Sesquiotica

Napoleon’s in the back, sweet Eugenie’s in the front
Sweating on the beach in the hot, hot sun
Suddenly Napoleon goes and splashes in the water
Folks all look around and say, “Do you think I oughter?”
Eddy calls up Oxford, says “Come for your appointment,
Meet me on the beach, you better bring the ointment”
How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

Soldiers study in casinos, they’re bathing in the salt
Villa Belza’s run down but it’s nobody’s fault
Virgin’s on the rock, Basquing in the sun
Sharks in the museum but the seals have the fun
When The Sun Also Rises it shines upon the turf
But the director’s friend comes and shows us how to surf
This may seem incoherent, shading into weird
Want to know the sense? Hey, grow a beard
How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

If you were listening to popular music in the mid-’90s – or, apparently, more recently in some circles – you will know instantly what song that’s riffing on: “How Bizarre” by the New Zealand group OMC. And if you know that song, you know it lacks the coherent lucidity of, say, “Down Under” by Men at Work. But you can make sense of the lyrics above… if you know about Biarritz.

Biarritz? Is that a bizarre place? Not exactly. It’s a seaside resort in France, in the Basque region near the Spanish border. But it has enough quirky things that a person can fill out some odd lyrics: 

• After the French revolution, sea bathing went from a thing one didn’t do to a thing that fashionable people did do, and Napoleon himself did it at Biarritz.
• Empress Eugènie, the wife of Napoleon’s nephew Napoleon III, built a palace in Biarritz that is now a hotel.
• Biarritz was also a popular spot with British royalty, and Edward VII caused a minor stir when he had the Earl of Oxford (H.H. Asquith) come to Biarritz to receive his royal appointment as prime minister.
• There are casinos in Biarritz, though they were converted for a time after World War II to an American G.I. University.
• There were salt baths – in water ten times as salty as the ocean – though they’ve been closed for 70 years now.
• Among the sights in Biarritz are a statue of the Virgin Mary on a rock reachable by a bridge; the Villa Belza, a neo-medieval villa built in the 1890s that for a time was in bad condition but is now spruced up into apartments; and the Museum of the Sea, which has aquariums with sharks and seals.
• When Peter Viertel was in town to direct the movie of The Sun Also Rises, a friend of his came from California and introduced surfing to Europe, and Biarritz is now a major surfing destination.
• And the name Biarritz is originally from Basque – as is the word bizar, which means ‘beard’ and is not related to Biarritz (similarity notwithstanding) but likely is the origin of the word bizarre.

That took a long time to get not very far, didn’t it. And ended up raising even more questions. Well, at least one question: How do you get from ‘beard’ to ‘weird’?

It’s not that beardos were weirdos. The sense seems to have taken a quirkier route. The Basque word bizar appears to have been the origin of Spanish bizarro, which means ‘handsome, gallant, brave, noble’ (like Zorro, perhaps?). And somehow it came from that into French bizarre, which means pretty much the same as English bizarre – English got the word from French, so at least that’s no surprise. 

Now, the French word may actually have gotten bizarre from the Italian bizzarro, which means now means ‘quirky, weird’ but previously meant ‘quarrelsome’. There are duelling ideas of where bizzarro came from, but the suggestion that it came from Spanish and that ‘gallant, brave’ slid over into ‘quarrelsome’ is at least plausible. And ‘quarrelsome’ can plausibly become ‘incongruous, quirky, nonsensical’, so at the very least we have a possible trail. For that matter, ‘gallant, brave’ can also slide over to ‘extravagant’ or – as brave is sometimes used euphemistically to mean now – ‘extremely inadvisable’. (The alternative suggestion, that the French saw bearded Spanish soldiers and thought they were weird, and used a Basque word for ‘beard’ to mean ‘weird’, is frankly rather bizarre as far as I’m concerned.)

However it got to be what it is, bizarre now is a word for something that is pointedly incongruous. I like the distinction Littré gives between bizarre, fantasque, and extravagant: “S’écarter du goût ordinaire par une singularité non convenable, c’est être bizarre ; s’en écarter par une fantaisie qui tout à coup change d’idée, c’est être fantasque ; s’en écarter d’une manière contraire au bon sens, c’est être extravagant” (To depart from ordinary taste by an inappropriate peculiarity is to be bizarre; to depart by a fantasy that suddenly changes one’s mind is to be fanciful; to depart in a manner contrary to good sense is to be extravagant). So, for instance, if bathing in the sea was simply not considered rational behaviour, doing so might be bizarre. Not that anyone would use that word to describe the emperor.

Merriam-Webster gives a similar kind of distinction between fantastic, bizarre, and grotesque, noting that bizarre “applies to the sensationally strange and implies violence of contrast or incongruity of combination” – which could describe soldiers taking classes in a casino, but somehow that’s not quite it. No dictionary I’ve looked at points out that z is a letter that is often used in English to give a sense of the strange or exotic – as it’s uncommon in the language and features largely in imported and confected words – but the word bizarre is at the very least no less exceptional for having it. (It wouldn’t have that effect in French, where z is somewhat more common.)

But how about that song, now? OMC – short for Ōtara Millionaires Club – were from Ōtara, a low-income suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, not a seaside resort for the upper classes in the south of France, so their song is anyway not Biarritz. And their singer, Pauly Fuemana, wasn’t Basque (he was Niuean and Māori) and didn’t have a beard, but it would have been more bizarre if he was and did, all things considered. But how bizarre is the song? Is it bizarre enough, or is it bizarrely not bizarre (like Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” is ironically full of things that aren’t ironic)? After all, there’s an important distinction to make between bizarre and simply incoherent. Or is the sense of bizarre just getting gradually bleached from time in the hot, hot sun? Well, here, you decide.