Rocket Man vs. Dotard

When President Donald Trump referred to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jung-un as “Rocket Man,” later amplified to “Little Rocket Man,” it got Kim’s dander up. His snappy comeback was, “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U. S. dotard with fire.”

“Rocket Man” was presumably a reference to the Elton John-Bernie Taupin song of that name, which ends with the lyric, “Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone.”

“Dotard,” on the other hand, is a once popular term that has fallen into disuse. Pronounced DOE-terd, it’s defined as a “person who is senile and has lost mental alertness.”

“Dotard” has a sterling literary history. Chaucer in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales refers to an “olde dotard shrew.”  Shakespeare uses the word several times, notably in The Taming of the Shrew when Baptista says of Vincentio, “Away with the dotard!” In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Denethor tells Gandalf, “I will not step down to be the dotard chamberlain of an upstart.” Union General George McClellan said of his predecessor, Gen. Winfield Scott, “I don’t know whether he is a dotard or a traitor.”

But the word now is admittedly old-fashioned.

According to the Associated Press, what Kim actually called Trump was a “neukdari,” a derogatory Korean word for an “old person.” The North Koreans are known to use outdated Korean-English dictioinaries, so when the Korean news agency translated Kim’s remarks, “dotard” popped up as a synonym for “neukdari.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has been in his dotage for many years. He’d like to remain there for some while, since there’s only one alternative. 

            You “Rocket Man,” said Mr. Trump,
            With a nod to to Elton John.
            He thought that it would make Kim jump
            And feel most put upon.

            But Kim was not to be outdone,
            And to a bookshop motored
            To seek a word with which to stun—
            And he discovered “dotard”!

BOOK   SIGNING

YOU’RE ON!

The Theatre Quiz Book

by

JIM BERNHARD

˜

Thursday, October 5 – 4:30-6:30 p.m.

River Oaks Bookstore

3270 Westheimer at River Oaks Boulevard

Refreshments!

How’s the Bayou By You?

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey’s horrendous rainstorm, which caused many of Houston’s bayous to go over their banks, one of the more scholarly customers has sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal with some surprising information about the word bayou.

As the article notes, bayou, which means “slow-moving or sluggish creek or river,” may look and sound as if its origins are French, but in fact they are probably Native American. The word is principally used in the Gulf Coast region; elsewhere a similar waterway would more likely be called a stream, a brook, a river, or a canal.

The origin of bayou is believed to be bayuk, a Choctaw word, taken from a tribe that populated Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama until the 1830s, when they were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma. Bayuk, generally spelled bayouque, later shortened to bayou, entered North American French sometime in the eighteenth century, and English-speakers soon borrowed it. Some etymologists say it first passed through a Native American pidgin called “Mobilian Jargon” that various tribes spoke among themselves.

Another entirely different theory traces bayou to the Spanish bahía, which means “bay.”

Houston is criss-crossed with bayous, including White Oak, Brays [pictured above, before and after flooding], Greens, Sims, Halls, Cedar, Armand, Vince, Luce and Carpenters—in all more than 2,500 miles of them, giving Houston the sobriquet “Bayou City.” 

The most prominent is Buffalo Bayou, which runs through downtown Houston, and where, in palmier days, the Bard could often be found lounging atop a pile of empty Chardonnary bottles, as fulsome lyrical effusions issued from his pen. Here is one of his most detested efforts from that era.

            I’ve never known if bayou

            Is pronounced to rhyme with Hi, you!

            Or if, when I say bayou,

            It should sound more like Ohio.