Out of the Friaring Pan

In an episode of Inspector Lewis, the spin-off of the Inspector Morse detective series on TV, the highly secular Lewis refers to a group of robed clerics as “monks.”  His theologically-minded partner, Sergeant Hathaway, corrects him: “Not monks—friars, actually.”

So what’s the difference?

Well, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, a friar (derived from the Latin fratres and French frère, meaning “brother”) was originally any member of a religious order who had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Some may have been confined to cloisters, where they led lives of eremitic contemplation; others participated in various public ministries. By the thirteenth century, however, friar was generally restricted to mean a member of one of the mendicant orders who had no fixed revenues and depended on voluntary offerings to support various services to the community.

Today, in the Roman Catholic Church, there are four principal orders of friars: the Dominicans (known as “Black Friars,” from the color of the mantle worn over their white robes); Franciscans (“Grey Friars” or “Brown Friars,” from the color of their robes), Carmelites (“White Friars”), and Augustinians, who wear black robes—but sorry, guys, you lost out to the Dominicans in claiming the nickname.

A monk, from the Greek word monos (“single, alone”) refers to a member of a religious order, usually Benedictine, who lives either in complete solitude (an eremite) or in a cloistered community, under a regimen consisting of prayer, contemplation, and worship, with no public ministry (unless you count producing tasty beverages like the eponymous Benedictine liqueur, yellow and green Chartreuse made by Carthusian monks, and Chimay beer brewed by the Trappists—all of which were invented to revive weary monks after a hard day’s comtemplation).

A monk is not to be confused, in most cases, at least, with a monkey, a small primate mammal with a tail, no liqueur, and a completely different etymology. Monkey originated as the name Moneke, the son of Martin the Ape in the German version of Reynard the Fox, a fable published in 1580.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou leads a semi-eremitic life, filled with monkey business, among which is the scratching of his thoughts upon tree bark. An example follows:

            A young, monastic oyster,

            Too boisterous for his cloister,

            Was smitten by a plump and shapely scallop.

            As the oyster grew much moister,

            He had an urge to hoist her

            On his shell and take off at a gallop.

            Through murky shoals he sped

            Straight for an oyster bed,

            To frolic with the luscious bivalve girl.

            “If you and I were wed,”

            The lusty oyster said,

            “We’d shuck these shells and make a little pearl.”

            The scallop was quite shocked,

            And said, “You’d be defrocked

            If you should try to take me in a tussle.
            You shouldn’t run amok,

            I’m no coquille St.-Jacques— 

            My boyfriend is a big and brawny mussel!”

            “You needn’t take that tone,”

            The oyster said. “Don’t moan—

            If you don’t want to play, then I’ll just scram.”

            So he left her all alone,

            Then he found a cherrystone

            And did a little necking with the clam.
 

Boo!

Today, children, we celebrate (or in some cases deplore with dread and loathing) the holiday known as “Halloween” (or, if you wish to be pedantic, “Hallowe’en”). The word was first used in the 16^th century, and it is too well known to mention that it derives from “Allhallows Even [Evening],” the night before November 1, the Christian All Saints’ Day, which honors the souls in heaven. (It is not to be confused with All Souls’ Day, November 2, which is for the benefit of the dear departed who haven’t yet made it to heaven but have high hopes.)

One of the customs of Halloween is to display a hollowed-out  pumpkin, with a carved face illuminated by a candle.  It’s called a “jack-o’-lantern.”  So today’s question, trick-or-treaters, is who was Jack?

There are several Irish myths about a disreputable old drunk known as “Stingy Jack,” who got into some kind of dispute with the Devil.  Some tales say it was an argument about who would buy the next drink, and others insist it had to do with the Devil’s climbing a tree to snatch a piece of fruit (shades of Adam and Eve!).  At any rate, the final result of the contretemps was that the Devil agreed that he would never claim Stingy Jack’s soul.

There was just one problem—when Jack died, he found that he wasn’t welcome in heaven, either.  Since the Devil had agreed not to take him, Jack was condemned to roam the earth, and, to help him find his way, the Devil gave him an ember, which Jack placed inside a carved-out turnip and used as a lantern.  The figure of “Jack of the Lantern” was used in the 17^th-century to mean a night watchman, and the term was later applied to the ignis fatuus, mysterious lights that appeared over peat bogs.  

To commemorate this legend, it became customary among the Irish, the Scots, and the English to scoop out the flesh and carve faces in potatoes, gourds, beets, and rutabagas, as well as turnips.  When the Irish immigrants came to America, they discovered it was a heck of a lot easier to carve a pumpkin than a turnip, and the plentiful autumn crop became the standard for jack-o-lanterns.

The Bard-o’-Lantern of Buffalo Bayou hides on Halloween, lest he be mistaken for a ghoulie or ghostie or long-legged beastie or thing that goes bump in the night. While in hiding, he conjures up incantations like this one:

            I hope I never meet the Devil--

            That would be most alarming,

            For I can tell you, on the level,

            I think I’d find him charming.

            He’d give me power and great riches

            And a big flat-screen TV,

            And send his warlocks and his witches

            To come and wait on me.

           

            He’d tempt me with Champagne and gin,

            Dark chocolate as well--

            And you can bet that I’d give in,

            And wind up down in hell.

Where Ya From?

People from England are English, people from China are Chinese, people from India are Indians, people from New Zealand are New Zealanders, people from Ecuador are Ecuadoreans, and people from Pakistan are Pakistanis.

Why not Englese, Chinans, Indish, New Zealandi, Pakistaneans, and Ecuadorers?

Thomas Tsoi, who teaches English to Hong Kongers at Holy Trinity College, has the answer, sort of. He has identified eight basic suffixes that indicate nationality in English (plus a few irregular ones). The basic eight are:

            -ian (Italian, Norwegian, Egyptian, Brazilian)

            -ean (Chilean, Korean)

            -an (American, Mexican, German)

            -ese (Japanese, Vietnamese, Portuguese)

            -er (Virgin Islander)

            -ic (Icelandic)

            -ish (Irish, Turkish, Swedish, Spanish)

            -i (Iraqi, Israeli, Yemeni)

The nonconformist ones include the endings of French, Argentine, Cypriot, Greek, Swiss, Dutch, Thai, Manx, Monegasque, and Seychellois, among others.

Some of these words can function as both adjective and singular noun (e.g., an American or Japanese person is an American or a Japanese); others do not (an English or Spanish person is not an English or a Spanish). 

Tsoi points out that the endings –ian, -ean, and –an are all variants of a Latin root meaning "pertaining to" and are the most commonly found suffixes in English. Which one is used depends primarily on how the name of the country is spelled.

The –ese ending comes from Italian (in which English, for example is inglese). Marco Polo and other Italian traders were the first Europeans to reach the Far East, and, as a result, the –ese ending is commonly used for Asian countries.  Why –ese is also used for some countries in Europe (Portuguese) and Africa (Senegalese) is the result of those countries’ colonial histories.

The endings –er and –ic are Germanic in origin are used in English for national endings mainly after the words land and island.  The –er typically refers to a person (Icelander), while the –ic is adjectival (Icelandic). (The –er is much more commonly used for residents of cities: New Yorkers, Londoners, Berliners, etc.)

The suffix -ish is also Germanic and means “belonging to.” In German, the –isch ending is very common: Italienisch, Französisch, Amerikanisch, etc.  English, which is basically a Germanic language, held on to a few of these endings. The

–ch in French and Dutch also stem from this German suffix.

Finally, the suffix –i comes from Arabic and is generally used only for Islamic countries (with the notable exception of Israel).

The Bard, who is proudly Buffalo Bayouish, is also a man of the world, as you can see.

            When The French

            Want to quench

            A really fierce thirst,

            They always turn first

            To a vin rouge or blanc--

            And who cares if it’s plonc?

            But the British,

            Who are skittish,

            Take their grub

            In a pub

            With a pint of good bitter,

            Than which nothing is fitter.

           

            Alas, the poor Irish,

            Whose troubles are dire-ish,

            Prefer a strong stout,

            But they’ll throw it out

            And shout, “Finis!”           

            If it isn’t Guinness.

           

            Now the Germans

            Will preach sermons,

            Or long, boring sagas

            About their great lagers.           

            It’s bier for those fellas,

            Both dunkles and helles.

            I hear that a Mexican

            Is so complex he can

            Dance a bolero,

            Around his sombrero,

            To prove that he’d feel a

            José Cuervo tequila.

           

            Of course, an American,

            Disdaining sherry, can

            Jump in his pool,

            Get nice and cool

            At his villa suburban,

            And sip Coke and bourbon.

           

            And as for the Bard,

            When he’s worked long and hard,

            Pushed himself to the max,

            Then he likes to relax

            With a teeny-weeny

            Dry gin Martini.

Name's the Same

Tautonyms are zoological terms for animals in which the genus and the species names are the same: Rattus rattus (black rat), Vulpes vulpes (red fox), Bison bison (American bison), and the self-explanatory Gorilla gorilla, for examples.

People can have tautonyms as well.  I’m thinking of the baritone Thomas L. Thomas, who was famous on the Voice of Firestone in the 1940s and 1950s.   Then there’s actress Evans Evans, who was in the movies Bonnie and Clyde and The Iceman Cometh. 

Both of them are of Welsh descent, as was James James, the 19^th century harpist who composed the Welsh national anthem.  Welsh (as well as Scottish and Irish) names lend themselves to tautonymy owing to the frequent use of patronymics—given names derived from the name of the father or a paternal ancestor.

Martin Martin was an 18^th century Scottish writer famous for A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland. An Irish counterpart, Henry Henry, was a 19^th century Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor.

And then, there’s Lang Lang, the spectacular young pianist, whose double name is actually two different Chinese words that are pronounced slightly differently and mean “brilliant man.”

Two British writers who were contemporaries—Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) and Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)—also had tautonymic names, but they didn’t come by them honestly.  Jerome’s father, an ironmonger and non-conformist minister, was originally named Jerome Clapp, but for reasons best known to himself, he changed his name to Jerome Clapp Jerome, which also became his son’s name.  The younger Jerome, perhaps to distinguish himself from his father, changed his own middle name from Clapp to Klapka; hence the middle initial K. He is best known for the comic narrative Three Men In A Boat.

Ford, whose fame rests on the novel The Good Soldier, was born Ford Hermann Hueffer, but changed it after World War I because it sounded too German.

“Mutual Problem” is a bit of whimsy by William Cole, who seems to want to challenge the Bard of Buffalo Bayou for poetic primacy. Oh well, let him:

            Said Jerome K. Jerome to Ford Madox Ford,
            'There's something, old boy, that I've always abhorred:
            When people address me and call me 'Jerome',
            Are they being standoffish, or too much at home?'
            Said Ford, 'I agree;

            It's the same thing with me.'           

                       

The Bard couldn’t resist adding this flourish:

            Said Thomas L. Thomas to the sprightly Lang Lang:

            “Is your name pronounced like ‘bang’ or like ‘bong’?”

            Lang Lang then snorted to Thomas L. Thomas:           

            “You tell me first if you’re Comus or commas.”

Talking Tacky

One of the customers of the blog, deploring last week’s posting about “piss-poor,” has upbraided me for being tacky.  Be that as it may, tacky is a word that demands—nay, screeches for—an explanation.

Tacky, now meaning “trashy” or “inappropriate,” has a circuitous etymological path.

The Online Etymological Dictionary traces the word to 1800, spelling it tackey and meaning a “small or inferior horse.” By 1852 it was used to mean “in poor taste.” 

The Oxford English Dictionary finds it was spelled tackie in 1860 and suggested that the meaning of a “broken-down or worthless horse” was unkindly extended to the poor white class of the Southern States, sometimes known, even more unkindly, as “white trash.” Thereafter, "tacky" became a popular insult among the well-to-do, and has been ever since a synonym for "shabby," "cheap," "tawdry,” “gaudy,” “dowdy,” or “lacking good breeding.”

The standard references decline to tackle tacky’s etymology, the OED calling its “origin obscure” and the Onliine Etymological Dictionary “uncertain.”  Come on, gang, you can do better than that.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, in whom are conflated all the various meanings of tacky (including “stickiness”), nonetheless maintains he was born with a silver spoon in his eye.  That may account for the deplorable lack of vision represented by this collection of undiluted detritus:

            Jackie is tacky,

            And Blackie is wacky,

            And Mackie, by cracky,

            Is tawdry.

            Maudie is gaudy,

            And Toddy is bawdy,

            And nobody’s broader

            Than Audrey.

           

            Billy is silly,

            And Millie is chilly,

            And Willie (that nut)

            Is just dowdy.

            Bobby is snobby

            And Robbie is knobby,

            And Jabba the Hut

            Hollers “Howdy!”

            Jerry is merry

            And Perry is scary,

            And Terry has nary

            A care.

            Janie is zany

            And Lainie is brainy,

            And Cheney’s got grainy

            Gray hair.

Pisssst!

Someone sent me an email claiming that the expression “piss-poor” stemmed from days in which urine was used to tan animal skins.  Families, said this epistler, peed in a pot, and once a day the accumulation was sold to the tannery.  If you had to do this to survive, you were “piss-poor.”

It’s a cute story, but ‘tain’t funny, McGee.* ‘Tain’t true, either.

The word piss dates to the 14^th century and is from the Vulgar (that is, as spoken by ordinary Romans) Latin word pissiare, a word of imitative origin, meaning just what you think it does.  In phrases such as piss-poor (or piss-ugly, or piss-elegant, for that matter), piss is used as a pure intensifier, usually implying excess or undesirability. Ezra Pound used the phrase piss-rotten in 1940 in his Canto LXIX.

Similar usage of piss- developed in the United States in the mid-20th century. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is by A. L. Hench, who reported in 1946 that an Air Corps sergeant had told him the term “was used by all the soldiers he came in contact with as descriptive of a thing in its lowest condition … e.g. ‘This is a piss-poor outfit. My job is a piss-poor one.’”

The phrase “so poor he didn’t have a pot to piss in” predates “piss-poor.”  It was used by Djuna Barnes in her 1936 novel Nightwood:  “My heart aches for all the poor creatures putting on dog and not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it from.”

By the way, pissant, meaning insignificant, is formed from the words piss and ant—but you hardly needed me to tell you that, did you?

The prudish Bard of Buffalo Bayou is reticent about using words like the one under discussion, so he has chosen to take a different tack:

            Does Ezra Pound the pavement,

            And will Horton Foote the bill?

            Can William Tell what they’ve meant

            If they see Iggy Pop a pill?

           

            Does Robert Stack the deck,

            Dame Diana Rigg elections,

            And does Johnny Cash a check

            And give Glenn Close inspections?           

           

            I wonder, will Claire Bloom,

            And also, does Al Hirt,

            To see what Elaine May consume

            As Jeremy Irons a shirt?

           

            Will Nicolas Cage a beast

            And Cary Grant a wish,

            And should Edith Head out east,

            To help Barbara Cook a fish?

           

            Does Martin Mull great notions

            And Bob Hope for the best,

            Does Tom Cruise all the oceans,

            And has Rip Torn his vest?

                                   

            And does Jim Carrey keys           

            And Chevy Chase sopranos,

            Just as Hugh Downs trees

            And helps Tommy Tune pianos?

           

*Only readers of a certain vintage will recognize the allusion to Fibber McGee and Molly, a staple of NBC radio from 1935 until 1952.

Seeing Dots Before Your i's

Have you ever wondered why we put a dot over a lower-case i and j?  Well, if you haven’t you should have, and here’s the answer, even if you didn’t ask the question.

According to word maven David Crystal, the letter I was a consonant in the Semitic alphabet and a vowel in Greek; it was adopted by Latin with both consonant and vowel values.  The inscription over the cross of Christ illustrates the consonant value:  INRI are the initials of the words Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews). 

J was developed in the Middle Ages as a fancy calligraphic variant of I, but later came to replace I whenever a consonant value was required. The dot on the lower case i and j was originally a diacritical mark used by medieval scribes, similar to an acute accent, to distinguish the stroke of an i from the identical strokes of m, n, and u when they appeared adjacent to the i. 

So you’d better dot you i’s—and cross your t’s, too, while you’re at it.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou likes to fool around with letters of the alphabet, and he is lucky that he hasn’t been caught at it yet.             

            If i’s a little dotty,

         And t’s a little cross,

         It’s because the literati

         Forget who is the boss.

         For i or t alone,

         Counts little, they’ll admit,

         But it clearly can be shown

         That, together, they are it.

Junket Mail

One of the customers of this blog (a non-paying customer, of course) asked if I remembered Junket, a dessert of my long-ago youth that was occasionally served when gelatin products were not available, owing to the disturbance in Europe and the Pacific at the time.

Junket (a trademarked brand name) is still manufactured, believe it or not, in Little Falls, New York.  It is made with sweetened milk and rennet.  Rennet, from the Old English word rynet (“cause to run together”), is a digestive enzyme found in calves’ stomachs that curdles milk, producing a custard similar to the curds and whey of which Little Miss Muffet (but not I) was so fond. 

In the Middle Ages, junket (not trademarked at that time) was a food favored by the nobility that was made with cream, not milk, and flavored with rosewater and spices.

The word's etymology is related to the Norman jonquette, a mixture of milk, egg yolks, sugar, and caramel--mmmm. Originally, a jonquette (or jonket) was a basket of rushes, in which the cream preparation was typically made. It derives from the medieval Latin word juncata.

Junket later took on the meaning of a feast of any kind of tasty food. Jonathan Swift’s instructive Directions to Servants in 1731 advised: “Whatever good Bits you can pilfer in the Day, save them to junket with your Fellow-servants at Night, and take in the Butler, provided he will give you Drink.”

By amplification, junket is now used to mean a trip (usually paid for by someone else) during which rich food and hearty drink are enjoyed, most typically by dedicated public servants on fact-finding missions to Las Vegas, the Caribbean, and the Riviera. 

No one has offered the Bard of Buffalo Bayou any junkets—of whatever variety—lately, and if the following is any indication, it is unlikely that anyone ever will.

            I feel so cool and mellow.

            Each time that I eat Junket®™.

            It tastes a lot like Jell-O®™.

            Good gracious, who’d a-thunk it?

           

            But it’s proclaimed just like a tenet

            On each package that they sell it in

            That Junket®™’s made with rennet,

            And Jell-O®™’s made with gelatin.

Signor Ponzi and the Governor

The governor of Texas, who has put himself forward as the cowboy candidate for president, is campaigning on the platform that global warming is a fraud perpetrated by crazed scientists lusting for cash, evolution is a hare-brained theory on the agenda of godless (never mind the redundancy) atheists, capital punishment is a sacred institution even if an occasional unlucky innocent person is exterminated, and Social Security is a vicious Ponzi scheme.  I leave the merits, if any, of his opinions to more learned savants, including those of the idiot variety, and limit my comments to the meaning of “Ponzi scheme.”

First noted in general usage about 1957, a “Ponzi scheme” refers to an investment scam in which early investors are paid using the contributions of later ones, and so on, and so on.  It is similar to plans known as “pyramid clubs,” but unlike them, it implies specific criminal deception.

The term got its name from Carlo Ponzi, who was born in Italy, near Parma (where the ham and cheese come from), in 1882. Something of a ham himself, he also hoped to be a big cheese. He came to the United States in 1903 and worked in various cities as dishwasher, waiter, clerical assistant, translator, bank teller, smuggler, and embezzler, finally settling in Boston, where he got a bright idea.  In 1919 he established an outfit he called the Security Exchange Company (has a sort of familiar ring, doesn’t it?), which promised investors a 50% return in 90 days.  Where do I sign up?

The plan, which he marketed from Montreal to Florida, was immensely successful. Ponzi used the money of succeeding waves of investors to make the promised pay-offs to earlier investors (pocketing what he wanted along the way). Such schemes were nothing new; they’ve been around for centuries—one is even mentioned in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit.  But Ponzi did it on a grander scale than ever before and at one point was taking in more than a million dollars a week—and in those days, a million dollars was real money. Theoretically this could have gone on for years, until the wealth of the entire planet was recycled and the final group of investors was left holding a great big empty bag.

But people caught on. Eventually Ponzi was charged with mail fraud and larceny.  He jumped bail and was arrested in New Orleans by a Texas deputy sheriff, acting outside his jurisdiction, brought to Texas, and extradited to Massachusetts. He served several years in prison, was then deported to Italy, and wound up in Brazil, where he died in poverty in 1949.  The wages of sin were the death of him.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou operates a kind of Ponzi scheme in verse, in which he takes thousands of words from unwitting writers, keeps a few for himself, and recycles the rest in supposed payoffs like these:

           

              Carlo Ponzi, the conman of Parma,

              Had skills that allowed him to charm a

              Whole host of investors,

              Who turned to protesters

              When they found he had very bad karma.

              Rick Perry, the Sage of Paint Creek,

              Declares that he really cain’t speak

              About Social Security,

              ‘Cause it’s full of impurity,

              And by gum, it simply ain’t chic.

                       

Labor Pains

With widespread homage to indolence, Americans like to celebrate Labor Day by lolling at the beach, lying in hammocks, and slurping beer on their verandahs. This annual observance was established nationally by President Grover Cleveland in 1894, following the killing of several workers by the U. S. military and U. S. marshals during what was known as the Pullman Strike against railways. 

Cleveland purposely avoided choosing May 1, the more common international workers day, lest it stir up memories of the Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886, which occurred around that date. 

In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, and other countries of the British Commonwealth, the May 1 observance is known as Labour Day.

The absence of a u in the American spelling can be traced to that old fussbudget Noah Webster, who wrote The American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. He saw no need of that useless u in words like labour, colour, neighbour, favour, honour, and flavour—so he got rid of it.

That pesky -our came into English from the snooty Normans, whose Frenchified spelling du jour was thought (by the Normans) to have an elegant je ne sais quoi, even though the original Latin words on which they were based got along just fine with a plain -or.  It was the 1755 dictionary of Dr. Samuel Johnson, a fussbudget of even higher standing than Webster, that perpetuated all those -our spellings.  Johnson even insisted on governour, horrour, tenour, and terrour, which are now thought to be in errour, even by the Brits.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou engages in as little labo(u)r as is humanly possible.  Certainly, very little of it was required to produce this scrawl:

             
            You work and work           

            Till you’re berserk,

            And then you reach retirement.

            Relax, you’re told,

            This age is gold,

            To rest is your requirement.

            “The best, you see,

            Is yet to be”—

            I wonder what that liar meant?

Semi-Prose

The winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest is Sue Fondrie, of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The contest, sponsored by the San Jose State University English Department, honors bad writing by asking entrants to submit the opening sentence of an imaginary novel.  It memorializes Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the 19th-century English author, whose novel Paul Clifford opens with this much-mocked sentence:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

The winning 2011 entry:

“Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.”

Britain’s Guardian likes to find egregiously bad sentences from actual novels. A few it has come up with are:

Danielle Steel in Star: "She wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San Francisco.”

Lindsey Davis, Shadows in Bronze: “By the end of the alley the fine hairs in my nostrils were starting to twitch.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Synthetic Men of Mars: “From Phundahl at their western extremity, east to Toonol, the Great Toonolian Marshes stretch across the dying planet for eighteen hundred earth miles like some unclean, venomous, Gargantuan reptile - an oozy marshland through which wind narrow watercourses connecting occasional bodies of open water, little lakes, the largest of which covers but a few acres.”

If you’d like to submit an entry for next year’s Bulwer-Lytton contest (the prize, according to the website, is a pittance), the email address is: srice@pacbell.net.  Entries are accepted 365 days a year.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou does not enter contests, inasmuch as he believes his writing is bad enough without anyone awarding him a prize for it.  Judge for yourself:

            I’ll bet my writing’s more egregious,

            Mawkish, crude, and sacrilegious

            Than anything that has been written

            Since the days of Bulwer-Lytton;

            Worse than any Harlequin romance

            By Barbara Cartland, Judith Krantz,

            Jackie Collins, Danielle Steel--

            Compared to them, I’ve no appeal.           

            I’m worse than Mary Higgins Clark

            Or any literary matriarch

            Like Stephenie Meyer and Anne Rice.

            With all their vicious vampire vice.

            Mickey Spillane and Louis L’Amour?

            I’m worse by far, and that’s for sure!

            Why, I am even lower down

            Than Sidney Sheldon and Dan Brown.

            Nora Roberts? I’d almost forgotten her—

            Not to worry, I’m much, much rottener.

                       

            So if all my prose and all my verse

            Are really bad and couldn’t be worse,

            And like those I’ve named, I’m booed and hissed,

            Why ain’t I on the best-seller list?

Look Out! Your Domain Is Imminent!

The Houston Chronicle recently reported that “[Governor Rick] Perry… signed imminent domain legislation because ‘ownership of personal property is crucial to our way of life.’”

What the Texas governor feels is threatening our sacred lifestyle is eminent (not imminent) domain, the right of the government to take private property for public purposes, by virtue of its sovereignty over lands within its jurisdiction. Of course the Gov may be worried that eminent domain is imminent, and he certainly wouldn’t want it to be immanent—that might be treacherous, er, treasonous.

It’s easy to confuse eminent with imminent and immanent, not to mention emanant, especially if you pronounce your vowels with a Texas twang, as the Gov usually does, especially when campaigning in the state for one or more offices.

Eminent, meaning “prominent,” comes from the Latin eminere, which means “to stand out, like a mountain.”  It suggests that the government’s domain, or area of jurisdiction, is superior to that of a private individual.  Imminent, meaning “ready to take place,” usually with the suggestion of threat, comes from a similar Latin root, imminere, meaning “to project, in a threatening manner, like a mountain.”

Neither eminent nor imminent should be confused with immanent (“indwelling, inherent,” from the Latin immanere (“to remain in place”), or with emanant (“issuing or flowing forth”) from the Latin emanare (“to flow”)

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, whose eminence and immanence may be in doubt, but whose imminence and emanance are both unquestioned, was inspired by the Governor’s views to make this typically insouciant observation:

            O, give me a home

            Where Republicans roam

            And there is no eminent domain.

            Where taxes are low,

            Just like I.Q.s, you know,

            And Rick Perry wins every campaign.

Riff and Raff

The New York Times Magazine now has a section called “Riff”—which apparently describes musings on whatever topic the writer of the day has in mind. Recent “riffs” have consisted of innocuous observations about attitudes toward celebrities and about the joys of reading Harry Potter books. But what’s a “riff”? 

One Times writer, Ben Ratliff, has noted an explosion of its use in that newspaper.  He found 57 instances of “riff” in 1990, 131 in 2000, and 221 in 2010. (Aren’t searchable texts wonderful?) 

As originally used, a riff is a “short, repeated phrase in jazz music.”  Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary believes it was first used around 1935 and had its origins as a shortened and altered version of the word refrain.

Today, a riff has broader applications—as a variation on a previous account, or as a succinct or witty comment, or, broadly speaking, a version of something, such as someone’s particular “take” on a topic under discussion. 

Riff is evidently not related to riffraff, meaning “the rabble or the mob.”  This word is a shortening of rifle et rafle, from the Old French riffler and raffler, both of which mean “to plunder”; hence rifle et rafle means every scrap of something, or “the sweepings, the refuse, the rubbish” and, by transference to human beings, “the rabble.” 

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has an elitist background—his second cousin once removed was the Count of Monty Crisco—and that may account for the Bard’s inordinate fear of the hoi polloi, as expressed in this ballad, which he is wont to sing as he accompanies himself on a kazoo:

            The riffraff will grab you,

            If you don’t watch out.

            Then, when they nab you,

            They’ll knock you about.

           

            They’ll slap you and slam you,

            And hit you with rocks,

            And then they will cram you

            Into a small box.

           

            Of course they will rob you—

            Every nickel and stitch,

            And then they’ll just fob you

            Off in a ditch.

            They’ll beat and desert you,

            They’re not at all sweet--

            But riffraff won’t hurt you

            Like the bankers on Wall Street!

Who Said "Uncle"?

During the recent acrimony between Republicans and Democrats in their struggle to pass debt ceiling legislation, one financial analyst observed: “I don’t think there’s anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t believe that the people who are being difficult on Capitol Hill are ultimately going to say uncle.” “Uncle,” as you must remember from your playground wrestling days, is an American expression used to indicate submission when you’re fighting. Some people suggest it was the Democrats who said uncle first—but the Republicans didn’t even realize it.

Be that as it may, wouldn’t you like to know whose uncle is being referred to? The Online Etymological Dictionary says the phrase was first used in 1918 and is of “uncertain signification.”

The intrepid Michael Quinion, in his blog “World Wide Words,” won’t settle for such shilly-shallying. He proposes, but cannot prove, that “uncle” is a corruption of an Irish word—anacol—that means “an act of protecting, deliverance, mercy, safety,” derived from the Old Irish aingid (“protects”).

Another theory, suggested by William and Mary Morris (they have a college in Virginia named for them, don’t they?), wants us to believe that “uncle” goes back to a Latin expression, patrue mi patruissime, meaning “uncle, my best of uncles,” used as a shout for help by ancient Roman youths who got into trouble. Hmmm…that sounds like one of those New Yorker Magazine “shouts we bet never got shouted.”

One other possibility ties the phrase to a joke that appeared in U. S. newspapers in the 1890s: A man was given a parrot by his nephew. He tried to get the parrot to say “Uncle,” but the parrot wouldn’t speak a word, so he angrily yelled “Say ‘Uncle,’ you beggar!” and then, throttling the bird’s neck, he threw him into a pen with ten prize fowls. Later, fearful he had killed the parrot, he returned to the pen and found nine dead fowls with their necks wrung. The parrot was standing on the tenth, twisting its neck, and screaming, “Say ‘Uncle,’ you beggar, say ‘Uncle’!” (When I read this joke, I thought the punch line had been omitted, but apparently, that is it.)

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, adopting his most avuncular style, has chosen to muse upon a variety of uncles:

My Uncle Sam

Is such a ham,

Decked out in red and white and blue.

I get a thrill,

And always will,

To hear him thunder, “I want you!”

Old Uncle Remus

And Nicodemus

Sat swapping tales, as was their habit.

Said Uncle Remus, “It would please us

If you told us about Jesus,

Then I will talk about Brer Rabbit.”

Do not pester

Uncle Fester

Or he might dynamite you,

Or, even worse,

Get out his hearse

And run you down to spite you.

Uncle Miltie

Pleaded guilty:

He killed ‘em on TV.

Now he’s gone,

But still lives on,

Alive on DVD.

I’ve often heard it said that Stanislavski,

When he directed Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,”

Liked to hum a few bars of Tchaikowsky

And “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon Ya’.”

Hard-Boiled Eggcorns

In its account of the death of “Dr. Death” (Jack Kevorkian), CBS News online reported that his attending physician said that “he had a cancerous legion that was inoperable.”  I find it hard to believe that Dr. Kevorkian’s problem was, as the report states, several thousand Roman footsoldiers, whether or not they were malignant.

What the physician probably said was that he had a cancerous lesion, which is an “abnormal change in the structure of an organ.”  Somewhere along the way, somebody misunderstood the word.

Such mishearings of spoken words are known as eggcorns—a word that is attributed to Geoffrey Pullum, who coined it in 2003 in a blog about a woman who substituted the phrase egg corn for acorn.  Some commonly heard eggcorns are:

            Go at it hammer and thongs (tongs).

            That’s a mute (moot) point.

            What’s the windshield (wind chill) factor?”

            I need a drink to slack (slake) my thirst.

            It’s impolite to easedrop (eavesdrop).

            Americans living abroad are known as ex-patriots (expatriates).

My favorite eggcorn was a closed-caption TV report about “Firefighters who have to deal not just with the fire but also with people fleeing the fire and ejaculating on all the major highways.”

Eggcorns are related to malapropisms, a word derived from Sheridan’s character Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals.  She liked to use big words, which tended to be the wrong ones—illegible, say, for ineligible. Another type of mis-hearing is known as a mondegreen, which is the misunderstanding of a poem or song lyric.  Mondegreens were discussed extensively in my blog of December 25, 2009, which you can (and should without delay) read at:

http://wordsgoingwild.blogspot.com/search?q=mondegreen

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou tends to mis-hear almost everything that is said to him, especially requests to shut up, which he misunderstands to mean please continue.

            I fried an eggcorn for my lunch,

            And it was fairly tasty--but

            The moment I began to munch,

            I felt a pain down in my gut.

            The reason was (I have a hunch)

            The eggcorn really was a nut.