning of the word but a metaphorical extension of its original sense. Old English botm, cognate with Latin fundus, meant land or farm or soil. This meaning of "bottom" is well-preserved in the phrase "bottom land" -- the level and fertile acres along the banks of a watercourse. Many English family names are consequently topographical surnames of ancient inhabitants of various river fronts -- such as Bottoms, Robottom, Higginbottom, Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Winterbottom, and Bottomley. Names that have nothing to do with either innings or asses.

The oddity that "bottom" can refer both to farmland and to the human butt can sometimes yield unconscious comedy. For example, in 1977, I was a guest at a wedding in the infelicitously named Kent village of Pett Bottom. I must hope that Pett is a variant of Pitt, a "hollow," rather than commonplace "pet" with a supernumerary "t".

These days, "bottom" is more likely to mean something like "the essence" -- as in such phrases "to get to the bottom of the matter"; or "the bottom of one's heart."

And then there's egregious Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who does not disdain the mandatory pun: "This is to make an ass of me."

Shakespeare likes the word "bottom." Here's Malcolm's most memorable characterization of Macbeth.  

 

                          I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o'erbear
That did oppose my will:

 

This "bottom" is not farmland or butt; it's the low point in a downward trajectory. This "bottom" is associated with "cistern" -- a receptacle for holding water.  Curiously, Shakespeare regularly uses the word in its relation to the water of oceans, most specifically the sea-bottom:  

 

            the slimy bottom of the deep.    (Richard III)

 

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.  (As You Like It)

 

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honor by the locks.  (I Henry IV)

 

As is the ooze and bottom of the sea. (Henry V)

 

Who ever yet could sound thy bottom? find
The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiliest harbour in?                                   (Cymbeline)

 

 

I suspect that Shakespeare would have savored the modern phrase, "bottom feeder."  But I doubt he would have understood, any more than I do, the names of the fifth and sixth quarks, which are top and bottom (exactly like an inning).

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

Words of My Life -- "Joint"

"Joint" is a word that in the course of my lifetime has engaged in some serious shape-shifting. When I first encountered the word, joint (derived from the Latin jungere, to join) was simply a place where two pieces of wood were glued together or where one's bones were articulated to produce a wrist, elbow, or knee. Mighty simple and uncomplicated, it would appear -- but even then "joint" had begun to accumulate variants. Rick Blaine's sentence in Casablanca was an early warning: "of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, she has to come into mine."  A "joint" was apparently a nightclub or bar. "Gin joint" suggests that  "Rick's Cafe Americain" was louche or sleazy, and perhaps it was, what with all the crooked gambling going on and with the mysterious "letters of transit" stuffed into Sam's piano. But why "joint"?  It seems fanciful to suppose that a joint was a place where various people "joined" together, but I can't think of a more persuasive etymology.    

Another use of joint came to my attention in the late 1960's when I became seriously interested in Jacobean oak furniture. Here's a handsome "joint stool":   

A joint stool was the most ordinary kind of chair during the period when Shakespeare was wielding his quill. Why "joint"?  Apparently because it was a joined stool, and therefore of higher quality than one that was merely glued. A joiner was a skilled craftsman before mass-produced nails and screws became inexpensive and commonplace.

Shakespeare knew joint stools very well: "Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool," says the Fool to a joint stool. Fool humors mad hallucinating Lear by pretending that the joint stool is the king's daughter Goneril. Shakespeare, by the by, played many a variation on "joint," employing or inventing  such terms as "joint-servant," "joint-laborer," "joint-ring," "jointress," "unjointed," "injointed," "short-jointed," "conjointly," and "disjoint."

But even Shakespeare would not have imagined the transfigurations of the word in these our latter days. Nowadays, a joint is a prison, though I don't know why one would call it so when such colorful appellations as "hoosegow," "clink," "stir," "slammer," and "pokey" are all on the tips of our collective tongues. Nor would he have imagined "joint" as a marijuana blunt or spliff. He wouldn't have known but might have appreciated "joint" as a term for the male sexual organ.

All of which makes it possible, theoretically, to say, "I was in a joint, smoking a joint, figuring out how to exercise my joint."

As for me, I use the word "joint" everyday -- in the most useful phrase "joint card."

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

Words of My Life: Provider

I first encountered the word "provider" in its positive sense as a virtual synonym for "mensch": "he was a good provider; he took care of his wife and his kids and his aged parents and even his employees" (if he had any).

But nowadays the word has been stripped of its warm associations and has emerged as a cool or neutral term. I encounter the word most often when I need medical attention. A doctor is no longer a doctor; he's been renamed a "provider." I believe this usage to be the invention of the nefarious insurance companies that govern and distort our medical system. "Doctor" and "nurse" are praise-words, rich in significance. "Provider" has no resonance. It reduces your doctor to an index or reference number and is therefore of great utility to the bureaucracy. I can't imagine that a doctor, asked what he does, would be happy to respond,  "I'm a provider."   

The word "teacher" has, for many, a positive resonance. I was a teacher; I was not an "education provider" -- nor would I have embarked on a career with the aim of being considered such. 

I believe that nowadays the most common use of the word "provider" occurs in the internet phrase, "content provider."  And so the word continues on its long downward path.

Roux/ Rue/ Rue/ Rubaboo

"Roux" is word that everyone seems to know but me. To the best of my recollection, "roux" had never crossed my personal threshold until last week -- perhaps because I have never taken any special interest in fine cuisine. I've now enlightened myself, but at the cost of blundering into a bewildering etymological thicket.

"Roux," to reprise the obvious, is "a mixture of flour and fat cooked together and used to thicken sauces.... Butter or lard are commonly used fats." But why "roux," with its excrescent French x? Un nom étrange. Roux, if I have it right, means brown, or more precisely, reddish brown (as opposed to "brun" or "marron." In the case of the sauce, roux is an abbreviated version of "beurre roux," or brown butter and, curiously, comes unbuttered into English as simply "roux." Roux derives from Latin russus or ruber, reddish, both of which ancient words originate in the same Indo-European root. I've now learned of a kind of surgery called a Roux-en-Y, probably pronounced "ruin why," which is a kind of "anastomosis"--  or gastric bypass -- in which blood or intestinal vessels are configured into a Y shape. But although one may suspect so, this "roux" has nothing to do with sauces, thank goodness, but is named for the Swiss  physician who originated the surgery, César Roux. I suspect that Roux's roux does not descend from ruber but from rufus, red-headed, as in William II, aka William Rufus.

But then there's the English word "rue." I know it as the common wildflower that we allow to grow in our waterfall garden, and there exist cultivated versions as well. This rue comes to English through French and from Latin ruta. The other English rue, as in "rue the day" is, as one might expect, of entirely different origin deriving from Old English hreow  -- "grief, repentance, sorrow, regret, penitence."

 

Exactly like Vivian de St Vrain, William Shakespeare was not familiar with "roux" but he knew and used both rues. Perdita offers the flowery one to Camillo and Polixenes: "Reverend sirs,/For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep/ Seeming and savor all the winter long." Ophelia, in her madness, also distributes rue, known also as herb of grace: "There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference." The botanical rue is referenced by the poetical gardener in Richard II; "in this place/I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:/ Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,/ In the remembrance of a weeping queen." The pun on rue/ruth is etymologically interesting. Ruth means sorrow and it is possible that ruth is to rue as truth is to true; that is to say, formed by analogy. 

 

It would be wrong to leave the subject of roux/rue without a mention of rubaboo, "an American stew or porridge of French and Métis people, consisting of bear grease along with peas, corn and other vegetables." Rubaboo blends "roux" with the Algonquian word aboo, which, I have been reliably informed, means soup and is therefore  an unusual, perhaps even unique IE + Algonquian formation. 

Words of My Life: Boot

Is there another common English word that exhibits such varied meanings as "boot?" Or one that has shown such continual transformation during my brief years on the planet?

Like much of my early vocabulary, "boot" entered my life through the medium of radio baseball . In my mind's ear, I can hear the voice of Red Barber announcing that "umpire Babe Pinelli has just given the boot to Leo Durocher." "Given the boot" does not make the claim that Durocher was presented with footwear; it means that he was kicked out of the game as if with a metaphorically-booted foot.

Nor was it only obstreperous managers who were "booted." "There's a two-hopper to third, but Cox boots it" -- meaning that he bobbled it, even though the ball never touched his foot. In baseball, curiously, you can boot a ball with your hand, which is, logically speaking, as nonsensical as mis-gloving it with your foot. 

As everyone knows, a boot primarily protects the area from the shin down to the toes. But there's a second common meaning to "boot": "something extra," as in the phrase "to boot." "He's a great pitcher -- and a good hitter to boot." The shoe-ish meaning comes through old French from a Germanic source; the profit or use or something-extra meaning derives from an unrelated OE (Old English) word; moreover, in latter stages of its development "boot" has also been influenced by its phonological neighbors booty, and, I suspect, butt. 

In order to gain some historical perspective, let us consider the ways in which Shakespeare makes use of the word boot. "To boot" meaning "in addition" is employed frequently, as, for example, when Henry IV swears "by my scepter and my soul to boot," or when Macduff says to Malcolm that "I would not be the villain that thou think'st/ For the whole space that's in the tyrant's grasp/ And the rich east to boot." A less familiar use occurs in The Winter's Tale, when Hermione, accused of adultery, concedes that  "it shall scarce boot me/ To say 'not guilty.'" Her "boot" means that it will not be to her advantage or profit to assert her innocence. This signification can shade over into gain or even into a coin itself, as for example when Camillo passes money to Autolycus, saying,"hold thee, there's some boot." Contemplating his gain, Autolycus muses, "What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here with this exchange." Just as boot is gain, so bootless means without gain or helpless, as when Henry V explains that he will be powerless to restrain a rampage: "We may as bootless spend our vain command/ Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil."

Shakespeare gets some punning mileage out of the multiple meanings of "boot." Glendower boasts that "[T]hree times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head/ Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye/ And sandy-bottom'd Severn have I sent him/ Bootless home and weather-beaten back. "Bootless" means helpless; but sardonic Hotspur, never noted for a sophisticated sense of humor, cannot resist the obvious pun: "Home without boots. And in foul weather too."

So a boot can be a shoe, an advantage, an addition, a reward, a help. But look what's happened to the poor helpless word in more recent times. "Boot Hill" is a cowboy frontier cemetery.  Across the waters, a "boot" is the trunk of an automobile. The infamous "Denver boot" is a wheel clamp that immobilizes a vehicle. In the army, a boot is a recruit or rookie who is sent to "boot camp."

But then, along came the computer, where one "boots" or restarts one's machine. This use, I'm told, originated with the phrase, to "pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps" -- i.e. perform a difficult task at one's own initiative, just as a computer starts itself. There's also the warmboot, which sounds little too much like the old torture device, the Spanish boot and which can also be called a softboot (but not by me).  

In Shakespeare's day, boot was not always distinguished from "booty" as in the case of the Archbishop of Canterbury's famous bees, which "like soldiers, armed in their stings,/ Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds,/ Which pillage they with merry march bring home." Booty as pillage survives to this day, but is, I think, obsolescent. Nowadays, booty is more likely to be used in the phrase "booty call" which means (and here I'm relying on the invaluable Urban Dictionary) a "telephone call made to request a sexual encounter." Who would ever have devised or imagined such an innovation?  Does this booty derive from "shake your booty," meaning to move your butt or bottom in a sexually suggestive way?  Not a meaning known to Shakespeare, or at least, not one that the Shakespeare concordance acknowledges.

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Words of my Life: Troll

"Troll" is a word that has strangely metamorphosized in the course of my lifetime. While It once had warm associations; now, not so much.

"Troll" came into my life in the late 1940s at Makamah Beach on the Long Island Sound. My grandmother Sonia taught me how to "troll" for bluefish or sunfish. Here's how you do it. You paddle slowly and let your "shiner" dangle on fishing line a few yards behind the rowboat. "Troll" is very like "trawl." Perhaps the two words are variants; or perhaps "troll" is a distant descendent of Latin trahere, to drag." Troll is related to "trolley," a device used to drag things from place to place, as a trolley does its passengers. "Troll" seems to incorporate the meaning "wander" or "wander into."

From my early interest in northern mythology (a "mythology," by the way, is someone else's religion), I learned that a "troll" is a clumsy ugly monster who hides out under bridges or in cemeteries. Trolls were troublesome, provocative, perhaps even cannibalistic. 

But nowadays, the older meanings of "troll" have been superseded. A 'troll' is now a person who participates in a conversation, usually an internet conversation, with the intention of sowing discord or causing trouble. I am not sure about the origin of this usage, but I would like to guess or hypothesize that it combines the sense of "wandering into" with the malevolence of the Scandinavian figure. A troll is therefore an electronic ogre.

 

Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Words of my Life: Hack

I cannot think of a word that has undergone greater change during the course of my lifetime than the plain monosyllable "hack."

"Hack" entered my language, like much of my early vocabulary, through the medium of baseball. "He took a good hack at that fastball;" "he's up there hacking away." A hack was a hard swing, not necessarily a successful one. [There was also Stan Hack, the great Chicago Cub third baseman whose career was just coming to an end as I was becoming conscious.]  In the days of my youth, "hack" was also slang for taxicab and a cab driver was a "hackie." I don't believe I've heard that particular use of the word in decades (except in 1940s movies). In seventh-grade "shop" class at PS 217, Mr. Kaminsky introduced me to the "hacksaw." The hack in hacksaw derives from a medieval word meaning "cut into pieces," but the taxi hack has an entirely dissimilar origin. It comes from hackney, a breed of horse and later the carriage itself that the horse drew -- the name of which then migrated to our big yellow taxi.

When did I first hear the expression, a "hacking cough"?  And why hacking? Perhaps because the noise of a cough is similar to the sound of the short sharp blows when one hacks through a forest or the jungle with a machete. Maybe that's how it originated-- but I'm not entirely convinced.

Hack has another older meaning -- mediocre or failing, or not good at one's trade, as in a "hack writer," or a "political hack." This usage is probably a shortened version of "hackneyed," meaning trite or overused. When you waste time, you're just "hacking around." In such cases,"hack" denoted incompetence.

Nowadays "hack" has come up in the world. To hack into a computer implies not laziness but skill. In this usage, "hack" is also malicious. Hackers may be smart but they're also dangerous; they can cause crashes when they illegally intrude to alter a program. 

The most common contemporary use of "hack," if I'm reading the data correctly, occurs in the recent coinage "lifehack," which is defined as "a strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one's time and daily activities in a more efficient way." I can't be the only person whose junk mail folder is regularly inundated with recommended lifehacks, most of which seem mighty silly or simplistic. 

And then there's an even more specialized use. Here's one that's new to me: "scientists announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently." This usage seems to retain something of the older meaning of cut or slash although it is a stretch to envision a genome being attacked by a sword or a snickersnee. 

Goodness gracious, it's a long road from waving at an inshoot with the old hickory to inserting bits of DNA in the tobacco genome. But here we are.

Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Words of my Life: Spatchcock

I first heard the word "spatchcock" at a Thanksgiving celebration some four or five years ago. The turkey, I was told, had been "spatchcocked." To be absolutely honest, I thought someone was pulling my leg. To my pure and undefiled ears, the word "spatchcock" sounded more than a little obscene. Certainly not something that a civilized person would do to a turkey. Or even to a fellow human being. I admit that I was puzzled: what sort of perverse activity is implied by "spatchcock." And just who would be the spatchcocker and who the spatchcockee?

But further investigation revealed that "spatchcock" is not a dirty joke nor even a slangy neologism. The word has an eighteenth-century origin and it's not sexual but culinary: "to cut poultry along the spine and spread the halves apart for more even cooking when grilled." Moreover, the word "spatchcock," believe it or not, has a sibling of its own: "spitchcock": "to split an eel along the back and then broil it." So spatchcock and spitchcock, yet as far as I know, no "spotchcock" or "sputchcock"-- but why not?  Lots of other land and sea beasts out there to de-spine and roast over an open fire. Spatchcocking, the process, probably dates back to the neolithic, after the taming of fire and long before anyone thought to call it by such a silly name.   

Etymology?  Though there are theories, I'm going to stick with "origin unknown." The common answer is that the word is "shorthand  for 'dispatching the cock.'" An undocumented, out-of-left-field guess, in my opinion. If I were to propose a theory, I would say that the "cock" must be a version of  "cook." I'm not prepared to venture a guess about the spatch. A mystery, unrecoverable. Perhaps a humorous coinage?

I'd hypothesize that "cock" might be related to the second part of common surnames such as Hancock, Adcock, Babcock, Hitchcock or Wilcox. Some say that the cock in these names is a hypocoristic suffix "applied to a young lad who strutted proudly like a cock." I'm skeptical. More credible, once again, is "cook." Hancock is Johan the cook, Adcock is Adam the cook, Hitchcock is Richard (Rich, Hich) the cook, and so on.

The ever-unpredictable Urban Dictionary provides another meaning for "spatchcock": "when you intentionally rub your backpack on a nearby stranger's genitals in an effort to sexually arouse them." What can I say?  Only that I've lived a long life and have never given a single thought to the erotic potential of the backpack. Nor have I ever been spatchcocked either in the traditional culinary nor the speculative contemporary sexual sense of the word (thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon!)

Other words of my life:

slouch,

cishet,

yips

ramps

jot and tittle

worship

mucilage.

 

 

Baseball Vocabulary

I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their alternative and larger existence.

For example, as a boy, I encountered the word "mound." It signified, and signified only, a pitcher's mound -- the ten inches of sand and clay from which a pitcher throws a ball. I had no idea that mounds could exist in nature or indeed, could exist anywhere outside of a stadium, there being no mounds on Coney Island Avenue, or, at least, none that I recognized as such.

And then there was the word "pitcher." If someone had said to me, in the 1940s, that "little pitchers had big ears," I might have thought of Preacher Roe, but I would have had no idea that there was such an object as a pitcher for water or other liquid. A pitcher was not jug, ewer, or crock -- it was a man standing on a rubber fooling a batter with a slow curve.

Standing on a "rubber?" Yet another word that had a specific baseball meaning, years before it became an eraser or a galosh or a condom.

Similarly, a "streak" was not a gash of color until many years after it was a winning streak or a losing streak or batting streak. A "dugout" was not a canoe, not in my corner of the universe.  Nor was a "rally" a political meeting or protest. A rally would never have led to a "strike" -- a word which I knew only as one of the allotted three. "Battery?" A team of pitcher and catcher, not something of military or electrical storage interest.

And then there were the plethora, the fountain of lovely words peculiar to baseball, like "shortstop" and "blooper." 

Inning was exclusively a baseballism. Not so "outing" which was in my childhood a pitcher's stint on the mound, and which only later became a picnic (or, even later, an involuntary revelation of someone's sexual inclinations). 

October 24:  How could I fail to include "pennant." When did I learn that a pennant was a kind of triangular flag?  Not in the 1940s (or even 50s).

I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their alternative and larger existence.

For example, as a boy, I encountered the word "mound." It signified, and signified only, a pitcher's mound -- the ten inches of sand and clay from which a pitcher throws a ball. I had no idea that mounds could exist in nature or indeed, could exist anywhere outside of a stadium, there being no mounds on Coney Island Avenue, or, at least, none that I recognized as such.

And then there was the word "pitcher." If someone had said to me, in the 1940s, that "little pitchers had big ears," I might have thought of Preacher Roe, but I would have had no idea that there was such an object as a pitcher for water or other liquid. A pitcher was not jug, ewer, or crock -- it was a man standing on a rubber fooling a batter with a slow curve.

Standing on a "rubber?" Yet another word that had a specific baseball meaning, years before it became an eraser or a galosh or a condom.

Similarly, a "streak" was not a gash of color until many years after it was a winning streak or a losing streak or batting streak. A "dugout" was not a canoe, not in my corner of the universe.  Nor was a "rally" a political meeting or protest. A rally would never have led to a "strike" -- a word which I knew only as one of the allotted three. "Battery?" A team of pitcher and catcher, not something of military or electrical storage interest.

And then there were the plethora, the fountain of lovely words peculiar to baseball, like "shortstop" and "blooper." 

Inning was exclusively a baseballism. Not so "outing" which was in my childhood a pitcher's stint on the mound, and which only later became a picnic (or, even later, an involuntary revelation of someone's sexual inclinations). 

October 24:  How could I fail to include "pennant." When did I learn that a pennant was a kind of triangular flag?  Not in the 1940s (or even 50s).

Cishet

We watched a Netflix series called Feel Good. I suppose that the series title must be taken ironically, because throughout the first two seasons, not one character seemed to feel even slightly positive or healthy. Just about everyone was miserable -- their unhappiness usually linked to romantic or more specifically sexual dissatisfaction. The program introduced many more eccentric varieties of coupling and frustration than I, a vanilla heterosexual, would have imagined. The main character, Mae Martin, played by Mae Martin, is a boyish lesbian; her on-again, off again affair with a womanly young lady is the focus of the story. Lots of obstacles both personal and social stand between the two women and the achievement of genuine happiness. Let's hope that they can figure it all out and find love at long last -- or at least by the end of Season 3. 

There was one scene that I found to be particularly curious and troublesome. A group of teachers assemble for a meeting, but before taking up business, every one of the participants reveals or defines his or her own sexuality. One young woman, surely the least glamorous of the set, refers to herself as "cishet." I didn't catch the word as spoken but fortunately we had the subtitles engaged and I was able to read the word, although in reading I pronounced it to myself as if the sh were a digraph for the lingual palatal fricative as in shut or shun. But I investigated the new word "cishet" -- and sure enough it exists and has become a feature of our contemporary culture. It's "cis" as opposed to "trans" which means not "across" but "this side" -- as the Romans referred to Gaul as either cisalpine and transalpine. In this coinage, "cis" refer to a person who accepts the gender designation assigned at birth by the appearance of one's genitals. "Het" is simply a truncation of heterosexual." "Cishet" therefore means someone who is unambiguously either male or female and is attracted to persons of the opposite sex.

Wow, that's me. After all these years of just thinking I was an ordinary guy, I now discover that I have a designation. I have a community, at tribe, perhaps even an interest group. Hey, I belong,

But I think that it's mighty odd and even oppressive that members of a school community, or any community, would feel that it is necessary or advisable to announce their gender classification before getting down to the business of the day. Shouldn't such information be allowed to remain private. If I want to be cishet, it's nobody's business but my own. But perhaps such formal revelations don't happen in real life -- only in satirical TV series. I sure hope so. 

Not so for Mae Martin, the first paragraph of whose biography reads "Mae Martin is a Canadian-born comedian, actor, and writer based in England. They wrote and starred in the Netflix comedy series Feel Good." So it appears that "she" is a "they" which in current modish jargon doesn't mean that she's plural but signifies that she feels inadequately represented by the simple and specific feminine pronoun. I can understand her motive, but frankly "they" confuses me and sticks in my ear. I appreciate its value as a statement of resistance to the "hetoro-normative" -- but by golly "they" sure throws a spanner into the grammatico-normative works. It would be good if English had a set of singular pronouns that are as gender indistinct as "they," but it doesn't, and to hijack the plural "they" and turn it into a singular is an awkward and I hope ephemeral innovation.  

Sometimes I receive communications from people who are much more up to date than dear old dad -- letters that are signed in the traditional way but to which is subjoined, "My pronouns -- "he his," or "she her hers" (or "they them their"). This habit, I suppose, clears the air and perhaps forestalls some embarrassing or awkward moments, but again, seems unnecessarily revelatory. It's limiting and partial. It seems to me to declare that such guys and gals were acting in the parochial interest of their own tribe or constituency -- much as if everyone appended to his or her name his own religion or nationality. I'm not happy with this innovation. Although it might seem progressive, it is in my opinion ultimately dangerously reactionary.

Therefore I am not so current that I would include my pronouns on any letters that I write. But I would like to append my adjectives,

Yours very sincerely,

Vivian de St. Vrain

(My adjectives:  "wise, upstanding, formerly debonair.")

Words of my Life: Slouch

When I was a boy, I was regularly reprimanded with these words (or some variation of them): "Don't slouch." "You're slouching! "You're slouching again!" "Why are you slouching?" 

Apparently I was a natural sloucher.  

It was a difficult criticism to absorb or to counter. I wasn't entirely sure what the word "slouch" meant but I sure knew that it wasn't anything good. In my mother's eyes, I believe, "slouching" was not only a physical but a moral lapse. But to be accused of something of which my body, not me in my own person as I knew myself, was guilty -- well, that was surely puzzling.

To slouch is to "sit or stand in a casual, lazy, drooping, or improper posture." "Lazy?" -- I was definitely lazy. "Improper? -- I'm not so sure. Nor do I know why being repeatedly accused of "slouching" was going to turn me into an upright proper person.

The most famous sloucher in literature is the villainous Orlick in Great Expectations, who was "always slouching. He never even seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere accident...  and when he went ...away at night, he would slouch out.... He lodged at a sluice-keeper's out on the marshes, and on working-days would come slouching from his hermitage." Slouching is unquestionably a marker of evil for Dickens. Was it so for my mom?

Then there's Yeat's "rough beast... slouching toward Bethlehem to be born." A second coming of sorts, and not at all a good one.

So there you have three slouchers: the "rough beast," Orlick, and me.

Pairings

"Kith and kin" is an excellent example of a "pairing" -- sometimes called a "coordinate pair." A pairing is a linguistic event in which two words join to produce a single meaning.

"Kith" has no independent existence nowadays and only exists as an element of the pair. "Kith and kin" means "family." Originally, back then, "kith" meant "known" and therefore signified "friends." "Kith and kin" was "friends and relatives." No longer; now it means "family and family." "Time and tide" is another fine pairing; "tide" meant "time" centuries before it came to refer to the moony fluctuation of the seas, although its older meaning survives in "eventide," "Yuletide," and similar words. Now "time and tide" seems to evoke the inevitability of both clock and waves -- both of them joined to wait for no man. "Kit and kaboodle" is also a lovely pairing, because "kaboodle" lacks independent existence. It may derive from "boodle' -- a thief's bundle -- with the "ka" added just for the fun of it. "Dribs and drabs" is more obscure in origin and may not be a true pairing. "Dribs" is probably a variant of "drip" but "drab" was in times past not a small amount of something or other, but an untidy or unchaste woman. It's possible that "dribs and drabs," now a rather neat pairing, is better thought of as a reduplicative like mumbo-jumbo or hoity-toity. "Nook and cranny" is a pairing in which both elements survive independently; "nook" originally a corner of a room, and "cranny" a narrow space in which a brown recluse might hide. When someone or something grows by leaps and bounds, it's hard to tell which is the leap and which the bound. The same with "hot and bothered" -- the two words simply reinforce each other. Similarly, a person might want to "pick and choose" between alternatives, but to do so requires only one action. "Flotsam and jetsam" is an amusing pairing of uncertain origin. It is often thought that flotsam lies on the surface of the water and jetsam is thrown into it, but such a definition might be merely a folk etymology derived from the words "float" and "jettison." A "hoot and a holler" both refer to shouting, but now they mean "shouting distance." "Stuff and nonsense" is obvious, but what sort of "stuff" is nonsensical? Perhaps it's the very vagueness of "stuff" that it allows it to pair up and reinforce "nonsense." "Alack and alas" is a weary but euphonious pair. "Wrack and ruin" becomes more transparent when it's remembered that wrack is a variant  form of wreck -- as "beck and call" becomes clearer when it is recalled that "beck" is a foreshortened version of "beckon." The cry in "hue and cry" is obvious; the hue is thought to derive from the OF verb huer (shout). 

Null and void, bag and baggage, prim and proper, vim and vigor, are self-explanatory.

Bits and pieces are sometimes called odds and ends. That's the long and the short of it. Jot and tittle have been thoroughly researched and explicated here.

Is "footloose and fancy-free" a pairing. Yes, I think so. An energetic and imaginative pairing. 

The "Yips"

The yips have been big news this week because Jose Altuve, Houston's golden-glove second baseman has made three throwing errors in two games. Glaring, costly errors. He's bounced balls to first base and to second base -- throws of twenty or forty feet which he has made successfully thousands of times in his outstanding career.

The "yips" is sports jargon for the sudden, inexplicable inability to make an ordinary or routine play. It's commonly used by golfers when they start missing short putts --but baseball has its famous yippers -- Steve Saxe, Chuck Knoblauch (both of them second baseman who have the shortest, easiest throws)  and now, possibly Altuve. Sometimes a good pitcher will lose his control and start to miss badly; the retired pitcher at the microphone will say, "he's lost his release point," which is a yippish diagnosis without using the word. Athletes think that the problem is psychological but it's possible that the condition is merely neurological - a "focal dystonia" or muscle spasm in the wrist. Basketball yips? Yes, sometimes a good foul shooter will miss four or five in a row. 

I suspect that the yips may not be a sports-only syndrome.

Once, a decade or two ago, I was driving across the country on a four-lane and needed to brake. For some reason, my feet (I was driving a standard transmission so both feet and the clutch pedal were involved) couldn't remember which was the brake pedal. I flailed with both feet and was utterly panicked for about five long seconds. Then I came to my senses, put the correct foot on the correct pedal, and continued on in normal fashion. Life continued. But if I had crashed the car and killed myself, which was certainly a possibility, investigators would have thought that I had fallen asleep at the switch. They'd have been wrong; it was just the yips -- a failure to perform a task that should have been entirely routine.

I wonder how many road disasters are caused by undiagnosed yippishness.

Do actors get the yips? Do musicians? Dentists?  Airline pilots? Surgeons ("You know, I've done that back surgery hundreds of times but three out of the last four, I've sliced entirely through the guy's spinal cord").

"Vaulting Variable Ramps"

Let me guess that a modern reader coming upon Shakespeare's euphonious phrase "vaulting variable ramps" would be baffled as to its sense. Just WS being willfully obscure, one might complain. But it's not so; it's just that the language keeps on changing, making things difficult for audiences and readers.

The most obvious meaning  of "vaulting various ramps" -- hurdling a miscellaneous series of inclined planes, as in a steeplechase -- won't fly. "Ramps" takes us down a wrong path, because its modern meaning (a wood or concrete construction leading from one level to another) was unknown in 1611. It didn't enter the English language until 1778 -- as a borrowing from French rampe. (The entrance to a highway, as in "take the ramp on the right" is an Americanism dating only to the 1950s.)

A "ramp" is also a vegetable. It's an uncultivated, wild member of the onion family lately celebrated by fad foodies (or food faddies) as a great delicacy. But why Shakespeare would want someone to hurdle an individual ramp or even a field of ramps is less than obvious. Another false start.

Let us therefore examine the context of the phrase "vaulting variable ramps."

It occurs in Cymbeline, the most magical of Shakespeare's last plays. Nasty Iachimo ("little Iago") tries to persuade Innogen that her virtuous husband Postumus has been unfaithful -- that he has, in another splendid Shakespearean phrase, "partner'd with tomboys." The situation excites Shakespeare's exuberant pen. Iachimo embroiders "tomboys" and claims that Postumus has consorted with "with diseased ventures/ That play with all infirmities for gold/ Which rottenness can lend nature; such boil'd stuff/ As well might poison poison." Should she, that is, Innogen (and here Iachimo's rhetoric soars)

         Live, like Diana's priest, betwixt cold sheets,

         While he [Postumus] is vaulting variable ramps,

         In your despite.  

"Ramps," therefore, are the opposite of Diana's priestesses, who live chastely; they are in fact loose women. Ramps who are neither architectural nor vegetable, but sexual and promiscuous. At least, they are so in this instance, because otherwise "ramp" carried a meaning closer to "virago" -- in 1611 an overbearing woman but not necessarily an unchaste one. The word "ramp" in this signification has disappeared but has bequeathed us "rapscallion" (which was earlier spelled both "ramscallion" or "rampscallion.") There is no evidence to support the easy inference that rapscallion combines "ramp" and "scallion."

"Vaulting variable ramps" means "to engage in a series of athletic sexual encounters." 

To vault into a lover's bed might seem to border on the comic but I don't think that it does so in this case. Shakespeare elsewhere seems to imagine intercourse as a vigorous event. A brothel is in his language a "leaping house." And surely it's not comic when Juliet hopes that Romeo will "leap to [her] arms."

The conception behind "vault" and "leap" reappears in the contemporary demotic phrase "jump his/her bones."

Ramps:

• 

   

 

 

 

 

Jot and Tittle

First of all, let us dismiss the notion that Charles Dickens invented a pair of persnickety punctilious accountants and named them Jot and Tittle. Sorry, it could or should have been the case, but it's not so. Nevertheless, both "jot" and "tittle," often found in each other's cozy company, have stories to tell.

Take jot, for example. In the masterful "seduction scene" in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago first torments the Venetian general and then pretends sympathy: "I see this (i.e. his nasty sly hints that Desdemona has been a-bed with Cassio) hath a little dashed your spirits." Othello responds defensively, perhaps a tad dishonestly: "Not a jot, not a jot."

The noun "jot" is not obsolete but it's not common either. What is a jot? A tiny bit, a shred, a whit, a speck, a scintilla, a mite, a trace, a skoch, an inkling, a dollop. Smaller by far than a mere smidgeon. But in its root meaning, was a jot a measure of liquid, such as an ounce? or of weight, such as a gram? A measure of distance?  A measure of time: "I'll be with you in just a jot."

Professor Google tells me it's none of those things and that I am entirely off track. "Jot" is alphabetic; it translates the Greek "iota," the smallest letter -- no more than a single straight line, a minimal minim. And therefore Othello might just as well have said (the words are cognates), "Not an iota, not an iota." He might have said it, that is, if he hadn't spent his dearest action in the tented field engaging exclusively in broils and battles, but instead had studied at some North African classical academy.

In fact, Shakespeare either didn't know or didn't use the word "iota," which seems not to have entered English until a generation after he ceased putting quill to paper. On the other hand, Shakespeare was mighty fond of the word jot, which he employed at least twenty times (though never so notably as in Othello), always to denote a small quantity and frequently to appear as a partitive: "jot of promise," "jot of ceremony," "jot of color," "jot of pleasure," "jot of blood.'" Shakespeare's "jot" can even signify a moment in time: "No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer." (His "jot" is always a noun, never the converted verb meaning "to write a few words quickly.")

Shakespeare undoubtedly knew the word "jot" from its famous and mysterious appearance in Matthew 5:18. Here's the familiar King James Version (1611): "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The phrasing is almost the same in the Geneva Bible of 1576 -- the translation that Shakespeare himself knew and used. "For truly I say unto you, Till heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle of the Law shall not escape, till all things be fulfilled."

I don't know what "all things" are and I certainly don't know what is meant by "fulfilled." But why should I, since Jesus's prophesy has long baffled trained professional theologians. But I do know that the pairing of "jot and tittle" has become proverbial.

What, then, is a "tittle." No, it's not a very small female breast. Nor is it a diminutive seabird, though it's not difficult to imagine a rocky south Atlantic island frequented by the "Lesser, or Little Tittle." In actual fact, it's a stroke of a pen -- and one that's even smaller than an iota. Specifically, it's the dot over the lower case "i" or lower case "j." Or, in an extended sense, any simple diacritical mark. 

Shakespeare used "tittle" just twice. The first was in Love's Labor's Lost in a passage in which Shakespeare makes game of affected language. Pompous Don Armado de Adriano compares little things (the woman he woos) to greater things (himself) "Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shalt thou exchange for rags? robes; for tittles? titles; for thyself? me." What a difference a "t" makes! "Tittle" makes its second, almost inadvertent, appearance in The Winter's Tale as an element in the dismissive reduplicative "tittle-tattling." Both of Shakespeare's tittles acknowledge that the word is an inherently silly one. Is it accidental that a number of words that resemble tittle are frivolous or infantile: babble, toddle, tattle, prattle?   

"Tittle" smacks of triviality. It lacks heft. It would have been a literary disaster, a catastrophe of the first order, if Othello had responded to Iago not with "Not a jot, not a jot," but with "not a tittle, not a tittle." 

[October 29]  Otis Brown responds: "Dr. M.: you've forgotten the most famous Tittle of all: Yelberton Abraham. How could you?

[November 2]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds:

 

Words of my Life: "Worship"

There are some words which one might read, study, and parse the dictionary definition and yet still not understand -- words for which one has no intuitive or even rational conception. For example, there's the word "heaven." I know that "heaven" can mean "sky," a definition that poses no problem, but when "heaven" is presumed to refer to a place beyond the sky in which the souls of dead people are eternally rewarded, then I'm absolutely baffled. My brain empties out. "Heaven" in such a sense is to me incomprehensible and meaningless nonsense.

Another such word is "worship," a word which has always puzzled me, right from the start, when the church bells of St Rose of Lima would ring on a Sunday morning to call parishioners to mass, leaving me and my brothers to play stickball or punchball all by ourselves. I recognize that "worship" is a word to which communities of English speakers give assent, and I observe that people attend temples, mosques, and tabernacles to perform certain activities, such as kneeling, genuflecting, singing hymns and uttering hosannas. Nevertheless, I can't agree that such activities equal "worship" -- because "worship" presupposes that there is a entity to which these activities are directed. And that entity, like "heaven" in the religious sense, doesn't exist. Just as heaven is a non-existent place, so worship posits a non-existent entity. And therefore the word "worship" has no intelligible meaning, to me.

Perhaps I lack what Charlotte Bronte called an "organ of veneration." Or, alternatively, worshipers are engaged in mass delusion. 

On the other hand, I have an excellent grasp of the word "awe." In fact, I am a great practitioner of awe. I'm regularly "awed" by both the achievements of my fellow beings in art, architecture, music, literature, mathematics and science, and also by the majesty of nature, in the form of grand canyons and in the triumphs of evolution. Moreover, I've felt "awe," in cathedrals and once, in the Church of the Rock in Helsinki -- a magnificent building that melds human ingenuity with natural beauty, -- overwhelming, transcendent awe.  And I can understand that for some people what I identify as "awe" might translate into "worship."  But again, not me. Though I'm awed by Rembrandt and Bach, but I don't worship them or their works.  I'll stick with awe.

I may lack an "organ of veneration," but I have a highly developed organ of wonderment.

Update on "worship."  For the first time in my life, a few weeks ago, I attended a religious service. I was in New Orleans and friends suggested that I join them at Vespers at Trinity Episcopal Church on Jackson Avenue. The attraction was Ellis Marsalis, who was to play a few notes for the attendees. A priest or whatever he's called, said a few words, read a prayer, and then elderly, frail Mr. Marsalis sat down at the piano and improvised for a few minutes. It was beautiful and perhaps transcendent. I suppose it was a form of worship. And it didn't hurt a bit. 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Notes on "Mucilage."

“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious -- perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with all that mucilage.")

In my life, mucilage made its mark long before glue arrived on the scene. In Brooklyn (and perhaps elsewhere) 1940s schoolchildren were issued small curvy bottles of the yellow stuff, each fitted with a red-rubber tip which was slit so that a drop or two of mucilage could be emitted when the bottle was pressed to the surface of your construction-paper or doily project. Actually, the slit regularly became caked and occluded and the hardened mucilage had to be scraped off with your fingernails. It was a lot like nose-picking.  

LePage’s Mucilage, I believe it was called. We said Page as "page" but surely LePage's Mucilage if pronounced Frenchly (le pahje) would be far more euphonious. Some claim that if you were building a model airplane, you would use mucilage on your fuselage, but I believe such an assertion to be the kind of persiflage at which I take umbrage. 

And yes, the word is a descendant and cousin of Latin mucus, meaning mucus.

Unbeknownst to 1940s me, mucilage has a life outside the bottle. It is a glycoprotein and exopolysaccharide found in most plants where it helps to store water and thicken membranes. I have now learned that the sticky stuff on the leaf tips of the insect-catching sundews that live at the edge of our pond is a form of mucilage. 

I would be curious to know from what plants William Nelson LePage distilled the vast vats of mucilage that were diluted and parceled out to schoolchildren, who then spent the hour after "Arts and Crafts" removing nasty mucilage scale from their fingers. But I do now know why schools loved the stuff  -- because vegetable mucilage is, if not exactly edible, not poisonous either. No hoofs were harmed during its production.

Once having established the mucilage monopoly, Mr. LePage must have brought home zillions. And if his descendants were as sticky-fingered as I suspect they must have been, they will be enjoying the profits on their yachts or in their Manhattan penthouses to this day while we 1940s pupils are left with only memory-traces of mucilage's peculiar feel and odor.  

Other words of my life:

slouch,

cishet,

yips

ramps

jot and tittle

worship

hack

 

Fango

I'm marvelously fond of the Italian word "fango," which translates into English as "mud." "Fango" is expressive of the matter which it describes. To my ear, the word fango sounds slimy and disreputable, perhaps even repulsive, while its English counterpart "mud" is bland and lacks character. And "fangoso" is so much more dramatic than "muddy."

But why fango?  How did fango infiltrate the Italian language? The Latin word for mud is "lutum," which would naturally yield Italian "luto", which, as it happens, is a word that does exist, but, so far, one that I've encountered only in dictionaries. Fango it is, and gladly. Let us revel in fango. 

Fango, according to my bank of etymological resources, appears to be of Germanic origin and a distant cousin to the English word "fen," "a low land covered in whole or part by water." Lots of fango in that there fen, obviously. There's also a rare (my dictionary says 'poetical') French word "fange," for mud, but the more common word is boue. Boue is one of a handful of French words (other than toponyms) that are of Gaulish origin. So that when it came to mud, both the Italian and French languages adopted indigenous rather than Latin words. And for good reason: if there's any substance that is common rather than learned, it's mud.  

"Fango" bears no relation to English "fang." Fang is an oversized tooth, but not in its earliest appearances. Old English fang denoted plunder or booty, "a seizing or taking." The root meaning of grasp or capture is present in the name of Good Master Fang, an ineffectual officer of the law in Shakespeare's The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth. Yet fang as unquestionably tooth or toothy in Duke Senior's metaphor in As You Like it, where "the icy fang/ And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,... bites and blows upon my body."

Orts

"Orts" is a rare but tasty word. Orts are the bits of bones, gristle, stems, skins, pits and other inedibles that are left on the plate after one finishes eating -- the stuff that is scraped directly into the garbage can. Orts are to be distinguished from "leftovers" which are the uneaten remains of the meal that are carefully sequestered for tomorrow's breakfast. Leftovers good, orts bad.

Shakespeare uses "orts" twice in the plays, both times metaphorically. The first instance is in Julius Caesar, when Anthony tells Octavius how little he values his colleague Lepidus. According to Anthony, Lepidus is "A barren-spirited fellow; one that feeds/ On abjects, orts and imitations." In this instance, orts seems to be prompted by the word "feed." A second appearance of the word orts is in Troilus and Cressida. Troilus has discovered that his beloved Cressida has been playing at fast and loose with Diomedes: "The bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolved, and loosed/ And with another knot, five-finger-tied,/ The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,/ The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics/ Of her o'er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed." It's a strong speech and "orts of her love" is a powerful phrase, though rather obscure nowadays to audiences for whom the "ort" is a mystery --which certainly includes contemporary audiences.

Whether Shakespeare's first audiences would have required a footnote for orts I do not know. It was never a frequently used word, though the OED attests its presence in the language from 1440 to 1880. I don't know of any recent usages, but once, when I was at lunch with a group of professional Shakespeareans, I asked at the close of the meal, "What do we do with the orts" -- everyone at the table knew exactly what I meant. Rather a specialized audience, however.

Orts should not be confused with Oorts. The Oort cloud is the presumed boundary of the solar system, way out there, ten times further than Neptune, where the comets are thought to reside until they are dislodged from their proper home and come hurtling toward the inner planets. Orts and Oorts are both leftovers, in the sense that they are the remains of an original creation, in the one case chicken pot pie and in the other the universe. Orts are much smaller but more palpable than Oorts. Makes a guy wonder what could possibly be denoted by ooorts? Or oooorts?

Words of My Life -- Boobs

When I was a boy, the word boob denoted a simpleton, a nincompoop-- what Shakespeare calls a mooncalf and what in an earlier life I might have called a schmuck or a schmendrick. "Boobs" was an everyday expression; so common and pervasive that The Three Stooges might just as easily have been called the The Three Boobs. There were other related uses of the word; "booby hatch" -- a semi-humorous appellation for what was formerly called an insane asylum, and also the "boob-tube" -- though whether the boob in that doublet denoted the machine itself or the schmendricks who stared at it was never clear to me. But at some point in my linguistic career the word "boob" re-emerged with a new primary signification. It now seems to have become the most common word for the female breast.

I do not like it when a breast is called a boob. It is disrespectful. A breast is soft and nurturing but also erotic and enticing. A boob is neither; it is a denatured object, stripped of its warm associations and joined instead to foolishness and boobery. "Boob" is a deliberately unsexual and undignified term. It is also, as Shakespeare says in a different context, "base, vulgar and popular."

And available. If a person should happen to google the word "boob," perhaps searching for information of an etymological kind, the first, second, third and perhaps hundredth entry that he or she will encounter is for "boob selfies." A "boob selfie," for readers equally as naïve as me, is a photograph which a woman takes of her boobs and posts on the internet.

Jane Austen did not do this. Neither did George Eliot. I can't demonstrate that the word "boob' is responsible for such a decadent display of immodesty, but I do note that phrases such as "breast selfies" or "bosom selfies" are inconceivable. 

Nor did suicidal Cleopatra, when bringing the venomous asp to her breast, say "Peace, peace/ Dost thou not see my baby at my boob/ That sucks the nurse asleep."

Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage.

Sleepers

In the catchment area of P. S. 217, as indeed in all of my home territory in darkest Flatbush, there was very little immigration or emigration. People stayed put, for the most part, and the students with whom you entered kindergarten were the ones who were likely to graduate with you at the end of eighth grade.

I can think of two outsiders who came not from a near neighborhood but from the rumored "outside world." One was Beryl McLeod, who arrived from Scotland, stayed long enough to engender in me a most powerful and confusing pre-adolescent crush, and then disappeared. Lovely Beryl spoke with a most exotic and enchanting accent, Glaswegian if I remember correctly. And then there was Alan Dean, who dropped in for a year or two from western Pennsylvania. He was a diminutive tough boy, not very bright but competitive on the punch ball field. He also spoke in a dialect unfamiliar to me and which I now judge to have been country or Appalachian. One day in Miss Finsmith's crowded stuffy fifth-grade classroom we pupils were asked to elucidate a picture that the teacher had displayed. It was a young lad with a candle in his hand. I recall very clearly a sentence of Alan Dean's: "you can see that it's nighttime because he's wearing his sleepers."

Alan Dean's "sleepers" made a lifetime impression on me, not only because I had never heard that specific term before, but because I wasn't until that moment aware of dialectical differences in vocabulary. I knew about soda but I had never heard of tonic; I knew about pancakes but had never heard of griddlecakes or flapjacks, and I wore sneakers all day every day but knew nothing of tennis shoes or tennies -- not to mention plimsolls. I was not only monolingual but monodialectical, if there be such a word. For someone to employ the word "sleepers" for an item of clothing that I knew only as "pajamas" was therefore a transformational experience.

And a very sensible word, at that. Much to be preferred to other deplorable dialectal terms for pajamas, as for example the twee diminutive "jammies," or worse, the lazy "pj's" (not doubt employed by the sort of people who would call orange juice, O.J.), or even worser, the infantile reduplicative "jim-jams." 

So I was on the alert the next time that 'sleepers" swam into my imaginative ken, which was when I first became acquainted with John Donne's clever little love poem, "The Good Morrow," in which the poet claims that until he fell in love, he was immature, unconscious: 

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

Who the heck, I wondered, were these "seven sleepers?" Not, in fact, a wardrobeful of pajamas nor (my first guess) a parody of the famous 'nine worthies" of chivalry?  But no, inasmuch as Donne habitually and regularly conflated religion and sex, he knew that the seven sleepers were a group of enthusiastic early Christian converts who were imprisoned for their faith in a cave near Ephesus, fell into miraculous sleep, and then woke up two centuries later to discover to their delight that their city had adopted and institutionalized their religion. Rips van Winkles of miraculous devotion.  

Of other religious or literary sleepers surely the most prominent are Thoreau's. In a poignant passage about railroads in Walden, Thoreau recalls that "sleepers" is the demotic name for the wooden ties on which steel rails are laid. From this suggestive bit of nomenclature, Thoreau elaborates a conceit about the way the new industrialism favors some and crushes others. "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad?  Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.” So "sleepers" live on.

I have never heard this sense of "sleepers" in conversation, but then, I don't talk about railroad-making all that much. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to endorse the continued pertinence of Thoreau's witty comparison. 

No doubt my regular metablogian readership has been waiting patiently for me to mention that the "sleeper" is the first and easiest trick learned by beginners with the yo-yo. At least, such was the case in the 1950s P. S. 217 schoolyard. And a spy in a "sleeper cell." And a dark horse. A surprise. A film; in fact, many films that are unexpected successes.

A lifetime of many and various "sleepers."

September 21, 2015.  Let me add that Sleepers are plentiful in the old West Bradford cemetery, they being one of the first families to colonize the part of Vermont in which I am now writing this paragraph. A quaker Sleeper disrupted a church service in the 1790s, shouting at the congregational minister, 'Sir, you preach false doctrine." There's a Sleeper farm right at the end of South Road, just over the West Bradford line into Corinth. Never met them, don't know if their family's historic religious enthusiasms have persisted.

Stoppers

I would have thought that I'd have had in the hopper all the senses, proper and improper, of "'stopper."  But I've come a-cropper.

The most familiar stopper is, of course, the blocker of liquids, as for example the cork that fits into the top of the wine bottle -- or the polished glass stopper that used to slide into those old-fashioned ink bottles. And then there's the stopper in baseball -- the ace pitcher, the "number one" on the staff, who brings a  losing streak to a close. And also the show-stopper -- the performer who freezes the show in its tracks, so excellently that he or she earns several rounds of applause and encores. (Latterly, a supremely attractive woman has come to be called a "show-stopper"; when she enters a room all activities, even molecular motion itself, immediately cease).

But down here in South Florida, where I am enjoying a few days of indolent hedonism, there's a stopper of which even the OED is ignorant. It's a plant -- a bush or small tree. The best known stopper is the simpson, myricanthes fragrans, demotically known to all as the nakedwood twinberry. It's a member of the eucalyptus family and smells nutmeggy. The fruit is edible, as might be expected of a distant cousin of the guava. Simpson stoppers are a food of choice for Florida's state bird (not the pelican, as one might expect, but the mockingbird). And there are other stoppers beside the aristocratic simpson: the redberry stopper Eugenia foetida, whose leaves and flowers are foul-smelling;  the white stopper; and the inedible Spanish stopper.

I have no clue about the etymology of "stopper" in this sense.  Neither does anyone else.

Terpen

Before there were dikes there were terpen.

I was disgracefully ignorant of terpen until I read Robert Van de Noort's North Sea Archaeologies: A Maritime Biography, 10,000 BC to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2011). Van de Noort devotes many pages to terpen, which are artificial islands constructed between 500 BC and 1000 AD in parts of the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. The earliest terpen were simple mounds on which a house was built; later several or more would be joined together to form small elevated villages protected against high tides and flooding. They might be as much as forty feet high. With the coming of dikes (c. 1000-1200 AD), terpen ceased to be constructed.

Here's a terp, viewed from above.

And here's another, photographed from ground level.

 

I've been to the lowlands and might have seen these peculiar topographical features with my own eyes, but I certainly didn't register them. Even if I had, I might have confused them with the grave barrows or tumuli that are common in Scythian Bulgaria, or even with drumlins, which have a similar look to the uneducated eye -- although drumlins are natural rather than man-made.

I love it that "terpen" retains its ancient plural, along with words such as oxen and brethren. There aren't many such words in the language (children is a reduplicated plural, the original "-er" plural supplemented by an -en plural -- and some day to be superseded, I predict, by "childrens").

Van de Noort's book is fascinating reading for those who like terpen and bronze-age sewn plank boats and such. It's rich in detail but might have been even richer if the author hadn't felt the need to waste space by calling the seashore a "place of liminality" and shipboard "a heterotopia sailing upon the Deleuzian ocean" -- and also indulge himself with many unconvincing  speculations dependent on such peculiar,  modish, transitory vocabulary.

When it comes to odd words, give me the old ones every time. Here are some satisfying lovely words that were as new to me as terpen: saltern (an area in fenlands set aside for salt manufacture); cofferdam (a temporary dam), thwart (a seat in a rowboat), leister (a two-pronged spear for fishing), dromond (a medieval galley) and broch (a dry-stone tower).

The Silliest Word in the Entire English Language, Bar None

To decide upon the language's silliest word, many would steep themselves into the gallimaufry that features such sesquipedalian monstrosities as mollycoddle, liripoop, and kinnikinnick, but in my view such words are no more than flagrant tomfoolery. (In point of fact, almost every word seems silly, if you just say it over and over again, especially spoon, swivel, and sluice [just in the s's alone]). A more promising category in which to delve is among those words that ought, from their sound, mean something entirely other than they do, as for example turdiform, titmouse, cacoethes, antimacassar and crepuscular. Some words are silly because it is inherently ridiculous that their combination of consonants and vowels should mean anything at all: usufruct, zeugma, ginkgo and glebe fall into that unlovely grouping.

As a child, I thought that the silliest word in the English language was "pumpernickel," but now I can make more mature judgments. I therefore announce that the second most ridiculous word in English -- the penultimate -- is "indubitably."  "Indubitably" is composed of a series of staccato syllables that can only be spoken by a duchess, or a dandy wearing a tuxedo and a monocle  -- or perhaps even a lorgnette. I have never heard anyone utter the word "indubitably" with a straight face. It's a word that is intrinsically litotic. 

And now, after decades of pondering, I proclaim that the grand champion silliest word in the English, and of this there can be no shadow of doubt, no possible probable shadow of doubt, is: ointment.

The evidence?  Well, first of all, there's that wayward "oint." Except for "oil" and oil-related words (oiler, oily), there are very few English words that begin with "oi" --and for good reason. "Oi" lacks the dignity of more imposing vowels. It's an unstable gliding sound, hard to fix in the mouth, almost thriphthongic.  Moreover, "oint" comes perilously close to "oink" and therefore reeks of the piggery. To couple "oint" with "ment" is to augment the awkwardness. Most words that end in "ment" make obvious sense: battlement, pavement, amazement, advancement. If the "ment" in ointment is such a suffix, what, pray tell, is an "oint"?  And then there's that foolish near-congruence of the first and second components of the word --its perfect and quintessential spondeehood -- exaggerated by slant rhyme and the awkwardness of "nt"/"nt." Altogether, "ointment" is indubitably absurd.

Etymology offers no solace. The silly thing came to us through Old French "oignement" from late Latin "unguimentum" and from classical Latin "unguentum."  "Ointment" may ultimately derive from an ancient root for butter. Just as might be suspected, that first ludicrous "t" is an accident, having been smuggled in, by analogy, from "anoint."  

When Jean Lundegaard bites Gaear Grimsrud on the hand, he grunts, famously, "Unguent, I need unguent." One hesitates to suggest an improvements to classic dialogue, but, tell the truth, wouldn't the scene have been even funnier and more memorable if Gaear had muttered, "Ointment, I need ointment?"  Especially if the tip of his tongue had landed plosively on both of the lingual-palatal stops?

Notes on the "Tarpaulin"

We're packing up, getting ready to go -- even though there hasn't been the slightest hint of frost. When I loaded the metal sculptures into the bed of the truck, I realized that it would be a good idea to cover them with a tarpaulin. So down I drove to Main Street and to the recently enlarged Aubuchon. "Where do you keep your tarpaulins?" I asked the young clerk. "What is a tarpaulin?  I've never heard of it?"  "Never heard of a tarpaulin," I replied, taken aback, "you use them to cover boats or cargo or the backs of trucks." "Oh," he said, brightening, "a tarp," and he took me right there where the shelves were loaded with blue "polytarps" -- canvas being virtually extinct, at least in our part of the landlocked world. 

The young feller didn't know the world "tarpaulin" and looked at me as if I were some sort of pretentious snob. But "tarpaulin" goes right back to my childhood -- it might be the first three-syllable word I ever learned. Not that I was nautical, not in any sense a "tar." But when it rained at Ebbets Field, the ground crew would roll out the infield tarpaulin and then we'd all sit and listen while Red Barber and Connie Desmond chatted for an hour or so until either play resumed or the game was postponed. "Tarpaulin" is not a hard or obscure word -- certainly not to baseball fans who can remember when fields didn't have roofs. But the big linguistic question is -- will the word tarpaulin survive in all its glory or will it be truncated into a pathetic apocopic monosyllablic shadow of itself?  Or will it be confused with the TARP, which is a horse of another acronymic color. Troubled (or more accurately, Toxic) Asset Relief Program. 

Well, I bought the "tarp"  -- not at Aubuchon, which didn't have the right size -- but down at the Farm-Way. So now we're one step closer to shoving off for DC and then back home. I'm overwhelmed with pre-nostalgia.