pillock

Posted on June 24, 2014 | 2 comments

If you’re not from Britain, this term may not be all that familiar to you. Allow me to quote the synonyms given in Visual Thesaurus: dolt, stupid person, stupid, stupe, pudding head, pudden-head, poor fish, dullard. To these I think I could reasonably add a common term from Canada: dickhead.

I think that’s a viable synonym not just because of the resentfully abusive way in which the word pillock tends to be used – it carries implications of not just dullness but obnoxiousness too – but also because of its literal reference.

Oh, you don’t know what part of the body the pillock is? Would you care to make a guess? The Oxford English Dictionary reckons that it’s probably shortened from pillicock. The pill is Scots and northern English dialect, probably taken from Scandinavian influences (the Danes used to run that part of the country); it refers not to, say, a little blue pill such as Viagra but rather to that part of the body that the little blue pill is meant to affect. The rest of the word pillicock should be sufficiently obvious. As to the aphetic form pillock, I have to wonder whether it may not have been affected by bollock, a word usually seen in the plural (like its referent).

The word seems like what you get when you expect a pillow and get a rock. It has a taste of someone who gets in a mixed-up pickle, someone who brings ill luck. And at the same time the /p/ and /k/ with a liquid and /ɪ/ between have a bit of a taste of prick as well as bilk and a bit of an echo of kill.

Although the word has been in at least some versions of English since the 1500s, it hasn’t been very evident in print until the last third of the 20th century, when it started being used as a term of abuse. I can’t say whether there was one particular work that served as a primary vector for this, but the word evidently caught on like wildfire.

I like this definition of pillock from 1978 in Approach: The naval aviation safety review: “An idiot who, having gotten himself into the wrong lane, then expects everyone else to give way so that he can get to where only he knows he wants to go, with or without use of flashing indicators or consideration for traffic flow.” You can see where, with such images in mind, the word might have proven quite appealing for general use. And might seem a nearly exact synonym for dickhead.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

meatball

Posted on June 22, 2014 | 1 comment

My friend Michelle wondered aloud to me, “Why is the word meatball so funny?”

I’m inclined to think the answer lies in large part in its combination of two words often used in humour, especially rather impolite humour, and sometimes in terms of abuse – meathead is a well-known example of the latter. As well, meat and ball are both basic things, learned early in life, free of any veneer of politeness (except in alternative usages, e.g., society balls, ballrooms, etc., which are etymologically unrelated – but even there the simple basic image and sense lurk in the background, as we see in the comedy shows done to benefit Amnesty International, The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball).

Meat gives an image of a dense, red lump of muscle, or perhaps of an equally dense brown bit of cooked food, not brain food but brawn food. Actually, the word meat originally referred to pretty much any food, and its sense narrowed over the centuries to the main attraction of the meal, that bit of insensate but strangely desirable dead animal that all the other bits attend on (does this sound like your workplace?). It also shows up places such as meathook (slang for hand), meat market (slang for that bar across the street from us, you know who you are), meathead, meat-eater, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, bush meat, red meat…

Ball can be a simple sphere, used for playing games, or it can be a conglomerate of items packed densely and probably messily together, or some formerly flat thing rolled or crumpled in a not-necessarily-tidy approximation of a sphere, or any of a number of things that happen to resemble spheres in some way, I’m sure a few come to mind. Balls are blunt things, projectiles, insensate objects. You’ll see ball in such combos as ball boy, ball handler, ball of wax, ball peen, be on the ball, play ball, keep your eye on the ball, blackball, butterball, cannonball, disco ball, eyeball, highball, pinball, snowball, spitball, the names of several sports, and various expressions referring figuratively to the testes.

So all of that is balled up, complete with seasoning and filler, into meatball. The seasoning includes a few popular culture references, chief among which the 1979 summer camp movie Meatballs, which was the first movie starring Bill Murray, and the popular children’s book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. The flavour also includes the sound: coming in on /m/ with the lips together like a pitcher reader to throw, adding the quick /i/ like a windup, cocking at /t/ and percussively releasing with /b/, and flying through the air and trailing off with /ɑl/. It’s a word just made to be shouted by a sports announcer through a PA – or by a boy on a playground.

Meatballs, the real things, are not (especially not under that name) thought of as highbrow cuisine. Take a bunch of thoroughly ravaged ex-animal and wad it up as you would something undesirable? No, this isn’t fancy cuisine, it’s just cuisine that people practically everywhere love to eat. In world cuisine, there are many kinds of meatballs, with many flavours and sizes, and having many different names in the various languages.

In the US, the dominant image is of the meatballs that one gets with spaghetti: large-ish ones with Italian herbs and spices – probably a jar mix – floating in tomato sauce – probably from a jar or can – and sometimes shoved into long bread in possibly the single most awkward sub sandwich idea ever.

Anyone who lives near an IKEA (including, of course, the entire population of Sweden, along with all the other places that look like Sweden, notably Canada) may be more likely to think of the smaller, differently spiced Swedish variety, often served with a cream sauce and/or lingonberry sauce, and potatoes rather than pasta. (See www.flickr.com/photos/sesquiotic/14340519212/ for a genuine southern Swedish smörgåsbord, already more than half eaten. You will notice that the meatballs were made in greater quantity than anything else.)

Still other people may think first of one of the many variations of kofta/kofteh/etc. eaten in the periphery of the Mediterranean and parts eastward. But it might seem vulgar to call those meatballs. It’s too familiar a word and suggests that this exotic discovery you are eating at the charming restaurant in that strip mall you usually don’t venture near is really something quite homey. Which, of course, for the people for whom it is not exotic, it is.

What meatballs are best? What are the most authentic? What kind should you eat? Is it OK to find meatball funny? An answer to these questions and more is provided by the film Meatballs:

 

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

sequoia

Posted on June 21, 2014 | 3 comments

Name a tree that has all five vowels in it.

Well, I kind of gave that one away, didn’t I? It’s the title of this word tasting note – today’s word to taste. It’s a seven-letter word, and the only two letters in it that aren’t vowel letters are s and q. Seven letters makes it a possible bonus word in Scrabble – but it’s not really all that long a word given that it names a very, very tall tree. (A longer word for a larger tree, also having all five vowel letters, is Indo-European… but of course that’s a language tree, i.e., a family, not an actual physical tree.)

Still, it’s fairly comprehensive: its consonant sounds involve the tip of the tongue [s], back of the tongue [k], blade of the tongue [j] (that’s a “y” sound; I’m using the International Phonetic Alphabet), and lips [w]. And the vowel sounds are one in the front, one in the back, one in the middle.

So did you notice how I just listed four consonant sounds and three vowel sounds? And yet this word has five vowels and two consonants.

No it doesn’t. It has five vowel letters and two consonant letters. The u and i are standing for glide consonants, which are pretty much vowels acting like consonants or consonants that sound like vowels…

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have all five English vowels. Actually, it can’t have all five English vowels, because English has more than five vowels. The six letters that can stand for vowels – don’t forget y – stand for, depending on your dialect, ten to twelve different individual vowel phonemes (monophthongs), plus several two-vowel combos (diphthongs) (some of the monophthongs tend to be said with some movement, making them really diphthongs, but I won’t go into that now). So my opening sentence was not accurate. Always remember: vowels and consonants are sounds, not letters. The letters just represent the sounds. The language exists without its written representation; the written form can have a feedback effect on the spoken language, but it is not primary.

And, in the case of English, it’s rather difficult and not all that transparent. It has some relation to sound, but it’s inconsistent and capricious. If you want to know how it got that way, read “What’s up with English spelling?” The point, anyway, is that while it’s a fun game for those who are good at it, it really fights the learner.

Consider the case of the Cherokee nation in the southern US in the early 1800s. They did not have a written form for their language. But one of the Cherokee, a clever and somewhat driven fellow, decided that it would be very helpful to them to have one. They were trading with white English speakers, so there was an example of a written language – albeit one that the particular Cherokee in question did not speak or read. He tried at first to come up with a written form that would have a different symbol for every word, but this took too long and would require too much memorization, and anyway his wife burned his efforts because they were keeping him from working. So he tried again, this time creating a syllabary, borrowing some forms he had seen in use in English (but with no relation between their English use and the Cherokee use) and inventing a number of others, for a total of 86.

Cherokee syllabics were not systematic like the Korean or Amharic syllabic forms; they were an arbitrary-looking set. But they represented the language quite tidily, and once a Cherokee learned them, he or she was fully literate: there were no booby-traps in the spelling, and they all knew how to speak the language (and no fools had taken it upon themselves to publish works declaring that they were all speaking it incorrectly). So once the Cherokees adopted this syllabary officially – because they could see how useful it was – they had higher literacy rates than the whites in neighbouring communities, who were afflicted with the perverse English orthography.

The Cherokee who invented this syllabary – which you can see at Wikipedia and various other places – was named Sequoyah.

Coincidence? Or is the tree sequoia named after the man Sequoyah? It’s debated. In fact, the Wikipedia article on the tree declares it very likely that Stephan Endlicher, the botanist – and linguist – who named the tree in 1847, did it in honour of Sequoyah, using a Latinized version of the name, and considers alternatives with some thought and detail, while the Wikipedia article on the man Sequoyah declares flatly that “this hypothesis has long been questioned and has now been rejected” – yet another illustration of why you should not take a Wikipedia article as final authority on anything, useful though it may be.

Whatever the case, I think this word sequoia is a good word for talking about language and spelling, and the vagaries and variations available therein. But since I like finding extra layers of meaning and levels of communication in language, I have an inclination to lengthen this word by half, to make it a bit more sesquipedialian – literally ‘foot-and-a-half long’. It has seven letters, so we’ll round up and add four more. Which four? I’ll say s, i, t, and c, and I’ll interleave them in the word, one after se, one after qu, one on either side of i. And what do I get?

Sesquiotica, of course.

 

Thanks to my brother, Reg, who brought up the link between sequoia and Sesquiotica. In case you’re wondering, sesquiotics is actually a pun on semiotics, and Sesquiotica a pun on the international journal of semiotics, Semiotica. In which, incidentally, I once published an article.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

Words that didn’t break at the glue line

Posted on June 20, 2014 | 3 comments

My latest article for TheWeek.com is about words that were put together one way and then broken apart another way. They’re words you know, too…

10 words that are badly broken

 

3 Comments

Posted in The Week

Tagged , , , , , ,

There’s no way to truly split an infinitive

Posted on June 18, 2014 | 4 comments

This article was first published on The Editors’ Weekly

You can’t split an infinitive.

I don’t mean I don’t want you to. I don’t mean it’s not proper to. I mean it’s not possible to. This is for the same reason that I haven’t just broken one off three times, at the ends of the three preceding sentences.

The English infinitive is one word. Not two. The to is not part of it. It’s just the infinitive’s trusty butler, and sometimes the infinitive doesn’t need the butler. When it does need the butler, it doesn’t need it right next to it all the time. And sometimes the butler stands in its place.

It seems rather posh, doesn’t it, for an infinitive to even have a butler? It wasn’t always thus. In Old English — that Germanic language that was taking root as of the AD 600s, brought over by the Angles and Saxons — the standard infinitive was one word, for instance etan (eat).

But there were cases where the infinitive functioned more like a noun and would be inflected like a noun in the dative case, and it would have the appropriate preposition before it, to. Here’s a clip from the Bible:

Ða geseah ðæt wif ðæt ðæt treow wæs god to etenne

“Then the woman saw that the tree was good to eat.” That is, good for eating. Generally the inflected infinitive was used in places where a noun (e.g., gerund) construction was equally usable: begin to work could also be begin working; the power to kill could also be the power of killing; to speak is a sin could also be speaking is a sin.

Obviously those instances have persisted, since my examples are in modern English. Something happened in-between the Old English period and now, though: English lost almost all of its inflectional affixes. The spelling and pronunciation changed some, too. So instead of ic ete, þu etst, he eteð, we etað, ge etað, hie etað, infinitive etan, subjunctive ete and eten, imperative ete and inflected infinitive (to) etenne, we now have I eat, (thou eatest), he eats, we eat, you eat, they eat, infinitive eat, subjunctive eat, imperative eat and (no longer inflected) to-infinitive (to) eat. All the affixes got eaten and just a little s is left.

One result is that the to-infinitive is now used a bit more widely than it was in Old English, since there are places where it wouldn’t be clear if it were just plain old eat. But the pattern is largely similar: we use to when the infinitive is the focus of purpose or necessity (want to eat, need to eat), completes the sense of a verb or noun (begin to eat, the power to eat), or is the subject or object of a sentence (to eat would be nice). We use the bare infinitive when it follows certain auxiliaries of mood and tense (you must eat), verbs of causing (I’ll make you eat), verbs of perception (I want to see you eat) and a few others in that general vein.

And we can snap off the infinitive and leave it implied; we don’t have to say it if we don’t want to. (Want to what? Say it, of course.) In fact, the to generally tends to stay more readily with what’s before it than with the infinitive it’s serving.

Well, that is how a butler treats guests. He has to watch them to make sure they don’t get lost or steal the silver.

4 Comments

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged , , , , , , ,

scratchative

Posted on June 17, 2014 | 2 comments

One nice thing about kids: they haven’t been trained out of scratching itches, linguistically.

Take for example my friend Trish’s daughter Nenya, not (quite) yet in grade 1. She asked Trish why some hand weights were on a towel. Trish told her it was to protect the floor. Nenya’s response: “Why? They’re not scratchative.”

You will not find scratchative in the dictionary. The more desiccated among us will therefore insist that it is not a word and must be replaced by something that is. Because, as we all know, every word that is a word was in the dictionary before anyone used it.

As long as by “every” we mean “one” – and that word is flauccinaucinihilipilification, which means ‘the action of estimating something as worthless’… fitting, no? Pretty much every word except that one (and maybe a slight few others) was invented by someone at some time and then, after people used it enough, put in a dictionary.

And how did those invented words catch on? They scratched the right itch. They were appropriately scratchative.

So why shouldn’t Nenya learn to put a different, more established word in place of scratchative? Well, what word? “They’re not scratchy” doesn’t really carry the same sense – scratchy has applications to clothing and sounds, but is ambiguous with something like hand weights. “They’re not scratching” is definitely out; of course they’re not scratching right now, they’re just sitting on a towel. Nor need we form a Latinate neologism such as, say, grattive. I mean, really, that’s just pretentious. If we can say someone who talks a lot is talkative, we can say something that scratches a lot (or perhaps at all) is scratchative.

Anyway, grattive wouldn’t truly trace to Latin. It would trace to the German root that Italian got grattare from. That German root showed up in two English words: cratch and scrat. They both meant about the same and both had rather suitable sounds, and eventually this doublet started to chafe and people simply merged the two into scratch. And Nenya took that new root and the established suffix ative and made a word. A perfectly serviceable word. She didn’t have to start from scratch. Just from scratch.

She’s not the first person to make up the word, either. It gets a couple of Google hits. We find that the word was used in a Missouri newspaper in 1889 (as transcribed in 2011) in reference to getting “a good scratchative cat.” And a 2007 account of using poetry for psychoanalysis reports a 10-year-old referring to her gerbil as “a good scratchative pet.”

So clearly this is a word that has been contained in potential in the available morphemes, just scratching to get out. And every so often it has managed to come free. Rather than scratch it out, why not admit it’s up to scratch?

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

livid

Posted on June 16, 2014 | 4 comments

What colour is livid?

For many of us, that may seem an odd question. “Furious is a colour?” (Linguists know that colorless green ideas sleep furiously, but most others are unaware of this.) We know the word pretty much exclusively as a descriptor of someone who is enraged. It is a lovely, nearly symmetrical, v-necked, candle-lit word, yes, but also one ending in that –id that shows up on stupid and several other not-desirable words, and we can always feel it vibrating with delicious ire. So when we are introduced to the idea that there is a colour called livid, we make the connection that this colour is the colour of fury.

OK, so what colour is fury? What colour is rage?

The answer comes readily enough to many people. Allow me to give two quotes from AA Gill, a travel-and-food writer with a razor-sharp tongue and a very well developed vocabulary:

The jam was thin and formed pools in the butter and tasted intensely of strawberries, not the thick, livid red anonymous fruit of England. (“Why I love Paris”)

Steak houses used to be leathery, clubbable lounges with cartoons of dead customers on the walls and faux Victorian paintings of obese cattle, staffed by ancient, permanently enraged waiters with faces as livid as well-hung sirloin and aprons that went from nipple to ankle. (“Steak Shows Its Muscle”)

There can be no doubt: Gill, like many others, means a red like blood and meat and cooked overripe berries. Vascular, florid. Vivid. Of course livid is vivid: just listen to it! It is vivid like living and loving, as over-rich as a liver; indeed, it is lurid. No?

Say, do you watch crime shows such as CSI? Do you recognize the word lividity? What do they use this word in judging?

The colour of corpses.

And do you know the phrase white with rage?

When people get angry, the blood runs to their faces. When they get very angry, the blood drains from their faces. A person whose face has gone red is mainly disposed to shouting and can be dealt with calmly. But if you should happen to see an angry person turn a whiter shade of pale, clear the vicinity immediately; Tarantino-style violence is very likely to ensue.

But wait, there’s more. Our word livid comes from a Latin word referring to a bluish-grey colour, the colour of a bruise. From the leadenness of that hue it shifted over time to mean pale. If you look up livid on Visual Thesaurus, you will see it has connections in four directions: black-and-blue; blanched, white, bloodless, ashen; light; and angry.

Thanks to that bruising, lividity names a discoloration caused by blood coagulating under the skin. This is one of the things that happen at a predictable time after death: Latin livor mortis. The skin in these areas turns… purplish-red.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! Yes, another colour.

Meanwhile, the association with rage has led to the ‘red’ sense being so common it has even been added to some dictionaries. Might as well – if AA Gill is using it that way, you can be sure many other educated users are too.

So livid is or isn’t lurid. Oh, by the way: lurid has two dictionary definitions. One is ‘glowing red’. The other, older sense (right from the Latin) is ‘wan, ghastly, yellow’. So livid and lurid simultaneously are and aren’t and aren’t and are roughly the same colour. Which is or isn’t vivid.

Divilish, isn’t it?

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

hurst

Posted on June 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

Neighbourhoods and plan-built towns are often named for what was deleted from the landscape so the ticky-tacky could be tucked and stacked all over it instead. Occasionally they name things that were never really there but that the developer would like people to think of as they ramble through the empty intestinal streets lined with lawns and garages and picture windows and vinyl sidings and garnished with parsley hedges and trees stuck into the green like so many birthday candles. And some of the developers’ favourite morphemes for the morphed geomorphology are bits of words seldom seen elsewhere.

Hurst is one such. Many a neighbourhood that hurts the hillscape has had this overrehearsed syllable thrust upon it. Pinehurst, Hillhurst, Woodhurst, Bensonhurst, Deerhurst, Beechhurst, Lakehurst, Millhurst, Stonehurst, Sandhurst, Oakhurst… Just about anything you can attach vale or dale to in a neighbourhood name can come to have a hurst on it instead.

Which is not to say that a hurst is like a vale or a dale. In fact, it’s the converse. It is not a dip down in the landscape but an upthrust. It’s a hill or knoll, either sandy or covered in trees. A sandhurst is thus a kind of hurst, while a hillhurst is really more of a redundancy. Or, sometimes, a double irony – in Calgary, Hillhurst is a neighbourhood in the valley along the Bow River, one of the lowest-lying parts of a very hilly city. (Well, OK, at its northern end, above Riley Park, it creeps up onto the heights to include the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology; by that technicality it is not as low and flat as its neighbours, Sunnyside to the east and West Hillhurst to the west.)

Hurst comes to us from old Germanic roots and has cognates in other Germanic languages. In English it remains as a nearly forgotten bit of the lexical geography, a word form largely ridden over and unnoticed, like the land beneath the streets that have spread like mold across the tawny foothills of Calgary. But it is not hearsed yet; it remains alive parasitically, a little verbal caboose – or a footnote, ready to be looked up by those who thirst for more.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Mind your idioms

Posted on June 14, 2014 | 2 comments

Originally published in Active Voice, the national magazine of the Editors’ Association of Canada

English has many quaint and curious phrases, clichés, and idioms, and we quite often see them misconstrued. Ours can be a very unforgiving game. You don’t have free reign to pawn off whatever one-of usages will tie you over, or do just any linguistic slight of hand (or vocal chords). No, you have to tow the line and stick to the straight and narrow, or your straight-laced readers will develop a deep-seeded dislike for you and give you short shift – they will wait with baited breath to see you get your just desserts and be hoisted on your own petard without further adieu, and the value of what you have to say will be a mute point.

Heh heh. Let me put that right:

You don’t have free rein to palm off whatever one-off usages will tide you over, or do just any linguistic sleight of hand (or vocal cords). No, you have to toe the line and stick to the strait and narrow, or your strait-laced readers will develop a deep-seated dislike for you and give you short shrift – they will wait with bated breath to see you get your just deserts and be hoist with your own petard without further ado, and the value of what you have to say will be a moot point.

Of course, that’s all well and good as long as we’re all playing the same game. But when we’re dealing with international audiences, the phrasing we use in hopes of striking a home run with our readers (or even just stealing a base) may seem to them to be not just cricket, and you won’t strike out – you will be dismissed.

We Canadian editors may be a bit smug about our position seemingly straddling the British-American fence. After all, we all know about our/or and re/er and ise/ize, and we may feel that, having mastered aluminium with an i and orientate with the ate and perhaps revise for study, estate agent for real estate agent, and some food terms – rocket (arugula), courgette (zucchini), marrow (summer squash), swede (rutabaga) – we can count on our intuitions with British.

But we run the risk of taking something for an error or typo when it’s really the correct British form. A bit over a decade ago, Orrin Hargraves came out with an excellent guide to British-American differences, Mighty Fine Words and Smashing Expressions; let me share with you some of the benefit of that smart volume: If you want to make a home from home in British English, and make a good job of it, don’t take the attitude of the know-all; know when to leave well alone if you want to cater for your readers and get on with them. Knowing your phrasal idioms can make the world of difference and give you a new lease of life – and if you don’t know them, you can rub your readers up the wrong way, and they might have a go at you and want to get shot of you. It will be more than a storm in a teacup; you will end up down at heel.

Which means, first of all, you will not render the above in a Canadian way: do not change it to home away from home, do a good job, know-it-all, leave well enough alone, cater to, get along with, make a world of difference, a new lease on life, rub your readers the wrong way, give you a tongue-lashing, get rid of you, tempest in a teacup, or down at the heels.

The best idea, of course, is to get a native British speaker – or, as occasion demands, an American speaker to add American idioms and weed out Canadianisms: don’t slip up and start talking about writing the odd test in pencil crayon, for instance (“Ohhhh, you mean taking the occasional test using a colored pencil! What was that other weird stuff you said?”). But at the very least, always look twice before crossing the idiom.

2 Comments

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged , , , ,

rhinestone

Posted on June 13, 2014 | 1 comment

This word makes me think of music. And the music it makes me think of brings to mind two specific places and times: two similar yet different places and two paradoxical juxtapositions.

The music it makes me think of is not Wagner. Das Rheingold does not play into it at all, even though it involves the Rhine and some stones. That opera is about actual gold, not fake diamonds. True, the gold in Das Rheingold is found in the Rhine, just as the original rhinestone crystals were (they’re manufactured now). But the gold was forged into a golden ring of power and trouble, while rhinestones are really for people grasping at the brass ring on the carousel of life and fame. Their meretricious coruscation is perfectly emblematic of the big music business.

But rhinestone does not make me think of Liberace or Elvis Presley, either, although both of them wore plenty of rhinestones. Nor does it make me think of the Rolling Stones, whether or not crossed with a rhinoceros.

Picture Water Street, the main drag of the Gastown historical district in Vancouver, in the late 1970s. A tourist mecca – or tourist trap. A family from Alberta is visiting: mom, dad, two boys. The boys are loading up on seashells and similar souveniry dreck with which they will fill shoe boxes to occupy the back corners in their closets and under their beds. Mom and Dad are looking at more adult things, jewelry and clothes, probably. Everything is novel and everything is so Vancouver and so not Alberta, so sea and shells and fish and so not dust and horses and cows. The boys are having friction with this bizarre thing called sales tax, whereby the price on the sticker is not the price you pay, but even that mainly serves to underline that they are somewhere else. And down this street, this historical seaside city street full of not-back-home-in-cow-country, walks…

Not a cowboy, no. A guy in jeans and whatever, carrying a portable radio that’s blasting Glen Campbell’s song “Rhinestone Cowboy.” (I will not swear he was walking; it was a long time ago, and the radio may have been plugged in.) I found this hilariously incongruous. You may think I even turned to my parents and said, “Mater, pater, that is hilariously incongruous.” But actually I just laughed. Cowboy? In Gastown? And then I turned back to my abalone shells.

Fast forward about three and a half decades, to another shopping street full of tourists and historical buildings. But this street is in Copenhagen, one of the half dozen streets that concatenate to make what’s called Strøget, the longest pedestrian shopping area in Europe. That’s fitting – Copenhagen comes from words meaning ‘merchant’s port’. We are right by the sea, in a city famous for a statue of a mermaid. Denmark has fields and farms and so on, but the only thing that is cattle-like is the herds of people plodding along the cobblestones to the slaughter of their wallets. It would be incongruous to hear something about cowboys there.

So, yes, there was a street performer, playing on his guitar and singing: “Like a rhinestone cowboy, Riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo… Like a rhinestone cowboy, Getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know…” Of course. Meanwhile not too many steps away people were having the dead skin on their feet debrided by small fish in tanks, and hundreds of dollars were being spent on postcards and silly porcelain Vikings that would adhere magnetically to a refrigerator.

But rhinestones don’t fool anyone, and aren’t intended to. Everyone sees that a rhinestone is a rhinestone and not a diamond. It is a glitter for those who want fame, who want to make it, who want to believe they have made it. For those who know that they’re a bit out of place. The singer of “Rhinestone Cowboy” is a hustler walking the dirty sidewalks of Broadway,

With a subway token and a dollar tucked inside my shoe
There’ll be a load of compromisin’
On the road to my horizon
But I’m gonna be where the lights are shinin’ on me

A street full of tourists wanting to see something different from where they’re from. People paying good money for cheap trite tchotchkes, compromises with reality, simulacra of simulacra. Stores filled with expensive clothes that you can only look at and aspire to. But in the end you’re aspiring to not another reality but a higher-status fantasy. Real cowboys don’t wear rhinestones, just like real longshoremen don’t. Skip the docks and go to the statue of the fictional being who wanted to become a real human but traded her voice to do so and in the end was discarded like any beautiful dream awoken from.

We went back from the charming escape of Vancouver to our Alberta of real cowboys, who are nothing special when you’re around them a lot. The image of them most people have comes from movies, which are meretricious coruscations. And we went back from Copenhagen to our Toronto of… no cowboys, no rhinestones. Never mind. The shining of the lights never lasts, and the dreams are always awoken from. Back in Copenhagen, the mermaid still sits on her rock, looking to the west. But we’re not there.

I bet that guy with the guitar is, though.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , , ,