Assling Around

Among the colorful vulgarisms spoken by characters in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (a raucous entertainment of dubious propriety in which I recently essayed a small role) is the phrase “assled around.”  It purports to be an authentic bit of Texas country slang, although as a lifelong Texan, I must confess the first time I ever encountered the term was in the show’s script by Larry L. King and Peter Masterson.

Its meaning is fairly clear from the context. Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd (the estimable Kevin Cooney in Theatre Under The Stars’ production) is complaining to Miss Mona (Michelle DeJean) that he didn’t see Lee Harvey Oswald shot on television because “I assled around and missed it.”  The invaluable online Urban Dictionary clarifies further in advising that assle is a verb derived from ass (meaning “buttocks”) and means “to vary from a direct course (especially so as to hinder those behind you, causing aggravation),” and in a more general sense, “to drag one’s feet, lag behind, meander, be dilatory or a slowpoke.” 

Vance Randolph in Blow the Candle Out, “Unprintable” Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, comes closer to Ed Earl’s usage in defining assle around as “loaf or wander idly about.”

The precise nature of the derivation from ass is left to the reader’s imagination, probably related to either sitting on it or being slow in moving it.

Neither The Oxford English Dictionary nor any of the various Websters I consulted has a listing for assle (or its variant assel), but they are helpful in letting us know that ass (and its British counterpart arse) stem from the Greek ourra (meaning “tail”), and that it has been in English usage since at least the year 1000 A.D., when the Benedictine Abbot Aelfric referred to someone’s “bare ers.” (He wasn’t a great speller, even though he was called “Aelfric the Grammarian.”)

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has a degree with honors in assling around, from an institution of higher learning that prefers to remain anonymous, for reasons that are abundantly clear from the following:

            An apostle in a castle

            Wet his whistle with a wassail

            From the vessel of a vassal

            Who was facile as a fossil.

            Then he tusseled with the tassel

            On a fissile sessile thistle

            As he wrestled with a passel

            Of epistles full of gristle.           

            On a trestle he would assle,

            Far from hustle and from bustle,

            Until jostled in a hassle

            By a missile on his muscle.

Joan of Where?

I’ve always wondered why Joan of Arc (or Jeanne d'Arc, if you want to get all Frenchy about it) was called that—since she was born in Domrémy, a village in the Vosges department of northeast France, the area known as Lorraine. 

As it turns out, she wasn’t really “of Arc” at all. Her father, Jacques, born in Ceffonds, did not come from Arc either, although his surname was d’Arc. The name d’Arc stemmed from the fact that Jacques’ ancestors had lived in the village of Arc-en-Barrois, and thus the surname d’Arc was handed down to him through them.

Joan never called herself Jeanne d’Arc or used her father’s surname at all.  When she left Domrémy she liked to be known as Jeanne la Pucelle, or “Joan the Maid.” Sometime later she took on the sobriquet “Joan of Lorraine” and also “Maid of Orléans,” from the place where she victoriously led the French in the Hundred Years War.  At any rate it was the custom in those days for unmarried daughters to take their mother’s maiden name, so had she chosen to use it she would have been Jeanne Romée. 

After Joan’s death, King Charles VII honored her family with a coat of arms containing the fleur-de-lis, which granted them the right to change the family name to Du Lys.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is always known by that name, except when he is arrested and, for ample reasons, uses a variety of aliases. But there is no way to arrest his attempts to versify:

            Joan of Arc and Helen of Troy

            In many ways were the same.

            They both caused armies to deploy

            And they shared the same middle name.

           

            One more peculiarity

            Of which I am aware is

            Another similarity:           

            Both of them loved Paris.

A Ram Sang

Anagrams have been around at least since the Greeks invented the word anagrammatismos, meaning “transposition of letters.”  Perhaps the concept is even older, dating to the time of Moses, when Themaru, or “changing,” was allegedly used to find hidden meanings in names. The Hebrew letters in Noah, for example, could be rearranged to spell the word for “grace” or those in Messiah to spell “he shall rejoice.”

The earliest Greek anagrammatist is thought to be Lycophron, a poet who flourished around 280 B.C.  He liked to make anagrams of names, including one about Atlas, the Greek letters of which can be arranged, to mean “wretched” (presumably because of his being bent over with the weight of the world).

Nowadays we have the help of a website at wordsmith.org, which has an anagram server that can instantaneously produce hundreds and sometimes thousands of words from famous names. 

With a stretch of the imagination, you can even make a wee bit of sense out of some of them, especially if the words are laid out like telegraphic newspaper headlines:

Inert Passerby

Britney Spears

(Best in Prayer)

Betrays Sniper,

Nips Betrayers,

Presbyterians,

Nearby Priests

Aeolian Jingle:

Join Agile, Lean

Angelina Jolie

In Jail—Ale Gone,

Alien Jig Alone

Noah and Silly

Lindsay Lohan

Had Only Nails,

Dahlia Nylons,

Shady Lanolin,

And Holy Snail

So much for the famous ladies of song and screen. What about politicians?

Well, there’s the famous rearrangement of George Bush to spell He bugs gore. Or better yet: Go, hug beers. Unfortunately, the best you can do with Gore’s name is the ungrammatical A ogler, or maybe Lo gear.

I tried my hand with politicians who are currently in the news and came up with the following bits of gibberish:

Moment I Try

Mitt Romney

I Torment My

Enmity to M.R.

Too bad Rick Santorum is no longer in the running, as his name lends itself to dozens of richly suggestive anagrams:

Rick Santorum,

Tourism Crank,

Struck A Minor

In Scrotum Ark;

Mourns A Trick

Run Riot, Smack

Into Rum Racks.

Rumors: Catkin

Rusk Romantic

But, alas, our President’s name has too many vowels and not enough consonants to yield much meaning:

Barack Obama

Amok!  Bar A Cab!

Ram A Boa Back!

Bam! Croak! Baa!

The Anagram Server can make 71,439 anagrams out of The Bard of Buffalo Bayou—not one of which makes any sense, and that is entirely appropriate.

            This is an anagram—

            A maharani’s sting

            Gains artisan ham,

            Ah! As mantra I sing!

            I, Satan, mash a ring,

            Again smash train,
            A mania has string,
            A gamin has strain.

           Asthma rains gain,
           A gas marina hints,
           Again harms stain--
           Aha! Sangria mints.
                                          
                                                                                                      

           

Keeping Up with the Jonesing

A review of a new PBS television series suggests that it’s so good “that you will be jonesing for more.”  To jones (for) is a relatively new verb (1970s) meaning “to crave something strongly.”  It derives from the noun jones, from the 1960s, meaning a habit, a desire, or an addiction—especially to heroin.

Around the midpoint of the 20th century jones was used in drug-culture slang to mean heroin itself and thence an addiction to heroin.  Worddetective.com draws a blank when it tries to trace the origin of this usage.  Best guess is that there once was a notorious drug dealer by that name or, more likely, that ‘Mister Jones’ was a frequent euphemism for a local drug pusher.

Jones is a common Welsh name, the earliest record of which in England is in the late 13th century. The name derives from a patronymic form of the Middle English name Jon (or Jone), and means “son of Jon.” The Anglo-Saxon equivalent would be Johnson.

Another well-known phrase, keeping up with the Joneses, is from the title of a 1916 comic strip by Arthur R. Momand in which he parodied American domestic life.

Few people have a jones for the Bard of Buffalo Bayou’s miasma of words, but inexplicably, he continues to spew them out anyway.  

            There was a young lady named Jones,

            Who couldn’t abide baritones.

            If one sang a cadenza,

            She’d contract influenza,

            And drown out the sound with her moans.

To Marceau, or Not to Marceau?

The other day on NPR I heard a blind man describing his attempt to orient himself in a strange room.  To familiarize himself with its layout, he related, “I Marcel Marceaued  the walls.”  This is the first time I had heard the name of the late, famed French mime used as a verb.

The reference, of course, is to one of Marceau’s famous routines in which he creates the illusion of a walled-in space by moving his flattened palms along an imaginary surface.  Although not a word was ever spoken during any of his performances, when he came offstage, Marceau was a ceaseless raconteur, as I learned in several après-show gabfests. He once said, “Never get a mime talking; he won't stop."

According to a cousin, Marceau spent his last years “lonely, ill, and broke.”  He died at a racetrack in Cahors in 2007 at the age of 84.  They say he went quietly.

Other names of individuals that have morphed into verbs include those of Marceau’s compatriot with whom he shared a name, François Marcel (marcel, “wave the hair with heated irons”), physician Franz Mesmer (mesmerize, “hypnotize”), jurist Robert Bork (bork, “discredit by an attack on character”), and John McAdam (macadamize, “pave a road with a small stones bound with cement”).  (The last is not the same as the botanist John Macadam, who discovered the macadamia nut.)

Another noted nut, the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, will never be a verb.  He’s much more suited to be an improper noun.  From under his favorite rock, he writes:

            I Marcel Marceaued a wall,

            And J. Edgar Hoovered a hall,

            And I trust you won’t scoff

            When you learn I showed off

            By Nolan Ryaning a ball.

Don’t Hold the Mayo!

Political commentator Ron Reagan (son of the Ronald Reagan) recently speculated on Mitt Romney’s potential Vice Presidential running mates, and characterized the possible choice of Ohio Senator Rob Portman as “Mayonnaise meets Tapioca.”  His point was that it would make an unexciting ticket of two bland white guys. 

Tapioca is a starchy food extracted from the root of the South American cassava plant.  Its name derives from word tipi'óka, in the language of the Tupí, an indigenous Brazilian people who also gave us the words jaguar, jacaranda, and carioca.

Mayonnaise is much harder to pin down.  Its ingredients are simple enough—oil, egg yolks, and vinegar—mixed to form an emulsion.  But the origin of the word has etymologists scratching their heads (not a pretty sight). 

The most common story is that it came from Port Mahon, capital of the Spanish island of Minorca, where the French defeated the British in 1756 during the Seven Years’ War.  To celebrate, the French commander, Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, organized a banquet, for which his chef planned a sauce of cream and eggs.  But, alas, there was no cream, so he substituted olive oil.  Voilà!  Sauce Mahonnaise, named for the seaport and later modified to Mayonnaise.

But there are problems with this theory. There is no contemporary verification that it happened, and the earliest record of the word mayonnaise in print is not until 1804—almost half a century after its supposed invention.  It’s odd that no one mentioned it in all that time.

Another view, championed by Larousse Gastronomique, is that the word is a corruption of moyeunaise, derived from Old French moyeu, which means “eggyolk.” 

Don’t care for that explanation?  OK, possibly it was originally called mayennaise, after Charles de Lorraine, Duke of Mayenne, who reputedly insisted on finishing his meal of chicken with cold sauce before being defeated in the Battle of Arques in 1589.  But that’s an even longer lag before the word’s first appearance in print!

Going still further back in time, the 19^th-century writer Pierre Lacam suggested that in 1459 a London woman named Annamarie Turcauht stumbled upon the condiment while trying to create a custard. Who she was or how Lacam knew about her is a mystery.

Yet another theory came from French chef Antonin Carème, who thought mayonnaise derived from the verb manier, “to stir.”

Grimod de la Reynière, a gourmand writing in 1808, surmised that the original name was actually sauce Bayonnaise, from the French town of Bayonne (famous for its ham).  Today Bayonnaise can mean a special kind of mayonnaise flavored with chili peppers.

In the immortal words of the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, “Hold the mayo and pass the mustard.” And now for some of his tartly flavored mortal words:

            Old Mitt Romney went to town,

            Riding on his pony,

            To find a V.P. of renown,

            Who’s only slightly phony.

            “The election will be nip-and-tuck,

            Therefore, my Number Two

            Must be someone who’ll bring me luck,

            Oh, how I wonder who!

            “No Sarah Palin do I seek,

            ‘You betchas’ don’t assuage me,

            And every time she tried to speak,

            She’d probably upstage me.

            “Rob Portman’s just like tapioca,

            Or is it mayonnaise?           

            I need a guy who’ll carioca,

            With moves like Tom DeLay’s.

            “That fellow, Marco Rubio--

            He’s very big in Florida,

            But he’s too much of a newbie, oh,

            Outside the Senate corridor.

            “The moderates have made a case

            For me to choose Mitch Daniels,

            But all those wing-nuts in my base,

            Would prefer my cocker spaniels.

            “Perhaps my man will be Paul Ryan,

            But I’m not sure how to judge it—

            Oh, he’s quite an up-and-coming lion,

            But he lugs around that budget!

            “I mustn’t overlook Chris Christie

            To be my running mate,

            He’s not easy to resist—he

            Pulls a lot of weight.

            But what if Democrats should thwart

            The best-laid plans of men?

            And suppose the vote winds up in court—

            Now who could help me then?

            “Aha!  I know the ideal guy,

            If shove should come to push--

            My choice is Jeb, for in a tie,

            You cannot beat a Bush!”

           

Pay the Two Dollars

The other day I said to a friend who was complaining about a 75-cent unspecified charge on his cell phone bill, “Just pay the two dollars.”  “What two dollars?” he replied, “it’s just 75 cents.” 

“Pay the two dollars” is an idiom once widely known, but now fallen into obscurity. It comes from an old vaudeville sketch by Willie and Eugene Howard in George White’s “Scandals of 1931."

The sketch commences on a New York subway. Willie is an inoffensive milquetoast, accompanied by a friend who is an aggressive and belligerent lawyer (which is, of course, a wildly improbable fictional creation.)

They argue, and Willie gets worked up and spits on the floor. The subway conductor points to a sign inidicating a $2.00 fine for spitting. Willie wishes to pay the fine, but the lawyer, as a matter of principle, will not let him.

Penalties escalate, as the lawyer unsuccessfully fights the fine and Willie pleads, "Let's pay the two dollars." But the lawyer is obsessed with vindication--and Willie is ultimately sentenced to death in the electric chair. The lawyer finally obtains a pardon for Willie, and as they return home on the subway, Willie denounces the lawyer for destroying his life. He becomes worked up again and inadvertently spits on the subway floor. Blackout.

"Pay the two dollars" became a catch-phrase meaning something like "Don't fight City Hall" or "Don't make a mountain out of a mole hill."

The sketch was re-created in the 1946 film Ziegfeld Follies by Victor Moore and Edward Arnold.

In Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is told jokingly by his mother (Jessie Royce Landis), "Pay the two dollars," after he futilely attempts to explain his kidnapping and win exoneration from a DWI charge.

Two dollars is on the high side of the estimated value of the collected works of the Bard of Buffalo Bayou. Here’s another of his 15-cent specials:

            Every time that someone hollers,

            “What can you buy for just two dollars?”

            I look on line and find with ease

            Two-dollar items just like these:

            Bottle opener key chains,

            Wooden model weather vanes,

            Ceramic custom coffee mugs,

            Rubbermaid two-gallon jugs,

            Mango-coconut lip balm,

            A fancy-schmancy card for mom,

            Three-packs of mini-writing pads,

            Children’s shorts in checks or plaids,

            Ninety-nine no-scent tea lights,

            Assorted tetrahedral kites,

            Harrods’ special Christmas crackers,

            The Colonel’s fresh grilled chicken snackers,

            A teeny-tiny picnic basket,

            A thermostatic housing gasket,

            Orchid-flavored Airwick candles,

            Multi-colored, salvaged sandals,

            American and other flags,

            Thirteen-gallon garbage bags,

            Tru-Turn blood-red snelled fishhooks,

            Old, remaindered Kindle books,

            One gallon “Gingrich gasoline,”

            A Game Role-Playing Magazine,

            Toddlers’, boys’, and girls’ tank tops,

            Plastic-handled toilet-mops,

                       

            Nearly new young ladies’ skirts,

            Unused Herman Cain T-shirts,

            Five, or maybe six, bananas,

            Garish orange and green bandanas,

            A Chinese bathtub rubber duck,

            A flask of wine from two-buck Chuck,

            Large orders of McDonald’s fries—

            See how much two dollars buys!

Fig Newton? Darn Tootin’

The Fig Newton, as we have known it through several generations, is no more. Oh, they still make the mushy pastry wrapped around a fig paste, but it now has a brand-new package and a simplified name.  Nabisco, the Kraft Foods division that makes the iconic cookie, thinks it will attract more (and younger) customers simply as a “Newton,” even though it still contains the same doughy covering and figgy goo.  If figs are not your thing, however, you can get a Strawberry Newton or a Raspberry Newton instead.

Fig Newtons have been around since 1891, when they were first manufactured by the Kennedy Biscuit Works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and named, for some unexplained reason, in honor of the nearby town of Newton.  Perhaps “Fig Cambridge” didn’t roll trippingly off the tongue. 

In 1991 the 100^th anniversary was observed with an 8-foot Newton and a performance by pop/country singer Juice Newton (undoubtedly a far better choice than Wayne would have been).

The Fig Newton may be confused with, because it is very similar to, the Fig Newman—an organic version of the same product manufactured by the company founded by actor Paul Newman.

Boston Magazine has come up with a list of other cookies named for Massachusetts venues, including Pepperidge Farms’ chunky chocolate “Nantucket”; the “Boston Cracker” (one that has been split and puffed), the “Cape Cod” oatmeal-raisin cookie, the “Beacon Hill” (a chocolate meringue cookie), and the ever popular “Toll House” cookie, invented by a cook using Nestlé chocolate in 1937 at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, which is a long way from Massachusetts, doesn’t give a fig about Newtons of any variety, including Sir Isaac.  He’d rather munch jelly rolls while strumming jazz tunes on his ukulele.  He writes as follows:

            What is it about a Fig Newton?

            It certainly isn’t its fizz.

            No, it’s duller than Vladimir Putin,

            Or an organic chemistry quiz.

            Compare one to an Oreo,

            And it tastes a bit like guano.

            It inspires no oratorio,

            Like a Pepperidge Farm Milano.

           

            Nutter Butter and Chips Ahoy,

            I cannot do without,

            Or Famous Amos, or Almond Joy,

            Or those treats from some little Girl Scout.

            Yet there’s something about a Fig Newton,

            But I can’t say e.g. or viz.

            Yes, there’s something, as sure as shootin’—

            But I haven’t a clue what it is.

Widows in Grass, Alas

Grass Widow is a post-punk trio based in San Francisco.  Post-punk is a musically complex form of rock, full of layered melodies, allusion, and metaphor, developed in the late 1970s from punk rock, which was noted for its lean instrumentation and anti-establishment sentiments.  Okay, but what is a Grass Widow?

The three women who form the band chose for their name a term that has a scattered history and more than one meaning.  It variously refers to a divorcee or woman separated from her husband, a woman whose husband is temporarily absent, an abandoned mistress, or an unwed mother. 

The estimable Michael Quinion of worldwidewords.org provides several possible etymologies, without committing himself.  It is possibly a corruption of grace-widow (French veuve de grace or Latin viduca de gratia), which referred in the medieval church to a woman divorced from her husband by a dispensation of the Pope.  Others, however, dispute this origin and say it is slang from the British Raj for wives who left the hot plains during the summer to estivate (and perhaps engage in hanky-panky) in cooler and “grassier” hill stations. 

But the phrase can be found much earlier—in Sir Thomas More’s 1528 Dialogue, in which it meant either an abandoned mistress or a woman who had cohabited with several men, perhaps expressing the notion that successive lovers had been “put out to grass.”  More writes:  “Tyndall wolde by thys waye make saynt Poule to say thus. Take & chese in but such a wydow as hath had but one husbande at onys...I thynke saynt Powle ment not so. For then had wyuys ben in his time lytel better than grasse wydowes be now. For they be yet as seuerall as a barbours chayre & neuer take but one at onys."

Another theory has it that the term came from the Latin bastum, meaning a pack saddle, and suggesting a child born after a brief encounter on an improvised bed, such as a packsaddle pillow.  Or maybe it’s just a reference to casual coition in the grassy fields

The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the term to the 1520s and says it meant "discarded mistress," analogous to the German Strohwitwe, or "straw-widow," probably an allusion to casual bedding. The meaning of a "married woman whose husband is absent" is from 1846.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou enjoys the company of widows of all kinds, finding them willing to overlook his peccadilloes, since they have no paragons at home to whom they can compare him.

            O, once there was a grass widow,

            Who never could pay what she did owe.

                        Her husband, alas,

                        Was a snake in the grass,

            And left her in debt with a kiddo.

Getting Even

Have you ever wanted to fix somebody’s wagon or settle his hash? Idioms for getting even abound, suggesting that the desire for vengeance is deeply rooted in the human heart.  “I’ll fix your wagon,” “I’ll settle your hash,” “Your goose is cooked,” or “This will put a spoke in your wheel” are all ways of saying that those who have done us wrong (or tried to) will get what’s coming to them—and it won’t be good.

Basically an Americanism, “fix your wagon” had a predecessor in “fix your flint,” which was used in print as early as 1835 in “An Old Sailor’s Yarns” by Nathaniel Ames: “We’ll fix his flint for him before the cook’s dinner is ready.” 

In this usage fix is deliberately ironic, meaning “tamper with” or “damage” rather than “make right.”  Flint was used in firearms to produce a spark, and to “fix” an opponent’s flint would ensure that he could not use his gun against you.  Fixing someone’s wagon emerged in the early 20^th century and probably referred to sabotaging an adversary’s means of transportation. The earliest citation I found was a 1936 Little Orphan Annie comic strip: “Hm-M-- Why not? Once I get the old fool talked into a business deal I’ll FIX HIS WAGON.”

In the mid-20^th century, the phrase morphed into “fix your little red wagon,” little and red being used as demeaning references to a child’s toy.

Putting a spoke in someone’s wheel specifically means to make progress difficult for him.  It was used as early as the 16^th century and stems from the days when wooden cartwheels were solid, with a single hole in them, which enabled a stick to be inserted and to function as a brake.

The meaning of “settle your hash” is “defeat definitively and finally.” Its usage dates to at least the mid-1800s.  The meaning probably stems from hash, referring to a “meat stew” and used colloquially to mean an “untidy mess.” “To make a hash” of something is to muddle it. To settle someone’s hash, therefore, is to put the mess he is causing in order.  Hash dates to 1657 from the French hacher, meaning “axe.”  The word hatchet also derives from hacher, and one etymologist speculates unconvincingly that “settle your hash” refers to “burying the hatchet,” an Iroquois ceremony in which battle axes were literally buried to symbolize peace.

Most interesting of all is the origin of “your goose is cooked.”  The 15^th century Czech religious reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake for heresy in 1415.  At the Council of Constance, which condemned him, Hus is said to have joked, “This Hus is not yet cooked and is not afraid of being cooked.”  Hus in Czech means “goose,” and thus the phrase made its way into England after Hus’s immolation.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou’s goose has been cooked for years; in fact, it’s burnt to a crisp. 

            I’ll fix your red wagon,

            Just you wait and see.

            I’ll sic a dread dragon

            On you with much glee.

           

            I’ll settle your hash, too,

            You won’t get away,

            Where you pedal or dash to,

            I’ll see that you pay.

           

            I’ll put a great big spoke

            Smack dab in your wheel,

            You’ll hate that your rig broke,

            And let out a squeal.

           

            Your goose and your gander

            Will be cooked to a turn,           

            And I’ll loosen your dander

            Till you do a slow burn.

            What say, then, Buster--

            You’re not scared to death?

            I may find this bluster

            Was a waste of my breath!

Don’t Call Me Ma’am!

A newspaper crossword puzzle offered the clue “Polite refusal to a lady,” for which the answer was NO MA’AM. But you’d better be forewarned that calling a woman “ma’am” is not always a good idea.  Senator Barbara Boxer reproved a general for calling her that at a Washington hearing. Writer Jill Soloway dislikes it because it makes her feel “fat and old, like an elderly aunt.” Natalie Angier did a long article in The New York Times cataloguing myriad objections to “ma’am.”

I was brought up—in the misleadingly named Beaumont, Texas (there is no mountain there, let alone a beautiful one)—to say “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” to all adult women. It is a custom that I still follow, as do many men, particularly those reared in the South.

“Ma’am,” of course, is a contraction of madam, a term of respect originally used by servants for their mistresses.  It’s from the French madame, “my lady,” originally from the Latin mea domina, or “my mistress of the house.” Lady, incidentally, is from Old English hlaefdige, meaning “one who kneads the dough,” a term Anglo-Saxons used for a female head of a household.  (Such breadwinners may well have needed lots of dough.)

The Oxford English Dictionary says that ma’am was formerly the ordinary respectful form of address to a woman of equal or superior rank or station, but now it is usually confined to the speech of servants or other persons of markedly inferior position. I guess they mean me.

In England the Queen and royal princesses are addresses as ma’am, after their initial appellation of “Your Majesty” or “Your Royal Highness.”  The word is correctly pronounced, just as in this country, to rhyme with “spam”—although many Brits say it to rhyme with “bomb” or “bum.”

In her Times piece, Angier points out that defenders of ma’am include Miss Manners, who regards it as a polite and dignified form of address. But Angier conducted a survey of her women pals and found that of the 27 who responded, 2 said they liked being called ma’am, 10 didn’t care one way or the other, and 15 disliked it.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou doesn’t care what you call him, as long as you don’t call him out.

        The road to transgression has been smoothed with macadam,

            Ever since Eve brought temptation to Adam.

                        This path to perdition

                        Includes the transition

            Of a genteel Madame to degenerate madam.

Obamacare and Other Eponyms

President Obama’s opponents have used the word “Obamacare” so often to refer to the Affordable Health Care Act that Democrats have now adopted it as a badge of honor.  “We LOVE Obamacare” and “Honk If You [Heart] Obamacare” signs are cropping up to praise the measure that will provide health insurance to 32 million people who currently don’t have any.

Having one’s name attached to something like Obamacare--an idea, a place, a discovery, a time period, or any other item—is known as an eponym.  You can probably guess that it’s Greek in origin: “attached to” (epi) and “name” (onyma).

Obama is among a handful of Presidents of the United States whose names have assumed new life in coined words.  There’s “Reaganomics,” a term for supply-side, trickle-down theories of tax policy, the same policy that the first President Bush labeled “voodoo economics.”

President James Monroe survives in the term “Monroe Doctrine,” a foreign policy designed to keep Europe out of the Western Hemisphere.

To his annoyance, President Herbert Hoover was remembered throughout the Depression by the unemployed who lived in “Hoovervilles”—memorialized in the musical Annie in the number “We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover.”

Probably the most famous Presidential eponym is the “Teddy Bear,” a still popular toy named in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt after he indignantly refused to shoot a bear cub chained to a tree so as to make it easier to hit.  This was on a hunting trip in Mississippi in 1902, and by 1903 “Teddy’s Bear” was a popular toy item.

Of course, almost every President has had his name attached to a city, town, village, or wide place in the road—from Washington, D. C., to Tyler, Texas, to Van Buren, New York. Washington’s name graces both the nation’s capital and also a state.

Some Presidents’ names have survived in vague adjectives that have no specific meaning, but suggest an attitude, a philosophy, or a style: “Jeffersonian,” “Jacksonian,” “Lincolnesque,” “Wilsonian,” and “Kennedyesque” are the most frequent. 

And we mustn’t overlook “Bushisms”— malapropisms or nonsensical statements inadvertently uttered under the pressure of political speeches, to which President George W. Bush had an uncanny propensity.  Some of his most notable examples:

* “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”

* “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”

* "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

* “They misunderestimated me.”

* “Our enemies…never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

* ”There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

* “I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being President."

The interesting thing about being the Bard of Buffalo Bayou is that he gets to publish nonsensical verses every week, even though no one actually reads them.  This week he accepts the challenge to use three Presidential eponyms in his drivel:

            O, send me somewhere,

            With Obamacare,

            Where the doctors don’t charge any fee,

            Where seldom is heard

            A Republican word,

            And the drugs on prescription are free.

            Yes, send me somewhere

            With a vin-ordinaire

            That’s as good as a sparkling champagne,

            Where only the comics

            Discuss Reaganomics

            And other such legerdemain.

            Please, send me somewhere

            With my old Teddy Bear,

            Where the beer and the cantaloupe spray,

            Where seldom is seen

            Fox News on the screen,

            And Rush Limbaugh has nothing to say.
 

           

Whatever…

The New York Times, bastion of all the news that’s fit to print, and then some, opened a recent story with the sentence “Whatever happened to Ron Paul?”  Somewhere on the staff of that august publication there must be editors who know better. 

In that sentence, as in the classic movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, what  and ever should be two words.  What is an interrogative pronoun, requesting information about “the identity, nature, or value of an object or condition,” and ever is an adverbial modifier meaning “over a period of time.”

The same paper in another story indicated that Mitt Romney will do “whatever it takes” to win the Republican nomination.  Maybe so, but at least this time they got whatever right. In this case it is properly one word, a pronoun meaning “anything,” “everything,”  “no matter what,” or “other similar things.” For example: Whatever I say, you tell me to “shut up” or I enjoy Chardonnay, bock beer, single-malt whiskey, or whatever.

The one-word whatever can also be an adjective, meaning “of any kind” or an adverb meaning “in any case.”  For example: I’ll take whatever money you have or There is no point whatever in your resisting because I have a gun.

Contemporary usage of the one-word whatever, following a question and usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes and/or a shrug of the shoulders, is adverbial in this sense, with an added connotation of “why are you bothering me with this?”

What ever became of the Bard of Buffalo Bayou?  Whatever.

            Mitt Romney on the Campaign Trail

           

            I’m not concerned about the poor,

            They have a safety net.           

            Ten thousand dollars says that you’re

            Not going to take my bet.

           

            I really like it when I’m able

            To fire the people who

            Repair my cars, install my cable,

            Or give me a shampoo.

            You’re out of work? Now, listen—shucks,

            I, too, am unemployed.

            Of course, two hundred million bucks

            Does help to fill the void.

           

            My income taxes cause me pains—

            Almost fifteen percent!

            I try to save my capital gains

            (But some of them I spent).

            I do get speakers’ fees and such

            At places I appear,

            But they don’t amount to much—

            Just half–a-mill last year.

           

            Corporations?  They are people,

            Just like me and you.

            Just wait—that Democratic Veep’ll

            Claim that isn’t true.

           

            My love of sports goes to extremes,

            I love to cheer and yell,

            I follow almost all the teams

            And know their owners well.

            How often do I wish again,

            That I could catch a flight

            To see those trees in Michigan—

            They’re just the perfect height.

            Home ownership? We need much more

            To make our nation thrive,

            Why, I myself own three or four—

            Or possibly it’s five.

           

            Obamacare’s abomination,

            I really do abhor it,

            With just one tiny reservation:

            In my state I was for it.

            For the price of gas we owe great thanks

            To Democrats who tax:

            It makes it hard to fill the tanks

            Of all my Cadillacs.

            On my lawn crew, I told their foreman,

            Hire no illegal alien.

            After all, I am a Mormon—

            And not Episcopalian.

            They say I’m like an Etch-a-Sketch,

            But, heck, that’s just plain nutty,

            When there’s a fact I have to stretch,

            I’m more like Silly Putty.

            As for that dog, atop my car

            To Canada—I swear,

            It really wasn’t all that far,

            And the dog just loves fresh air.

           

            You won’t find more, if you should delve

            Much deeper into Romney.

            Just vote for me in 2012,

            And I mean Anno Domini.