Category Archives: word tasting notes

culex

Posted on January 12, 2017 | Leave a comment

Look at this cute word. It’s cool – it’s extra cool! It has an excellent shape, rounded at one end and cross-tailed at the other, and winged in the middle with the ascending l. It could be the name of a company. Or it could be some other lexical Lucullan: a relative of ilex, perhaps, or some other lex thing, with a bit of cul in the tail? Is it a cue being called right on 60 (LX)?

No, it’s gnat.

Worse than that, in fact. It’s gnasty. It’s one of the most obnoxious pests on the planet, a vector for viruses and bacteria and parasites.

It’s a mosquito.

Not just any kind of mosquito, though. There are several subfamilies of the family Culicidae, which encompasses all the mosquitos and their ilk. Culex is just one genus. But it happens to be one of the most common (it has more than 1000 species), and it’s the one after which the family Culicidae and subfamily Culicinae were named. It’s known to carry a number of diseases, including West Nile virus and possibly Zika virus.

But not malaria. Malaria is carried by anopheles mosquitoes, which look a little different if you have the mischance of inspecting them up close. They also carry a few other diseases. You’ve probably heard of the anopheles mosquito. Its name comes from Greek for ‘useless’, which is pretty on-the-spot.

You may not have heard of the culex mosquito by that name. People just call them mosquitoes – when they call them anything repeatable. Well, culex is the Latin word for ‘gnat’. Linnaeus pressed it into service for this genus. It seems a bit of a shame – such a word could have a much cooler, sexier use. It’s used as the name of a character in a Super Mario role-playing game, so that’s something. But in the coolness department it doesn’t come close to Skrillex.

Unless it bites him.

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munch

Posted on January 9, 2017 | 2 comments

I’m not a peever. There are some usages I’m not too keen on, but I usually don’t dwell on them, because there’s no accounting for taste. There are a couple of words, though, that get some journalistic go-ats exceeding what I can swallow – the sense stretched just too far for me. I am left with hands on face, jaw agape, a bit like a person in a rather famous painting.

Not to say I’m screaming like the figure in Edvard Munch’s famous work is. But just as the figure is surrounded by much thick swirling colour, I’m a bit overcome by rather bold strokes in the word-painting. And some rather overused terms too.

I’ve occasionally joked about making a parody of newspaper food writing; I’d call it Munching Thick Crusty Slabs. But at least in that sentence munching is being used for something that involves an audible “munch” sound, or anyway a very pronounced movement of the jaws. Which are classic components of the meaning of munch, which has been with us, in its imitative formation, since the 1400s.

We know from Chaucer and others around the time that one may munch bread, and from Shakespeare that a donkey may munch dry oats and a person may munch chestnuts. We also know, though, from Thomas Dekker in 1631 that one may munch up cheese, and from Joanne Baillie in 1798 that one may munch up plum-cake, but note that those are both munch up – add the up and it seems to connote ‘gobble’. We also know from Baroness Orczy in her 1905 Scarlet Pimpernel that one may munch grapes. But they do make some sound, do they not?

Perhaps I am being too particular. But I still remember reading a review of some brunch places in a Toronto newspaper and seeing a reference to one patron “munching on eggs,” and thinking, “Goodness, how over-fried those eggs must have been – or did they not remove the shells?” And I can look through articles in The Toronto Star from recent years and see people “munching” on “a charcuterie plate with local cheeses and ethically-sourced cured elk and beef,” “souvlaki, perogies and sangria,” and “sliders” (small burgers, in this case made using meatballs). All of which are soft things.

Well, there it is. Consumption has its risks along with its pleasures. We all munch on the foods and words we choose as we like, and sometimes we are served something that is not quite to our taste. I have opinions about food, too, after all: I like peppers only if they are hot or roasted or both; I like nutmeg only if I can’t actually notice it; I like cilantro only if it is on my wife’s plate and not mine (in exchange I get the “nasty sea insects” she abominates). That doesn’t mean they’re intrinsically bad. I just have my pertinacities, and they are relatively few. I can also get bored of clever things that are overdone – I’m tiring of heavily hopped beers, for instance, and I don’t mind if a fancy meal involves neither smoke nor foam. But on the other hand, I like a good many things that quite a lot of other people can’t abide.

Modern art, for instance. And expressionist art too. Like that bloke Edvard Munch. Poor Edvard, though: he had a rather austere, pietist upbringing, and he lost his mother and one sister to tuberculosis, or, as it was called at the time, consumption – the only kind of consumption he likely had more than enough of. There was also mental illness in the family. As he at one time wrote, “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies – the heritage of consumption and insanity.” It made for outstanding art, but I don’t mind not being him.

So I can hardly complain about a few things I’m not (so to speak) crazy about in the words I consume. And anyway tastes are such tricky things. The name Munch is pronounced like “moonk,” not at all like the nice eating word. I do wonder, if we pronounced our verb munch the same way, whether I would expect different things of its sense. Probably…

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asperity

Posted on January 7, 2017 | 3 comments

It is a season of much asperity.

Yes, there is, as Samuel Johnson wrote in The Rambler, “The nakedness and asperity of the wintry world.” But there is also, as he wrote another time in the same periodical, much “Quickness of resentment and asperity of reply” – if not in our personal daily lives, then certainly in the larger world. (Thanks to the OED for the quotes.) As we traipse through the precipitation, we could aspire to something much more auspicious: prosperity, sincerity, perhaps a party (or parties). Something to leave a better taste in the mouth.

Taste? To me, asperity has a clear taste, and that taste is the taste of Aspirin. Have you every chewed an Aspirin? It is acetylsalycylic acid, and as such is as sour as ascorbic or acetic acid (vitamin C or vinegar), but since Aspirin also contains cornstarch, hypromellose, powdered cellulose, and triacetin, it has a chalky bittersweetness to it as well, and a texture not made for chewing really. So hard to swallow by itself.

And asperity of speech or circumstance is hard to swallow, and is sour and bitter. But I think asperity tastes like Aspirin just because the words sound the same. I could in other conditions have thought of it as poisonous like an asp, or as thick as aspic, or perhaps as poor as the opposite of prosperity. None of which have anything to do with its origin, and their resemblance to its sense is essentially coincidental.

What cool hell has spawned asperity? Like so many other words, it came to us by way of French – Old French asprete, which in modern French is âpreté – from Latin. The Latin is asperitatem, which is taken from the root asper. That may look like a name (indeed, by coincidence it is: Asper is a family name, but not from the Latin), and it may look like it’s related to aspiration, but it’s not. It’s just Latin for ‘rough’. Rough as a rasp.

That’s a good way to think of it. Take up a rasp in your hand and rub it: it is covered in asperities (yes, you can say that: the plural asperities literally names the things that cover a rasp or any rough rugged surface). It has an asperity of feeling. If you rub it against furniture, it makes a sound with asperity. (Here’s Johnson in The Rambler again: “Our language, of which the chief defect is ruggedness and asperity.” Speak for yourself, Samuel.) And when your significant other sees what you have done to the furniture, you will likely experience further asperity. Which is to say, things will be rough between you for a bit.

What can you do about asperity? The world will always have its friction, its roughness, its points. But it will also have its smoothness, and over time roughness will wear more and more to smoothness, even as other things break and become rough. Winter comes and it is cold; the summer comes and it is warmer. And interim we seek such solace as we may find: pastry, parties, art, repast, pay… there’s always something in the mix. And something more to aspire to.

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croon

Posted on January 5, 2017 | 2 comments

The lexis of our language is like a coral reef, full of wonders rich and strange. And, as with coral reefs, one of the threats to its diversity is bleaching.

Coral bleaching is a result of coral shedding algae due to rising sea temperatures. Semantic bleaching is a result of words shedding distinctions of meaning due to overuse, over-broad use, what one might call thesaurusitis: treating all words in a section of Roget’s as fungible. The words are still in use, but they lose much of their distinction of sense, thereby reducing the expressive power of the language. And modern electronic media can amplify this effect.

Expressive power and electronic amplification have much to do with the word of which I sing today, croon. It’s not a new word; it dates back half a millennium in Scotland and northern England, where it has for that long had the sense of a low sound, either (particularly in Scotland) a low, deep, loud, steady sound, or (more broadly) a low murmuring sound or soft quiet singing. It sounds like it should mean what it means. In singing, it’s the opposite of belting. Belting is the kind of singing you do when you have a noisy room and poor (or no) amplification. Once you have a good microphone and good speakers, you can draw the audience in with quiet, smooth singing. You can croon.

Which is what happened in jazz in the late 1920s onward. The first truly famous crooner was Rudy Vallée. His soft voice crept like a lover into millions of living rooms through the radio. Many others followed; the one probably most often thought of as a crooner was Bing Crosby. They all had a gentle, quiet singing style that worked closely with the microphone.

But as one technology giveth, another helpeth take away. Newspapers are written by people who are trained to be allergic to repetition. They seek different words for the same thing to make their prose seem more varied and expressive. We can never forget that a pumpkin is a gourd thanks to them; we are given the idea that every promise, however solemn and formal or not, is a vow; food writers talk of people munching even the softest, smoothest, quietest foods (ice cream? oatmeal?). And every act of singing may be called crooning.

It’s not that the word is always used over-broadly; it has not been utterly bleached. But a quick look through recent New York Times articles finds gospel choirs “crooning” more than once and a jazz singer who “crooned over the trio, belting the 1941 Duke Ellington classic” – yes, crooning and belting as the same act. Even non-singers, we are told, have sometimes “crooned”: soccer fans, en masse in a stadium, “crooned” “We’re not going home”; Donald Trump, at a rally, “crooned” “I love you! I love you!” to his supporters. Every one of these uses is amplified to an unlimited number of eyeballs through the wonder of the world wide web.

As a linguist, I can look at this and just write it down as instances of semantic broadening due to an evident desire for more expressive-sounding vocabulary (with the likely long-term effect of reducing the expressive value it draws on). As an editor and user of the language, however, I would rather resist it, because it ultimately reduces the expressive power. And there can be quite a lot of expressive power in the soft, quiet, focused, and amplified sound of crooning.

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kyle, kylie

Posted on January 3, 2017 | 5 comments

There are some words, like some people and some songs, that you just can’t get out of your head – they keep coming back to you. And sometimes when they come back they mean a different thing each time.

One word like that is kyle. As a noun, it has three different origins and three different meanings. One is ‘sore, ulcer, or boil’, coming from Old Norse kyli ‘boil, abscess’. Another refers to a small iron wedge that holds the head of a hammer (or similar implement) onto the shaft; it’s related to German Keil. The third is ‘narrow channel, strait’; it comes from Gaelic caol (pronounced about like “kale”). If you know someone named Kyle – or if that’s your name – you’ll be relieved to know that the personal name comes from that third sense.

Which is not to say all Kyles are strait-laced. Certainly not all Kylies are. I don’t know about you, but when I see Kylie I immediately come back to Kylie Minogue, the pop star who had a huge hit with her 2001 “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.”

Funny thing about Kylie, though. She’s from Australia. And while I don’t know what her parents had in mind when naming her, there’s another word from Australia we need to come around to: kylie. It’s not very common in current use, but it’s still in the dictionary.

What’s a kylie? It’s another distinctly Australian thing: a boomerang. The word comes from Noongar, one of the indigenous (Aborigine) languages of southwest Australia. So it’s fitting that Kylie has had many happy returns.

Just as a little tangent: her family name Minogue traces back to an Irish Gaelic word meaning ‘monk’. Kylie doesn’t seem very monastic… I guess she came around.

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attacca

Posted on December 30, 2016 | 4 comments

This is a good word for New Year’s. Each year proceeds from the previous, attacca.

If you’re looking at a musical score, and at the start of a movement you see attacca, you know you’re supposed to dive right into that movement without pausing from the previous one.

To attack it.

Except no. No and yes, but no.

To attach to it.

Sure, when the next movement comes along, you have a choice to pause for a moment or just to jump on it and keep going. But while a strong attack on the opening note can make quite a statement, the point is just that it’s attached like a trailer to a truck. It’s concatenated: chained together.

Why the confusion? Because the two English words, attack and attach, connect to the same Italian verb, attaccare. I won’t say the Italian is the direct source, but the English words and the Italian word appear to have the same origin – and both English words translate to attaccare. It reminds us that attach or stick (or tack on, if you like the sound) can be active and aggressive, not always passive. Think of a magnet: bring it close enough to the right kind of thing and it just – attack-attaches to it.

The Italian has a broad ambit of senses: according to Harper Collins, senses include ‘attach’, ‘stick’, ‘hang (up)’, ‘attack’, ‘begin, start’, ‘stick, adhere’, ‘be contagious’, and ‘cling’. Attaccare discorso means ‘start a conversation’, and Con me non attacca! means ‘That won’t work with me!’ That’s quite a lot of meaning sticking to one word. But it all seems to work, because it’s all related.

Years don’t need magnetism or a physical attack to roll around, of course. The line from one to another is arbitrary and instantaneous, and the instant passes without tremor (other than percussive sounds from fireworks and champagne corks). In truth, the time it takes to pass from one year to another is more than a full day: the Line Islands, part of Kiribati, are 14 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, while Howland Island and Baker Island, owned by the US – and farther west than the Line Islands – are 12 hours behind it. That means that when the new year first arrives on the planet, it’s only 10 AM on New Year’s Eve in London, and when it last arrives it’s already noon on New Year’s Day in London. It is possible for something to happen on January 2nd and for people not so far away to learn of it on December 31st of the previous year.

There are also half-hour and even quarter-hour time zones on the planet (for example, when it’s noon in London it’s 5:30 PM in India and 5:45 PM in Nepal), meaning that the new year arrives a total of 39 times. And, because a day lasts 24 hours, it will be New Year’s Day – or New Year’s Eve, or any other day – somewhere on the planet for 50 hours from when it first arrives to when it last departs.

Time may seem to attack. The year 2016 has one heck of a casualty toll among famous people, for instance (and a far greater one among non-famous people). But as attached as we are to our arbitrary divisions of time, a year has no true discrete existence. Yes, the planet orbits the sun in a regular period, but just where we draw the line to start a new period is arbitrary – roughly 10 days after it reaches perihelion, going by the calendar that will start the year 2017 forthwith (other calendars start other years at other times). We go with it because it works with us. Because we are attached to it.

And while we may make resolutions to turn over new leaves each New Year’s, we mostly just turn over new pages in calendars (if even that). We don’t let go of our attachments. Rather, we sing to not letting old acquaintance be forgot. We go right into the next movement, but it is still attached to the one before.

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populism, populist

Posted on December 28, 2016 | 1 comment

Language change is, generally, organic. It usually doesn’t happen by fiat (especially in English); it also doesn’t happen by vote. There may be some influence from “above” by people such as English teachers, but that mostly affects what rules people think they’re breaking when they’re speaking the way they want to speak anyway. You could say that language change – grammar, the meanings and pronunciations of words, and so on – happens by mass popular movement.

Which is not to say that it’s populist. Populism is a political stance that advocates the people – the general populace, hoi polloi – in opposition to a ruling élite. Language change is not the product of a program leading a movement of the populace in opposition to English teachers, editors, and others. There could be such a movement, of course, but de facto language change happens by popular will anyway. We’re all part of it, not just the people at the top. (The situation can at times be different for languages with official deciding bodies, such as in France.)

So, you could reply, if we all decided that the meaning of populism should shift to ‘following the will of the people as with a general tide, without a specific political program’, then that would be the meaning. Well, yes, if that sense shift happened and ultimately overcame opposition. The change would probably take quite a while and not be without some controversy. But it could happen.

But there are shifts that we have every right and reason to resist, no matter how many people use the new sense. We are all streamkeepers of this flowing language. When a word is being used as a euphemism to let something slide that should not, or when its use carries implications that have negative consequences, we should not let these pass unnoticed. If we speak up and point out the problems, we may help these shifts to become unpopular.

So, for instance, for a long time there was a default assumption that people in certain roles were masculine, and so he and him were used. Around the time that such assumptions started to be a bit less tenable, a common line from prescriptivists was that he and him were the natural universal gender-neutral pronouns. (Poor men, having to sacrifice the uniqueness of their pronoun! Ah, such sacrifices must be made.) At long last enough people pointed out that this did, in fact, convey the default assumption of masculinity – words carry resonances and implications whether you say they should or not – and so use of masculine pronouns as a universal has lost general acceptance. (Read more about this in my article on they.)

Which, I suppose, you could say was a populist movement – the neglected masses against the prescriptive authorities – though it was in particular a movement by and on behalf of the more neglected moiety of the populace, to influence the more dominant segment and thereby produce a fairer outcome for all.

But now let’s say that people start using populism to refer to a movement focusing on the desires not of the whole population but on a minority of it who consider the remainder to be of lesser status. Say, for instance, that there is a group we’ll call X in the population, and they feel that the government has been giving too many rights to that larger part of the population that is not X. This group has traditionally been the group that, for all its internal differences, has been ceteris paribus the more-advantaged group, and they’re seeing non-Xes get similar rights. This doesn’t involve the loss of any rights from X – unless you consider it a right to have things that other people you consider inferior can’t have. If some political leader or party rallies members of X against the government just so they can protect their perceived right to have more rights, would you call that populism? Would you accept seeing it called populism? When the movement is for the rights of not all the populace but just a subset of it, and strongly against the rights of others?

This is not a hypothetical question. I’m seeing populist used quite a lot by news media and the commentariat for racist, nativist, frankly sexist and reactionary movements. In countries across Europe and at least one in North America, leaders who advocate or enfranchise not just xenophobia but racism and sexism are being called populists, and the reactionary groups that support them are being described as having populist sentiment.

Which implies that women and non-white people are not part of the populace, or anyway are not relevant parts of it. In spite of being, in sum, the majority. And, for that matter, it also implies that white men are, en masse, in favour of such movements. Which is also not true.

I think we owe ourselves and everyone else a duty to make this use of populist and populism unpopular.

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niveous

Posted on December 25, 2016 | 3 comments

We went on a trip through niveous countrysides and cityscapes. The three pictures above are the views from our three successive hotel rooms on the mornings of our checkouts. The land is covered with snow, smooth and white as Nivea, frothy as Evian, delicate and naïve, ovine in its fluffiness.

In our peregrinations we passed white churches and picnic tables.

We skied niveous riparian plains with veinous trees and red paint.

We walked streets nixed with flakes, past trees spruced with invasive lights.

Envious of our niveous souvenirs? Snow is pretty but problematic. You can march with boots or glide with skis, but if you are consigned to driving from point to point you may be disappointed by the slowness of the snowiness. Beauty may be paralyzing, and if you think snow is baleful, allow me to introduce you sometime to the ice storm, a singularly lethal beauty. Weather is the hand you are dealt, and you play it as you may and must.

Words, too, are dealt to you. You have more of them in your hand than you probably remember, and more ways to play them than you probably think the rules allow.

The word for now is niveous. It means ‘snowy’ but without the Tintin reference but with various other overtones and a vibe at its heart. It comes from Latin, of course: niveus, an adjectiving using the combining form niv- referring to snow. The nominative form of the noun for ‘snow’ in Latin is nix. Which may not sound very soft (except inasmuch as it reminds us of Stevie) but reminds us of the obliterating effect of a snowfall, nixing the picture. Cecidit nix: snow has fallen, snow has snowed, neige a neigé. And all is as gnomic as a sphinx, buffered with billions of flakes, each unique and evanescent. A presence that makes an absence, but a textured, soft one.

For the time being. Until it breaks and melts and mixes with dirt. Well, never mind. There will always be more.

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carousel, carousal

Posted on December 19, 2016 | 3 comments

The life of leisure and revelry is a merry go-round. Do not get on your high horse and look down on us in our carousal; we are on horses, high, and looking down on you from our carousel. Drink life to the bottom, drain the glass, get in a lather, rinse, and repeat, go back, Jack, and do it again. It’s like Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde, where A sleeps with B sleeps with… all the way to J, who sleeps with A, through all the levels of turn-of-the-century Viennese society, a carousel, a ring-around-the-Rogers. Except with carousal we’re just talking about consumption of food and beverage, exchange of convivial fluids, not vital fluids.

What is the difference between a carousal and a carousel? One is a round-and-round ride that will leave you dizzy, perhaps a bit sick, and feeling like a kid again, and the other one is a fairground attraction involving fake horses. One has an a and one has an e. And then there’s that pronunciation, which is messed up as all-get-out: the stress is on “rouse” in carousal, though you may well have trouble being roused after one, and on “care” in carousel, though it is a carefree ride. Well, OK, that’s if you’re an Anglophone North American. If you’re a Brit, according to Oxford, you are expected to say it /karuːˈzɛl/, which is as close as an Anglo can come to the French pronunciation.

Oh, yes. That’s another thing. The word that involves a fairground ride with fake horses comes to us from French, and to French from Italian, and traces back to horseback tournaments of knights. The word that involves drinking a lot comes to us from German, and traces back to… drinking a lot. Going all out, in fact.

All out? Gar aus! Different accounts link it to drinking all the beer from a glass or to drinking until the innkeeper says “Everybody out!” But it often has the implication of a pub crawl or multiple-itinerary bender, perhaps under the influence of cruise. Anyway, gar aus is what gave us (via multiple different spellings) our modern carouse, and somewhere along the way we started voicing the s and devoicing the g (as may happen when one has had a few). So now its noun form, carousal, rhymes with arousal, which seems usable enough, as the two have an inevitable yin-yang relationship: carousal can lead to, and defeat, arousal; and, on the other hand, the morning after you have caroused, you must perforce be aroused, so you can do it again… maybe not that day, though.

And carousel? From French carrousel, from Italian carosello or garosello (and there’s that g/c alternation come round again), which named a tournament with jousting or riding in formation or feats on horseback. The ultimate origin is much disputed. Could come from a word for ‘quarrelsome’, or a word for ‘chariot’, or a word for a Neapolitan ball game that traces ultimately to a word for ‘shaved head’. I suggest debating it on your next carousal. You’ll go round and round and won’t get anywhere in the end, but it will be fun. Even if it’ll probably leave you with a headache.

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naughty

Posted on December 17, 2016 | 1 comment

Naughty or…?

Or nice, of course. Santa’s going to find out who’s naughty and who’s nice. We all know that thanks to a song written in 1934 by John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie. It was a huge hit when it was sung on Eddie Cantor’s radio show – within a day it had orders for 30,000 records and 100,000 copies of the sheet music. (Yes, that’s right. Think about that for a moment.) Nice, eh?

Nice, in case you didn’t know, comes ultimately from Latin nescius, meaning ‘ignorant, unknowing’, and has taken an interesting path since then to mean just about any quality you want it to mean – or nothing at all. Nice, eh?

Not nice. Naughty. Not just because such etymological wantonness may seem naughty, and not just because both nice and naughty have ‘wanton’ as one of their dictionary definitions (and yeah, we know what that Santa dude is really after), but because naughty comes from nothing.

Well, no, it doesn’t come from nothing. It comes from one thing that comes from not one thing but two things, and each of those things is two things. But it does come from ‘nothing’. That is, it comes from naught, meaning ‘nothing’, and that comes from both ne aught and na wight, the former of which means ‘not anything’ and the latter ‘no being’ (or ‘no person or thing’). Directly related, in fact intertwined and not really possible to separate, is nought ‘zero, zilch, nil, nada, nothing, bupkes, jack squat’.

So the oldest recorded sense of naughty, from circa 1400, is ‘having nothing’. Ooo – poverty bad. Well, being poor is often seen as a moral failing, isn’t it? At least by those people who worship a golden (or at least orange-ish) idol, seen as virtuous by dint of material wealth – and who claim to follow the teachings of a person who said “Blessed are the poor” but who grab money and tell the poor their poverty is their own fault. Well, “they have had their reward,” as the guy they claim to worship (not the one they really do worship) said.

But, even though having stuff is seen as a blessing and not having it as a curse, naughty didn’t get the meaning ‘bad’ because poverty is seen as a moral failing. Or at least it doesn’t appear that that’s the reason. Rather, it’s because bringing others to nothingness, to deprivation, especially moral deprivation and depravity, is seen as wicked. And the earliest ‘wicked’ senses of the word make it clear that it was not seen as lack of material goods: it was first used to mean ‘morally bad, wicked’. Which meant wayward, disobedient – and also wanton, particularly in the sexual sense.

We still believe by default that there’s something morally wrong with enjoying yourself – and something enjoyable about being morally wrong. Advertising makes that clear: if you see the word sinfully it’s probably followed by delicious or something similar, and decadent is now a lexeme kept almost exclusively for chocolate desserts. Guilt is something you are supposed to feel after consuming too many calories, at least in the view of those who sell “diet” food. Enjoy yourself and hate yourself; buy to be bad and buy to be good. A nice control cycle we have going, eh? Or should I say I naughty one.

We don’t use naughty in full severity anymore, though. Nowadays it is reserved almost entirely for (a) the peccadillos of children (and even those are winked at) and (b) sexual inclinations and activities, which of course are subject to the same control cycle as other primal pleasures, only raised to a higher exponent. This is not something that developed in the 82 years since that Santa Claus song came out, either. A popular song of 1871 was “It’s Naughty but It’s Nice.” The phrase naughty but nice has been in use as such since not long after that.

So why Christmas? I mean, yes, Santa as the jovial, agreeable version of an enforcer, a Big Brother who has you caged in a panopticon (e.g., modern England or any other surveillance state, including your computer, don’t kid yourself), dealing out rewards and punishments. But consider: What do people like about Christmas? Among other things, getting stuff. What are we always told? It’s better to give than to receive. How do you reconcile that? Easy: We organize an occasion where I give to you and you give to me. So we get that thing that is naughty – avarice, cupidity – while at the same time being nice, i.e., virtuous (but not ignorant; disingenuous, rather). A nice bit of subterfuge. Which allows us to merge an old pagan festival of consumption in the face of impending winter with a celebration of the birth of someone who proclaimed “Blessed are the poor” and enjoined us to give rather than take.

Oh, by the way, do you like the photo at the top? It’s from the Christmas Market at the Distillery District in Toronto, part of the seasonal Saturnalia. It’s above the outdoor bar. Nice, eh?

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