Snuff and Nonsense

I’ve wondered if the phrase “up to snuff”—meaning “capable of performing the task at hand”—has anything to do with the powdered form of tobacco that my grandmother used to gleefully dip into. As it turns out, it does.

The phrase apparently originated in the early nineteenth century. In an 1811 parody of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by John Poole, he writes: “He knows well enough the game we’re after: Zooks, he’s up to snuff.” And in another place: “He is up to snuff, that is, he is the knowing one.”

In Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1823, “up to snuff and a pinch above” is described as meaning “flash,” that is “showy and ostentatious.” It is presumed that the derivation was from the powdered tobacco popular since the seventeenth century, in reference to the stimulating effect it had when taken orally. “Up to snuff” became associated with sharpness of mind and superior ability based on the fact that it was expensive and it was generally carried in ornately decorated boxes. Thus “up to snuff” came to mean “up to a certain high standard” of cost and artistic quality.

No one has figured out what the Bard of Buffalo Bayou is up to—but it probably isn’t snuff. 

            A French breakfast is not up to snuff--

            It’s just croissants and other such stuff.

                        No matter how much you beg,

                        You’ll be served only one egg,

            For the French say that one egg is un oeuf.

Hale Colombia

A newspaper advertisement by a prestigious foundation touted its grants to successful immigrants, including one who had excelled at Columbia University.  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, the next item in the ad sang the praises of another grant recipient, who had immigrated to the U. S. from Columbia—Bogotá, to be precise. Not so good.

Norteamericanos often have trouble distinguishing Columbia from Colombia, and I’m here to help. Both names derive from the name of Christopher Columbus, who happened upon the Western Hemisphere in 1492, a date that will live in infamy. 

Columbia, with a “u,” as in the University, the Broadcasting System, the River, the gem of the ocean, the shade of blue, and the Pictures company, is a poetic appellation for the United States of America, which first appeared in England in 1738. The U.S. of A. might well have been named the U.S. of C., if it hadn’t been for another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who visited South America on behalf of the Portuguese around 1500. A German mapmaker named Martin Waldseemüller, having read Vespucci’s journals, named the continent “America” (a Latinized version of Vespucci’s first name) on a map he published in 1507.

The nation of Colombia, where the coffee, the cut flowers, and the cocaine come from, was also named in honor of Christopher Columbus, in the Spanish version, Cristóbal Colón; hence an “o” where the English put a “u.” Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary who coined the name Colombia, intended it to be used for the entire New World. The newly formed Republic of Colombia claimed the name in 1819.

Now, for a simple mnemonic to distinguish the two:
            The capital of Colombia is BOgOtá.
            Columbia is the name of a University.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is a Latinophile because geographic names in South America are easier to rhyme than places like Connecticut and Massachusetts, not to mention Schenectady and Hamtramck.

            May your home-away-from home be a
            Cozy casa in Colombia,
            Nestled high upon a hill
            Looking down upon Brazil,
            Where you will dine on choicest filet 
            Of tender Kobe beef from Chile,
            Hoppin’ john with kangaroo,
            And Lima beans grown in Peru,
            Served with favas and farina
            From the fields of Argentina,
            And from sunny Uruguay
            A toasted ham-and-Swiss on rye,
            With luscious hearts of baby palm
            From balmy, palmy Suriname,
            Then, perhaps, a piece of pie
            Of peaches picked in Paraguay,
            Topped by chunks of sweet banana
            From plantations in Guyana.
            Escoffiers from Ecuador
            May make some petite petits fours,
            And then the maître-d’ will give ya
            Some bollitos from Bolivia;
            At last, to make it gaily gala,
            Viva vino from Venezuela!

The Relevance of Revenant

Leonardo DiCaprio is receiving a lot of attention for a new film called The Revenant, in which he endures a number of unpleasant experiences, including being roughed up by a cantankerous bear and having to dine on a raw bison liver. The life of a Hollywood star is not as sybaritic it’s cracked up to be!

As the star in the title role, Mr. DiCaprio is “the revenant,” a word we don’t see much of these days. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its first use to 1828, in Sir Walter Scott'sThe Fair Maid of Perth, where it means “one who returns from the dead; a ghost.” Formed from the present participle of the French revenir (“to return”), revenant can also mean “one who comes back after a long time away.”

Incidentally, Webster wants us to pronounce the word in the French manner, i.e. rev-uh-NONH, although it allows an anglicized REV-uh-nunt as second choice.

The film, written and directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a man with one too many diacritical marks in his name, is based on a 2002 novel by Michael Punke called The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge. Since writing it, Punke has become U. S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, and as a government official, he is forbidden from publicizing the reissue of his novel. “He can’t even sign copies,” complains his publicist. Punke, however, is not forbidden from collecting the royalties, which will no doubt be ample.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is always eager to sign copies of his work.  He has a closetful of them, waiting for someone to ask for one.

            Did Leonardo’s tummy quiver
            When he had to eat that liver,
            Or did he say, “It’s all for art—
            Please pass the kidneys and the heart”?           

             

How's That Again?

If you ever wonder why foreign relations are fraught with misunderstandings of the other guy’s meanings and motives, you need look no further than an online translation site. These sites, devised by experienced linguists, interpreters, and computer experts (one supposes), offer what people probably believe are accurate translations from one language to another.

While one hopes that the world’s diplomats do not rely upon these online services, such as Google Translate, Babelfish, and Worldlingo, many of them are hearing their fellow diplomats’ ideas filtered through the perhaps even less reliable interpreters who bring their own inadequacies and prejudices to on-the-spot instantaneous translation of complex world issues.  It’s no wonder that a few nuances may be lost in translation.

 

To test the efficacy of the online translators, I tried a little experiment with a couple of simple English children’s verses. To reflect the major languages spoken in the world, I translated each of them successively from English into Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French, and then back into English. Here are the results. I started one experiment with:

 

          Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

          How I wonder what you are,

          Up above the world so high,

          Like a diamond in the sky.

And ended up with:

        I turned,

            And I do not know how to do some of the stars,

            And a flash from the top of the world,

            Like diamonds.

For a second attempt, I started with: 

 

        Mary had a little lamb, 

        Its fleece was white as snow,

        And everywhere that Mary 

            went                               

        The lamb was sure to go.

 

The resulting translation, after going through eight other languages and then back into English was:

            Mary, Mary, was wherever he may be,

            Please go ahead,

            Lamb and wool in the snow,

            And pregnancy.

To test how the online translator would do with an actual current political statement, I chose one that has made the news rather recently, by one of the more bellicose presidential candidates, who said of ISIS: “I would carpet-bomb them into oblivion.”  That statement went through the translation process and emerged simply as:

“I had forgotten the bombing.”

Some other examples of translation fiascos can be found in my book, Puns, Puzzles and Word Play, including a surreal rendition of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

 Maybe the best diplomacy is just to keep your mouth shut.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has never learned to keep his mouth shut and is resigned to the fact that he will never be Secretary of State.

                        

             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.

Merry Little Christmas, Revisited

In this week before Christmas, here is a reposting of a blog that most recently ran three years ago, but I was asked about it the other day, so I think it’s worth recycling once more.  You may have missed it when it appeared before, and even if you read it, you have problably forgotten it. (Yes, you have.)

A favorite song this time of year is Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” with its heart-warming lyrics that cheered up adorable little Margaret O’Brien when Judy Garland sang them in 1944 in Meet Me in St. Louis. 

The original lyrics, however, were not at all heart-warming. In fact, Garland found them downright depressing. “If I sing that lyric to little Margaret O’Brien,” she said, “the audience will think I’m a monster.” See for yourself:

 

               Have yourself a merry little Christmas,

             It may be your last,
             Next year we may all be living in the past.
           

            Have yourself a merry little Christmas,

            Pop that champagne cork,
            Next year we will all be living in New York.

            No good times like the olden days,

            Happy golden days of yore,
            Faithful friends who were dear to us

            Will be near to us no more.

            But at least we all will be together,

            If the Lord allows,
            From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow,
            So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Though credited to Blane and Martin, the song was completely written by Martin, and he resisted changing anything. Tom Drake, the actor who played Judy’s romantic interest in the movie and a friend of Martin’s, told him: “You stupid son of a bitch! You’re gonna foul up your life if you don’t write a new verse!” So Martin finally agreed to make the song more upbeat. His new lyric was:

            Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
            Let your heart be light,
            From now on, our troubles will be out of sight.

            Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
            Make the Yuletide gay,
            From now on, our troubles will be miles away.

            Here we are as in olden days,
            Happy golden days of yore.
            Faithful friends who are dear to us           
            Gather near to us once more.

            Through the years we all will be together,
            If the Fates allow,
            Until then we’ll have to muddle through   

                    somehow,           

            So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.  

You’ll note that the “Lord” is changed to the “fates.” Apparently, Hollywood felt you shouldn't be too religious about Christmas!

In 1957, Frank Sinatra asked Martin to “jolly up” the line "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" for his album "A Jolly Christmas." Martin's new line—"Hang a shining star upon the highest bough"—is now more widely known than the original.

Yet another lyrical change was in store.  In 2001, Martin, a devout Seventh Day Adventist, wrote a religious version of the song:

            Have yourself a blessed little Christmas,

            Christ the King is born,

            Let your voices ring upon this happy morn.  

           

            Have yourself a blessed little Christmas,

            Serenade the Earth,

            Tell the world we celebrate the Savior's birth. 

            Let us gather to sing to Him
            And to bring to Him our praise, 
            Son of God and a Friend of all, 
            To the end of all our days. 

            Sing hosannas, hymns, and hallelujahs, 
            As to Him we bow, 
            Make the music mighty as the heav'ns allow, 
           And have yourself a blessed little Christmas now.

         

So take your choice—depressing, uplifting, or religious—but since Martin died a few years ago, at the age of 96, there probably won’t be any more versions.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who is not yet 96 but after years of dissipation looks about 105, is now specializing in non-sequitur verses, which have nothing to do with the blog to which they are appended. He says it’s a new art form:

       In a fierce game of bridge, I try to play smart,

       And I slam down my tricks with a thump.

       With a club or a diamond, a spade or a heart,

       But the tricks that are best are no-Trump.

Conversion Table

This conversion table was recently passed on to me by a scientific friend. Some of the equivalencies may be worth noting for future needs:

Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = Eskimo pi



2,000 pounds of Chinese soup = won ton



Time between slipping on a peel and hitting the pavement = 1     bananosecond



Weight of an evangelist = 1 billigram



Half a large intestine = 1 semicolon



Shortest distance between two jokes = a straight line



2,000 mockingbirds = two kilomockingbirds

 

1,000 ccs of wet socks = 1 literhosen



2 physicians = 1 paradox

2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Harvard Medical School = 1 IV league

1 millionth of a truite meunière in a bistro = 1 microfiche

6 witches’ spells removed = 1 hexagon

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou knows about spells: when he saw a Mickey Mouse cartoon, he had a Disney spell.

            There were three witches in Macbeth,

            Their cauldron filled with doom and death,

                 The first said “Bubble, bubble,”

                 The second, “Toil and trouble,”

            The third said, ”Whew! I’m out of breath.”

Why-Fi?

On a recent journey to that City of Bright Lights and Shattered Dreams (I mean, of course, New York), I noted that Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport offers free Wi-Fi, as did the hotel at which I stayed. This is a great service to travelers who wish to connect their laptops, smartphones, tablets, digital audio players, and the like to the Internet.

I know that the “Wi” of “Wi-Fi” is a shortened form of “Wireless,” but I wondered about the “Fi.”  Let’s see now, “Hi-Fi” means “High Fidelity,” “Sci-Fi” means “Science Fiction,” and the U. S. Marine motto sometimes shortened to “Semper Fi” is “Semper Fidelis.” So “Wi-Fi” obviously means “Wireless….uh….Wireless….what?”

It turns out the “Fi” doesn’t really mean anything.  It’s just a catchy term, analogous to “Hi-Fi,” coined in 1999 by the Interbrand Corporation and trademarked by The Wi-Fi Alliance. It is a little easier to remember than Wi-Fi’s official name: “The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.11 Direct Sequence Standards.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is a devotee of Whi-Fi—which in his case stands for Whisky Fifths.

            A very shy fly endeavored to try

            To fly as high as the pie in the sky.

            But close to the sun, he began to fry.                       

            He’s buzzing now in the sweet by-and-by.

Everything’s Cricket

The All-Star Cricket series recently played matches in three American cities, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, to promote the sport that is the second most popular in the world (after soccer). Cricket has long been associated with Great Britain and its colonies and now is dominated by teams from the Commonwealth countries, including Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Caribbean nations.

A wee bit similar to baseball, it involves a ball, a bat, and eleven players. The play consists of throwing the ball (“bowling”) so that the batsman has a chance of hitting it and running to score runs. That’s pretty much where the similarity ends.

The earliest known reference to the sport is in 1598, when it was known as “creckett” or “krekett,” although the game is thought to have been played as early as the 13^th century. It was a popular game at the Royal Grammar School in 1550.

The origin of the word is highly speculative.  Some say it is from Anglo-Saxon cricc, meaning “crutch or staff.” Samuel Johnson’s 18^th-century dictionary pegged it to the Anglo-Saxon cryce, meaning a “stick.” Criquet in Old French meant a “club” or a “goal post.”

The name may also have derived from the Dutch krick, which also means a “stick” and is cognate with the modern word crook. Another possible Dutch source, though this seems to be a stretch, is the Dutch krickstoel, meaning a long low stool used as a kneeler in church and thought to resemble the wickets (or stumps) used as markers in cricket. Yet another Dutch antecedent may be krick ket sen, a name for the game of hockey, referring to the hockey stick, which resembles the bat used in early forms of cricket.

In the sense of “fair play,” as in the phrase, “That isn’t cricket,” the first such used dates from the 1850s. 

 
Cricket, in referring to the sport, has no connection to the same word when used to mean an insect. That is a 14^th-century word derived from the French criquer, to “crackle, creak, or rattle,” alluding to the noise made by a cricket.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has always longed to play cricket, since he understands that free beer is often offered to the players following a game. 

            They hurled the cricket
            Ball at Crockett.           
            Then he’d kick it,
            And he’d knock it.
            But he hit a
            Sticky wicket
            When they told him           
            Where to stick it.

Oh, Men! Oh, Women!

Some feminists have objected to the words woman and women because they contain the words man and men and seem to define persons of the feminine gender only as a sub-category of the masculine. They have proposed womyn and wimmin as alternatives.

In fact, the word man referred to a person of either sex until sometime around the 8^th century. Before then, a male person was known as a wer (a word now lost, except in a word like werewolf or as the origin of world), and a female person was a wif or wyf (a word that developed into wife with a specialized meaning). The term wifman was used to designate a female servant.

Sometime before the 12^th century wifman and werman came into use to distinguish female and male persons. Wifman then morphed into woman, and werman lost its first syllable.

Thus woman developed independently of any reference to the male gender.

Incidentally male and female have no etymological connection. Female, a 14^th-century word, derives from the Old French femelle, which is based on the Latin femella (“girl”), a diminutive of femina (“woman”). Male, also 14^th century, comes from Old French masle, which originated in the Latin masculus (“male”). Femelle was changed to female because of the supposed association with male, but the words are not truly related in any way.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou believes that men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet.  Someday he hopes to work that line into a poem. Until then, you’ll have to settle for this tripe: 

            There was a young woman
            Who married a Roman
            Who lived in a house near the Forum.
            She was a slattern
            Whose life formed a pattern
            Quite lacking in proper decorum. 

            Her husband (named Junius)
            Was so impecunious
            She felt she must earn a denarius,
            So she joined a bordello,
            Where every last fellow
            Found her talents were many and various. 

            Now Junius was sly
            And he turned a blind eye
            To his wife’s dissolute occupation,
            And he went on a spree
            To the Isle of Capri,
            For a fabulous five-star vacation.

East is East, Unless It’s Levant

No one seems able to decide whether to refer to the notorious Islamic terrorist group as ISIS or ISIL. The former stands for “Islamic State in Syria,” which seems to be the prevalent term, and the latter, less frequently used, means the “Islamic State in the Levant.” Levant?  What exactly does that mean?

It’s an imprecise term for the geographical area on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, which would include the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Palestine—a good portion of what is now usually known as the Middle East. The word Levantine has been used to refer to someone of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin.

Levant entered English from French, derived from the Italian levante, meaning “rising” and refers to the rising of the sun in the east. Levant has been in use since the 15^th century, its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary being in the 1497 Naval accounts and inventories of the reign of Henry VII, which refers to a “viage [voyage] to be made to the levaunt.”
 
The word inevitably calls to mind the eccentric American composer, pianist, actor, and wit named Oscar Levant. He was seen in numerous American movies, usually playing a cynical, wisecracking piano player, and later became a ubiquitous guest on Jack Paar’s Tonight show. He became addicted to prescription drugs and spent considerable time in mental institutions after episodes of erratic behavior. Among his mordant witticisms are:

           

            “There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”

                                       

            “I'm controversial. My friends either dislike me or hate me.”

                       

            “The pun is the lowest form of humor unless you think of it first.”

            
            “The last movie I made at Warner Brothers was with Doris Day. That was before she was a virgin.”
           
            “Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath.”
           
            “What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.”

           

            “Roses are red, violets blue, I’m schizophrenic, and so am I.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou thinks of himself as an Oscar Levant manqué.  He lacks only the wit, the talent, and the fame of the original.

            A young lady from the Levant,

            Longed to frolic with General Grant.

                        But she found that Ulysses

                        Was the biggest of sissies,

            For Grant just said, “No ma’am—I can’t.”

            So she turned to Immanuel Kant,

            Whom she thought she could surely enchant.

                        But she was too thick

                        To grasp the Ding an sich

            And Kant declared curtly, “I shan’t.”

            At last she corralled Buffalo Bill,

            And hoped he would give her a thrill.

                        She’d heard in the Wild West

                        Men had plenty of zest—

            And Bill said, “I can, and I shall, and I will!”