RETHINKING MOSES SMITH
Jerry Harkins
Don’t you just hate it when somebody reads something you wrote and says, “Yes, but are you aware of [something any idiot should have been aware of]?" I once wrote a term paper about Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard without knowing that they had been real, not to say famous, lovers. Fortunately, the professor was so upset that any student of his could think Pope ever wrote anything but doggerel that he didn’t realize that said student literally didn’t know what he was talking about.
Some years after I wrote “Assassination by Niggling: The Curious Case of Moses Smith vs. Serge Koussevitzky,” I came across “The Koussevitzky Case,” by the brilliant American composer and critic Virgil Thomson. [1] It is embarrassing to report that Thomson’s take on Smith’s biography of Koussevitzky is pretty much the dead opposite of my own. Given our respective credentials, readers will be forgiven for preferring his version.
And yet.
I knew, of course, that everyone who had known him liked Moses Smith and respected his work. Indeed, the point of my essay was to wonder how such a person could write such a nasty book. “By any reasonable standard,” I wrote, “the book is a hatchet job, an early example of a now familiar genre, the attack biography.” Like Thomson, I believe Koussevitzky was one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, and that he was ill-advised to file a bootless lawsuit against Smith. Unlike Thomson, however, I do not agree that Smith’s “niggles” were common knowledge (and by implication, true). Nor do I agree that, “Mr. Smith’s book makes Koussevitzky out to be a very great man indeed, but also makes him human.” Koussevitzky thought and I think he comes off looking like an ogre and a charlatan whose musical talent is very limited. Well, I’ve made that case elsewhere and see no reason to change my mind now.
But why did such a knowledgeable person as Virgil Thomson think Smith’s book was the fair, objective and positive (!) product of a scholarly mind? What am I missing? Or could it be that Thomson was simply defending a kindred spirit? Like Smith, he often damned his targets with faint praise. Consider this discussion of Porgy and Bess:
“Porgy is none the less an interesting example of what can be done by talent in spite of a bad set-up. With a libretto that should never have been accepted on a subject that should never have been chosen, a man who should never have attempted it has written a work that has some power and importance.” [2]
Indeed. Thomson was well known for using his column in the New York Herald Tribune to settle scores with those he thought had somehow “dissed” him. The website virgilthomson.org admits, “He was a bull in a China shop, not geared for making friends. He deflated Toscanini and Jascha Heifetz ("silk-underwear music").” It goes on to report on his problem with Gershwin:
“The Gershwin problem was more obvious. His natural genius was undeniable, he exuberantly and effortlessly exuded music like Schubert. But he had no formal training… and his music lacked structure and form, was not professional. Gershwin's Piano Concerto (1926) was a loose cannon next to Aaron Copland's (1927)…yet the Gershwin composition had the audacity to become an American classic, appreciated by millions, while the Copland, fine as it is, a period piece.”
To the extent this is accurate, it is a perfect example of the priestly rhetoric of music critics. Natural genius simply cannot compete with the holy writ of the standard music curriculum. With a few minor changes, Moses Smith could have written the same thing about Koussevitzky. In fact, he did write that Koussevitzky’s "...lack of a solid foundation cannot be concealed beneath the most ingenious patchwork of talents and random training." [3] Critics generally believe that their discipline is somehow intellectually if not morally superior to its subject. Nicolas Slonimsky, a conductor and critic in his own right (and incidentally one of Smith’s anonymous sources) compiled an extensive history of critical abuse. [4] Thomson was not the only critic who loathed George Gershwin. Here is Lawrence Gilman of the New York Times on Rhapsody in Blue: “trite…feeble…sentimental and vapid…fussy and futile. Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!” On Porgy and Bess, he found the songs “sure-fire rubbish.” His colleague Herbert Peyser of the Telegram wrote that American in Paris “…is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane…” Oscar Thompson of the Evening Post called it “musical buffoonery…blunt banality…ballyhoo vulgarity.” Elsewhere I have proposed a law requiring a five-day waiting period before a critic can purchase a thesaurus.
So there remains the possibility that Thomson was wrong (and wrongheaded) and I am right. (By the way, I was surely right about Eloisa to Abelard. It is a great poem even if Pope didn’t make the story up. And Pope was right in his Essay on Criticism when he wrote about critics, “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.”)
Notes
1. Reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Virgil Thomson: A Reader, Routledge, 2002, pp. 132-135.
2. Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle, W.W. Norton, 11997, p. 302.
3. Moses Smith, Koussevitzky, Allen, Towne & Heath, 1947, p. 35.
4. Lexicon of Musical Invective, University of Washington Press, 1963.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
ASSASSINATION BY NIGGLING
The Curious Case of Moses Smith vs. Serge Koussevitzky
Jerry Harkins [1]
Anyone familiar with the life of Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1874-1951) knows two big things. First, although now largely forgotten, he was probably the most broadly influential classical musician of the Twentieth Century and the godfather of many seminal works of modern music. Second, more than fifty years after his death he still lacks a serious biography. Three attempts were made during his lifetime. Two are frankly hagiographic.[2, 3] The third is a vicious attack on his competence and integrity by the critic Moses Smith.[4]
The story of the Smith opus and the lawsuit it sparked [5] have been well documented elsewhere. By any reasonable standard, the book is a hatchet job, an early example of a now familiar genre, the attack biography. When the court ruled that its “…many depreciatory statements [are] invariably followed by ameliorative observations of unreserved praise,” it displayed not only a penchant for circumlocution but also an appalling insensitivity to rhetoric. It seemed to miss Smith’s subtle sarcasm and his skill at damning with faint praise. He employs innuendo, indirection and “niggling” or nitpicking [6] to paint a portrait that is both personally and professionally venomous. A few examples will illustrate these practices:
- On Page 35, Smith says that, as a student, Koussevitzky “…made rapid progress in the art of conducting, and his mastery grew steadily through the years.” However, “…the lack of a solid foundation cannot be concealed beneath the most ingenious patchwork of talents and random training.” The missing foundation included musical theory and composition. The idea that the Moscow Philharmonic Conservatory provided something that might be called “random training” is nonsense. Worse, on Page 13, Smith had already questioned whether Koussevitzky had been awarded the diploma of a Free Artist.
- On Pages 343 and 344, Smith characterizes the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky as having “…superlative tone, often too beautiful, too intensely expressive at times that require simplicity.” Moreover, “…at the slightest suggestion of lyricism, [its] rhythm is likely to fall apart.”
- Throughout his career, Koussevitzky was widely regarded as the definitive interpreter of the Russian masters, especially Tchaikovsky. Smith, however, has a very different view. “The music degenerates into a nonsensical series of animal-like spasms.” Then, in practically the same breath, he refers to Koussevitzky as, “…one of the great conductors of our time. His interpretations have such varied qualities as poetry, sweep, originality and enkindling imagination.” However, when he arrived in Boston, “…he lacked the resourcefulness and technical agility without which no conductor in a third-rate Continental opera house could hope to hold his job. He does not quite have them today when he is past 70.” After thirty-five years of conducting, “…his beats and cues are often deceptive.”
This goes on and on: Koussevitzky was 17, when he left home, not 14 as he often claimed. His memory for scores was terrible. He was a poor accompanist and an inadequate musician. Then, “Such reservations, however, are perhaps niggling in light of Koussevitzky’s positive achievement…[that] has set him in a class by himself.” It is little wonder that Koussevitzky felt put upon. In his suit, he complained that the book, “…describes me as generally incompetent as a conductor of orchestras, brutal to the musicians in my orchestra, incompetent as an instructor of conducting, and a poseur, deficient in musical education and training.” It did indeed even if it was not libelous.
Libel or not, Koussevitzky is, by default, the most important classical musician of the twentieth century. Thus the question: who was Moses Smith? Why did he dislike Koussevitzky? And, irresistibly, who were his sources?
Smith seems to have been born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on March 4, 1901, one of the five children of Fred and Rebecca Haifetz. There is no record of his birth and no record of a name change but he was Moses Smith by the time he entered Harvard with the class of 1921. The lack of documentation is not uncommon for the time and place. It is consistent, indeed, with other evidence hinting at a poor but hard working Jewish family seeking to cope with discrimination and better its lot. In any event, he graduated with an A.B. in music and subsequently spent two years at Harvard Law School. In time, he married Ethel Singer Robinson and they had two daughters. He became a wholesale shoe salesman and supplemented his income by writing freelance music reviews for the Boston American. In 1934, he succeeded the well known critic HTP (Henry T. Parker) at the prestigious Boston Evening Transcript where his reviews of Koussevitzky’s concerts were generally favorable. He left Boston in 1939 to take a position in New York as Music Director of Columbia Phonograph Company a year after it had been acquired by William S. Paley for CBS. In that capacity, he tried unsuccessfully to recruit Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony away from archrival RCA Victor. In 1942, he became general manager of the Music Press. By that time, he had become afflicted with multiple sclerosis. He retired before the end of the war and devoted himself to completing Koussevitzky and writing a handful of freelance articles. He died in Roxbury, Massachusetts on July 27, 1964, the day after what would have been Koussevitzky’s ninetieth birthday.
Thirty-one years after his death, I placed an Author’s Query about Smith in The New York Times Book Review and received replies from six people who had known and worked with him after 1939. All spoke highly of him, using such descriptors as kindly, scholarly, courageous, compassionate, erudite and delightful. Together their letters make a persuasive case even if his book is deficient in all these traits. The inescapable conclusion is that we are dealing with a work that is out-of-character, a “pen breathing revenge” wielded by a sorely aggrieved human being. Koussevitzky had no doubt deeply offended him, something he was eminently capable of doing.
In his acknowledgments, Smith tells us that most of his sources “…must remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” However, it is not difficult to draw up a short list of suspects. We are looking for at least two people [7] who had access to information and a reason for disparaging Koussevitzky. Moreover, as late as 1947, they seem to have had some reason to fear exposure. The prime suspects I believe are Nicholas Slonimsky and Fabien Sevitzky.
Slonimsky, a man who gave new meaning to the word “polymath,” left what amounts to a confession, albeit an unsatisfying one. “To my horror, Smith intended to use some rather juicy tales about Koussevitzky that could have come only from me. Yes, the facts were there, but I told Smith that he would betray our friendship by reporting them.” Smith replied, “Nicolas, you cannot censor history.” [8] Unfortunately, he does not tell us which tales were his. He only regales us with the one story he was most worried about, the only one he persuaded Smith to withdraw. He fails to tell us why he was so worried about that particular morsel and it is not clear why he still feared Koussevitzky.
The complex relationship between Koussevitzky and Slonimsky is beyond the scope of this essay but it lasted little more than five years from late 1921 to the spring of 1927. Thus, anything said by Slonimsky about Koussevitzky’s life before or after that would have been hearsay filtered through two decades of memory and animus. [9] This might not have deterred Slonimsky who loved gossip and was a world class raconteur, but I suspect that Smith would have drawn the line at repeating it whole cloth. For the more intimate “niggles,” he probably relied on someone closer to the family either Sevitzky or his wife, the Polish soprano Maria Dormont Sevitzky.
Fabien Sevitzky was by no means the lout described by Slonimsky [10] and Maria was no shrew. Both were accomplished musicians, well thought of in their communities. Both had distinguished students. Both, too, were closer to their modest roots than Koussevitzky who had wholeheartedly adopted the manners and mores of his aristocratic in-laws. Over the years, the relationship between uncle and nephew deteriorated until, ultimately, the latter unsuccessfully went to court to challenge the former’s will.
The Sevitzkys arrived in the United States the year before Serge and Natalie, and Fabien seems to have come with a burden of family bitterness far heavier than the usual cause ascribed to it. Serge’s insistence, in 1908 or thereabout, that Fabien shorten his last name may have been inconvenient but it was not entirely unreasonable. Fabien’s father (Adolf I think), seems to have resented Serge’s departure and later success and probably was the original source of the bad-mouthing that was repeated to Smith. Many of the stories are the kind of family mythology that all biographers are familiar with: real grievances multiplied over time by misfortune and repetition. Oral histories compiled by Soviet musicologists tend to support Koussevitzky’s versions of disputed matters.
One can easily forgive Slonimsky who no doubt took a lot of guff from the haughty maestro, and one can readily understand the family foibles that might lie at the heart of Sevitzky’s stories. It is more difficult to understand Moses Smith, gentleman and scholar. Whatever the provocations, he must have realized that his sources were tainted and it must have offended his sense of history to pass on distortions and fabrications. Moreover, he added some mudslinging of his own. He is critical of Koussevitzky for “forgetting” his Jewish origins until the rise of Hitler. There is, however, no evidence that Smith himself was any more mindful of his heritage before or after 1933. (In contrast, one of Smith’s brothers served as President of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, a forerunner of the United Jewish Appeal.)
We are left trying to imagine the psychology that shaped Smith’s hostility, a response so strong that it overcame the habits and values of a lifetime, We are left, too, with Koussevitzky who could be charming but did not always choose to be. He seems to have been driven by his own devils not the least of which was a morbid fear of being judged incompetent. When Koussevitzky’s insecurities came together with Smith’s, the result was a book that serves the memory of both poorly.
NOTES
1. Jerry Harkins is a writer living in New York City. This essay was published in a slightly different form in the Journal of the Koussevitzky Recordings Society, Vol. IX, No. 1, Spring 1996.
2. Lourie, Arthur, Serge Koussevitzky and His Epoch (translated from the Russian by S. W. Pring) Knopf, 1931.
3. Leichtentritt, Hugo, Serge Koussevitzky: The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New American Music, Harvard University Press, 1946.
4. Smith, Moses, Koussevitkzy, Allen, Towne and Heath, 1947.
5. Koussevitzky vs. Allen, Towne and Heath, Inc. et al. 68 N.Y.S.2d779 (March 4, 1947)
6. Smith himself characterizes at least some of his “reservations” as “perhaps niggling” (Smith, op. cit. p. 339).
7. There must have been more than one because there does not seem to have been any single person whose relationship with Koussevitzky extended from his youth through the 1940’s except his third wife, Olga, who left her own unpublished memoirs.
8. Slonimsky, Nicolas, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 106.
9. Slonimsky is not always reliable when it comes to basic facts about Koussevitzky. For example, he says the maestro was buried at Serenak, his Tanglewood estate, and that his suit against Smith netted him one dollar in “moral damages.” He refers to Olga as his second wife. Koussevitzky lost the suit outright and there is no such thing as “moral damages.” He was and remains buried in the graveyard of The Church on the Hill (Congregational) in Lenox, Massachusetts. Olga who was Natalie's niece was Koussevitzky's third wife. It should also be noted that as Editor of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th Edition, Schirmer, 1994), Slonimsky was nothing but laudatory in his entry about Koussevitzky.
10. In an interview with Tom Godell (Journal of the Koussevitzky Recordings Society, I:1, 1987, pp. 6-13), Slonimsky characterizes Sevitzky as the stupidest conductor and “…the greatest damn fool I ever met.” This is simply not credible. Sevitzky built several fine orchestras including that of Indianapolis, and enjoyed a better reputation among his musicians than his uncle.
The Curious Case of Moses Smith vs. Serge Koussevitzky
Jerry Harkins [1]
Anyone familiar with the life of Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1874-1951) knows two big things. First, although now largely forgotten, he was probably the most broadly influential classical musician of the Twentieth Century and the godfather of many seminal works of modern music. Second, more than fifty years after his death he still lacks a serious biography. Three attempts were made during his lifetime. Two are frankly hagiographic.[2, 3] The third is a vicious attack on his competence and integrity by the critic Moses Smith.[4]
The story of the Smith opus and the lawsuit it sparked [5] have been well documented elsewhere. By any reasonable standard, the book is a hatchet job, an early example of a now familiar genre, the attack biography. When the court ruled that its “…many depreciatory statements [are] invariably followed by ameliorative observations of unreserved praise,” it displayed not only a penchant for circumlocution but also an appalling insensitivity to rhetoric. It seemed to miss Smith’s subtle sarcasm and his skill at damning with faint praise. He employs innuendo, indirection and “niggling” or nitpicking [6] to paint a portrait that is both personally and professionally venomous. A few examples will illustrate these practices:
- On Page 35, Smith says that, as a student, Koussevitzky “…made rapid progress in the art of conducting, and his mastery grew steadily through the years.” However, “…the lack of a solid foundation cannot be concealed beneath the most ingenious patchwork of talents and random training.” The missing foundation included musical theory and composition. The idea that the Moscow Philharmonic Conservatory provided something that might be called “random training” is nonsense. Worse, on Page 13, Smith had already questioned whether Koussevitzky had been awarded the diploma of a Free Artist.
- On Pages 343 and 344, Smith characterizes the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky as having “…superlative tone, often too beautiful, too intensely expressive at times that require simplicity.” Moreover, “…at the slightest suggestion of lyricism, [its] rhythm is likely to fall apart.”
- Throughout his career, Koussevitzky was widely regarded as the definitive interpreter of the Russian masters, especially Tchaikovsky. Smith, however, has a very different view. “The music degenerates into a nonsensical series of animal-like spasms.” Then, in practically the same breath, he refers to Koussevitzky as, “…one of the great conductors of our time. His interpretations have such varied qualities as poetry, sweep, originality and enkindling imagination.” However, when he arrived in Boston, “…he lacked the resourcefulness and technical agility without which no conductor in a third-rate Continental opera house could hope to hold his job. He does not quite have them today when he is past 70.” After thirty-five years of conducting, “…his beats and cues are often deceptive.”
This goes on and on: Koussevitzky was 17, when he left home, not 14 as he often claimed. His memory for scores was terrible. He was a poor accompanist and an inadequate musician. Then, “Such reservations, however, are perhaps niggling in light of Koussevitzky’s positive achievement…[that] has set him in a class by himself.” It is little wonder that Koussevitzky felt put upon. In his suit, he complained that the book, “…describes me as generally incompetent as a conductor of orchestras, brutal to the musicians in my orchestra, incompetent as an instructor of conducting, and a poseur, deficient in musical education and training.” It did indeed even if it was not libelous.
Libel or not, Koussevitzky is, by default, the most important classical musician of the twentieth century. Thus the question: who was Moses Smith? Why did he dislike Koussevitzky? And, irresistibly, who were his sources?
Smith seems to have been born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on March 4, 1901, one of the five children of Fred and Rebecca Haifetz. There is no record of his birth and no record of a name change but he was Moses Smith by the time he entered Harvard with the class of 1921. The lack of documentation is not uncommon for the time and place. It is consistent, indeed, with other evidence hinting at a poor but hard working Jewish family seeking to cope with discrimination and better its lot. In any event, he graduated with an A.B. in music and subsequently spent two years at Harvard Law School. In time, he married Ethel Singer Robinson and they had two daughters. He became a wholesale shoe salesman and supplemented his income by writing freelance music reviews for the Boston American. In 1934, he succeeded the well known critic HTP (Henry T. Parker) at the prestigious Boston Evening Transcript where his reviews of Koussevitzky’s concerts were generally favorable. He left Boston in 1939 to take a position in New York as Music Director of Columbia Phonograph Company a year after it had been acquired by William S. Paley for CBS. In that capacity, he tried unsuccessfully to recruit Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony away from archrival RCA Victor. In 1942, he became general manager of the Music Press. By that time, he had become afflicted with multiple sclerosis. He retired before the end of the war and devoted himself to completing Koussevitzky and writing a handful of freelance articles. He died in Roxbury, Massachusetts on July 27, 1964, the day after what would have been Koussevitzky’s ninetieth birthday.
Thirty-one years after his death, I placed an Author’s Query about Smith in The New York Times Book Review and received replies from six people who had known and worked with him after 1939. All spoke highly of him, using such descriptors as kindly, scholarly, courageous, compassionate, erudite and delightful. Together their letters make a persuasive case even if his book is deficient in all these traits. The inescapable conclusion is that we are dealing with a work that is out-of-character, a “pen breathing revenge” wielded by a sorely aggrieved human being. Koussevitzky had no doubt deeply offended him, something he was eminently capable of doing.
In his acknowledgments, Smith tells us that most of his sources “…must remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” However, it is not difficult to draw up a short list of suspects. We are looking for at least two people [7] who had access to information and a reason for disparaging Koussevitzky. Moreover, as late as 1947, they seem to have had some reason to fear exposure. The prime suspects I believe are Nicholas Slonimsky and Fabien Sevitzky.
Slonimsky, a man who gave new meaning to the word “polymath,” left what amounts to a confession, albeit an unsatisfying one. “To my horror, Smith intended to use some rather juicy tales about Koussevitzky that could have come only from me. Yes, the facts were there, but I told Smith that he would betray our friendship by reporting them.” Smith replied, “Nicolas, you cannot censor history.” [8] Unfortunately, he does not tell us which tales were his. He only regales us with the one story he was most worried about, the only one he persuaded Smith to withdraw. He fails to tell us why he was so worried about that particular morsel and it is not clear why he still feared Koussevitzky.
The complex relationship between Koussevitzky and Slonimsky is beyond the scope of this essay but it lasted little more than five years from late 1921 to the spring of 1927. Thus, anything said by Slonimsky about Koussevitzky’s life before or after that would have been hearsay filtered through two decades of memory and animus. [9] This might not have deterred Slonimsky who loved gossip and was a world class raconteur, but I suspect that Smith would have drawn the line at repeating it whole cloth. For the more intimate “niggles,” he probably relied on someone closer to the family either Sevitzky or his wife, the Polish soprano Maria Dormont Sevitzky.
Fabien Sevitzky was by no means the lout described by Slonimsky [10] and Maria was no shrew. Both were accomplished musicians, well thought of in their communities. Both had distinguished students. Both, too, were closer to their modest roots than Koussevitzky who had wholeheartedly adopted the manners and mores of his aristocratic in-laws. Over the years, the relationship between uncle and nephew deteriorated until, ultimately, the latter unsuccessfully went to court to challenge the former’s will.
The Sevitzkys arrived in the United States the year before Serge and Natalie, and Fabien seems to have come with a burden of family bitterness far heavier than the usual cause ascribed to it. Serge’s insistence, in 1908 or thereabout, that Fabien shorten his last name may have been inconvenient but it was not entirely unreasonable. Fabien’s father (Adolf I think), seems to have resented Serge’s departure and later success and probably was the original source of the bad-mouthing that was repeated to Smith. Many of the stories are the kind of family mythology that all biographers are familiar with: real grievances multiplied over time by misfortune and repetition. Oral histories compiled by Soviet musicologists tend to support Koussevitzky’s versions of disputed matters.
One can easily forgive Slonimsky who no doubt took a lot of guff from the haughty maestro, and one can readily understand the family foibles that might lie at the heart of Sevitzky’s stories. It is more difficult to understand Moses Smith, gentleman and scholar. Whatever the provocations, he must have realized that his sources were tainted and it must have offended his sense of history to pass on distortions and fabrications. Moreover, he added some mudslinging of his own. He is critical of Koussevitzky for “forgetting” his Jewish origins until the rise of Hitler. There is, however, no evidence that Smith himself was any more mindful of his heritage before or after 1933. (In contrast, one of Smith’s brothers served as President of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, a forerunner of the United Jewish Appeal.)
We are left trying to imagine the psychology that shaped Smith’s hostility, a response so strong that it overcame the habits and values of a lifetime, We are left, too, with Koussevitzky who could be charming but did not always choose to be. He seems to have been driven by his own devils not the least of which was a morbid fear of being judged incompetent. When Koussevitzky’s insecurities came together with Smith’s, the result was a book that serves the memory of both poorly.
NOTES
1. Jerry Harkins is a writer living in New York City. This essay was published in a slightly different form in the Journal of the Koussevitzky Recordings Society, Vol. IX, No. 1, Spring 1996.
2. Lourie, Arthur, Serge Koussevitzky and His Epoch (translated from the Russian by S. W. Pring) Knopf, 1931.
3. Leichtentritt, Hugo, Serge Koussevitzky: The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New American Music, Harvard University Press, 1946.
4. Smith, Moses, Koussevitkzy, Allen, Towne and Heath, 1947.
5. Koussevitzky vs. Allen, Towne and Heath, Inc. et al. 68 N.Y.S.2d779 (March 4, 1947)
6. Smith himself characterizes at least some of his “reservations” as “perhaps niggling” (Smith, op. cit. p. 339).
7. There must have been more than one because there does not seem to have been any single person whose relationship with Koussevitzky extended from his youth through the 1940’s except his third wife, Olga, who left her own unpublished memoirs.
8. Slonimsky, Nicolas, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 106.
9. Slonimsky is not always reliable when it comes to basic facts about Koussevitzky. For example, he says the maestro was buried at Serenak, his Tanglewood estate, and that his suit against Smith netted him one dollar in “moral damages.” He refers to Olga as his second wife. Koussevitzky lost the suit outright and there is no such thing as “moral damages.” He was and remains buried in the graveyard of The Church on the Hill (Congregational) in Lenox, Massachusetts. Olga who was Natalie's niece was Koussevitzky's third wife. It should also be noted that as Editor of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th Edition, Schirmer, 1994), Slonimsky was nothing but laudatory in his entry about Koussevitzky.
10. In an interview with Tom Godell (Journal of the Koussevitzky Recordings Society, I:1, 1987, pp. 6-13), Slonimsky characterizes Sevitzky as the stupidest conductor and “…the greatest damn fool I ever met.” This is simply not credible. Sevitzky built several fine orchestras including that of Indianapolis, and enjoyed a better reputation among his musicians than his uncle.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
POOR ANDREW (GREELEY, PATENTLY)
Jerry Harkins
To say that Andrew M. Greeley is a writer would be an act of supreme lèse-majesté. Since 1961, by my count he has published 140 books—about three a year. Fifty-nine of these have been novels and now, nearing 80, he has at least two more in the works. To say he is a Catholic priest is either obvious or blasphemous, maybe both, for reasons I hope to make clear. In his spare time, he teaches sociology at the University of Arizona, conducts research at the University of Chicago, and lectures at the National University of Ireland. He writes a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributes regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal. Oh, yes, he also preaches.
Let it be said at the outset: he is not a particularly good writer. His prose is often mannered and there is no writer in English more in need of a proofreader. His fictional landscape is limited to one plotline which involves a fair amount of sex, always in the service of love which is his big theme. Of course, there aren’t very many literary themes and boy-meets-girl is far and away the most popular. But Father Greeley reminds me of Saint Paul. You remember Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians where he provides a gorgeous but idealized description of love. Reading it, I always get the feeling that Paul is a man who has thought about the subject deeply but has had little experience of the real thing. That describes Father Greeley’s take on sex: too much, too obsessive, too perfect, too merely provocative, in short, too long on imagination and too short on human nature and its discontents. (As a confessor, I suspect he knows all too well the difference between what it is and what it should be and chooses to write only about the latter.) He is also a romantic, not necessarily a capital offense but a trait that offends the delicate sensibilities of refined literary critics. Finally, he is a bit of a mystic. The spirits of those who have gone before have speaking parts in some of his novels and are just offstage in others. His characters regularly encounter poltergeists and, occasionally, even angels. In his book Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing (Prentice-Hall, 1974) he describes what some psychologists call peak experiences that reveal a kind of sudden awareness and a pleasure beyond pleasure. In several of his novels, the central character comes face to face with a guardian angel and experiences an inexplicable but powerful force that connects him ecstatically to the life-giving energy of the universe. In Patience of a Saint (1987), there is a description which gives a good idea of what the author is thinking about. The principal character is standing on a Chicago street corner. He hears a “whooshing” sound:
Then time stood still, the whole of eternity filling a single second and a single second filling the whole of eternity…With [it] there came a love so enormous that his own puny identity was submerged in it…It filled him with heat and light, fire that tore at his existence and seemed about to destroy him with pleasure and joy.
Still another book in this series is Contract with an Angel (1998). The protagonist ultimately dies and goes to heaven where he has a conversation with God, certainly not the God of Job (“Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me,”) but more like that played by George Burns in the film Oh, God. Greeley’s God explains, “I create because I love stories, especially love stories. Like all romantics I delight in happy endings.” God, it seems, is not unlike Andrew Greeley.
This is the thinnest of literary ice. Moreover, it simply does not sound like it comes from the same pen that produced a 1962 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago entitled, “The Influence of Religion on the Career Plans and Occupational Values of June 1961 College Graduates.” A fair amount of Greeley does not sound like Greeley. Except for the sex scenes which are more or less interchangeable. Including the angelic sex scenes.
Having said all that, if the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for work done “in an ideal direction” and bestowing “the greatest benefit on mankind” as it was supposed to, Greeley would surely have won it years ago. But it does not. Embarrassed by its anointing the likes of Pearl S. Buck and Sinclair Lewis in the 1930’s, it explicitly excluded popular (which is to say accessible) literature after World War II. Thus, there is no chance that you will see Father Greeley in white tie and tails accepting a medal from King Carl XVI Gustaf any time soon. Not to worry. As a non-laureate, he joins such worthies as James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Emile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings and Vladmir Nabokov.
Now the good parts: Greeley is one of the smartest, most humane writers around. He knows pretty much everything worth knowing and a lot of stuff that is not really essential to living the examined life. He is a marvelous storyteller, a worthy pilgrim in the long line of Irish saints, scholars and seanchais. Naturally, he has a point to make as do all storytellers: he thinks that God’s love is, to use a word that comes up frequently, implacable and that passionate sex is a metaphor for that love.
Is he a heretic? Is he on his way to hell? Well, if you were brought up Catholic in the 1950’s and have never recovered from it, the question need not detain you. Similarly, if you were seduced by the false spring of Vatican II, you can skip to the next question. But if you are a fallen Catholic or some other form of rational Christian and are sick of silly old men making hash out of the gospel of love, these are good questions if only because the answers may apply equally to your own salvation.
Father Greeley is a Pelagian as were all the Irish Saints. As you know, Pelagius (c. 354 - c. 420/440) was an ascetic monk and reformer who denied the doctrine of original sin deduced from the fall of Adam and was several times declared a heretic by the various authorities of the church. He was also acquitted several times but his belief system was certainly contrary to the considered opinion of Saint Augustine of Hippo who held that the default condition of the human race is evil. Exactly how Gus convinced himself of such an absurdity is another story but it was attractive to the hierarchs because it gave them exclusive power over the question of salvation or damnation. Even the Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, promoted the Augustinian view, the former in a somewhat softer version than the latter. The problem Pelagius saw was basic: what kind of God would create an essentially evil universe? And, if humans were created in the image and likeness of God, as Genesis claims, is God all evil instead of all good? Now there is a real dilemma here. After all, God is also said to be all-knowing. Knowing everything and going ahead anyway is a pretty strong argument for predestination. So every Augustinian must believe that God has predestined a number—a very large number—of people to hell. In which case, why bother paying any attention to the clergy?
Greeley’s answer begins with the idea that the first and most certain thing Christians can know about God is that God is love which, of course, is also the title of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est [Note 1]. However, I doubt Benedict means love in the comprehensive sense Greeley does. Instead, he divides it into two distinct manifestations, eros and agape. Although eros can be morally good, it has frequently been distorted and “divinized.” The Pope writes:
The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness. All other powers in heaven and on earth thus appear secondary…
That “divine madness” is the crux of the problem. It is true, he says that “…eros tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves.” But, in the next breath, he asserts that dodim, the Hebrew equivalent of eros in the Bible, suggests a love that “…is still insecure, indeterminate and searching.” It is self-seeking in contrast to ahaba or agape which, “…becomes renunciation and…is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.” Ecstasy as opposed to renunciation, especially in the male of the species, threatens the church which can’t help thinking of Eve’s seduction of Adam.
I believe Greeley would argue the opposite: that eros, especially in its ecstatic state, heightens our awareness, appreciation and connections to all things heavenly and earthly. In almost all his fiction, he explicitly says that sexual attraction is a metaphor for God’s unquenchable love for his creatures. The metaphor of sex is meant by God to remind us that we sinners cannot escape his love. The church, however, has historically regarded sex as entirely reproductive in purpose although in recent times it has discovered that it also has what it calls a “unitive” function. I think that means it brings people together. If so, it has taken the church the better part of two thousand years to get even a tenuous grip on the obvious. But reproduction is the key for the church in determining sexual morality. Eros is morally acceptable only when it is open or opens the way to conception. It is an execrable means of fulfilling the commandment “Be fruitful and multiply.” If God had consulted the church, humans would reproduce through binary fission.
I think Greeley would resist any alienation or division of love. Rather, he seems to believe that love is a single phenomenon made manifest in many ways including sexual love. Greeley would say that these manifestations are of the same species differing only in their accidentals. The love of double chocolate malteds is on the same emotional spectrum—if different in degree—as the love of a spouse. The feeling is similar, only more or less intense. If agape, as its etymology suggests, is selfless love, how shall we say that eros is necessarily any different? Like any human characteristic, it can be distorted in ways that range from self-absorbed sex to pedophilia. The Pope’s problem is that his list of erotic distortions is too long because it fails to distinguish between practices rooted in love and those rooted in pathology. It is the quality of the love between the lovers not its externalities that determines whether sex is or is not pathological. The markers of high quality are mutuality, sensitivity and commitment which are what we mean by “love, honor and cherish,” “forsaking all others” and “until death do us part.” Quality has nothing to do with race, religion, gender or the alleged permeability of latex.
Pelagius was certainly right about all the main points which means that Augustine and Jerome were wrong. It may be that the church has always known this or, more likely, feared it might be the case. The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia admitted that, “The gravest error into which he [Pelagius] and the rest of the Pelagians fell, was that they did not submit to the doctrinal decisions of the Church.” In other words, it has little or nothing to do with theology or logic, but only power.
Rome has continued in this vein ever since. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, it insisted that the Celtic manner of dating Easter and the way the Irish monks cut their hair were heretical. In 1431, it burned Joan of Arc for being a relapsed heretic in that she dressed like a man. Such trivial pursuits have nothing to do with heresy. Neither did Galileo’s proof of heliocentricity in 1633. Once the auto de fe went out of fashion, the church has been tongue-tied whenever it has confronted real heresy. In 1962, the Holy Office, formerly known as the Holy Inquisition, denounced Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for his denial of the doctrine of original sin. It reiterated its condemnation as recently as 1981 “…to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.” As usual, they were not being entirely candid. The Jesuits had already silenced him on the subject in 1925 and he had acceded to the ban. His works were circulating in a form of academic Samizdat limited pretty much to scholars. What the inquisitors were really worried about was that Teilhard’s speculations about evolution might be contagious.
Maybe the Curia is trying to bore its enemies to death. In 1979, the Holy Office tried unsuccessfully to silence Hans Küng for denying the bizarre doctrine of papal infallibility. In 2007, the Pope declared that pro choice politicians should be excommunicated or that they had already excommunicated themselves depending on which Vatican press release you read. In none of the modern cases did they use the word heretical although all three center on the denial of important teachings.
Unlike Pelagius and Teilhard, Greeley does not reject original sin at least in public. I have read more of his books than is good for me and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him mention it. I trust he realizes that eating that apple could not have been a sin because, at the time, poor Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil. The expulsion is a myth meant to teach us that we are incomplete beings who must strive to re-unite with the Godhead. Like all myths, you cannot parse it too closely without quickly running into absurdity. In all the torturous history of biblical commentary, no one has ever explained a thousand non-sequiturs like Luke 13:30, “Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.” The tortoise will beat the hare. If you read the Bible as anything other than myth and metaphor, you will rapidly descend into a Wonderland of logical chaos and pure nonsense. At the same time, if you fail to take its profound teachings to heart, you will be condemned to an impoverished existence. Worst of all, if you rely on the interpretations of professional religionists, you will be a slave to their self-interest. Take for example, the embarrassing arguments of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical banning birth control. The biblical citations in that document are adduced solely to bolster the contention that the church has the power to decide these matters. None address the substance of the issue for the very good reason that the Bible says nothing about birth control. Except, of course, for the much-abused story of poor Onan (Genesis 38:1-10) whose crime, whatever it was, merited death. Every single citation that does support the proposition that contraception is evil is referring to some recent papal encyclical, letter, exhortation or speech [Note 2]. In other words, contraception is evil because I say so and my predecessors said so. You cannot trust the hierarchs to be anything other than diligent in defense of their alleged power. So, if you are walking that lonesome valley, and you would like someone to point the way, stay away from the Catholic Church and, indeed, most other forms of modern Christianity.
Unless you find a pastor like Andrew Greeley, a godly man, a humanist, and a person perfectly in tune with the divine sense of humor.
Notes
1. The first sentence of the encyclical is “DEUS CARITAS EST, et, qui manet in caritate, in Deo manet, et Deus in eo manet.” The official Vatican translation renders this correctly as: “God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.” Even the Vatican would not mess with this translation which is more a direct quote from the First Epistle of Saint John. No such inhibitions restrain the American bishops. The translation prepared by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says, “God’s love for us is fundamental for our lives, and it raises important questions about who God is and who we are.” The bishops are better Latinists than that but they don’t want people thinking God is love or, even worse, love is God. So they make up a little fib.
2. There is one exception, a reference to Chapter 8 of the Catechism of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). This deals with the sacrament of matrimony and makes no reference whatever to contraception.
Jerry Harkins
To say that Andrew M. Greeley is a writer would be an act of supreme lèse-majesté. Since 1961, by my count he has published 140 books—about three a year. Fifty-nine of these have been novels and now, nearing 80, he has at least two more in the works. To say he is a Catholic priest is either obvious or blasphemous, maybe both, for reasons I hope to make clear. In his spare time, he teaches sociology at the University of Arizona, conducts research at the University of Chicago, and lectures at the National University of Ireland. He writes a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributes regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal. Oh, yes, he also preaches.
Let it be said at the outset: he is not a particularly good writer. His prose is often mannered and there is no writer in English more in need of a proofreader. His fictional landscape is limited to one plotline which involves a fair amount of sex, always in the service of love which is his big theme. Of course, there aren’t very many literary themes and boy-meets-girl is far and away the most popular. But Father Greeley reminds me of Saint Paul. You remember Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians where he provides a gorgeous but idealized description of love. Reading it, I always get the feeling that Paul is a man who has thought about the subject deeply but has had little experience of the real thing. That describes Father Greeley’s take on sex: too much, too obsessive, too perfect, too merely provocative, in short, too long on imagination and too short on human nature and its discontents. (As a confessor, I suspect he knows all too well the difference between what it is and what it should be and chooses to write only about the latter.) He is also a romantic, not necessarily a capital offense but a trait that offends the delicate sensibilities of refined literary critics. Finally, he is a bit of a mystic. The spirits of those who have gone before have speaking parts in some of his novels and are just offstage in others. His characters regularly encounter poltergeists and, occasionally, even angels. In his book Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing (Prentice-Hall, 1974) he describes what some psychologists call peak experiences that reveal a kind of sudden awareness and a pleasure beyond pleasure. In several of his novels, the central character comes face to face with a guardian angel and experiences an inexplicable but powerful force that connects him ecstatically to the life-giving energy of the universe. In Patience of a Saint (1987), there is a description which gives a good idea of what the author is thinking about. The principal character is standing on a Chicago street corner. He hears a “whooshing” sound:
Then time stood still, the whole of eternity filling a single second and a single second filling the whole of eternity…With [it] there came a love so enormous that his own puny identity was submerged in it…It filled him with heat and light, fire that tore at his existence and seemed about to destroy him with pleasure and joy.
Still another book in this series is Contract with an Angel (1998). The protagonist ultimately dies and goes to heaven where he has a conversation with God, certainly not the God of Job (“Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me,”) but more like that played by George Burns in the film Oh, God. Greeley’s God explains, “I create because I love stories, especially love stories. Like all romantics I delight in happy endings.” God, it seems, is not unlike Andrew Greeley.
This is the thinnest of literary ice. Moreover, it simply does not sound like it comes from the same pen that produced a 1962 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago entitled, “The Influence of Religion on the Career Plans and Occupational Values of June 1961 College Graduates.” A fair amount of Greeley does not sound like Greeley. Except for the sex scenes which are more or less interchangeable. Including the angelic sex scenes.
Having said all that, if the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for work done “in an ideal direction” and bestowing “the greatest benefit on mankind” as it was supposed to, Greeley would surely have won it years ago. But it does not. Embarrassed by its anointing the likes of Pearl S. Buck and Sinclair Lewis in the 1930’s, it explicitly excluded popular (which is to say accessible) literature after World War II. Thus, there is no chance that you will see Father Greeley in white tie and tails accepting a medal from King Carl XVI Gustaf any time soon. Not to worry. As a non-laureate, he joins such worthies as James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Emile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings and Vladmir Nabokov.
Now the good parts: Greeley is one of the smartest, most humane writers around. He knows pretty much everything worth knowing and a lot of stuff that is not really essential to living the examined life. He is a marvelous storyteller, a worthy pilgrim in the long line of Irish saints, scholars and seanchais. Naturally, he has a point to make as do all storytellers: he thinks that God’s love is, to use a word that comes up frequently, implacable and that passionate sex is a metaphor for that love.
Is he a heretic? Is he on his way to hell? Well, if you were brought up Catholic in the 1950’s and have never recovered from it, the question need not detain you. Similarly, if you were seduced by the false spring of Vatican II, you can skip to the next question. But if you are a fallen Catholic or some other form of rational Christian and are sick of silly old men making hash out of the gospel of love, these are good questions if only because the answers may apply equally to your own salvation.
Father Greeley is a Pelagian as were all the Irish Saints. As you know, Pelagius (c. 354 - c. 420/440) was an ascetic monk and reformer who denied the doctrine of original sin deduced from the fall of Adam and was several times declared a heretic by the various authorities of the church. He was also acquitted several times but his belief system was certainly contrary to the considered opinion of Saint Augustine of Hippo who held that the default condition of the human race is evil. Exactly how Gus convinced himself of such an absurdity is another story but it was attractive to the hierarchs because it gave them exclusive power over the question of salvation or damnation. Even the Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, promoted the Augustinian view, the former in a somewhat softer version than the latter. The problem Pelagius saw was basic: what kind of God would create an essentially evil universe? And, if humans were created in the image and likeness of God, as Genesis claims, is God all evil instead of all good? Now there is a real dilemma here. After all, God is also said to be all-knowing. Knowing everything and going ahead anyway is a pretty strong argument for predestination. So every Augustinian must believe that God has predestined a number—a very large number—of people to hell. In which case, why bother paying any attention to the clergy?
Greeley’s answer begins with the idea that the first and most certain thing Christians can know about God is that God is love which, of course, is also the title of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est [Note 1]. However, I doubt Benedict means love in the comprehensive sense Greeley does. Instead, he divides it into two distinct manifestations, eros and agape. Although eros can be morally good, it has frequently been distorted and “divinized.” The Pope writes:
The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness. All other powers in heaven and on earth thus appear secondary…
That “divine madness” is the crux of the problem. It is true, he says that “…eros tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves.” But, in the next breath, he asserts that dodim, the Hebrew equivalent of eros in the Bible, suggests a love that “…is still insecure, indeterminate and searching.” It is self-seeking in contrast to ahaba or agape which, “…becomes renunciation and…is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.” Ecstasy as opposed to renunciation, especially in the male of the species, threatens the church which can’t help thinking of Eve’s seduction of Adam.
I believe Greeley would argue the opposite: that eros, especially in its ecstatic state, heightens our awareness, appreciation and connections to all things heavenly and earthly. In almost all his fiction, he explicitly says that sexual attraction is a metaphor for God’s unquenchable love for his creatures. The metaphor of sex is meant by God to remind us that we sinners cannot escape his love. The church, however, has historically regarded sex as entirely reproductive in purpose although in recent times it has discovered that it also has what it calls a “unitive” function. I think that means it brings people together. If so, it has taken the church the better part of two thousand years to get even a tenuous grip on the obvious. But reproduction is the key for the church in determining sexual morality. Eros is morally acceptable only when it is open or opens the way to conception. It is an execrable means of fulfilling the commandment “Be fruitful and multiply.” If God had consulted the church, humans would reproduce through binary fission.
I think Greeley would resist any alienation or division of love. Rather, he seems to believe that love is a single phenomenon made manifest in many ways including sexual love. Greeley would say that these manifestations are of the same species differing only in their accidentals. The love of double chocolate malteds is on the same emotional spectrum—if different in degree—as the love of a spouse. The feeling is similar, only more or less intense. If agape, as its etymology suggests, is selfless love, how shall we say that eros is necessarily any different? Like any human characteristic, it can be distorted in ways that range from self-absorbed sex to pedophilia. The Pope’s problem is that his list of erotic distortions is too long because it fails to distinguish between practices rooted in love and those rooted in pathology. It is the quality of the love between the lovers not its externalities that determines whether sex is or is not pathological. The markers of high quality are mutuality, sensitivity and commitment which are what we mean by “love, honor and cherish,” “forsaking all others” and “until death do us part.” Quality has nothing to do with race, religion, gender or the alleged permeability of latex.
Pelagius was certainly right about all the main points which means that Augustine and Jerome were wrong. It may be that the church has always known this or, more likely, feared it might be the case. The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia admitted that, “The gravest error into which he [Pelagius] and the rest of the Pelagians fell, was that they did not submit to the doctrinal decisions of the Church.” In other words, it has little or nothing to do with theology or logic, but only power.
Rome has continued in this vein ever since. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, it insisted that the Celtic manner of dating Easter and the way the Irish monks cut their hair were heretical. In 1431, it burned Joan of Arc for being a relapsed heretic in that she dressed like a man. Such trivial pursuits have nothing to do with heresy. Neither did Galileo’s proof of heliocentricity in 1633. Once the auto de fe went out of fashion, the church has been tongue-tied whenever it has confronted real heresy. In 1962, the Holy Office, formerly known as the Holy Inquisition, denounced Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for his denial of the doctrine of original sin. It reiterated its condemnation as recently as 1981 “…to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.” As usual, they were not being entirely candid. The Jesuits had already silenced him on the subject in 1925 and he had acceded to the ban. His works were circulating in a form of academic Samizdat limited pretty much to scholars. What the inquisitors were really worried about was that Teilhard’s speculations about evolution might be contagious.
Maybe the Curia is trying to bore its enemies to death. In 1979, the Holy Office tried unsuccessfully to silence Hans Küng for denying the bizarre doctrine of papal infallibility. In 2007, the Pope declared that pro choice politicians should be excommunicated or that they had already excommunicated themselves depending on which Vatican press release you read. In none of the modern cases did they use the word heretical although all three center on the denial of important teachings.
Unlike Pelagius and Teilhard, Greeley does not reject original sin at least in public. I have read more of his books than is good for me and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him mention it. I trust he realizes that eating that apple could not have been a sin because, at the time, poor Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil. The expulsion is a myth meant to teach us that we are incomplete beings who must strive to re-unite with the Godhead. Like all myths, you cannot parse it too closely without quickly running into absurdity. In all the torturous history of biblical commentary, no one has ever explained a thousand non-sequiturs like Luke 13:30, “Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.” The tortoise will beat the hare. If you read the Bible as anything other than myth and metaphor, you will rapidly descend into a Wonderland of logical chaos and pure nonsense. At the same time, if you fail to take its profound teachings to heart, you will be condemned to an impoverished existence. Worst of all, if you rely on the interpretations of professional religionists, you will be a slave to their self-interest. Take for example, the embarrassing arguments of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical banning birth control. The biblical citations in that document are adduced solely to bolster the contention that the church has the power to decide these matters. None address the substance of the issue for the very good reason that the Bible says nothing about birth control. Except, of course, for the much-abused story of poor Onan (Genesis 38:1-10) whose crime, whatever it was, merited death. Every single citation that does support the proposition that contraception is evil is referring to some recent papal encyclical, letter, exhortation or speech [Note 2]. In other words, contraception is evil because I say so and my predecessors said so. You cannot trust the hierarchs to be anything other than diligent in defense of their alleged power. So, if you are walking that lonesome valley, and you would like someone to point the way, stay away from the Catholic Church and, indeed, most other forms of modern Christianity.
Unless you find a pastor like Andrew Greeley, a godly man, a humanist, and a person perfectly in tune with the divine sense of humor.
Subsequently
Father Greeley died in his sleep during the night of May
29-30, 2013 in the eighty-sixth year of his age. He insisted he was only a priest and that all the things he
was known for—writing, teaching, doing research and being a partisan of Chicago
and its sports teams—were merely his way of being a priest. He said he wanted his tombstone to
read, “A loud-mouthed Irish priest.”
He is missed already.
Notes
1. The first sentence of the encyclical is “DEUS CARITAS EST, et, qui manet in caritate, in Deo manet, et Deus in eo manet.” The official Vatican translation renders this correctly as: “God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.” Even the Vatican would not mess with this translation which is more a direct quote from the First Epistle of Saint John. No such inhibitions restrain the American bishops. The translation prepared by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says, “God’s love for us is fundamental for our lives, and it raises important questions about who God is and who we are.” The bishops are better Latinists than that but they don’t want people thinking God is love or, even worse, love is God. So they make up a little fib.
2. There is one exception, a reference to Chapter 8 of the Catechism of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). This deals with the sacrament of matrimony and makes no reference whatever to contraception.
RE EX NIHILO
Jerry Harkins
In 1974, the young American sculptor Frederick Hart won the commission to create a suite of works to be installed as part of the main entrance to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. The work, in six separate pieces, was dedicated in 1990. It includes free-standing, larger than life portraits of St. Peter and St. Paul [1], a large carving of Adam that serves as the front of the trumeau (the post that separates the doors of the main entrance), and three high relief carvings representing the creation of day, the creation of night, and the emergence of mankind. The latter, “Ex Nihilo,” shows eight human figures, four male and four female, appearing to emerge from what Genesis calls the void and what theologians have long referred to as nihilo, nothing.
Most Christians believe that before God created the heavens and the earth, there was nothing except God who then, by an act of will, became the uncaused first cause. Mr. Hart, with just a touch of artistic ambiguity, said that “Ex Nihilo” represents the “…state of rebirth and reaffirmation of all the possibilities in being human.” Of course, there is no reaffirmation of anything if the figures are emerging from nothing. He later said, “That might mean that the eight figures represent eight Christians in the act of being born again.” If so, the work is an elaborate metaphor for the cleansing waters of (adult) baptism. The soul’s release from the chains of original sin is seen has having been pre-figured in the creation of the world. Had this interpretation occurred to him before he began work I suspect he would have given the work a different title, perhaps something taken from Galatians 5, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” He would also have had to change the background as neither chaos nor nothingness is a good metaphor for the law from which St. Paul says Christ is freeing us. Mr. Hart’s life was marked by a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage as his Christianity became progressively more orthodox. His explanation may reflect this process more than it does his original intent. At a minimum, it suggests that he was aware that the sculpture has nothing to do with the biblical story of creation.
I see “Ex Nihilo” as a commentary on the relationship between the human and the divine. The title of the piece is nothing more than an afterthought. The figures appear to emerge from chaos [2], which is not nothing. Elsewhere Hart called the background “the majesty and mystery of divine force in a state of becoming.” The last phrase about mystery and majesty clears some of the fog but leaves the question: What that is divine is or ever has been becoming? Divine simply is. As God said in introducing himself to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.’” [3]
Frederick Hart was arguably the greatest figurative sculptor of his generation and together with Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the greatest of the many Americans who have worked in the classical tradition. He was not, however, by any means a literalist. His “Awakening of Eve,” for example, clearly depicts a navel she could not have had. And “Ex Nihilo,” in spite of its title, is not a representation of the Genesis story. The first two verses of the biblical account read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” It does not say the heavens and the earth were created out of nothing. On the contrary, it is saying that at the time God started his creation, the heavens and the earth already existed but the earth was empty. This is made explicit in Young’s Literal Translation [4] where the line is rendered, ‘In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth, the earth hath existed waste and void…” The recent translation of Robert Alter [5] has the same line as, “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste…” And Everett Fox [6] has it, “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste…” The author of Genesis almost certainly would have been thoroughly befuddled by the concept of absolute nothingness. The ancient idea that creation involves making something out of nothing was seized upon by medieval theologians many of whom resorted to mysticism to confront the emerging empiricism of Roger Bacon and the nominalism of William of Occam. In any event, nothing is not what Mr. Hart meant by nihilo even if that is what both the word and the theologians mean.
You have to look at the work carefully. Four adult men and four adult women are emerging from a chaotic background suggestive of primordial energy. This then is certainly not Day 6 of Creation because on that day only Adam was created. Indeed, Hart’s scene takes place sometime after the “creation” of Eve for neither she nor Adam are depicted. Even biblically, these eight people could not have emerged from nothing. Since Hart was both thoughtful and religious, it is necessary to conclude that the figures represent all of us and the background—the nihilo—is not literal but metaphoric. Perhaps, like E. E. Cummings, he is saying we humans are “lifted from the no / of all nothing.”
For more than a hundred years, it has been clear that the facts of evolution make a literal reading of Genesis impossible. Thinkers like the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, have pointed out that God and evolution are perfectly compatible but this idea has gained little traction within the Catholic church [7] and is actively opposed by Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Hart is known to have been influenced by Teilhard and it seems likely he set out to promote his own similar view. What is important is not how God created us, but why. Teilhard did not say so, nor does Hart, but one answer is that God created us because he had no choice. He was incomplete without something to love and to be loved by. Contrary to what John Milton claimed, God most certainly did need man’s active love. [8] And, of course, vice versa. This is a radical idea because an omnipotent God should need nothing and should not be subject to compulsion of any kind. Which, of course, is the message of Job. But not of Mary. Miraculously pregnant, the Virgin goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth and says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” What does this mean if not that her soul makes the Lord greater?
If this is at all close to what was in Hart’s mind, it offers a satisfying explication of the sculpture. We are all creatures of existential alienation, striving blindly away from our sense of emptiness. Upward and outward we strive with our eyes closed. Upward toward heaven and the love of God, outward from the loneliness of self. The figures are incomplete, still in the process of becoming as is all creation until the last trumpet. Their loneliness is a perfect metaphor for the absence of love. Hart is saying what St. Paul was saying: without love I am nothing, only Hart’s version is an affirmation. Love is everything. Perhaps it is.
Notes
1. The official name of the edifice is the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Both saints are depicted at the moment they accepted Jesus.
2. “The nothingness of chaos” is an oxymoron. Merriam-Webster defines chaos as “a state of things in which chance is supreme; nature that is subject to no law or that is not necessarily uniform; especially the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct and orderly forms.” Only things can be chaotic and they are so when their arrangement or motion is not subject to the laws of probability. No one has ever found a truly chaotic phenomenon .
3. Exodus 3:14.
4. Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible, Revised Edition, Baker Books, 1995.
5. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.
6. The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions. Commentary and Notes, Schocken Books, 1983.
7. On October 23, 1996, John Paul II delivered an address to an audience of scientists which was then published as formal statement endorsing the theory of evolution "...as more than just a hypothesis." Subsequently, the International Theological Commission, headed by then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, seemed to endorse this position by saying, “Through the activity of natural causes, God causes to arise those conditions required for the emergence and support of living organisms, and, furthermore, for their reproduction and differentiation." After Ratzinger’s elevation, however, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, commented that the Pope’s 1996 statement was “rather vague and unimportant.” He further said, “Evolution in the Neo-Darwinian sense…is not true” and was “invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.” His Eminence does not know the difference between Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism and does not realize that his enemies care not at all for purpose and design.
As interesting as all this may be, the present writer was the only one who noticed that the pope had chosen to publish his address on the 5,999th anniversary of the sixth day of Creation, according to the calculations of Bishop Ussher. That, of course, was Adam’s birthday and maybe Eve’s too.
8. “On His Blindness” claims that “…God doth not need / Either man's work or his own gifts.” It is not clear whom “his own” refers to. It could mean God and the gifts he has given mankind. Or it could refer to man and the “gifts” that man bestows on God in the form of prayer and sacrifice. The latter reading is perfectly consistent with the great theme of the Reformation: We are not saved by good works but by faith alone.
Jerry Harkins
In 1974, the young American sculptor Frederick Hart won the commission to create a suite of works to be installed as part of the main entrance to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. The work, in six separate pieces, was dedicated in 1990. It includes free-standing, larger than life portraits of St. Peter and St. Paul [1], a large carving of Adam that serves as the front of the trumeau (the post that separates the doors of the main entrance), and three high relief carvings representing the creation of day, the creation of night, and the emergence of mankind. The latter, “Ex Nihilo,” shows eight human figures, four male and four female, appearing to emerge from what Genesis calls the void and what theologians have long referred to as nihilo, nothing.
Most Christians believe that before God created the heavens and the earth, there was nothing except God who then, by an act of will, became the uncaused first cause. Mr. Hart, with just a touch of artistic ambiguity, said that “Ex Nihilo” represents the “…state of rebirth and reaffirmation of all the possibilities in being human.” Of course, there is no reaffirmation of anything if the figures are emerging from nothing. He later said, “That might mean that the eight figures represent eight Christians in the act of being born again.” If so, the work is an elaborate metaphor for the cleansing waters of (adult) baptism. The soul’s release from the chains of original sin is seen has having been pre-figured in the creation of the world. Had this interpretation occurred to him before he began work I suspect he would have given the work a different title, perhaps something taken from Galatians 5, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” He would also have had to change the background as neither chaos nor nothingness is a good metaphor for the law from which St. Paul says Christ is freeing us. Mr. Hart’s life was marked by a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage as his Christianity became progressively more orthodox. His explanation may reflect this process more than it does his original intent. At a minimum, it suggests that he was aware that the sculpture has nothing to do with the biblical story of creation.
I see “Ex Nihilo” as a commentary on the relationship between the human and the divine. The title of the piece is nothing more than an afterthought. The figures appear to emerge from chaos [2], which is not nothing. Elsewhere Hart called the background “the majesty and mystery of divine force in a state of becoming.” The last phrase about mystery and majesty clears some of the fog but leaves the question: What that is divine is or ever has been becoming? Divine simply is. As God said in introducing himself to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.’” [3]
Frederick Hart was arguably the greatest figurative sculptor of his generation and together with Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the greatest of the many Americans who have worked in the classical tradition. He was not, however, by any means a literalist. His “Awakening of Eve,” for example, clearly depicts a navel she could not have had. And “Ex Nihilo,” in spite of its title, is not a representation of the Genesis story. The first two verses of the biblical account read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” It does not say the heavens and the earth were created out of nothing. On the contrary, it is saying that at the time God started his creation, the heavens and the earth already existed but the earth was empty. This is made explicit in Young’s Literal Translation [4] where the line is rendered, ‘In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth, the earth hath existed waste and void…” The recent translation of Robert Alter [5] has the same line as, “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste…” And Everett Fox [6] has it, “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste…” The author of Genesis almost certainly would have been thoroughly befuddled by the concept of absolute nothingness. The ancient idea that creation involves making something out of nothing was seized upon by medieval theologians many of whom resorted to mysticism to confront the emerging empiricism of Roger Bacon and the nominalism of William of Occam. In any event, nothing is not what Mr. Hart meant by nihilo even if that is what both the word and the theologians mean.
You have to look at the work carefully. Four adult men and four adult women are emerging from a chaotic background suggestive of primordial energy. This then is certainly not Day 6 of Creation because on that day only Adam was created. Indeed, Hart’s scene takes place sometime after the “creation” of Eve for neither she nor Adam are depicted. Even biblically, these eight people could not have emerged from nothing. Since Hart was both thoughtful and religious, it is necessary to conclude that the figures represent all of us and the background—the nihilo—is not literal but metaphoric. Perhaps, like E. E. Cummings, he is saying we humans are “lifted from the no / of all nothing.”
For more than a hundred years, it has been clear that the facts of evolution make a literal reading of Genesis impossible. Thinkers like the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, have pointed out that God and evolution are perfectly compatible but this idea has gained little traction within the Catholic church [7] and is actively opposed by Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Hart is known to have been influenced by Teilhard and it seems likely he set out to promote his own similar view. What is important is not how God created us, but why. Teilhard did not say so, nor does Hart, but one answer is that God created us because he had no choice. He was incomplete without something to love and to be loved by. Contrary to what John Milton claimed, God most certainly did need man’s active love. [8] And, of course, vice versa. This is a radical idea because an omnipotent God should need nothing and should not be subject to compulsion of any kind. Which, of course, is the message of Job. But not of Mary. Miraculously pregnant, the Virgin goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth and says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” What does this mean if not that her soul makes the Lord greater?
If this is at all close to what was in Hart’s mind, it offers a satisfying explication of the sculpture. We are all creatures of existential alienation, striving blindly away from our sense of emptiness. Upward and outward we strive with our eyes closed. Upward toward heaven and the love of God, outward from the loneliness of self. The figures are incomplete, still in the process of becoming as is all creation until the last trumpet. Their loneliness is a perfect metaphor for the absence of love. Hart is saying what St. Paul was saying: without love I am nothing, only Hart’s version is an affirmation. Love is everything. Perhaps it is.
Notes
1. The official name of the edifice is the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Both saints are depicted at the moment they accepted Jesus.
2. “The nothingness of chaos” is an oxymoron. Merriam-Webster defines chaos as “a state of things in which chance is supreme; nature that is subject to no law or that is not necessarily uniform; especially the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct and orderly forms.” Only things can be chaotic and they are so when their arrangement or motion is not subject to the laws of probability. No one has ever found a truly chaotic phenomenon .
3. Exodus 3:14.
4. Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible, Revised Edition, Baker Books, 1995.
5. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.
6. The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions. Commentary and Notes, Schocken Books, 1983.
7. On October 23, 1996, John Paul II delivered an address to an audience of scientists which was then published as formal statement endorsing the theory of evolution "...as more than just a hypothesis." Subsequently, the International Theological Commission, headed by then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, seemed to endorse this position by saying, “Through the activity of natural causes, God causes to arise those conditions required for the emergence and support of living organisms, and, furthermore, for their reproduction and differentiation." After Ratzinger’s elevation, however, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, commented that the Pope’s 1996 statement was “rather vague and unimportant.” He further said, “Evolution in the Neo-Darwinian sense…is not true” and was “invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.” His Eminence does not know the difference between Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism and does not realize that his enemies care not at all for purpose and design.
As interesting as all this may be, the present writer was the only one who noticed that the pope had chosen to publish his address on the 5,999th anniversary of the sixth day of Creation, according to the calculations of Bishop Ussher. That, of course, was Adam’s birthday and maybe Eve’s too.
8. “On His Blindness” claims that “…God doth not need / Either man's work or his own gifts.” It is not clear whom “his own” refers to. It could mean God and the gifts he has given mankind. Or it could refer to man and the “gifts” that man bestows on God in the form of prayer and sacrifice. The latter reading is perfectly consistent with the great theme of the Reformation: We are not saved by good works but by faith alone.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
“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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
