“FUCK” AND OTHER ENDANGERED WORDS AND PHRASES

Jerry Harkins



It has not escaped my attention that I am not getting any younger. I’m not quite ready for the glue factory (q.v.) but the number of people who understand the reference to a glue factory is getting smaller and smaller each year. So the time seems ripe to record some of the marvelous words and phrases of yesteryear — yes, yes, Sister Mary Joseph, I know most are cliches and many are venial sins, but you can rest assured this paper will be circulated only among scholars. Since they are beyond redemption anyway, there is no possibility of giving scandal. I am told that many selections are of Irish origin. I hadn’t noticed. One reviewer claimed that there was a heavy emphasis on words related to sex. At least there are no entries that give rise to both complaints.


Asshole. Term of opprobrium thought by the uninformed to refer to the anatomical conduit for noxious waste. Actually, the term does mean vacuous but it derives from the defining characteristic of an outhouse. In days of yore, there were one-holers, two-holers and three-holers, the latter designed by and for persons of delicate sensibilities to accommodate asses of different dimensions, separately or in various family combinations.

At Sixes and Sevens. An extremely confusing and impossible state of affairs, usually involving an element of being at odds with reality. A very old metaphor derived from a medieval dice game called Hazard in which there were long odds against a bet placed on five and six. There is no seven. Hence, six and seven would be an impossible bet. Apparently taken into English by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde in which there is the line “Lat nat this wrecched wo thyn herte gnaw, But manly sette the world on six and sevene” In Richard III, the Duke of York says, “I should to Plashy too, But time will not permit. All is uneven, And everything is left at six and seven.”

Back beyond God-speed. A place so remote that the blessing “God-speed” is of no value because it will not stretch that far. Hence, a favorite destination for those bent on illicit activities. Related to the British colonialism in the back of beyond meaning extreme, fringe, or beyond the pale (q.v.). The Irish say beyond the beyond to describe unacceptable conduct, especially hooliganism (q.v.).

Bagpipes.  1.  A musical instrument uniquely designed to be played by the human elbow.  Having tried and failed to develop an elbow technique for piano, guitar, flute and trombone (see illustrations), the Scots hit upon the idea for bagpipes by observing the rutting behavior of rams.  Why the elbow was so highly regarded is not known.  Some scholars believe that it is because the funny bone is the seat of Presbyterian musical sensibility while others say it derives its mystical meaning from the prominent role it plays in Scottish foreplay.  In any event, the music it produces is a cross between the siren of a Gestapo police van and the feeding cries of seagulls.  2.  An instrument of torture invented by the Scots for the purification of heretics and the salvation of souls.  As is so often the case with technology, however, the Scots failed to see the unintended consequences.  In the absence of ear plugs, they came to derive pleasure from the pain which is the exact opposite of the effect they derive from sexual activity.  By the time they realized the role of the ears in hearing, bagpipes had been banned by the Geneva Convention.

Bear baiting. Vicious teasing. From the English sport in which a bear was tied to a stake and set upon by a pack of dogs. Now confined to a remote area of Pakistan because the Roundheads, as Dame Edith Sitwell said, “…outlawed bear baiting not because it gave pain to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the people.”

Between can and can’t. As long as possible, usually said of a person who works hard from the moment work is possible until it is no longer so (originally from first dawn to nightfall).

Beyond the pale. Outside a boundary, often considered the boundary of civilization or the reach and, hence, the protection of the law. From the Latin palus meaning stake or pole, the root also of palisade. In Tsarist Russia, what English speakers called the Jewish Pale was an area roughly a hundred miles around Moscow within which it was legal for Jews to live. In Ireland, the Pale was an area extending roughly forty miles north and west of Dublin within which British law held unquestioned sway and Protestants could feel comfortable.

Bicker. A drinking vessel often made of wood, often horn-shaped with a wide mouth and a pointed base requiring therefore a separate stand. From the Greek bikos earthen jug. In Scotland, the original containers were probably rams’ horns and it never occurred to the Scots to change the shape when other materials became available. One of the defining characteristics of Scottish culture is the inability to understand why anyone would stop drinking long enough to give the vessel a rest. Actually the Scots liked the shape however inefficient for reasons you may care to speculate about after reading the entry under horn. Is it necessary to add that drinking Scotch in ram’s horn quantity can lead to the kind of verbal squabbling we associate with the word today?

Blither. Diarrhea of the mouth. Inane, meaningless, prolonged chatter. Hence, prayer.

Blooming. In England, a semi-vulgar intensive used in place of the more vulgar “bloody.” What inspires the English to conflate flowers with blood is a sexual psychosis buried deep in their national psyche.

Bogtrotter. A person living on the lowest rung of Irish society, one rung down from the Shanty Irish (q.v.). The bogs in question are quaking bogs made up of large mats of sphagnum moss which appear to be solid ground but are actually floating in highly tannic water. Except in the wettest seasons, it is possible to walk on these mats but gingerly. It is never possible to trot on them and one who attempts it is bound to look (and probably be) thoroughly inebriated until he falls into the water. A person hastening to the outhouse in the middle of the night frequently gives the appearance of a bogtrotter which is the origin of the vulgarism “the trots.” As the moss dies off, it sinks to the bottom, piling up until there is no room left for new growth, a process that takes centuries. When the dead moss is almost dry, it is called peat (q.v.) and is cut or quarried and burned for cooking and warmth.

Boilermaker. Libation consisting of a shot of whiskey and a six ounce glass (called a shell) of draft beer. The drinking of boilermakers is a sacred ritual which must be performed in strict accordance with tradition. The whiskey is drunk first in a single gulp. The beer is a chaser taken immediately after the whiskey usually in two gulps except for the last drink of the night when only one gulp is allowed. Named in honor of Jim Jeffries, the heavyweight champion of the world 1899-1905, who was known as The Boilermaker after his day job. He retired undefeated, and then tried to make a comeback in 1910 as The Great White Hope. He was knocked silly by Jack Johnson, the first black champion, on July 4 of that year in Reno, Nevada. Johnson was not a beloved champion because he had a habit of marrying and otherwise consorting with white women. Still, he beat one Great White Hope after another until Jess Willard knocked him out in Havana on July 4, 1919. It took Willard 26 rounds.

Boondoggle. A wasteful project. Originally a Boon Doggle was a ring American Boy Scouts used to hold their neckerchiefs in place. Cutely coined from bone from which they were often made and dog in the sense of a simple mechanical device for holding, gripping, or fastening something. A firedog holds burning logs. A hot dog was originally a bucket used by iron workers to catch hot rivets. A worker who did this with flair was said to be “hot dogging.” (The great American frankfurter came by its nickname through a different route. See hot dog.)

Born-again. Adj. Undead (q.v.)

B.P.O.E. Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. A fraternal and charitable organization once ubiquitous in small town America and still claiming more than a million members in some 2,100 “lodges” which, if true, is a Good Thing. This and other fraternities were originally meant to provide venues to circumvent the crazy quilt of local liquor laws. Lodge brothers could come in after a hard day’s work and enjoy a drink-em-up before, after or instead of facing the wife and kids. In most towns, the Elks were not as fancy as the Masons or as interesting as the Odd Fellows. Elks are ungulates with a strong herding instinct, the herds being single-sex for most of the year. The males grow elaborate horns which are shed each year and they produce vast quantities of testosterone and musk. Like their cousins, the reindeer, therefore, they stink to high heaven. They are the noisiest of the even-toed ungulates. They are slightly stupider and considerably less dangerous than their other cousin, the moose. Thus, it is easy to see why the BPOE founding fathers chose them as their mascot. All things considered, however, they might have been better advised to call themselves eagles.

Bromide. Something that is so commonplace or boring that you can’t stay awake. Before the advent of modern psychopharmacology, potassium bromide was used as a sedative and anticonvulsant.

Bump on a log. Inactive, especially when one should be doing something. The “bump” being referred to is a fungus growing on a fallen log. The original “fungus” was probably a slime mold which is large enough to be seen as a bump but which is no longer classified as fungus. It may be described as a mass of naked protoplasm that ingests organic material mainly from dead trees. Slime molds are often brightly colored.

Bundling. In New England, the custom of courting couples to spend nights together in a single bed fitted with a stout two-by-six pine board to separate them. Everyone else would stay up for hours listening carefully for squeaking mattresses. This combined the more refined elements of bear baiting and bull fighting and, like them, was designed for the amusement of the audience, not the participants.

Burlesque. An entertainment akin to vaudeville but usually including one or more ecdysiasts as the headline act. The word itself refers not to the ladies but to the comedians who opened for them and acted as clowns throughout their performances. From the Italian burla meaning a coarse joke. Ultimately from the Latin word burra which refers to the cloth covering for a desk often made of coarse wool. While the relationship between a coarse joke and a piece of coarse wool is not as clear as one might hope, burra is also the root of bureaucrat which refers to a person, often coarse, who also covers a desk.

Cakewalk. Originally an intricate strut or dance contest devised by slaves to mock the pretensions of their masters. The winner was often awarded a cake by the master who had no clue that he was an object of ridicule. Later used to describe anything that was simple or easy (which was the way masters viewed slaves). Thus, a racist slur not unlike wog (q.v.). Notwithstanding its sad history, it is one of a large class of words called contranyms, words that can be used as their own antonym, in this case simple and intricate. Seeded is another example meaning either with or without seeds. A stain is a color or a discoloring. Dead usually means deceased but may also mean perfectly or positively as in the expressions dead on and dead to rights. Transparent means both obvious and invisible. Sanguine may be hopeful or bloody. Note the range of opposition in such words, from out-and-out antagonism to subtle irony.

Calamity Jane. A person, usually female, who leaves destruction in her path. In the wild west, Calamity was slang for any sexually transmitted disease while Jane was a sobriquet for prostitutes who never used their real names. Martha Jane Cannary Burke (1852-1903) claimed to be the original Calamity Jane. She was not a prostitute but a cross dresser who fought in the 7th Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer before the unpleasantness at the Little Big Horn. It’s a true story and she was indeed called Calamity Jane but she is not the origin of the phrase.

Callipygian. To adjust one’s position often to make room for someone else, especially as in the polite request to “callipygian over,” an equivalent of which might be “Move your cute ass.” From an almost identical Greek word meaning beautiful or shapely buttocks (the Greeks being connoisseurs of such things) . The English expression “Move your blooming arse” is a half step less friendly, more of a demand than a request.

Candle. A device for holding the darkness at bay (q.v.). Rendered obsolete in 1881, it is now used principally as an instrument of seduction and for something called aromatherapy. Candles were always expensive (although modern designers have carried this tradition to truly ridiculous heights). The expression, The game isn’t worth the candle, refers to the profligacy of playing games that require artificial light at night. Someone or thing that can’t hold a candle to some other person or thing is worth less than the candle in question. It is an insult but slightly less offensive than not worth a tinker’s damn (q.v.).

Chalk Sunday. The second Sunday in Lent. The day a young man who had (so far) neglected his responsibility to make an honest woman out of a colleen was marked with chalk and ridiculed by the children of the parish. The children were never wrong about this because the previous week had been Shrove Sunday and everyone in the parish had been to confession. If you’re wondering what happened to the seal of the confessional, you must not have grown up in a rural Irish town where gossip is the principal entertainment.

Church key. A portable appliance, now mostly obsolete, used to punch triangular holes in pre-pop-top metal cans and, often, to pry off pre-screw-top bottle caps. In a pinch, the church key could do almost anything for which you didn’t have the proper tool, most notably shucking oysters or prying up the encrusted caps of early automobile batteries. Once found in every kitchen, lunch pail and glove compartment in America and used primarily to open beer cans. “Church” in this usage is a euphemism. In many homes, when father said he was going to church, everyone understood he was really going to the local tavern. Food cans were invented in the late Nineteenth Century and, for sixty years, were opened by devices that pierced the rim and then cut it off leaving a jagged edge unsuitable for guzzling. The pressurized can was introduced after World War II and it immediately became apparent that Americans were enthusiastic guzzlers. The church key was, therefore, an essential cultural innovation, one whose passing is to be mourned.

Cigar. A tube of tobacco wrapped in tobacco leaf which was burned at one end and inhaled through the other. Usually made in Cuba by hand and, hence, unavailable in the civilized world for the past 40 years. Substitutes looking remarkably like the real thing are, however, made of shredded peat moss wrapped in plastic, and are known to cause delusional behavior. Other uses have been developed for the new cigars by scientists such as Bill Clinton but their safety and efficacy have not been established.

Clap. Gonorrhea. Clapier is a rabbit warren in Old Provençal and was taken into Middle French to refer to a house of prostitution in honor of the sexual prowess of rabbits (as compared to Frenchmen).

Clear old quill. A newly stropped straight razor. Stropping re-aligns the microscopic serrations of the blade that are the technical reason such razors give the closest, most comfortable shaves available. The expression recalls the difficulty of writing with a quill pen. You needed an old quill that had been well broken in and maintained in such a way that it was always “clear” of dry ink and other debris.

Cock. Any male fowl, especially a rooster, so-called from ancient days in imitation of its vocalizations. Also, to act with disdain from the cock’s characteristic strut or swagger. Also, the human male sex organ and, hence, the human male, so called because of their ill-founded arrogance, for example in refusing to ask for directions or permission.

Colleen. A young girl. Nothing like a gamine (see, gams) but equally breath taking. The colleens were so attractive that the English felt compelled to denigrate them with the calumny that they “aged poorly.”

Cribbage. A complex card game played mostly in the long winter nights of Northern New England in which the score is counted and recorded by placing small wooden pegs in small wooden holes. If you think New Englanders might have found better ways to spend the dark time, you probably don’t know that most of them were Scots-Irish. The closest they came to an alternative amusement was something called “bundling” (q.v.), an activity that was quite popular because it could be done in the dark.

Criss-Cross. At odds with, at right angles to, hence any network of intersecting lines such as a game of tic-tac-toe. King Edward I of England, the “Hammer of Scotland,” had many sins to answer for but he was a romantic, deeply in love with his wife, Eleanor of Castile. She bore him sixteen children and, when she died in Harby, Lincolnshire in 1290, her body was brought back in procession to Westminster Abbey. A “Christ’s Cross” stone memorial was erected at each of the twelve cross roads her cortege paused at for the night. Three of these remain but the one at Charing Cross is a poor reproduction erected in 1864 when the famous railroad station was built. The site of the original is now occupied by a statue of the ill-fated Charles I and is the point all distances from London are measured to or from.

Crock. Nonsense. Polite shorthand for “crock of shit.” The crock in question is the now obsolete piss pot (q.v.) which, of course, was made of crockery. When the appliance companies introduced the slow-cooking “Crock Pot,” it was named by product development specialists too young to know what they were talking about.

Curate. An old fireplace poker used instead of the new one which is kept on the hearth for show only. Hence, a parish priest who does most of the actual work of the parish as assistant to the pastor. The connection involves a certain amount of sexual innuendo as well as the invocation of hellfire. Enough said?

Daisy-picker. A person more interested in smelling the roses than attending to the task at hand. A chaperone who can be counted upon to be less than fully diligent in the execution of his or her duties. Hence, oblivious, a slacker, but not necessarily in a pejorative sense.

Dog. Really awful. The worst performing stock in your portfolio. An esthetically challenged woman. This usage of the noun for man’s best friend got an early start. In the Northern Hemisphere, it refers to the hottest, muggiest days of summer. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky and is the head of the big dog (Canis major). From mid-July through mid-August, it rises and sets in conjunction with the sun. It is so bright, the Romans thought it added its heat to that of the sun, hence the “dog days” of summer. Given that there are some 60 million pet dogs in the United States, it is surprising that someone hasn’t made an issue out of such obvious discrimination.

Dragoon. To compel a person to take part in some enterprise by intimidation, trickery or brute force. Originally a French cavalryman, an ancestor of the Foreign Legionnaires, often impressed into service and known for extraordinary bravery or cruelty depending on one’s point of view. Also a now largely forgotten amphibious landing of American, British and French forces in Provence in August, 1944. Dragoon was originally called Operation Anvil to indicate its relationship to Operation Hammer which became Operation Overlord. The allies successfully fought their way up the Rhone River where they joined up with Patton’s Third Army. Perhaps the finest hour of the Free French Army.

Dutch. n. 1. Trouble, as “you’ll get into Dutch.” 2. Suicide, as in “Do the Dutch.” 3. adj. By halves as in Dutch treat and Dutch door. Hence, halfhearted, half baked, halfway, etc. Just why the English use the tribal name of their charming and accomplished neighbors as a pejorative is not quite clear. It may have something to do with the need the English had in the late Seventeenth Century to be rescued from chaos by the intervention of the Dutch Prince William of Orange. William (a Protestant) was the nephew of James II (a Catholic) and the husband of James’ daughter Mary (his cousin and an ex-Catholic, the worst kind). Of course, it could also be the retribution of a just God for William’s defeat of the Catholic forces at the Battle of the Boyne, July 1, 1690, which confirmed England’s ascendancy over Ireland. To hell with King Billy, and God bless the Pope!

• Double Dutch. A game of jump rope employing the simultaneous use of two ropes. Hence, confusing. Gibberish. Less intelligible than even the Dutch language which lacks both the precision of French and the charm of German.

• Dutch Courage. Gin.

• Dutch Door. A door divided into halves horizontally that can be opened without the danger of anyone coming in or going out. Hence, inhospitable.

• Dutchman’s Point. A task so simple that the most simpleminded person could not possibly screw it up. In Euchre, a hand that cannot be lost because the player holds the three highest trumps.

• Dutch Oven. A domed chamber set in the side wall of a fireplace to capture otherwise wasted heat for baking. Later an appliance for baking on a stove top. Hence, a cheap way of cooking. Hence, cheap.

• Dutch Roll. Simultaneous horizontal and vertical oscillations of an airplane. Hence any extremely dangerous situation.

• Dutch Treat. A date in which boy and girl pay their own way. Hence, a non-treat. Beloved of teen age boys who are long on imagination but short on cash and couth.

• Dutch Uncle. Any stern and uncompromising advisor.

• Ronald W. “Dutch” Reagan. 40th President of the United States. Think about it.

Eight Ball, Behind the. In deep trouble. In the game of Kelly Pool (called 8-Ball in the United States), the object is to sink the eight ball. First, however, you must sink all the striped or all the solid balls. If you scratch on the eight ball before that, you automatically lose. If the eight ball lies in the path of your shot, you are almost certain to scratch. World class players can make such shots most of the time, so the phrase should not be used to describe an impossible situation, only a very difficult one.

Ejaculation. We’ll take a break here so certain of our readers can get their minds out of the gutter. An ejaculation is a short prayer such as “Jesus save us” or “Mary, Queen of Grace.” In Catholic elementary schools, there were competitions to see which class could say the most ejaculations during Lent. If you were lucky enough to have Dolores Johnson in your class, you were a sure winner because she never said fewer than 1,000 a day. Reporting was on the honor system but it took a better man than I to lie about praying to the nuns. Ejaculations, brief as they were, were said to have magical powers. For example, if you said, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” at the hour of your death, you would go straight to heaven. “Virgin mother of God” was good for warding off sexual temptation. As you might imagine, there was a fine line between ejaculations and blasphemy (“Mary preserve us under thy mantle.”)and the thrill of walking that line in front of the good sisters was sometimes irresistible.

Fair Lady. A light-skinned woman of high birth. Matilda of Banbury, not Eliza Doolittle, is the exemplar of the species. Mattie was a lady of Viking extraction who was engaged to a local worthy named Edward. Edward was mortally wounded in a fight with her brother but he recovered in miraculous fashion after Matilda rode around a cross in the center of town mounted on a white steed. A variation of the Lady Godiva story except that Matilda is usually depicted fully clothed. Ever afterwards, young English gentlemen-in-training were advised to ride a cock horse to Banbury cross, to see a fair lady upon a white horse. A cock horse is a hobby horse. A hobby horse was a small or medium-sized light horse having a gentle ambling pace. (I expect a deluge of letters from scholars who are certain that Matilda was a fine lady, an old lady or a pale lady. Others will claim that, like Godiva, the lady in question was quite naked. Finally, there are those who will say Matilda was Godiva.)

Fallow. The meaning of lie fallow is obvious, but, in Ireland, fallow most commonly refers to the fallow deer, Dana dana. The coat of this animal is decidedly spotted especially in summer. The Middle English word falow is the name of the dun color that serves as the field for the deer’s white spots, and is, of course, the color of a fallow field. But in “Pied Beauty,” Father Hopkins praises God for dappled things including landscape that has been “plotted and pieced” by “…fold, fallow and plough.” Hopkins had the richest vocabulary of any English speaker who ever lived. Hence, the suggestion is that a fallow was some sort of farmer’s tool. Throughout western Ireland there are hundreds of pubs called “The Fallow” but I have not yet located an inn keeper who could tell me why. The amount of research involved, however, has not been without its rewards. (A fold is what Americans call a cultivator, and if you don’t know what a plough is you may be in over your head.)

Fata Morgana. An illusion or mirage, especially a rare castle-like form of the aurora borealis. Literally, Morgan’s destiny. From the Italian name of Morgan le Fay, sister and lover of King Arthur, mother of Lancelot, and the Lady of the Lake. Morgan was said to have the power to become invisible, leaving the viewer thinking she had been a mirage. She is thought incorrectly by academics to be a purely mythical personage and, thus, the association with the illusory. In fact, she is based on an historical Queen of the native people of Britain and Ireland prior to the arrival of the Celts in about 1500 BCE. In Ireland, these people are called the Tuatha De Danann, the Children of the Mother Goddess Danu, personified by the River Danube. She was taken at a very early time into Celtic mytho-history and her story became enmeshed in the other great Celtic stories involving the real King Arthur. Anachronistically, of course. It is virtually certain that the Tuatha had been long subsumed by the Celts at the time of King Arthur, but they remain with us in the legends of the “wee people” and in the gene pools of western Ireland.

Fine Italian Hand. Exquisite, said of a person who puts together an elegant plan, crafts a beautiful object or acts with uncommon grace. The usage is based on the development in Italy of the Italic style of lettering. Over the centuries, the expression acquired an overlay of subtlety or craftiness but not in a malevolent sense. A person who uses it interchangeably with Machiavellian is not as familiar with Machiavelli as one might hope and is probably engaging in stereotypical rhetoric. Like God, the Italians are subtle but not malicious.

Flahoolagh (and many alternative transliterations). Gaelic meaning extraordinarily generous, freehanded or, in Ireland, of normal fellowship. “He’d give you the shirt off his back” comes as close as a language invented by Anglo Saxons can but it misses the giving Gael’s sense of happy abandon or oblivion depending on the time of day. The Irish believe, against all evidence, that God loves a cheerful or an oblivious giver.

Flannigan. Battle between two ships close enough so that each crew can see the whites of the other’s eyes. A down and dirty brawl. Michael Flannigan (1783-1901) was a mythical Irishman who was impressed into the British Navy and served on Lord Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar in 1805. The battle was fought with unprecedented violence at close quarters. Flannigan’s subsequent long life was comprised of one great brawl after another in beds and bars around the world. He is credited with a major role in the invention of the high pressure steam engine and he served as the engineer at the first demonstration of the first steam locomotive in 1803. He made one fortune by inventing an aphrodisiac compounded of the penises of seals. In point of fact, there was no one named Flannigan among the 800 crew members of HMS Victory. So far as my scholarship has been able to discover, there has also never been a Flannigan who lived 118 years.

Flivver. Originally a Model T Ford introduced October 1, 1908 and made through the 1927 model year. Later a flying automobile developed by Lawrence Sperry and produced in extremely limited quantity by Henry Ford. Still later a slang term for the PT boat, the name of Ford’s estate in Dearborn, and the name given to a later Ford model. In the late 20’s, values having deteriorated, flivver was slang for anything considered cheap and old fashioned. It resonated with flapper, the female icon of the roaring twenties. There is no logic to the connection—just as there is none for such expressions of the time as the bee’s knees or the cat’s pajamas.

Forever Amber. A 1947 Otto Preminger film starring Linda Darnell, Cornell Wilde and, believe it or not, Jessica Tandy. Even though it won an Academy Award for best score, it was a thoroughly forgettable bodice ripper, remembered today only because it was denounced as pornographic, often and loudly, by Francis Cardinal Spellman. (This was in the days before clerics knew what pornography was and before they developed a taste for it.) The film gave rise to The Pledge, an oath taken annually by Catholics to boycott films rated C or below by the National Legion of Decency. This, in turn, made the Kathleen Winsor novel into a perennial best seller among teens in the days before The Catcher in the Rye.

Foreplay. Golf. From the most common expression heard on golf courses (“Fore!”). Golf is, of course, a game invented by the Scots, the object of which is to bash a wee little ball with a big awkward stick in an effort to drive it into a cold, rigid and unforgiving hole. The idea for the game came to one Fergus Mac Foyle in 644 AD. As he was approaching Mrs. Mac Foyle in an amorous frame of mind, she hit him with her broomstick in his wee little balls. Wondering why she had done such a thing, (Fergus was neither the most nor the least sensitive of Scots) and being parsimonious with words, he yelped, “Fore?” He decided he needed a hobby that would keep him away from his beloved—something that was so boring that she would refrain from accompanying him. He called the game he invented foreplay but it was renamed golf by the Victorians who based the new coinage on an Anglo Saxon root, colf meaning a club. As Tiger Woods once said, “Hockey is a sport for white men, basketball is a sport for black men, golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.”

Frenchie. Condom. A device invented by the French and commonly depicted in cave paintings of the first and second centuries AD such as those found in the vicinity of Combarelles. In France, they are known as capeaux which sounds enough like chapeau, hat, to give rise to a body of fairly sick humor. There is, for example, the report of the widower who attended his wife’s funeral wearing what one guest wanted to say was a black hat. Unfortunately it came out as the Malapropism, capeau noir. Upon hearing this, an acquaintance remarked, “Comment délcatesse!”

Fuck. Copulate. In modern Dutch fokken means to breed cattle and fock in Swedish is a regionalism for penis. This is not strictly speaking an endangered term but its usage has become such a commonplace that it is in danger of becoming meaningless. Its use in vulgar expressions meaning more or less to mess up or to mess with derives from the undeniably messy appearance of the human or bovine sex act. First Sergeant Joseph F. Bouté of the United States Army once used various forms of this word six times in a grammatical 12-word sentence by way of encouraging his troops to attend religious services on Sunday morning. This is probably a record of sorts.

Gams. Legs, especially well shaped female legs. The French word gamine refers to a small playfully mischievous girl. Much as you might like to think of Leslie Caron in Gigi (and who doesn’t?), that’s not exactly what the French had in mind. Think more like Lolita. The French, by the way, got the word from the Greek γαμοσ (gamos) which means marriage, as in polygamous. You see how etymology works, don’t you? It’s by association: marriage - girl - legs - play.

Garter belt. A garment designed to hold up ladies’ stockings. Regarded by men as highly sexy because it acts as a frame and by women as highly uncomfortable. Rendered obsolescent in 1959 by John Gant’s invention of pantyhose and extinct in 1962 by Mary Quant’s invention of the mini skirt. Men hated the former and loved the latter but, unfortunately, the former persisted even when the latter went out of fashion.

Gay. Happy. Hence, unencumbered by heterosexual relationships. Hence, homosexual.

Get one’s ashes hauled. To have sex, especially with a casual acquaintance or a lady of the evening. Coal burning furnaces produced large quantities of ash which had to be collected and hauled away every few days. However, embers could persist among the ashes for weeks. Hence, ashes had to be separated from garbage and trash, and hauling them could be dangerous. Casual sex could also be dangerous in several ways such as getting clap (q.v.) or getting caught.

Gloaming. Late evening, after the sun has set and the last sunlight has faded from the sky but before nightfall. The Scottish word for what the French call L’heure bleu. From Middle English glo, suggesting a residual glowing quality to the dark blue sky. The most romantic time of day and the second most auspicious after only dawn. A moment of possibility. You may recall the Scottish song “Loch Lomond” with the line “And the moon coming out in the gloaming.” The words are not by Bobbie Burns and the song is not a love song although it does recall watching the moon rise over the mountain with one’s lassie. It is a lament first sung following the defeat of Bonnie Price Charlie and his Highlanders at the battle of Culloden, April 16, 1746. Charles escaped but his troops were decimated. After the battle, the English combed the field and the surrounding area slaughtering the wounded. On leaving Stuart Castle for the battle, Charlie was assured that the gate he used would not be opened again until a Stuart was returned to the throne of England. It has remained closed down to the present day.

Glue Factory. An establishment for the manufacture of adhesives by boiling down the hides and bones of unlucky animals for their collagen and gelatin. Often the final destination of superannuated horses. When Elmer Pearson, a chemist working for the Borden Company, invented a superior glue in the 1930’s, the company was afraid, for obvious reasons, to trademark it with its beloved Elsie symbol. They replaced her with a bull which people think is named Elmer but such people don’t know about Dr. Pearson. Today, of course, Elmer’s Glue, like everything else, is made from polyvinyl acetate.

Goldbrick. A Second Lieutenant in the United States Army so called because of the gold bar that signifies his or her rank. Hence, any slacker. Junior officers, especially those receiving their commissions from ROTC or OCS programs (90-day wonders) are greatly disliked by the enlisted grades because they are inexperienced and yet have power for the first time in their lives, an explosive combination. This is one of the reasons why lieutenants experience the highest casualty rates of any rank in combat, often being shot by “friendly” fire. Some lieutenants, on the other hand, know all this and the smartest of them tend to delegate all the important work to the First Sergeant (First Shirt). The dumbest of them are also called “jabasses” from their habit of carrying swagger sticks and poking troops with them thereby enhancing the casualty rate.

Goofus. A jerk, bumbler, an incompetent person. From the Middle French goffe meaning clumsy. As the Eskimos have 99 words for snow, English speakers have a rich vocabulary for describing stupidity. In both cases, it is a matter of simple necessity. A dingus, for example, can be a gadget like a gizmo. But it is also a jerk — not so much a bumbler, but a jerk with a nasty streak. Dingus also serves as one of the infinite variety of substitutes for penis which is perfectly consistent with its other connotations. From the Dutch dinges meaning pretty much the same things. And is there anyone left who knows what a gibone (say: ja bone ee) is? It refers to a person regarded as terminally stupid and is derived from the Gibonese, the inhabitants of Gibeon who tried to trick Joshua into believing they were not his neighbors but were from a distant country. Since Joshua was in the process of slaughtering his immediate neighbors, this stratagem was meant to save their lives. When, as was inevitable, Joshua uncovered the deceit, he merely enslaved the Gibonese. (See Joshua 9.)

Google. A cartoon character whose given name was Barney. Immortalized in a Spike Jones song:

Barney Google, with his goog- goog- googley eyes.
Barney Google had a wife three times his size.
She sued Barney for divorce
Now he's living with his horse.
Barney Google, with his goog- goog- googley eyes.

Barney Google, with his goog- goog- googley eyes.
Barney Google, has a girl that loves the guys.
Only friends can get a squeeze.
That girl has no enemies.
Barney Google, with his goog- goog- googley eyes.

Hence, a cuckold. Closely related to “ogle” which refers to a function of the male autonomic nervous system by means of which a man’s eyes respond in gaga (googoo in New England) fashion to the sight of an attractive female. Also, any fish with large, prominent eyes such as the rock bass. From the Middle French gogelen meaning prominent. Also, the name of an Internet search engine that makes writing stuff like this easy. Said engine was named by orthographically challenged engineers who meant to say googol, the name given to the number 10 to the hundredth power. (A Googolplex is 10 to the googol.)

Growler. Workingman’s lunch pail so-called from the effect its contents usually had on the stomach of its owner. Made of anodized steel, it was shaped as a one-quart pail or bucket with a fitted top and a handle. When the food was removed, the pails would be collected by the growler boy who would take them to the nearest tavern and have them filled with beer.

Hain. To economize, especially foolishly. To be penny wise and pound foolish. To hain a field was to keep the cow out and let it lie fallow. In short order, the field would go back to native grasses. Among the poorest farmers, the maturing grasses could then be used for hay (q.v.) thereby avoiding the expense of cultivation. Harvesting native grass, however, is even more difficult than harvesting alfalfa hay. And, of course, by harvest time, your cow has certainly died of starvation.

Hanging fire. On hold, with the implication of high anxiety. When the cannoneer lit his primitive fuse, the spark would take an indeterminate amount of time to reach the charge. Often enough, the damn thing would be slow or go out entirely necessitating a hair raising decision: relight, replace or run like hell.

Happy as a pig in shit. To be blissful, from the obvious contentment of pigs wallowing in mud. Used by people who know nothing about either pigs or mud. The former are actually quite fastidious. Certainly, they enjoy a relaxing mud bath now and then but, if a pig sty is less than sanitary, it is because the farmer is an ignoramus not because the pigs like it that way. Methodist farmers use the words slop or swill, both nice-nellyisms referring to what they often feed their pigs. Pig food consists of any food that is too far gone to use as leftovers but too good to consign to the compost heap. Of course, the technical meaning of slop is shit (see Piss Pot) and, it must be said, pig food often smells like it. Still, the only milieu that makes pigs ecstatic is mud, which is a natural by-product of the their energetic pursuit of root vegetables.

Hardass. A person tough in mind and body. From the French patois spoken by the Metis of Canada, in which hardi meant bold or fearless. The voyageurs and coureurs de bois, respectively the licensed and unlicensed traders of early Canadian history, usually had Indian families in the West and French families in the East. Ultimately the gene pools blended into a group called Meti. Single women were always scarce and some of these hard working traders inevitably tried other pleasures which they found to their liking. A few became legendary for their skill at the womanly arts of cooking, sewing and beading, and their names have come down to us in the rich folk music of their people. They were called bardaches and were respected members of the community who were as brave and (fool)hardy as any of their hetero colleagues.

Hardscrabble. Barren or marginal ground, especially farmland and most especially a hayfield (see below). From the Middle Dutch scrabbelen meaning to scrape, scratch or scribble. The same root yields the name of a popular board game manufactured by Hasbro. Originally called Lexico, the game was re-named Scrabble because someone thought players “grope frantically” which is nonsensical at least whenever I have played it. The word might have been more appropriate for strip poker.

Haul over the coals. Subject to intense interrogation, often including intimidation or worse. A suspected heretic was dragged slowly over a bed of live coals. In the unlikely event he or she survived, it was taken as miraculous proof of innocence. If a confession was elicited, the convict would be promptly burned at the stake. Ideally, the accused died while undergoing the trial, sparing the authorities the extra trouble and expense. All in all, though, a highly effective method of dealing with heresy.

Hayday. [Almost always spelled incorrectly as heyday, thought by tone deaf scholars to be derived from an African American contraction for “Hey, there!”] The best of times, the peak of fullness. Exactly the right moment to begin the backbreaking work of harvesting the hay. Hay is frequently denigrated (something regarded as important “ain’t hay”) but it is absolutely essential to the survival of the family farm, and it is, by no means, an easy crop. In the United States, we produce about 160 million tons of hay a year, devoting about 60 million acres, or approximately 2.5% of the nation’s arable land, to the enterprise. However, unlike market crops such as rutabaga, hay is used only on the farm. Thus, there is no future contract for it, which, in our debased society, means that it has no investment value. A similar ambivalence has transferred to the metaphoric use of the word. To say, “In her hayday, Ella Fitzgerald could bend a note to the breaking point,” conveys the speaker’s belief that things ain’t what they used to be. It also demonstrates that the speaker has a firm grasp of the obvious but that, of course, is the essence of scholarship.

Haymaker. Knockout punch or some analogous mortification of the flesh. One makes hay by cutting the grass so smoothly that it falls with a single swipe of the scythe, quickly and neatly, ready for baling. If you do a messy job of it, the hay is hell to bale. Precision cutting makes it marginally more manageable. It is the single blessing of modern technology that no one has to use a scythe anymore. A “harvester” can be pulled behind a tractor and its rotating blades will do almost as good a job. There are even easier ways but they are the province of agribusiness, well beyond the means of the family farmer.

Hayseed. Rube, bumpkin, yokel. An unsophisticated, gullible person from the supposed intellectual simplicity of farmers. This is ignorant in that hay is harvested before it flowers never mind goes to seed. Thus, technically, there is no such thing as hayseed, only the seed of the grass or legume from which the hay is made. On the other hand, you do have to be pretty dumb to think you can manage a hay meadow. The opposite of a hayseed is a person with “street smarts,” someone too smart to be a farmer and too stupid to know how to farm.

Haywire. All fucked up. See Dictionary of Psychiatric Disorders under “Looney Tunes.” From the tendency of the cheap wire used to bale hay to work itself into crazy quilt knots. Also, from the madness of small farmers who fantasize about their Utopian way of life. Baling and, a few months later, unbaling hay are two of the most ridiculous, time consuming and life threatening jobs still legal under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. There are machines that can be attached to combines that will bale hay automatically for any farmer rich enough to own or rent a combine. The combines do not, however, do haywire. You have to be really dim for that. Instead, they wrap the hay in 5 mm plastic tarps from which it cannot be extracted without a chain saw. Do you have any idea how much hay it takes to feed a single cow during a long Kansas winter? The bastards have nine stomachs.

HBC. Here before Christ. Said of the First Families of Virginia, the Boston Brahmins, denizens of Philadelphia’s Main Line, Daughters of the American Revolution and anyone else who’s family has been here longer than yours. Originally said of French Canadians whose roots go back to the Sixteenth Century explorers. Derived from the name of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the great Canadian institution founded in 1670 and still the country’s fifth largest employer.

Head over heels. Thoroughly, with abandon. He fell head over heels in love. Note that, with the exception of lorises, having one’s head over one’s heels is the default position for primates. Originally, the expression was heels over head and expressed the exuberance of a somersault. It is not known when or why the corruption occurred but it must have coincided with gentrification brought about by the Holy Inquisition.

His Heels. The Jack or Knave, especially of the trump suit. In cribbage (q.v.), a Jack of the same suit as the card that is turned up to begin play. A Jack was a person of the lower classes who was a royal servant Such persons were thought to be promiscuous or to have round heels although that phrase was more often applied to women.

Hold at bay. To maintain in temporary balance. Check but not checkmate. Webster’s Unabridged lists 103 meanings for the word bay and a goodly number of them fit this phrase. In Middle English and Old French, bay referred to a dam or lock, both of which hold back water for a time. It also refers to the standoff between a pack of baying hounds and a treed fox, a situation that will be remedied as soon as the pack of baying hunters arrives. To hold something in abeyance derives from the same roots and means the same thing. It is spelled with an e only to encourage people to misspell it.

Hooligan[ism]. Englishman, especially a young soccer fan. Rowdy, uncouth, often implying destructive mob behavior including looting. There is a strong class connotation in the word which arose abruptly in 1898, derived from the name of a possibly mythical Irish family living in the London slums. The unpretty image was immediately applied to John Bull himself in his guise as an imperialist. An editorial in the Literary Digest for December 23, 1899 claimed, “Th[e] high priest of this cult of ‘Hooliganism’ is Rudyard Kipling, poet-laureate of the Anglo-Saxon empire…The Hooligans who form the scum and the undercurrent of modern society in every country hail him as their prophet.” The American cartoonist Thomas Nast created a famous image of the Irishman as an unevolved ape man which, 30 years later, became the quintessential representation of a hooligan.

Horn. Any of several musical instruments derived from the shofar, a ram’s horn blown in the synagogue during the high holy days. The shofar has all the musical subtlety of a bagpipe (q.v.). Given the shape of the original and the well known predilections of rams, the adverb horny has become a metaphor for the condition of having an erect penis which can also be blown but without significant musical effect. A tin horn is a lesser version (tin being deemed lesser than brass), lacking the stature and experience of the real thing. A green horn is a recent Irish immigrant. Since there is no such thing as a green horn in nature, you may draw your own conclusions.

Huckster. A sales person, especially one who uses pressure tactics. Once referred to any middleman. From Middle English and Middle Dutch roots meaning hawk which is, of course, one of nature’s most efficient predators.

Huggah dah puggah. Something that needs doing or saying. “He didn’t say huggah dah puggah” implies that he should have said something but didn’t. A poetic metaphor for see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Cugger, pronounced ugh-a in the West of Ireland, means whisper. A púcóg is a blindfold. Thus, whispering in the dark (see also whistling in the dark).

Hob. Mischief from Hobbe a diminutive of the name Robin as in Hood. (The surname of the mischievous English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is, however, merely a delightful quirk of history.) “Hob and nob!” was used as a toast to companionship (originally of the merry men who nobbed with Rob) or, from a different etymology (habben, to have), to whatever may come. To hobnob means to socialize, especially with the nabobs who were native royals retained as British viceroys. Contrast with wog (q.v.).

Hot Dog. A tubular sausage served in a split bun, often called a frankfurter. Evolved from various spiced and ground secondary meats popularized in Frankfurt, Germany in the late fifteenth century. There are many charming legends about the origin of the term hot dog to describe this delicacy but the Germans have been calling them Heiser Hunds for centuries—heiser in the sense of hot spices and hunds because of their shape which is reminiscent of dachshunds. In America, the name was changed to hot dog during World War I.

Hurling and curling. Wiling away the hours pleasantly but not productively. Hurling and curling are two of Ireland’s most popular sports. The latter has of late been added to the Olympic Games as a winter sport which is dominated by Canadian women of Scots Irish extraction. Hurling is a little like the American Indian game of Lacrosse except with fewer rules. It is the only known sport in which the players’ performance is actually enhanced by drinking copious amounts of hard liquor. Scoobeen is a version of hurling that pits one whole town against another often with 500 or more players on each side. There are no winners or losers but anyone left standing at nightfall gets free drinks. Scoobeen has, therefore, come to refer to a drunken riot.

Ice Box. A chest made of oak and lined with tin or the more upscale zinc for the cold storage of food. Ice was delivered in 50-pound blocks which melted slowly into a water pan that had to be emptied regularly. Pantries were extensions of middle class kitchens built on stilts with a drain in the floor, thereby eliminating the need for the pan. The ice was harvested from frozen lakes and fresh water rivers during the cold months and stored in 200- and 300-pound blocks in ice houses where the blocks were insulated with sawdust. For this reason, the ice business was often an adjunct of the local lumber yard. Ice businesses were also owned by coal companies which had in place a seasonally complementary distribution system of horse drawn carts and very strong men. For obvious reasons, early entrepreneurs often carried all three of these lines.

Ice Cube. A small, cube-shaped piece of frozen water ideal for chilling drinks. Because of the way water freezes, they were never perfect cubes having a slight dome on top and slightly rounded corners. Still, they worked well in a glass which is more than can be said for the misbegotten half moon shaped “cubes” that have replaced them. The latter conform perfectly to the side of the glass, forcing the liquid to run around them and dribble down the drinker’s chin. But the half moons are easy for ice machines to make and it’s important to keep the machines happy.

Inspector of Public Buildings. A loafer or ne’er-do-well. More recently, a worker who must be bribed to perform the minimal duties of a job. The phrase pre-dates the New York City Department of Buildings which is, therefore, an example of convergent evolution.

Jerrybuilt. Anything made in a slapdash or unorthodox fashion. Named for a possibly fictional Seabee named Jerry who could make anything the Navy needed from a torpedo to a bridge using only tin cans and string. (A Gerry can is a gasoline container without an airlock and, hence, liable to explosion. So called in denigration of the German soldiers (Gerries) who had to use them in World War II, and now used exclusively by American suburbanites to purchase gas for their lawnmowers. To gerrymander is to rig a political district so as to favor a particular candidate or party. Named for Governor Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts who invented the technique. Many colorful political practices got their start in Massachusetts even before the ascendancy of the Irish.)

Jism. Energy, juice (as in electric current), hence semen, hence any viscous fluid. The OED admits it does not know the origin of the word in spite of its clear connection to jazz (see jukebox). Research will no doubt reveal that it is a West African word meaning pep or vim and was part of the jazz-jog-juke complex. Nonetheless, “pass the jism” referred to whatever was the hottest hot sauce among the condiments, and a “quart of jism” referred originally to kerosene, later to automotive oil. A “bottle” of jism is ketchup.

Jukebox. A cabinet, often with colorful neon graphics, containing many records (now CD’s) which may be selected and played upon payment of a modest fee. Such devices were an important part of the mating rituals of American teenagers circa 1950. The verb juke is a Southern regionalism meaning to mess around. The noun joog from which juke is derived is Gullah for brothel. Some bright doctoral candidate should take up the relationship between these words and jazz. As an encouragement, it can be mentioned that the term jig-jag and the word jog are also encountered in African-American dialect as synonyms for sexual intercourse. Also see jism.

Kibosh (kybosh). Check. To “put the kibosh on” is to prevent something from happening. There is a hint of using sorcery to do so, but nothing as strong as a hex or jinx. Cie bais is Irish for the death cap, the most poisonous mushroom in the world (Amanita phalloides), one bite of which will stop any discussion in its tracks. The botanist who gave the fungus its Latin name had a sense of humor. Phalloides, of course, means phallic and refers to the shape. Amanita is the Aramaic equivalent of semper fidelis. So what we have here is a tribute to an ever faithful penis. The only thing left to discover is whether the botanist was male or female, married or single.

KP. Kitchen police. Soldiers who once performed the most menial duties in appropriately named mess halls. Also, the duties themselves. The word police refers to any control or regulation of matters affecting the comfort, health, morals, safety, or prosperity of the public. Its use in law enforcement is merely a specific example of this. KP is now obsolete having been replaced by the Halliburton Corporation.

KY. Of no use; useless. In the America of the 1830’s, there was an upsurge of language “reformers” who thought that English spelling and grammar were excessively capricious. Being mainly academics, politicians and journalists, they imagined that the phrase “no use” might be rendered “know yuse.” For obvious reasons, it never caught on, but its initials, KY, did survive longer than you might expect. The marketing geniuses who named KY Jelly were blithely ignorant of this history while the postal officials who came up with the 2-letter abbreviations for the states may have been making a point. (A far more lasting contribution of the reformers was OK which derives from “oll korrect.”)

Kileen. An abandoned churchyard used only for the burial of unbaptized infants. Hence, any place to be avoided at all cost. The theology of limbo has changed since Vatican II. The church no longer says you have to be baptized to be saved but merely claims that it knows of no other way. In Ireland, it was generally assumed that everybody was going to hell anyway, so why the kileen was considered a place of dread is not perfectly clear. Limbo was clearly preferable to hell and purgatory and, in some ways, to heaven itself. I suspect it went back to the pre-Christian era when the Irish may have been less sophisticated and more superstitious than at present.

Kilroy. Legendary, ubiquitous cartoon character of World War II vintage, named for James J. Kilroy a Boston dock worker whose signature “Kilroy was here” was marked on shipments going from Pier 4 to all the war fronts. There are a half dozen myths as to why he used this mark. The surname is common in Ireland where it is also a suffix in place names. Ballymackilroy is the town near a mill owned by Kilroy’s son.

Lace Curtain Irish. Irish American persons, mostly female, who have acquired what they believe to be upper class tastes and sensibilities as evidenced by their predilection for fine window treatments. In Ireland, persons of refinement were invariably Anglo Irish and Protestant and it was to this class that the immigrants looked in an effort to feel better about themselves in a hostile environment. In the old country, the distinction between the classes was not so much lace versus muslin curtains as it was glass versus mica windows. Those who lived in thatched huts had no glass and many had no mica either. What windows they had were simply holes in the wall except in winter when they might be covered with newspaper, cotton oilcloth or isinglass made from the air bladders of sturgeon. Not all Irish Americans developed airs and those who did not were referred to as Shanty Irish (q.v.). Some Shanty Irish Americans became successful politicians or prelates and most of these tried to pass as Lace Curtain. Jiggs and Maggie won the Irish Lottery and “Bringing Up Father” became a long running comic strip displaying her success and his failure to make the transition.

L’heure bleu. A perfume by Guerlain introduced in 1912 just as la Belle Epoque was giving way to the modern. One of the great fragrances, mostly floral with vanilla and balsam base notes, redolent of romance. Think of joie de vivre, the Folies Bergère or Le Moulin Rouge of “Can-Can.” The term itself refers to the “blue hour,” the interval between the dusk and the dark. After the sun sets, the sky remains light for a time, then comes the a brief interval of infinite possibility when the sky glows blue, the world is still not dark, and the first stars appear. In the winter, this magical moment is over in a heartbeat but in summer, especially in Paris, most especially on the banks of the Seine, it lingers for as long as fifteen minutes.

Macushla. Ancient Irish term of endearment often rendered as “my dear” or “dearest,” and so translated at the end of the movie “Million Dollar Baby.” The literal meaning is “pulse of my heart.” You will have to take my word for the fact that it is derived from the archaic expression “cuirle mo roioe.” The blue eyed macushla of the 1910 song by Josephine V. Rowe and Dermot MacMurrough is the singer’s dead lover. It was made famous by the great Irish tenor John McCormack.

Make hay while the sun shines. Timing is everything. To continue our obsession with hay, it must be dried to a moisture content of no less than 18% and no more than 22% before you can bale it, otherwise it will either burn or rot. Not that there is much practical difference because, as hay rots, its temperature rises. At about 115ºF, it becomes subject to spontaneous combustion. Thus, in most places, you need at least a week of steady sunshine between harvesting and baling the hay. This is a crucial time when the farmer prays for dry weather, thus confusing even God who is used to hearing him plead for rain. It is also why so many farmers are Presbyterians. They believe (rightly in my view) that God will grant the most contradictory wishes of the elect, whereas the non-elect can fend for themselves. When farming was a sane activity, no one baled hay. They pitched it loose into haylofts with pitchforks. Loose hay, of course, is less subject to combustion but also takes up considerably more space. Still, the destiny of barns is to burn down one way or another which is why barn raising became a neighborly and often festive occasion. A barn fire is not a bonfire although the results can be similar. A bonfire is a large, hot fire set outdoors for various liturgical reasons including the reduction of heretics to ashes.

Make the match. To ingratiate oneself in a manner just short of obsequiousness. To be deferential as one might be on first meeting one’s prospective in-laws. The forests of Ireland were stripped bare to meet the needs of the British Navy. Thus, wooden structures became quite rare and carpentry became an endangered craft. Occasionally, however, timber could be salvaged from sunken ships or otherwise recycled. Such timber was of many shapes and sizes and therefore had to be used with great finesse, matching joints and tenons exactly. This work was exquisitely delicate.

Merry Widow. A strapless corset, often black and usually with attached garters (see garter belt). Mury in Old English meant brief. In Middle English, mury became mery and acquired the sense of teasing delight. The “widow” implies that the garment was reserved for women in mourning, an implication that is demonstrably untrue.

Muzzle the ox. Behave in a miserly fashion. Deuteronomy 25:4 states, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.” A cheap farmer would use a muzzle to prevent the ox from eating. Since corn was indigenous to the Western Hemisphere until the time of Columbus, Deuteronomy must have meant some other crop. Not to quibble, however, the idea is a good one: to let the guy doing the work enjoy an occasional nibble of the proceeds.

Nickelodeon. Jukebox (q.v.). (Derived by combining the Greek word odeom, meaning a small theater, and the five-cent price of entry. In picky dictionaries, always spelled with a final m instead of the ubiquitous n.) It is no longer known which came first, the tiny, one-reel, storefront movie theaters, or the calliope-type band boxes that, for five cents, played a tune automatically. The latter were marvels of the mechanical age, some of them having up to a hundred instruments. They were originally run on steam power and later on electricity. When jukeboxes entered the culture, some people, knowing the derivation of the term, preferred nickelodeon as more genteel. It was, however, a jukebox that Theresa Brewer was singing about in the Number One song of 1950 by Stephen Weiss and Bernie Baum, “Put Another Nickel In In The Nickelodeon.”

O’clock. A contraction of the expression “of the clock.” Ten of the clock is the time when a specific clock says it is ten, AM or PM. Clocks of old were not terribly accurate so, when schedules were being set, you had to agree on the one that would be used as the standard. This might be the clock in the town square or the watch in the conductor’s pocket or the “Regulator” in the front office.

Odor of Sanctity. Phrase that once referred to the belief that the corpse of a saint gave off a sweet smell. In a less sanitation-conscious age, this may have been true relative to other environmental smells. Today the emphasis is on decomposition (or deconstruction if you prefer). It refers to a anything that is past its prime.

Offbeat. Eccentric, unconventional, out of step, marching to a different drummer. In music, any beat that is not the downbeat or accented first beat of a measure, called down because the conductor signals it with a downward movement of the baton. The (often silent) beat that precedes and anticipates the downbeat is, of course, the upbeat Not all offbeats are upbeats but all upbeats are offbeats. In marching and dancing (and much of real life too), it is essential for everyone to step out together on the downbeat and one who fails to do so is “out of step.” A beatnik, or, more properly, simply a beat, was an unconventional person, often one who wrote unconventional poetry that managed to do without rhyme, reason or rhythm. Upbeat and downbeat are also used to indicate optimism and pessimism respectively for reasons that are semantically weak and logically counterintuitive.

Off One’s Rocker. Quite crazy. Staggering. Keeling over. A rocker was a common type of ship’s keel, the longitudinal timber to which the ribs are attached and which provides a degree of stability. [Célan is Old English for cool. To keel a pot is to stir the contents to keep them cool enough to prevent them from boiling over. Shakespeare’s “A Winter Song” in Love’s Labor Lost ends with the line, “Greasy Joan doth keel the pot.” Thus, long before keel became cool and acquired its Jazz Age meaning, it merely implied keeping things from boiling over, and to be off keel was to experience intimations of mortality.]

Open Road. Unobstructed. Highway or public road. In the days before there were more cars than people, one could often find stretches of road that were virtually traffic free. The implication is that such a road is easy and inviting to walk upon. This is the sense meant by Walt Whitman in his poem of the same name. The much later song refers to the stretch of U.S. Route 30 between Omaha, Nebraska and Cheyenne, Wyoming. (There are a few benighted souls who claim this distinction for the stretch of Route 66 between Tucumcari, New Mexico and Kingman, Arizona. However, 66 was not even begun until 1926 by which time there was already too much traffic. Route 30 from New York to San Francisco was laid out between 1912 and 1930, the brainchild of Carl Fisher who had built the Indianapolis Speedway. They began to pave it when Congress passed the first highway bill in 1921 but the open road portion remained dirt until the mid-1930’s.)

Out of Sorts. Out of order or ‘kilter’ usually in the sense of not feeling well or being in ill temper. Sorts is an archaic usage meaning suits in the sense of the four suits or sorts in a deck of playing cards. To be out of suit in Bridge means a player no longer holds any card of the suit led.

Pig in a Poke. Something you are asked to accept on blind faith, without evidence. A poke is a bag, satchel or pocketbook (Old English pocca). In the old farmers’ markets, piglets were sold in burlap sacks. (How else would the buyer get them home?) Unscrupulous dealers, selling to trusting buyers, would sometimes substitute a cat for the pig. Upon arriving home, the only thing the victim could do was to let the cat out of the bag, which is to say confront the unvarnished truth.

Piggyback. To ride on another person’s shoulders. By extension, any method of transporting one thing on top of a conveyance, as a truck trailer on a railroad car. The phrase has nothing to do with pigs but is a corruption of the term pick pack. The pick or pike was the basic weapon of the infantry, a stout staff with a metal point or hook. A pack (see preceding entry) was a kind of harness designed to carry the pike on one’s shoulder.

Paddy Wagon. A police vehicle for transporting alleged miscreants from the scene of their indiscretion to that of their incarceration (known as going from bad to worse). It was named by Theodore Roosevelt while he was New York’s Police Commissioner because, at the time of its invention, most such miscreants were of the Irish persuasion and were, therefore, referred to as paddies. Had this vehicle been invented more recently, you would probably call it an Alleged Perpetrator Transportation System (APTS).

Petard. Fart. From the Latin pedere, to break wind. To be hoist[ed] [on or by] one’s own petard refers to levitation brought about by the expulsion of gas from the intestines. Hence, to be victimized by a plot of one’s own devising. Fart comes from the Old High German ferzan by way of the Middle English farten.

Peter out. To diminish gradually as a vein of ore in a mine. A metaphor based on the detumescence of the penis following intercourse. Peter has long been a mildly obscene synonym for penis, probably because in both Latin and Greek it means rock. Pecker is another such synonym for reasons that should be fairly obvious. The famous line, “Peter Pecker picked a peck of pickled peppers,” is less innocent than generally thought. And never again will you hear the line, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church…” without emitting an embarrassing snicker.

Pie in the sky. A promise that will never be fulfilled. From an early Wobblie parody of the old hymn, “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.”

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die

Piss pot. Also, slop jar. A household utensil made of pottery into which one could relieve oneself at night without having to make a cold and/or wet trip to the outhouse. Plain piss pots commonly sold for five cents or less and slightly more elaborate ones were often given away as promotional items by dry goods stores, undertakers (q.v.) and other retail establishments. So when you got up in the middle of the night you would experience both relief and gratitude to Henry’s Honest Hardware Emporium. Banks thought it more genteel for depositors to spit into their premium items and, thus, gave away spittoons (q.v.) before the invention of the electric toaster. The expression, “He doesn’t have a pot to piss in” was meant to denote extreme poverty. The poor, of course, were required to “piss up a rope” (q.v.).

Piss up (over) a rope. Cease your pretensions. Get off your high horse. Originally, to relieve oneself at sea by aiming over the rope siding, thereby avoiding fouling the deck. This was a great leveler engaged in by the captain and the lowest swab. Later, to piss in an upward arc as one would in pissing out a bedroom window. In this way, the pisser might enjoy the esthetic experience created by the play of light on golden arches of his own creation. (The half of humanity who cannot pee standing up must look elsewhere to nourish their esthetic sensibilities.)

Piss into the wind. Self-defeating, for obvious reasons. Any activity so hopeless as to be almost admirable in its recklessness. Those of slightly more moderate sensibilities may substitute spit into the wind.

Pipe Dream. Sequence of thoughts passing through the mind of a person listening to the music of bagpipes (q.v.). Among Celts, these thoughts can be quite evocative and even pleasant.

Pope’s nose. The hindmost appendage or tail bone of a bird, especially a turkey, bearing its tail feathers and protecting the cloaca, the avian genital and excretory duct. So called because of the prevalence of hairy noses among the successors of St. Peter (or perhaps because pretty much every pope ever elected was a turkey’s ass).

Presbyterian. Member of a Protestant sect that professes belief in predestination, the notion that some very small number of people, the elect, have been designated from the beginning of time to go to heaven. You don’t know who you are but worldly wealth is a sign of God’s favor and being a Presbyterian is a leg up. In a politically correct age, this whole business is downplayed and believers talk more like Episcopalians who believe everybody goes to heaven. Also, a cocktail formerly made with bourbon but now more usually with Scotch. Fill an old fashioned glass with ice. Pass over the glass a bottle of Scotch with its tax seal unbroken (the condition known as Caledonia intacta). Add a splash each of soda and ginger ale (but tap water makes a fine substitute), and serve with lemon peel. For a Perfect Presbyterian, omit the ice, water and lemon peel. A Dutch Presbyterian is the same drink except you use an empty gin bottle, the only kind available in Holland. (There are no Perfect Dutch Presbyterians even though the Dutch Reformed Church has followed the Presbyterian confession ever since the Peace of Westphalia.)

Pugh ma Hone. Gaelic (Póg mo thón) meaning, roughly, kiss my ass. If you understood Irish sexual practices, you would know this is very much a term of endearment. Alas Celtic sexuality is well beyond the scope of this modest paper.

Quantum. In physics, the smallest increment into which energy or certain forms of matter can be subdivided. The phrase “quantum leap” is an oxymoron. From the Latin quantus, how much. In English, a really old noun meaning measure. It is a little known fact that Mary Quant named herself in honor of the quantum shortly after inventing the mini skirt which is, of course, the smallest unit of decency in Christendom. Actually it would be more accurate to say “re-invented.” The garment in question was originally invented by King Henry II (1133-1189) who was, therefore, called Henry Curtmantle. Henry, whom you may remember as the Lion in Winter, was the grandson of William the Conquerer (nee William the Bastard). Why he wore short skirts is not known. In any event, the mini skirt represents the highest achievement of English culture.

Quagmire. A precarious position from which it is difficult to extricate someone or something. That rarest of English vocabulary phenomena—a redundant metaphor within a single word. A mire, from the Old Norse myrr, is a swamp or bog characterized by the clayey, viscous soil that is featured in Uncle Remus’ Tar Baby story. A quag, from the Old English cwacian meaning to shake, is what Americans call a quaking bog. The surface is made up of dense mats of sphagnum moss which are in the process of filling in a shallow pond or lake and will eventually become peat (q.v.). It looks like you can walk on the surface and you can if you are extremely careful and test every footfall with a walking pole. The sensation of the ground moving in a different direction with each step is not for the faint of heart.

Queer (often, Quare). A word, like very, that amplifies the word it modifies; an intensive. The Quare Fellow is a play by Brendan Behan. The title refers to a very special bloke, a condemned prisoner who has strange effects on everyone else. A queer duck is a goose. A quare yoke is an automobile, so called because when it was new, it was seen as an amazing, revolutionary device, akin to the yoke (q.v.) used to join draft animals. Over time, the word acquired a sense of weirdness which is the connotation meant by those, straight and gay, who use it as a synonym for homosexual.

Rabble. A hiring hall or a hiring fair. Any location used for the transaction of casual labor agreements. Now largely replaced by temp agencies. Why the word has come to refer to a mob is hard to fathom except as a rank prejudice of the capitalist class.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul. To re-allocate funds foolishly, unfairly and/or unwisely. King Henry VIII had good reason to fear for his immortal soul so shortly before his death in 1547, he sought to bribe God by restoring St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The project was carried out by his daughter Queen Elizabeth I between 1560 and 1565. Lizzie was a realist and did not want to waste her own money on a project that was patently hopeless. So she paid for it by placing a heavy tax on the revenues of Westminster Abbey, technically the Collegiate Church of St. Peter in Westminster, thereby robbing Peter to pay Paul. The whole scheme turned out badly as Henry went to hell anyway and St. Paul’s burned down in the Great Fire of 1666.

Rubirosa. The largest peppermill in an expensive restaurant, named in honor of the penis of Porfirio Rubirosa (1909-1965), the sometime Dominican diplomat and race car driver who invariably gave his profession as “playboy.” Senor Rubirosa’s success with rich and beautiful women was legendary and his five wives included Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress and Doris Duke of the tobacco family. Sad to report, however, although well endowed, he did not have a record-setting penis. The blue ribbon member, regardless of what you read elsewhere, belonged to the late French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, whose bone measured 50.8 centimeters or about 20 inches at rest. (The tiny member now owned by an impressionable American doctor is a fraud perpetrated by a jealous Jesuit.) The red ribbon, at 14 inches, is held by an African American gentleman who died in Baltimore in 1964. Of course records can be deceiving. As you know, “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.”

Sashay. To strut. To walk with an exaggerated swagger. From the French chasse meaning reliquary. Enchasser originally meant to enshrine, and later to ornament as in “chasing gold” or other precious metals. One who sashays up to the bar is looking to attract attention. The actual motion is a rolling of the hips. The sashaying male, whether straight or gay, is adopting a movement usually thought of as feminine.

Scumble. To soften a line or color in a painting by rubbing with an almost dry brush or a finger. Similarly, to render a color less brilliant by overcoating it with a varnish or similar material. From the Old High German scum meaning foam or froth which in turn is from the Old Norse skumi meaning twilight, the time just before l’heure bleu (see: gloaming). The twilight, the softening and the foam root the word in romance which makes it curious that it has acquired several fairly ugly meanings. You will be happy to learn however that the slimy pond scum that can make swimming unpleasant, can be eliminated with a naturally occurring fungus.

Sex. Any of several strategies living things have evolved to reproduce their kind. Sex requires the union of male and female genetic material which, in most cases, is accomplished by the fertilization (or attempted fertilization) of an egg by a sperm. Other diversions may be erotic or sexy, but unless a union of egg and sperm is at least possible, the act is not sex. You see where we’re going with this: when Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sex with that woman,” he was telling no less than God’s honest truth. For obvious reasons, sperm cannot traverse the digestive system on their way to the egg. (According to the Catholic Church, “safe sex” is neither safe nor sex but a mortal sin anyway.)

Shanty Irish. Irish American persons of the lower classes as evidenced by their living quarters in both Ireland and America. The term refers not to their evident poverty but to the social pathologies rightly or wrongly associated with that poverty including a preference for beer over tea. Also the name of a famous P-51B Mustang Fighter piloted by World War II Ace Gilbert O’Brien of the 362nd Squadron, 357th Fighter Group, Eighth Army Air Force. The 357th was in combat between February of 1944 and May of the following year. It had 695 air victories and produced 43 Aces including five triple and four double aces. Although its main job was to protect bombers, its most famous engagements were the D-Day invasion of Normandy, and the relief of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. It is presumed that a scrapper like O’Brien was shanty Irish but that he had a lace curtain mother who named him Gilbert for God’s sake!

Shebeen. A speakeasy or other location for the consumption of illegal beverages or moonshine. The derivation is unknown but, until about 1700, there was no such thing as an illegal beverage in Ireland. After the passage of the Penal Laws, alcoholic beverages were taxed which was like taxing salt or tea in America. Thus, the shebeens arose as centers of tax avoidance and civil disobedience generally. In America, the word became shebang referring to the entirety of some class as in “the whole shebang.” The connection is, however, elusive.

Shrive. To confess one’s sins or to hear the confessions of others. The participle form is shriven and the noun is shrift as in “giving short shrift.” The phrase originally referred to an abbreviated form of the sacrament given in emergencies but has come to mean casually, without ceremony. Related to Shrieve or Shreeve, an older form of sheriff. Sheriffs, too, are in the business of eliciting confessions.

Slut. A cheap candle (q.v.) sometimes called a rush made by dipping the dried core of a rush or reed stem into fat drippings or resin. Hence, a lady of easy virtue. That hence is, I know, problematic but there you have it. The ladies in question were rarely cheap and never easy.

Smashing. (Also, striking, knockout, knock-em-dead, dressed to kill, drop dead gorgeous). Extremely attractive, said especially of a woman or her clothes, presumably from the effect they have on the male observer. Used primarily by upper class men with Larchmont lockjaw. Just why beautiful women inspire such violent metaphors is still being researched.

Snooker. To defeat primarily through good defense. The eponymous game looks like pool but uses smaller balls and pockets on a larger table. To snooker an opponent, one leaves an ineligible ball between the cue ball and the object ball. This is not as easy as it sounds. In fact, snooker is the only game named after a single tactic that is rarely executed successfully. The game appears to have been named after the snook or needlefish which is also elongated. To cock (q.v.) a snook means to thumb one’s nose at, the greatly exaggerated jaw of the fish being confused with a nose. (Snooker should not be confused with euchre which means to defeat by deviousness. Euchre is a disreputable game that looks like bridge and plays like poker. It is, however, blessed with an extraordinary vocabulary.)

Soho. See, here! Expression used in rabbit hunting when the quarry is spotted (which, being quite rare is also the origin of the word rarebit which is, naturally, a meatless dish). The London borough of the same name memorializes the connection between poor people and rabbits. The upper crust hunt fox, and the equivalent cry is “Tally-ho” which means Mark, here! Fox hunting is a conspicuous display of wealth in that it proclaims the hunter has the time and the means to pursue an inedible victim while riding an expensive horse across field and stream in a state of mild inebriation. (One shudders to imagine the course of literary history had Mississippi river boaters used Tally instead of Mark. Someone named Tally Twain would not have survived a year on the river.)

Spall. Chips or flakes of stone, naturally occurring gravel. From Old German spalden, to split or spill, especially brains and blood. Spaldeen is Brooklynese for Spalding, the company that made the famous pink rubber ball. That company is now a subsidiary of the Russell Corporation of Atlanta, but the original Spalding family were German gravel miners.

Spitting Image. An exact copy, said especially of a child and one of its parents. Academics engage in all sorts of gymnastics to explain where this came from, generally agreeing that the original phrase was spitten image which morphed to spit and image and finally wound up as above. How they wonder did the word for saliva come to mean identical? Wrong question. The root of spit is the same as that of split meaning to divide into equal (identical) halves. So the real question is how did identical come to mean saliva? I have no idea.

Spittoon. A receptacle, usually made of brass, for the expectoration of tobacco juice, often from an impressive distance. When the disgusting bolus hit the brass, it would give off a distinctive and apparently very satisfying twang or toon. Chewing tobacco has long since gone the way of the horse and buggy except among baseball players who expectorate on the field of play for ritual reasons. Hence, the spittoon is obsolete and can be seen only in antique stores and the United States Senate where it is used as a reminder that Senators were once men of some minimal talent.

Stag. Gaelic, an obstinate woman. We have already noted that the Eskimos need 99 words for snow and the English need even more for stupidity. Similarly, the Irish have an extraordinary vocabulary for describing various kinds of unpleasant women (not counting vulgar words). A strap, for instance is an impudent girl while a toice is a fresh girl, a fairly fine distinction you have to admit. What is intriguing about stag, however, is that this is the only case in any language where it is not reserved exclusively as a masculine noun, referring especially to castrated males. Could it be that the Irish think…ah, no, that would be too pat.

Straw. Were you hoping I’d skip this? Ha! Straw is what is left after a mature grass plant has produced seed which has then been threshed out of it. It is useful for bedding, flooring, roofing and, when spun, as a coarse fiber. It has almost no nutritional value and is used for fodder only in desperation. Hay is the same material harvested before the plant has gone to seed and while the stalk still has some nutritional value. Hay is a product, straw is a by-product. Hay is green, straw is yellow. A straw boss is an underboss, a straw vote doesn’t count, and a strawman is a logical device ("argumendo" for those of you who read too much William F. Buckley) used to limit debate.

Sub rosa. In confidence, secretly. Latin meaning "under the rose." Cupid gave Harpocrates, the god of silence, a rose so he would not betray the confidence of Venus. Hence the ceilings of Roman banquet-rooms were decorated with roses to remind guests that what was spoken sub vino was also sub rosa.

Sun over the yardarm. Time for the first drink of the day. The yardarm is the large horizontal spar attached to the mast of a ship from which the square sail is hung. On east west journeys, the sun rises over the yardarm about an hour after sunrise and is again over it about an hour before sunset. The rule therefore is ambiguous. The English no doubt meant you couldn’t drink before, say, six in the afternoon. The Irish thought anytime after about seven in the morning was fine. Some unknown genius pointed out that the sun is always over the yardarm somewhere in the world. To confuse matters further, in the good old days, the sun never set on the British Empire. In this usage, yard harks back to an old German word meaning a tapered rod which was taken into Middle English as a vulgarism for penis.

Taxicab. An automobile with driver available for hire, usually for short trips within a local area. From the Medieval Latin taxa, a fee, and cabriolet, a horse-drawn carriage often called a hansom cab. Such carriages were usually pulled by a hackney horse (q.v.), hence the term hack referring to a cab driver.

Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Don’t. (alternatively, to steal sheep.) To offer needless advice to an expert. In the good old days, a person who lived long enough to become a grandparent surely had no teeth left. One efficient way to get protein without chewing was to suck raw eggs. If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it. And don’t try it because today’s raw eggs harbor an exotic fauna that could kill you. As to stealing sheep, Irish women became experts at a young age. For males, it was a capital crime but the worst that could happen to a female was transportation to Australia for seven years. So, in addition to digging taters, the wives and daughters were responsible for an occasional dinner with meat.

Three Martini Lunch. At one time, the central liturgy of American business around which all other activities revolved. The first drink was medicinal, meant to ease the hangover from the previous evening. The second soothed the transition from sports talk to dirty jokes while the third was taken to hold you over until you got to the bar car on the way home. The invention of the Vodka Martini was a cultural milestone that allowed the drinker to imagine that no one could smell the alcohol on his breath. Business lunches had two ironclad rules. At least one client or prospect had to be present, and there had to be a moderately plausible business reason for putting it on the expense account, also know as the “cuff.” Rendered obsolete by an overly rigorous interpretation of the tax code by the IRS. Even the bar cars are gone.

Thrill, The. The irresistible impulse to buy a round of drinks for the house. When the thrill comes over a drinker, he (invariably) asks one or two of his friends to stand him to a drink. They, noting the man’s grandness of stature, naturally refuse the request, citing poverty. This leaves him no choice but to treat everyone himself, an act that makes him feel like a lord, looking his own poverty in the face and laughing at it.

Tinker’s Damn. Something, often an opinion, of no value, as in “Not worth a tinker’s damn.” In Ireland, a tinker was an itinerant repairer of household appliances, so-named for his skill with solder which is made from tin and lead. Like his American counterpart, he might also sell pots and pans, needles and thread and other simple necessities from the back of his horse-drawn cart. Denigrated by men who lived in thatched huts ostensibly because he had no fixed residence, the tinker was, in fact, a citizen of some substance. The wives of the denigrators often had an entirely different and more favorable opinion based on experiences that their husbands only suspected. The tinker was widely traveled and highly sophisticated in the mysterious ways of pleasing women.

Tomato. A girl of marriageable age, especially one whose zaftig proportions might have appealed to Peter Paul Rubens. Now, sadly, obsolete as is the fruit that served as the referent for the metaphor. Heirloom tomatoes are making a modest comeback but the market for heirloom maidens is likely to remain somewhat specialized.

Turf. Compressed dried peat moss used as fuel by the poor. Gathering peat, like making hay, is backbreaking and dangerous work. Although it is not the most efficient fuel, it is said its characteristic smell, blended with that of thatch, is evocative. Today, Irish American yuppies burn peat incense to get in touch with their roots. This is something no one who has ever lived in a thatched hut would dream of doing. As the measure of firewood is the cord, the measure of turf is, appropriately, the reek or rick, which is also, in Ireland, the volume of a haystack. In Scotland, reek means smoke, especially the smoke from a peat fire over which Scotch whisky is distilled. In Ireland, the Reek is the holy mountain of St. Patrick (Croagh Patrick) in County Mayo and Reek Sunday, usually the second Sunday in July, is the day pilgrims climb it barefooted. (Turf has come to refer to any kind of sod comprising the top layer of a cultivated plot of ground which is an understandable mistake and to a racecourse which is less so. Its use in the expression surf and turf is sophomoric even if it does rhyme.)

Undead. A being, usually human, who is technically dead but still animate such as a vampire, zombie, ghoul or ghost. Usually hostile to living things but often vulnerable to sacred objects or to the death of the person who brought them forth.

Undertaker. One who buries the dead. Charon, the ferryman on the river Styx, was the first professional to take deceased souls to the underworld for a fee. In the American West, the local barber doubled as the local doctor. By having a strategic alliance with a local carpenter, the doctor could also serve credibly as the town undertaker. Today, undertaking has become a separate branch of the health care industry known as bereavement management. It is dominated by large public corporations such as McFuneral’s® and Coca-Coffins™ but the idea of vertical integration derives seamlessly from the frontier, which is quite comforting when you think about it.

Weight. Often in the phrase The Weight. The most important person in the vicinity. Hence, prestige, gravitas. In the golden age of shipping—which is to say before steam ships or before cargo containers depending on when you were born—the weigher was the dock worker who, needless to say, weighed your cargo, thereby determining the shipping fee you would be charged. It was said that weighers never had to buy their own cigars or their own beer.

Where MacGregor sits. Answer to the question: where is the head of the table? The MacGregor is, of course, the chief of the eponymous clan, a large and fractious Scottish family. Used to answer any such dumb question such as “Where is the seat of government?” or “Where is company headquarters?” Often attributed to the Latin poet Martial (40–102 AD) although it is hard to believe that Clan MacGregor is quite that ancient. On the other hand, Martial was a Celt of Northern Spanish extraction.

Whistling Dixie. Talking without thinking. A New York songwriter, Daniel Emmett, wrote the famous song in 1859 after his wife complained about the cold by saying, “I wish I was in Dixie.” The word referred, she said, to anyplace south of the Mason Dixon Line which had been established as the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in 1767. In fact, the word probably derived from worthless banknotes issued in New Orleans from about 1830. These were denominated in French in which dix means ten. (Fort Dix, New Jersey, is named after John Adams Dix, a leading abolitionist and Free Soil Democrat who served as a United States Senator, Postmaster General and, for 52 days, Secretary of the Treasury under President Buchanan. He also served as a Major General in the Civil War.)

Whistling in the dark. Bravado, putting up a false show of courage or knowledge. The idea of whistling to ward off one’s fears goes back at least to John Dryden. When Anna sings, “Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect, and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid,” she is invoking a very old wisdom. Or when Guenevere asks Arthur what the simple folk do when they’re beset and besieged, he tells her, “When they’re sorely pressed, they whistle for a spell.” Huckleberry Finn knew that one had to whistle while passing a graveyard at night to prevent being set upon by the spirits. The idea, presumably, was to warn ghosts that you were one person who had no fear of attracting their attention. Later the phrase came to mean bullshit, holding forth on a subject the speaker knows nothing about. The connection between bravado and bullshit is obvious, that between fearing ghosts and attracting their attention only slightly less so.

Whole Cloth. False, fabricated out of lies. In fact, whole cloth is the real goods, the full length and width of cloth as it came off the loom and therefore without eccentric changes in color, texture and general quality. Unfortunately, in the past, textile merchants regularly sold inferior pieced goods as whole cloth until no one believed any claim they made. It is not unlike our own perception of used car sales people. Maybe the car was driven only by a little old lady to take her to church and maybe the moon is made of green cheese but that’s not the way to bet.

Whole Hog. Thoroughly. Completely. With a hint of foolishly. Hog was Irish slang for a shilling and the phrase suggested that it might be excessively flahoolagh (q.v.) to spend the whole amount in one place. Most Irish people had never held a shilling and rarely even seen one. It was worth roughly ten cents.

Wing it. To bluff oneself through a task for which one is not prepared. To take an examination without studying. Also one of two strategies for getting through life with a minimum of hassle. (The other is to sleepwalk through it.) From the failure of lazy actors to learn their lines, depending instead on prompters who were located in the wings of the stage.

Wog. A native person of low social class (as opposed to a nob). This was originally an affectionate if condescending term coined by Her Majesty’s colonial bureaucrats who were convinced that native women could not walk without wiggling their hips—which they found inviting. From the Middle English wiglen which is also the root of polliwog. The word became blatantly offensive when a toy manufacturer introduced Polywog, a black doll endowed with every conceivable racial stereotype in the early 1900’s.

Wooden Nickel. Currency so debased as to be worth nothing, as in “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” Named in honor of William Wood, a close personal friend of one of King George I’s many mistresses. The lady persuaded the king to grant Wood a patent for minting Irish currency containing no precious metal. With his primitive understanding of Gresham’s Law, George figured this would be a good way to further impoverish the Irish. It might have worked except for the fact that the only use most Irish had for currency was to pay English taxes and Protestant tithes.

Yellow[dog] journalism. A redundancy.

Yoicks! A command used by the master of the (fox) hunt or his whippers-in to call the hounds to heel. From the medieval command Hoicks meaning Stop! The hounds, having been carefully trained to chase the fox, must be dissuaded from the frustration incident to their being unable to tear it to shreds. Even an exhausted fox is smart enough to go to tree where he will be safe from the hounds. He is not, unfortunately, safe from heavily armed and pleasantly inebriated human hunters. The difference between shooting sitting ducks and treed foxes is elusive but there you have it. In America, where there is a shortage of foxes, the prey may be a coyote who is smarter than not only the hounds, but the hunters and even the horses. Indeed, the hunters probably think the coyote is a fox. Coyote hunting is that rare animal sport in which rooting for the animal means rooting against the underdog.

Yoke. A wooden bar, often arched, placed over the necks of two draft animals so that they must pull together. Matthew (11:29) quotes Jesus as saying, “My yoke is easy and my burthen is light” but this is a questionable translation of the Latin word iugum which, although it is the root of yoke, really meant any binding. Ancient yokes were poorly designed and often ended up choking one or both animals. Thus, easy would be a satiric reference to a very painful device. The horse collar was invented in the Thirteenth Century, thereby shifting the weight to the animals’ shoulders. This single innovation should probably be considered the origin of agribusiness.

Young Turk. A brash, young rebel anxious to displace his or her more powerful but allegedly less adept elders. Originally, a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) founded by Mehmet Talaat, the Interior Minister in the government of the antepenultimate Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909). Once the Young Turks took over, they became their elders, setting up a Sultanate more to their liking but even less effectual than its decrepit predecessor. One of the Young Turks, however, was Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) who served this tottering government in the military. He became a national hero in 1915 by handing Winston Churchill what some consider the gravest defeat of his career at Gallipoli. It was, however, a Pyrrhic victory, coming at the cost of 250,000 casualties, three times British losses. Kemal led a new revolution in 1919, became President in 1920 and founded the modern Turkish state in 1923. In 1934, Parliament passed a law requiring all citizens to have surnames and it gave Kemal the name by which history remembers him, Ataturk, meaning Father of the Turks. As President, he established a secular state, introduced the Roman alphabet, liberated women and outlawed the wearing of the fez. He seems to have grown with the growth of his power and popularity. In 1934, he wrote to the survivors of the Gallipoli dead, “You the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives in this land, they have become our sons as well." The only comparable figure in modern history is Charles de Gaulle, and, sadly, he never made it illegal for men to wear berets.

THE GENTLE JOYS OF MAYBE [1]

Jerry Harkins

Pete Seeger tells a story about a king who asked his wise men to reduce all the world's knowledge and wisdom to a single book he could use to educate his son. It took them nearly a year and, when they were done, the king challenged them to distill the book down to a single sentence. Five years of intense labor and constant debate followed until, at last, the wise men were able to agree on the sentence, "This too shall pass." Again the king sent them back to the academy. "Find me," he commanded, "the single word my son can live by, the irreducible essence of everything we know." Ten years passed. At length, the sages, old, gray and worn with disputation, returned. "Sire," said their leader, "the one word at the heart of all wisdom, is maybe." [2]

The Day Science Acquired A Sense Of Humor. Paul Johnson began his survey of Twentieth Century history with the remarkable claim that, “The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse... confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe.” The theory was General Relativity and Professor Johnson rightly says that it revolutionized the way people perceive reality. It was also, he argues, the first piece of high science to be followed by the mass media. [3] Eventually, millions of people did come to know the world had changed even if, as was also widely reported, only three of those people actually understood what Einstein was talking about. To the extent that this was true, it may have been due to the fact that the press itself displayed remarkable confusion about relativity. It still does. The famous formula e = mc2 became journalistic shorthand for everything in the modern world that befuddled people — a sort of modernist mantra replacing the old saw, "It's Greek to me."

In fact, compared to most modern thinkers, Einstein was a classicist. It was not until 1930 that Werner von Heisenberg really upset the Newtonian apple cart by demonstrating that nature does not permit us to know the mass and the momentum of a particle at the same moment, a phenomenon he called the Uncertainty Principle in recognition of the implication that we cannot ever fully know anything. There is, it seems, an important, inherent and invincible ignorance at the heart of our knowledge of the universe. Around the same time, Kurt Gödel was proving that there is a class of mathematical problems that have no technical solution, that is, there are questions without answers. His two Incompleteness Theorems argued that logical systems lack the ability to describe mathematical systems and cannot be proven to be free of inconsistency. Einstein hated the entire drift of things. "God," he later said, "does not play dice with the universe!" He may yet be proven right, but uncertainty — in art and philosophy as well as in science — is, for the moment, well established as the defining characteristic of modernism.

For those who are finicky about the benchmarks of history, then, 1919 was a false alarm. The modern world really began on Saturday, October 25, 1930. It was the last day of the Sixth Slovay Conference. Heisenberg had been working on uncertainty for several years but that was the day the titans of physics, led by Einstein himself, conducted a famous thought experiment that convinced most of them it must be true. Science had suddenly acquired a Zen-like overlay which at first seemed extremely threatening.

A Brief History of Science. The activities we refer to as "science" are a way of knowing things based on systematic observation and dispassionate analysis. These tools have evolved gradually as a response to the experience of intellectuals that the explanations of the divines, derived from revelation and tradition, are invariably out of sync with the knowledge we gain through our senses. The church might reason by biblical exegesis to the conclusion that the sun revolves around the earth, but Galileo, who had actually looked at the solar system and measured its movements, knew differently. Even as he recanted under the paternal guidance of the Holy Inquisition, he muttered under his breath, "E pur si muove," — in effect, might and right make strange bedfellows. [4] Science replaced revelation and deductive reasoning first with systematic observation and induction, then with experimentation and statistical inference.

In spite of its apparent challenge to divine order, there is something irresistibly comforting about scientific truth. [5] The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Always. Every action creates a reaction which is equal in force and opposite in direction. There are no exceptions. Certainty, whether religious or scientific, is seductive and gradually the certainties of science became a substitute for the crumbling dogmas of theology. This state of affairs lasted a bit more than two centuries until, in 1859, Darwin published his theory of evolution. The Origin of Species started an epistemological war that has persisted to the present day.

For the first sixty years or so, the battle was joined largely over a symbolic issue, the descent of man. The fundamentalists believed (and some still do) that humankind was created from the clay of the earth on Friday, October 28, 4004 BCE. [6] They accept without question the report of Genesis 2:7 that "...God formed the human of dust from the soil" and reject without hesitation any notion that they might personally be related to a monkey. This, at least, is the controversy that always gets all the ink. [7]

But a more troubling problem lurked just below the surface of evolution. If species evolve, exactly how do they do it? How does a frog turn into a prince? Evolution posits a fair amount of one thing turning into another and it's hard to imagine God bothering to map it all out in advance. William Blake asked the tiger, “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” But more to the point, did God see the tiger in the paramecium? Or did she leave it to chance? It’s fine to say that the paramecium did not turn into a tiger, that both were created simultaneously out of nothing. But, like Galileo, the biologists have actually looked and the fundamentalists can only rejoin that looking is cheating. [8]

In one of history's truly brilliant insights, Darwin had proposed that environmental changes — sudden or gradual — present new challenges and opportunities to old species. Some members of a species evolve into new species by responding with adaptations that prove to be advantageous. Darwin called this "natural selection" and others referred to it as the survival of the fittest. [9] Still, no one knew exactly where these adaptations came from or why some individuals adapted while others did not. When the answers did begin to emerge they were more threatening than even Bishop Wilberforce had imagined.

Essentially, the early neo-Darwinians discovered that gene pools carry many variations within them some of which find frequent expression (e.g., hemophilia); others of which are rare (e.g., albinism). [10] The variations are often (but not always) harmful to the individuals that carry them. But they persist in the gene pool against the day that the environment changes and they become advantageous. These variations arise primarily — and this is the real sticking point — from seemingly random genetic mutations. A cosmic ray from deep space happens to pass through a sex cell and re-arranges its DNA. It just so happens that that sex cell is the one in a billion that gets a chance to reproduce. [11]

This model is now known to be incomplete and new models have been devised to account for the speed and direction of change. Still, the Darwinian challenge is seen by many as heretical, not because evolution is thought to be beyond the ability of an omnipotent God, [12] but because it suggests that our most basic sense of reality rests on the quicksand of chance. This implies a dictatorship of capriciousness; like Alice, we react in horror to the idea of a croquet game in which the mallets are flamingos, the balls are hedgehogs and both are free to act without regard to law, convention or prophecy. We are the slaves of our genes which, in turn, are at the mercy of random packets of energy that zip across the universe for millions of years only to wind up making mischief with them. There is no grand design, no meaning, no memory, no destiny. There is only chance, indifferent and implacable.

"...un grand peut-etre" The Uncertainty Principle deepens the Darwinian dilemma and restores the tyranny of Plato’s cave. Contemplating the confused state of nuclear physics in the wake of Bohr’s 1913 planetary model of the atom, it occurred to Heisenberg, that the laws of classical physics might not apply in the world of the infinitely small. This insight led him in two directions, one explicating uncertainty itself and the other applying it to the creation of a probabilistic description of fundamental reality.

Quantum mechanics seeks to describe the structure and behavior of sub-atomic particles — the more or less familiar electrons, protons and neutrons that comprise the atom, the photon which is the basic unit of electromagnetic radiation, and the six sets of quarks and anti-quarks currently thought to be the basic building blocks of the universe. It turns out that these are not really particles and that they behave in ways that seem radically “weird” to us. For example, they appear to be able to exist in more than one place simultaneously; under certain conditions, they travel faster than the speed of light; and some of them are “entangled” in ways that let them influence each other instantaneously over vast distances. [13]

Perhaps the most bothersome characteristic of these manifestations is that they seem to exist in an indeterminate state until someone measures them. In other words, the measurement imparts the reality. If a photon were a child and a teacher gave it an IQ test, the act of testing would force the child to choose between smart and non-smart. This is bad enough but now, enter uncertainty. Since the teacher is measuring intelligence, we cannot know whether the child is a boy or a girl. Indeed, it would be neither; its sex would be indeterminate. Moreover, if the child had a twin and you wanted to know only its hair color, it wouldn’t have any until you looked. But the instant you looked at one child, it would “become,” say, a redhead. And so would its twin even if the two were located at opposite ends of the universe. Of course, you couldn’t know where either one was actually located. But the color information would travel faster than light and the more barriers you tried to place in its path, the faster it would travel.

You can see why quantum weirdness inspires truly amazing flights of fancy in the public press: it is for the same reason editors gravitate to man-bites-dog stories. But there is no paradox and, properly understood, not even a decent puzzle. When we try to measure the photon, we are applying standards from our own perspective where things exist in time and have dimension. But from the photon’s perspective (or from the perspective of an observer on the photon), the universe is quite different. There is no up or down, no right or left, no here or there and, most importantly, no now and then. At this level, nature is indifferent to such artifacts and only begrudgingly allows us to fumble around with our silly rulers.

Silly or not, we do want to understand things from our own worm’s eye view. Thus, just as the Victorians responded to Darwin in the context of their horror at being descended from monkeys, the modernists assumed that, if the building blocks of the universe are fundamentally insubstantial, then so must we be. To those who thought about such things, uncertainty seemed a cold, ominous doctrine, playing upon the racial nightmare of free fall. It seemed to separate us from history and ethics and, in some ways, from meaning itself. Like a fifth horseman, it brought death to the soul by mocking our intellectual attainments, our social constructs and our moral imperatives. If uncertainty is the ultimate fruit of the tree of knowledge, then all that is left is to lament with Solomon that everything is literally vanity. For in an uncertain universe, the plight of the individual — the grand theme of the Renaissance, the Age of Reason and the Romantic Era — is of no significance. If nothing is certain, then nothing is sacred and nothing is important and nothing is interesting. Life is, as Macbeth observed, “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Probable-Possible, My Black Hen. You remember her: “She lays eggs in the Relative When. / She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now / Because she’s unable to Postulate How. [14] You can’t blame the poor hen for being confused, and it’s not her fault that the eggs she lays are not very nourishing. Roosting, as she does, on the Left Bank — she’s that sort of hen, you know — she spends her days consulting with intellectuals who frighten her with visions of the sky collapsing on the ash heap of philosophy. Now you may protest that it is overstating the case to claim that uncertainty gave birth to existentialism or that existentialism was responsible for the nihilistic tendencies in modern culture. [15] But there is no doubt that, in the wake of uncertainty, the existentialists felt compelled to restore some sense of meaning to individual experience. The old ideas about human dignity had to be jettisoned, they felt, under the crushing burden of an indifferent universe. Perhaps they tried their best. They kept insisting on their own optimism while writing about the most depressing themes: dread, alienation, instability and, my personal favorite, the "nullity of existential possibilities." Sartre was actually trying to say something positive about the transcendence of the human mind over the uncertainties of physical being. There is a perfectly good French noun for this — transcendant — but Sartre chose néant — nothingness. L'Être et le néant, eh, bien? He meant it in the sense of no thingness, lacking substance, not concrete. But he had to have known the subtlety would escape almost every reader. Like other European philosophers of the time, having experienced the abattoir of World War I—or at least its aftermath—and having felt compelled to justify it, Sartre was not by nature an optimist and his insistence to the contrary is merely pathetic self-deception. [16]

It is not surprising, though, that many of the best and brightest sank into a Slough of Despond. Uncertainty killed philosophy and came very close to killing art. A urinal is not transformed into art by being mounted on a gallery wall, nor is it rendered anti-art by being disconnected from the plumbing. [17] A blank canvas is no more or less uplifting than any other sophomoric statement. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence is not music simply because it is divided into three movements and published on staff paper. Whatever else you may think of such things, they are all expressions of nihilism, of surrender to the blind forces of the cosmos.

But the impulse to make art is strong and many artists soon began to grapple with the new sensibility. Eugene O'Neill, for one, saw, "...the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to provide a new one" as the central challenge to dramatists. Like many others, he turned to Freud and Jung, seeking new truths in the interior landscapes they were illuminating. For a time it worked, and psychoanalytic insight supplied the raw material or the methodology for a great deal of art. But it wore poorly when it became apparent that it consisted of nothing more nourishing than facile talk.

The dilemma for the artists was very real. The challenge arose from science, a language they did not speak. So they sought out and fell prey to those who purported to be intermediaries, one-eyed kings promoting half-baked sciences. In addition to psychoanalysis (scientific shamanism) they chased the gurus of Marxism (scientific hooliganism) and cultural anthropology (scientific gossip mongering). They produced a fair amount of great art but also more than their share of impenetrable novels, inarticulate poetry and incomprehensible paintings. Academia, in turn, responded with incoherent critical theories purporting to explain the inexplicable. [18]

Eventually, though, artists came to understand that uncertainty had never been the black hole of despair it seemed at first. In the place of discredited certainty, it offered probability which turned out to be attractive in its own right. In a universe devoid of certainty, probability restored the faith that, as unknowable as things may be, they are not capricious. Indeed things are more or less predictable within the parameters of well established laws that are intuitively satisfying. Probability is objective without compromising the possibility of surprise and ecstasy. It is operational without being a straitjacket. It was never certainty that we had to learn to live without. It was rather the collective myth that any particular certainty was the source of whatever small security we could muster and the resulting urgency we felt to keep uncertainty at bay.

These realizations took decades to gain a foothold, and in the interim, modern art lost much of its audience. But gradually uncertainty began to seem natural, comfortable and even — properly appreciated — playful as a source of thematic material. We smile with recognition each fall as Charlie Brown kicks off the new season rebelling against the almost perfect certainty that Lucy will snatch away the football at the crucial moment. [19] Our delight reflects the power of almost — of maybe — in our lives. Maybe, this time, the universe will be benevolent. The chances are remote, but they keep Charlie tilting bravely at his windmills.

Probability is the measure of maybe. It is virtually but not perfectly certain that Lucy will, once again, send Charlie flopping head over heals. You expect it. You smile because you know that Charlie is staring down the near certainty of his own humiliation, and you admire him for doing so. He plays the game not because he is good at it, but because he is unwilling to concede the certainty of defeat. Charlie is like us; we are modernists: certainty is boring; it is the enemy of interest, engagement and passion. Oh, we still seek it out, but we have learned that the pleasure is in the chase.

Probability encouraged artists to explore the regions between the known and the unknown, between order and chaos. Some tilted one way, some the other but these regions are the medium of modernist art and, thus, in McLuhanist terms, its message. John Cage, for example, composed his Music of Changes (1951) in which every musical element was determined by a throw of the I Ching. Think of it as order imposed at random. Earle Browne took the idea a step further in December 1952 whose “score” consists of pages of abstract typography meant to be interpreted musically by performers. Indeterminism was not new to music; Charles Ives had experimented with it as early as 1906 in his seminal work The Unanswered Question. But in Cage, it is the subject as well as the medium of the work. Other composers tilted toward order. The serialists, notably Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez composed almost by formula but then made a clear separation between composition and performance, often asking the performers to improvise.

Many of these artists took themselves too seriously, as people with an almost religious mission. They were ultimately relegated to the academy and to the least accessible reaches of critical theory. But others caught the liberating spirit of uncertainty and probability. Alexander Calder reinvented sculpture with mobiles that relied on random breezes to impart movement to them. The art of Calder is not in the randomness but in the control of random elements to produce movement that is both lyrical and slightly magical. In a similar vein, Lawrence Ferlinghetti reinvented the sonnet, that most rigorous of poetic disciplines. He substituted not blank verse but an almost random meter that relies on assonance — In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see… — instead of traditional syllabification. In “Coney Island of the Mind,” the lines have anywhere from nine to thirty-four syllables and in the earlier “11” from Pictures of the Gone World, there is one line of 89 words and 120 syllables.

In retrospect, this coming to grips with the uncertain was probably inevitable given our thirst for the gambling proposition, and it is no coincidence that gamblers, not Newtonian physicists, were the first to work out the laws of probability. [20] The Latin word for game is ludus which also has the sense of a trifle, an amusement, hence the English word ludicrous. Probability is an element of all games. It is the essence of roulette. It plays a minor but crucial role in most competitive sports. America loves a winner but only if there is a chance that the best player will lose. Babe Ruth was both the home run king and the strike out king. You never knew.

Magic exerts a similar pull. You see it, and you know it can’t be true. But for just a moment, the magician forces you to think that, this time, the laws of nature have been repealed. The assistant has been cut in half at the waist and has then been restored. This time, there is no other explanation. Magic does not work for a child too young to know that it cannot be true. And it does not work for the sophisticate who knows how it was done. It can only work for the person capable of gasping, however briefly, at a miracle.

Lastly, we should note the bond between magic and religion. Death is the eternal verity and religion teaches us to die, ameliorating the certainty of death with the possibility of salvation or rebirth. Religious magic — whether sacramental such as transubstantiation or liturgical such as glossolalia — is always a metaphor for immortality. It is very strong magic compounded equally of faith and skepticism, hope and reason, fierce courage and naked fear.

As it turns out, truth is elusive. It yields only tentatively to science, art, religion and philosophy. Its pursuit is our destiny and perhaps also our doom. We eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge and are cast into a journey whose destination is unknown. Like Plutarch’s boatman, we look astern while rowing forward. If probability is the measure of maybe, then maybe is the measure of our progress, our claim to glory and the source of much of our joy.

Scholarly Notes and Diversions

1. In the spirit of Our Lady’s Juggler, this essay is dedicated to the memory of George M. Glasgow, late Kavanaugh Professor of Speech in Fordham University. Dr. Glasgow was a gentleman, a scholar and a true eccentric who believed that the only decent way to study logic was to cultivate fallacy.

2. Like all good stories, this one is hard to track down. Pete Seeger used it to introduce "Seek and You Shall Find" on Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs (Columbia Records, CS 9505). He got it from his father, the noted musicologist Charles Seeger. The first half of the story, ending with the line, "This too shall pass," had previously been used by Abraham Lincoln in a speech he gave in Milwaukee in 1859 and the line appears by itself in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1860 novel, The Marble Faun. As a child, I remember being told that when Caesar paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome, a slave rode with him in the chariot repeatedly whispering in his ear, "Etiam transebit!"  This too shall pass! It made an impression.

As long as we're at it, we may as well save a few footnotes by owning up to the other dubious quotations cited in this paper. Einstein probably never imagined God playing dice but you will find the famous metaphor attributed to him in Philipp Frank's 1947 biography and it has been repeated so often that the great man should have said it even if he didn't. Presumably he did say, "Raffiniert is der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht," roughly, God is subtle but not malicious — because that line is engraved on a mantle piece at Princeton University. For years, it escaped me that this is an elegant pun because Boshaft, malicious, is almost homophonous with Botschaft which, in some contexts refers to the gospels.

Similarly, Rabelais, asked on his deathbed where he expected to go, probably did not say, "Je vais chercher un grand peut-etre" — I seek to go to a great perhaps. Still, it seems perfectly consistent with the character of one of history's greatest cynics.

Those of us who have never imagined being subjected to the tender mercies of the Holy Inquisition need not inquire as to what if anything Galileo might have or should have said. The sotto voce remark attributed to him is probably a pious fraud perpetrated by admirers who worried that he might seem insufficiently defiant.

Finally, it has been nearly 40 years since I encountered Eugene O'Neill's remark about the death of god and the failure of science. I think I remember it being in a letter to George Jean Nathan but I have never been able to find it again and have no reference for it.

3. Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties, Harper and Row, 1983, p. 1. Professor Johnson says (p. 3) that the Eddington experiments, "...aroused enormous interest throughout the world. No exercise in scientific verification, before or since, has ever attracted so many headlines..." He is stretching the truth more than a little bit. The New York Times did report the eclipse the next day in an unsigned, three inch dispatch from, of all places, Chicago where it was not visible. It was on Page 6. It did not, then or later that year, mention Eddington, Einstein or relativity but focused on speculation about a "big cloud" on the eastern edge of the sun. The cloud metaphor was simply an inept stab at describing an especially brilliant solar flare. There had been lucid pre-eclipse descriptions of the Eddington experiments in the British journal Nature (Feb. 6, 1919, p. 444 f.) and in a Scientific American column of May 3, 1919 (which, however, failed to mention Professor Eddington). I suspect Johnson was thinking of the renown that relativity did gradually attain as the 1920's progressed. By 1931, Herman Hupfeld could reasonably write the lyric "...we get a trifle weary of Mr. Einstein's theory" for "As Time Goes By," the song made famous 11 years later by Dooley Wilson as Sam in Casablanca. For the record, Edington took 16 photographs of the eclipse which showed several stars that were not where they should have been because the their light was bent by the sun’s gravity. The “bendability” of light was one of the most important implications of the General Theory of Relativity.

4. This is a fascinating story. Galileo believed — wrongly I think — that the book of nature is written in mathematical characters (see his letter Il Saggiatore of 1623). The Church, on the other hand, believed — rightly in my view — that mathematics is a self-referential system that does not bear on physical reality except incidentally and fortuitously. Mathematics can describe certain aspects of reality but it is purely a figment of the human creative imagination. The numbers are no more the reality than notes on a staff are the music or the word is the thing. Please bear this in mind as we discuss “reality” as it appears to the photon. Time and dimension are measurements of human perceptions. They do not compute for photons.

5. Even the church found science hard to resist and for every scientist it persecuted there were a dozen who enjoyed its patronage. From Roger Bacon to Gregor Mendel, an impressive number of scientists were monks and science itself often masqueraded as natural philosophy. They got away with it by the simple expedient of publishing in Latin which constituted no threat to the faith of the masses.

6. This, of course, is the sixth day of creation (in the Julian calendar) according to Bishop Ussher's calculation which is still found in the marginal notes of many bibles. James Ussher (1581-1656) was the (Anglican) Archbishop of Armagh from 1625 and Primate of Ireland from 1634 to 1640. He was an accomplished scholar but his dating of the creation, "...could not have been more wrong" in the view of Steve Gould. (See Gould, Stephen Jay, "Fall in the House of Ussher," Natural History, November, 1991, p. 12 ff, reprinted in Eight Little Piggies, Norton, 1993.) Still, Gould finds it, "...an honorable effort for its time" and urges us not to ridicule it. Well, of course not. Still, it is hard to resist having a bit of fun at the expense of an Irish Calvinist whose view of biblical inerrancy was considerably to the right of Luther. I suspect anyone with any sense of metaphor would not devote 2,000 pages of dense Latin prose to deducing a date for the creation. And life is much too short to spend a lot of time worrying about the sensibilities of anyone without a sense of metaphor.

7. Fundamentalism refers essentially to the belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God and, therefore, contains no error. As such, it has been an important issue in Christianity since the Reformation. But modern fundamentalism is a direct outgrowth of the debate over evolution. It emerged gradually from about 1890, became an institutional force in the United States in 1919, and was elevated to the status of dogma in a coup engineered by W.A. Criswell at the Southern Baptist Convention of 1979. Harold Bloom, no friend of the neo-fundamentalists (he calls them Know-Nothings only because, “…Fascist has never domesticated itself as an American term,” whatever that means), offers an incisive understanding of their position. In their quest for bedrock certainty, the neo-fundamentalists have proposed not only that the Bible is free of error but that inerrancy is the prime meaning of the Bible. “Neo-fundamentalists want a densely substantial inerrancy, a truth beyond language, beyond ambiguity, beyond any possibility of refutation” (The American Religion, Simon and Schuster, 1992, p. 230).

8. It is often said that evolution is only a theory, that no one has ever seen one thing evolve into another in nature. Such people know very little about orchids.

9. This unfortunate phrase was coined by one of Darwin's great explicators, Herbert Spencer, but Darwin embraced it immediately much to the regret of generations of his defenders. In truth what is interesting about evolution is that unfit variations survive against the day that they might be needed. Of course Darwin had no way of knowing this.

10. My mother always said, “What’s natural isn’t wonderful” by which I think she meant that values such as beauty and intricacy are not mysterious even if they are hard to explain. The incidence of albinism in the population is about 1 in 17,000. That of hemophilia B is 1 in 40,000. But the gene for hemophilia is actually expressed much more frequently — 1 in 7,500 live male births. Sadly, hemophilia is often fatal while albinism is not. The persistence of hemophilia in the gene pool is hard to imagine in terms of selective advantage but there it is against the day when it might be needed.

11. This is not quite right because it takes many such mutations to produce a noticeable effect. This was the central point of the 1969 Wistar Symposium Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Monograph No. 5, 1967) in which the mathematicians proved that there has not been enough time for one form of hemoglobin to evolve into another, just one of millions of changes needed for an ape to become a human. The great Neo-Darwinian Ernst Mayr responded, in essence, “Yet evolve it certainly has.” Shade of Galileo! Both sides, of course, were right. Evolution has occurred. That is a fact. We do not yet fully understand how it happened never mind why. Probably we never will.

12. Fundamentalists think the fossil record is the spawn of Satan but orthodox Christians have never flatly condemned evolution even if they often wished it would go away. On October 23, 1996, Pope John Paul II published a formal statement endorsing the theory of evolution "...as more than just a hypothesis." Several months later, Steve Gould (Note 6) devoted his This View of Life column to the pope’s statement, noting its conformance with his own view that “…evolution is both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief.” The entire Curia, I am sure, breathed a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, I was the only one who noticed that the pope had chosen to publish his address on the 5,999th anniversary of the Creation.

13. Quantum weirdness serves our upscale media in much the same way that celebrity gossip provides fodder for supermarket tabloids. The Times, for one, cannot resist paradoxical headlines. For example, some years ago (September 16, 1997, Page F5), it reported on a series of experiments in which two colliding beams of radiation were used to produce an electron and a positron. The results, according to The Times, confirmed a longstanding prediction, “…that light beams colliding with each other can goad the empty vacuum into creating something out of nothing.” This sentence betrays a very profound ignorance. First, one cannot goad a vacuum into doing anything. Second, the notion of an empty vacuum implies that the author thinks there may be some other kind. But what is really disturbing is the idea of creating something out of nothing. That is not what happened. Energy got converted into matter, just as Einstein said in 1905 and just as the longstanding predictions predicted. The author of the article in question, Malcolm W. Browne, is not himself profoundly ignorant. Rather he is the victim of a journalistic culture that values the spectacular claim over accuracy and that routinely indulges in sloppy editing.

14. In case you’ve forgotten, this is from The Space Child’s Mother Goose by Frederick Winsor, Simon and Schuster, 1958.

15. What can you expect from a Jesuit-educated writer? To me, nihilism refers not to an obscure political/ philosophical movement that arose in Russia in the 1850’s but to a strain of cynicism about reality that infects numerous intellectual fashions of the last century and a half. There is a certain kind of academic to whom the great issues of 2,000 years of Western philosophy are trivial. Meaning itself is a bourgeois affectation. Deconstructionism, for example, postulates that all texts undermine themselves because meaning inheres in the world independently of any human attempt to represent it in words. It follows from this view that the "meaning" of a text bears only an accidental relationship to the author's conscious intentions. Thus, trying to understand the last two sentences is futile.

16. Sartre’s politics were more significant than his philosophy. He was a committed Stalinist until the Soviet invasion of Hungry in 1956. He then became a Maoist, making the shift from the diabolical to the merely insane with ease and a certain amount of grace. He ultimately denounced Being and Nothingness as the product of “aristocratic idealism” but it was a strange renunciation. It seems to have been the book itself or maybe the process of writing it that was being rejected, not its contents.

17. "Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp was completed in 1917, two years before the modern world began which argues not that art caused uncertainty but that uncertainty fell on fertile soil. When he submitted it pseudonymously to the avant garde Society of Independent Artists for exhibition, it was rejected.

18. By the early 1960's, it had become evident that literary criticism in particular had gone off the deep end. There were so many isms afloat that they became immune even to parody. One disgruntled Berkeley professor produced a casebook containing an even dozen fictitious critical appraisals of Winnie-the-Pooh only to have it taken seriously (See: Crews, Frederick C., The Pooh Perplex, E.P. Dutton and Co., 1965). One of his essays, for example, postulates that the "...stories in the book are really dictated by compromises between the edificatory wishes of the Milnean voice and the self-indulging wishes of the Christophoric ear." And this was before the advent of deconstructionism which killed literature entirely in a chamber of toxic verbiage.

19. Charlie Brown is Existential Christian, a modernist version of John Bunyon's Pilgrim seeking the way, the light and the truth in this Vale of Humiliation. Lucy, of course, is the devil — not the medieval Prince of Darkness, but the boulevardier of heaven we meet in Job and as Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess. Snoopy, naturally, is God, again, not the fierce God of Genesis but the somewhat less engaged version you run into in mainline Protestant churches. (Readers suspecting the writer of making all this up are invited to consult The Gospel According To Peanuts by Robert L. Short, John Knox Press, 1964. Those who think it blasphemous should consider that it could be worse. In Frank L. Baum's version of the story, The Wizard of Oz is God and he turns out to be a frightened little nerd with a big megaphone. In The Book of J, Harold Bloom casts Yahweh as a sexually frustrated Jewish-American prince.)

20. Perhaps “gamblers” is not completely accurate to describe the professions of Gerolano Cardano (1501-1576), a physician, Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) an attorney, and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a mathematician. Each made multiple contributions to mathematics and none can be said to have specialized in probability. Rather, all were attracted to it through a shared interest in games of chance.

THE BRUNELLUS PROBLEM Jerry Harkins 

 There is a certain kind of one-upmanship practiced by intellectuals in which the object is to demonstrate a mastery of obscure information. This differs from Trivial Pursuits in several important respects. For one thing, it is a blood sport and for another it never intrudes into anything that might remotely be confused with popular culture. A pundit who compares Pat Buchanan to the Docetist heretics is marking his intellectual turf in much the same way a dog marks a hydrant but without the dog’s sense of play. 

 The master of the form is, of course, Umberto Eco whose 1980 novel, “The Name of the Rose,” is a tour de force of arcana, so much so that three classicists published what became a best selling guide to the book for American readers. Their “Key” is almost as good as the novel. For example, a minor character, the obscure French philosopher John Buridan (c.1290-c.1360), is identified only as, “an important figure in the Nominalist debates.” You are expected to know what nominalism is, how it relates to the realist philosophy of William of Baskerville, the (fictional) hero of the novel, and his friend, the (historical) moderate nominalist William of Occam, and how it resonates in Twentieth Century logical positivism and contemporary deconstructionism. It is further understood that your interest is purely scholarly. The authors will not waste your time with gossip about one of the most interesting figures of the dark ages. Of course you are not even aware such assumptions are being made about you unless you exhausted the mystery genre at an early age, so score two points for the authors of the “Key.” 

Still, “Key” does not approach the subtlety of “The Name.” You can read the entire novel several times and never realize that the author supposes you are as familiar with the works of Jorge Luis Borges as he is. In this instance, you have lost several points without even knowing the ball was in play even if you cover Borges in the graduate seminar you teach every two or three years. 

The most irritating thing about Eco, however, is not that he knows more than you do or that he is always right but that he has a bad habit of hinting at knowledge so outré that you, dear reader, have no hope of looking it up. Such is the case with Brunellus. Early in the novel, William and his apprentice, Adso, arrive at a Benedictine monastery and are greeted by a group of monks outside its walls. Adso reports this conversation: 

“I thank you, Brother Cellarer,” my master replied politely, “and I appreciate your courtesy all the more since, in order to greet me, you have interrupted your search. But don’t worry. The horse came this way and took the path to the right. He will not get far because he will have to stop when he reaches the dungheap. He is too intelligent to plunge down that precipitous slope…” 

“When did you see him?” the Cellarer asked. 

“We haven’t seen him at all, have we Adso?... But if you are hunting for Brunellus, the horse can be only where I have said.” 

Subsequently we learn how William has deduced the nature of the Cellarer’s mission and the location of the horse. But how has he learned the animal’s name. When Adso asks, William says only, “May the Holy Ghost sharpen your mind, son! What other name could he possibly have? Why even the great Buridan, who is about to become Rector in Paris, when he wants to use a horse in one of his logical examples, always calls it Brunellus.” 

And may the Holy Ghost sharpen your mind also, reader! Everybody except you knows why a monk’s horse must be named Brunellus. It is so obvious Eco will not insult you by explaining it. 

As it turns out, the present writer is not exactly chopped liver when it comes to horse arcana. For one thing, he knows the “Key” is wrong to translate Brunellus as Brownie. Naturally, he knows about Buridan’s ass Brunellus, the metaphorical intellectual who starves to death between two equidistant bales of hay. (Buridan may be obscure but his ass is famous.) And like anyone else familiar with Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale, he is aware of Nigel Wireker’s “Speculum Stultorum.” This is a fable of another Brunellus, also an ass, who desperately wants a longer tail and, not finding it through drugs or graduate study at the University of Paris, returns to England to found a new monastic order. 

So has Eco erred? Might it be that a monk would consider Brunellus a perfect name for an ass but not necessarily for a horse? To assume an error on Eco’s part would be a fool’s bet. He’s good at this. Better than you and even better than I. Maybe as good as my friend Gerry Sircus. 

I can live, I suppose, with my own ignorance. I can even live without knowing how to Google my way out of it. But it’s hard to accept that someone else besides Eco knows the answer and it is not I. 

Somewhere there is the entomologist who named a rare Hawaiian butterfly Rhyncopalpus brunellus (Little Bruno the brown nose). What other name could it possibly have? Worst of all is my certain knowledge that Eco knows about that damn butterfly and is just waiting for me to mention it casually. Einstein said that God is subtle but not malicious. Would we could say the same of Umberto Eco.

Subsequently

Fifteen years after publishing this essay, I read the brilliant book Life Is Simple:  How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe by Johnjoe McFadden, (Basic Books, 2021).  As it turns out, I need to recant my description of John Buridan as "...a minor character, [and an] obscure French philosopher."  I must have slept through Dr. Javier's class on nominalism (as I slept through most of his classes).  At least the Holy Ghost sharpened my mind enough so that I figured out that William of Baskerville is Eco's surrogate for William of Occam.

BILLY BASHING
Jerry Harkins


The Times must have run front page book reviews before June 20, 2004 but I can’t, for the life of me, recall one. [1] The publication of Bill Clinton’s memoirs, however, was too much of a temptation. The Times’ relationship with Mr. Clinton is not a simple one. It endorsed him twice but that didn’t stop it from despising him or from siding with his most rabid, red meat critics. It never said anything good about him that wasn’t damning with faint praise. It has praised George Bush unreservedly on several issues, but never Bill Clinton. Toni Morrison famously explained it as a concomitant of its perception that he had been our first black President and she was right. He fed The Times’ nightmarish vision of a southern black hoodlum: big, loud, trashy and sexually voracious. They miss the catharsis of their daily Billy bashing so they decided to enjoy the opportunity to renew old grudges. They brought out their biggest literary gun, one Michiko Kakutani, and issued her a new well of bile. Ms. Kakutani was not amused: “…numbing, self conscious garrulity,” she wrote. Long-winded and tedious. Self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull. A messy pastiche. Self-serving, often turgid. Wow! That is literary criticism. Self-conscious, self-indulgent and self-serving—all in one 1,600 word barrage. There should be a 5-day waiting period before critics are allowed to buy a thesaurus.

Now this may lead you to ask, who in hell is Michiko Kakutani? Well, according to the GoldSea Asian American web site, she is Number 10 on their list of the 60 most inspiring Asian Americans. Here’s what they have to say about her:

"Her surgical vivisections of bloated authors have made the New York Times lead literary critic the bitch-goddess of American letters and won her a Pulitzer in 1998 to boot. Browbeating America's cultured class with its own code is Kakutani's contribution to the spider-webbing crack in the stereotype of English-fracturing Asians. She did it all while keeping her inner -- or outer -- life from being limned by either the fawning or the fuming."

I have a little trouble with “surgical.” The vivisection image is not a pretty one but the writers wanted to imply the precision and finesse with which they think the critic goes about her dirty but necessary business. I associate her more with axes and sledge hammers, but that is only my opinion. And, “bitch-goddess” may be a bit harsh, but they know her better than I do. As to “browbeating America’s cultured class,” well, she is a product of Yale University whose graduates, by their own admission, tend to know everything worth knowing (William F. Buckley, Jr.), nothing much about anything (George W. Bush), or everything everyone else should and should not know (Pat Robertson). And while I’m at it, I may as well admit that Ms. Kakutani is pretty much an equal opportunity critic: she doesn’t like most of the books she reads which must make for a fairly pinched life. But she really despises the Clintons. She found Hillary’s book, Living History, “…a mishmash of pious platitudes” and “robotic asides.” And, of course, it was “self-conscious.” Self-conscious may be the whole idea of autobiography but Ms. Kakutani knows what she doesn’t like. [2] I wonder if she’s ever tried cozy mysteries or Harlequin romances. Probably not.

Given all the ignorant malcontents among its readers, The Times got a lot of nasty letters about its ongoing obsession with the Clintons. Its Public Editor Daniel Okrent [3], however, reviewed the brouhaha and found nothing objectionable about the review or the obsession. Which came as a relief to me because in football it would be called “piling on” and carry a fifteen yard penalty. In journalism, it is called indulging the editors’ neuroses and gets nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Notes

1. I am told it did run a front page review of one of the Harry Potter masterpieces. I must have been out to lunch that morning.

2. Nine days after the Kakutani review, The Times published another one in the Sunday “Book Review” (6/29/04). This was marginally more sympathetic which is surprising as its author was Maureen Dowd, the paper’s most acerbic columnist. Ms. Dowd, you may remember, was the writer who castigated Judy Dean for not standing by her man on the campaign trail. A positive review by Larry McMurty was published on July 4 and a sophomoric satire by Christopher Buckley ran in the Book Review on July 11. Fortunately Mr. Clinton is writing another book so we can look forward to another cycle of what Alexander Pope referred to as, “Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss”

3. Mr. Okrent is neither a member of the public nor an editor of the paper. He is the Complaint Department going by a puffed up name, a little like calling the garbage man a sanitation engineer which in fact is not a bad job description for Mr. O.

YANKEE GO HOME
Jerry Harkins

Life is full of mysteries and I guess I should get used to it. At the moment, I’m wondering why the United States pursues a foreign policy that may or may not be consistent with its values but sure as hell is not at all consistent with its interests. This is going to turn into a piece about Iraq but maybe we should begin with something easier. Such as Korea. A half century ago, we sent 1,789,000 soldiers to save South Korea from being swallowed up by North Korea. Of these, 33,742 were killed and 92,134 were wounded. I know it’s not polite to mention it, but that’s a big investment. Since then, we have maintained enough soldiers there—currently around 37,000—to serve as an earnest of our commitment. They couldn’t possibly stop a new invasion. They would be overrun in a matter of hours. But their mere presence is supposed to remind the North Koreans that we are willing to double down on our blood investment. To me this has always seemed a questionable strategy, even while it kept on working for fifty years. North Korea is an insane Stalinist state unlikely to conform its actions to any standard known to the civilized world, including its own survival.

Anyway, the South Koreans no longer want our protection. They have adopted what they call a “sunshine policy” the gist of which is that the North is no longer a “main enemy” but is now a “friendly neighbor.” The dear leader does his best to render Seoul more realistic and cannot be faulted if they choose to ignore him. What the South seems to want is reunification with the North, and the North says it’s willing to talk about it on the condition they throw us out first. While we’re leaving, they also want us to participate in an aid package to bail them out of the chronic economic disaster they have created by choosing guns over butter.

The Southerners are rioting in the streets and their politicians are outdoing each other screaming to anyone who will listen, “Yankee go home.” Sub rosa, some of them want us to stay because, if we go, it will make international investors nervous and that would be bad for the likes of Samsung, Hyundai and Kia. Hyundai especially is playing both sides of the street. It is making a huge investment in the North. For one thing, it paid $500 million for the right to build all the civil engineering projects the North undertakes after it gets the necessary foreign aid—which is to say after hell freezes over. It is also building a huge multi-billion dollar manufacturing facility in the North. But it’s business plan is predicated on selling a good share of the projected output in the U.S. market which, given the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, is somewhat speculative. So there is no appetite in the executive suite for making investors any more antsy than they are given that the company is pouring trillions of Won into a black hole. They prefer that we stay, hoping that investors are stupid enough to think our presence will act as a deterrent to Mr. Kim. It’s the Korean stock exchange that drives what passes for policy among the tonier classes. Most folks though just want us gone. And if you ask me, that sounds like a plan.

The South Koreans aren’t the only ones who think our North Korean policy is inconvenient or ill conceived. After considerable saber rattling, the Northerners and the Southerners forced the U.S. to sit down with them in April, 2003. The meeting ended badly so the Chinese decided to get involved in a particularly inscrutable fashion. After intense diplomacy, they convened a six-way conference in August after which they announced a vague agreement to meet again. The dancing in the streets that might ordinarily greet such momentous happenings was subdued, however, when the North Koreans announced that they had already built six nuclear weapons and were reprocessing enough plutonium to make forty more. Still, the Chinese, preferring not to contemplate whom Honorable Kim planned to bomb, said the meeting had been a great success. The North Koreans, thinking perhaps China had not gotten the memo, said they saw no reason for further meetings until the U.S. meets all its demands—which is to say caves into extortion. One of the Japanese representatives chimed in with the view that the main stumbling block was the U.S. refusal to make the necessary concessions to said extortion. He didn’t say what the concessions were because, like everybody else, he has no idea what Kim Jong Il wants besides a library of porno flicks. All this is bonkers of course but it leads to the conclusion that the countries of the region are united in believing we are the bad guys. It’s the only thing that unites them and I have no stomach for bursting their bubble. I mean if it weren’t for the common enemy in Washington, the Koreans and the Chinese might come to blows over the volatile issue of the downfall of the Kingdom of Koguryo in 668 C.E. The Japanese and the Chinese might be at each other’s throats about whether the rape of Nanking was genocide or merely an excessively enthusiastic expression of Japanese eroticism. Barbarians like us, brought up in the straightjacket of Aristotelian logic, can never hope to understand the nuances of East Asian diplomacy. So here’s the policy: we declare the Korean War over, pack up and go home.

You say we can’t trust the North Koreans. Ten minutes after we leave, they’ll issue an ultimatum and maybe drop a bomb or two on Seoul for good measure. Maybe. Probably not, but maybe. The Great Beloved Leader is hard to predict. I mean in your heart you know he’s a fruitcake. But it’s none of our business. The South Koreans are all grown up. A free, self-determining, highly successful nation. Maybe they got that way on our dime, but now they get to make these decisions all by themselves. It may be hard to see the kids fledge but there you have it. And if they fall out of the nest and die, well we tried. It’s a cruel world. Pack up, Yankee, and mustering as much dignity as possible, go home.

It seems so obvious you have to wonder what you’re missing. What are we worried about? Not Japan. What we do in Korea has absolutely no effect on Japan where we have another tripwire in place. A lot of Japanese don’t want us either so maybe they should hold a plebiscite and we agree to abide by the results. Like the Koreans, it’s sometimes hard to know just what the Japanese want us to do. At the moment, they’re working with us in an effort to develop an antimissile system that could intercept rockets fired from North Korea (or, for that matter, China). The Northerners do not approve of this and have announced that Japan’s cooperation with the United States, “would serve as a detonating fuse to turn Japan into a nuclear sea of fire.” Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi says there’s nothing to worry about. “The reports I’ve had say it is nothing to make a fuss about,” he opined. The South Korean deputy reunification minister, Lee Bong Jo, agrees. If a nuclear sea of fire doesn’t faze these guys, you have to wonder what would.

Surely we don’t have to worry about Hawaii, at least not for the present. The day North Korea poses a threat to Hawaii, we simply bomb it back into the Stone Age. Al Qaeda? I don’t know but, to the extent North Korea may be a player on the terrorism stage, or on the nuclear proliferation stage, our response has got to be serious which is to say independent of South Korea. Anyway, the 37,000 troops we have in South Korea are not in a position to contribute to the war on terrorism. If anything, they are hostages limiting our flexibility.

I can get pretty worked up about this. I’m thinking I may be wrong and the South Koreans really want us to stay. I mean, I don’t speak the language and I am fully aware of my limitations when it comes to diplomatic subtleties. Moreover, I am biased. I actually agree with a lot of what I see on the placards. George Bush as a demented vampire isn’t so far from the truth. George is, at minimum, a muscular Christian who scares the hell out of me. As far as he’s concerned this is not about North Korea or South Korea. It’s about domestic politics right here in the good old US of A. The Administration does not want to get involved in Korea, at least not yet. At the same time, it does not want to be seen as turning tail. So it has adopted an amazingly cynical program of its own: we won’t even talk to the bad guys until they agree to improve their human rights record. Our President would like people to believe he gives a damn about human rights which is hard to do in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. South Korea’s response to this bit of diplomatic theater is classic. The former Foreign Minister, a Mr. Ban, says that of course human rights should be honored everywhere but the “particular situation” in North Korea must be taken into account and the issue should not “have a negative effect” on negotiations. The “particular situation” seems to be the fact that Mr. Ban knows Mr. Kim is a sadistic bloodsucker who is not overly stable and there’s not a hell of a lot he can do about it. For pure cynicism, then, Seoul and Washington seem to be in a dead heat.

The evident flaw in all this policy posturing is that North Korea is much more of a problem than Iraq ever was, even if the problems it poses are or should be more salient to their neighbors than to us. But Mr. Bush is not ready to deal with North Korea, thank God because I’d hate to see a renewal of hostilities. What’s stopping him is Iraq where the war he did want is not going so well. The American priorities are informed not by a strategic vision, not by a noble goal, not even by our self interest. They are driven by a sort of malignant neglect. The key strategic value is winning elections and that will be determined, Karl Rove thinks, by how Iraq plays on the six o’clock news. We can’t fight two wars at the same time, a fact that seems to have come as a surprise to the geniuses running the Pentagon. We’d lose them both which is worse than losing only one. So Korea takes a back seat.

Given all these uncertainties, I want to be very careful. Maybe we should stay in Korea after all. Why? How does it advance the interests of the United States to station 37,000 warriors in Korea? I have no idea but that may simply be a failure of imagination. Korea is not like the Middle East where, at least, we do have a strategic interest in the oil. Which brings us, at last, to the point of this essay.

We do need Middle Eastern oil but to think our entire misbegotten policy in the region is about oil is myopic. If it were, we would have kissed off Israel decades ago. One of the great myths is that our policy toward that woebegone country is based on some sort of high moral commitment. Sadly it is not, even though it may once have been. It would be more accurate to say that it is based on the high moral commitment of American Jews who, not incidentally, tend to vote their convictions. A lot of King George’s fundamentalist friends agree with them because they think that Armageddon cannot start until the Jews are secure in Israel. The Jews, of course, are not about to dissuade them even though they know the fundamentalists don’t have both oars in the water. I hope this isn’t news to you. A very similar calculus informs our Cuba policy which is driven by a bunch of aging refugees with grandiose ideas. But unlike Israel and Cuba, neither Iraq nor the Arabs have much of a constituency in the U.S. outside the oil companies. So our leaders were free to orchestrate the Iraqi war anyway they pleased. It was, however, a bargain with the devil. Once we invaded, there was never going to be a realistic exit strategy that would not be seen as turning tail. The worst part of that is it gives Jacques Chirac gloating rights and sets the United Nations down on the moral high ground. Damn!

Whenever the subject turns to Iraq (as you see it has), you get a lot of heated arguments. There is however one thing everybody except the Iraqis and I agree on: whatever else we do, we have to be sure to preserve the “territorial integrity” of Iraq. The thinking class believes it would be a disaster should the country descend into ethnic or regional chaos because it could spill over and destabilize or otherwise discommode the neighbors. The only problem, as it so often is, is reality: we are living in an era of religious and ethnic fragmentation. The Basques want to separate from Spain and France, the Kashmiris want to get out from under the heel of Hindu India, the Kurds want their own state carved out of Iraq, Iran and Turkey, Nigeria is coming apart at the seams, the Sudanese Muslims are slaughtering the Sudanese Christians, Bangladesh split off from Pakistan not too long ago and the Sikhs of India would like to follow suit, the Muslims of southern Thailand are fighting a nasty little rebellion against the Buddhists, there is no more Czechoslovakia, Quebec is sporadically unhappy being part of Canada, the only thing holding Syria together is a brutal dictatorship, and Central Asia is a witch’s brew of nationalities seeking nationhood. Think Chechnya. There is a word for this process. It is called Balkanization in honor of a thousand years of religious and ethnic hatreds among the brotherhood of Southern Slavs. You could just as easily call it Caucasianization in honor of the ethnic and religious fissions going on in Georgia and elsewhere. Georgia is a nation with just a hair more than five million souls—a tad smaller than Rio de Janeiro—who are waging four revolutions simultaneously (Abkhazia, Ajaria, South Ossetia and Mengrelia) requiring the attention of peacekeepers from Russia and the UN. In Africa, tribal war affects practically every country south of the Sahara and religious war is being waged in every other country. The fact that a lot of these people are starving does nothing to lessen their enthusiasm for slaughter. It must be admitted that many of the problems are the result of former colonial powers trying to impose European or, in the case of Georgia, Stalinist geopolitical logic on vast swaths of the globe that were perfectly happy with their own cultural logic which, often enough, involved mutual slaughter.

Can this teach us something about Iraq? Probably not, but the word Iraq derives from the medieval Arabic name for the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of Baghdad that was later called Al-Jazirah meaning The Island. From 1534 to 1918 this piece of modern Iraq was known variously as Baghdad or Mesopotamia (meaning between the rivers) and was a province (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire. It was home to numerous Arabic-speaking tribes belonging mostly to the Suni branch of Islam. In 1922, the British cobbled it together with Al Basrah, the province in the south inhabited primarily by Shiite Muslims and Ma’dan or Marsh Arabs. Mosul, the adjacent province in the north populated largely by Kurds and other non-Arabs, was added by treaty with Turkey in 1926. This was a big mistake given all the oil but (a) Turkey had been on the losing side in World War I, and (b) Turkey already had enough trouble with its own Kurds. But the important thing to take from history is that the so-called Iraqis have been engaged in tribal warfare with each other and their neighbors since the beginning of recorded history. They invented war more than five thousand years ago along with cuneiform writing, banking, despotism, imperialism and many of the other accouterments of what we like to think of as civilization. During the Ottoman era, this area was the eastern frontier and there was rarely a day of peace between the Suni Arabs and the Shiite Persians.

Thus, what is shown on today’s maps as Iraq is not a nation or a state but a federation yoked together recently by outside colonialists against the will of all the native parties and their neighbors. There is not now nor has there ever been equilibrium of any sort and any notion that order can be imposed is nothing but wishful thinking. “A democratic Iraq” is a contradiction in terms; “at peace with its neighbors” is delusional. In the absence of a brutal dictatorship, the only force that could possibly hold the parties together is oil to which all three have some reasonable claim. But these are not reasonable people given to cooperation and compromise. To Iraqis, freedom means the freedom to riot, pillage and kill each other and everyone else. The vision of the United States Marine Corps—which has known and successfully dealt with fanaticism before—negotiating with what appears to be a ragtag militia that has fought it to a standstill is revealing. As a nation, the United States is simply not willing to use the overwhelming force that would be needed to subdue its tormentors. If it wouldn’t do it in Vietnam after wasting 50,000 lives, it will not do it in the deserts of Mesopotamia. Even the Soviets were not willing to do it in Afghanistan. Their half-hearted attempt to do so contributed mightily to their downfall when the comrade citizens got sick of the bloodshed. (Note to Karl Rove: you might want to fact check this.)

So where are we? Well, in a few short years, America has alienated pretty much the whole world. It wasn’t easy. The war was just the last straw and it is making everything worse every hour we spend there. Why don’t we leave? It seems to me that our mission in Iraq has, as our own beloved leader has said, been accomplished. The Great Evildoer is in our custody. Neither he nor his successors will threaten anyone with weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future for reasons too embarrassing to mention. The only thing left is nation building which Dear Leader denounced in his 2000 campaign.

Anyway, there is no nation. Get used to it. The good folk who live there don’t want us to build one for them. In this non-desire, they are joined by like-minded colleagues imported from Al Qaeda and Hamas. They do not want democracy. They want a dictatorship, some preferring one or another Islamic model, others a Baathist one. Anyway, it seems to me, the idea of imposing democracy is another sort of contradiction in terms. So why are we working so hard to convince ourselves that we are, in Mr. Bush’s words, “doing God’s work?” What are they saying? Is God pissed off at Iraq the way he once was at Sodom? Are smart bombs his modern version of fire and brimstone? If that’s what they think…well, that’s blasphemy. That describes a God who is either stupid or sociopathic or both.

It is basically impossible to extricate yourself from a quagmire while retaining even a shred of dignity. But if you’ve ever been trapped in one, you know that your only other option is to drown. You are already wet, filthy and invested with bugs you don’t want to know about. It is just not worth trying to preserve what little dignity you have left. Every fiber of your being is shouting, “Get the hell out of here!” But, you say, abandoning Iraq now will have dire consequences. Yes, it will. The Arabs will be very mad at us and oil futures will go through the roof in anticipation of another embargo. The right wing will be in full voice demanding to know “Who lost Iraq?” The question, of course, will be moot because Iraq will no longer exist. They wouldn’t like the answer anyway because it would mean Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush would have to fall on their swords.

Withdrawing from Iraq will be calamitous in ways we can’t begin to imagine but, even so, staying there is a fool’s game. The President is forever giving speeches in front of what Madison Avenue calls scrims that bear the motto of the day. For the forthcoming concession speech, the scrim should say, “About face.” But, given the administration’s penchant for the big lie, it will probably say, “Advancing to the rear.”

AGINCOURT, TRAFALGAR, WATERLOO AND NOW SINGAPORE
Jerry Harkins

Jacques “Iraq” Chirac has not been having an easy time this year what with the ignominious demise of the EU constitution, high unemployment, a bitter struggle with Tony Blair over France’s addiction to high agricultural supports and another with his young constituents who took to the barricades over their god-given right to employment security and six week vacations. The International Olympic Committee not only didn’t give the 2012 games to Paris, they added insult to injury by giving them to London. Think of it as the Battle of Singapore. Jock didn’t help his own cause by mouthing off about British cuisine and claiming that the only contribution the Brits have made to agriculture is mad cow disease. His own contribution, of course, is terminal foot in the mouth syndrome. I mean the man said that English food is the worst in the world except for Finland. The Finns had two votes on the IOC committee. I was not surprised by the Olympic Committee’s decision. The French play a little soccer and have produced a handful of good tennis players but generally they don’t win very much. The video of the good citizens of Paris expressing their disagreement may have been misleading. Their anger was directed less at the IOC and more at England and Tony Blair who, they announced, had cheated. Well, they said the same thing about Hank the Cinq, Wellington and Lord Nelson. The French have a lot of experience with the English, most of it embarrassing.

France, you see, is a state of mind making a sincere effort to be a nation. Since 1792, it has tried thirteen different forms of government: five republics, two empires, a Reign of Terror, a Directorate, a Consulate, a restored Monarchy, and, during World War II, two Nazi collaborationist regimes, that of Pierre Laval in Paris and Philippe Petain in Vichy. While all have been ineffective, they have produced a colorful cast of leaders beginning with Robespierre who ruled by the dictum, “Terror without virtue is powerless.” Virtuous terror is one of those uniquely French constructions that is logical only in a language with a very nuanced grammar. It is the same kind of logic that turns Napoleon into a “military genius” which, in any other language, would be an oxymoron.

In the real world, Napoleon was a military idiot. He did manage to defeat Austria, Italy and Egypt before running into major league pitching in such places as Haiti. And Russia. In less than six months in 1812, through sheer stupidity fortified by invincible arrogance, he managed to reduce an army—his own—of more than 400,000 soldiers to a mob of fewer than 10,000. In fact, military history provides the perfect capsule description of French history. Over the centuries, French soldiers have displayed courage, resolve and patriotism. French generals on the other hand have been mostly inept. The Arc de Triomphe is a monument to that ineptitude. On it are engraved the names of 801 French generals, 799 of whom you have never heard. On its sides are the names of 268 battles, 30 of which are regarded as definitive victories. The rest are ties. There was not enough space for definitive defeats.

Vive la France! When Marianne looks in her mirror, she sees a beacon to mankind, the fragile guardian of culture, art, ethics and cuisine in an undeserving world. She knows people think of her as something of a scold. The Americans especially accuse her of being haughty, arrogant and often frivolous. Well, what can one say about the Americans? Twice in the last century, the French had to rescue them from the jaws of defeat. Victory and defeat do not mean the same things in French as they do in other languages. For example, the terror alert system in Paris has five levels: take a vacation, run, hide, surrender and collaborate. Calvin and Hobbes capture this philosophy precisely. Calvin is stationed behind the wall of his snow fort proclaiming, “I’m ready for anything!” He is immediately bombarded by several dozen snowballs. Hobbes asks him, “Are you ready for unconditional surrender?” Buried in the remains of the fort, Calvin replies, “That above all else.”

The most important French hero of recent times was Charles de Gaulle who, as a young man, did everything he could to teach the British and Americans how to save his country’s butt. When this proved impossible, he single handedly invaded Normandy, liberated Paris, fought off the German counterattack in the Battle of the Bulge and reduced Berlin to ashes. He accomplished all this armed only with a butter knife while riding a white horse and wearing a bulletproof cape. Later, as President of the Republic, he put down the Algerian revolt and developed the force de frappe which is essentially an ice cream confection. He then withdrew France from military participation in NATO, confident that it could defend itself. Against the United States and Great Britain. Napoleon had already scared the hell out of the Russians so they wouldn’t dare attack France. Unfortunately, his nuclear adventure went awry when it came up against Greenpeace. He was undaunted. He once said, “When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.” He often said, “I am France.” Does that sound familiar? Charles XI’s answer to Louis XIV. L’etat c’est moi.

His distaste for the United States was total. Looking down that marvelous Gallic nose of his, he declaimed, “You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.” The biggest damn fool thing the Americans did, however, was to try to bail France out of the mess it had created in its colonial satrapy, Viet Nam. Ike, who was President of the U.S. at the time, still had a soft spot for the French (remember, de Gaulle had saved Ike from ignominious defeat in Europe). He also had a weakness for the domino theory so he took over the fight against the Viet Cong thereby beginning America’s 20-year nightmare.

Chirac is a tinker’s version of de Gaulle, a tacky, plaster souvenir statue of the anointed one. How he rose to be the leader of a great nation is something of a mystery, one I don’t want to probe too deeply. I can hear my French friends asking me about how a great nation like America could elect an ignorant Yahoo like George W. Bush as its own supreme leader. Of course, the answer is we did it to restore French smugness in the wake of their defeat by Greenpeace. As it turned out we needn’t have bothered. The French merely declared the Battle of Greenpeace a great victory and engraved it on the Arc de Triomphe. Their smugness was never discommoded.

The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one big thing. The French know everything. For example, they know how to make the most disgusting things palatable. Do you want to eat snails? Go to Paris. Truffles anyone? Ditto. Horses? Well, you get the idea. They used to make the best wine in the world but now they’re second or third. That’s what happens when you spread culture to the heathens. That great civilizing mission often comes a-cropper which gives them a chance to bemoan the invincible barbarity of the non-French. Americans, for example, have never learned the proper use of a bidet because they have never let us observe one being used. There are instruction manuals but some things are hard to put into even French words.

Unlike any other nation in the world, France is necessary. If it didn’t exist we would have to invent it. We could call it Disneyland.

DE LAY OF DE LAND
Jerry Harkins

Ladies and gentlemen, Christianity offers the only viable, reasonable, definitive answer to the questions of 'Where did I come from?' 'Why am I here?' 'Where am I going?' 'Does life have any meaningful purpose?' Only Christianity offers a way to understand that physical and moral border. Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world -- only Christianity.
—Tom DeLay
April 12, 2002



Regular readers know my mantra: what would Jesus do? Go on first class golfing junkets paid for by lobbyists? Gerrymander Texas congressional districts in the mad pursuit of power? Sell access and influence to political contributors? Put his wife and daughter on the payroll? Sell to the highest bidder the popcorn concession at the crucifixion? Sure he would.

Tom DeLay is toast and I, for one, will be happy to pass the jam. Much to his surprise, he has been indicted on charges of criminal conspiracy and money laundering in connection with the above-referenced Gerrymander. His defense is twofold. First, “I didn’t do it.” Well, that’s a relief! Second, the prosecutor is a partisan fanatic. So that’s the story! The fanatic in question replied, “Being called vindictive and partisan by Tom DeLay is like being call ugly by a frog.” Tom also allowed as to how this was political retribution for his successful role in the Gerrymander. “This is,” he said, “one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history.” I immediately thought of Nathan Hale, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Haymarket martyrs. I had the unworthy wish that Tom might share the fate of these victims of prosecutorial misconduct. This is, after all, Texas. He probably won’t though. His lawyers immediately went into court and asked a judge to throw out the charges on the ground that this was the weakest indictment in history (except for that of Jesus). It would take a judge with an iron stomach to do so but, hey, this is Texas and Mr. DeLay is a very big shot in the Lone Star State. Judges are not terribly expensive.

Leader DeLay poses as a former bum who was born again by the grace of Jesus. This is primo politico claptrap down in Texas. Being or at least having been a bum is taken as proof of one’s manhood and being born again is conclusive evidence that God is on our side. He got thrown out of Baylor for drinking but that is not so bad because Baylor is a heretical Baptist school which is not sufficiently fundamentalist. Contrary to the Chicago Declaration, Baylor says it, “…is founded on the belief that God's nature is made known through both revealed and discovered truth.” “Discovered truth” includes science which is blasphemous.

Tom was an exterminator before being elected to Congress representing Sugar Land, Texas. I’ve always thought he spent too much time with cockroaches. He married his high school sweetheart and they’ve been practicing family values ever since. Christine is on the payroll as is daughter, Danielle, whom he retains as a consultant. She is also a lobbyist, but with born again Christians you have to look beyond mere appearances. She avoids lobbying in Washington, working only in Texas where her father has no influence except for little courtesies like the Great Gerrymander.

Texas is a land of contradictions—big open spaces and small closed minds. Much of the state (no one really knows how much) is still dry but you can usually get a drink by becoming a “member” of the local restaurant of your choice. Admission costs a quarter and there is no IQ test. Texas has no income tax, personal or corporate. It prides itself on being the low tax state and it is always grateful to Mississippi without which it would invariably rank fiftieth in everything else too. Go to a business lunch in Dallas or Houston and look around you. Seventy-five percent of the men are carrying handguns. If it’s a club that lets women in, 50% of the girls will be packing too. We’re not talking about .22 caliber Saturday Night Specials either. In keeping with their status as citizens of the nation’s second largest state, Texans prefer the .357 Magnum and Elephant Load ammunition for their everyday shooting. It is rumored that Colt is working on just such a gun equipped with a grenade launcher and stiletto. The light weight model for ladies will omit the stiletto. In any event, since these eating clubs are the last redoubts of the three martini lunch, you are well advised to keep a low profile. When a junior executive sashays up to the salad bar, be alert. Study President Bush's body language and speech patterns and wonder if he too is armed. “Dangerous” goes without saying.

Texans all think they are cowboys. They love to dress up in ten gallon hats and high heeled boots made with the leather of exotic, preferably endangered species. These costumes are invariably accessorized with four-pound rodeo championship belt buckles measuring at least six by nine inches. In Houston eating clubs, some of these buckles will be made of solid gold and marked with what looks like a cattle brand but is really a registered logo of Neiman Marcus. It takes a tough man to break a mean bronco, brand a longhorn cow or do either to a real Texas lady.

As you might expect, Texas comes complete with its own mythology. It used to be that Texas politicians really were giants—colorful characters who were as corrupt as the devil but slick as a slaughterhouse floor and charming as a fakir working a cobra. Think of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. Every story you ever heard about either one of them is true. It all began at the Alamo where a posse of American icons—Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark) and Davy Crockett (The Duke himself) among them—discovered the ultimate weapon, PR. The art of making a silk purse out of a pig’s ear. Pretty much everything you’ve ever heard about the Battle of the Alamo is bullshit except that Santa Ana won. That means Texas lost but you won’t find it mentioned much. Any five year old will tell you that our 187 heroes won a moral victory in spite of a Mexican army numbering in the millions. It’s the same sort of moral victory old Tom DeLay is about to enjoy in Huntsville.

Texans have always lied a lot but today’s batch are degenerates compared to their ancestors. DeLay is a perfect example. When things go wrong he whines his lies. Can you imagine LBJ whining? When a problem arose, Landslide Lyndon would round up the malefactor, put his massive arm around the man’s shoulders and say, “Let us reason together.” It was very effective. And perfectly legal.

Subsequently

In November 2010, The Hammer was convicted and a few weeks later was given three years in jail. He blamed his problems on the liberals and told the Today Show that Travis County, Texas was the most liberal jurisdiction in America. He is out on bail pending appeal and is likely to remain so for some time. He could get off on the "merits" (remember this is Texas) but if it gets to the federal courts it would get interesting. Under the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, corporations cannot be prohibited from making political contributions. Texas law seems to do just that so Tom's best hope is to argue that he was convicted under an unconstitutional law. Makes one yearn for the good old days when we just strung up malefactors from the nearest cottonwood tree.