A few words from and about that devil-may-care Dickens

Howard Richler

July 2012

This year marks the bicentenary of one of the all-time literary greats—Charles Dickens. No other author has provided us with so many memorable characters who are recognizable to so many people: Artful Dodger, David Copperfield, Fagin, Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Pip, Scrooge, Tiny Tim and Uriah Heep.

And aside from Shakespeare, no other writer has endowed us with so many works that are considered classics. On the Greatest Literature of All Time site, these eight works by Dickens are listed: Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Little Dorritt, Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities.

From the age of 15, Dickens’s life was characterized by constant activity and metamorphoses. At different times he worked as a legal clerk, a courtroom and parliamentary shorthand reporter, a journalist, an actor, a magazine editor and manager of theatrical productions.

He wrote in a didactic style that revealed the squalid nature of Victorian society, characterized by its widespread poverty and lack of justice for those on the bottom rungs of the pecking order.

Many of his most memorable characters are portrayed negatively and serve as examples of the hypocrisies of the British class system and the cruel practices of capitalism in 19th-century Britain.

Dickens, however, was hardly a saint. He saddled his wife, Catherine, with 10 children and after 22 years of marriage decided that she wasn’t worthy of him, then coerced her into a separation while constantly mocking her to his friends.

Dickens met Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862 and in a letter Dostoevsky penned years later, he related that Dickens had told him “that all the good, simple people in his novels ... are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was ... his cruelty ... his shrinking from those whom he ought to love. There were two people in him, one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.”

While Dickens’s place in the pantheon of literature is widely recognized, not as well known are the contributions he made to the English language. The OED sports almost 10,000 quotations from him and among authors he is the sixth-most-cited individual.

He is credited with being the first person to use 258 words and phrases that include “aglitter,” “bachelor apartment,” “boredom,” “butter-fingers,” “cloak and dagger,” “coffee shop,” “devil-may-care,” “dustbin,” “facts and figures,” “flummox,” “gonoph” (to mean pickpocket, from the Hebrew word for thief), “never say die,” “pay off,” “preggers,” “prima ballerina,” “put the kibosh on,” and “sit-down” (noun sense).

Even more extensive are the lists of words where he is the first person to use it in a particular context. Here we have “balance (to steady the body under the influence of opposing forces), “balloon” (cartoon sense), “bedevilment” (maddening trouble), “card” (to mean “original character”), (the) “creeps,” “gay dog” (man given to self-indulgence), “humane” (to cause minimal pain), “nasty” (to mean “serious”), “peck” (to mean “kiss”), “revolver” (gun sense), “stunning” (to mean “splendid”), “to whom it may concern,” and “up” (a rise in prosperity).

Dickens is not responsible for the expression “What the Dickens?” The first citation of the word is in 1599 in Thomas Heywood’s King Edward IV-Part I and Shakespeare used the term in 1616 in Merry Wives of Windsor. Dickens here serves as a euphemistic word for “the devil.” The word, “Dickensian,” to refer to Dickens style or the conditions that the author describes, surfaced in our language in 1881, 11 years after his death.

Howard’s next book, From Happy to
Homosexual and other mysterious
semantic shifts, will be published in 2013.

hrichler@gmail.com

Tying the knot, a cross-cultural analysis of bondage in marriage

Howard Richler

June 2012

Ever since cavemen stopped dragging away unwilling partners by the hair, marriage has been a knotty situation.

The climax of a Hindu ceremony arrives when the garments of the bride and groom are tied together and, bound in this manner, the knotted couple walk round a holy fire. Chinese Buddhists revere the deity Yue-laoum, who unites all predestined couples with a silken cord insuring that the union will be consummated. Since 1275, “tying the knot” has also been a symbol at weddings in England. Traditionally, the ribbons in a bridal bouquet would be knotted as a symbol of the solemn bond of marriage. John Ray, a 17th-century naturalist quipped, “He had tied a knot with his tongue he can’t untie with his teeth.” It seems to me that Ray was equating bonding with bondage.

Bonding, however, occurs in other marriage rituals. Before my daughter Jennifer was married some years ago in a traditional Jewish ceremony, a ketuvah “marriage contract” was signed by the couple and witnessed by two friends. This contract is ordained by Talmudic law and according to some authorities dates back to Biblical times. The ketuvah, written in Aramaic, details the husband’s obligations to his wife: food, clothing, dwelling and pleasure. It also creates a lien on all his property (there is even a reference to the shirt from the husband’s back) to pay her a sum of money and support should he predecease her or (Oy Vay!) divorce her. The document has the standing of a legally binding agreement that in many countries is enforceable by secular law.

In the marriage ceremony itself, Jennifer and her spouse, Noah, repeated their vows underneath a chuppah, a Hebrew word that means “canopy.” The chuppah is a decorated piece of cloth held aloft as a symbolic home for the new couple. With so many terms from Hebrew and Yiddish being recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, I wasn’t totally surprised to find an entry for the word “chuppah.” What was surprising, however, was the first citation of the word coming from George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda.
Noah intoned to Jennifer these Hebrew words: Harei at mikudeshet li, b’taba’at zo k’dat Moshe v’Yisrael, which translates as “Behold, you are consecrated to me by this token according to the laws/traditions of Moses and Israel.” In turn, Jennifer announced to the throng, Ani l’dodi v’dodi li, “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

I remember cringing at the wedding when an inebriated relative asked me if I was comfortable in my penguin suit. This lexicographically challenged chap was obviously not aware that the tuxedo’s origin is not tied to a puny penguin but to a wild wolf. A tuxedo is so named because in 1890, the dress code at the local country club in Tuxedo Park, 65 kilometres from New York City, dictated that gentlemen wear a tailless dinner jacket at most nightly affairs. This was known as a tuxedo coat until matching trousers were added to the ensemble, which came to be known as a tuxedo.

The connection to the wolf does not relate to the lasciviousness of these posh men but rather to the manner in which Tuxedo Park acquired its name. The P’tuksit were a subtribe of the Delawares, who lived along the western shore of the Hudson River and the name literally means “round-footed,” an allusion to the wolf.

In the 18th century, American settlers gave the name of the P’tuksit, anglicized as Tuxedo, to a village in southeastern New York and by 1880 Tuxedo Park on the shore of Tuxedo Lake became a fashionable resort of the very wealthy.

Let me conclude by hoping that all of this summer’s brides and grooms are bound together in happiness.

hrichler@gmail.com

Reflections on baby talk and mutant English

Howard Richler

May 2012

This article is dedicated to my daughter Jennifer, born in Quebec, who gave birth to Maya Ruth Richler-Stoffman on April 5th in Bloomington, Indiana.

The Oxford Companion to the English Language (OCEL) is missing an “s” at the end of its title. The OCEL has headings for more than 400 varieties of our multitudinous language, such as Australian English, Singapore English, and Canadian English.

I’ve never even heard of some of the varieties, such as Babu English, which is described in OCEL as “a mode of address and reference in several Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi, for officials working for rajahs, landlords, etc.”

My mother tongue, Quebec English, is actually one of these mutations listed in OCEL. In my dealings with the outside world, I’m constantly being reminded, if not chided, about the distinctiveness of my English.

Some years ago, while toiling in the steel industry, I couldn’t reach a customer in Newfoundland and in my recorded message stated that “my local is 222.” I found out a week later why the person never phoned me back. My reference to “local” made him think I represented a union—I should have used the term “extension.”

I would think that many a mother born in Quebec, but bringing up her children elsewhere, is likely to have her mongrel English roots sussed out were she to use the word “suss” as a noun in a prenatal class.

Howard Richler’s daughter Jennifer with 3-year-old Judah and nearly-new Maya Ruth. Photo courtesy of Howard Richler

You see, for many Quebec anglophones a “suss” is their word of choice for a pacifier but this term is only to be found among English-speaking people deriving from Quebec. It comes from the French-Canadian term for a pacifier—suçon or suce—and derives from the French word sucer, “to suck.” Even in France, this term would be largely unknown as the definitive word there would be une tétine.

This mongrelization is not unusual, as the term “pacifier” for many products we associate with babies varies quite a lot in the English-speaking world. The term “pacifier” in the United Kingdom is largely unknown and the definitive term for such is a “dummy” because the device is an artificial teat. In North America and the U.K., many people use such other terms for pacifier as binky or nuk (or nuk-nuk). Binky was actually a brand name for a pacifier introduced by Playtex in 1948 and produced until 1977. Nuk derives from the Nuk baby product company, which was established in Germany in 1964.

Interestingly, the term “binky” grew beyond the sense of pacifier and is often used to refer to a young child’s blanket, stuffed animal or other prized possession.

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, British English and North American English are two languages separated by an ocean, and we see this chasm in many terms we use associated with babies. After all, “popping” a baby in a cot in Britain just means placing it there, whereas stating that you “popped” a baby in a North American crib might get you arrested for harming an infant.

In England, a nanny changes a baby’s nappy, not its diaper. This word was first used in English in the 14th century when it referred to a textile fabric and by the next century it referred to a linen fabric.

It is in the 17th century that the word is first used to refer to a baby’s napkin or cloth. The word nappy is a version of napkin and its first citation in the OED is in 1927.

The term pram to refer to a baby carriage
goes back to 1884 and I was surprised to discover that it is actually a shortening of the word perambulator.

Nowadays this term has succumbed to the more descriptive push chair.

hrichler@gmail.com

Howard Richler’s book From Gay (Happy) to Gay (Homosexual) and other mysterious semantic shifts will be published by Ronsdale Press in 2013.

Consider whether to sanction the non-sanctioned use of sanction

Howard Richler

April 2012

“This movement … is a way to ask you … to sanction Guy
Turcotte by keeping him at Pinel.”

—Attorney Guy Poupart, The Gazette, March 17

Notwithstanding Poupart’s purported usage, sanction when used as a verb usually means “permit” or “authorize,” but when used as a noun it invariably means a “penalty.”

Complicating matters even further, dictionaries are at odds on this issue. For example, Merriam Webster, Cambridge and Encarta only recognize an approving sense for the verb, whereas the OED, Canadian Oxford and American Heritage allow that it can denote a punitive sense. Since using the word in this manner might be misunderstood, it might be wise to say “issue sanctions against” to eliminate the possibility of non-comprehension.

The OED explains how the dichotomy in meanings occurred. “Sanction” surfaces in English as a noun in the 1570s and the OED relates that the word derives from the Latin sanctio, “decree” where it referred to the “action of ordaining as inviolable under a penalty.” Thus sanctions most often refer to measures taken by authorities to discourage courses of action that are not approved by muckety-mucks. Perhaps because it is more efficacious to dissuade with a stick than to persuade with a carrot, the punitive sense of the noun took hold. Interestingly, when used in the singular, as in “UN sanction” or “church sanction,” often the word is used to mean approbation.

We first see the verb sense of sanction in the 1770s and consistently it has been used in the original sense of endorsement or recognition by an authoritative decree. This is the intended meaning in Edmund Burke’s 1791 An Appeal From the New to the Old Whigs: “Tests against old principles, sanctioned by the law.”

The “penalize” sense of the verb sanction seems to have arisen in the middle of the 20th century, and although this usage is not inherently illogical, I would advise against employing it unless the context makes your intention perfectly clear. Hence in 2010, when Sarah Palin told right-wing political commentator Glenn Beck, “We’re not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do,” we assume because of her politics that she didn’t have the approval sense of the verb sanction in mind. (However, I stand to be “refudiated,” to use another Palin expression, on this point.)

Notwithstanding the above, in the last five years I’ve noticed an increasing use of the verb sanction to mean “penalize,” in the manner employed by Poupart in the opening quotation. This is no doubt because the punitive sense of sanction to refer to actions taken by a nation or an alliance of nations against another as a coercive measure to enforce a violated law or treaty is the most common usage. In the process of back-formation, this sense gets extended to the verbal sphere.

Though this use of the noun only developed in the 20th century, I predict this usage will eventually represent the dominant verbal sense and one day sanction the noun and sanction the verb will live in harmony.

Howard Richler’s From Gay (Happy) to Gay (Homosexual) and other mysterious semantic shifts will be published by Ronsdale Press in 2013.

The etymological ingredients of food aren’t always appetitizing

Howard Richler

March 2012

In his book Crazy English, wordsmith Richard Lederer makes us question the ingredients of many of our foods. After all, there’s no egg in eggplant, no peas or nuts in peanuts, and blackberries are green and then red before they are ripe.

How can we trust the fruits we eat when a grapefruit has nothing to do with grape and a pineapple doesn’t seem to be related to a pine tree or an apple? Are strawberries named for straw? What about raspberries?

In the case of “strawberry,” etymologists are divided on the meaning of “straw.” Whereas some believe it derives from an obsolete sense of the word “small piece of chaff,” referring to the external seeds, others think it derives from the fact that the plant’s runners resemble straws. “Raspberry” derives from an obsolete English word for the fruit “raspis.”

The designations “grapefruit” and “pineapple” highlight the fact that often words are named for seemingly peculiar perceptions. The only resemblance between a grapefruit and a grape is that both are grown in clusters but this was enough for it to be called “grapefruit.” An apple must have been deemed to be the generic fruit for a long time because by the 13th century, the term “pineapple” was applied in English to “a pine cone.” The word was applied to the fruit in the mid-17th century, because of its similarity in shape to a pine cone.

This doesn’t look at all like an apple. Photo: Gérald Anfossi

Another fruit named for its perceived appearance was the “coconut.” When 15th-century Portuguese explorers discovered this delicacy in the Indian Ocean islands, they fancied that the three little indentations at the base of the large nut looked like eyes. Thinking that these three “eyes” gave the nut the appearance of a grinning face, they named it the “coconut,” coca being the Portuguese word for a grimacing face.

These fruits, however, have tepid etymologies compared with the avocado, which ultimately derives from the Nahuatl language of South America where it was given the name ahuacatl, “testicle,” because of the similarity in shape. The Spanish conquistadors absorbed this word originally as aguacate but before long the word morphed into avocado, the Spanish word for “advocate.”

In the name of etymological propriety, one might be particularly resistant to eating vanilla ice cream. In Elizabethan England, vanilla was thought to have aphrodisiac properties because the sheath-like shape of the pod of the plant bore a resemblance to the vagina. Nor were the English alone in this gynecological perception, as the word “vanilla” comes from the Spanish for “little vagina.” Similarly, you might not want to know that vermicelli is a form of the Italian word for worm, verme. It is so named because when heated, it expands and exudes what resembles small worms.

Also not particularly appetizing is the etymology of pumpernickel bread. This coarse bread is the progeny of the unholy union of the New High German, pumpern, “to break wind” and nickel, “goblin” or “devil.” It was claimed that if you ate pumpernickel you’d fart like the devil. The aubergine, on the other hand, enjoys an anti-flatulent heritage. It began its life as the Sanskrit vatinganah that referred to the lack of gas it produces. It went through a transcontinental migration to become the Catalan alberginia, and finally French aubergine.

Occasionally this process can also work in reverse; a non-food word can derive from a food. If sausage represents one of your favourite foods, it behooves me to relate that your bowels are etymologically “little sausages.” The word comes from the Latin botellus, which meant “intestine” or “little sausage.” It is said that the Romans used the same word for intestine as sausage because soldiers noticed a distinct resemblance of the slashed stomachs of their slain comrades to sausages.

Bon appetit.

hrichler@gmail.com

Howard Richler’s From Gay (Happy) to Gay (Homosexual) and other mysterious semantic shifts will be published by Ronsdale Press in 2013.

American Dialect Society names the lexiest creations of the year

Howard Richler

February 2012

Since 1990, the American Dialect Society, or ADS, has paid homage to the most sublime, lexiest creations of each year—new words that grace our lexicon annually.

These words have been drawn from a number of varied categories. For example, “gate rape” (defined as “pejorative term for invasive new airport pat-down procedures”) reigned supreme in the “most outrageous” category in 2010, and “waterboarding” won in the “most euphemistic” category in 2006.

Each year, a “word of the year” is chosen and, as one would expect, the world of technology has provided us with the dominant neologisms, such as app (2010), tweet (2009), Y2K (1999), e-, as in e-mail (1998).

Conclusive evidence of this trend arrived in 2010 when “google” was voted the word of the decade.

At an ADS convention in Portland, Oregon, last month, it was decided that the word of the year for 2011 was “occupy.” It was felt that “occupy” became an emblem for the whole protest movement.

Ben Zimmer, language columnist at the Boston Globe, stated “occupy” in “just a few months took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement.” I do not agree that
“occupy” is being used in a distinct sense. Starting in the 14th century, it had a sense of taking possession of something by force. By 1920, the verb was used to mean to gain access to a piece of land or building without authority as a form of protest.

And if I see another dumb joke on Facebook, such as “I’m gonna occupy a beer from the fridge now,” I’m going to seriously unfriend some people.

Before dismissing the society’s choice, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one particularly shocking sense of “occupy” that has fallen from our vernacular. From the 15th century to the beginning of the 19th century, “occupy” was used as an euphemism for engaging in sex. In John Florio’s Worlde of Wordes written in 1598, there is reference to “raskalie whores in Italy, who cause them to be occupide one and thirtie times by one and thirtie several base raskalie companions.”

My favourite category this year was the “most creative” section. Here we sampled “bunga bunga,” referring to the sex parties associated with former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Its etymology is somewhat murky, however a German actress claims that “bunga bunga” originated as Berlusconi’s nickname for her, and eventually morphed into his term for wild parties with young girls.

But the winner in this category was “Mellencamp,” describing a woman who has aged out of being a cougar. Pop music enthusiasts will discern that the term is named after pop singer John Cougar Mellencamp.

Indeed, eponymous neologisms were popular this year. To “Mubarak” is “to farcically hold on to power,” and if you’re “Mubaraked” to your chair it might mean you’re stuck in it. Another eponymous term that emerged this year was “Tebowing,” lampooning the praying pose of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.

Given its geopolitical importance, I was disappointed that the term “Arab Spring,” referring to popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes in the Arab world was not one of the nominees for word of the year. Mind you, it was runner-up in the “most likely to succeed” genre. The winner here was the word “cloud” referencing online space for the large-scale processing and storage of data.

Another term in this category that I believe will have legs is “tiger mom,” which refers to an extremely strict parent.

Lest you feel that Canada was given short shrift because neither the verb “to Harper” (to cut off debate) or “to McKay” (to use a military helicopter instead of a taxi while on vacation) did not register with American
Dialect voters, I am proud to say that the impetus for the occupy movement had a Canadian genesis. It was on July 13 that the Vancouver-based anti-consumer magazine Adbusters suggested online that people “Occupy Wall Street” in lower Manhattan on Sept 17.

The movement went viral and, thanks to the Canucks, the ADS had its word of the year.

hrichler@gmail.com

Scotch spirit not only warms ... it burns

Howard Richler

December 2011

January 25 marks Robert Burns Day and will be commemorated by Scots (and Scot wannabes) worldwide, whether they are enjoying a hearty McEwan’s ale or a McCallum single-malt scotch and, alas, even if they are stone sober.

Robbie was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, on January 25, 1759, to William Burness, a poor tenant farmer, and Agnes Broun. He was the eldest of seven and spent his youth working his father’s farm.

In spite of the family’s meagre means, William Burness engaged a tutor for his precocious son Robbie. At 15, Robbie was the principal worker on the farm and this prompted him to start writing in an attempt to find “some kind of counterpoise for his circumstances.” It was at this tender age that Burns penned his first verse, My Handsome Nell, which was an ode to the subjects that dominated his life, namely whisky and women.

When his father died in 1784, Robbie and a brother became partners in the farm. Robbie, however, was more fascinated by the poem than the plough and after having fathered several illegitimate children, he planned to forsake Scotland and abscond to a Caribbean island.

Serendipitously for Scotland, his first collection of verse, Poems-Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published at this juncture and received much critical acclaim.

He thus remained in his homeland, touring the country before eventually arriving in Edinburgh, where he mingled with the illustrious artists and writers who were agog at the “Ploughman Poet.”

By Burns’s lifetime, the ancient Celtic language of the Scots had been reduced to a mere dialect and Burns took it upon himself to resurrect Scots to its halcyon level of yesteryear. Many of Burns’s finest poems are composed, at least partially, in Scots and thus helped revalidate the ancient tongue of his forefathers.

The last years of Burns’s life were devoted to penning such poems as A Red, Red Rose, Sweet Afton and Tam O’Shanter. He died when only 37, of a heart disease perhaps exacerbated by the arduous manual work he undertook when he was young.

Here are some of the opening stanzas from his masterpiece Tam O’Shanter (with translation notes for Scots and archaic English):

When chapman billies (peddler fellows) leave the street,

And drouthy (thirsty) neebors meet;

As market-days are wearing late,

An folk begin to tak the gate;

While we sit bousing (boozing) at the nappy (strong ale),

An getting fou (full-drunk) and unco (very) happy,

We think na on the lang (long) Scots miles,

The mosses, waters, slaps (gates), and styles,

That lie between us and our hame (home),

Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame,

Gathering her brows like gathering storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

This truth fand (found) honest Tam o Shanter,

As he frae (from) Ayr ae (one) night did canter:

Auld Ayr, wham (whom) ne’er a town surpasses,

For honest men and bonie lasses).

O Tam had’st thou but been sae (so) wise,

As taen (taken) thy ain (own) wife Kate’s advice!

She tauld thee weel (well) thou was a skellum (scamp),

A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum (babbler);

That frae November till October,

Ae market-day thou was nae sober;

That ilka (every) melder (amount of grain to be ground) wi the miller,

Thou sat as lang as thou had siller (silver/money);

That ev’ry naig (nag/horse) was ca’d (driven) a shoe on,

The smith and thee gat roarin fou on;

That at the Lord’s house, even on Sundav,

Thou drank wi Kirkton Jean till Monday.

She prophesied that, late or soon,

Thou would be found, deep drown’d in Doon,

Or catch’d wi warlocks in the mirk,

By Alloway’s auld, haunted kirk(church).

Ah, gentle dames, it gars (compels) me greet (weep),

To think how monie (many) counsels sweet,

How monie lengthen’d, sage advices

The husband frae the wife despises!

Burns’s simple yet eloquently evocative verse, with its celebration of life, speaks to people everywhere. So let’s all raise a glass in honour of Robert Burns. Personally, though, I’ll forego the haggis.

hrichler@gmail.com

Arizona haboobs cause quite the hubbub

Howard Richler

November 2011

Not since the debacle some years ago when some Americans suggested renaming French fries “freedom fries” because of France’s lack of support for the invasion of Iraq, have we seen the same level of linguistic jingoistic meshugas. Let me explain.

This summer, Arizona experienced massive dust storms caused by thunderstorms emitting enormous gusts of wind across the desert.

Some local weathermen referred to this phenomenon as a “haboob,” which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “A violent and oppressive wind which blows at certain seasons in the Sudan, and which brings with it sand from the desert.”

Haboob derives from the Arabic habub, “blowing furiously.” No apparent controversy there, and yet the use and derivation of haboob prompted several angry letters from Arizonans.

Typical of such was the following to the Arizona Republic: “After living here for 57 years, I have seen an ‘Arizona dust storm’ or two. I am insulted that local TV news crews are now calling this kind of storm a haboob. How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?”

This sentiment was echoed by other irate letters to the editor.

To be consistent, however, there are a number of other words that should be avoided to protect the sensitivities of Arizonans:

Algebra: This word derives from the Arabic al-jebr, which means “the reuniting of broken parts.” When algebra entered the English language, it referred to the setting of broken bones, and sometimes to the fractures themselves.

As late as 1623, we find an OED citation that only refers to algebra as “bone-setting,” but the mathematical sense of the word entered our lexicon in the 16th century and quickly became the dominant sense.

Zero: “Zero” ultimately descends from the Arabic çifr, from which we also get the word “cipher.” Its first citation to denote the number 0 in English occurs in Edward Grimstone’s 1604 translation of José de Acosta’s widely cited Historia natural y moral de las Indias, where he states: “They accompted their weekes by thirteeene day marking the dayes with a Zero or cipher.”

As mathematicians remind us, the invention of nothing (or zero) was one of the more important discoveries in math history.

Alcohol: Cleopatra probably applied an antimony paste to her eyelids called al-kuhl, the al part meaning “the” and the kuhl ending meaning “powdered antimony.”

Arab alchemists (another Arabic word) gave the name al-kuhl to any finely pulverized powder obtained by sublimation and thus to all compounds obtained through the distillation process. The word came into English as “alcool,” referring to any fine powder. Given the Islamic prohibition against drinking alcohol, it is ironic that this word derives from Arabic.

However, it was not until the 19th century that the word alcohol became used exclusively to denote the West’s favourite liquid.

Magazine: This word ultimately derives from the Arabic makh zin, the plural of makhzan, “storehouse.” Its first sense in the OED is “a place where goods are laid up; a storehouse for goods,” and this sense of storing lives on in its ammunition reference: a gun’s magazine as a holder of bullets or cartridges.

Its sense as a periodical emerged almost accidentally in 1731 when the editors of the Gentleman’s Magazine used the word because they said that they intended “to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces.” The term caught on almost immediately to refer to a periodical publication and this became the dominant sense of the word.

So those who feel insulted by the borrowings from Arabic should bear in mind that English didn’t get to be the global language it is today by being pure. Long may it sleep around.

Howard Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

Trying to rehabilitate harmful four-letter words

Howard Richler

October 2011

Little did police constable Michael Sanguinetti realize that his not-very-common name would one day elicit over one million Google hits following his ill-advised use of a four-letter word while addressing a group of students at Osgoode Law School on matters of health and safety. In case you haven’t heard, Sanguinetti advised women to “avoid dressing like sluts” to mitigate the risk of sexual assault.

Feeling that Sanguinetti’s comments were implying that victims were responsible for being attacked, a “SlutWalk” took place in Toronto in April, attracting more than 3,000 angry demonstrators.

Before long, this type of march went viral and as I write well over 50 slutwalks have been held in various North American cities, such as Montreal, Chicago and Los Angeles as well as similar events in Melbourne, Amsterdam and London.

Slutwalktoronto.com states: “Historically, the term ‘slut’ has carried a predominantly negative connotation.

“Aimed at those who are sexually promiscuous, be it for work or pleasure, it has primarily been women who have suffered under the burden of this label. And whether dished out as a serious indictment of one’s character or merely as a flippant insult, the intent behind the word is always to wound, so we’re taking it back. ‘Slut’ is being reappropriated.”

This raises the following question: Can the meaning of slut be rehabilitated? Before answering this question, it might be instructive to look at the etymology of “slut.”

The Oxford English Dictionary offers two main definitions: a) “A woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance; a foul slattern.” (This sense is still quite common in England, particularly among older people); b) “A woman of low or loose character; a bold or impudent girl; a hussy, jade.”

Notwithstanding that the “loose” rather than the “slovenly” sense is the dominant one, the latter is listed first because its first usage in the 15th century preceded the second by 50 years.

It should be noted that under definition b), the OED mentions that slut can be employed “In playful use, or without serious imputation of bad qualities.” For example, in 1664, diarist Samuel Pepys referred to his servant girl Susan as a “most admirable slut who pleases us mightily.”

One should note, however, that the last recorded “playful” sense of slut was in 1884 by C.G. Gordon, and when Charles Dickens uses the word in Nicholas Nickleby as well as in Dombey & Son decades earlier, it carries a strong licentious connotation. So there can be no doubt that nowadays when both men and women direct the word toward women, it is invariably a term of opprobrium.

The sense of disdain can range from the relatively mild to the almost vitriolic; seeing a slut as a woman with low self-esteem who dresses provocatively to make herself more desirable, to seeing a slut as someone with low moral character who is not selective with whom she copulates.

Men are generally not called “sluts” and probably most men would not be concerned if similarly labelled. As a result of the double standard in society, men are more likely to be referred to positively as “studs” or by the somewhat archaic term “ladies’ man.”

So to answer the question on whether the term “slut” can be reappropriated, the answer is largely a resounding “No!”

The reality is that only the people whose attitude toward equality of the genders is not problematic will use “slut” in a non-derogatory manner. In any case, the English words people choose to use is not controllable, because no person or force owns them.

For example, while some francophones might be unhappy with all the “anyways” and “ohmygods” found in their vernacular, as language use is a democratic process; nothing can be done about it.

Even if eventually by some process the meaning of the word is ameliorated, unless societal attitudes change, before long there would be another pernicious word employed to debase women.

hrichler@gmail.com

Howard Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

Some students seem to write in hydraulics

Howard Richler

September 2011

September marks back to school season and as kids no longer study history, I thought I’d warn teachers about some of the written pronouncements they might have to endure in the months to come. To facilitate the flow of information, I have arranged in chronological order this collection of quotes from various websites. • No human beings were found during the Ice Age because it was the pre-stork era.

• In Ancient Egypt people wrote in hydraulics.

• The Great Wall of China was built to keep out the Mongrels.

• Cleopatra died when an ass bit her.

• The ancient Greeks invented three kinds of columns—corinthian, ironic and dorc—and built the Apocalypse.

• The Acropolis of Athens contained the Parthian, the Erectum, and the Esophagus, a temple to the war-god.

• Homer wrote The Iliad and the Oddity.

• Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

• Oedipus Complex was a famous queen of Egypt.

• Oedipus killed his father and married his real mother. That’s called incense.

• The Romans prosecuted the early Christians because they disapproved of gladiola fights and would not burn insects before the statue of the emperor.

• Roman women built fires in their brassieres.

• The Crusades were trips to drive the turkey out of the Holy Land.

• The Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had trouble with unsympathetic Genitals.

• In the Middle Ages many people died from the bluebonnet plague after growing boobs on their necks.

• Because people thought Joan of Arc was a witch they burned her to a steak. • Michelangelo painted the sixteenth chapel.

• Columbus discovered America while cursing the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta Colada and the Santa Fe.

• Henry VIII had a hard time walking because he had an abbess on his knee.

• Sir Francis Drake circumcized the world with a 100-foot clipper.

• Queen Elizabeth’s navy defeated the Spanish armadillo.

• William Shakespeare wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter.

• The main theme of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra was death and suffrage.

• Miquel Cervantes wrote Donkey Hote.

• The Pilgrims crossed the ocean in hardships.

• Descartes’ maxim was “cogito eros sum.”

• Johann Bach practiced on an old spinster in his attic.

• The French Revolution occurred because Louis XIV was revolting.

• Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation.

• Charles Darwin wrote The Organ of the Species.

• In the middle of the 19th century, all the morons moved to Utah.

• Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.

• Thomas Edison was the inventor of the phonograph and the indecent lamp.

• The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a surf.

• John Steinbeck went on to win the Nobel Prize for literacy.

• In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise.

• The president of Iran is a man called Mahmoud Iwantjihad.

As geography is not taught the way it once had been, place names also take a beating by students:

• The Israelites lived in the Sarah Desert and traveled by Camelot.

• Moses went up Mount Cyanide for the Ten Commandments but died before he reached Canada.

• Pompeii was destroyed by an overflow of saliva from Mount Vatican.

• They are fighting a civil war in Serbia because the Bostonians, Crates and Hertzgodivas want to get rid of the Serves.

• The capital of Ethiopia is Adidas Ababa.

Origin of “jazz” is shrouded in legend

Howard Richler

July 2011

In the years since its debut in 1980, the Montreal International Jazz Festival has featured such legendary figures as Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, B.B. King, Ray Charles, Stan Getz and Ella Fitzgerald.

The origin of the word “jazz” itself is shrouded in legend. One theory states that the word derives from a slave by the name of Jasper who lived in a plantation near New Orleans in 1825.

Another hypothesis claims that the progenitor of the word is Jasbo Brown, an itinerant black musician who played along Mississippi River towns and later in Chicago cabarets at the turn of the 20th century. An etymology that has gained widespread currency among musicians credits Chaz Washington, a ragtime drummer from Vicksburg, Mississippi, circa 1904, as the word’s founder.

In his book So This is Jazz, Henry Osgood states that “Chaz had the gift for faking and a marvellous sense of syncopated rhythm.” Geneva Smitherman, professor of English at Michigan State University, speculates that the term may ultimately come out of Africa from the Mandingo word jasi “to act out of the ordinary.” Still another theory holds that the word derives from the French verb jaser, “to chatter.”

This may not be such a far-fetched idea. After all, French was spoken in New Orleans either in the form of Creole or the Acadian of the early settlers transported from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Whatever its origin, the word “jazz” first appears in the lyrics of a 1909 song called Uncle Josh in Society: “One lady asked me if I danced the jazz.” Here, the word refers to a ragtime dance. Its use to denote the music that accompanied such a dance, and, more generally, to a type of improvised syncopated music, is not recorded until 1913. On March 6, 1913, the San Francisco Bulletin reported that “the team which speeded into town this morning comes pretty close to representing the pick of the army. Its members have trained on ragtime and ‘jazz’.”

The original jazz band, according to Herbert Asbury’s 1938 book The Latin Quarter, was the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band, comprised of seven boys, ages 12 to 15, who first surface in New Orleans in 1895.

Five years later, another New Orleans group tried to usurp this name at a gig and the original Spasm lads protested by throwing rocks at performers and dancers at the Haymarket dance hall. This tactic proved effective as the owner of the dance hall repainted advertising placards to read Razzy Dazzy Jazzy Band. Another legend avers that in 1916, Johnny Stein’s band was playing at Schiller’s Café it Chicago when an inebriated, retired vaudeville entertainer leapt to his feet and exhorted the band “jass it up, boys.”

According to this piece of apocrypha, the term caught on and Stein’s ensemble was rechristened the Original Dixieland Jass Band.

The word “jazz” had been used as a verb meaning “to speed things up” for at least 40 years by blacks living in New Orleans before it attained lexicographic recognition.

The first OED citation of the word as a verb is from the New York Sun in 1913 and it reinforces the energizing sense of the word: “In the old plantation days when the slaves were having one of their rare holidays and the fun languished, some West Coast African would cry out, ‘Jaz her up,’ and this would be the cue for fast and furious fun.”

This sense of excitation quickly moved to the sexual arena and by the 1890s the word was used as a synonym for the ultimate four-letter word. Hence, Clay Smith stated in his 1924 book Étude, “if the truth were known about the origin of the word.{jazz} it would never be mentioned in polite society.”

In any case, whether you are a member of polite society, or a rowdy like me, I hope you had a chance to enjoy the jazz festival.

http://howarderichler.blogspot.com

hrichler@gmail.com

Hoi polloi rules, semantic anarchists be damned

June 2011

Presently. This might seem like a non-contentious word, but Senior Times editor Barbara Moser related to me that her friend became apoplectic (and shunned her for months) because Barbara had the effrontery to use presently to mean “shortly” (first used in this manner in 1443) rather than its original sense of “immediately,” (first used in 1385).

Lest you have the impression that Ms. Moser represents some type of semantic anarchist, she told me that she instructs her students not to use “presently” to mean “currently,” but truth be known this is the way the word is most often used. In fact, if you do a Google search on the use of the word “presently,” you will find that the word is used to mean “currently” more than 90 per cent of the time.

This raises the question (I can’t bring myself to say “begs the question”) whether the use of “presently” to mean “currently” is wrong?

The OED allows the secondary meaning of presently to mean “at the present time,” but adds this caveat: “Apparently avoided in literary use between the 17th and 20th centuries, but in regular use in most English dialects; revived in the 20th cent. In the U.S., subsequently in Britain and elsewhere. Regarded by some usage writers, esp. after the mid-20th cent., as erroneous or ambiguous.”

If you believe that Barbara’s usage brouhaha represents an isolated incident, you’d be wrong. Many people become rather exercised over what they consider to be the misuse of a word. Exhibit 2. When Simon Winchester wrote The Professor and the Madman in 1999 describing how “madman” Dr. William Chester Minor contributed to the making of the OED under the auspices of “Professor” James Augustus Henry Murray, he received fulsome praise from all for his splendid book.

Well, not quite. Winchester was deluged by angry letters from readers of the book because in Chapter 9, he used “fulsom” as a synonym for “extravagant” or “over the top,” upsetting a certain segment of his audience.

Many readers felt that this usage was erroneous because the original meaning of the word was “offensively excessive” and Winchester says that detractors expressed alarm “that an authority on the language would make that mistake and that my use of fulsome eroded the credibility of the book as a whole.” Winchester told me that when he wrote his subsequent book, The Meaning of Everything, which accounts in greater detail how the OED was compiled, he used “fulsome” in a similar fashion “to annoy the pedants who excoriated me for using it in the first.” This also asks the question, How long do we insist that older meanings should prevail?

Truth be told, there is no simple answer, because there is no definitive arbiter on what qualifies as proper English. According to Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and other American dictionaries, many new meanings are acceptable. For example, “peruse” can mean not only to “examine carefully” but to “read over in a casual manner”; “disinterested” can mean “not interested” as well as “impartial”; and “enormity” can mean the same as “enormousness.” On the other hand, some dictionaries and many learned usage commentators regard these positions as linguistic heresy.

I don’t mean to imply (infer?) that I am a totally laissez-faire language libertarian. My bête noire is the misuse of “beg the question” to mean “ask the question, instead of using the term to refer to the point at issue, the thing that one is trying to prove. An argument that “begs the question” is circular, as it is based on its own conclusion.

I fear that an important linguistic concept is being lost when people use “beg the question” to mean “ask the question.” But when I hear the vast majority of journalists, even those of the BBC, regularly use it in this manner, I fear that the battle may have been lost.

Language commentator William Safire started out as a rigid prescriptivist, but even he acknowledged in his book In Love With Norma Loquendi that the masses represent the final arbiter of language: “The rules laid down by elites are to be respected … but in the end democracy, which goes by the name of common usage, will work its will … When the population challenges the order over a period of time, Norma Loquendi – the everyday voice of the native speaker – is the heroine who changes the order and raises a new standard.”

hrichler@gmail.com

Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows : The Private Lives of Words (Ronsdale Press).

Writs and hustings and exploring the lex of electile dysfunctionality

Howard Richler

May, 2011

The writ was dropped March 26, and to paraphrase Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest: “To drop one writ may be regarded as unfortunate, to drop two in five years looks like carelessness.”

Actually, no writ is dropped; writs of election are issued, and the sense of drop is idiomatic, as in “drop a line.”

Another dropped item is your ballot, and when you cast it, you are etymologically dropping the ball, as we borrowed the word from the Italian ballotta, “little ball.” In days of yore, people often voted by dropping little balls into a receptacle. The first OED citation of the word in 1561 states: “Boxes into whiche if he wyll, he may let fall his ballot, that no man can perceiue hym.” Related to “ballot” is the idea that since a white ball often meant a “yes” vote and a black ball designated a “no” vote, the term blackball came to refer to exclusion from a club in the late 18th century.

Only in Canada is an electoral district referred to as a riding, but we have to look to Yorkshire, England, for the word’s provenance. One would suppose that the term has something to do with the verb “to ride,” but such is not the case. Until 1974, Yorkshire was divided for administrative purposes into three ridings and the key word here is “three.” The word riding came into English in the 15th century from Old Norse thrithjungr, “third part” and was originally rendered in English as “trithing.”

Just as “riding” is not connected to “ride,” the word candidate is not related to the candid nature of those seeking office. If candidates were etymologically correct, they would wear white clothes, as the word derives from the Latin candidatus, “dressed in white.” In ancient Rome it was the custom for those standing for election in the Senate to don white togas, probably in an attempt to convince the populace they were as pure as snow.

Another word that only appears during an election is “hustings,” and as we know, candidates are prone to hitting them during campaigns. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines “hustings” as “The political campaigning leading up to an election, e.g., canvassing votes and making speeches.” The word was originally rendered in the singular and literally means “house thing,” but “thing” originally had the sense of “meeting” or “assembly,” and these council meetings would be called by a lord or king and attended by his particular “house.” Over time, “husting” acquired other specific meanings, such as a court of law in the Guildhall in London and a platform on which candidates stood to address the electorate. In the 20th century, “hustings” has come to refer to the general hullabaloo created during an election campaign.

By the way, if you happen to believe that politicians are crooks, it might be because you somehow intuited that etymologically the word “Tory” is associated with thievery. According to the OED, the original sense of Tory, “In the 17th century, [was] one of the dispossessed Irish, who became outlaws, subsisting by plundering and killing the English settlers and soldiers.” Lest you find this anti-Irish, you can take small comfort from knowing that the OED points out that within a decade the word’s banditry label was extended to other races, such as Scottish Highlanders.

It quickly became a term to refer to any Irish Papist and by the middle of the 17th century, the word was often used by British commentators as a synonym for “bandit.” Through a process of major political flip-flopping over the years, this term originally referring to brigands came to refer to those who vigorously supported the crown.

Now that you’re lexically prepared, don’t neglect to follow the dropping of the writ and vote for the candidate in your riding by dropping the ball for the party who might be Tory, but hopefully doesn’t harbour bandits.

Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

If you must know, lexicographically speaking, the egg came first

April, 2011

Howard Richler

As we approach Easter, it is as good a time as any to ponder what came first: the chicken or the egg?

For ancient philosophers, this question evoked the basic puzzle about the origins of the cosmos and humans. Aristotle said, “If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother—which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg.”

To which I say, “That’s your opinion, Ari.”

What is fact rather than opinion is the lexicographic answer to the age-old enigma. Egg comes before chicken. Now pedants might argue that because chicken starts with “c”and “egg” with “e,” ergo chicken precedes egg in a dictionary, ergo I am lexicographically incorrect. I, however, am referring to the dates the respective words entered our language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “egg” is first recorded between 805 and 831 and was originally spelled aeg, and had several plural forms including eyren, eyron and ayren. Over the next number of centuries, it was spelled in many different ways, including ey, ay and most commonly ei. The spelling “egg” was imported from Scandinavia in the 14th century and for about a century ei and “egg” competed for supremacy. In 1490, William Caxton wrote, “What shoulde a man in these dayes now wryte ‘egges’ or ‘eyren’, certaynly it is hard to playse every man.”

The word chicken, on the other hand, doesn’t appear until the year 930 and its first recorded citation is in the Lindisfarne Gospels in the form of the word cicceno. Many similar forms of chicken are found in the Germanic languages, such as kuiken from Dutch and kylling from Danish and Norwegian.

It is generally believed that all these variations come from an ancient word keuk, which may have given rise to the word “cock.” If this is so, etymologist John Ayto in Dictionary of Word Origins informs us that “chicken amounts etymologically to a little cock.” The word cock was the original word for the domestic fowl and it first surfaces in 897.

In 950, the term “hen” surfaces to refer to the female of the species and “cock” becomes restricted to males. “Chicken” originally referred to the young of the domestic fowl and it only became the definitive word for domestic fowl of any age in the early 19th century.

I will take this opportunity to answer two other “what came first” riddles, namely orange the fruit vs. orange the colour, and ass the animal vs. ass the buttocks. The fruit beats out the colour by three centuries as the fruit “orange” is first recorded in English at the beginning of the 14th century, whereas the colour only surfaces early in the 17th century. The Sanskrit word naranga, “orange tree,” eventually morphed into the Old French orenge, which then came into English as “orange.” In the Middle Ages, the Seville orange was brought by the Arabs (called naranj in Arabic) to Sicily from where it was introduced to the rest of Europe.

In the case of the two senses of “ass,” the answer as to precedence is more complicated. “Ass” the animal is first recorded in the year 1000, deriving from the Old English assa, which has no known cognate in any other language.

Seeing that the term “ass” as derriere only emerged in the 19th century, “ass” the animal clearly precedes “ass” the posterior. But this latter sense is really a morphed form of “arse,” which came into the language along with the “ass” in the year 1000. So “ass” became “donkey” and “arse” became “ass.” Why? In many languages the letter “r” stops being pronounced when it precedes the letter “s.” This occurred in many places in England as well as parts of New England and the southern U.S. Thus, “horse” could be pronounced as “hoss” and “arse” as “ass.”

It just would not do for “lass” to rhyme with the new pronunciation of “arse” and by 1770 “decent folk” started to replace “ass” with “donkey ” in their everyday speech. By 1840, the use of “ass” to refer to the animal was restricted mostly to scriptural usage.

In any case, please remember to put your eggs in the same basket before you count your chickens.

Howard Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

Irish bulls might be pregnant with truths

Howard Richler

March, 2011

Not everyone loves a parade, so on St. Patrick’s Day we pay homage to the Irish without parading, you can indulge in Irish bulls.

An Irish bull refers to a statement that defies logic or syntax in some manner yet manages to be communicative. The word “Irish” was not always attached to utterances with apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes, but by the time Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth wrote her Essay on Irish Bulls in 1802, the practice of declaring the bulls Irish was well established. One assumes the Irish were targeted with prefixing bull because of their penchant to use colourful metaphors. The meaning of “bull” here is a “self-contradictory proposition,” and the word may derive from the Old French boule or bole that referred to “deceit” or “fraud.”

The Oxford Companion to the English Language provides the following classic example of the genre: “Childishness is hereditary in their family.”

Alternate names for this phenomenon are “Goldwynism” and “Berraism” because of the penchant of movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn and former baseball player Yogi Berra for this type of declaration. Goldwyn “allegedly” made these statements: A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

Anyone who would go to a psychoanalyst should have his head examined.

If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man alive.

A hospital is no place to be sick.

I can give you a definite perhaps.

We’re overpaying him, but he’s worth it.

Don’t talk to me while I’m interrupting.

The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying.

If you fall and break your legs, don’t come running to me.

I never put on a pair of shoes until I’ve worn them five years.

It isn’t an optical illusion. It just looks like one. Our comedies are not to be laughed at.

Berra learned his métier under New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel, whose observations included such comments as: “A lot of people my age are dead at the present time,” and “Good hitting always stops good pitching and vice-versa.”

Berra is credited with the following:

Referring to a N.Y. nightclub: Nobody goes there any more; it’s too crowded.

Sometimes you can observe a lot by watching. Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.

99% of the game is half mental.

When you get to a fork in the road, take it.

It’s like déjà vu all over again.

It ain’t over till it’s over.

Many people think that Berra would have never said the word déjà vu, as it wasn’t the kind of language he would employ. But Yogi himself claims he said this in reference to regular home-run hitters Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle.

Although Irish bulls are structured grammatically to appear devoid of logic, their effect on many listeners is to suggest an oxymoronic truth, such as “thundering silence.” This is why John Pentland Mahaffy, the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, observed a century ago that “an Irish bull is always pregnant.” Enjoy St Pattie’s Day.

Why lovers really are bird-brained

“On wings of love and fly to me my turtle dove.” “As clear and pure as a turtle dove, and that is what fills me with love.”

I espied these two saccharine messages recently while perusing Valentine’s Day cards and had the humdrum epiphany that the turtle dove is the quintessential symbol for Valentine’s Day.

(Do not confuse the turtle dove with the reptilian turtle. The bird’s name in Old English was turtur, an onomatopoeic rendering of the bird’s coo.) Not only does “turtle dove” conveniently rhyme with “love,” but the turtle dove is also said to be a very solicitous partner that constantly dotes on its mate. This sense is reflected in the following passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Take her for me ... Jove, a cool ruttime send them. Yea, turtledove her.”

The turtle dove is but one example of the “animalistic” nature of romance.

Lovers are referred to in such other beastly ways as “bunny,” “kitten,” “puppy,” “sparrow,” “sparling,” “lambkin,” “tiger” and “stallion,” and are even likened to potentially disease-infested rodents, such as mice and squirrels.

The metaphorical use of animals to refer to lovers is a time-honoured practice. In his book The Lover’s Tongue, Mark Morton relates that the period from the 15th to the 18th century represented the apogee for the metaphorical comparison of one’s beloved with livestock: “People interacted with animals not just in their McNugget or Quarter-Pounder incarnations, but as fellow creatures, sharing the same plot of farmland, if not the same house.”

For example, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the character Pistol exclaims: “Good bawcock, bate thy rage, use lenitie, sweet chuck!”

“Bawcock” is a corruption of the French beau coq, which means “beautiful cock” or more euphemistically “fine rooster”; “chuck” here is a variation of “chick.”

In the Scottish poet William Dunbar’s 16th-century verse In Secreit Place This Hyndir Nycht, a woman in the poem addresses her lover thus: “My belly huddrun, my swete hurle bawsy,” which translates as: “My big lummox, my sweet unweaned calf.”

I may never ever again be able to eat a steak without blushing. Perhaps it would also be wise to avoid employing the term of endearment piggsneye, (especially if your beloved is kosher), used by Chaucer in The Miller’s Tale in 1388. The OED defines it as “one specially cherished; a darling, pet; commonly used as an endearing form of address.”

It is a combined form of “pig’s-eye” and the OED relates that it “originated in children’s talk and the fond prattle of nurses.” Its last recorded usage dates back to 1941 in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters: “My dear, my very dear Wormwood, my poppet, my pigsnie.”

Of course, terms of endearment can transcend comparing your beloved with an animal. You can also employ such nonsense rhymes as “honey bunny,” “lovey dovey” and “tootsie wootsie.” If you find these terms annoying, take solace that many others of this ilk are now archaic.

In All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare refers to a husband’s “kicky-wicky,” which transfers from its literal sense as a gray mare to a wife. Other rhyming terms that have similarly vanished are “gol-pol” (a woman with blonde hair), “crowdie-mowdie” (oatmeal and water eaten uncooked) and the nonsensical duo of “slawsie gawsie” and “tyrlie myrlie.”

Equally grating are the variety of “–ums” words used as forms of endearment. These seem to have originated as terms for children (or cats) but were soon adopted by babbling, inarticulate lovers. Here we have the quartet of “diddums,” “pussums,” “pookums” and “snookums.”

And if you choose to call your beloved by some silly or animalistic name this Valentine’s Day, please ignore everything I’ve written above. Howard Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

There’s no great Xmas conspiracy

Howard Richler

December, 2010

Some years ago I read an article in which the writer railed against “the Xmas vulgarization and the creeping secularization it represented.” This exercised writer also believed that Xmas was a commercial conspiracy to expel “Christ” from Christmas.

Not so. Actually, Xmas is a relic of ancient Greek, in which “X” is the first letter of Xristos. By 1100, the word Christianity had been rendered as “Xianity.” Xmas is first recorded in 1551 and might have been popularized by penny-pinching engravers for whom the five fewer letters lowered costs.

Also, many people were under the false impression that the “X” represented the cross of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland. But whereas early Christians had understood that the term merely was Greek for “Christ’s mass,” later Christians, unfamiliar with the Greek reference, mistook the X as a sign of disrespect and an attempt by the ungodly to rid Christmas of its core meaning.

While Xmas might not be taking Christ out of Christmas, one of the theories about the origin of mistletoe definitely takes the romance out of kissing under this shrub. According to some authorities, “mistletoe” derives from the Old English word mistiltan; tan meaning “twig” and mistil meaning “dung.” It seems that in days of yore, people believed mistletoe shoots sprang from bird droppings.

Two centuries before Christ, the Druids used mistletoe to celebrate the coming of winter. It was also believed that this plant had special healing powers. In 1866, in Treasure of Botany, John Lindley and Thomas Moore wrote that “mistletoe … had such repute for helping in the diseases incidental to infirmity and old age that it was called Lignum Sanctae Crucis, “wood of the Holy Cross.”

It was believed that mistletoe was a cure-all for everything from hoof and mouth disease to syphilis and that it rendered women barren and oxen fertile. Kissing under the mistletoe is likewise a pre-Christian ritual. In his book Word Play, Robertson Cochrane relates: “During the pagan yuletide, various liberties were permitted people who … contrived to be situated under a sprig hung from the ceiling. … After every hanky or panky a berry was plucked, and when they were all gone, that was the buss terminal.”

The early church banned the use of mistletoe in Christmas celebrations because of its pagan origins and suggested replacing the heathen shrub with holly.

More perplexing, however, is the origin of a beverage you might drink while canoodling under the mistletoe. I refer, of course, to eggnog and specifically to its second syllable. By the late 17th century, the word nog was used in eastern England to refer to strong beer. One theory claims that nog was a shortening of noggin, referring to a small mug or a small drink of spirits; another possibility has the word coming from the Scottish term nugg or nugged ale, which referred to ale warmed with a hot poker. One folk etymology has the term being a shortening of “egg and grog.” Although this theory sounds eminently reasonable, there is not a shred of evidence to support it.

Despite the lively images suggested by the term Boxing Day, the term has nothing to do with the pugilistic urge to punch out some obnoxious relative after Christmas; nor does the holiday have anything to do with disposing of the mountain of cardboard boxes by recycling them or returning them to a store. Instead,the OED explains that it is “observed as a holiday on which post-men, errand-boys, and servants of various kinds expect to receive a Christmas-box.” Boxing Day served to entrench Britain’s rigid class system. Whereas gifts among equals were exchanged on or before Christmas Day, beneficence to those lower on society’s totem pole occurred only after Christmas.

This all goes to show that we have made some social progress in the last 200 years as those workers lucky enough to receive a Christmas bonus generally receive it before the holiday.

Howard Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

Cultural epithets inspired by traditional food and drink

Howard Richler

November, 2010

pepsi noun (pl -sis) Cdn informal derogatory, a French Canadian (from the perceived Québécois preference for Pepsi-Cola). — Canadian Oxford Dictionary

iReferring to an ethnic group according to a real or supposed preference for some type of food is a time-honoured epithet, which hardly any ethnic group has escaped.

Hence, a German is a “Kraut,” an Italian is a “spaghetti bender,” a Jew is a “bagel dog,” a black person is a “watermelon,” an East Indian is a “fig gobbler,” a Queenslander is a “banana bender,” a Mexican is a “beaner,” a Frenchman is a “frog” and a Québécois is a “pea soup.” The French from France refer to people from England as “les rosbifs” notwithstanding that “roast beef” was a term English adopted from French.

Growing up in Montreal, I first heard “pepsi” as a derogatory term for a French-Canadian sometime in the late 1950s. In case you believe it was revolutionary in the art of derogation to label members of a group according to a beverage instead of a food preference, it is not. The term “Limey” to refer to Brits comes from the policy in the British navy to enforce the consumption of lime juice by sailors to prevent scurvy.

As the Canadian Oxford Dictionary points out, the epithet “pepsi” derives from the belief (held by Quebec anglos) that Québécois swilled Pepsi because they couldn’t afford the marginally more expensive Coke. While Pepsi’s early marketing did promote itself as the more economical choice – “Twice as much for a nickel too, Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you,” impecunious Québécois of that era were probably imbibing Kik Cola, which was the cheapest cola available during the ’50s and ’60s.

In any case, the designation “pepsi” became the epithet of choice among Montreal anglos to describe French-Canadians. Whereas English Canadians outside Quebec may have referred to one who spoke French as “pea soup” or “frog,” “pepsi” (and sometimes “gorf” – frog backwards), was another moniker to disparage the ethnic majority who tended to live east of St. Lawrence (anglophones of yore didn’t refer to it as St. Laurent). One has to remember that these were the days when the two solitudes did not interact a hell of a lot. Sometimes anglos called French Canadians “pepsi Mae Wests” – Mae West was the brand name of a locally made white cake with a cream filling that was covered in dark chocolate, that was also supposedly popular among French Canadians.

The Québécois couldn’t win with us. A sophomoric joke that made the rounds explained that French Canadians were called “pepsis” because a bottle of Pepsi had nothing from the neck up. The fact that this was standard for any soft drink didn’t seem to register with the joke-tellers. In the early ’70s, the term “pepsi” became more widely known both by francophones and anglos living outside of Quebec, and the term seemed to morph among the Montreal anglo cognoscenti into “pepper,” possibly due to the increasing popularity of the soft drink Dr. Pepper.

Sometime in the 1980s, I started to hear French Canadians say things like, “Il est un vrai pepsi.” Being a discerning bloke I sensed that this designation was being used to impugn the aesthetic sensibility of some yobo from a place like Saint-Louis-du-Ha!-Ha! But since Pepsi Cola has been using popular author and humourist Claude Meunier as their Quebec spokesperson since the 1990s, I wouldn’t be surprised if the expression vrai pepsi evolves into a half-teasing, half-cherished designation. That Meunier’s most enduring character from these ads is a zonked hockey player highlights the fact that the company’s success ­– Pepsi is said to outsell Coke two to one in Quebec – comes from promoting the idea of being able to laugh at yourself, of taking pride in yourself as a culture. Just as Québécois now embrace Pepsi as their brand, maybe they now can embrace “pepsi” as their slang.

Howard Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

Palindromes will have you coming and going

Howard Richler

October, 2010

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a palindrome as: “A word or a sequence of words that reads, letter for letter, the same backwards as forwards.”

Examples of palindromes are the words “level,” “deified” and “racecar” and the sentences “Madame, I’m Adam,” and “Was it a rat I saw?”

The word palindrome derives from the Greek palindromos, which translates as “running back again.” It should not be confused with hippodrome or a velodrome, which are arenas where horses and bicycles are, hopefully, running only forward. Sotades, a Thracian iconoclast, is generally credited with inventing palindromic sentences. This accounts for the alternate name for palindromes, Sotadics.

Sotades, however, burst one balloon too many. He made the mistake of satirizing the Egyptian king Ptolemy II in one of his palindromes. The humourless king didn’t appreciate Sotades’s wit and had him stuffed inside a lead chest and thrown in the sea.

The majority of palindromes seem to be written in Latin and English, but their use is not unknown to other languages. The palindromist Alastair Reid, in his book Passwords written in 1959, quotes palindromes in French ¬– Eh, ça va, la vache? – and Spanish – Dabale arroz a la zorra el abad – which my limited Spanish tells me has something to do with rice, a prostitute and an abbot.

John Taylor is credited with devising the first English palindrome. In his Nipping or Snipping of Abuses written in 1614, he confesses palindromically: “Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel.” “Dwel” is an old spelling of “dwell” and the use of an ampersand is not totally kosher. Symmetry can be returned to the universe if we rewrite it like this: “Evil I did dwell; lewd did I live.”

One of the best known English palindromes is attributed to an enisled anglophile Napoleon, who is purported to have intoned: “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”

Perhaps inspired by the immortality Napoleon attained by his palindromic lament, 20th-century politicians and leaders have had a penchant for palindromic ejaculations. Curiously, all these utterances are in English.

Here is a top 10 sampling:

A man, a plan, a canal – Panama. (Woodrow Wilson dedicates the opening of the Panama Canal to its chief engineer, George Washington Goethals; 1914.)

Jar a tonga; nag not a raj. (Winston Churchill admonishes Mahatma Gandhi; 1942.)

Are we not drawn onwards, we Jews, drawn onward to new era? (Attributed to David Ben-Gurion;1948.)

Can I attain a C? (George Bush soliloquizes in his quest for mediocrity while attending Yale University; 1967.)

Egad! A Red loses older adage. (Ronald Reagan admits that Gorby seems to be a swell type of guy; 1988.)

Drat! Saddam a mad dastard. (The emir of Kuwait expresses his disdain for Saddam Hussein; 1990.)

No! Rome, moron. (Sylvio Berlusconi chastises his travel agent for booking him to Nome, Alaska; 1999.)

No in uneven union! (In a speech to the Monarchist League of Canada, Jacques Parizeau declares that he will no longer tolerate a second-class status for Quebec;1995.)

Sex at noon taxes. (Attributed to Bill Clinton declining a midday service call from Monica; 1998.)

Now, I won. (George Bush is relieved after the Supreme Court rules that he has won Florida’s 25 electoral votes and will thus become the 43rd president of the United States; 2000.

Howard Richler's latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

There must be 500 ways for governments to say “murder”

Howard Richler

September, 2010

Thanks to the movies, we’ve become used to the quintessential gangland euphemism for murder. ie., “whack.”

Goodfellas featured this line: “Jimmy had never asked me to whack somebody before – but now he’s asking me to go down to Florida and do a hit with Anthony?” and Donny Brasco gave us: “The army is some guy you don’t know telling you to go whack some other guy you don’t know.”

Truth be known, the world of politics is far more prolific and creative than the mob in its use of euphemisms for murder.

The Nazis were masters of the evil semantic art. All the following terms were euphemisms for genocide: delousing, evacuation, process, final solution, resettlement and special treatment. I particularly dislike the term “concentration camp” because the intent of the Nazis was not so much to concentrate people in an area as to kill them. Hence, for the purpose of clarity, “death camp” should be used instead.

While the process of euphemistic murder may have been “refined” by the Nazis, it was not created by them. In 19th-century Australia, the word “disperse” was employed to replace the killing of aboriginals.

Centuries earlier, the ancient Romans mastered the art of doublespeak. For example, if an enemy of the state was to be executed in Rome, announcements were posted that said of the accused, “They have lived,” and similarly if the Romans “took notice of a man in the ancestral manner,” it meant the poor sod had been executed.

Some modern terms for murder include “terminate” (with or without extreme prejudice) “pacify, “liquidate,” “wet work,” “eliminate,” “disappear” and “neutralize.”

In 1984, the CIA distributed a manual to Contra leaders in Nicaragua that said: “It is possible to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges, police and state security officials, etc.”

Of course, Hamas doesn’t admit to committing “suicide bombings,” but rather talks up “heroic martyrdom operations against the Zionist enemy.” Actually, many people don’t think “suicide bomber” is strong enough and have replaced it with “homicide bomber” and even “genocide bombers,” because the bomber is, in essence, collateral damage in the attempt to kill as many people as possible.

Still another ghoulish euphemism for state-ordered murder is “bush clearing.” This term was employed by the Hutu majority in Rwanda as a euphemism for the slaughter of more than 800,000 Tutsis in 1994.

Probably one of the best-known euphemisms for state-sanctioned murder emerged from the Balkans in the early ’90s. I speak of course, of “ethnic cleansing.” Ironically, it originally didn’t refer to murder.

It was first used in 1981 to refer to the establishment of ethnically “clean” territories in Kosovo by the Albanian majority. It related then to such administrative and non-violent matters as quotas for the Serbian minority.

Today’s sense of ethnic cleansing arose in 1992 in the war in Bosnia. Serbian commanders referred to the operation as cisjenje prostora, “the cleansing of the territory” and the term was used to refer to the taking control of a conquered territory in the final phase of combat. It appears that ethnic cleansing is a time-honoured practice.

The Assyrians in two periods in the 9th century BC and 7th century BC forcibly resettled 4.5 million people.

Writing in 1946 when the full account of Nazi atrocities was unfolding, George Orwell stated in his essay Politics and the English Language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. ... Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Unfortunately, the wind still seems solid.