Bogus May Bug Us

I occasionally hear young people (anyone under 60) say something they don’t approve of is “bogus.”  In current usage, that word seems to mean “unbelievable, untrue, undesirable, or stupid.” 

Bogus was first used in early nineteenth century America to mean “counterfeit money,” and later to refer to anything “fake” or “ersatz.” Precursors of bogus can be found in English as early as 1500.  Middle English bugge meant a “frightening specter,” and is related to our modern word bug. Other related words include bogeyman, boggart, boggle, and bogle, a Scottish word for “ghost” popularized by Walter Scott and Robert Burns.

The variant bogus first referred to a contraption that printed counterfeit money, and later to the money itself.  Some trace this usage to the word tantrabobus (sometimes tantrabogus), an eighteenth-century Vermont colloquialism for any odd-looking object.  This might have its source in tantrabobs, a Devonshire word for the devil.

That old devil of Buffalo Bayou, a.k.a. the Bard, remains the champion of bogus verse, in all the above senses.     

            Experts have often asserted that orange 
            Is a word that all rhyming abhors, 
            But look into Webster’s and you will find “sporange: 
            A sac for asexual spores.” 

            But nothing shows up that matches with bogus— 
            It’s rhymeless, like purple and silver. 
            Now why can’t there be a word such as flogus, 
            Or pantheocurpal or trilver? 

           

The Real Skinny

The Skin Game, a 1931 Alfred Hitchcock film, deals with two families trying to get the better of each other in a land deal that is their mutual undoing. The term skin game was used again in the title of a 1971 movie starring James Garner and Lou Gossett Jr. as two con men, one black and one white, in the pre-Civil War Midwest, who devise a scheme in which Gossett poses as a slave and Garner “sells” him to an unsuspecting townsman.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines skin game as a game that the “player cannot possibly win.”  Presumably this notion stems from the verb skin, meaning “get the better of someone,” derived from the act of skinning an animal for its valuable fur. Hence, a skin game is a swindle or confidence trick. “Fleecing” someone is an analogous term.  Paper dollars taken from the victims of skin games were referred to as skins.

A skin game is also defined as a “card game in which each player has one card which he bets will not be the first to be matched by a card dealt from the pack.”

In golf, a skin game involves a foursome betting against another in three categories: team play, individual “greenies” (closest to the pin), and individual “skins” (any single low score on a given hole). For obvious reasons, skin game (or skin trade) can also refer to the business of prostitution or pornography, as anyone who has ever visited a skin palace or watched a skin flick can eagerly testify.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou squeezes out his verses by the skin of his teeth, and if you don’t like them, well, it’s no skin off his nose.

            I like to play the skin game,

            And never miss a lotto.

            It is more fun than a gin game,

            That’s always been my motto.

            I also love a shell game,

            And dote on three-card monte,

            I think that it’s a swell game—           

             Come on, let’s play—avanti!

             Yes, I’ll play any con game,

             Be the butt of any joke—

             But they all become a non-game

             The minute I am broke.

Addendum: After a recent blog about the Oreo cookie and its predecessor, the Hydrox, some customers accused the Bard of Buffalo Bayou of following the path of least resistance by composing a so-called verse about Oreo but not Hydrox. Never one to let a challenge go unanswered, the Bard insisted on adding this entry to his already superfluous collected works:

           I think you might safely say Hydrox

            Would win a taste-test against dried rocks---

            But wait! Don’t be hasty!

            Dried rocks might be tasty,

            So we’d better wait till we’ve tried rocks.
 

False Fronts

On “60 Minutes” Lesley Stahl referred to a brand-new, but uninhabited, Chinese city as a Potemkin city.  Similarly, when President Obama visited Burma last year, the New York Times suggested that in sprucing up the decrepit University, authorities were creating a Potemkin campus. For me, Potemkin conjures up the 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, which dramatizes the 1905 mutiny aboard that ship.  So who or what is Potemkin?

Grigori Potemkin (1732-1791) was a Russian field marshal, statesman, and courtier of Empress Catherine the Great.  According to one account, during a visit by Catherine to the Crimea in 1787, Potemkin wanted to impress her with the value of the lands he had conquered in that region.  He had hollow façades of entire villages constructed along her route to make it look as if there were thriving communities in place, when in fact, the land was barren. 

Potemkin has thus come to mean any fabrication intended to make people believe something is better than it really is.

In a similar fashion, when Russian authorities toured poverty-stricken East Germany during the Cold War, local officials would refurbish only the ground floors of dilapidated buildings on the road from the airport, knowing that the officials would view them from the windows of their limousines, and the ground floor is all they would see.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has been writing Potemkin verse since he first put pen to paper.  Try and see behind the glittery façade of this one: 

            When Potemkin built a façade, 
            Very few people hurrahed, 
            They said, “We don’t mind 
            That there’s nothing behind, 
            It’s what’s out in front that’s so odd.” 

            So Potemkin said, “All right, look here— 
            If the front of my builiding seems queer, 
           There’s no need to curse it, 
            I’ll simply reverse it, 
            And then feast your eyes on my rear.”

Pick A Picayune

The venerable New Orleans Times-Picayune, long the iconic daily newspaper of the Crescent City, has curtailed publication to only three days a week.  This is a sad state of affairs for a proud paper, with several Pulitzer Prizes, whose staff at various times included O. Henry, William Faulkner, cartoonist Walt Handelsman, and Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, who, as Dorothy Dix, dispensed advice to several generations of love-troubled readers.

The Picayune’s tragic decline calls to mind a perennial question: why would anyone name a newspaper the Picayune—a word that means “petty, paltry, contemptible, and insignificant”?

If you have read my book Porcupine, Picayune, & Post, you know the answer to this question, but for other less fortunate and benighted customers of this blog, I will lay out the background once more.  A picayune was initially a Spanish coin in Louisiana and Florida, worth a little more than 6 cents.  The word comes from the French picaillon, adopted from the Provençal picaioun, a diminutive of the Portuguese picalho, which means “money.”  After the United States acquired Louisiana in 1803, the name picayune persisted and was applied to the five-cent piece (also known as a “fippeny bit”).

When Francis Lumsden and George W. Kendall, two ambitious Easterners, arrived in New Orleans in 1837 and decided to start a newspaper, they tried to outdo the city’s other journals, which all cost a dime or more, by charging only five cents.  As a marketing ploy, they named the newspaper for what it cost—a picayune.  In 1914 the Picayune merged with the Times-Democrat and became the Times-Picayune. 

No coin is small enough to charge for the work of the Bard of Buffalo Bayou. If there were something worth, let us say, 1/1,000^th of a picayune, that would still be too much. Just see for yourself:

          Way down yonder in New Orleans,
           The land of those Creole cuisines, 
           With dirty rice, red kidney beans, 
           Filé gumbo, galantines, 
           Pompano and peppered greens, 
           Turtle soup and trout terrines, 
           Étoufées and smoked sardines, 
           Remoulades, pecan pralines— 
           Food that’s fit for kings and queens, 
           Not recipes of Paula Deen’s!

How the Cookies Crumble

The Oreo cookie celebrated its 100^th anniversary last year, and darned if I didn’t fail to observe the occasion. The first Oreos were produced in 1912 by the National Biscuit Company, and the name was trademarked on March 12 of that year. 

There is a lot of disagreement over the origin of the name Oreo.  One theory holds that it derives from the French word or, meaning “gold,” the color of the cookies’ original packaging.  Others say it stems from the Greek ōréos, a word for “beautiful” when applied to inanimate objects.  One outlandish notion suggests that it was formed by taking the re in crème (the vanilla filling) and placing those letters between two O’s formed by the two outer cookies.  If the folks at Nabisco know the truth, they aren’t telling.

It should be noted for the record that I also failed to observe the 100^th anniversary of the very similar Hydrox cookie, which was launched in 1908—four years before Oreo. The name Hydrox is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, the constituents of water. Over the years Hydrox got the reputation of being a knockoff of Oreo, instead of the other way around.  After a series of transmutations, including one as Keebler’s “Droxies,” what used to be a Hydrox is now available only as a variety of Famous Amos.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has not eaten an Oreo in more than 50 years. He is a militant advocate of more healthful fruit products, especially the fermented variety.

            A tenor whose name was Vittorio

            Was jazzed up from eating an Oreo,

            So, thanks to Nabisco,

            He broke into disco

            While singing a Bach oratorio.

Hork! Hork!

 A fascinating New York Times article about how the human mouth processes food contained this passage: “A less lethal and more entertaining swallowing misstep is nasal regurgitation. Here the soft palate — home turf of the uvula, that queer little oral stalactite — fails to seal the opening to the nasal cavity. This leaves milk, say, or chewed peas in peril of being horked out the nostrils.”

Emphasis is mine, to convey that I had never before come across the verb hork.  It’s used here in one of its many senses, “to cough or vomit in such a way that the expelled matter exits through the nose.”  But it turns out hork in modern slang has a vast array of meanings: “cough up a hairball,” “choke,” “gobble  food greedily,” “steal,” “break, ruin, or foul up,” “throw,” and “carry or cause to move.”

Determining the origin of the word is not so easy.  A blog with the alarming title “Disorderedthoughtprocesses.com” has several suggestions.

1. Hork is a corruption of gork, a term used in hospital emergency rooms to describe a patient who is non-responsive for an undetermined reason. In a broader context, the word refers to anything that is non-functional.  The etymology of gork is unclear, but it may be an acronym of “God only really knows.”

2. Hork derives from the cartoon character Ren Hoëk (pronounced “Hork”), the mentally unstable Chihuahua on TV’s “Ren and Stimpy.”

3. Hork is an onamatopoeic approximation of the sound a cat makes when coughing up a hairball.

4. Hork is a corruption of hawk, a 16^th-century imitative word defined as “to attempt audibly to raise phlegm by clearning the throat.”

Any or all of these may be correct, so take your choice.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou coughs up rhymeballs with distressing frequency.  There is no known cure for his condition. 

            Whenever I decide to hork, 
            It depends on how I feel, 
            As to whether I hork a haunch of pork 
            Or hork a hunk of veal. 

            I hork whatever is on my fork, 
            And I hork it through my nose, 
            I have even horked a cork 
            And a piece of garden hose. 

            I once horked something through my throat 

            That was rough and tasted bad, 
            I felt I’d horked a billy goat— 
            And, sure enough, I had!            

           

Hero Worship

John Montagu (1718-1792), the 4^th Earl of Sandwich, who ordered his dinner meat served between two slices of bread so he could keep playing cribbage without getting the cards greasy, didn’t really invent the sandwich. People had been eating meat between pieces of bread for millennia—but his waggish friends thought it funny to call food served in that manner a “sandwich.” 

One popular variety of the Earl’s delight is known today by many names in different regions: po-boy, submarine, hero, hoagie, grinder, blimpie, torpedo, rocket, zeppelin or zep, bomber and bap. The origin of some of these names is obvious when one looks at the sandwich, which consists of an oblong roll of French or Italian bread, sliced lengthwise, and filled with some combination of meats, cheeses, fish, lettuce, tomato, pickles, peppers, onions, and condiments.   The shape of such a concoction is clearly reminiscent of such devices as a submarine, a torpedo, a rocket, a blimp, a zeppelin, or a bomber.

But what about po-boy, hoagie, hero, grinder, and bap?  The stories are as varied as the ingredients of the sandwiches. 

The most likely origin of the po-boy (a dialectical version of “poor boy”) was in the New Orleans restaurant of Benny and Clovis Martin, both former streetcar conductors. During a streetcar strike in 1929, the Martins helped their erstwhile colleagues by serving them free sandwiches, filled with odd scraps of beef. The restaurant staff jokingly referred to the strikers as "poor boys", and soon the sandwiches themselves took on that name.

The hoagie has many possible origins, all in Philadelphia.  It may have started in World War I, when Italian-American workers in a shipyard known as “Hog Island,” introduced an Italian-style sandwich that became known as a “Hog Island” sandwich, then a “hoggie,” and finally a “hoagie.”  An alternate explanation is that it’s a word derived from “Hogan,” a nickname for Irish workers in the shipyard, referring to the “hog meat” or pork in their sandwiches. Another theory holds that the sandwiches were first sold in Philadelphia in 1879 by street vendors known as “hokey-pokey men”; hence, a “hokey” sandwich.  Yet another possible origin is the phrase “on the hoke,” which referred to a destitute person in Philadelphia’s Italian community. Deli owners would give away meat scraps in bread to the poor and called these sandwiches “hokies.” Finally, some linguists think that it was originally a “hooky” sandwich, originating with truant youngsters who ate them while skipping school. No one really knows the truth.

A hero is a New York term, first seen in 1937.  Some people say it was invented by Clementine Paddleford, a food writer for the New York Herald-Tribune to refer to a sandwich of great, or “heroic,” size. Others point to a corruption the Greek sandwich known as a gyro, even though the sandwich is identified with Italians.. 

Grinder is a New England term, and yet again we owe it to Italian immigrants, who used the word to refer to dock workers, who were partial to the sandwich.  Or maybe the term originated from the difficulty in chewing the crusty bread. (In Boston the grinder is sometimes calle a spukie or spucky, from a kind of Italian bread known as spucadella.)

Finally, bap is a Scottish term for a soft, floury roll, about 5 inches in diameter, usually more round like a hamburger bun than oblong, which may or may not be stuffed with various fillings. The origin of the word, which dates from the 16^th century, is unknown—but may have sprung from pap, a Scottish word for the mammary gland, which the roll resembles in shape and size. In fact, in today’s British slang baps can mean “breasts.” A bap is used to make what the Brits call a “chip butty,” which is a buttered roll filled with fried potatoes and malt vinegar.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is filled with vinegar and heaven knows what else.  Whatever it is, some of it has oozed out in the following verses:

           

                                    I.

            One day Bacall said, "Listen, Bogie,

            I'm feeling pretty tired and logy,

            It makes me act like some old fogey—

            You know, I think I'll eat a hoagie,

            Ideally, one stuffed with pierogi."

            She ate, and then she smoked a stogie,

            Then roped and saddled up a dogie,

            And rode him off to see a yogi.

                                       II.

            Way out west, in far Toledo,

            There a lived a bold and bad bandido,

            Who said in life his only credo,

            Was just to sharpen his libido

            By putting on a sexy Speedo

            And strolling up and down the Lido

            While lunching on a huge torpedo.           

                                          III.

            The mighty Roman emperor Nero

            Thought that he might try a hero,

            But instead he opted for a gyro,

            Because its price was almost zero.

                                       IV.

            Those TV friends, both Ren and Stimpy,

            One day were feeling rather gimpy,

            They moped around and looked quite wimpy.

            At last they thought they’d have a blimpie,

            But, sad to say, they found it skimpy.

           

                                         V.

            It's said that there's no girl and no boy,

            No roly-poly Pillsbury Doughboy,

            Who would refuse a luscious po-boy

            When served upon an antique lowboy.

                                         VII.

            Now this is just a quick reminder

            That you can put into a binder:

            You really ought to wear a blinder

            When you consume a greasy grinder--

            For that will make you feel much kinder.

           

                                           VIII.

            I say, old chap,

            I took a nap,

            Put on my cap,

            And bought an app

            To make a map

            To find a bap

            Right in my lap.

            And that’s a wrap!

New definitions

A list of creative definitions that are supposedly the winners of a contest in The Washington Post has been circulating—apparently for years—on email.  The contest asks entrants to come up with a new way to define existing words. While there is little evidence that such a competition actually exists, some of the alleged entries are bizarre enough to bear repeating, especially in a blog as disoriented as this one. To wit: 

Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled to find how much weight one has gained. 

Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.


Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk. 

Willy-nilly, adj.  Impotent. 

Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp. 

Ventricle, n. Leakage from an air-conditioner grill. 

Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash. 

Crepuscular, adj. Oozing from a thin pancake. 

Tempestuous, adj. Constantly annoyed by part-time workers.

Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.


Pokemon, n. A Jamaican proctologist.

New definitions are not unusual for the Bard of Buffalo Bayou.  Every time he spews out a word, it means something different.

            A proctologist I’ll call Doctor Janus

            Had a patient whose conduct was heinous, 
                        As the doc checked his rear, 
                        He’d recite from Shakespeare--

            What a pain in the Coriolanus!
        

Dust Off Your Lustrum

In the vintage John Wayne-Katharine Hepburn film Rooster Cogburn, the local federal judge tells U. S. Marshal Cogburn that he has served the court almost “two lustrums.” Cogburn is understandably puzzled (as was I) until the judge explains that a lustrum is a period of five years.

It’s a Latin word, as you undoubtedly recognize, denoting an ancient Roman animal sacrifice that was customary between 566 B.C. and 74 A.D., following the taking of a census. Intended as an act of purification for the Roman populace, lustrum most likely derives from luere (“to wash”), a verb akin to the synonymous lavere, which survives in lavatory and other English words.   

The Roman censuses were taken at five-year intervals, so the term lustrum evolved to mean “a period of five years.”

It would be a fine thing if the Bard of Buffalo Bayou took some time off lasting two or three lustra, or maybe more, but no such luck!  Fearing he might lose his quickly fading luster, he bounces back every week, like a demented ping-pong ball.

         Once, or maybe twice, in a lustrum,

         Too much wine puts me in a flustrum,

         And when I feel gaga,

         At the end of the saga

         I fall down face-first in Ligustrum.  

       

Words of the Year

The Oxford University Press has chosen a “word of the year”—by which it presumably means the word it regards as most representative of that year’s zeitgeist. Naturally, the OUP’s British and American lexicographers have very different ideas about which words are tops.             

For 2012, the Brits chose omnishambles—defined as a “situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.”  Wonder what they had in mind?  A shambles, from the Middle English schamel (“vendor’s table”), is a slaughterhouse, and, hence, “a scene of great destruction or disarray.” 

Omnishambles occasionally shows up in a variant—Romneyshambles—referring to the disastrous public relations fiasco the former U. S. Presidential candidate created during his pre-Olympics visit to the United Kingdom.

Runners-up included mummy porn (or “mommy” porn in Americanese), a “literary genre represented by Fifty Shades of Grey”; and green-on-blue, “military attacks by forces regarded as neutral,” derived from the color of the uniforms of Afghan attackers of NATO forces.

Believe it or not, the word of the year chosen by American editors was GIF. That’s an acronym of “graphic interchange format,” a method of posting to the Internet those images of cute kittens, precocious children, and heaping plates of food that we all love to see. GIF can be used either as a noun or a verb.

Runners-up in the Yanks’ competition included Eurogeddon (the potential financial collapse of Greece and other countries in the Eurozone), superPAC  (those political action committees the Supreme Court unleashed on our recent elections), nomophobia (a “fear of being without one’s mobile phone”), and Higgs boson, of which by now everyone knows the meaning.

Ironically, selection as word of the year does not guarantee inclusion in any Oxford dictionaries.  That honor demands long-time usage, which few neologisms can muster.  There are five factors in a word’s survival, according to wordsmith Allan Metcalf: frequency of use, 
unobtrusiveness
, diversity of users and situations, generation of other forms and meanings, and 
endurance of the concept.

There is only one factor in the continued survival of the Bard of Buffalo Bayou: sufficient Chardonnay to fuel his late-night lucubrations, which generate such droolings of rhyming spittle as the following:

            My life is one big omnishambles,

            In which I love to wallow,

            As through the mess my spirit ambles,

            In hopes the Muse will follow.

            At night I lie upon a bed

            Beneath a weeping willow,

            Till morning comes l rest my head

            Upon a sodden pillow.

           

            I try to rise, to no avail,

            Amidst the hurly-burly,

            But like a little piglet’s tail,

            Eight o’clock’s twirly.

Okey-dokian

Making the email rounds recently was a collection of sentences supposedly known as paraprosdokians.  They are defined as “figures of speech consisting of a sentence of which the latter part is unexpected, and frequently humorous.” Examples given are:

         “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”  (Groucho Marx)

         “The last thing I want to do is hurt you—but It’s still on the list.”

and

         “She was good, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went.”  (Saki)

Paraposdokian is asserted in these emails to be a word that originated in classical Greek rhetoric, derived from para (“against”) and prosdokia (“expectation”). Some linguists, however, argue that the word is not classical Greek or even medieval Latin, but a modern coinage.

A convincing case against the word’s historical authenticity is made by Canadian linguist William Casselman, who calls it a “bogus word made up by some semiliterate doofus.” He believes it originated in the late 20^th century and never appeared in Greek literature. He notes that the word, though used as a nominative, appears in a form that is accusative in Greek—a fact that suggests someone ignorant of Greek grammar cobbled it together. 

Casselman acknowledges that there are, of course, sentences with surprise endings.  He says that linguistic experts refer to these as “sentences with surprise endings.”

Some paraprosdokians (if I may be permitted to perpetuate usage of a dubious word) also change the meaning of the words between the first and last part of the sentence.  The classic example (attributed to Groucho Marx, that champion paraprosdokiast) is:

         “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

This is a form of pun that can also be called an antanaclasis (“reflection”), of which other classic examples include:

         “If we do not all hang together, we shall all hang separately.”  (Ben Franklin)

and

         “If you’re not fired with enthusiasm, then you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.” (Vince Lombardi)

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has been fired numerous times, almost invariably with enthusiasm bordering on desperation.  Unfortunately, this blogger is powerless to prevent him from perpetrating his poetic pustules:

         I had a lovely evening

         But this sure wasn’t it.

         The chairs were made of cast-iron,

         And pained me just to sit.

         The smiling host and hostess

         Insisted I’d have fun

         Conversing with their children,

         Aged five, and three, and one.

         They had a German shepherd

         Who slobbered on my knees,

         While baring teeth and snarling,

         And infesting me with fleas.

          

         The other guests were zombies,

         Addicted to Fox News,

         Insisting that I listen

         To wild Tea Party views.

        

         The drinks were clearly watered,

         I know that’s true becuz

         I downed at least a dozen

         And never felt a buzz.

         Dinner, said our hostess,

         Would be a little late,

         Perhaps about ten-thirty,

         When we’d been asked for eight.

         And when the food appeared,

         The meat was tough and cold,

         The veggies all were soggy,

         The bread was edged with mold.

          When asked to linger longer,

         I managed to resist

         And made a hasty exit—

         Then tripped and broke my wrist.

         No more boring evenings,

         With bad food, kids, and pets!

         Next time that I’m invited,

         I’m sending my regrets.