Fiddle-Faddle

An eminent drama critic for one of the nation’s most distinguished daily newspapers (well, perhaps I stretch a point or two) recently suggested that an overblown touring production of that overwritten musical Jekyll & Hyde might have benefited from the “soft-peddling” of certain lurid elements.  It is natural to assume that he meant “soft-pedaling,” the usual idiomatic phrase, derived from the left-hand pedal on most pianos, which mutes the sound, meaning to “underplay or de-emphasize.”

On mature reflection, however, I am willing to admit that “soft-peddling” might be equally apt, implying a “soft-sell” rather than a “hard-sell” approach.

Whichever the critic intended, pedal and peddle are often confused in contemporary usage.   Just for the record: pedal, from the Latin pedalis, is a “lever or treadle, usually pressed by the foot, to activate a mechanism on a musical instrument or other mechanical device (such as a bicycle).” The word first appeared in print in the seventeenth century.

Peddle is an older word—fourteenth or fifteenth century—and is a back-formation from peddler, which derives from the Middle English pedder, meaning a “person who travels about with wares to sell.” A ped is a “pack or basket.”

Piddle, meaning either to “act in a trifling way, dawdle, dally, or toy” or, informally,  to “urinate,” probably is a corruption of peddle, dating from the eighteenth century.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is a piddler of great renown, and one can view the results of his piddling hereinbelow:

           

            Never piddle in a puddle,

            Or try to treadle while astraddle,

            And don’t coddle as you cuddle

            And canoodle in your saddle.

            In a huddle never doodle

            With a poodle who can waddle,

            Do not diddle with a noodle.

            And don’t dawdle as you toddle.

           

            In the middle of a muddle

            Please don’t meddle with a paddle,           

            Never addle as you fuddle—

            Just hit the pedal and skedaddle!

           

God Save the Queen’s English

Recent articles in both The New York Times and the BBC Magazine commented on the increasing invasion of Britishisms (or “Briticisms,” as they used to be known) into American English. Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic regarded the phenomenon as the Yanks’ attempt to sound sophisticated. 

The articles didn’t point out that the cross-pollination works both ways.  In recent years, on visits to the United Kingdom, I’ve been startled to encounter cookies where biscuits once were served (chocolate-chip, at that!), bags of potato chips rather than crisps, sidewalks instead of pavements, elevators replacing lifts, and periods at the ends of sentences where full stops used to sit. Whether that makes the Brits sound sophisticated I couldn’t say.

On the other hand, here’s a quick primer of some words that used to be strictly British but have inched their way into the American vocabulary:

Bum – “buttocks,” used since the fourteenth century where Americans would say butt. Bum, from the Middle English bom, is thought to be onomatopœic, analagous to other similar words meaning a “protuberance or swelling,” such as bump, bud, and burr.  Butt is the older term, from the late thirteenth century, derived from buttock, which came from buttoc, meaning the “end of a small piece of land.”

Cheeky – “insolent, impudent, or audacious,” in use since 1840, probably from the same anatomical notion that gave rise to jaw or mouth off, alluding to insolent speech. Cheeky monkey is an especially evocative characterization of a saucy young person.

Chuffed – “elated, very pleased,” from the now obsolete chuff (“swollen with fat”), which was last used in that sense in the sixteenth century. If you read the Inspector Lynley mystery novels by Elizabeth George (who is, oddly enough, an American), you’ll encounter this word a lot.

Dodgy – “risky, dangerous, suspicious,” first used around 1860 and probably derived from the verb dodge, meaning “evade.”

Gobsmacked – “flabbergasted, struck dumb with amazement,” attested only since the 1980s, and probably derived from gob meaning “mouth” and smack meaning “hit.”

Knickers – “undergarment for women, i.e. panties,” most often seen in the idiom “Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” meaning “calm down.” Not to be confused with the old-fashioned American word that meant knee-breeches, knickers derives from knickerbockers, so-called from their resemblance to the trousers worn by Dutch settlers in New York as depicted in the George Cruikshank illustrations of Washington Irving’s History of New York, published in 1831, written under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker.

Loo – slang for “lavatory or toilet,” in use since the 1920s, probably derived from French lieu d'aisance, "lavatory," literally "place of ease," a euphemism picked up by British servicemen in France during World War I. Others say it may be a pun on Waterloo, based on water closet.

Shag – a vulgarism meaning to “copulate with,” dating to 1788, probably from the obsolete verb shag (late fourteenth century) meaning “shake or waggle.”

Suss – “come to understand, figure out, " in use since 1966, a slang shortening of the police jargon usage of the verb suspect.

Wonky – “shaky or unsteady,” first noted in 1919, and of unknown origin, possibly from the German prefix wankel-, which has a similar sense, or from surviving dialectal words based on Old English wancol  ("shaky, tottering").

Britishisms used by the Bard of Buffalo Bayou are pretty much limited to “another pint of bitter” and “where’s the loo?”  Nontheless, he has tried his hand at a little transatlantic debauchery, which we all hope will do nothing to imperil the Special Relationship.

            Don’t be perplexed by pedagogy,                       

            And sit around just feeling stodgy,

                        Listen, chum,

                        Get off your bum,

            Go out and do a deed that’s dodgy.

            When you are weary, wan, and wonky,

            And feel as dumb as some old donkey,

                        Don’t be non-plussed,

                        You’ll get it sussed--           

             Just hang out in a honky-tonky.

            When your lamplight fades and flickers,

            And you’re lapping up a load of liquors,

                        Don’t feel rebuffed,

                        You can be chuffed,

            Just knock the knots out of your knickers.

                       

            If you are growing old and creaky,

            And find your plumbing’s rather leaky,

                        Here’s what to do:

                        Step in the loo,

            And come out chipper, chic, and cheeky.

            If you are drooping and you’re dragging,

            And your libido’s lame and lagging,

                        Don’t be gobsmacked,

                        It’s time to act--

            ‘Cause sure as shooting, you’re shy some shagging.

Caught Knapping

Remember that old song “The Happy Wanderer,” sometimes known as “Valderi, valdera”?  The lyric oozed pastoral charm:

           

            I love to go a-wandering

            Along the mountain track,

            And as I go, I love to sing,

            My knapsack on my back.

I’ve always wondered what a knap was and why the wanderer had one (or more) in his sack.

Nowadays, there are no knaps, but when the word knapsack came into use (the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1603), it stemmed from the Low German knappsack, which derived from knappen meaning “to make a snapping noise,” which was interpreted to mean “to eat.”  Sack is also Low German and—guess what—means “sack.” So the knapsack presumably was where the happy hiker carried food on which he could chomp away, no doubt making a snapping noise as he smacked his lips.

The knapsack’s cousin, the backpack, is pretty much the same thing, except it’s usually mounted on a metal frame.  Its use was first noted in 1914.

The cheeky Urban Dictionary tells us that the versatile backpack can also mean a form of hip-hop music that is socially conscious, a person who constantly hovers too close to his or her mate or dancing partner, a person with muscles on his back, a nerd who contributes nothing to a gathering but a sour disposition, a manager who oversupervises, or a few other interesting things that I would blush to mention.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has been known to blush on rare occasions, when discovered in flagrante delicto.  Here is one of the more flagrant of his delicta:

           

            I love to go a-wandering

            Along the Vegas Strip,

            And as I go, I tightly cling

            To one lone poker chip.

            That one chip is all that’s left

            Of all the cash I had,

            And now I’m broke and so bereft,

            I hope Steve Wynn is glad.

            But losing all my hard-earned cash

            Was not so bad a thing

            As when I broke out in a rash

            To hear Wayne Newton sing.

Let’s Do Lunch

Hungry, anyone? The New York Public Library currently has a fascinating exhibit about the history of lunch in New York.  It includes the background of the power lunch, the 3-cent school lunch, and such iconic emblems as the sidewalk cart, the Automat, the deli, the diner, the hot dog, the soft pretzel, and hot pastrami.  It also devotes a panel to the origin of the word lunch, which, as it turns out, is rather complicated.

The word can be found in English literature as early as 1591, but with a different meaning than it has today.  A Spanish dictionary of that year lists lunch as the meaning of the Spanish lunja, literally a “loin” or “a hunk of ham or bacon.”

Etymologists believe that the modern meaning of lunch derived from luncheon, which appears in print eleven years earlier, in 1580, with a similar meaning, in this case a “hunk of cheese.”  Luncheon is believed to have its root in nuncheon, a corruption of nonechenche, from the Latin nonus (“noon”) and Old English scenc (“to pour out” or “to drink”). 

Other wordsmiths point to the German non lunchentach, meaning a noon drink of ale, usually with bread.

By 1660 luncheon was used to mean any noontime meal, probably consisting of bread and cheese or other light fare. The shorter form of lunch developed later and was regarded as vulgar.

In his 1755 Dictionary of English Language, Samuel Johnson defines lunch as “As much food as one’s hand can hold.”  He suggests it comes from the word clutch or clunch, although he also includes a possible derivation from the Spanish louja [sic].

In its present sense of a meal at midday, lighter and less formal than an evening dinner, the first usage of lunch found by the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1829, although the Online Etymological Dictionary finds lunch as both verb and noun, meaning “a light meal” or “to partake” of it, as early as William Davies’ 1786 play The Mode, in which this racy dialogue appears:

            MRS. PRATTLE: I always to be sure, makes a point to keep up the dignity of the family I lives in.  Would you take a more solid refreshment?—Have you lunch’d, Mr. Bribe?”

            MR. BRIBE: Lunch’d O dear! Permit me, my dear Mrs. Prattle, to refresh my sponge, upon the honey dew that clings to your ravishing pouters. O!  Mrs. Prattle, this shall be my lunch. (He kisses her).

With such usage it should come as no surprise that lunch was still regarded as a vulgarism as late as the 1820s.  Brunch, by the way, a portmanteau word combining breakfast and lunch, wasn’t used until 1896.

All the Bard of Buffalo Bayou knows about lunch is that there is no such thing as a free one, although he keeps looking.

            Last week I had this great hunch

            (Goodness knows)

            I knew how I could get a free lunch

            (So it goes).

                        Having eaten my fill,

                        I just tore up the bill!

            But the waiter then gave me a punch

            (In the nose).

Little Epergne, Who Made Thee?

Bill Bryson, the prolific Anglo-American author who writes about everything under the sun and sells lots of books doing it, has a problem with epergne. The word, which denotes an elaborate, tiered centerpiece typically holding several dishes or vases, certainly looks French.  But Bryson says the word doesn’t exist in the French language and no one knows its origin. In At Home: A Short History of Private Life, he writes, “For a century or so, no table of discernment was without its epergne, but why it was called an epergne no one remotely knows. It just seems to have popped into being from nowhere.”

But words don’t pop out of nowhere, do they?

Certainly, it’s not unusual for a word’s origin to be uncertain.  Roughly half the words I look up in the Oxford English Dictionary offer only weaselly, wishy-washy, namby-pamby etymologies.  In Bryson’s defense of its non-French origin, epergne does not have an acute accent on the first e, as you might expect, as in étagère. And the pronunciation is invariably given as EE-PURN (or sometimes A-PURN), but never with the second syllable rendered as anything resembling PAIRN-YA, as a French word might be pronounced.

On the other hand, a lot of French transplants, like epaulet, lose their accents crossing the Channel.  And don’t forget the Brits have always been impatient with foreign pronunciations—some of them even insisting the Belgian town of Ypres is called “Wipers.”

But where did epergne come from, then?

The O.E.D. is willing to admit that it is perhaps….just perhaps…a corruption of the French épargne, which means “saving” or “economy.”  It’s a leap from that meaning to a table centerpiece, but Wikipedia’s language expert suggests that diners were able to help themselves to finger foods like fruit, nuts, sweetmeats, pickles, etc., from the epergne, and were thus  “saved” the trouble of passing their plates. Hmmmm.

If an epergne revolves, it might be called a “lazy Susan,” an Americanism from 1906, for which none of the discreetly prudent dictionaries I have seen wishes to venture an etymology.

In French, incidentally, an epergne is known as a surtout, which also means “above all” or “especially.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou likes to fill his epergne with gummy bears and jelly babies to provide a wholesome snack as he puts pen to parchment to regale his dwindling coterie of fans with semi-verses like this one:

            The hoity-toity epergne,

            It may not surprise you to lergne,

            Has ergned the disdagne

            Of folks who are plagne,

            And really just don’t give a dergne.

“Just Call Me Mr. President”

The Presidential elections loom.  I urge all of you to be sure and vote, provided that your political views align with my own.  You know who you are.

If you are one of those benighted souls who plan to vote for the other side—and I know who you are—permit me to remind you what a glorious day November 6 would be for a long ride in a remote part of the country, far from jangling phones and crowded polling places.  Go early, to enjoy the sunrise, and stay till midnight.  

Those of you who are still considering the two nominees will want to know something about their names—other than what they are, I mean.  Earlier this year I provided you with the underlying meaning of the surnames of all the candidates at that time: seven Republican contenders and the sitting Democratic President.  See “Name That President!,” January 9, 2012 at: http://wordsgoingwild.blogspot.com/search?q=Romney%2C+Obama

Now, we have the opportunity of looking at the first names of the last two candidates standing: Mitt and Barack.

As for Romney, it’s probably well known by now that his first name isn’t really Mitt.  It’s Willard, a name he was given in honor of his parents’ good friend J. Willard Marriott, the hotel mogul. Usually pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, Willard is of Old English origin and means “strong desire.”

Mitt is a shortened form of Milton, after Romney’s cousin Milton “Mitt” Romney, onetime quarterback for the Chicago Bears. Milton is also Old English and can mean either a “town by a mill” or a “middle town.”

The President's first name, Barack, is Swahili and has its origins in Arabic. The original root of the name (B-R-K) means "blessed." The root word is used in many other phrases to denote blessings and to describe people who are blessed:

• Mabruk! = "Congratulations!"
• Barakallah feek = "May God bless you"
• Barakah = blessings from God (feminine version of the name)

In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found throughout the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22: “And God blessed (ḇāreḵə) them, saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.”

Obama's middle name is Hussein, which was his grandfather's first name. The name, of Arabic origin, means "good" or "handsome one."

Armed with this information, you cannot fail to make the right choice when marking your ballot. And may blessings rain upon you, handsome one.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has already voted (early and often), but he’s keeping mum about his choice.  Warren G. Harding would be my guess.   Elections notwithstanding, the Bard emerged from his lair down in the doldrums just long enough to leave this little calling card:

            Well, fiddle-dee-diddle,

            Mitt’s town’s in the middle

            Or perhaps it’s just by a mill.

            He has strong desire,

            No doubt, to acquire

            A job as the king of the hill.

            But wait, I have heard

            From a talkative bird,

            Who just flew in through the transom,

            That Barack is blessed,

            And the bird, when pressed,

            Added the fact that he’s handsome.

My Miniscule Momento

Each time I hear someone boast of having a treasured momento, I react with nearly as much violence as when I hear or read of something miniscule. These two “M” words—memento, meaning “souvenir” (or some other keepsake), and minuscule, meaning “very small”—are misspelled and mispronounced more often than not.  Why?

In the case of the former, I suppose it’s because of confusion in generally muddled minds with the word momentous, meaning “of great importance.”  The words, as you might expect, if you gave it any thought, come from two entirely different roots.

Memento is the imperative form of the Latin verb memenisse (“to remember”), and as a noun it referred originally to a prayer in the Roman Catholic Mass beginning “Memento, Domine, famulorum famularumque,” or “Remember, O Lord, your servants.”  Later memento came to mean a “reminder”—especially of the fact that we are all going to die, in the phrase memento mori (“remember to die”).  Nowadays, people probably would prefer their mementoes not to do that for them.

Momentous, on the other hand, is from the word moment, meaning “importance,” which is rooted in the Latini momentum (“movement”).  An event of moment meant something (like a Presidential election or a Lady Gaga concert, say) with the power to move one with force or excitement. 

As for minuscule, it derives from the Latin minusculus (“rather small”), a diminutive of minus (“less”), which, in turn, derives from minor (“smaller”).  Originally minuscule was used to refer to a medieval style of writing and subsequently to lower-case letters.

The prefix mini-, seen in many words such as minimum, minicar, minibus, minicomputer, and miniskirt (but not in minuscule!), also comes ultimately from the Latin minor—but by a different route, through minimus, meaning “the least or smallest.”

To confuse matters even further, miniature, which now means “small replica,” comes from an entirely different root—miniare, which means to “paint with the color vermilion.”  It referred originally to paintings colored red in medieval illuminated manuscripts.  Such paintings were necessarily small, so miniature  evolved to mean anything smallish.

Well, I trust you’ll be able to sleep nights now that we’ve settled that.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has no trouble sleeping nights, or days, for that matter.  He claims it’s because of his clear conscience; others insist he has just passed out from too much booze.  You be the judge:

            If you find in your mailbox a story

            With goings-on ghastly and gory,

                        Dealing with death

                        And someone’s last breath—

            Well, that’s a memento mori.                       

            Thanks, but no thanks, I get quivery

            Just thinking of that special delivery,

                        You tell the Grim Reaper

                        I won’t answer his beeper—

            I prefer a memento vivere.

                 

Say Hello to Fais Do Do

I was invited recently by a friend of Cajun descent to a “fais do do.”  I had a vague notion of a fais do do as being some kind of celebration, but I wasn’t sure what kind. 

It turns out that it’s a dance party, generally one featuring zydeco music and plenty of crawfish jambalaya and beer.  The term apparently originated in Louisiana in the period just before World War II.

It comes from the French words meaning “make sleep,” or, in more idiomatic English, “go to sleep.”  “Do do,” pronounced to rhyme with “go go,” is Cajun baby talk for “sleep,” deriving from the word dormir. 

There are slightly differing stories of the how the term was applied to the party. One is that parents would urge their small children to “go to sleep” or “fais do do,” as quickly as possible, so the parents could leave them and go to enjoy the revelry. 

The other is that the party’s host customarily provided a separate room for small children to sleep during the festivities, and a lady charged with looking after them would repeatedly say, “Fais do do,” so les enfants could get to sleep in the midst of the adjacent merry-making.

In any event, the fais do do to which I was invited was several hundred miles away, and I was forced to decline.  I stayed home and fis do do myself.

The old Bard of Buffalo Bayou is something of a dodo, in that, for all practical purposes, he is extinct—or at least obsolete. So is the pitiful detritus of his meretricious musings, to wit:

            Had I invented Silly Putty,

            I’d be so rich I could act nutty.

            If I had thought up Etch-A-Sketch,

            Think of the money it would fetch!

            Were I the first to make a Slinky

            I’d wear big diamonds on my pinky.

            And I would hold a fais do do,

            If I’d earned lots of Play-Doh dough.
 

A Note (Again!) to the Editors of The New York Times

You—yes, you—you so-called editors at The New York Times—are you aware you have a serious “what ever/whatever” problem? In a recent arts page story, you announced a new remake of that classic horror movie “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”  Tch, tch! How many times must I remind you that what ever, in this sense, is two words?  I did just that in a previous blog of April 12 this very year.  Please see, without delay:

http://wordsgoingwild.blogspot.com/search?q=what+ever

I must admit, it’s getting tiresome to have to keep correcting you about such a simple and straightforward grammatical matter, over and over again.  Okay, Times editors, listen up, once more:

In that movie title you mentioned, 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.”

Now if you should have a sentence in which whatever can be used as one word, it would be something like this one: “Whatever happened to Baby Jane is a matter of indifference to me.” Or “Whatever they do, The Times editors cannot seem to remember the difference between what ever and whatever.”

In these cases, whatever is one word, a pronoun, meaning anything,” “everything,”  “no matter what,” or “other similar things.”  It can also be an adjective, meaning “of any kind” or an adverb meaning “in any case.”  For example: “Whatever grammar book you’re using doesn’t seem to help,” or “My corrections of your solecisms seem to do no good whatever.”

Just in case youTimes editors need some reinforcement, I’ve asked the Bard of Buffalo Bayou to whip up a little sestet as a reminder—and if you get it wrong again, he’s going to write a whole sonnet, something we want to avoid at all costs!

            What ever became of the rules of good grammar?

            Today’s writers think rules don’t have enough glamour,

            So the rules have to be pounded in with a hammer.

            Whatever they write in their latest endeavor

            Today’s writers think is exceedingly clever,

            But as for the grammar, they just shrug, “Whatever.”

Write and Wrong

As it does every year at this time, the English Department of San Jose State University has awarded its Bulwer-Lytton prize for the most wretched opening sentence for a work of fiction.  This year the grand prize winner for bad writing is Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, whose excruciatingly awful entry reads:

            As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his   
     eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash 
     mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat 
     the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to            
     25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether 
     the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his 
     soul needed regrouting.

There are various categories in which awards are made, one of them being the worst (or best) puns in an opening sentence.  Two dishonorable mentions are especially ghastly and worthy of our attention: the first by Peter Bjorkman of Rocklin, California, and the second by Terry L. Johnson of Tularosa, New Mexico:

            The two power-hungry, 20-something biographers met
     with me incognito and settled on penning my memoirs, one
     on a percentage of future sales and one on upfront 
     remuneration; so there is one yuppie I pay, one yuppie
     I owe, ghost writers in disguise.           

                                         ***

            He got down from his horse, which seemed strange to 
     him as he had always believed that you got down from a 
     duck or a goose.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, the contest is named in honor of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the nineteenth-century British author, whose novel Paul Clifford opened with this purplish over-the-top 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 housetops, 
     and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that
     struggled against the darkness.
          

Bulwer-Lytton, incidentally, coined the phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword.” His own pen was more on the order of a blunt instrument.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, besotted with cheap Chardonnay and besmirched with chile con queso, could not bestir himself to come up with a new verse for this year’s contest. No matter:  some of you probably have not yet memorized the lines the Bard grudgingly penned last year, so they are reprinted herewith in their entirety:

            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?

Let There Be (Gas) Light

An infuriated friend reported recently that she had been “gaslighted.”  Fearing the worst, I asked if she had suffered second- or third-degree burns.  But it turns out that gaslighting has nothing to do with actually catching fire. 

As I should have deduced, but did not, without having to look it up, gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse, in which false information is conveyed in order to make a victim (or others) doubt his or her cognitive ability. 

The allusion is to the film Gaslight (based on a play called Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton) that was first produced in 1940 and remade in a more famous version in 1944, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman (and a teenaged Angela Lansbury). Boyer’s character methodically attempts to drive his wife (Bergman) insane, or at least to make others believe she is mad, partly by frequently causing the gas lamps in their Victorian-era house to dim and flicker for no apparent reason. 

Such a manipulation of someone’s environment to disorient them is what is known nowadays as gaslighting. It may take the form of denial by an abuser that previous incidents ever occurred, or it could be the staging of bizarre events by the abuser. It has become a colloquial expression that is now used in clinical and research literature.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who for much of his life has been lit (but not by gas, which is an entirely different problem for him), goes, when he is able, with the flow, as follows:

                       If someone stabbed me in the shower,

                        Then I guess that I’d be Psychoed.

                        And if a gecko made me cower,

                        You could say that I was Geicoed.           

                       

                        If you should burn my favorite sled,

                        I guess that I’d be Citizen Kaned,

                        Serve a big dead rat to me in bed?

                        Well, then I would be Baby Janed.

                        But the most horrific notion,

                        The one that really makes me panicked,

                        Is of drowning in the ocean,

                        For then (glug, glug) I’d be Titanicked.

When I Bale Out—Waive!

Not once but thrice in a novel I read recently, paratroopers in World War II were said to be baling out of airplanes.  The only sense I could make of this was that these intrepid airmen were making large bundles of something—possibly hay or cotton—and tossing them out of the aircraft, an unlikely activity, especially during wartime. What the author meant, of course, was that these guys were bailing out, that is jumping from the plane while wearing a parachute (a practice that seems sensible to me only if the plane is crashing—although decidedly more sensible than jumping without a parachute).

Bail, the verb that appears in the correct phrase bailing out, ultimately has its root in the Latin bajulare, “to carry a burden,” and since 1613 or so has meant to “clear water from by dipping and throwing.”  Parachutists jumping from a plane must have reminded someone of water being tossed from a boat, and the term thus acquired its new meaning around 1930.

Bale, on the other hand, is from Old High German balla (“ball”) and means to make up something into a bale, or bundle.

The confusion of bale and bail is similar to using bait when bate is meant, especially in the phrase with bated breath.   Bate, from Middle English abaten is to “reduce the intensity of, or hold back,” which is what you do with your breath when it’s bated.

If your breath were baited it could either be laced with something tempting as an attraction (from Old Norse beita or “food”), or possibly persecuted, teased, or attacked (from Old English bitan or “bite”), as in the phrase bear-baiting.   

Just after I thought I had finished this blog, what should appear before my unbelieving eyes but another similar solecism, this one in the Houston Chronicle, presumably written by a writer and edited by an editor: “'It's knock 'em dead entertainment,' said the director, choreographer, co-writer and narrator of the flag-waiving musical, whose full title is 'Yankee Doodle Dandy'…”

If you waived a flag, you’d be giving it up, from the Middle English weiven, which means “reject or decline.”  I’ll bet what those George M. Cohan idolators are really doing to that grand old flag is waving it—making it flutter in the air, from the Old English wafian, meaning “motion with the hands as a signal.”

Mercy me, if you’re in the writing or editing business, learn to spell one-syllable words, for Pete’s sake!  (I’ll cut you some slack on the longer ones.)

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has nothing to say about these word confusions, except for his muddled views in this tautologous and utterly unhelpful rhyme:

         Do not write bale if you mean bail,

         The same for male if you mean mail.

         And likewise bate, instead of bait,

         And also gate instead of gait.

         And waive should not be used for wave—

         Naïve? Its umlaut fends off nave!

         Such words are far from interchangeable,

         Their letters are not rearrangeable—

         And yet Mitt Romney can’t explain

         Why Bain is not the same as bane.

Élan Vidal

A recent correction in The New York Times apologized abjectly as follows:

       “An obituary about the author Gore Vidal in

       some copies on Wednesday included several         

       errors….[A]ccording to Mr. Vidal’s memoir         

       ‘Palimpsest’, he and his long-time live-in companion, 

       Howard Austen, had sex the night they met, but did not 

       sleep together after they began living together.  It is not 

       the case that they never had sex.”   

In trying to be specific about the sexual habits of this man of letters, the Old Gray Lady has only succeeded in confusing matters further. When The Times asserts they “did not sleep together,” is that a euphemism for having sex, or does it mean literally only that they slumbered in separate beds?  And when it says, “It is not the case that they never had sex,” does that mean that the night on which they met was the one time they indulged, or that they may have frequently had sex after they began living together, but not in the beds in which they slept?  More investigation is clearly called for!

If only The Times had been around when Dante and Chaucer and Shakespeare walked the earth, think of the insights we might have gained into their lives!  Surely a careful reading of La Vita Nuova, by Times reporters, would have disclosed whether Dante and Beatrice, although they never slept together, did, in fact, converge from time to time in a little nook on a Florence side street.  And The Times could surely have delved deeply enough into the copious papers left by Chaucer to let us know whether he and Lionel, the Earl of Ulster, were up to something besides a military campaign, while not sleeping together on that long junket to France.  And had The Times been able to burrow into Shakespeare’s private life, it surely would have discovered the identity of the “fair youth” to whom the Bard lovingly dedicated his first 126 sonnets—but with whom he never slept.

Speaking of the Bard, that other one, who searches for half-empty wine bottles on the sunny beaches of Buffalo Bayou, he insisted on adding his simpering opinion of Vidal’s sexual habits, and try as I might, I could not stop him:

                        Said Gore to Howard:

                        “Though I deflowered

                        You the night we met,

                        More hanky-panky

                        Would make me cranky

                        In bed with you, I bet.

           

                        I can’t be flirty

                        Past eleven-thirty,

                        While I am counting sheep,

                        I’m quite oblivious

                        To things lascivious

                        And soon fall fast asleep.

                       

                        When I feel droopy,

                        I can’t make whoopee,

                        The thought of it is brutal.           

                        In my pajama

                        To read the Kama

                        Sutra would be futile.

                                               

                        But hear me, Howard,

                        Once shaved and showered,

                        I like my sex diurnal,

                        From break of dawn

                        Till my first yawn—

                        But not, please note, nocturnal.”