Recumbent Lie vs. Setdown Lay

In this corner, the reigning intransitive champion of the English-speaking world, Recumbent Lie. And in the opposite corner, the feisty challenger, the transitive champion, Setdown Lay. Lay has been trying to overcome Lie since the 14th century and is making great headway. According to Bryan Garner in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, the use of lay when lie is correct is the most frequent mistake made in the English language.  Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is almost (but not quite) prepared to throw in the towel: “Some commentators,” says the lexicon, “are ready to abandon the distinction.”  But it cautions, “…even though many people do use lay for lie, others will judge you unfavorably if you do.” 

In the simplest terms lie means “to recline” or “or to be situated.”  People and objects may both lie: You lie on the floor of the saloon. The empty whisky bottle lies next to you. Lay means “to put or set [something] down.” One may lay both people and objects: I will pick you up and lay you on the sofa.  Then I will lay the whisky bottle on the bar. 

The confusion between the two is caused by how the verbs are declined. (For a definition of decline, see The Decline and Fall of the Woman Umpire.) The past tense of lie is lay, and the past participle is lain.  Lay’s past tense and past participle are both laid.  So if you lie on the floor in the present, and lay on it in the past—some people will naturally, though incorrectly, assume that you can lay on it the present as well. 

Both Messrs. Lie and Lay, by the way, hope that you will not confuse them with other similar-sounding verbs.  Prevaricating Lie, whose past tense and past participle are both lied, does not even stem from the same root as Recumbent Lie.  And Setdown Lay’s cousin, the disreputable Getz Laid, has been disowned by the family as too vulgar for words.

Ken Lay and Frito-Lay do not enter into this discussion.   

Always eager to add to the confusion, the Bard of Buffalo Bayou hopes these

demonic, mnemonic verses will be just the ticket:

                                                I.

            The lazy farmer’s wife declared, “You layabout—

            Get up, go buy a chicken coop on layaway.

            Don’t lie to me about the cash that you lay out,

            My hens must have a decent place to lay.”

                                               

                                                II.

            I was laid up, so I lay down           

            To lie low while I was sick.

            My boss rang up to lay me off,

            And I laid it on quite thick.

           

            But still my boss laid into me--

            That made me worse, no doubt.

            Now on my tomb engraved you’ll see:

            “Laid up, laid low, laid off, laid out.”

Uncommon Language

Poet Dana Gioia, former director of the National Endowment for the Arts, has a new book on British poetry called Barrier of A Common Language.  The title comes from a famous comment made by Dylan Thomas.

Differences in British and American vocabularies are legion.   You’re familiar with many of them: lift/elevator, biscuit/cookie, potato crisps/potato chips, chips/French fries, petrol/gasoline, lorry/truck, and on and on.  The differences are so many that you have to wonder how this “barrier of a common language” is ever overcome.

But who was it that first came up with this epigram about that barrier?  Was it Thomas?  Or Winston Churchill, who is often credited with the remark?  Or George Bernard Shaw, who is cited in a dictionary of quotations for having said something similar?  Or was it that epigrammatist par excellence Oscar Wilde?  Apparently, it was all of them.

A  blogger in England, who writes under the name Scriptor Senex (the Old Man Writer), posted this meticulously documented clarification:

            Sometimes the inquirer asks, ‘Was it Wilde or Shaw?’ The answer appears to be: both. In The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote: ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’. 

            However, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (Esar & Bentley) quotes Shaw as saying: ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language’, but without giving a source.  The quote had earlier been attributed to Shaw in Reader’s Digest (November 1942).

            Much the same idea occurred to Bertrand Russell (Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1944): ‘It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language’, and in a radio talk prepared by Dylan Thomas shortly before his death (and published after it in The Listener, April 1954) - European writers and scholars in America were, he said, ‘up against the barrier of a common language’.

            Inevitably this sort of dubious attribution has also been seen: ‘Winston Churchill said our two countries were divided by a common language’ (The Times, 26 January 1987; The European, 22 November 1991).

It seems, then, that there are hardly any British writers in the last hundred years who have not said something similar.  Trying desperately to get in on the act, the Bard of Buffalo Bayou wrote the following mid-Atlantic verses:

                                                I.

            A Briton who seemed a bit squiffed

            Tried to board an American lift.

                        But that elevator

                        Was just a dumbwaiter,

            And the Brit wouldn’t fit—catch my drift?

           

                                                II.

            A Yank who was driving in Soho

            Found that his car wouldn’t go.

                        “Have you got gas?”

                        He asked a young lass,

            Who said, “Yes—but ‘twill pass, don’t you know.” 

                                               III. 
            An Englishman said, "I surmise
            When my PC from America dies,
                          And the sounds of its blips
                          Say it needs microchips, 
            Then I'll give it a small side of fries."

           

Lost in Translation

Why Translation Matters is a new book by Edith Grossman, a noted translator of Spanish literature, most famous for Cervantes’ Don Quixote in 2003.  One of her theses is that fidelity to the original work demands that the translator avoid word-for-word literal translation and, in effect, create an entirely new piece of literature.

The pitfalls of literal translation can be easily seen by anyone who relies upon on-line translation services.  As an experiment filled with merriment, I used three different on-line services to translate a passage from English to Spanish; then using the word-for-word Spanish translation I asked the same service to translate it back to English.  The results differ markedly.

The original is an excerpt from one of Hamlet’s soliloquies: 

To be, or not to be, that is the question.  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. 

         

Alta Vista’s Babelfish, finishing in a distant third place, renders it thus:  

To be or not to be, that one is the question.  If he is noble in the mind to undergo the slings and you shoot with an arrow of the indignant fortune or to take the arms against a sea from hardships and being been against, terminate them.

ImTranslator gives us:  

To be or not to be, it is the question. If 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and the arrows of the scandalous fortune, or to take weapon against a sea of problems, and contravening, finish them.

           

Only Google came up with an English-Spanish-English version that was pretty close to the original:  

To be or not be, that is the question.  If nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.

           

I take the experiment further in my book Words Gone Wild, which, Deo favente, will soon be an intruder in the dust of every bookshelf in America.  “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” as you will learn if you read the book, comes through the permutations of several languages as: 

          Mary had the small lamb, 
          Its quilts was beautiful like snow, 
          And this Mary went, 
         The ewe-lamb everywhere was exactly suits him.

         

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who regards the crass promotion represented by the previous paragraph as unspeakable gaucherie, prefers this version of “Mary”:

            Mary had a little lamb,

            Potatoes, and mint jelly,

            Pickles, slaw, and deviled ham

            She brought home from the deli.

           

            A tummy-ache made Mary weep.

            She cried, “How sick I am!”

            Then, like Bo-Peep, who lost her sheep,

            Mary lost her lamb.

Mad as a Dormouse?

Why is it that the “Mad Hatter” gets such a bad rap?  In fact, he was no madder than anyone else at the March Hare’s Mad Tea Party—or in all of Wonderland, for that matter.  In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat tells Alice that the March Hare and the Hatter are both mad.  In fact, says the Cat, “we’re all mad here.  I’m mad.  You’re mad.”  And yet it’s only the Hatter, not the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, or the Dormouse, who is always mentioned with the sobriquet “mad.”  In fact, we sometimes use the idiom “mad as a hatter.”

Over the years the Hatter has been brought to life by a variety of impersonators, including  Ed Wynn, Edward Everett Horton, Hedda Hopper, Martin Short, Anthony Newley, and now, to satisfy the myriad literary scholars who have been clamoring for his interpretation, Johnny Depp. Most characterizations portray “mad” as “eccentric,” rather than “angry,” but the phrase “mad as a hatter” is used to mean both.

The idiom predates Alice in Wonderland, by nearly thirty years at least. It was used in Thomas Halliburton’s The Clockmaker, published in 1837.  The origin of the phrase is unclear.  Some say it was originally “mad as an adder.” Webster says “hatter” is just an intensifier, probably used because it rhymes (sort of) with madder.  Pat Ryan in a recent New York Times article suggests half-heartedly that the original phrase was adapted from the French il raisonne comme un huître—“he reasons like an oyster.” 

The best bet by most etymologists is that the phrase derived from the fact that hatmakers in the nineteenth century used mercurious nitrate to cure felt, and the constant exposure to the substance gave them what were called “hatter’s shakes,” uncontrollable twitching, and in severe cases, blurred vision, slurred speech, and hallucinations.  Hence, if someone acted strangely or violently, that person was said to be “mad” (in whatever sense) “as a hatter.”

Those who move in poetic circles (even though they may become somewhat dizzy) are familiar with another idiom—“bad as the Bard of Buffalo Bayou.”  Here’s why.

               Mad as a hatter,

            Blind as a bat,

            Sad as a batter

            Whose average is flat.

            Light as a feather,

            Smart as a fox,

            Tougher than leather,

            Strong as an ox,

            Deaf as a post,           

            Drunk as a lord,

            White as a ghost,

            Stiff as a board,

            Big as a house,

            Hard as a brick,

            Quiet as a mouse,

            Tight as a tick,

            Slow as a snail

            Clear as a bell,           

            Thin as a rail,

            Hotter than hell,

           

            Trite as a simile

            That’s now a cliché,

            Yet soldiers on grimly,

            As plain as the day.

           

Who Is Whom?

Which of these sentences using who and whom, both of which appeared recently in The New York Times, is incorrect?

1.    Mr. Bashi said he was charmed by Ms. Vicens, whom he said was at once “sophisticated and intellectual” and yet “didn’t take herself too seriously.”

2.    The admiral who Johnson was questioning assured him that the military does not anticipate any island-toppling.

Answer: both of them are wrong. It’s that who-whom thing again.  Simply put, who is always in the nominative case and functions as the subject of a verb, and whom is always in the objective case and must be the object of a verb or preposition.

The use of whom instead of who in a subordinate clause every time a verb follows is tempting—but it must be heroically resisted until you have determined if it is correct. The writers of both sentences above fell into traps—the first by carelessly thinking that whom is the object of he said, and the other by over-correcting such a potential mistake and assuming that who is the subject of assured.

I’m going to let Byron A. Garner, who I am willing to bet makes more money writing about words than I do, explain it.  In the Dictionary of American Usage, he writes:

“The correct uses of who are sometimes tricky.  But if the pronoun acts as the subject of a clause, it must be who, never whom—e.g.: ‘Alan Alda, who you quickly realize is sorely missed on TV, stars as Dan Cutler…’ (Who is the subject of is.)"

Thanks, Mr. Garner.  That explains No. 1 above, in which he said is a parenthetical expression inserted between the pronoun and the verb was, of which who should be the subject. But why is who in No. 2 wrong?  If you look closely, you will see that who is not the subject of assured, as it might first seem. The subject is admiral, and “who [read whom] Johnson was questioning” is an adjectival clause modifying admiral, in which whom should be in the objective case as the direct object of was questioning.  

All this palaver has hopelessly confused the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, whom you all know and who you all know is easily addled.

       

      ‘Twixt her and she, or him and he,

      Or them and they, or us and we,

      I neither fret nor fume.

      But there’s one thing I cannot say:     

      If Doctor Who should come my way,

            Would I meet Doctor Whom? 

Of ‘The’ I Sing

A regular customer of this blog, commendably eager for practical knowledge, has pointedly asked why it is that the British omit the definite article “the” before certain words, while Americans do not.  For example, if someone in London is helping a Harley Street surgeon pay for his yacht, that person is “in hospital”; but doing the same for a Park Avenue doctor in New York will put the American “in the hospital.”  Americans also speak of events occurring “in the future” while Brits tend to say “in future.”  Why is that?

The real question is why Americans are so inconsistent as to include “the” before words like “hospital” and “future,” and omit it before “school,” “church,” “court,” and other words of that kind. Well, as the Sage of Concord once confided to the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, consistency is the “hobgoblin of little minds.”

Another Sage (of Baltimore), the curmudgeonly H. L. Mencken, suggests that the habit of using “the” before certain nouns came to the New World from the Irish, who picked it up from the French, who put la or le, and the Germans, who insist on der, die or das, before most nouns. Don’t ask why; that’s just the way it is.  In French, War and Peace is La guerre et la paix; likewise the German title of Karl Marx’s Capital is Das Kapital.  In his 1919 tome The American Language, Mencken says: “An Irishman does not say, ‘I am good at Latin,’ but ‘I am good at the Latin.’  In the same way an American does not say ‘I had measles’ but ‘I had the measles.’”

The British textbook High School Grammar and Composition by Wren and Martin (a couple of fine old English birds by the sound of it) states that the definite article should be avoided before words like church, school, hospital, college, university and bed (!), when these are referred to for their primary purpose.  Americans and British follow the same rule—mostly: We go to church, we go to school, and we go to bed—all without benefit of “the.”  The article “the” should be used, say the birds, when referring to the same nouns as objects, e.g. we contribute to the church, we build the school, we make the bed.

But the British themselves don’t always follow Wren and Martin’s rule.  Just to confuse things even more, both Yanks and Brits go to the theatre, the ballet, and the opera; but while Americans watch TV, the British watch the telly.

Bard of Buffalo Bayou, when not in a church, in a school, in a hospital, or on a toot, pens scraps of drivel, one of which follows:

            Hail to The, a useful article!

            From top to end, in every particle!

            Perhaps The’s greatest claim to fame

            Is that it is the middle name

            Of many folks in history’s pages.

            To name a few, down through the ages:

            Ivan The Terrible, Louis The Fat,

            Alfred The Great, Maggie The Cat,

            Minnie The Moocher, Edward The Confessor,

            Richard The Lionheart, Ajax The Lesser,

            John The Baptist, Jack The Ripper

            Billy The Kid, George The Gipper

            Kermit The Frog, Winnie The Pooh,

            William The Conqueror, Pepe Le Pew

            I could go on longer and name some more,

            But that’s quite enough from Bard The Bore.

Weep No More

A British customer of this blog writes with a query about the phrase “Jesus wept”—not as the shortest verse in the King James Bible (John 11:35), but as an expletive expressing annoyed surprise.  It’s a phrase that’s been in use at least since the customer’s childhood, when he heard his father use it, and that was a half-century ago (or, to be honest, a little bit more). 

Despite the Biblical injunction against taking the Lord’s name in vain, the name of Jesus Christ (or variants such as “Jesus H. Christ,” “Geez,” “Sheesh,” and “fer Crissakes”) has been used an exclamation by plenty of Christians, as well as others, for centuries, if not millennia.  A few examples will more than suffice: “Bi iesus” in Piers Plowman (1377),  “By Jhesu” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1390), “O Jesu” in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 (1597) and “By Gis” in Hamlet (1601).

“Jesus wept,” as an expletive, is apparently of much later vintage. In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) Stephen Dedalus exclaims “O weeping God,” and later in the same passage says, “Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.”  Whether “Jesus wept” in this case is an interjection or simply a declarative statement may be open to interpretation.

In A Vision of Battlements (1965) Anthony Burgess writes dialogue that clearly uses the phrase as an expression of exasperation: “Oh, Ennis, oh God Almighty, Ennis.  What the hell’s got into you these last few weeks?  Oh, Jesus wept, what am I going to do with you?”

It is primarily in Great Britain, Australia, and certain parts of Ireland that “Jesus wept” is used in this fashion, but it is also found in works by the American novelist Stephen King. And an American blogger recalls that when his grandmother would trip on something, she would cry out, “Jesus wept, Moses crept, and Peter went a-fishin’!”.

Like Niobe, the lachrymose Bard of Buffalo Bayou has also wept in his time, although he tries not to, since tears falling into his Chardonnay make it taste salty.  Instead he vents his emotions in cloying and often incomprehensible rhymes:

            Crying when milk’s

            Spilt in your tepee

            Helps, I presume— 

            Just like John Wilkes

            Booth getting weepy

            At Lincoln’s tomb. 

Of Time and the Riviera

Ah, the joys of the Riviera!  Be it French, Italian, or Mexican, it beckons to us with warm, foam-flecked waters lapping gently at our toes; sun-drenched beaches, strewn with lithe, lightly clad bodies; and tall, soothing drinks, sipped sybaritically under the shady comfort of gaudy umbrellas advertising Campari, Pernod, or Carta Blanca.  Enough of such daydreaming!  The class will come to order for a serious question: why is it called “the Riviera”?

It’s an Italian word, dating from the seventeenth century, meaning “coastline,” ultimately from the Latin riparia (“riverbank”). The first area identified as a “Riviera,” was in Italy, a narrow stretch of land in Liguria, from La Spezia in the east to Ventimiglia in the west.  It includes such famous ports as Portofino, Rapallo, San Remo, and Genoa, which is in the Italian Riviera’s center. 

In the nineteenth century English vacationers flocked to France's Côte d’Azur (or "blue coast"), so named by  Stéphen Liégeard in his 1887 book of that title, in reference to the color of the Mediterranean Sea.  Before long, the name Riviera was applied, not only to the Italian Mediterranean coast, but also to the French, from Menton, near the Italian border westward to Hyères, and including Monte Carlo, Nice, Cap d'Antibes, Cannes, and Saint-Tropez.

While “Riviera” simply means coastline, it came to imply a string of luxurious winter resorts.  Hence the Mexican Pacific coastline, from Cabo San Lucas to Acapulco, including Mazatlán and Puerto Vallarta, came to be known as the “Mexican Riviera.”  The connotation of a “string of glittering resorts” may be conflated with the French word rivière, which is a necklace of diamonds.

Caught thumbing through a stack of well-worn travel folders, the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who is a real homebody, expressed his latent wanderlust in this ditty:

            If I were on the Riviera,

            Where all the glitterati go,

            I might run into Yogi Berra,

            Brigitte Bardot, or Jeanne Moreau.

            If I were there in Nice or Cannes,

            I might meet that guy Sarkozy.

            We’d sip Champagne, admire Cézannes,

            Reveling in la vie en rosy.

            If I were on the Riviera,

            I’d wear a tiny string bikini,

            I’d feel as young as Michael Cera

            And look as old as Toscanini.

High and My Tea

The dining room of a de luxe American hotel, into which I inadvertently stumbled, advertised in engraved script on a gold-colored placard that between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00 p.m. it would serve “Royal High Tea.”  Scholarly research insisted that I find out precisely what this enticing afternoon refreshment was, and it turned out to be an astonishing array of food and beverage that included a pot of tea (Indian, Chinese, Earl Grey, or herbal); thin, crustless sandwiches of cucumber-and-butter, ham-and-butter, smoked-salmon-and-butter, and (surprise!) prosciutto-and-butter; five kinds of cake (fruit, sponge, pound, chocolate, and an unidentifiable grayish one); cream puffs; chocolate éclairs; and—the pièce de résistance—scones studded with raisins and slathered with whipped cream and strawberry preserves—all served from tiered stands onto fine china by a cadre of white-gloved waiters in gold-braided epauleted uniforms.

When I attended an English university many, many moons ago, I frequently enjoyed High Tea.  It wasn’t described as “royal,” however, and it usually consisted of a cup of tepid tea with milk, a hard fried egg, chips, baked beans on toast, and bangers (that’s what British sausages are called, owing to their high water content that often makes them explode when cooked).

Why the difference between the “royal” American high tea and my rather more commonplace English high tea?  It stems from a misinterpretation (guess by whom) of the word high. 

High, a word that we got, of all places, from Lithuania (kaukaras, “hill”), has taken on a versatile range of meanings, including “lofty, expensive, tipsy, rotten, malodorous, forcible, extreme, shrill, loud, serious, abstruse, and liturgically elaborate,” but the two meanings that have confused American tea-sippers are “principal” and “luxurious.” 

Tea, in England, is not only a drink, but also a light meal, which typically includes bread and butter, biscuits (cookies), and, if you’re lucky, cake, crumpets, or scones.  This ordinary afternoon tea differs from “high tea” (so-called at least since 1831), which is a principal meal, specifically one that includes meat, and is eaten in the late afternoon, taking the place of both afternoon tea and dinner.  Americans might call it supper. High tea is probably not often served at Buckingham Palace, and the phrase “royal high tea” I expect would strike most Britons as an absurdity.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou also strikes Britons as an absurdity (as he found out when he tried to strike several Britons).  In days of yore, he used to recite this poetic confection filtered through his tea-stained mustache:

            When you’re in old Blighty,

            And you’re feeling down,

            Be sure to take High Tea

            To banish that frown.

            And when you take High Tea,

            If you spill on your dhoti,

            Just say, “Well, all righty,

            I guess I’ll have Low Tea.”

Standing (Sort Of) at Armageddon

Two days after the recent long-awaited health care reform bill was signed into law, President Obama spoke in Iowa to explain that it might not be such a bad thing after all for the United States to inch closer to being a civilized country. “Leaders of the Republican Party,” he said, “called the passage of this bill ‘Armageddon.' Armageddon! End of freedom as we know it! So after I signed the bill I looked around to see if there were any asteroids falling. Some cracks opening up in the earth! Turned out it was a nice day!''  If it really had been Armageddon, what might we have expected to happen?

The New Testament’s Book of Revelation (or The Apocalypse, as it is sometimes called) alludes to a great world-ending battle between good and evil, and in Chapter 16, Verse 16, almost as an aside, it is mentioned that the warring forces will meet at a place called Armageddon.  The word is from the Hebrew har megiddo (Mount Megiddo).  Megiddo was an ancient city founded about 5,000 years ago and the site of many battles throughout history, including World War I.  Events at the final Armageddon may possibly include heat, fire, darkness, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, hail, rivers and oceans turned to blood, and quite a bit of blaspheming, according to the Good Book. 

Teddy Roosevelt made the term “Armageddon” politically famous in Chicago, on August 6, 1912, when he left the Republican Party (or acknowledged that it had left him) and founded the Progressive Party, telling his adherents, perhaps a wee bit overdramatically: “Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness … to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing: We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.”

Well, maybe.  Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected that year, and the world did not come to an end.  In any event “Armageddon” has entered the political vocabulary. It has a nice, apocalyptic ring to it, suggesting both “armies” and “God,” and politicians of certain persuasions toss it around to characterize their attempt to prevent almost any measure to which they are opposed but do not have the votes to stop.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has not been to Armageddon, and it is not high on his list of places he would like to visit.

            If I should go to Armageddon,

            Full-girded for a fight,

            I think my senses all would deaden

            And I wouldn’t sleep at night.

            I’d be a flop at Armageddon,

            The foe would have his way.

            My arms and legs would both be leaden

            As I went to the fray.

            I think I’ll pass on Armageddon,

            All that fire and smoke

            Would likely cause my eyes to redden

            And make me cough and choke.

            At Armageddon, I would lose,

            And things would be quite vile.

            Instead I’ll take a Caribbean cruise,

            That’s really more my style.

Please Be Gentle

Except when they are hurling accusations like “You lie!” and shouting epithets such as “Baby killer!” members of the United States House of Representatives are unfailingly courteous to a fault. They invariably refer to each other as the “Gentleman from Waxahachie” (or wherever) and never as “the idiot on the other side of the aisle.”  They seem a bit uncertain about protocol, however, when a member happens to be a woman.  If you watch Congressional proceedings on the indispensable C-Span, you will notice that a Congresswoman is not referred to simply as “the Lady from Dubuque” (or wherever), but as the “Gentlewoman” and sometimes, redundantly, as the “Gentle lady.”

A “gentleman” (the word gentle is from the Old French jentil, meaning “high-born”) was originally used to denote a man entitled to bear arms under heraldic rules, but who did not rank as high as the nobility (barons, earls, marquesses, and similar panjandra). The woman with whom a gentleman consorted came to be known as a “lady” (originally Old English hlaefdige, meaning “one who kneads the dough”), a term previously used for a female head of a household.  “Gentleman” and “lady” evolved to mean persons of a loosely defined social position—better than the rabble, but not necessarily ultra-highly elevated, a standard that was variable in different times and places.  Ladies and gentlemen were people who dressed in clean clothes, never said “I ain’t” or “you is,” didn’t slurp their soup, and generally conducted themselves with propriety—just like a member of the Congress.

“Gentlewoman” is an acceptable, though slightly archaic-sounding, synonym for “lady,” but it can also mean (as Shakespeare used it) an “attendant upon a lady of higher rank.”  Other than being the brand name of a model glider, “gentle lady” is apparently an invention of the Congress, for use when “lady” or even “gentlewoman” just doesn’t seem polite enough. 

Always polite enough, but sometimes just barely, the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, proffers these lyrics with kid gloves:

           

            A little bit of politesse

            Can hide a multitude of sins.

            That’s why a villain with finesse

            Almost always wins.

             And so I say both “thanks” and “please,”

             And I obey the Golden Rule,

            ‘Cause if I mind my Qs and Ps,

            They won’t guess I’m a fool.
 

Adjectives Get Religion

Which adjective best describes your religious activity—devout, observant, practicing, fervent, militant (or none of the above)? Certain adjectives seem to attach themselves with greater regularity to some religious faiths than to others.  A highly scientific (I kept notes) Google search reveals the following interesting facts.

Among religionists who are devout (“warmly sincere, pious”), Catholics seem to have it over everyone else.  Google shows 289,000 references to “devout Catholic,” compared with 169,000 Muslims, 105,000 Jews, and 100,000 Mormons.  Among the most “devout” adherents, oddly, are Atheists, for whom Google lists 129,000 hits.

When it comes to being observant (“mindful of or careful in following rites, laws, and customs”), Jews take the cake, or maybe it’s the rugelach. Google finds 75,000 references to “observant Jew,” compared with 57,000 Muslims, 15,000 Catholics, and only 7 Unitarians, who, after all, don’t have much to be observant about.  Even Atheists do better than Unitarians, with 717 Google hits for being observant.

Catholics win again for practicing (“actively engaged in a specified way of life”) with 128,000 citations, followed very closely by Jews with 124,000 and Muslims with 59,000. Atheists hold their own with 14,000 references to those who “practice” their non-religion, as opposed to only 7,200 practicing Lutherans, 7,100 Baptists, 5,200 Episcopalians, 3,700 Unitarians, and a mere 2,900 Evangelicals.

Being fervent (“marked by great intensity of feeling”) is one area in which you might expect Evangelicals to score high—but, according to Google, with 9,900 citations for fervent Evangelicals, they trail Catholics, who have 37,000, but outdo the 6,200 Muslims, 1,700 Lutherans, 1,700 Jews, 1,100 Baptists, and a measly 104 Unitarians who are fervent in their religious lives.

Apparently there is a militant (“aggressively active, as in a cause”) Atheist lurking behind every tree and ranting on every street corner.  The non-believers win hands down for militancy—46,000 such Atheist references, compared with 38,000 Muslims, 20,000 Catholics, 3,100 Jews, 2,200 Mormons—and only 2 Episcopalian references as “militant.”  Even the Unitarians, with 356 citations, seem to be more militant than Episcopalians.

Caught in a posture that was far from militant, and certainly not fervent, devout, or observant—torpid might be the best description—the Bard of Buffalo Bayou offered this humble orison:

            I pray that, when I meet a fellow human being

            Who holds beliefs with which I'm strongly disagreeing,

            Who has ideas that I find lacking in validity,

            Whose actions seem to me to show extreme stupidity,

            Whose looks and dress and manners strike me as barbarity--

            I have the grace to treat that stupid jerk with charity.

Well, What Do You Know [Insert Punctuation Mark Here]

The New York Times begs to inform us that a new punctuation mark has made its way into the books. It’s called a sarcmark, and its function is to identify sarcastic comments, especially in email messages, where context may be slight. Without a sarcmark, the danger is that your sarcasm in such statements as “I really love my boss” or “We had a delicious meal at Michael Pollan’s dinner party, didn’t we?” might be lost on the recipient.  This new punctuation mark has been developed by a Michigan company known as Sarcasm, Inc., which seems genuinely sincere when it offers software to imprint a sarcmark for $1.99.

The sarcmark can now take its place alongside another little-used punctuation mark, the interrobang, which was invented in 1962 by an advertising man named Martin K. Specter. It’s a combination question mark and exclamation point (which is known as a “bang” in printer’s slang), to be used at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question, such as “How am I supposed to take a shower when you’ve used all the hot water” or “What do you mean that’s cranberry sauce on your shirt collar” 

Specter proposed the new mark in an article in the magazine TypeTalks and asked readers to suggest a name for it.  Other contenders included rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest. In 1966, Richard Isbell of American Type Founders issued a font that included the interrobang as one of the characters. By 1968, an interrobang key was available on some typewriters.  Over the years use of the interrobang has fizzled and now it is difficult to find in most type fonts—although Miscrosoft Word offers it as a Wingding.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who is a self-styled font (of specious wisdom), suggests the following additional punctuation marks, and to represent them, he proposes employing some of the weird symbols in the Microsoft Webding catalog whose actual usage he does not know.

    Gloomaloop -  to express extreme sadness or distress:
    My computer crashed, and I lost the 200,000-word autobiography that I’ve been working         on for thirty years [gloomaloop here]

    Sneeracle - to express utter contempt:
    So you thought Robert Downey Jr. was a better Sherlock Holmes than Basil Rathbone             [sneeracle here]

    Geewhizzer  - to express astonished disbelief:
    You have won a Nobel Prize for your chocolate chip cookie recipe  
           [geewhizzer here]

    Dubitab - to express maximum uncertainty:
    Try plugging this prong into that socket and see if it works [dubitab here]

Other suggestions are welcome, but no prize of any kind will be awarded.

Pigs' Skins and Cats' Guts

No, Virginia, footballs are not really made from the skins of pigs, and violin strings are not made from the intestines of actual cats.  So how did the words pigskin and catgut originate?

In the case of pigskin, sometime around the 8th century, the Saxons invented a game of primitive football, in which rowdy mobs tried to kick a ball-like object from their end of town to their opponents’ territory.  It may not seem very sporting of them, but the ball-like object they used was the severed head of a defeated Viking invader.  Later, when Vikings became less numerous (you can see why), the avid athletes began to use animal bladders, sealed and inflated. Sometimes they were pig bladders but more often those of cows and sheep.     

In the mid-19th century, thanks to Charles Goodyear, who invented vulcanized rubber, the bladders and Viking heads were replaced with rubber balls, usually covered with animal hides to make them more durable.  Although the hide was usually cow leather, the old “pigskin” designation was resurrected by an imaginative sports writer around the turn of the century.  And it stuck.

Catgut is the name given to a cord usually made from the intestines of sheep or goats.  It is sometimes used to make strings for some musical instruments.  While the innards of horses, mules, pigs, and donkeys are also sometimes used, the cord has never been made from cats. 

Theories abound about the origin of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it’s a reference to “caterwauling” by an inept string player.  Others think it may be a contraction of “cattle gut” or a confusion of the word kit, meaning a small fiddle, with kitten. 
Our old friend, the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, turned to Mother Goose, who always has a few choice words about various critters—cows, horses, lambs, blackbirds, and spiders—as well as pigs and cats.

    Tom, Tom, the running back,
    Stole the pigskin and went on attack.
    As he picked up yardage down the field,
    The pigskin just sat back and squealed.

    Hey diddle, diddle,
    The cat and the fiddle—
    Now here’s the scuttlebutt.
    A Perlman cadenza
    Gives a cat influenza

Doing It Widdershins

In a British murder mystery that forced itself upon me the other day, I read that the Detective Chief Inspector “stirred his tea widdershins.”  Well, what do you know about that? Do all British cops do it?  Or is it just a DCI thing?  What the heck does it mean anyway?   

Widdershins, or withershins, as some persnickety dictionaries prefer, is a devious word whose true meaning is a little hard to grasp.  Here are some of the definitions: “in a left-handed, wrong, or contrary direction; counterclockwise; in a direction contrary to the apparent course of the sun; contrariwise; topsy-turvy; in a direction opposite to the usual.” The Oxford English Dictionary says your hair is widdershins if it’s standing on end.

So was the DCI stirring his coffee counterclockwise, wrongly, with his left hand, opposite from the sun’s course, differently from the way he usually stirred it, or while he was having a bad hair day?  Take your choice.

The word’s origin is Germanic: widar (“back against’) + sinnen (“to go”). 

For those of you who care about such things (and I expect the number is exceedingly small) the opposite of widdershins is deasil (pronounced just like the fuel).

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who has kicked a few widders’ shins in his rambunctious salad days, is more ruminative of late, especially about murder mysteries.

           

            Oh, Detective Chief Inspector,

            Have you solved the murder yet?

            Was it the dapper Duke who decked her,

            Or the boorish Baronet?

            The Husband also is suspicious,

            For he inherits all her cash.

            The Maid is known to be malicious—

            Her actions seem a little rash.

            It could have been the victim’s Doctor,

            But he’d use poison, wouldn’t he?

            Instead, it seems the villain knocked her

            In the head quite brutally.

            Ah! Perhaps it was the Vicar

            Who dispatched the fatal blow,

            When he has a drop of liquor,

            He turns belligerent, you know.

           

            Of course, her Lawyer might have killed her,

            It’s rumored he has been disbarred.

            So many suspects must bewilder

            All your men at Scotland Yard.

           

            But your deductions are much subtler,

            No culprit’s safe from your attack—

            What? You say it was the Butler?

            Good grief!  I want my money back.